My Drunk Kitchen: Onion Rings

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Guns 'R Us

Out-of-state residents can purchase firearms in Arizona read the sign behind the counter at Sprague's Sports in Yuma. ASK US HOW. I asked a clerk named Ron for details. He was short, packed solid as a ham, with a crew cut and a genial demeanor. He pointed to the cavalcade of hunting rifles lined up on the long wall behind him. "Any of these you can get today—or these over here," he said, leading me to a corner of the store where two young men in ball caps and a woman with a sparkly purse were admiring a selection of AK-47's.

"You have to admit this is pretty badass," the one man was saying. He had a carbine shorty perched on his hip, Stallone-style.

"I don't know," the woman said. "To me, it looks mean."

"It's supposed to look mean."

"They should make it in pink," she said. "Wouldn't that be cute?"

"You're shitting me."

"They should make it in Hello Kitty!" she said. "I would totally buy it if it was Hello Kitty."

"Sweet holy crap," the other man said. "That would be the worst possible death. Can you imagine? Shot dead by a Hello Kitty semiauto."

It was difficult to tell if Ron was listening in on any of this; both of us had our lips pulled back in pretend smiles. "Now, what can I show you?" he asked me while the one guy went on faking his bad death and the woman continued her torture with something about rainbow-colored bullets.

I didn't really want to buy an assault rifle, or even a handgun, but I was curious to know what buying one felt like, how the purchase worked, what-all was involved. Nobody in my circle back east had guns, nobody wanted them, and if anybody talked about them, it was in cartoon terms: Guns are bad things owned by bad people who want to do bad things. About the only time the people where I come from thought about guns was when something terrible happened. A lunatic sprays into a crowd and we have the same conversation we always have: those damn guns and those damn people who insist on having them.

I had come to Arizona, the most gun-friendly state, to listen to the conversation the rest of America was apparently having. One in three Americans owns a gun. About 59 million handguns, 46 million rifles, and 28 million shotguns—nearly 135 million new firearms for sale in the U.S. since 1986. We are the most heavily armed society in the world. If an armed citizenry is a piece of our national identity, how is it that I'd never even met it?

In Arizona, anyone over 18 can buy an assault rifle, at 21 you can get a pistol, and you can carry your gun, loaded or unloaded, concealed or openly, just about anywhere. The IHOP was said to be the only restaurant in Yuma that prohibited you from bringing your gun in. "Needless to say, most of us won't eat there," Ron said. On the rack behind him, assault rifles stood stupid as pool cues, black and blocky, with long magazines protruding erotically this way and that.

"I'm kind of surprised you carry assault rifles," I said to Ron.

"There's no such thing as an assault rifle," he said. "These are 'military-style rifles' or 'modern sporting rifles.' "

"But they're assault rifles," I noted. I knew that much from TV.

"Assault is one of the worst things the media has ever done to us," he said. "Have any of these rifles ever assaulted anyone?"

He went on to say I could buy as many of them as I wanted and walk out with my arsenal today. "These guns have helped our industry tremendously," he said. "They've attracted a whole new generation.... Is there one you want to try?" He brought down a Colt AR15-A3 tactical carbine, slammed in an empty magazine, and handed it to me. It felt disappointingly fake, an awesome water pistol, perhaps, or a Halloween prop. I asked if I would need to tell him why I wanted to buy a gun like that or what I intended to do with it. He squinted and smiled and appeared politely speechless. "Would you have to do what, now?" he asked.

It was difficult for us to find a comfortable, common starting place, but the reach was certainly genuine.

by Jeanne Marie Laskas, GQ |  Read more:

Photographs by David Graham

Sue Different

[ed. Jury rules in favor of Apple (and against consumers). Read: A Verdict That Alters the Industry.]

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, in 2007, he strode across the stage in his black turtleneck, praising the device’s interface and announcing, poignantly, “boy, have we patented it.” In the Samsung case, Apple asserts that its Korean competitor blatantly copied the iPhone—and Apple is probably right. The highlight of the recent trial was the release of a hundred-and-thirty-two page document, from 2010, in which Samsung employees laid out, in great detail, Apple’s superiority. The document is like a primer on phone-interface design. (See, for example, the discussion of why Apple’s system for entering long telephone numbers is clearer than Samsung’s). Gradually some of Samsung’s phones began to look like cousins of an iPhone; then they began to look like brothers. The Galaxy S could now pass as the iPhone’s unshaven twin. (...)

In general, we should want good ideas to be copied. If you’ve got a Samsung phone, be grateful that the engineers at Apple helped design the dialer. Yes, inventors need incentives to invent. They need to know that their ideas can make them money and that building something brilliant can make them rich. And in some industries—particularly ones, like pharma, with huge research costs—you do need strong patent protection. But technology doesn’t work like drug development. The industry evolves quickly, and you need to try to be first, whether you get patent protection or not. Enforcing patents can help you lock in profits; but patents won’t change your approach to research.

The prime example of this phenomenon is, of course, Apple. It invented the iPhone and the iPad, and locked in huge profits and brand loyalty before anyone could catch up. Apple, on Monday, became the most valuable company in the history of mankind—and its most valuable product is the iPhone. The company is worth six hundred and twenty-five billion dollars, roughly four times as much as Samsung.

Furthermore, software patents (and even some hardware patents) are notoriously confusing. Last summer, “This American Life” ran an extraordinary segment on the muck of software patents, which included one engineer admitting that he didn’t understand even the patents he himself had filed. They were just “mungo mumbo jumbo.” It’s hard for the patent office to evaluate code; it’s even harder for juries. Given the complexity and confusion, a good general principle would be to first do no harm. This summer, Judge Richard Posner dismissed a case between Motorola and Apple, and then proclaimed in an interview that the fighting between technology companies shouldn’t be surprising. “As in any jungle, the animals will use all the means at their disposal, all their teeth and claws that are permitted by the ecosystem.” He then added, “It’s not clear that we really need patents in most industries.”

by Nicholas Thompson, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Vicki Behringer/Reuters

Talking With Rickie Lee Jones

Rickie Lee Jones has been recording other people’s songs almost as long as she’s been recording her own. The EP “Girl At Her Volcano,” back in 1983, collected her versions of torch songs and jazz standards, and she has repeatedly returned to similar projects. “Pop Pop,” released in 1991, was recorded with jazz players such as Charlie Haden and Joe Henderson and contained, along with a clutch of jazz standards, her take on Jimi Hendrix’s “Up From The Sky.” On “It’s Like This,” in 2000, she sang songs by Marvin Gaye (“Trouble Man”), Steely Dan (“Show Biz Kids”), Traffic (“The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys”), among others.

Her new record, “The Devil You Know,” due September 18th from Concord, returns her to interpretive territory, with a set of intimate, sometimes stark, versions of songs that she loves—and, consequently, that she loves to sing. The album kicks off with Jones’s take on the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” and moves through Van Morrison’s “Comfort You” and Donovan’s “Catch the Wind,” Rod Stewart’s “Seems Like a Long Time” and Tim Hardin’s “Reason to Believe.”

Jones agreed to discuss the album, its predecessors, and the art of the cover song.

You’ve come back to these interpretive projects throughout your career. Are they all motivated by the same impulse, or do you think of them each very differently?

They are part of the same overall project. When my career started in 1979, the division between singer-songwriter-dom and singer-dom was a wide abyss, and singer-songwriters were not allowed to cover songs. Before I got signed, when I played live, I would do some of my own songs and also songs that I loved, like “Makin’ Whoopee” and “My Funny Valentine.” All those songs, the originals and the others, were part of me. And I got lots of flak. I’m not sure why, exactly, but there was a strong belief that singers should only sing their own songs.

Why do you think that was?

Singing other people’s material was perceived, I think, as a weakness of my persona. The effect, though, was to make me dig my heels in and try even harder to combine the two. There was a moment when I was doing jazz, with “Something Cool,” from “Girl At Her Volcano.” But I didn’t follow up on it right away. I went back and recorded originals, other albums. Then Linda Ronstadt released those records arranged by Nelson Riddle. So, when I decided to return to it, I was talking it over with Don Was, who was my producer, and I wanted to do a guitar-based record. He suggested the bandoneón, which is how that record, “Pop Pop,” ended up with this Left Bank, café sound. I thought if I did a piano record it would bury me. It almost buried me anyway. The L.A. Times did a review with two journalists on the same page, a pop writer and a jazz writer, and the jazz writer tore me apart. What was happening? Was I being punished?

Part of the dynamic with recording other people’s songs, though, is that a listener is automatically going to compare your version to what’s already known, and it can either seem like you’re revealing something new or tampering with a treasured memory. Take “Sympathy for the Devil,” which is an iconic Rolling Stones song. You open this record with your version of it, which is completely different in arrangement and feel.

In my mind, I guess, I see a group on the right side: those are the die-hards with their hands folded who see any interpretation as tampering. On the left side there are the people who say, “Hooray, whatever you do is great.” I have to say that I am hardly aware of the people on the right side. They feel that they are holding a line, I guess. I am not sure why. Mick Jagger already recorded that song. What would be the point of doing it the same way, with the same drums and the chanting? There’s no point in competing with that. It’s definitive and it exists and it was a long, long time ago. The only point in singing it, for me, is that the way I’m singing it now is new. In this case, I was part of a tribute to the Stones at Carnegie Hall, and I got to play “Sympathy For the Devil” before I recorded it. I walked out and sat in a chair and started to play rhythm guitar and I felt the audience gasp. Their reaction was like sucking in air. They held their breath and then, about eight seconds later, most of them were totally with me.

by Ben Greenman, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Myriam Santos

Boys on the Side: The Hookup Culture

Girl Land, like so much writing about young women and sexuality, concentrates on what has been lost. The central argument holds that women have effectively been duped by a sexual revolution that persuaded them to trade away the protections of (and from) young men. In return, they were left even more vulnerable and exploited than before. Sexual liberation, goes the argument, primarily liberated men—to act as cads, using women for their own pleasures and taking no responsibility for the emotional wreckage that their behavior created. The men hold all the cards, and the women put up with it because now it’s too late to zip it back up, so they don’t have a choice.

But this analysis downplays the unbelievable gains women have lately made, and, more important, it forgets how much those gains depend on sexual liberation. Single young women in their sexual prime—that is, their 20s and early 30s, the same age as the women at the business-­school party—are for the first time in history more success­ful, on average, than the single young men around them. They are more likely to have a college degree and, in aggregate, they make more money. What makes this remarkable development possible is not just the pill or legal abortion but the whole new landscape of sexual freedom—the ability to delay marriage and have temporary relationships that don’t derail education or career. To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.

The business-­school women I met were in an extreme situation. Wall Street culture had socialized them to tolerate high degrees of sexual crudeness, and they were also a decade past the tentative explorations of their freshman year. But they are merely the most purified sample of a much larger group of empowered college-age women. Even freshmen and sophomores are not nearly as vulnerable as we imagine them to be.
“Rather than struggling to get into relationships,” Armstrong reported, college women “had to work to avoid them.”  (...)

At Yale I heard stories like the ones I had read in many journalistic accounts of the hookup culture. One sorority girl, a junior with a beautiful tan, long dark hair, and a great figure, whom I’ll call Tali, told me that freshman year she, like many of her peers, was high on her first taste of the hookup culture and didn’t want a boyfriend. “It was empowering, to have that kind of control,” she recalls. “Guys were texting and calling me all the time, and I was turning them down. I really enjoyed it! I had these options to hook up if I wanted them, and no one would judge me for it.” But then, sometime during sophomore year, her feelings changed. She got tired of relation­ships that just faded away, “no end, no beginning.” Like many of the other college women I talked with, Tali and her friends seemed much more sexually experienced and knowing than my friends at college. They were as blasé about blow jobs and anal sex as the one girl I remember from my junior year whom we all considered destined for a tragic early marriage or an asylum. But they were also more innocent. When I asked Tali what she really wanted, she didn’t say anything about commitment or marriage or a return to a more chival­rous age. “Some guy to ask me out on a date to the frozen-­yogurt place,” she said. That’s it. A $3 date.

But the soda-fountain nostalgia of this answer quickly dissipated when I asked Tali and her peers a related question: Did they want the hookup culture to go away—might they prefer the mores of an earlier age, with formal dating and slightly more obvious rules? This question, each time, prompted a look of horror. Reform the culture, maybe, teach women to “advocate for themselves”—a phrase I heard many times—but end it? Never. Even one of the women who had initiated the Title IX complaint, Alexandra Brodsky, felt this way. “I would never come down on the hookup culture,” she said. “Plenty of women enjoy having casual sex.”

by Hanna Rosin, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: Emiliano Granado

linda vachon / tête de caboche #2261140 ¬
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Eliot Hodgkin - Five Oyster Shells, 1961

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The Paranoid-Critical Method

Paranoia, as the cliché has it, is a higher state of awareness, a form of privileged insight unburdened by such trivialities as plausibility or verification. It’s sometimes seen as a cancer that afflicts our hermeneutical faculty, causing it to enlarge and impose itself everywhere, explaining everything in terms of everything else in an ongoing, provisional way, usually to simultaneously rationalize and vitiate a sense of futility. It substitutes spurious explanations for actual efforts to change things, often things about oneself. This sort of thinking can create an impenetrable fortress of depression, repelling all intuitions that it can actually make a difference to do something.

But as Kurt Cobain famously observed, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.” Depressive paranoia can blind you to the ways people are actually preying on you. And criticality can be labeled paranoia as a way of discrediting or pre-emptively dismissing it. There is a basic level of paranoia that’s necessary to conceive of oneself as a self, to allow us to recognize our vulnerability and accommodate it in advance rather than let it be something we register only after self-defensive instincts have fired. Some paranoia is necessary to believe that our interpretations of social situations matter. As long as we can modulate our level of paranoia in light of the contexts we find ourselves in, we can retain a secure sense of self — secure, that is, in a suitable understanding of the social dangers we face. (...)

Most of my conjectures lately have to do with the systemic paranoia induced by social media and its surveillance capacity. The horrendous ramifications for privacy are obvious to everyone at this point, yet they have not deterred anyone from using social media and allowing social media to embed themselves ever deeper into everyday-life practices. Where is the paranoia? Is it so omnipresent to have become invisible? And why hasn’t it stopped people from signing up?

Rather than avoid the intensifying social threat, we appear to be adjusting our inner paranoia to accommodate these unprecedented levels of vulnerability. This suggests an unthinking and ongoing transvaluation of values is occurring, whereby the invasive and exploitive possibilities inherent in social media are recoded as an expression of basic human impulses, as realizations of long-held dreams of connection and freedom of expression, of collective self-discovery or the discovery of long-suppressed collectives. Somehow we can look at something like Facebook and see it as a tool for building trust rather than obviating it.

Part of this transvaluation takes the natural yearning for recognition and inflates it an unchecked hunger for indiscriminate fame, as though attention were like money, fungible and hoardable, and more of any kind of it is automatically good. Fame has no limits and can’t really be rationalized on the scale of what had been routine life; those who have been saturated with the amount of attention fame brings have almost always been psychically destroyed by it. It is the opposite of being appreciated for what you do in the moment, or what sort of person you are to the people you are close to, and eventually precludes those humbler forms of appreciation, which are impossible in the context of fame. Your own notoriety becomes the explanation for everything anyone says to you; it’s all obligatory homage being paid to fame, and the relation of all that attention to how you actually are in the world can’t be verified. It becomes a paranoid condition, in which no approval or recognition is genuine but instead must be interpreted as having been calculated to achieve some other aim. Fame in many ways is confirmed by the experience of paranoia. The degree to which fame is regarded as desirable, paranoia is desirable too.

by Rob Horning, The New Inquiry |  Read more:

Marlon Brando and Al Pacino
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When Spike Lee Became Scary

Do the Right Thing is one of the few truly great films of the 1980s: an intelligent, matter-of-fact examination of race in America and also a vibrant, funny slice of New York life. It all takes place (except for a brief but powerful epilogue) over the course of the hottest day of the summer, on one block in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The center of the block's activities (and the film's) is Sal's Famous Pizzeria, owned and operated by Italian-American proprietor Sal (Danny Aiello), with the help of his sons Pino (John Turturro) and Vito (Richard Edson). Deliveries are made by Mookie (Lee), who serves as the pizzeria's ambassador, bringing news in and taking pizzas out to their primarily African-American clientele.

Lee's script marshals a rich cast of supporting characters, chief among them Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), who paces the streets, blaring Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" on a never-ending loop at full volume, and Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito), the would-be revolutionary who sits down that afternoon to eat his slice and suddenly notices that the "Wall of Fame" in Sal's Pizzeria is inhabited only by Italian-Americans (Sinatra, DiMaggio, DeNiro, Pacino). He asks why "there aren't any brothers on the wall." Sal replies, not unreasonably, that it's his place, and when Buggin' Out gets his own place, he can put whoever he wants on his wall. Buggin' Out retorts, also sensibly, that there aren't a lot of Italian-Americans buying pizza in Sal's joint, so maybe the wall of fame should include some black folks. ("Two valid points," Lee maintains, on a recent audio commentary.) And with that conversation, and the minor confrontation that follows, a slow fuse is lit that, by the end of the day, will explode in violence.

The way that Lee handles that scene shows the even-handedness of his writing and directing. Neither Sal nor Buggin' Out are obviously right or obviously wrong, and Lee refuses to do his audience's thinking for them. Much is made in the film's DVD supplemental materials of Lee and Aiello's disagreement over a fundamental fact about the character of Sal: whether or not he is a racist. Lee thinks yes, Aiello thinks no, but that's the beauty of the picture—it allows room for us to go either way, and that disagreement may, in part, be one of the reasons Sal is such a fascinating, complex character.

But these characters aren't just about prejudices. What is most remarkable about Do the Right Thing is how finely shaded each and every important character is, and how all of those shadings come into play by the time the film reaches its breathless conclusion. At the end of the day, Buggin' Out returns to Sal's Pizzeria with Radio Raheem and Smiley in tow, the boom box at full blast, the sounds of "Fight the Power" filling the tiny restaurant. Buggin' Out and Raheem want "brothers on the wall," and Sal wants them to "turn that shit down." Tempers flare and harsh words are exchanged; Sal loses his cool, pulls out his Louisville Slugger, screams epithets at them, and smashes the boom box to smithereens. A full-scale brawl breaks out in the pizzeria, which spills out onto the street. Police are called—and, of course, the NYPD goes right for the two young black men.

Radio Raheem is subjected to what Lee calls the "Michael Stewart choke hold"—alluding to the 1983 death of graffiti artist Stewart while in police custody. Raheem falls to the Bed-Stuy pavement, dead; he's tossed into a police cruiser, as is Buggin' Out. The police flee the scene, leaving the angry crowd fuming at Sal and his sons. As tensions come to a boil, Mookie picks up a garbage can and heaves it through the plate glass window of Sal's Famous Pizzeria. The angry mob descends on the restaurant, smashing glass, tearing the joint to pieces, and setting it afire. Sal and his sons watch, stunned (Sal: "That's my fuckin' place." Pino: "Fuckin' niggers"). Police return, along with fire trucks. The crowd, chanting "Coward Beach" (another historical allusion, to a 1986 race clash in Howard Beach, Queens that left one young black man dead and two more injured) won't disperse, in spite of police warnings. So the fire department turns the hoses on the black residents, Lee deliberately echoing the most iconic imagery of the civil rights movement.

The question a lot of people ask about the film, to this very day, is in regards to the climax: "Did Mookie do the right thing?" Then and now, it's a silly question—of course he didn't. But why is he singled out? (Probably because he incites the destruction of white-owned property, but that's another discussion.) In the broad scope of the film, nobody does the right thing: not Mookie, not Sal, not Buggin' Out, and certainly not the NYPD. In the blistering heat of that Brooklyn sun, people who are basically good do the wrong things at the wrong moment—and we believe all of it, that all of them would act that way right then, because they seem real people, and their tenuous character flaws have been so subtly but effectively teed up. "I believe that any good-hearted person, white or black, will come out of this movie with sympathy for all of the characters," Ebert wrote, when the film was released. "Lee does not ask us to forgive them, or even to understand everything they do, but he wants us to identify with their fears and frustrations. Do The Right Thing doesn't ask its audiences to choose sides; it is scrupulously fair to both sides, in a story where it is our society itself that is not fair."

by Jason Bailey, The Atlantic |  Read more:

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The Quiet Hell of Extreme Meditation

These are my final words: "Why a camp chair?" I speak them to a man named Wade. Wade from Minnesota. I'm in line behind him, waiting to enter the Dhamma Giri meditation center, in the quiet hill country of western India, for the official start of the 10-day course. Wade tells me that this is his second course and that he learned a valuable lesson from the first. "I'm so glad I have this," he says, indicating the small folding camp chair tucked under his arm. I utter my last question. It's never answered. One of the volunteers approaches, puts a finger to his lips, and the silence begins.

Not just silence. I have – we all have – signed a pledge to observe what's called "noble silence." This means no speaking, no gestures, no eye contact. "You must live here," we're told, "as if you're completely alone." There is also no exercise permitted, except walking. No cellphones. No computers. No radios. No pens or paper. No books, pamphlets, or magazines. Nothing at all to read. There will be only two simple vegetarian meals a day. My suitcase, with my phone and laptop, is locked away in the meditation center's office. I have just a day bag, with a couple of toiletries, a med kit, and a single change of clothes. I'm wearing sandals and sweatpants and a loose T-shirt.

The line begins to move, and I follow Wade and the rest of the men – women are in a separate area – through the ­20-acre campus: cement paths piebald with bird droppings, a couple of shady banana trees. In the center is a monumental pagoda, with a gleaming gold-painted dome perched, ­wedding-cake style, atop several white, circular tiers. The 250 or so men have been divided into four groups, and I follow mine, Group Three, down a set of stone steps to a smaller pagoda.

We remove our footwear. I pick mine up while I notice that most of the Indian students – I'm one of only a handful of Westerners – pinch their sandals between the toes of one foot, lift the pair, and park them deftly on a metal rack. Inside the pagoda is a large, roundish room with white ­cinderblock walls, empty save for neat rows of square blue pillows.

A couple of volunteers – they're officially known as Dharma Servers and are permitted to make occasional hand gestures – point to where I should sit. Cushion 51, according to the safety-pinned tag. To my left is a middle-aged man, portly, wearing slacks and a purple dress shirt and a large gold watch. To my right is a reed-thin student-­looking guy in jeans and a polo shirt and stylish, metal-framed glasses. They're both sitting cross-legged, with a straight back, so I assume the same position. We are all facing the front, where there are two raised platforms with unoccupied cushions. Soon a pair of older men, one with a mop of black hair, the other balding, walk in and sit on the raised cushions, facing us. These are our teachers. The first meditation is about to begin.

I'm deeply, heart-slammingly nervous, yet also elated. This is something I'd long wished to experience: a chance to unplug, de-stress, switch off. To halt, for a decent spell, the incessant babbling – my own and everyone else's. I'd had three children in three years: My life, morning, noon, and, goddammit, middle of the night, was overwhelmingly noisy. I was snared in the new-father vortex of fewer hours to work and more bills to pay. At my last doctor's visit, for the first time in my life, I registered alarmingly high blood pressure.

I chose the meditation style known as Vipassana for several reasons. It's wholly nondenominational. No gods are prayed to, no mantras chanted, all religious iconography is prohibited. If you typically wear, say, a crucifix, you must remove it for the duration of the course. Also, there is no need for prior meditation experience – in fact, I was told, a neophyte is the ideal student because you won't have any bad habits to avoid – which suited me perfectly, as I'd never meditated before. (...)

Demand for Vipassana courses, despite the 10-day commitment, is often overwhelming. Waiting lists are common. Classes are now taught in more than 70 countries, including the United States, but I wanted to travel to India – to the motherland of the Buddha, to the world's preeminent Vipassana center, to a place so far from home that I'd be deterred from quitting. Dhamma Giri, the center I wished to attend, can house more than 500 students, but getting in is like applying for college. I even had to write a brief essay, in which I pleaded that I was desperate to "capture a greater degree of calmness in myself." A few weeks later, via email, I learned I'd been accepted for a spot in the February 2012 class. So I left my wife and kids and flew to Mumbai.

Now, folded atop my royal-blue cushion in the crowded room in the small pagoda, facing the teachers, I wait. I don't quite know what to do. It's evening; there are no windows in the meditation room, but there's ambient light, gradually waning. Spiderwebs are hammocked about the ceiling. I glance at the teachers; they're motionless, eyes closed. I look at my neighbors. Eyes shut. I close my own. I listen to the birdcalls, intense beyond the pagoda's walls. There's the scent of a burning bug coil. Someone burps.

by Michael Finkel, Men's Journal |  Read more:

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Money Market Funds 'Operating Without a Net'

Attempts to make sweeping changes to a popular type of mutual fund that played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis have been derailed.

The chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary L. Schapiro, wanted to bring her vision for regulating money market mutual funds to a vote as early as next week. But Ms. Schapiro acknowledged on Wednesday evening that three of the five commissioners opposed her plan and said she was calling off the vote. (...)

Until the financial crisis, money market funds were considered a dull, low-return corner of the markets. But now, most of the nation’s top financial regulators view the sector as one of the most vulnerable parts of the American financial system. (...)

Regulators view the funds as vulnerable because they act like banks by taking in money and promising to return every dollar that investors put in. Unlike banks, though, they do not have to pay deposit insurance or keep capital buffers to protect against defaults.

The funds, which provide short-term loans to banks and other borrowers, grew wildly over the last 30 years because they typically offered a higher return than bank accounts and at their peak held $3.8 trillion.

Most investors have used the funds like low-risk bank accounts from which money could be immediately withdrawn.

But in the financial crisis the vulnerability of the funds was laid bare. In September 2008, the Reserve Primary Fund suffered losses on $785 million of debt issued by Lehman Brothers and fell below $1 a share, known as “breaking the buck.”

Investors fled the Reserve Primary Fund and a panic ensued in which they withdrew about $300 billion from money market funds in one week, contributing to the credit freeze that gripped global markets. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department stepped in to bail out the money market fund sector with a guarantee and a special loan facility.

The S.E.C. voted in 2010 to introduce several new rules aimed at making the funds more stable. The most significant change forced fund managers to hold more assets that could be easily sold for cash. (...)

“Money market funds effectively are operating without a net,” Ms. Schapiro said.

by Nathaniel Popper, NY Times |  Read more:

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A Community on Overdose

About half of those living in McDowell County depend on some kind of relief check such as Social Security, Disability, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, retirement benefits, and unemployment to survive. They live on the margins, check to check, expecting no improvement in their lives and seeing none. The most common billboards along the roads are for law firms that file disability claims and seek state and federal payments. “Disability and Injury Lawyers,” reads one. It promises to handle “Social Security. Car Wrecks. Veterans. Workers’ Comp.” The 800 number ends in COMP.

Harry M. Caudill, in his monumental 1963 book Night Comes to the Cumberlands, describes how relief checks became a kind of bribe for the rural poor in Appalachia. The decimated region was the pilot project for outside government assistance, which had issued the first food stamps in 1961 to a household of fifteen in Paynesville, West Virginia. “Welfarism” began to be practiced, as Caudill wrote, “on a scale unequalled elsewhere in America and scarcely surpassed anywhere in the world.” Government “handouts,” he observed, were “speedily recognized as a lode from which dollars could be mined more easily than from any coal seam.”

Obtaining the monthly “handout” became an art form. People were reduced to what Caudill called “the tragic status of ‘symptom hunters.’ If they could find enough symptoms of illness, they might convince the physicians they were ‘sick enough to draw’... to indicate such a disability as incapacitating the men from working. Then his children, as public charges, could draw enough money to feed the family.”

Joe and I are sitting in the Tug River Health Clinic in Gary with a registered nurse who does not want her name used. The clinic handles federal and state black lung applications. It runs a program for those addicted to prescription pills. It also handles what in the local vernacular is known as “the crazy check” -- payments obtained for mental illness from Medicaid or SSI -- a vital source of income for those whose five years of welfare payments have run out. Doctors willing to diagnose a patient as mentally ill are important to economic survival.

“They come in and want to be diagnosed as soon as they can for the crazy check,” the nurse says. “They will insist to us they are crazy. They will tell us, ‘I know I’m not right.’ People here are very resigned. They will avoid working by being diagnosed as crazy.”

The reliance on government checks, and a vast array of painkillers and opiates, has turned towns like Gary into modern opium dens. The painkillers OxyContin, fentanyl -- 80 times stronger than morphine -- Lortab, as well as a wide variety of anti-anxiety medications such as Xanax, are widely abused. Many top off their daily cocktail of painkillers at night with sleeping pills and muscle relaxants. And for fun, addicts, especially the young, hold “pharm parties,” in which they combine their pills in a bowl, scoop out handfuls of medication, swallow them, and wait to feel the result.

A decade ago only about 5% of those seeking treatment in West Virginia needed help with opiate addiction. Today that number has ballooned to 26%. It recorded 91 overdose deaths in 2001. By 2008 that number had risen to 390.

Drug overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in West Virginia, and the state leads the country in fatal drug overdoses. OxyContin -- nicknamed “hillbilly heroin” -- is king. At a drug market like the Pines it costs a dollar a milligram. And a couple of 60- or 80-milligram pills sold at the Pines is a significant boost to a family’s income. Not far behind OxyContin is Suboxone, the brand name for a drug whose primary ingredient is buprenorphine, a semisynthetic opioid. Dealers, many of whom are based in Detroit, travel from clinic to clinic in Florida to stock up on the opiates and then sell them out of the backs of gleaming SUVs in West Virginia, usually around the first of the month, when the government checks arrive. Those who have legal prescriptions also sell the drugs for a profit. Pushers are often retirees. They can make a few hundred extra dollars a month on the sale of their medications. The temptation to peddle pills is hard to resist.

by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, TomDispatch.com |  Read more:
Illustration: Univ. of Toronto

Tiny Hawaiian Island Will See if New Owner Tilts at Windmills

Lanai City, Hawaii — Lanai should be the very picture of tropical tranquillity, the kind of Pacific island where Gilligan set ground. Just 3,135 people live on its 141 square miles. There are no traffic lights, movie theaters or bakeries. There is just one gas station and three main roads. It is ringed with vast and empty beaches, accessible only by four-wheel drive. A visitor can roam its hills for hours without encountering another living being.

Yet for all its seeming serenity, Lanai — a privately owned island in easy sight of Maui’s western shore — is torn these days by economic and cultural conflict, struggling with its identity and an uncertain future after its reclusive residents learned that their island had been sold to the reclusive billionaire owner of a software company.

Since James Drummond Dole bought Lanai from a rancher 90 years ago, the island has undergone a series of wrenching economic transformations. Under Dole, it became the world’s largest pineapple plantation, known as Pineapple Island, with bristling fields and a colony of workers. When Dole moved its operations overseas in the late 1980s, Lanai turned to tourism, opening two high-end resorts where rooms go for as much as $1,100 a night, providing a new source of employment for this community.

But when those resorts struggled with the recent economic downturn and the challenge of bringing tourists to a remote island with single-propeller air service, the island’s owner proposed building a field of 45-story turbine windmills, across bluffs and beaches covering over a quarter of the island, to produce energy to sell to Oahu. The plan polarized residents, dividing those who saw the turbines as the economic salvation of their struggling island from those who treasured its wild and undeveloped isolation.

“It’s awful, just awful,” said Robin Kaye, one of the opponents, sweeping his arm across the land where the windmills would rise, a tumble of otherworldly rock formations framed by views across the Pacific to Maui and Molokai. “There are families who won’t talk to each other anymore. It has really ripped us up.”

Lanai’s new owner is Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle. He bought 98 percent of the island — the remainder is government property and privately owned homes — six weeks ago from David H. Murdock, another billionaire, whose holdings include Dole and who was the force behind the windmill proposal. The price was not disclosed.

Mr. Ellison now owns the gas station, the car rental agency and the supermarket. He owns the Lanai City Grille, the Hotel Lanai, the two Four Seasons resorts, two championship golf courses, about 500 cottages and luxury homes, a solar farm, and nearly every single one of the small shops and cafes that line Lanai City. He owns 88,000 acres of overgrown pineapple fields and arid, boulder-strewn hills, thick with red dust, as well as 50 miles of beaches.

But Mr. Murdock is not quite gone. As part of his deal, he retained the option to build the windmills should he win the requisite approvals. That was viewed here as one final anxiety-causing shot at his Lanai neighbors.

For all the speculation about Mr. Ellison’s intentions — the most prevalent being that the new owner, whose team of yachts won the America’s Cup in 2010, would turn Lanai into a hub for sailing — he has yet to appear in public, speak with elected officials or tell anyone what he might have in mind. He did not respond to a request for comment.

“Everybody is basically in the dark,” said Mary Charles, who runs the Hotel Lanai. “It’s been a very tough struggle for Lanai for the past five years.”

by Adam Nagourney, NT Times |  Read more:

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

My Home is the Sea || by Clare Elsaesser

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