Nara: Where Japan Began

If, when you think of Japan, you imagine bullet trains and capsule hotels and narrow lanes ablaze with winking lights, then replace those images with empty space. Put aside every dystopian thought you've ever collected from Blade Runner or Lost in Translation and, instead of yellow-haired punks and gothic Lolitas, picture heaps of autumn leaves. Bundle together the din of J-pop, baseball fanatics, and the world's most crowded train stations and superimpose upon them pure silence.

Now you're in something like the vast open space that is Nara, twenty miles south of Kyoto. The little sign in my engagingly unglamorous room at the Nara Hotel readsplease, no fire in the fireplace. The photographs on the wooden walls of the creaking two-story room are of earlier visitors—emperors and their families, some offering ghostly waves as if from another world. Behind the wooden front desk stands an enormous old black safe, almost as tall as I am, and across from it, in the lobby, is what could pass for a little Shinto shrine complete with growling leonine temple guardians. The hotel, which could stand in for a Scottish hunting lodge in a local production of Ivanhoe, is more than a hundred years old, and the only staff in evidence this sweaty midsummer dawn are two deer, waiting at the entrance where doormen might be expected. I walk along the driveway, under the Prussian-blue skies of 4:45 a.m., and orange lanterns lead me deeper into the silent dark. (...)

Today, most visitors favor Nara with an easy day-trip from Kyoto. But I live in Nara, and have grown to see how absence can have a power of its own, and how what's overlooked may pack a punch that the visited often lacks. Kyoto may be where Japan learned to wrap everything in courtesy and gossamer surfaces and smiles that leave you at once warmed and a little shut out. But Nara is the enigmatic, plain stone object—very probably sacred—which sits inside that beautifully wrapped box.  (...)

Like most foreigners, I went straight to Kyoto twenty-four years ago when I left New York to live in Japan, knowing that it would put me right in the heart of the Basho poems and Hiroshige woodcuts I'd savored from afar. But five years later, my Japanese sweetheart found herself moving to Nara, and I ended up in a modern suburb called Shikanodai, or "Deer's Slope." As I settled in, I learned how rich a city can be if it's not burdened with self-consciousness—and all the attention that comes from being a capital for ten centuries.

Before Nara was made the center of the newly forming nation, the capital had moved each time an emperor died, so that it would not be contaminated with the memory of an imperial death. And so prior to Nara, the court had settled in Asuka, only twelve miles away. And before that, Prince Shotoku—generally described as the founding father of Japan—had built a great temple in Horyuji, just nine miles from central Nara. Indeed, in Japanese mythology, the very first human ruler of the land, the Jimmu Emperor, set up his palace in the Yamato Plain, south of Nara, almost 660 years before the birth of Christ. Which means that all of Japan's earliest history is set amid the rice paddies and running streams of greater Nara, where grand temples like Murou-ji and Hase-dera tower above villages, and even the latticed windows in the central shrine known as Kasuga Taisha are officially designated "Important Cultural Property."

And so it is not surprising that Nara is, in many ways, where Japan became Japan. When the empire arrived in Nara in the eighth century—and decided to stay—the new court became the place where the folkloric animism of Japanese-born Shintoism merged quite naturally with the Buddhism that was streaming in from China. Shintoism gave the city—and Japanese culture as a whole—its sense of hills and fields teeming with spirits (and an emperor who was said to be a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess). Buddhism gave it its sense of gravitas and a grounding for a life that never forgets the inevitability of death. In 768, a deity was rumored to have been seen riding a white deer over the hills in Nara; that image seemed to echo the deer park where the Buddha was said to have delivered his first discourse, near Varanasi, in India. (Ever since, the deer here have been considered sacred.)

by Pico Iyer, Conde Nast Traveler |  Read more:

Photo:Michael Kenna

Your Former Teenage Crush

[ed. See also, Molly Ringwald on writing: Act Like a Writer.]

Molly Ringwald peruses the rack of designer clothing pulled in as potential attire for her imminent photoshoot, noting to the photographer that she'd prefer to avoid anything that might come off as being "too glamorous". She immediately gravitates towards a lovely pink silk-shantung sweetheart-neckline number, reaching out to grab it.

"That one's really pretty," offers the stylist.

"But it's pink," murmurs Molly.

"Got it," the stylist smiles.

"No pink for you these days?" I ask.

"I've kind of had enough pink in my life," Molly deadpans, clacking the dress hanger down in the reject section without a second thought.

Everyone laughs, everyone gets it. That chapter has long since closed.

Many novelists might not mind an extra dose of glamour, and surely few would have such a knee-jerk aversion to the possibility of being portrayed in pink, especially if they're pretty in it. But most other authors in question are not globally known first and foremost as actors, and not a single one of them at the very mention of their name will perpetually glide through the minds of millions as a sweet underdog teenager from the mid-1980s wearing a homemade prom dress that's pink.

Molly Ringwald doesn't shun the past, she just refuses to walk around in it. She happily obliges the legions who question her about the three classic coming-of-age films for which she's best known – Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, all written by (and the first two directed by) the late great John Hughes. Ringwald recalls that watershed era fondly, and she has attended a few cast reunions, including a tribute to the departed Hughes at the 2010 Oscars. The bio line of Ringwald's recently launched Twitter page even includes the rather apt designation "your former teenage crush".

These days, the 44-year-old Ringwald is talking about her new collection of fiction, a "novel in stories" called When It Happens To You. We've spent the morning roaming around Venice, California, south of Ringwald's home in Santa Monica and just north of Marina Del Rey, where her photoshoot will take place in the afternoon. A street carnival with rides and games is in full swing nearby as we breakfast at Venice's Gjelina restaurant (she orders the Moroccan baked eggs with merguez), then wander the boutiques along trendy Abbot Kinney Boulevard, where Ringwald buys her kids a few gifts (some Japanese mugs with cute animal drawings on them).

Ringwald sparkles as she talks about her family, her work and her life. She's genuinely inquisitive and constantly engaging. Conversations frequently veer off into music and books, two of the subjects closest to her heart (her father is jazz pianist Bob Ringwald). While she's clearly focused on forging ahead, the woman who smiled out as a teen from the cover of a 1986 Time magazine next to the headline "Ain't She Sweet?" finds that the past is never all that far behind.

"It's heavy," Ringwald admits, of walking around with an entire era on her shoulders. She laughs with a hint of frustration. "The more I pursue other things that really, truly matter to me, it's less heavy, but I think the heaviest thing about it is that so many people have so many memories attached to me. It's kind of like this giant collective unrequited love. I wasn't there when they had their first slumber party or their first date or their first kiss, and yet I'm somehow connected to their lives in that way."

by Mark Blackwell, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photo: Barry J. Holmes

Fussbudget

One day in March, 2009, two months after the Inauguration of President Obama, Representative Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, sat behind a small table in a cramped meeting space in his Capitol Hill office. Hunched forward in his chair, he rattled off well-rehearsed critiques of the new President’s policies and America’s lurch toward a “European” style of government. Ryan’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all died before their sixtieth birthdays, so Ryan, who is now forty-two, could be forgiven if he seemed like a man in a hurry. Tall and wiry, with a puff of wavy dark hair, he is nearly as well known in Washington for his punishing early-morning workouts as he is for his mastery of the federal budget. Asked to explain his opposition to Obama’s newly released budget, he replied, “I don’t have that much time.”

Ryan won his seat in 1998, at the age of twenty-eight. Like many young conservatives, he is embarrassed by the Bush years. At the time, as a junior member with little clout, Ryan was a reliable Republican vote for policies that were key in causing enormous federal budget deficits: sweeping tax cuts, a costly prescription-drug entitlement for Medicare, two wars, the multibillion-dollar bank-bailout legislation known as TARP. In all, five trillion dollars was added to the national debt. In 2006 and 2008, many of Ryan’s older Republican colleagues were thrown out of office as a result of lobbying scandals and overspending. Ryan told me recently that, as a fiscal conservative, he was “miserable during the last majority” and is determined “to do everything I can to make sure I don’t feel that misery again.”

In 2009, Ryan was striving to reintroduce himself as someone true to his ideological roots and capable of reversing his party’s reputation for fiscal profligacy. A generation of Republican leaders was gone. Ryan had already jumped ahead of more senior colleagues to become the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, and it was his job to pick apart Obama’s tax and spending plans. At the table in his office, Ryan pointed out the gimmicks that Presidents use to hide costs and conceal policy details. He deconstructed Obama’s early health-care proposal and attacked his climate-change plan. Obama’s budget “makes our tax code much less competitive,” he said, as if reading from a script. “It makes it harder for businesses to survive in the global economy, for people to save for their own retirement, and it grows our debt tremendously.” He added, “It just takes the poor trajectory our country’s fiscal state is on and exacerbates it.”

As much as he relished the battle against Obama—“European,” he repeated, with some gusto—his real fight was for the ideological identity of the Republican Party, and with colleagues who were content to simply criticize the White House. “If you’re going to criticize, then you should propose,” he told me. A fault line divided the older and more cautious Republican leaders from the younger, more ideological members. Ryan was, and remains, the leader of the attack-and-propose faction.

“I think you’re obligated to do that,” he said. “People like me who are reform-minded ignore the people who say, ‘Just criticize and don’t do anything and let’s win by default.’ That’s ridiculous.” He said he was “moving ahead without them. They don’t want to produce alternatives? That’s not going to stop me from producing an alternative.”

Ryan’s long-range plan was straightforward: to create a detailed alternative to Obama’s budget and persuade his party to embrace it. He would start in 2009 and 2010 with House Republicans, the most conservative bloc in the Party. Then, in the months before the Presidential primaries, he would focus on the G.O.P. candidates. If the plan worked, by the fall of 2012 Obama’s opponent would be running on Paul Ryan’s ideas, and in 2013 a new Republican President would be signing them into law.

Sitting in his office more than three years ago, Ryan could not have foreseen how successful his crusade to reinvent the Republican Party would be. Nearly every important conservative opinion-maker and think tank has rallied around his policies. Nearly every Republican in the House and the Senate has voted in favor of some version of his budget plan. Earlier this year, the G.O.P. Presidential candidates lavished praise on Ryan and his ideas. “I’m very supportive of the Ryan budget plan,” Mitt Romney said on March 20th, in Chicago. The following week, while campaigning in Wisconsin, he added, “I think it’d be marvellous if the Senate were to pick up Paul Ryan’s budget and adopt it and pass it along to the President.”

To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to understand is Paul Ryan.

by Ryan Lizza, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration: Jorge Arevalo

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To Hear Beck's New Album, Learn to Play an Instrument

Anyone who's followed the musical career of Beck Hansen knows that the eclectic singer-songwriter is no stranger to experimentation. Some of Beck's early work was pioneering in its fusion of indie rock, country, hip-hop, and soul. He went on to explore how the album format could become a participatory multimedia experience. More recently, Beck has launched innovative projects like the Record Club, covering full LPs by the likes of Leonard Cohen, Yanni, and INXS in a day's time, then posting the results online for free download.

So it's no surprise that Beck's latest project is a uniquely ambitious and imaginative endeavor. On the upcoming Song Reader, a collaboration with the renowned publishing house McSweeney's, Beck will issue a new collection of songs not in recorded form, but as 20 booklets containing sheet music for others to play. If you want to hear the new Beck album, you better learn how to play an instrument—and read music notation—or wait until other Beck fans start making recordings (and there are sure to be many). From McSweeney's:

Song Reader is an experiment in what an album can be at the end of 2012—an alternative that enlists the listener in the tone of every track, and that’s as visually absorbing as a dozen gatefold LPs put together. The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d expect from their author, but if you want to hear “Do We? We Do,” or “Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard,” bringing them to life depends on you.

The booklets will come packaged in a hardcover carrying case and will be accompanied by original art and essays by Beck and music critic Jody Rosen. The McSweeney's website will host Song Reader tracks recorded by Beck's musician pals, as well as a set of specially selected versions submitted by Beck fans—information about how to participate is forthcoming.

by Eric Steur, Good |  Read more:
Photo by rawkblog4 / Used under CC BY license

What I Did Last Weekend

It is the unofficial pastime of New York living: every day, all across the city, untold numbers of people spend hours perusing properties that they have no intention — and no means — of actually purchasing.

“We’re out dreaming today,” Kevin Schultz, 33, said recently after looking at a house listed at $1.68 million on 13th Street in Park Slope. “But we’re not buying anything yet. And we’re not really going to buy that one, either.”

Mr. Schultz had attended an open house, one of the more bizarre rituals in real estate, whereby otherwise privacy-obsessed New Yorkers invite complete strangers into their homes to inspect their fixtures and moldings, their bedrooms and bathrooms, and — eek! — their closets, all in the hope that one of those wanderers will serendipitously, and with must-have-this-now immediacy, fall in love and write a check so big it makes their hand tremble.

For the seller, it’s usually a long shot: dozens may nibble, few will bite. None of this is news to brokers, who have long understood that many of the people they welcome into other peoples’ homes are just gawking, walking by or simply digesting a nice Sunday brunch.

“It’s a form of entertainment,” said Michele Kleier, the president of Gumley Haft Kleier and a regular on the reality TV show “Selling New York.” “It’s cheaper than Broadway.”

Indeed, some brokers say that open houses are basically client Kabuki — an antique pantomime meant to convince sellers that they’re working for their commission. (...)

Except when the system works. Take that $1.68 million house in Park Slope, a three-story charmer with a small roof deck, a front porch and a basement made for hobbits. It was sold just days after I saw it as a result of, you guessed it, an open house.

To be sure, for every broker who doubts the process, there’s another who hails it, saying the open house is a good way for buyers to educate themselves, a good way for brokers to practice their pitches and an even better way to get those two groups together in the same space at the same time.

“I think it’s one of the greatest things going on in real estate,” said Judi Lederer, a senior vice president of Town Residential. “I really do.” She added that finding time to schedule private viewings can be the most difficult part of being a broker.

So is the open house an authentic rite of passage to the front gate of homeownership? Or is it time-wasting window shopping? Are passers-through just daydreaming, or taking the first step in making that dream real?

To try to find out, I embarked on a tour of open houses over several weekends, entertaining flights of fancy in fine digs around the city, a voyeuristic jaunt that was part keeping up with the Joneses, part “Talented Mr. Ripley.” Along the way, I imagined living in elegant brownstones in Brooklyn, along cobblestone streets in TriBeCa and in 1-Percenter pads in Clinton. I’ve seen myself as a D.I.Y.-er in Hamilton Heights, a gentrifier in Harlem and a penthouser in Park Slope.

And what I discovered was the variety of strategies and techniques employed in the open-house game, which often combines the tactics of chess with the funny money of Monopoly.

by Jessie McKinley, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Ron Barrett

Olympics Vs. Banksy
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Houston is Not Cool

Have you ever wondered why Aunt Jemima offers two instant-pancake mixes: one that requires you to add milk, eggs and oil, and another that requires you to just add water? It’s because Aunt Jemima knows that some of its customers are weirded out by just-add-water food, so it gives those people the option of cracking an egg so they’ll feel like they’re cooking.

In some people’s minds, a pancake just isn’t a pancake unless it has milk, eggs and oil. Just as, in some people’s minds, a city can’t be “cool” unless it contains particular ingredients. That’s the thinking behind the new list of America’s Coolest Cities on Forbes.com. The top spot, with a “who-woulda-thunk it?” flourish, goes to Houston, Texas.

The pick of Houston is presented as counterintuitive — “The Bayou City may not be the first place you associate with being hip or trendy.” True! — but in fact, the criteria used to select it are as conventional as could be. The list works on the presumption that there’s broad consensus on the things that a cool city needs to have: young people, “stylish housing developments,” galleries, green space, outdoor activities and “the likelihood of meeting another person of a different race or ethnicity” (which happens to Forbes readers all the time!). The idea that a cool city would not have these things is assumed to be absurd.

That this list is equally absurd is obvious. But though lists like this perpetuate the peculiar notion that a city needs to boast a particular set of specs to be cool, they didn’t invent it. Check-the-boxes urban cool is so prevalent an idea today that hardly anyone thinks about it anymore: Youth plus lofts plus galleries equals cool. But filing places under “cool” or “not cool” misses a lot of the nuance that makes cities work. Providence recently decided not to create a cool new waterfront esplanade because it would have taken valuable space away from a vital shipping port. The tangle of uncool freeways that run through Indianapolis serve its lucrative trucking industry. You’d be hard-pressed to find a large stock of “stylish housing developments” in St. Louis, or, if you’re white, meet another person of a different race or ethnicity in Portland, Maine.

Are these cities less cool for having these attributes? According to the Forbes definition, yes. But according to the cooler definition of cool, no — they are thoroughly, precisely themselves.

by Will Doig, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Insomnia. Gerard Dubois

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Under Copyright Pressure, Google to Alter Search Results

[ed. Interesting. On the one hand you could say Google is agreeing to censor web search. On the other, it's preempting a media-backed government 'solution' to intellectual property rights. Or it could be facilitating manipulation of search results by encouraging more copyright take down requests (read the last paragraph). What a tangled web we weave.  I'm always leery when Big Media applauds anything.]

Big media companies won a battle in the fight to combat online piracy on Friday when Google said it would alter its search algorithms to favor Web sites that offered legitimate copyrighted movies, music and television.

Google said that beginning next week its algorithms would take into account the number of valid copyright removal notices Web sites have received. Web sites with multiple, valid complaints about copyright infringement may appear lower in Google search results.

“This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily — whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music Web site, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify,” Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a company blog post.

The entertainment industry, which has for years pressured Google and other Internet sites to act against online piracy, applauded the move. (...)

The announcement comes just over six months after a heated battle between big media companies and technology companies, who were sparring over proposed legislation intended to crack down on pirated online content, particularly by rogue foreign Web sites.

In January, media companies like Viacom, Time Warner and the Walt Disney Company backed two antipiracy bills, one in the Senate and the other in the House of Representatives, while Internet activists and companies like Google and Facebook argued the bills would hinder Internet freedom. Buoyed by a huge online grass-roots movement, and aided by Wikipedia’s going black for a day in protest, the bills quickly died.

That tension has decreased somewhat as media companies have met with Silicon Valley executives over how to solve the problem to everyone’s satisfaction. (...)

Google said it had received copyright removal requests for over 4.3 million Web addresses in the last 30 days, according to the company’s transparency report. That is more than it received in all of 2009.

by Amy Chozick, NY Times | Read more:

Under Our Skins

It starts with the simple questions: Can I afford not to own a cell phone? Would I still be employable if I didn’t own one? Would I still know what is happening and get invited to parties? The next year, it’s owning a smart phone. Or being on Facebook. Or getting an iPad for the children. None of this is about being aspirational. It’s about keeping up, an imperative sharpened by the economic crisis. So we cut expenses, but not when it comes to technology. Perhaps we eat out less, or travel less. But the cell phone — which by now has become a smartphone — stays. And the thing about smartphones is that in order to be fully functional they need to know where they are — that is to say, where we are. This knowledge defines them. It is what makes them smart.

If you don’t own one of these devices yourself, you will perhaps have had the experience of being shown a map of your current location by an iPhone owner. This has happened to me at least half a dozen times: “See, this is where we are.” It doesn’t matter that I thought that I knew where I was. My mental map was no match for the crisp precision of the iPhone’s. From that moment, being in that place meant something different. The concept of presence had been redefined. And I thought it was cool, every single time. With mobile Internet and dynamic maps come a host of location services that collectively provide greater and greater incentives for allowing the phone to constantly track your position and broadcast it to other people in your networks. In this way we keep tags on each other and keep track of each other’s absences. “X hasn’t checked in for a few days. I hope she’s okay.”

Geotagging one’s tweets seem to be especially popular at the moment. I wrote this, and I wrote it here. It is no longer simply an utterance, but an utterance with longitude and latitude. This will enrich communication, somehow.On top of this network of distributed surveillance made up of seemingly benign small brothers and sisters watching (over) one another is another, more traditionally structured layer relating to the adoption of these technologies by companies, families, and schools to track the movements of their employees, children, and students. If I lump these terms together it’s because they are practically interchangeable. Companies track their mobile workers electronically to ensure operational efficiency; families track their children electronically to make sure that they are safe and don’t venture where they are not supposed to; schools track their students electronically to improve security and discourage truancy. But these aren’t different kinds of surveillance. They are all ultimately about controlling bodies in space. They are about enforcing compliance by making the subjects constantly visible and aware that they are being watched.

It doesn’t matter that not all companies, not all families, and certainly not all schools do this. The fact that some of them do, that what 15, 10, perhaps as little as five years ago would have struck us as dystopian fantasies have become routine arrangements, is what we must account for.

by Giovanni Tiso, The New Inquiry |  Read more:

[ed. Reminds me of Chihuly's poppies in the lobby of the Bellagio.]

This beautiful installation of umbrellas was recently spotted in Águeda, Portugal by photographer Patrícia Almeida. Almost nothing is known about the artist behind the project or its significance, but it’s impossible to deny the joy caused by taking a stroll in the shadowy rainbow created by hundreds of parasols suspended over this public walkway. (more)

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Keola Beamer

Reviews of White Noise Recordings

Due to the ever-increasing loudening of the universe, white noise is now a multi-billion-dollar-grossing industry. I just made that fact up! It's probably not true in the slightest! But there are a TON of albums, apps, websites and purveyors, all devoted to white noise. That is because some of us cannot sleep without it, due to exterior noise and/or snoring, or because of our fear of silence and/or death, or also because we are tired of babies crying.

The best way—with a few exceptions!—to use white noise at night is with an iPhone or iPod docked in some kind of speaker-thing. Or from your computer to speakers! (As long as everything else is shut off.) Whatever is in the room, it'll work. Don't go crazy. Don't try to "game" the "system." You go to sleep war with the sleep aids that you have. You set that puppy to "repeat one" track and turn off shuffle and boom, done. I personally find that if I turn my speakers away from the bed, so that sound is bouncing off the walls and around the room, I get more out of it. And then I use it on headphones on planes. Here is my guide to everything in my white noise rotation.

Brown Noise
From Simply Noise
Nice, but very flat. Doesn't have gradations in tone. Does a decent standing fan imitation though. But slightly forceful. Their white noise and pink noise are not ideal.

White Noise Blowdryer
From "White Noise"
Do you like hairdryers? Well, here's a heinous, irritating recording of a hairdryer for you!

Victoria Falls
From WhiteNoiseMP3s.com
This has a nice "wide scope" sound. The waterness of it is not distracting. The full 66 minutes of this "quasi-binaural field recording" has both low and high tones, which is important, but is concentrated in the medium spectrum. Because it's "real audio," it is actually random noise, and patternless, which is terrific. Feels like: sleeping in a hammock without all the discomfort and bugs. Downside: you might wake up having to pee desperately. (...)

3 Hour Nap
From White Noise Therapy Volume 2
Oh man. This is deep. It's not good for snorers. But it is great for sleeping on your own. Best possible use for this is actually playing on your iPhone from under your pillow. It's a dreary kind of drone, but when close to your head at low volume, it's extremely soothing—the way you'd imagine a train ride should be, but never is, here in disappointing real life. Can be weird on planes, as it's very similar to wind noise and actually somehow embeds with the plane noise.

Sleepy Jet Cabin
From WhiteNoiseMP3s.com
Speaking of. Ugh! I don't really want my plane to sound MORE like a plane.

Deep Sleep Therapy
From Deeper State: White Noise for Infants
This is like a frosty white cocoon of deep noise. Excuse me I'll be righ zzzzzzzzzzz. Best for sleeping alone. Some of the other cuts on this classic album are decent too. (See also: "Safe and Sound" and "Snugglebug." Avoid "Goodnight Moon" and "Counting Sheep." Too shrill.)

by Choire Sicha, The Awl |  Read more:

Gorillaz feat. Andre 3000 and James Murphy

[ed. Converse, I never knew you had in you. The (excellent) Gorillaz song gets lost in the mix, so here's another version.]

Charles Sheeler, Golden Gate, 1955

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

During a visit to San Francisco, Sheeler took a number of photographs to use for his paintings. This unusual view of the Golden Gate Bridge, painted a few months after he returned east, resulted from superimposing a number of those 35-millimeter slides.
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Future Foods

Volatile food prices and a growing population mean we have to rethink what we eat, say food futurologists. So what might we be serving up in 20 years' time?

It's not immediately obvious what links Nasa, the price of meat and brass bands, but all three are playing a part in shaping what we will eat in the future and how we will eat it.

Rising food prices, the growing population and environmental concerns are just a few issues that have organisations - including the United Nations and the government - worrying about how we will feed ourselves in the future.

In the UK, meat prices are anticipated to have a huge impact on our diets. Some in the food industry estimate they could double in the next five to seven years, making meat a luxury item.

"In the West many of us have grown up with cheap, abundant meat," says food futurologist Morgaine Gaye.

"Rising prices mean we are now starting to see the return of meat as a luxury. As a result we are looking for new ways to fill the meat gap."

So what will fill such gaps and our stomachs - and how will we eat it?

Insects

Insects, or mini-livestock as they could become known, will become a staple of our diet, says Gaye.

It's a win-win situation. Insects provide as much nutritional value as ordinary meat and are a great source of protein, according to researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. They also cost less to raise than cattle, consume less water and do not have much of a carbon footprint. Plus, there are an estimated 1,400 species that are edible to man.

Gaye is not talking about bushtucker-style witchetty grubs arriving on a plate near you. Insect burgers and sausages are likely to resemble their meat counterparts.

"Things like crickets and grasshoppers will be ground down and used as an ingredient in things like burgers."

The Dutch government is putting serious money into getting insects into mainstream diets. It recently invested one million euros (£783,000) into research and to prepare legislation governing insect farms.

A large chunk of the world's population already eat insects as a regular part of their diet. Caterpillars and locusts are popular in Africa, wasps are a delicacy in Japan, crickets are eaten in Thailand.

But insects will need an image overhaul if they are to become more palatable to the squeamish Europeans and North Americans, says Gaye, who is a member of the Experimental Food Society.

"They will become popular when we get away from the word insects and use something like mini-livestock."

by Denise Winterman, BBC News |  Read more:

The Meaning of Square

One small step for vanilla lattes, one giant leap for mankind, is how the world characterized the deal yesterday between Starbucks and Square, the new mobile payment company that, in addition to the iconic square swiper shown above, can identify people and their financial information as they approach a register, match the merchant with the customer's face and payment info and allow transactions to happen without cash, credit, or even arms:

"That's $5."
"I'm Derek Thompson."
"Thanks, you're all set."

... and I'm out the door with my drink.

This is what a cashless society looks like. And it is cool. But, like, how cool really?

Let's count some of the ways it is important: for merchants and for customers. For merchants, point-of-sale technology is awful, outdated, and expensive. Credit cards are a hassle, cash and coins are cumbersome, and payment software can be buggy and complicated. Square is simple. It not only de-kluges the process of ringing somebody up, but also it humanizes the interaction by making the point of contact all about two people's faces rather than a credit card and a swiper. That's nice.

For customers, Square eliminates friction. This is either very good or very dangerous, and maybe both. Paying for stuff shouldn't be such a chore. Some merchants take one credit card, but not another, or they require a $10 minimum payment, or they only take cash, and they've run out of certain bills. These are first world problems, to be sure, but we are living in a world of first world problems and solving them in an elegant way is no small feat. By divorcing paying from any sort of mindful action, frictionless transactions make us forget about money. That's good news if you think customers should spend more money. It's bad news if you think most American families aren't thinking mindfully about money enough, already.

These are innovations of convenience, mostly, but they arguably build a gateway to bigger things: for data, for advertising, and for, yes, society. The data created with millions of digitized interactions could provide deeper records of what people are buying and how much they're paying for it -- the sort of information that would be important to corporate research departments or macro-economists. And the GPS capabilities lend themselves easily to targeted advertising. Wired paints a picture of the future:

You're walking down the street. It's hot. The Starbucks a block away sends you a message that your favorite hot-weather order - venti skinny latte on ice -- is available to you at a dollar off. You accept the offer, and with a few taps, add an almond biscotti to the tab. Then you stroll into the Starbucks. Everything is ready when you arrive - you simply pick it up, the barista checks out your punim, and you're out the door. 

When I read the first batch of stories about Square, my reaction was, "This sounds pretty fun. But is it revolutionary? Are we so lazy and pressed for time that disrupting the action of taking out your credit card is a gosh-wow innovative leap?"

I think the answer is two-fold: (1) Innovations that save time, even just a little bit of time, are real innovations, because in any advanced economy time and attention are currency and creating more of them can make us all richer; (2) What's important about Square isn't just the transactions it makes more efficient but also the cashless world it pulls closer to the present.

by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic |  Read more:

All in a Dream

Space colonies. That’s the latest thing you hear, from the heralds of the future. President Gingrich is going to set up a state on the moon. The Dutch company Mars One intends to establish a settlement on the Red Planet by 2023. We’re heading towards a “multi-planetary civilization,” says Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX. Our future lies in the stars, we’re even told.

As a species of megalomania, this is hard to top. As an image of technological salvation, it is more plausible than the one where we upload our brains onto our computers, surviving forever in a paradise of circuitry. But not a lot more plausible. The resources required to maintain a colony in space would be, well, astronomical. People would have to be kept alive, indefinitely, in incredibly inhospitable conditions. There may be planets with earthlike conditions, but the nearest ones we know about, as of now, are 20 light years away. That means that a round trip at 10 percent the speed of light, an inconceivable rate (it is several hundred times faster than anything we’ve yet achieved), would take 400 years.

But never mind the logistics. If we live long enough as a species, we might overcome them, or at least some of them: energy from fusion (which always seems to be about 50 years away) and so forth. Think about what life in a space colony would be like: a hermetically sealed, climate-controlled little nothing of a place. Refrigerated air, synthetic materials, and no exit. It would be like living in an airport. An airport in Antarctica. Forever. When I hear someone talking about space colonies, I think, that’s a person who has never studied the humanities. That’s a person who has never stopped to think about what it feels like to go through an average day—what life is about, what makes it worth living, what makes it endurable. A person blessed with a technological imagination and the absence of any other kind.

by William Deresiewicz, American Scholar |  Read more:

Ionas Wood
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