Wondering How Far Magazines Must Fall

Making a weekly newsmagazine has always been a tough racket. It takes a big staff working on punishing deadlines to aggregate the flurry of news, put some learned topspin on it and package it for readers. But that job now belongs to the Web and takes place in real time, not a week later.

Tina Brown may have understood the digital insurgency that was disrupting the publishing business, but that didn’t stop her from stepping into the maw at the end of 2010, after Sidney Harman bought Newsweek. She married her Web site, The Daily Beast, with Newsweek in an attempt to put the paddles to a franchise gone cold, but Mr. Harman is now gone and his family has withdrawn its financial support. With losses continuing to pile up, that leaves IAC/InterActiveCorp, which also owns The Daily Beast, holding the bag.

As the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Ms. Brown was an odd choice to be Newsweek’s savior. Even in its diminished state — Mr. Harman bought it for a dollar in addition to assuming some $40 million in liabilities — the magazine is aimed at a mass audience in the kind of Middle America places where Ms. Brown, a hothouse flower of Manhattan media, rarely visits. Still, she has been able to maneuver The Daily Beast into the middle of the conversation and she has never lost her touch for getting people talking. But a newsweekly is a brutal, perhaps unwinnable, challenge.

Because of changes to the informational ecosystem, weeklies have been forced to leave behind the news and become magazines of ideas. Ms. Brown understood that; it’s just that some of her ideas weren’t always very good. Sometimes she tried too hard — Barack Obama was depicted as the first gay president — and sometimes not hard enough, as with last week’s cover about fancy dining around the world.

People who predicted that her effort would come to tears might be tempted to do an end zone dance now. But that would be dumb. The problem is not Tina Brown or her conceptual obsessions, or even the calcified formula of the weekly magazine.

The problem is more existential than that: magazines, all kinds of them, don’t work very well in the marketplace anymore.

Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff. Last week, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that newsstand circulation in the first half of the year was down almost 10 percent. When 10 percent of your retail buyers depart over the course of a year, something fundamental is at work.

I talked to an executive at one of the big Manhattan publishers about the recent collapse at the newsstand and he said, “When the airplane suddenly drops 10,000 feet and it doesn’t crash, you still end up with your heart in your stomach. Those are very, very bad numbers.”

by David Carr, NY Times |  Read more:

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Need an Expert? Try the Crowd

In 1714, the British government held a contest. They offered a large cash prize to anyone who could solve the vexing “longitude problem” — how to determine a ship’s east/west position on the open ocean — since none of their naval experts had been able to do so.

Lots of people gave it a try. One of them, a self-educated carpenter named John Harrison, invented the marine chronometer — a rugged and highly precise clock — that did the trick. For the first time, sailors could accurately determine their location at sea.

A centuries-old problem was solved. And, arguably, crowdsourcing was born.

Crowdsourcing is basically what it sounds like: posing a question or asking for help from a large group of people. Coined as a term in 2006, crowdsourcing has taken off in the internet era. Think of Wikipedia, and its thousands of unpaid contributors, now vastly larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Crowdsourcing has allowed many problems to be solved that would be impossible for experts alone. Astronomers rely on an army of volunteers to scan for new galaxies. At climateprediction.net, citizens have linked their home computers to yield more than a hundred million hours of climate modeling; it’s the world’s largest forecasting experiment.

But what if experts didn’t simply ask the crowd to donate time or answer questions? What if the crowd was asked to decide what questions to ask in the first place?

Could the crowd itself be the expert?

That’s what a team at the University of Vermont decided to explore — and the answer seems to be yes.

by Joshua E. Brown, University of Vermont |  Read more:

Photo: James Cridland

Casinos as the Bleak New Senior Citizen Center

As with many adventures, I didn't realize I was on one until I was deep in the belly of a southern Louisiana casino where 35 cent bets flowed faster than the free Diet Coke. My elbow rested on the walker of an elderly gentleman who was teaching me slots. He worried I was going to waste all my money. I appreciated his grandfatherly concern even as I struggled not to ask him, "Is this really a responsible thing to do?"

As a hospice professional and pastor, I realize the importance of communities encouraging active lifestyles among the elderly. By 2030, over 20% of our US population will be over 65. Caregivers, churches, and governments will be looking for recreational outlets that offer community and fun while honoring the independence and dignity of older Americans. Half of all adult visitors to casinos last year aged 50 and older, so I decided to observe the American Gaming Association's (AGA) "Responsible Gaming Education Week" -- which is held annually since 1998 in the first week of August -- by asking: do casinos do justice to our seniors? What does it mean for anyone, much less vulnerable aging people, to gamble "responsibly"?

In an oft-quoted AGA survey from 2002 , the Peter D. Hart Research Associates, Inc., and The Luntz Research Companies report that 62 percent of seniors see casinos as merely an inexpensive day out for someone on a fixed income. They argue that "90% of seniors don't want someone telling them how to spend their time or money" and that "senior citizens believe gambling is a question of personal freedom...[that] they should be able to go into a casino, have their own budget, and spend their disposable income the way they want." The AGA uses their annual "Responsible Gambling Education Week" to suggest that pathological gambling is rare. But reading between the lines of the "educational" factoids and pop quizzes they offer it is easy to see the real message: there is NO such thing as luck. The longer and faster you play any "game," the more money the house guarantees you will lose.

My adventure begins with a leisurely, summer weekday morning drive down River Road in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The casino boat parking lot is nearly full at 11:30 a.m. Valets are using casino-logoed scooters to assist disabled drivers from their cars and through the sliding glass doors. They shout "Good luck to you!" as nurse's aides, clad in scrubs, unload other seniors from nursing home and assisted living facility vans, pushing their wheelchairs into the brightly lit facility.

Inside, an elderly man sleeps with his walker at his side. I am looking for the buffet ($2.99 senior day) but am soon lost, and I end up wandering down the descending ramp that leads to the gambling boat. When I pass through a turnstile three blazer-clad security men offer a jovial, "Good luck to you! Good luck to you!" A silver-haired man, tripping on the high pile of the carpet, redirects me to the buffet.

by Amy Ziettlow, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: Reuters

Just a Friendly Robocall

Hi there. I hope I am not disturbing your dinner. This is Arnold Landis, calling to discuss a most crucial choice you’re going to have to make this upcoming November. You know what’s meant a lot to me? All of those times we attended each other’s birthday parties, back-yard barbecues, and watching each other’s kids play soccer on Saturday mornings. What memories! And while my marriage is ending, our friendship has only just begun. This November, when the Landis divorce is finalized, do the right thing. Choose Arnold Landis as your friend for the future. Paid for by Arnold Landis.

Hello. This is Maxine Landis, and I want to talk to you about something very valuable to me. Loyalty. Through the years, I have enjoyed the friendship of just so many honest, hard-working people. People like Walter and Marie Pollard, who have welcomed me into their wonderful monthly canasta nights. People like Lester and Susan Fenner, who, in 2006, helped me organize a block-wide sidewalk sale, only to see it blossom into an annual and much cherished tradition in our development. I believe that these bonds were forged and strengthened thanks to one simple thing: loyalty. This November, stay loyal. Stay friends with Maxine. Paid for by Maxine Landis.

Hello, friend. This is Arnold Landis calling. Maxine Landis has been speaking a lot about loyalty of late. I’ve seen firsthand how easily such “loyalty” can be tested. I’ve seen Maxine Landis coldly cut off friends over something as minor as an unreturned serving dish. I’ve seen names get crossed off Maxine’s invite list as retribution for a perceived snub at the supermarket. I’ve seen Maxine Landis refuse to attend holiday parties in protest against what she considered a garish Christmas-light display. If loyalty comes easily to Maxine Landis, disloyalty comes even easier. Don’t get stuck with a backstabber. Choose Arnold Landis as the friend you keep this November.

This is Maxine Landis. I wasn’t alarmed by Arnold Landis’s recent turn toward name-calling, since I’ve heard Arnold Landis call his so-called friends much, much worse. People like Martin Powter, whom he once referred to as Captain Baldspot. People like Elisabeth Tandy, whom Arnold nicknamed The One With the Alcoholic’s Nose. People like the Blitsteins, whom Arnold called The Shitsteins. Do you want to remain constantly on guard, wondering what horrible names you’ll soon be called behind your back? Of course not. Go with Maxine.

by Mike Sacks and Bob Powers, The New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration: Jules Fieffer

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The Typeface of Truth

I know in my heart that graphic design is important. Sometimes the fate of nations depend on it, sometimes it's the missing link between a soft drink brand and Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, sometimes it just makes you happy. But I also know that the ingredients used by graphic designers — colors, shapes, typefaces — are fundamentally mysterious. What do they mean? How do they work? Why does one work better than another? What criteria should we use to choose?

This ambiguity can be maddening, especially to clients, who in desparation will invoke anecdotes and folk wisdom to help control an otherwise rudderless process. I've been told in meetings that triangles — to take one example — are the "most energetic" (or the "most aggressive"?) shape. I've been asked if it's true that white means death in Japan. Or is it black? Or red? Or China?

To tell you the truth, I've always appreciated this ambiguity. Like other experienced designers, I appear to navigate this miasma of hearsay with confidence. For the truth is that in our field, to quote screenwriter William Goldman, "Nobody knows anything." Black can be ominous or elegant. Triangles can be trendy or timeless. And typefaces? Hmm! Typefaces can be...anything you want them to be, right? There are many reasons to pick any one typefaces, all of them more or less arbitrary.

So imagine a client demands that text be set in "the most credible typeface." I would probably hide a smile and say there's no such thing.

But there is such a thing, says Errol Morris.

Several weeks ago, Morris, the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author, posted a simple quiz in his New York Times Opinionator blog. Ostensibly, the object of the quiz was to determine if the reader was an optimist or a pessimist. You read a short introduction about the likehood of an asteroid hitting the earth, and then an indented passage from a book by David Deutch, The Beginning of Infinity, in which he claims "we live in an era of unprecedented safety" and will likely be able to defend ourselves against such an impact. Morris then asked the reader to agree or disagree with the truth of that claim, and to indicate the degree of confidence the reader had in his or her conclusion. The result, supposedly, was to determine how many of us are optimists (finding Deutch's statement to be true) versus how many are pessimists (finding the statement to be false).

But it was all a trick. Morris was actually testing something completely different: the effect of fonts on truth. "Or to be precise," as he points out in his followup post today (part 1, part 2), "the effect on credulity. Are there certain fonts that compel a belief that the sentences they are written in are true?"

To find out, he had a colleague, Benjamin Merman, create a program that changed the font of the indented David Deutch passage each time the article was first opened. Each person taking the quiz would read the passage in one of six randomly assigned fonts: Baskerville,Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans, or Trebuchet. So the test had nothing to do, really, with optimist or pessimism. Instead, it was meant to find out if setting the passage in one typeface or another would lead people to believe it more.

Now, if you're like me, you already know what the least trustworthy typeface is, right? It's got to be Comic Sans: goofy, unloved, mocked Comic Sans. And it turns out we're right. According to Morris, people seem to be consciously aware of Comic Sans: it was in the news as recently as a few weeks ago, when it caused a minor dustup in the midst of the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle. This awareness seems to engender, in Morris's words, "contempt and summary dismissal." And good riddance, say I and countless other graphic designers.

But what about the other side of the equation? Is there a font that inclines us to believe that a sentence that's set in it is true? After analyzing the research, Morris says the answer is yes. And that typeface is Baskerville.

To Morris's surprise, the results of the test showed a clear difference between the performance of Baskerville and other fonts — not just Baskerville and Comic Sans (no contest); or Baskerville and Trebuchet or Helvetica (a clear serif versus sans distinction); but even Baskerville and Georgia (a lovely, and arguably even more legible serif by Matthew Carter). Compared to versions in the other typefaces, the passage set in Baskerville had both the highest rate of agreement and the lowest rate of disagreement. This led Morris to the inevitable conclusion: Baskerville is the typeface of truth.

by Michael Bierut, Design Observatory |  Read more:
Image: John Baskerville, The Book of Common Prayer, 1762.

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A Greener, Safer Empty Lot

Vacant lots in neighborhoods can mean trouble. Often overgrown and kind of creepy, these places can be magnets for crime, with tall grasses and bushes that can conceal criminal activity or serve as hiding places for weapons. They may even be good places to stash a body.

But not all empty lots breed crime. New research suggests that vacant lots that are cleaned up and maintained see reduced crime in their immediate surroundings. Cleaning and greening empty lots can even make people feel safer, according to the study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, published this week in the journal Injury Prevention.

The research is based on two separate clusters of vacant lots in Philadelphia – one set that was eventually cleaned up and maintained and one that wasn't. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society helped by removing debris from some sites, planting grass and trees, building fences and doing maintenance every two weeks. The researchers analyzed police records for these areas for the three months before the empty lot greening and the three months after and found a decrease in total crime as well as drops in assaults with and without a gun. Residents living near the greened lots reported feeling significantly safer than those living near the untouched empty lots.

The study builds on the previous work of one its main authors, who analyzed thousands of greened and non-greened empty lots over the course of more than a decade and found significant decreases in gun assaults around the areas that had been greened.

Though the findings of this newer study show only slight decreases in crime near the cleaned-up lots, they make a good case that neighborhoods with overgrown empty lots should clean them up. A little time with a weedwhacker may be all it takes to stop your block from becoming a crime den.

by Nate Berg, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Photo credit: Editor B/Flickr

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Psychiatry’s Legitimacy Crisis

About 40 years ago, American psychiatry faced an escalating crisis of legitimacy. All sorts of evidence suggested that, when confronted with a particular patient, psychiatrists could not reliably agree as to what, if anything, was wrong. To be sure, the diagnostic process in all areas of medicine is far more murky and prone to error than we like to think, but in psychiatry the situation was — and indeed still is — a great deal more fraught, and the murkiness more visible. It didn’t help that psychiatry’s most prominent members purported to treat illness with talk therapy and stressed the central importance of early childhood sexuality for adult psychopathology. In this already less-than-tidy context, the basic uncertainty regarding how to diagnose what was wrong with a patient was potentially explosively destabilizing.

The modern psychopharmacological revolution began in 1954 with the introduction of Thorazine, hailed as the first “anti-psychotic.” It was followed in short order by so-called “minor tranquilizers:” Miltown, and then drugs like Valium and Librium. The Rolling Stones famously sang of “mother’s little helper,” which enabled the bored housewife to get through to her “busy dying day.” Mother’s helper had a huge potential market. Drug companies, however, were faced with a problem. As each company sought its own magic potion, it encountered a roadblock of sorts: its psychiatric consultants were unable to deliver homogeneous populations of test subjects suffering from the same diagnosed illness in the same way. Without breaking the amorphous catchall of “mental disturbance” into defensible sub-sets, the drug companies could not develop the data they needed to acquire licenses to market the new drugs.

In a Cold War context, much was being made about the way the Soviets were stretching the boundaries of mental illness to label dissidents as mad in order to incarcerate and forcibly medicate them. But Western critics also began to look askance at their own shrinks and to allege that the psychiatric emperor had no clothes. A renegade psychiatrist called Thomas Szasz published a best-selling broadside called The Myth of Mental Illness, suggesting that psychiatrists were pernicious agents of social control who locked up inconvenient people on behalf of a society anxious to be rid of them, invoking an illness label that had the same ontological status as the label “witch” employed some centuries before. Illness, he truculently insisted, was a purely biological thing, a demonstrable part of the natural world. Mental illness was a misplaced metaphor, a socially constructed way of permitting an ever-wider selection of behaviors to be forcibly controlled under the guise of helping people. (...)

To address the embarrassment, one of the profession’s internal critics, Robert Spitzer of Columbia University, persuaded the American Psychiatric Association to authorize the development of a new diagnostic manual. The document he and his Task Force produced, approved and published in slightly modified form in 1980 as the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM III for short) launched a revolution in American psychiatry whose effects are still felt today. Versions III R (revised), IV, and IV TR (text revision) and DSM 5 (to be released in 2013) have been produced with numbing regularity. The advent of DSM III and its descendants constitute the backdrop to the argument presented in the new book by Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield, All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry’s Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders.

Horwitz and Wakefield want to argue for the harmful impact of what is often called the neo-Kraepelinian revolution in psychiatry. Emil Kraepelin was the fin-de-siècle German psychiatrist who launched the fashion for descriptive psychopathology and first made the distinction between dementia praecox and manic-depressive illness. Horwitz and Wakefield suggest that the efforts of Kraepelin’s late-twentieth century successors to make psychiatric diagnoses more rigorous and predictable have instead enabled psychiatric pathology to get out of hand. They identify two problems: the psychiatric profession’s obsession with simplistic, symptom-based diagnoses, and the looseness of its criteria for defining mental states as pathology. All sorts of anxieties that are in reality part of the normal range of human emotion and experience have been transformed by professional sleight of hand into diseases. The upshot, they contend, is that whereas thirty years ago less than five percent of Americans were thought to suffer from an anxiety disorder, nowadays some widely cited epidemiological studies have decreed that as many as 50 percent of us do so.

by Andrew Scull, LA Review of Books |  Read more:

The Secret to Solar Power

When I visited Sungevity’s offices in January, Kennedy kept asking if I had been across the street yet. “Have you taken him?” he asked a colleague. “When are we taking him?”

Eventually, Kennedy took me himself. We walked out of Sungevity’s main offices and across the cobbled street to an abandoned Barnes & Noble. When he opened the doors, I understood why he wanted me to see it: there before me, in one great room under a vaulted ceiling, were row after row of headset-wearing Sungevity employees tapping away at banks of high-resolution computer screens. Sungevity’s massive installation, interconnection and service teams — what Kennedy calls “project management,” meaning everything that has to be done once the solar system has been ordered — worked here. Though they have since moved into a different office space, as of January there were about a hundred people working in that abandoned bookstore, nearly as many as there were in all of Sungevity’s vast headquarters across the street.

The operation demands this many people because the permits required to put a solar array on your roof vary from city to city, even within California. “Some agencies want an AutoCAD drawing of the proposed installation as a digital file,” Kennedy said, pointing at the various people at work at their monitors. “Others want a single line electrical drawing as a piece of paper in a folder somewhere. And somebody’s got to do all that.”

When I asked Lyndon Rive if SolarCity had a similar operation, he said: “There’s a lot of complexity with permitting and everything else. We’re trying to hide the customer from that pain.” Lynn Jurich at Sunrun told me that the work it takes to arrange permits for an installation adds $2,500 to the cost of each system. Looking out at the Sungevity work force in that former bookstore, it wasn’t hard to believe. It was a living, moving picture of the inefficiencies created by fragmented policy — but it was also a lot of jobs. I kept trying to move farther and farther back, just to get some sense of the scale. As we walked out, Kennedy said: “This business is a baby growing up so fast, forget childhood. It’s straight into adolescence and beyond.”  (...)

The reason that the residential solar industry has begun to buck this general trend is because, instead of appealing to our heartstrings, it has begun to appeal to our checkbooks. The innovation that made this possible — selling solar services instead of solar panels — was pioneered in the commercial market by Jigar Shah. Though Shah was trained as a mechanical engineer, his most important bit of engineering was financial: in 2003, he started a company called SunEdison, which offered something called a solar-power purchase agreement (P.P.A.) to commercial customers.

Instead of having to pay all of the money for a solar installation up front and then having to carry that payment as a debt on their balance sheets, which no publicly traded company wants to do, companies like Whole Foods and Staples contracted with SunEdison to have solar panels put up at no initial cost. SunEdison then charged the companies for the amount of energy that the panels produced at a fixed rate for a period of 20 years — a rate that was less than what the companies were already paying the utilities, and that would ultimately save them even more money as energy prices inevitably rose over time. The bold stroke was that they were selling the power, not the hardware. (...)

Lyndon Rive, the head of SolarCity, said: “People don’t buy gas stations. People don’t buy utilities. Why are we having them buy solar equipment?” The premise of the lease is simple. You go online to one of the installers and enter basic information about your location and your previous year’s energy usage. The installer then uses satellite and aerial imagery to assess how viable your rooftop is for solar use — too many trees are a problem, southward-facing roofs have the most exposure to sunlight over the course of the day — and whether they can put enough of a system on your roof to make it worthwhile.

If they can, the basic value proposition is this: Say you have been paying your utility, on average, $100 a month. The solar company installs solar panels on your roof, maintains them, monitors them and repairs them for the life of the lease. The output will reduce your utility bill to roughly $20 a month, and you pay around $65 a month to lease the equipment (and the power the equipment produces, along with maintenance). You’re now paying $85 a month total, 15 percent less than you were, the installer has a revenue stream that it can use for cash flow or sell off to an investor and everybody is playing his part in reducing the burning of fossil fuels.

“The most frequent question I get,” Kennedy says, “is: ‘What’s the sting? Where’s the trap?’ ” Lyndon Rive says he still goes to dinner parties, where people know all about SolarCity and what he does, and at the end of his pitch about the solar lease, somebody will say: “So how much does this cost again? What’s the payback period?”

“‘You haven’t heard me!”’ he shouted to me, over the telephone, spelling out his frustration with those kinds of questions. “You get cheaper electricity! Full stop!’ ”

by Jeff Himmelman, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Stephen Lewis

Chuck Berry, Keith Richards

[ed. "If you want to get it right, let's get it right." ha ha...I'm sure KR had more than a few second thoughts after rehearsing for this tribute (in fact, I know he did. Read Life, his amazing autobiography.]

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Tyler Schatz I Said Fix It, Not Clean It

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Bob Marley

[ed. Complete live show from Santa Barbara 1979. 92 min.]

Jarek Puczel. Girl on a seesaw. 65x50 cm. oil and acrylic on canvas Via
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