Everyone Eats There

I left Los Angeles at 4 in the morning, long before first light, and made it to Bakersfield — the land of oil derricks, lowriders and truck stops with Punjabi food — by 6. Ten minutes later, I was in the land of carrots.

You know that huge pile of cello-wrapped carrots in your supermarket? Now imagine that the pile filled the entire supermarket. That’s how many carrots I saw upon my arrival at Bolthouse Farms. Something like 50 industrial trucks were filled to the top with carrots, all ready for processing. Bolthouse, along with another large producer, supplies an estimated 85 percent of the carrots eaten by Americans. There are many ways to put this in perspective, and they’re all pretty mind-blowing: Bolthouse processes six million pounds of carrots a day. If you took its yield from one week and stacked each carrot from end to end, you could circle the earth. If you took all the carrots the company grows in a year, they would double the weight of the Empire State Building.

At Bolthouse’s complex, carrots whirl around on conveyor belts at up to 50 miles an hour en route to their future as juliennes, coins and stubs, or baby carrots, which the company popularized and which aren’t babies. Other carrots become freezer fare, concentrate, salad dressings and beverages. Fiber is separated for tomato sauce and hot dogs. Whatever’s left becomes cattle feed.

Bolthouse is just one of the many massive operations of California’s expansive Central Valley, which is really two valleys: the San Joaquin to the south and Sacramento to the north. All told, the Central Valley is about 450 miles long, from Bakersfield up to Redding, and is 60 miles at its widest, between the Sierra Nevada to the east and the Coast Ranges to the west. It’s larger than nine different states, but size is only one of its defining characteristics: the valley is the world’s largest patch of Class 1 soil, the best there is. The 25-degree (or so) temperature swing from day to night is an ideal growing range for plants. The sun shines nearly 300 days a year. The eastern half of the valley (and the western, to some extent) uses ice melt from the Sierra as its water source, which means it doesn’t have the same drought and flood problems as the Midwest. The winters are cool, which offers a whole different growing season for plants that cannot take the summer heat. There’s no snow.

The valley became widely known in the 1920s and 1930s, when farmers arrived from Virginia or Armenia or Italy or (like Tom Joad) Oklahoma and wrote home about the clean air, plentiful water and cheap land. Now the valley yields a third of all the produce grown in the United States. Unlike the Midwest, which concentrates (devastatingly) on corn and soybeans, more than 230 crops are grown in the valley, including those indigenous to South Asia, Southeast Asia and Mexico, some of which have no names in English. At another large farm, I saw melons, lettuce, asparagus, cabbage, broccoli, chard, collards, prickly pears, almonds, pistachios, grapes and more tomatoes than anyone could conceive of in one place. (The valley is the largest supplier of canned tomatoes in the world too.) Whether you’re in Modesto or Montpelier, there’s a good chance that the produce you’re eating came from the valley.

I came to the valley both by choice and by mandate. In preparation for the magazine’s Food and Drink Issue, I asked readers to suggest my assignment. They could send me anywhere they wanted, within limitations of climate and jet lag. After reviewing the suggestions, it became clear that readers wanted an article that incorporated big farming, small farming, sustainability, politics, poverty and, of course, truly delicious food — and in the United States, if possible. So I decided to head to the Central Valley, where all of this was already happening. This also happened to satisfy a curiosity of mine. From a desk in New York, it’s impossible to fathom 50 m.p.h. carrots, hills of almonds, acres of basil and millions of tomatoes all ripening at once. How can all of this possibly work?

But I was also inclined to head to the valley because I know that, for the last century or so, we’ve been exploiting ­­ — almost without limitation — its water, mineral resources, land, air, people and animals. Mark Arax, a writer who lives in Fresno and has chronicled the region’s past and present, offered his opinion while serving me and a dozen others marinated lamb, a terrific recipe from his Armenian family: “This land and its water have gone mostly to the proposition of making a few men very wealthy and consigning generations of others, especially farmworkers, to lives in the dust.” I’d already seen an example of how wealth has been concentrated and captured in the valley: this summer, Campbell’s bought Bolthouse Farms for $1.55 billion. Meanwhile, there are thousands of valley farmworkers who are often victims of wage-theft and (illegally) required to supply their own tools.

So for five days I drove through the southern half of the valley. I wanted to learn as much as I could about the agriculture in America’s produce factory; where thoughtful farmers were leading it; and how — if at all — it might become sustainable.

by Mark Bittman, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Vincent Laforet

Un Homme Qui Dort (1974)

The title of Bernard Queysanne and Gerges Perec's 1974 haunting masterpiece, Un homme qui dort

(based on Perec's novel of the same name), translates roughly to "A Man Asleep", and that is an accurate description of the sole character in this beautifully fractured tale of alienation and isolation. The character is a man 25 years of age (Jacques Speisser), living alone in a cramped, lonesome Parisian apartment. We never learn his name, and we never hear him utter even a single word of dialogue. We simply view him going about various chores and activities that seem to take on a ritualistic importance: making a cup of Nescafe, reading, brushing his teeth, playing solitaire, attempting to fall asleep, piling dirty laundry into a basin of murky water, avoiding contact with friends and family so that a pile of crumpled letters accumulate near his door, and on occasion, trudging outdoors for a trip to the cinema or the diner. The film's opening segments contrast this unnamed man indulging in these repetitive routines with exterior shots of inhabitants in the city systematically going through the motions of every day life, and it becomes quickly clear that we are observing a human all but completely removed from the rhythms of society, marching to the beat of his own drum. The only words spoken in the film are done so by a female voice-over, who reads strikingly poetic passages from Perec's novel that convey the various emotional turmoils and anxieties felt by the nameless protagonist, as the character continues to avoid all contact with family and friends, and interaction with society in general as he slips further and further into this solipsistic void.

Un homme qui dort is shot in gorgeous black and white by cinematographer Bernard Zitzerman, and the film more than once recalls the work of Alain Resnais; with its classy compositions and gliding camera and enigmatic voice-over, and especially with its use of high contrast black and white in the latter part of the film, which is used to further give the outdoor scenes an alien quality, so foreign does the nameless hero feel walking the streets of his very own block. It is also fascinating how the camera methodically pushes in and out on the man in moments of contemplation, as though he were a specimen of loneliness under some giant existential microscope, whose very existence is on the verge of dissipating at any moment. The music in the film is sparse but used effectively, alternating between a high-pitched ambient tone that crescendos arbitrarily without warning, and an urgent clicking gallop, punctuated by harsh bangs on a piano. This disconcerting and distressing soundtrack only heighten the overwhelming sense of angst and disquietude that accompany the continuous shots of the young man and his vacant, lifeless stare, as he embarks on one lonesome, meaningless endeavor after the next.

There is no traditional narrative here, no backstory, no indications as to what could have possibly gone wrong in this persons life, or if anything ever went wrong at all. There is only the shell of a man, withdrawn, cut-off, sitting around and waiting until there's nothing left to wait for. By the end of the movie, the character is indulging himself in various delusions and launching into venemous, misanthropic speeches comparing humans to monsters, before a final bleak voice-over seems to suggest that nothing has been learned here, and that the character may never find peace, may never find a compromise, a possible means of actually living his life, as opposed to sleepwalking through it, as long as he is giving himself to these conditions. Un homme qui dort is a powerful experience for anyone who's ever felt like cutting themselves off from the world completely, for anyone who's just wanted to totally disappear from everything. It's a terrifying yet beautiful glimpse into a sad, sick life not led, and a piercing call to arms against neutrality and indifference. To disappear from the world is not difficult; to disappear from yourself is an entirely different matter, and this is a film that recognizes that with a deep, aching conviction.

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Jack Hughes

Does Biology Make Us Liars?

Aristotle was a cynic. Sure, the Bible exhorts to “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” but he knew better. “The friendly feelings that we bear for another,” instructed his Ethics, “have arisen from the friendly feelings that we bear for ourselves.”

Two thousand years later, in 1739, Hume spelled out what the pagan thinker intuited: “I learn to do service to another, without bearing him any real kindness; because I foresee, that he will return my service, in expectation of another of the same kind.” Hume’s Edinburgh neighbor, Adam Smith, penned an often quoted phrase in this vein in The Wealth of Nations: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly on the benevolence of his fellow citizens.”

Self-love makes the world go round. But, alongside cooperation, could self-love give birth to deception? Could the imperative of self-regard be so great, in fact, as to lead to self-deceit? In his new book, Robert Trivers, a master of evolutionary thought, roams from stick insects and brain magnets to plane crashes and Israeli-Palestinian wars in service of a corollary to Aristotle’s hard-boiled thesis. We humans deceive ourselves, Trivers argues. We do so often, and almost always the better to deceive others for our own personal gain. From misguided estimates of self-worth to false historical narratives of nations, the self-love that spins the world is itself fueled by self-deceit. And the price can be substantial.  (...)

Deception is rife in humans for the same reason it is in nature: there are inbuilt clashes of interest, whether it be sexual strategy when it comes to females and males, parental investment when it comes to mothers and fathers, or resource allocation when it comes to parents and offspring. An expert in detecting conflict where others see harmony, Trivers worked out the evolutionary logic behind such relationships in the early 1970s, spawning entire fields in behavioral studies and genetics and giving rise to a number of predictions. One of the starkest of these was the idea that because fathers and mothers have different interests when it comes to the fetus (dad wants the baby bigger than mom does), identical genes on the chromosomes that they have each bequeathed will battle each other over control of embryonic growth. Sure enough, in the 1980s, biologists began to discover genes whose expression levels depended on from which parent they had come. And the gene knows where it came from, following the basic logic of genetic conflict Trivers described years before genomic imprinting was discovered.

Deception, to be truthful, is less of a mind-twister than self-deceit. Like Hume and Smith before him, Trivers understood that giving could serve one’s interests if the rewards of cooperation outweighed its costs. Using the logic of game theory, he showed that the principle of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” made evolutionary sense. Soon “reciprocal altruism” helped explain otherwise beguiling sacrificial behavior. But benevolence requires a strong sense of justice because a sense of justice is necessary to appreciate dishonesty: after all, in games of trust, especially with lag time, cheaters can wreak havoc. And so, over evolutionary time, an arms race honed in social mammals a growing intelligence. Trivers finds it ironic that “dishonesty has often been the file against which intellectual tools for truth have been sharpened.” But one of the outcomes of this Darwinian dynamic may have also been a genuine instinct for fairness, born of the need to distinguish trustworthy partners from charlatans.

But if evolution has done such a grand job of fine-tuning our senses in the service of detecting deceit, why does all the hard-won information that we extract from the world through our senses often become muddled and deformed in our brains? Why do we project our own traits onto others, repress true memories and invent false ones, lie to ourselves, rationalize immoral behavior, and generally deny inconvenient truths? Seventy percent of people rank themselves better-looking than average, according to a study cited by Trivers; 94 percent of academics (shocking!) think they are better than average, too. Why is this? The answer, Trivers would have us believe, is that the possibility of deceit raises the probability of ever more subtle mechanisms for spotting deceit, which in turn raises the probability of mechanisms for self-deceit. Trick yourself to trick another: what better way to conceal the truth? Self-deception is not a defensive measure meant only to make us feel better; it is a weapon instilled in us by natural selection to help deceive others for our own good.

by Oren Harman, TNR |  Read more:

Photo: Evan-Amos/Creative Commons

Dan Bern

[ed. I remember a hard freeze one year with hardly a wisp of snow, right through December -- the ice nearly three feet thick. I took my truck out on Big Lake, spinning brodies for at least a quarter of a mile. Without snow covering the ice you could see air bubbles like this everywhere, in all kinds of frozen, fantastic patterns.]

Photographs of water & ice by Douglas Capron

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Melissa Mitchell, Kliff Hopson

[ed. Feeling a little homesick today.]

Amanda Hocking and the 99-Cent Kindle Millionaires

As Amanda Hocking said herself, "I don't understand why the internet suddenly picked up on me this past week, but it definitely did."

And how.

The writing world is abuzz about Amanda Hocking, the 26-year-old self-published author who sold over 450,000 copies of her e-books in January alone, mostly priced between 99 cents and $2.99. She's now a millionaire. The writing world has been abuzz for a while about J.A. Konrath, who has very publicly blogged about the significant amount of money he has made selling inexpensive e-books.

Many people in the last week have sent me links about these authors, wondering...

What exactly is going on here? How in the heck are these self-published authors making so much money? Is this the future? And does this mean the end of the publishing industry as we know it?

The News That's Fit to Print

Before we delve into what this means for the world of books, I feel like it's important to take a deep breath and splash some cold water on our faces.

The reality: This is still a print world and probably will be for at least the next several years. Even as some publishers report e-book sales jumping to between 25% and 35% in January, the significant majority of sales are still in print. As I wrote in my recent post about record stores, over a decade after the rise of the mp3 the majority of revenue in music is still in CDs.

So let's not get out of hand (yet) about the scale of this e-book self-publishing revolution, if it is indeed one. Yes, this is real money we're talking about. Yes, these authors deserve all the credit in the world. And yes, these authors are also making money in print as well.

But we're still a ways away from self-published Kindle bestsellers making Dan Brown, James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer, J.K. Rowling kind of money, the old-fashioned way, through paper books in bookstores. It's not as exciting a story to remember that traditionally published franchise James Patterson made $70 million between June '09 and June '10, but it's still worth keeping in perspective.

Let's also not forget that Hocking, Konrath and a couple of others are the tip of a very large iceberg of self-published authors, the overwhelming majority of whom are selling the merest handful of copies. As Hocking herself writes:

I guess what I'm saying is that just because I sell a million books self-publishing, it doesn't mean everybody will. In fact, more people will sell less than 100 copies of their books self-publishing than will sell 10,000 books. I don't mean that to be mean, and just because a book doesn't sell well doesn't mean it's a bad book. It's just the nature of the business.

Yes, it's new, it's a big deal, it's seriously awesome for Hocking, who seems like a super nice and humble person. But let's not also lose our perspective about the scale of the shift taking place. The book world is changing in a big way, but it still ain't done changed just yet.

by Nathan Bransford |  Read more:

Zhao Ji (Emperor Huizong, 1082 - 1135): Auspicious Cranes
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Those Summers, These Days

On a warm afternoon in August, almost all of the fifty or so members of my extended family gather at my grandma’s farm to celebrate Grandma Fugman’s 80th birthday, and concurrently, my son Elvis’s second birthday. Picnic tables and chairs dot the front lawn, burgers and hot dogs roast on a grill, a slight breeze rustles the century-old trees bordering the street. It is warm but not sweltering, cool enough to sit comfortably in the shade. Two of my cousins recline on a blanket with their six-month-old babies beneath the lane of maple trees along the south side of the yard. My dad and his brother sit at the picnic table, each with a Miller Lite in his hand. Some uncles and nephews kick a soccer ball around. While it’s a special occasion that we’re gathered for on this Sunday in August, one could expect to see a half dozen or so kids in the yard at Grandma’s house on any given day. All of the family members on my dad’s side live within 30 minutes of each other in Northeast Ohio, except for me, my husband, and my kids. Elvis and my daughter, Lydia, with my cousins and cousins’ kids, push tractors and bull dozers in the same sand pile that my brothers and I played in twenty years ago, and my dad and his siblings twenty plus years before that. If they dig deep enough, they will probably unearth a Matchbox car from 1970. Beneath the shade of a maple tree, the cousins and second cousins and first cousins twice removed, or whatever they might be, get the same grit of the family farm beneath their fingernails.

I spent my childhood romping around the farm with my cousins, begged my dad to take me with him in the mornings to traverse the cool, wet terrain of the cornfield, dew heavy before the sun rose over the tree line. My cousins and I were taught the way to pull an ear of corn away from the stalk with a swift twist in order to make a clean break. After we filled the bushel baskets lining the dirt lane, Dad, or Frank or June or Connie or Rich or Pat or one of the other aunts and uncles, would lift the baskets over the edge of the pickup. We challenged each other to see who could launch themselves up into the truck bed the fastest. Our bony legs dangled over the tailgate, prune-y feet in wet shoes swinging back and forth as we bounced through the field to the house.

When we weren’t trying to help pick corn or vegetables in the field, my older cousins and I would play a dozen different versions of tag, hide and seek, SPUD, ghost in the graveyard, and baseball, employing “ghost runners” when there weren’t enough of us to run the bases, pitch, catch, and field. We jumped from the wooden bench swing into a mountain of maple leaves each fall. The swing’s rope rubbed our palms until they stung as we spun each other around. We barrel rolled each other down the slope from the house to the trees, the whole world spinning. We picked red raspberries and black raspberries and didn’t notice until much later the scratches on our legs from the bushes.

When we tired of playing in the yard, we walked through the corn and hay, down the hill, and into the woods. The trails wound randomly, looped around an ancient tree and backed up to a creek, but it was more fun to ignore the trail and plot out our own way, stepping on branches and startling at the sudden rustle of leaves nearby. The woods were never quiet, even when we would shush each other into silence and freeze, our breathing heavy as we eyed the forest for deer or fiercer wildlife we imagined into existence. The birds would chirrup, frogs ribbit, bees hum, chipmunks and squirrels rummage, leaves crackle. Cars could be heard coming down Stafford Road, spraying up limestone and tar as they sped along. When it was hot, we navigated skunk cabbage and may apples to the creek, waded in the cold, knee-high waters hunting for crawfish and minnows, challenged each other to walk through the culvert pipe underneath the road. As the pond my dad dug in the woods filled with rain water and run-off from the fields, I imagined all of us in speed boats, hanging out on a sandy beach, fishing and picnicking by the lake. It didn’t matter that you could skip a rock from one end of the pond to another or that the mud bottom and snapping turtles prevented anyone except our black lab from swimming in it. We roamed around the pond hunting for tadpoles, wary of the higher weeds, afraid there might be snakes.

Our parents were elsewhere—working at a job, sitting in the living room with Grandma, weeding in the garden. We came back for lunch and for dinner, but no one scolded us for being gone so long, at least not that I remember. We were free to wander.

It is hard for me to imagine a childhood without the farm or a definition of home without the farm in it. The summer I turned ten, my parents bought the century home across the street from the farm and next door to my other set of grandparents. Home extended beyond the four walls of my parents’ house and was defined by natural boundaries; it stretched through the field and woods all the way to the creek and then south to the lane, across the road and down to another creek, then back up through the rows of field corn to my mom’s parents’ yard, bordered by towering blue spruce trees. My brothers and I were more at home outdoors than in. No matter the day or season, someone was always around to play with, all I needed to do was cross the street, hop the ditch, and walk down the field. If there weren’t cousins there yet, they’d be there soon, I was sure of it.

by Sarah Wells, Ascent |  Read more:

FiveBooks Interviews > Renata Salecl on Modern Misery

The Slovenian philosophy professor decries the tyranny of choice and says we now expect long life, a beautiful body, sexual and job satisfaction. But the idea that we can perfect ourselves dooms us to failure and misery

Why misery? 

I wanted to go against the presumption that happiness is the theme of today’s life. This ideology of happiness has actually produced more unhappiness than needed, since we’ve constantly been measuring our lives with regard to success, or self-fulfilment, or enjoyment. From a psychoanalytic point of view it’s been known for a long time that total satisfaction is completely impossible to attain.

The books I chose describe the most prevalent forms of unhappiness linked to the expectations that we have in today’s post-industrial capitalism. Those expectations are: long life, beautiful body, a sexually satisfied life, creatively satisfied life, an ideal of self-making. The idea is that we have the power to create this ideal life – and exactly these books reverse this presumption.

Tell me about The New Black.

Darian Leader is a British psychoanalyst who in a great way undermines today’s ideas about depression. He starts with the premise that we live in a society of hyped optimism, where depression appears as a danger that goes against optimism – it’s something for people who gave up the fight for success or whatever. Today we use the terms depression and stress too much – they dominate psychiatric and self-help discourse.

They’re debased terms; you might be ‘depressed’ if you miss the bus.

Absolutely. Or just the common boredom of children can be described as depression. But what Darian does is to return to the difference between melancholy and mourning, and he makes a great distinction between them. It’s very good to return to these different roots of depression, and to stay with them – not as traumatic things, but as something pretty normal which has been forgotten.

So we should re-codify depression?

Not perceive it as a unified term, but to see it as various different things, which is why he is using the old terms of melancholy, mourning and loss.

Darian is also critical of the pharmaceutical industry: depression appears as something universal that can be quickly dealt with using pretty much universal types of drugs. But, as he points out, this denies the fact that the symptom is connected to some cause beyond the depression. He shows that in depression everyone has a different logic and a different individual story, which can be linked to loss – of another human being, of identity, of a job, of health or love. It can also be linked to being stuck in circulating around some lack.

He particularly shows that what we cannot deal with easily today is mourning. Not only mourning people we have lost, where it is quite easy to see why someone is sad; but whenever we lose someone we mourn not only that person, but also who we were for that person – and that’s much more difficult to overcome. Our society has a hard time dealing with that: previous societies (he uses a lot of anthropology) had long rituals related to mourning for the beloved and so on.

Contemporary society has a problem with death altogether.

Absolutely. There’s a denial of death, almost a prohibition of thinking about it, and an attempt to prolong life unrealistically. We try to stay away from a person who is mourning. And he shows that mourning and loss can be very much helped with various social rituals, as it was in the past. For example, children today are almost not allowed to attend funerals. But funerals have a huge symbolic role, especially for small children if their grandparent dies, to be part of saying goodbye and be part of the ritual.

He also deals with the important difference between lack and loss. He points out the problem that we have with loss as such: sometimes we lose something and can pinpoint what we have lost. But sometimes actually we are stuck in a particular deadly enjoyment of circulating around a lack in our life, and that can be a completely different melancholic state from a mourning state. In the conclusion he sees a way of overcoming this stuckness via artistic production. Some artists, for example, have been very good at circulating around the pain of lack, and have created great works of art. So not only has melancholy been the cornerstone of a lot of cultural production in the past and today, but it can even be its engine.

If you were to read this looking for some prescription for your own life, wouldn’t that set up unrealistic expectations? Not everybody has a creative spark.

That’s a great point. Unfortunately life is perceived as a work of art; everyone is supposed to work on life as a special project or a business plan. I would think that he’s not planning to push everyone into creation; what he is doing is basically unpacking and destigmatising depression and showing that it’s a really dangerous term to use universally. That’s where I think he helps everyone.

Interview of Renata Saleci by Tom Dannet, The Browser |  Read more:

Fairfield Porter, Wheat, 1960
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The Problem With High Frequency Trading

One of the many consequences of global warming is that it’s now, for the first time, possible to drill under the sea bed of the Arctic ocean. The oil companies are all there, of course, running geological tests and bickering with each other about the potential environmental consequences of an oil spill. But they’re not the only people drilling. Because there’s something even more valuable than oil just waiting to be found under the Arctic.

What is worth so much money that three different consortiums would spend billions of pounds to retrofit icebreakers and send them into some of the coldest and most dangerous waters in the world? The answer, of course, is information.

A couple of days ago, I called a friend in Tokyo, and we had a lovely chat. If he puts something up on Twitter, I can see it immediately. And on the web there are thousands of webcams showing me what’s going on in Japan this very second. It doesn’t look like there’s any great information bottleneck there: anything important which happens in Japan can be, and is, transmitted to the rest of the world in a fraction of a second.

But if you’re a City trader, a fraction of a second is a veritable eternity. Let’s say you want to know the price of a stock on the Tokyo Stock exchange, or the exact number of yen being traded for one dollar. Just like the light from the sun is eight minutes old by the time it reaches us, all that financial information is about 188 milliseconds old by the time it reaches London. That’s zero point one eight eight seconds. And it takes that much time because it has to travel on fiber-optic cables which take a long and circuitous route: they either have to cross the Atlantic, and then the US, and then the Pacific, or else they have to go across Europe, through the Middle East, across the Indian Ocean, and then up through the South China Sea between China and the Philippines.

But! If you can lay an undersea cable across the Arctic, you can save yourself about 5,000 miles, not to mention the risk of routing your information past a lot of political flash points. And when you’re sitting in your office in London and you get that dollar/yen exchange rate from Tokyo, it’s fresh from the oven, comparatively speaking: only 0.168 seconds old. If everybody else is using the old cables and you’re using the new ones, then you have somewhere between 20 milliseconds and 60 milliseconds when you know something they don’t.

Those are periods of time so short that humans can barely notice them. This essay, for instance, is about 900,000 milliseconds long, and it takes me hundreds milliseconds just to say the word “cable”. Which is a word with more than one meaning. To you, it probably means some kind of wire. But to City traders, it means 1.6254, or something very close to that number. Because in the City, “cable” means the pound/dollar exchange rate. And it’s named that after a transatlantic cable which was used to telegraph the exchange-rate information from London to New York as far back as 1858.

So what we’re talking about here is nothing new, in terms of kind. Nathan Rothschild built a significant chunk of his fortune by using a system of couriers who told him the result of the Battle of Waterloo a full day before anybody else in London knew it. And my own employer, the Reuters news agency, was founded on sending financial information between Brussels and Aachen using carrier pigeons.

What’s new is that billions of pounds can be made by having access to information not a day in advance, or an hour, or even a second, but even just a millisecond or two. Stock exchanges aren’t physical places where human beings bargain with each other any more: they’re racks of computers in places like Mahwah, New Jersey, where the cables are carefully measured to be exactly the same length so that no one has an infinitesimal advantage thanks to the amount of time it takes information to travel an extra few millimeters down a wire.  (...)

Most of the trading on US stock exchanges is done by something called algobots, these days. These are algorithms: they’re computers which are programmed to put in orders, take out orders, trade in big size, trade in small size – all according to very sophisticated rules, called algorithms. And one of the ironies about the flash crash is that it was actually caused in large part by algobots not trading. The US has over a dozen different stock exchanges, places where stocks are bought and sold. Most of us have only ever heard of the listing exchanges, the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq. But there are many more you probably haven’t heard of, with names like Arca and BATS, as well as sinister-sounding things called Dark Pools. What happened in the flash crash is that when the trading got completely crazy, the algobots just switched themselves off. This was something they weren’t used to, they didn’t know how to react, and so they just went away. And there was suddenly no liquidity in the market. No one was offering to trade. And with no one offering to trade, the prices just plunged, all the way down to one cent. Because there were no bids in the market any more.

The algobots can be very useful, on a day-to-day basis. If a normal person like me buys a few shares in some company or other, that trade doesn’t even happen on any stock exchange at all. It just happens directly with a broker, an algobot, who’s happy to take the other side of my trade because small individual investors like me are normally pretty stupid, and tend to buy high and sell low.

In any case, if any given stock exchange is an incredibly complicated thing, the fragmentation of the stock exchanges has created a much more complex system yet. Most big banks and stockbrokers — and the algobots they control — have access to all of the different exchanges, and they trade wherever they think they can get the best prices. Since the best prices tend to be found wherever the most traders are trading, you end up with something a bit like six-year-olds playing football: everybody’s running towards the ball at the same time. And the result is these huge waves of activity, where traders move en masse, from one stock exchange to the next, in very unpredictable ways. If you layer that unpredictability on top of the complexity inherent in any system of multiple stock exchanges, you end up with something which will almost certainly break in a pretty catastrophic manner at some point. We don’t know how, and we don’t know when, but there’s an ironclad rule of any system: the more complex it is, the less predictable it is, and the more likely it is to fail catastrophically in some unforeseeable manner.

by Felix Salmon, Reuters |  Read more:
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Can Marissa Mayer Really Have It All?

There comes a moment in every very ambitious person’s life when she sees with perfect clarity that the path before her is blocked. For Marissa Mayer, Google employee No. 20 and Silicon Valley’s reigning “geek queen,” this moment occurred last year, when her former boyfriend, Google co-founder Larry Page, kicked her off the company’s elite operating committee, to which she had been appointed the previous year.

Page had taken over the running of Google’s day-to-day operations from Eric Schmidt, the company’s longtime CEO, in April 2011, and immediately launched a major renovation of the company’s structure and priorities. Mayer was bruised in that reshuffling. For about a dozen years she had presided over “search”—which is to say everything the user saw, felt, and experienced when navigating Google—but now she was shunted away from that core business and put in charge of “local”—maps, restaurant recommendations, and the like. This was arguably a demotion and at best a lateral move. And when Page overhauled the operating committee, or “OC,” Mayer’s reduced status was made both explicit and public. The committee was renamed “the L-Team,” after the boss, and he pushed Mayer off in order to make room for a handful of others, including Android and YouTube masterminds Andy Rubin and Salar Kamangar. “She was not included,” says her friend Dylan Casey, who left Google last year. The L-Team is Google’s Sanhedrin, a group of insiders that decides strategy and vets acquisitions. If you’re on it, you have a hand in shaping Google’s future—and, therefore, the future of global technology. If you’re not—well then, you have Google on your résumé and a net worth estimated at $300 million.

Mayer was not happy, according to people who know her. “Marissa is very, very, very driven,” says Brian Singerman, a former Googler who is now a partner at Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm. But at the office, she kept her cool. “She was a trooper,” is how someone familiar with the situation described her. “She worked through it.”

Google loyalists said the move was part of the reorg, plain and simple. “That was what Larry thought was best for the company,” says Casey. Others said it was political, a punishment for Mayer’s inability to play nicely with other VIP Googlers, and bloggers began to wring their hands anew over the larger question of sexism in tech. Two other people removed from the L-Team were also women; one of them, Shona Brown, who ran business operations, “is a freaking Rhodes scholar,” says a former Googler, “another one of these rock stars.”

Then there was the delicate matter of Mayer’s public but never widely reported relationship with Page. (“Most local journalists know the gossip, relish it,” vented Nick Denton on Gawker in 2006, but “wouldn’t dream of working it into an article,” so anxious are they to protect their access to Google’s top tier.) Although some of Mayer’s former colleagues insist the affair had no bearing on their friend’s corporate profile, others disagree, pointing to the hard facts: Under Schmidt, Mayer was on the committee; under Page, she was booted off. “It’s got to have some impact,” says Dave McClure, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who knows Mayer slightly. “It gave her access to strategy and thinking at the highest levels. And it probably made it more difficult for her to advance. I don’t know too many other senior female executives who went out with the CEO who were still there after they stopped going out.” Page got married in 2007. Two years later, Mayer married the investor and lawyer Zachary Bogue.

She may have been stymied at Google, but Mayer, at 37, was already one of the most visible tech personalities in Silicon Valley. “She is, for all intents and purposes, famous,” says Casey. She was popular with the press for her accessibility in an industry notorious for its reclusive, or stammering, geniuses. She threw parties at her penthouse atop The Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco, to which everyone yearned to be invited. And throughout Silicon Valley and among the groupies drawn to its idiosyncratic nerd glamour, she was as well known for her hobbies—notably a taste for high-end fashion and a large collection of Dale Chihuly handblown glass—as she was for her tech cred. In a world still struggling to leave behind that age-old bias—girls can’t do math—Mayer was everyone’s favorite exception, fully girl and fully geek, a former ballet dancer who stayed up all night writing code. And one who seemed driven to make her own path when the men around her wouldn’t oblige. Frustrated at Google, she did what any strategically savvy executive in her place would do. She publicly shored up her brand while privately contemplating her next move. She tweeted her whereabouts from Davos and Vail as she kept things going at work (notably, overseeing the acquisition of Zagat listings). She got herself a seat on the board at Walmart. And she checked a big item off her Life List, one that might have been a professional obstacle for another kind of woman: She got pregnant.

Now, less than a year after news of her being sidelined at Google, Mayer arrives at two auspicious milestones virtually at once. Twelve weeks ago, she was named president and chief executive officer of Yahoo Inc., making her one of twenty female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and the only one to take the job while pregnant. At Yahoo, Mayer has her work cut out for her. Yahoo is a foundering brand suffering from a dramatic talent drain and years of chaos on its board and in its upper ranks. Its second-quarter results were grim, with U.S. search queries down 17 percent from a year ago and time spent on its content pages down 10 percent. The Yahoo stock price has been bumping along all year between $14 and $17 a share, about half of what it was five years ago. Mayer has to turn this around—and fast.

And last week, on September 30 at 10:22 p.m., her first child was born, a boy, weighing nearly nine pounds. “Name TBD,” she wrote in an e-mail she sent to a large circle of friends. “Suggestions welcome!” The e-mail was signed, “With love and happiness, Marissa & Zack.” It is, perhaps, a blessing that she doesn’t think much, she has said, of the high-achieving mother’s mantra, “balance.”

In celebration of the new arrival, Mayer’s friend Craig Silverstein, Google employee No. 1, who also left the company this year, is thinking about building Mayer a homemade diaper cake: three tiers of diapers in three different sizes, stacked around an empty cardboard tube and decorated all over with toys, onesies, and burp clothes. Mayer has made them for many of her friends’ babies and once showed him how, Silverstein says. “She had a whole recipe. She helped me make one. We went to five different places to get the right toys. You spend all night putting it together.” At the tippy top, Mayer likes to put a plush toy octopus. Silverstein calls the diaper cake “the perfect Marissa baby present”: “It has usability at its core.”

by Lisa Miller, The Cut, NY Magazine |  Read more:

The Young Man's Guide to Geezer Style

[ed. Ahh...sweet vindication. It was only a matter of time.]

Right now, the cool kids aren't taking their style inspiration from icons like the Clash or the Stones or the Kanyes. Nope, they're adopting the suited nonchalance of old grandpas, from their fusty ties to their sneakered feet. Here, we break down everything you need to know about the biggest suiting trend of the moment: old-fogey fashion

At GQ, we picked up on the suiting trend we call geezer style because it's right under our noses. Both guys on this page are on the GQ staff: 24-year-old editorial assistant Mark Anthony Green and 27-year-old fashion editor Justin Doss. It's counterintuitive, but these young guns and their stylish friends are all obsessed with old-school suits, mostly Italian. They know the minutiae of fit, fabric, and construction. And when they're raving in the hallways about someone with sick style, it's not, like, Ryan Gosling. It's some old dude they saw on the subway eating a tuna sandwich and wearing a threadbare suit from 1964 with a pair of New Balance 574s.

As we'll see, there are lots of ways to get your geezer on, but this look starts with the suit. The jacket's shoulders should be natural, meaning almost no padding. And when it comes to style and fabric, let it rip: Go double-breasted or with a Caddyshack plaid. The only real tweak is in the fit—the young guys keep it super slim. To learn how to fast-forward your own style, read on.

by Will Welch, GQ | Read more (if you dare):

Photo: Taghi Naderzad

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No Filter: Inside Hipstamatic’s Lost Year

If Lucas Buick's company Hipstamatic is on the verge of bankruptcy, you couldn't tell by the dinner spread. It's mid-September and we're at the Isola restaurant in the Mondrian Soho, an expensive hotel-cum-lounge where you're never quite sure you're wearing the right style of Warby Parkers. Under the airy space's glass ceiling and sparkling chandeliers, Buick and "director of fun" Mario Estrada knock back espresso martinis and old-fashioneds, while digging into tuna and pine nut crudos and fennel sausage pizza with herbed ricotta--delicious fare just begging to be photographed, filtered, and shared with friends.

"This is it. We're clearly falling apart," says Buick, laughing. "If this is the last supper, then I wish we had a bigger table."

Despite a rough couple of weeks, the Hipstamatic cofounder and CEO is in good spirits. In late July, over lobsters and bottles of Prosecco, Buick told me he wanted Hipstamatic, a $1.99 photo app that takes analog-style photographs on your iPhone, to become the "Kodak for the digital era." He envisioned a time when his company could be the industry leader for selling digital lenses, films, and flashes, as well as providing third-party camera and printing services.

But then just 16 days later, Buick laid off five of his employees, roughly half the company’s workforce, including its entire developer team and social media and office managers. The decision sparked a swath of bad press and ex-employee backlash, and led many to question the San Francisco-based startup's viability. "Suddenly I was getting calls from friends asking, 'Do you still have a job?'" Estrada recalls. "We're going bankrupt? When did all this happen?"

“It got a little ugly,” admits Buick, who turns 30 this week. With a doughy face and ginger scruff, the former graphic designer carries a soft, seemingly happy-go-lucky demeanor, which juxtaposes his otherwise serious look: black G-Star jacket, black shirt, and black-framed glasses. "I didn't even like coming to work,” he says. “When you're the guy who built the company and you don't even want to work there yourself, something just isn't right."

Hipstamatic's journey over the past year has been tumultuous, to say the least. As Fast Company has learned from speaking to more than a dozen players involved, Hipstamatic has wrestled with ever-growing social competition, internal tensions, and a lack of product vision--not to mention juggling acquisition interest and worsening term sheets in a post-Facebook IPO world.

But what the startup has most struggled with is remaining relevant in an unforgiving app market dominated by one of the hottest spaces in tech: photos. Photos are considered the killer app of any platform, web or mobile. They're the driving force behind Facebook's social success, and the reason for its blockbuster acquisition of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram, which recently surpassed Twitter in U.S. smartphone engagement. They're why Marissa Mayer is said to be rethinking Flickr as she takes up the reins at Yahoo; why Google recently bought Snapseed; and why a slew of hot Internet startups from Tumblr to Pinterest to Camera+ have gained popularity. Even Apple introduced photo-stream sharing capabilities in its latest version of iOS.

Hipstamatic was one of the first startups to crack the photo formula in the mobile space--then it watched similar services gain ground and eventually blaze by. The company’s experience proves that no startup can rest on its laurels in the age of the iPhone, when the time between innovation and disruption is ever shortening, and when IPOs and fast exits are valued over establishing long-term viable businesses. And perhaps most significantly, Hipstamatic proves that no modern startup can ignore the siren call of social, even if at its own peril.

by Austin Carr, Fast Company |  Read more:

Photo: Shutterstock

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Daredevil Sets Sight on a 22-Mile Fall

Whatever the leap means for mankind, it should definitely be one giant step for a man.

Felix Baumgartner, a professional daredevil, plans to step off a balloon-borne capsule 22 miles above Earth on Tuesday morning and plummet for five and a half minutes until opening his parachute a mile above the New Mexico desert. If all goes as planned, he will do a series of barrel rolls in the near-vacuum of the stratosphere and then plunge headfirst at more than 700 miles per hour, becoming the first sky diver to break the sound barrier.

Mr. Baumgartner, 43, a former Austrian paratrooper who became known as Fearless Felix by leaping off buildings, landmarks and once into a 600-foot cave, said that this was his toughest challenge, because of the complexity involved and because of an unexpected fear he had to overcome: claustrophobia. During five years of training, he started suffering panic attacks when he had to spend hours locked inside the stiff pressurized suit and helmet necessary for survival at the edge of space.

But he persevered with the help of psychological conditioning and a mentor, Joe Kittinger, a retired Air Force colonel who has held the altitude and speed records since 1960, when he jumped 19 miles from a balloon during a research project (after nearly dying in a practice jump). Mr. Kittinger, now 84, will be the only voice on the radio guiding Mr. Baumgartner during the two-hour ascent to the stratosphere.

“Felix trusts me because I know what he’s going through — and I’m the only one who knows what he’s going through,” Mr. Kittinger said on Sunday at the mission-control center here.

And just why would anyone want to go through this? Both men like to stress the science to be learned, but there are, of course, other motives.

“All of my life I have been looking for unique goals, things no one has accomplished,” Mr. Baumgartner said.

Mr. Kittinger knew just what he meant. “From the beginning of mankind, the boys want to go higher, faster, lower,” he said. “It’s a fascinating part of human nature. We’re never satisfied with the status quo.”

Previous attempts to break Mr. Kittinger’s records have cost a Frenchman nearly $20 million and claimed the life of an American, Nick Piantanida, a New Jersey truck driver who died from brain injuries after his suit depressurized in 1966. Mr. Kittinger said he joined this project, called Red Bull Stratos, after the energy drink, because he considered it the first with the resources to do the job properly, thanks to the scores of aerospace veterans hired by Red Bull.

For Mr. Baumgartner, the dangers will start as soon as his pressurized capsule lifts off. To reach such thin air requires an enormous yet lightweight balloon, 55 stories high, built of a polyethylene plastic that is one-tenth the thickness of a sandwich bag.

If the fragile plastic ruptures below 4,000 feet — the Dead Zone, as the project’s engineers call it — there will not be enough time for a parachute to deploy, forcing Mr. Baumgartner to make a crash landing.

Mr. Kittinger used a much smaller balloon to rise 102,800 feet in 1960. “It’s a phenomenal view,” he recalled. “The sky is black, and you see the curvature of the Earth, and the colors are beautiful. But you’re also aware that if anything happens to your pressure suit, you’re dead.”

The Red Bull helium balloon is supposed to climb more than 120,000 feet. There, Mr. Baumgartner will perform an exquisitely rehearsed bunny hop designed to keep his body from spinning out of control.

“In a regular sky-dive, you use your hands against the air to stop from tumbling, but there’s no air to use up there,” he said. “If you start to tumble over, you carry that tumble all the way down.”

The worst-case outcome is the kind of spinning that nearly killed Mr. Kittinger during a training jump in 1959. He went into a flat spin, blacking out as his body whirled at 120 revolutions per minute. He regained consciousness only after his emergency parachute opened automatically.

After the bunny hop, Mr. Baumgartner hopes his body will slowly rotate so that he descends headfirst and breaks the 614-m.p.h. speed record held by Mr. Kittinger. After 34 seconds, engineers calculate, he will have fallen to 102,000 feet and accelerated beyond the speed of sound, which at that altitude is close to 690 m.p.h. (the exact figure depends on the temperature).

“I expect him to reach 720 miles per hour, about Mach 1.1,” said Art Thompson, the technical director of Red Bull Stratos and a former designer of the Stealth bomber. Mr. Baumgartner should remain supersonic for 20 seconds, until he reaches an altitude of 92,000 feet. Then the thickening atmosphere should slow him to subsonic speed, and eventually to a terminal velocity of 120 miles per hour.

Engineers and physicians are not sure what will happen if Mr. Baumgartner goes through the sound barrier. They realize he could be battered as parts of his body go supersonic or subsonic at different times, but the impact is expected to be manageable because of the thin air at that altitude — or so the engineers and Mr. Baumgartner hope.

by John Tierney, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Jay Nemeth/Red Bull, via Associated Press