Saturday, October 20, 2012
Arrogantly Shabby
At first glance, Fairbanks-based Arrogantly Shabby seems like a lot of other fashion blogs: Cool kids in cool clothes, modeling in obscure, offbeat locations. But there’s something a little different about the clothes and accessories featured on this blog: They were found at the dump. And they probably haven’t been washed.
Anyone who has lived in Fairbanks knows that dumpster diving is a popular pastime for many, and a way of life for some. Hopeful scavengers descend on the transfer stations scattered around town, where residents take their throw-aways to be trucked to the city landfill on the outskirts of town. These transfer stations, known colloquially as the "dump," feature both garbage bins and reuse stations, and are swarming grounds for treasure-seekers of all kinds.
Friends Trista Crass and Katie Robb, two Fairbanks girls with a creative streak and self-proclaimed “cheap” side, have taken that beloved local tradition online with Arrogantly Shabby. With upwards of 10,000 views a month from all over the world, the fashion blog is now approaching its three-year anniversary.
The blog started as a “joke” says Crass, “but when we went and did it, we realized how fun it was.” The idea was born one night after a weekly sauna party: Crass had complimented Robb’s scarf, who replied “it’s actually a pillow case,” snagged from the dump and then cut up into pieces. They slowly realized that pretty much everything they were wearing had come from the dump. Arrogantly Shabby had begun.
by Laurel Andrews, Alaska Dispatch | Read more:
Photo: Arrogantly Shabby
How Small Is Too Small?
Most people see a parking space and promptly back up into it; Tim McCormick sees one and thinks, “I could live here.”
Who would willingly choose to live in something with the footprint of a parking space (8x10x16 feet)? Millions already do, argues McCormick, a communications consultant: bedrooms, dorm rooms, motel rooms, hostels, mobile homes and the like. “I myself live comfortably in a converted one-car garage of 200 square feet,” he says, “which allows me to live inexpensively near downtown in super-expensive Palo Alto.”
In cities where space is at a mind-boggling premium, McCormick’s idea of taking up residence in a parking space — in what he refers to as a “Houselet” — isn’t all that far-fetched. It may in fact be more appealing than the so-called “hacker hostels” that got a lot of buzz earlier this summer. Essentially apartments that house herds of would-be startup entrepreneurs willing to pay market rate to live in near-migrant-worker conditions, hacker hostels are proliferating in cities like San Francisco and New York where work culture calls for 24/7 commitments and lots of food-truck takeout (which no doubt inspired upLIFT’s prefab parking pods for the city).
These apartments are less living spaces than crash pads with a social networking component.
They do fit a particular market need, however, which is more than a lot of housing options can lay claim to. Is collaborative space the new urban amenity, replacing the granite counter top or Viking range? Perhaps. Savvy developers see a market — namely, people’s attraction to what’s outside a dwelling as much as, if not more than, what’s in it — and are trying to fill it. (...)
It is an understatement to say that demand far outstrips supply in San Francisco. As a result, rents and mortgages have gone through the roof. (Compare those 200 units to the 16,502 units of affordable housing that will be built this fiscal year in New York City.) San Francisco has proposed reducing the minimum square footage for residential units (currently 290 square feet) so that more units can be built. The proposed new minimum would be 150 square feet plus kitchen, bathroom and closet (a size that is, interestingly enough, about the size of McCormick’s one-car garage). It’s also, jokes Patrick Kennedy of Panoramic Interests, a developer in Berkeley, Calif., who has created a 160-square foot prototype, as small as “you can go without causing psychological problems.”
Who would willingly choose to live in something with the footprint of a parking space (8x10x16 feet)? Millions already do, argues McCormick, a communications consultant: bedrooms, dorm rooms, motel rooms, hostels, mobile homes and the like. “I myself live comfortably in a converted one-car garage of 200 square feet,” he says, “which allows me to live inexpensively near downtown in super-expensive Palo Alto.”In cities where space is at a mind-boggling premium, McCormick’s idea of taking up residence in a parking space — in what he refers to as a “Houselet” — isn’t all that far-fetched. It may in fact be more appealing than the so-called “hacker hostels” that got a lot of buzz earlier this summer. Essentially apartments that house herds of would-be startup entrepreneurs willing to pay market rate to live in near-migrant-worker conditions, hacker hostels are proliferating in cities like San Francisco and New York where work culture calls for 24/7 commitments and lots of food-truck takeout (which no doubt inspired upLIFT’s prefab parking pods for the city).
These apartments are less living spaces than crash pads with a social networking component.
They do fit a particular market need, however, which is more than a lot of housing options can lay claim to. Is collaborative space the new urban amenity, replacing the granite counter top or Viking range? Perhaps. Savvy developers see a market — namely, people’s attraction to what’s outside a dwelling as much as, if not more than, what’s in it — and are trying to fill it. (...)
It is an understatement to say that demand far outstrips supply in San Francisco. As a result, rents and mortgages have gone through the roof. (Compare those 200 units to the 16,502 units of affordable housing that will be built this fiscal year in New York City.) San Francisco has proposed reducing the minimum square footage for residential units (currently 290 square feet) so that more units can be built. The proposed new minimum would be 150 square feet plus kitchen, bathroom and closet (a size that is, interestingly enough, about the size of McCormick’s one-car garage). It’s also, jokes Patrick Kennedy of Panoramic Interests, a developer in Berkeley, Calif., who has created a 160-square foot prototype, as small as “you can go without causing psychological problems.”
by Allison Arief, NY Times | Read more:
Phoro: Panoramic Interests
iMetamorphosis
’What’s happened to me?’ he texted no one in particular. It wasn’t a dream. His dorm room, a proper community college dorm room although a little too small, lay peacefully between it’s four supermodel and athlete covered walls. A collection of networking conference name badges lay spread out on the Ikea Bjursta—Toledo was an aspiring entrepreneur—and above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of Fast Company and housed in a nice but fake wood frame. It showed a 20-year old internet billionaire wearing a T-shirt and jeans, slouching casually and looking utterly unconcerned in an office chair.
Toledo then turned to look out the window at the typical Portland weather. Through his internal microphone, raindrops could be heard hitting the non-touch enabled pane, which made him feel quite sad. ‘How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense,’ he thought, but that was something he was unable to do because he was used to sleeping on his stomach, and in his present state couldn’t get into that position. However hard he tried to roll over, he only managed to slide further through the set of application menus on his touch screen belly. He must have tried it a hundred times, turned off his camera so that he wouldn’t have to look at the sliding applications, and only stopped when he noticed his battery life percentage drop from 86 percent to 85 percent.
‘Oh God,’ he thought, ‘what an improbable career path I’ve chosen! Attending networking events and web seminars day in and day out. Starting a business like this takes much more effort than joining an established corporation, and on top of that there’s the curse of the new economy, worries about studying the right thing, fast food and junk food, incoming requests and invites from different people all of the time so that you can never really get to know anyone outside of a few party pictures of them on Facebook. It can all go to Hell!’
by Oyl Miller, McSweeny's | Read more:
Photo: Richard Termine via:
Consumer Products
2) Celebrities are not appendages of our society anymore; they are the basis of our communal lives. Literature and architecture, art and politics, are at most sidelights—small, ancient alleyways down which fewer and fewer minds wander. Pop culture has long since left the word culture behind to become the primary way we understand the world. Just before she died, the film critic Pauline Kael told a friend, “When we championed trash culture, we had no idea it would become the only culture,” and she was right. The average American household now watches eight hours and twenty-one minutes of television a day. If we want to understand ourselves, if we want to understand the civilization to which we belong, we have to understand celebrities, because the modern world of freedom and loneliness has produced them as the primary communal experience. (I know more about Tom Cruise’s sexual history than I do about my cousins’.) We confront the mysteries and the terrors of life through them.
3) Celebrity culture may seem ahistorical—superficial and of the moment—but its roots reach deeply into the past four hundred years. The dominance of celebrity culture is the long triumphal march of image over substance. (...)
11) The rise of more intense, and briefer, celebrity over the past century is a side effect of the movement from silent film to the camera phone. Andy Warhol’s dictum that everyone in the future will have fifteen minutes of fame was probably overstating the duration. Viral videos have given the briefest, most superficial fame to a boy doing light-saber tricks, a man attempting to knock down the Oasis frontman, a baby laughing maniacally for a couple of minutes.
12) Within the maelstrom of image, however, certain celebrity types return to the public consciousness again and again. Gwyneth Paltrow is not just Gwyneth. Without Greta Garbo, there is no Grace Kelly; without Grace Kelly, there is no Gwyneth. The power of this particular trope—the blond princess—is huge; Great Garbo was the most charismatic actress in history. Avenue Princess Grace in Monaco is the most expensive stretch of real estate in the world, over twice the per-square-foot value of an average Fifth Avenue apartment. Each manifestation of the Gwyneth/Grace/Garbo figure wears the skin of the previous manifestation. For women, along with the blond princess, we have the blond whore (Mae West, Tallulah Bankhead, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna), the exotic (Sophia Loren, Penélope Cruz), the independent (Katherine Hepburn, Barbara Streisand, Ellen Burstyn). Among men, the tough guy, the consummate gentleman, the upstanding fellow, the outsider, the shlub, the permanent child, the destroyed adolescent, the man who consumes himself to death, have all been constantly reinvented. As in any other form of polytheism, gods appear and disappear, built to fit time and occasion and place. No matter what social change is under way on the playing field of history, the gods above remain; they hover over the changing world without moving. There has always been a James Dean, there will always be a James Dean.
by Stephen Marche, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
No need to bring your umbrella to this interactive installation piece. This mystical indoor rain room by Random International utilizes light, movement, and presence as the foundation of their artwork, which is why visitors can experience the soft pitter patter sound of the raindrops without even getting wet. As they walk, sensors detect motions which in result choreographs the water away from them as if the visitors control the weather.
via:
What It's Like to be on Jeopardy
A spam filter almost scotched my chance to be on television. I was scanning through the usual detritus of offers in July 2011 to enhance body parts and transfer large sums of money from people in distant lands, and spotted this subject line:Jeopardy! Contestant Audition in SeattleHa! That's a new scam, I thought, before I recollected that I had taken the Jeopardy quiz show's online screening test earlier in 2011. While I have been told my entire life that I would be perfect on Jeopardy due to my ability to retain and produce (on demand or in spite of protestations not to) trivial information, I thought I scored poorly on the online test. Apparently not.
I called the number in the email after first confirming via Google that it was actually connected to Sony Pictures Entertainment, which produces the show, and was told that, yes, it was legit. A year later, I found myself at Sony Pictures in a suit and a tie shaking hands with Alex Trebek, and hearing the dulcet tones of announcer Johnny Gilbert say my name.
If you have access to this quaint thing called "broadcast television," whether over the air or through cable or satellite receivers, you might have seen me win $15,199 last night by ultimately correctly recalling Karl Marx's name in the nick of time. That was a squeaker. I'll be on again this evening, and you'll see how I perform this time around.
Jeopardy is a fascinating cultural phenomenon. Everyone I know seems to have watched it as a kid, and some friends and colleagues' parents continue to watch it every night. The show had a top viewership of 50 million in the 1990s, but has declined to about 9 million today. The last time you may have thought about it, if you're a typical Boing Boing reader, is when you heard that Ken Jennings won 74 episodes in a row after the program lifted a five-win maximum. (Ken was an outlier. Few people have won more than five episodes since, and no one has come close to his run.) (...)
After my first (and only?) stint on the show, a friend of mine pointed out that while Jeopardy appears to be a quiz show, it's really a very particular form of a reality show. It's like The Amazing Race with most (but not all) of the personality stripped out. Instead of competing Survivor-like in physically intense challenges with deprivations and also trying to manage the social calculus of not being voted off, Jeopardy reduces us mostly to brains and reflexes.
This starts with the selection process. For decades, Jeopardy had cattle-call auditions in which interested people were called in to take a quick test. Those that scored well continued on, and some made it on the air. But most people were sent away. This is, of course, highly inefficient. Three years ago, the show switched to an online screening test, and now has 100,000 people take that quiz each year.
From the 100,000, the contestant coordinators winnow out about 2,000 to 3,000, they say, for in-person auditions, like the one I went to in August 2011. The audition is intended to make sure that people perform well on the show, and starts out with a 50-question rapid-fire exam in which answers don't have to be in the form of questions. It then proceeds into a quite realistic simulation of the show with signaling buzzers, a game board, and an interview section. (...)
The show wasn't and isn't looking solely for smart people who test well. Rather, they want people with a combination of traits: a deep knowledge well, the ability to retrieve an answer quickly, unflappability, a decent personal presentation and personability. The 21 people in my audition slot in Seattle (including an old friend I ran into who had auditioned before) for the most part had those characteristics.
If contestants were cast simply by rote memorization and rapid-retrieval abilities, you know the result, because you see it at technology trade shows and engineering colleges: a row of people, mostly men, would affectlessly and rapidly answer every question as fast as possible and seem somewhat unsympathetic. They might not even scream or smile when they won. That's not good TV. The show wants people who have a few interesting stories about themselves, and to whom the 10 million or so home viewers will be able to relate. They can't be super-brainiacs, because that deflates viewers playing along at home.
by Glen Fleishman, Boing Boing | Read more:
Why Do We Hate Facebook?
It started with a media report in France and in a few days the story had gone around the world. Our private Facebook messages from 2007 and 2008 were being made public on our walls. The story was picked up on U.S. blogs and was rapidly spread through Facebook status updates and on Twitter.
Facebook quickly issued a strong denial, tech journalists drilled deep, and the story was quickly debunked. Yet the message -- the cautionary status updates -- still spread, translated across Facebook's global communities. Even when faced with evidence to the contrary, people still insisted the story was true: They didn't care what Facebook said, they knew they didn't write that on their Wall, they never would have written that in public.
Our susceptibility to believe reports that Facebook is playing fast and loose with our data comes as no surprise. Facebook has let us down many times before, changing privacy settings without telling us and exposing our information. But in the social-media-powered hysteria, something else was on display. It was almost as if many of us wanted to believe it, as if we wanted to feel let down by Facebook. What the messaging saga showed us was the sheer depths of distrust and unease held by many of Facebook's heaviest users.
I confess: I love Facebook. It is my social network of choice. I am not a basement dweller, living my life online. I live a normal life with friends and family and Facebook is an enhancement of that. I use Twitter, but for journalism and networking rather than for communicating with friends. The Twitter me is the corporate me, truncated and reined in. On Facebook, I can be more myself. Over the years, Facebook has brought me closer with many people I am happy to be closer to. If I didn't use Facebook, I wouldn't have made those connections. The technology did that.
But sometimes, in praising Facebook, I feel like I am a rarity. Being too enthusiastic about Facebook is just not done in polite, techno-literate society. Among the general public, Facebook is the lowest-scoring "e-business company" on the American Customer Satisfaction Indexes with 61 on a 100-point scale. While Facebook has just reached a milestone of 1 billion users worldwide, there are some worrying signs for the company, for example the shrinking number of web-based users in the United States.
The sense of unease about Facebook appears in many different guises. There are those who criticize Facebook -- and social media in general -- for being inauthentic, superficial, and at odds with the "real world." There are those who take umbrage at Facebook's business model, its behavior as a virtual monopoly. There are those -- hipsters, fashionistas -- who wouldn't be seen dead anywhere other than Tumblr. There are those from the church of high-tech who ideologically oppose Facebook's closed platform, its capture of the open web, and long for a distributed open-source alternative. There are those who worry about what they see as Facebook's cavalier attitude to users' privacy, especially when those users are based in odious regimes. There are those who see Facebook as just the latest incarnation of mass consumer society, where our desires and behavior are being manipulated by The Man. And then there are those who just see Facebook, and social networking in general, as trivial and quit after getting too many Farmville requests.
While all of these viewpoints are very vocal, among the great mass of Facebook users they are likely edge cases, a long tail of elite unease. Right in the heart of Facebook's user base, though, the concern about the service is far more complex, revealing, and interesting. The low-level hum of discontent, revealed in the recent hysteria over messages is due to our evolving relationship with data. It is a relationship most of us don't really understand, but it gives us a general sense of foreboding.
by Luke Allnutt, Tangled Web | Read more:
Friday, October 19, 2012
Diary: Online Dating
The man generally held responsible for internet dating as we know it today is a native of Illinois called Gary Kremen, but Kremen was out of the internet dating business altogether by 1997, just around the time people were signing up for the internet en masse. Today he runs a solar energy financing company, is an elected official in Los Altos Hills, California and is better known for his protracted legal battle over the ownership of the pornography website sex.com than he is for inventing internet dating. Like many visionary entrepreneurs, Kremen doesn’t have very good management skills. His life has passed through periods of grave disarray. When I met him, at a conference on the internet dating industry in Miami last January, he asked where I was from. ‘Ah, Minnesota,’ he said: ‘Have you ever been to the Zumbro River?’ The Zumbro flows south of Minneapolis past Rochester, home of the Mayo Clinic. It turned out that Kremen had once driven, or been driven, into the river. He used to be addicted to speed.
In Miami Kremen recounted the genesis of his ideas about internet dating to a room full of matchmakers. In 1992, he was a 29-year-old computer scientist and one of the many graduates of Stanford Business School running software companies in the Bay Area. One afternoon a routine email with a purchase order attached to it arrived in his inbox. But it wasn’t routine: the email was from a woman. At the time, emails from women in his line of work were exceedingly rare. He stared at it. He showed the email to his colleagues. He tried to imagine the woman behind it. ‘I wonder if she would date me?’ Then he had another idea: what if he had a database of all the single women in the world? If he could create such a database and charge a fee to access it, he would most probably turn a profit.
In 1992, that couldn’t be done – modems transmitted information too slowly. Then there was the scarcity of women with online access. Because in its early days the internet was prevalent in worlds that had historically excluded women – the military, finance, mathematics and engineering – women were not online in big numbers. As late as 1996 America Online estimated that of its five million users, 79 per cent were men. In more administrative fields, however, a growing number of women had email.
So Kremen started with email. He left his job, hired some programmers with his credit card, and created an email-based dating service. Subscribers were given anonymous addresses from which to send out their profiles with a photo attached. The photos arrived as hard copy, and Kremen and his employees scanned them in by hand. Interested single people who did not yet have email could participate by fax. By 1994 modems had got faster, so Kremen moved to take his company online. He and four male partners formed Electric Classifieds Inc, a business premised on the idea of re-creating online the classifieds section of newspapers, beginning with the personals. They rented an office in a basement in San Francisco and registered the domain match.com. (...)
I joined OK Cupid at the age of 30, in late November 2011, with the pseudonym ‘viewfromspace’. When the time came to write the ‘About’ section of my profile, I quoted Didion’s passage, then added: ‘But now we have internet dating. New faces!’ The Didion bit sounded unpleasant, so I replaced it with a more optimistic statement, about internet dating restoring the city’s possibilities to a life that had become stagnant between work, subway and apartment. Then that sounded depressing, so I finally wrote: ‘I like watching nature documentaries and eating pastries.’ From then on I was flooded with suggestions of YouTube videos of endangered species and recommendations for pain au chocolat.
OK Cupid was founded in 2004 by four maths majors from Harvard who were good at giving away things people were used to paying for (study guides, music). In 2011 they sold the company for $50 million to IAC, the corporation that now owns Match. Like Match, OK Cupid has its users fill out a questionnaire. The service then calculates a user’s ‘match percentage’ in relation to other users by collecting three values: the user’s answer to a question, how she would like someone else to answer the same question, and the importance of the question to her. These questions ranged from ‘Does smoking disgust you?’ to ‘How often do you masturbate?’ Many questions are specifically intended to gauge one’s interest in casual sex: ‘Regardless of future plans, what’s more interesting to you right now, sex or true love?’ ‘Would you consider sleeping with someone on the first date?’ ‘Say you’ve started seeing someone you really like. As far as you’re concerned, how long will it take before you have sex?’ I found these algorithms put me in the same area – social class and level of education – as the people I went on dates with, but otherwise did very little to predict whom I would like. One occurrence in both online and real-life dating was an inexplicable talent on my part for attracting vegetarians. I am not a vegetarian.
by Emily Witt, LRB | Read more:
Illustration: Winston Churchill
[ed. Google in all it's estimable wisdom has decided to put various posts (apparently anything sex-related) behind a warning screen because...well, who knows? "This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content as outlined in Blogger’s Community Guidelines." Even something from the London Review of Books, by the great writer Emily Witt. God help us.]
Enjoyment Day
My friend Tom sits down across from me and says he thinks he just saw a baby take a sip, although he’s not sure. Moments later, we watch a Mr. Bean-sized car drive past, carrying a blond woman who waves at the crowd like a pageant queen. Bad Durkheim’s Wine Princess is on parade. Throughout the day, she will make her way down Germany’s Weinstraße—and so will we.
The German Weinstraße (literally “Wine Street”) is an 85-kilometer road that winds through the Pfalz (Palatinate), Southwest Germany. The decision to name a road Weinstraße dates to 1935, when it was conceived of as a way to connect the wine growers in the region and increase tourism. The last Sunday in August is the Weinstraße’s big day, known as Erlebnistag Deutsche Weinstraße, which translates to “Enjoyment Day on the German Wine Street.” On Enjoyment Day, Police close the street to motorized traffic and people ride bikes, rollerblades, and sometimes scooters down the Weinstraße to 15 different wine festivals in the Pfalz. In recent years, as many as 400,000 people have come to ride and drink on Enjoyment Day.
When we’re about half way through our first round of wine, my brother Mike, who arrived in Germany less than a week ago and seems overwhelmed, turns to me and says, “Geez. This is a lot different than a wine tasting in California.”
Like everyone here, Mike sips on a glass of Riesling, but he might be the only person in Bad Durkheim drinking from a 0.25-liter wine glass, which is the same size as the glasses you have in your kitchen cabinets. The rest of us drink from something called a Dubbeglas, which looks like a dimpled pint glass, holds a half-liter of wine, and is traditional to the Pfalz region. If a half-liter serving sounds like a lot of wine, it’s because it is. Drink two Dubeglases and you’ve already consumed more than a standard bottle of wine on your own. For those who wish to pace themselves, the Germans drink something called weinschorle, which is a 50/50 mix of wine and sparkling water.
In other words, this is a wine drinking festival; there’s not a lot of tasting going on.
I Heart Emoji
Over the past few years, the definition of texting has further evolved with the introduction of something that has both loosened the medium’s restrictions and presented new ones. Down at the bottom of the list of new features promised by iOS5, the iPhone operating system that débuted last year, was something at which only a true text-artist would rejoice: the iPhone keyboard would now come automatically equipped with Emoji, a line of tiny Japanese pictographs that can be deployed like letters. Anyone using an older model iPhone or Android already had the option of texting with Emojis, but to do so required downloading an app, and then manually adding the “language” to the keyboard. Now access was effortless. Last month, with the introduction of the iPhone 5 and iOS6, texters got another treat: a set of brand new Emojis, hundreds of them. As one aficionado recently put it, via text: “It’s like you’re a speaker of some primitive Japanese picture language with only three hundred some odd words and your vocabulary just DOUBLED.”
It’s hard to explain the appeal of this primitive language, but perhaps just as hard not to succumb to it. Emoji (the word is an anglicization of Japanese characters that translate literally to “picture letter”) takes the idea of the emoticon—the smiley face :), the sad face :(, the winking face ;), the heart <3—and brings it to its logical conclusion: full color, detail, a world of options. For starters, the classic emoticon faces are turned right-side up, now rendered as bright yellow orbs, and their expressions, no longer subjected to the limits of standard punctuation marks, run the gamut of cartoonish emotion: grin with eyes closed; grin with eyes open; wide-eyed, red-cheeked embarrassment; eyes-lowered, red-cheeked embarrassment; gritted teeth; hearts for eyes; puckered lips; wink with a smile; wink with tongue out; features crumpled in misery; eyebrows furrowed in anger. There are eleven Emoji hearts, including one that appears to be pulsating and one with an arrow shot through it. (...)
Most Emojis are universally understood—even the ones you can’t imagine finding use for. (My personal favorites in that category comprise what I like to think of as the Lost Toys: nearly obsolete technological equipment it seems hilarious to reference at all, let alone in a text, including a fax machine, a floppy disk, a VHS tape, a pager, a CD, and a camcorder.) Others, however, are distinctly Japanese. There is an array of actual Japanese characters, a line of Japanese foods (a plate of curry with rice, a bowl of ramen, a bento box, tuna sushi, onigri, shrimp tempura, a dish of shaved ice, a bottle of sake), a handful of Japanese trinkets, and a yellow face wearing a surgical mask, with sad eyes. And then there are the Emojis that seem to just be lost in translation: a pyramid of excrement with eyes and a grin; a stack of dollar bills with wings; the tip of a fountain pen in front of a padlock; a pair of hands held up, palms open, beneath a line of blue triangles; a building with the letters BK on it (not signifying, presumably, Brooklyn); the number 18 circled and crossed with a diagonal line. (...)
According to Business Wire, more than seventy per cent of young women in Japan use “Emoji-enabled services” (Emoji is also available for some e-mail platforms, including Gmail) and the Emoji market there exceeds three hundred million U.S. dollars. So what does one do with Emojis? Although just scrolling through them provides a little thrill, figuring out how to use them is the exciting part. Personally, I like to pepper them throughout my texts, using them to complement a word, feeling, or concept when appropriate: “Had you already left when the undercover cops broke up the party?! [policeman]” “[airplane] fly safe [pill] [sleeping Zs]”.
Sometimes I send them on their own. I recently texted a friend mired in grad school a tiny green turtle, just to let her know I was thinking of her; she responded with a poodle, and then a yellow face blowing a kiss. Even Vladimir Nabokov, arguably unparallelled in his mastery of the English language, acknowledged that sometimes nothing but an emoticon will quite do: when, in 1969, the New YorkTimes asked him how he ranked himself among other writers, he replied, “I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile—some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.”
by Hanah Goldfield, New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration: Maximilian Bode
The Life of Riley: BB King at 87
And on he comes, to applause from people who know him well and claim him as their own – the last of the blues masters a few weeks short of his 87th birthday. "Nice evening, isn't it?" he says, and introduces his nephew on sax. Some of his 15 children (all by different mothers) and innumerable grandchildren are in the audience, though one of his daughters died recently of diabetes, as had BB's mother – a poignant riptide beneath the occasion. "I guess you can look at me," he says from the stage, "and tell I'm the old man. My name is BB King."
Backed now by a lilac glow in the western sky – and looking east towards the village of Itta Bena, where he was born – BB sits down and starts up the show. He reaches "Key to the Highway", and there it is: that one long and trembling note, hanging there in the wafts of barbecue smoke, like only BB King can play it. He rolls his eyes, raises his eyebrows, then stares out into the crowd – and there's a collective gasp, a ripple of applause, and a mutual bond of affection.
This is a huddle, not a crowd, really. The town has come to hear its famous son: mostly black people – in families, many with a picnic – plus a few whites with ponytails, ZZ Top beards or other gestures of nonconformity. There are people here like Alfred Knox – one of 11 children with eight of his own (and 21 grandchildren) – who left Mississippi for Milwaukee when he was 19, the sound of Honeyboy Edwards playing juke joints ringing in his ears, and has now come back with his nephew Gervis to hear BB, to hear and talk blues, talk politics. The usual jocks and suits who wave bottles of Bud and shout at tourist clubs like BB King's own franchise in Memphis are not here for this annual homecoming concert – oddly, but thank God.
Nor, indeed, are some of Indianola's good citizens. Latunya and her friend were in the post office earlier, and said how "We're real excited BB's coming back. Gee, I'd lo-o-ove to go see him play. But I go out Fridays. I don't go out Wednesdays, I only go out Fridays". This is also the town in which the White Citizens Council was formed, political wing of the Ku Klux Klan; and the founders' heirs are probably elsewhere tonight.
The maestro's sonority on guitar is as inimitably perfect as ever. After one long, searing note during "The Thrill is Gone", BB King darts the stare of a clown right into the front rows, as though to say: "How about that!?" But it is BB's voice on the warm breeze that stops a heartbeat – that feeling behind and between the words that is the quintessence of the blues.
by Ed Vuillamy, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Kevin Nixon/Guitarist
What Happens in Brooklyn Moves to Vegas
Around the same time, the Las Vegas city government was also about to move, and Hsieh saw his opportunity. He leased the former City Hall — smack in the middle of downtown Vegas — for 15 years. Then he got to thinking: If he was going to move at least 1,200 employees, why not make it possible for them to live nearby? And if they could live nearby, why not create an urban community aligned with the culture of Zappos, which encourages the kind of “serendipitous interactions” that happen in offices without walls? As Zach Ware, Hsieh’s right-hand man in the move, put it, “We wanted the new campus to benefit from interaction with downtown, and downtown to benefit from interaction with Zappos.” The only hitch was that it would require transforming the derelict core of a major city.
For Hsieh, though, this was part of the appeal. Transforming downtown Vegas would “ultimately help us attract and retain more employees for Zappos.” For the city itself, it would “help revitalize the economy.” More important, it would “inspire,” a word Hsieh uses often. Hsieh closed his presentation at the faux log cabin high above the desert with the sort of fact he seems to always have on hand: up to 75 percent of the world’s population will call cities home in our lifetime. “So,” he concluded, “if you fix cities, you kind of fix the world.”
Most tourists never see downtown Las Vegas. There are a few blocks of mostly run-down casinos, cavernous gift stores and the enormous, glittering LED display overhead called, with hopefulness, the Fremont Street Experience. Less than two miles to the north, there’s the so-called homeless corridor, a patchwork of soup kitchens and air-conditioned shelters that protect the area’s thousands of homeless from life-threatening 115-degree afternoons during the summer. And this is within a greater metro area that has dominated the nation’s unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy lists for much of the last four years. Everyone knows at least one person who has left town for Houston, Dallas or Atlanta.
Nevertheless, the Downtown Project is hoping to draw 10,000 “upwardly mobile, innovative professionals” to the area in the next five years. And according to Hsieh, he and his team receive requests for seed money from dozens of people every week. In return, the Downtown Project asks not just for a stake in the companies but also for these entrepreneurs to live and work in downtown Las Vegas. (They’re also expected to give back to the community and hand over contacts for future recruits.) In expectation of all these newcomers, the project has already set up at least 30 real estate companies, bought more than 15 buildings and broken ground on 16 construction projects.
For those entrepreneurs who live in other parts of the country, and most do, the question often comes down to how eager they are to relocate to a downtown area filled with liquor stores and weekly hotels. Less than a year after the project was officially established, about 15 tech start-ups have signed on. The first tech investment went to Romotive, a company developing smart-phone-controlled personal robots. Money has also gone to Local Motion, a start-up that designs networks for sharing vehicles, and Digital Royalty, a social-media company.
by Timothy Pratt, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Brian Finke
Thursday, October 18, 2012
The Story of Amanda Todd
We’ll never know, when the fifteen-year-old Amanda Todd, of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, decided to make last Wednesday the last day of her life, whether she expected that that act would turn her into a household name. If she imagined her fame at all, she must have felt ambivalent at the prospect. In her short life, Todd had already learned that notoriety had a dark side. A certain kind of fame had already found her, and with it came a certain kind of life she plainly convinced herself that she couldn’t escape.
In a YouTube video she left behind, Todd told the tale by flash card, set to a maudlin song called “Hear You Me.” Her story is this: A few years ago, she was chatting with someone she met online, a man who flattered her. At his request, she flashed him. The man took a picture of her breasts. He then proceeded to follow Todd around the Internet for years. He asked her to put on another show for him, but she refused. So he’d find her classmates on Facebook and send them the photograph. To cope with the anxiety, Todd descended into drugs and alcohol and ill-advised flirtations and sex. Her classmates ostracized her. She attempted suicide a few times before finally succeeding, last week.
Todd’s suicide is easily analogized to Tyler Clementi’s, mostly because the public has diagnosed both cases as the result of “cyber-bullying.” Yet, as a descriptive term, “cyber-bullying” feels deliberately vague. Somewhere in the midst of the “mob” there is usually at least one person whose cruelty exceeds the tossing off of a stray insult. In Clementi’s case, the magazine’s Ian Parker chalked the harasser’s motives up to “shiftiness and bad faith,” the kinds of things that criminal statutes can’t easily be invoked to cover. But with Todd’s harasser, the malice is unquestionable. Anyone who has ever been to high school knows what they are provoking by distributing photographs like that.
It is a cultural myth—one particular to the Internet—that the methods of a harasser are fundamentally “legal,” and that the state is helpless to intervene in all cases like this. The systematic way the harasser allegedly followed Todd to new schools, repeatedly posting the images and threatening to do it again, makes it textbook harassment regardless of the medium. Indeed, in Todd’s native Canada, cyber-harassment is prosecuted under the general harassment provision of the Canadian criminal code. And in the United States, most states have added specific laws against cyber-harassment and bullying to their general legislation of harassment. At the federal level, there is the Federal Interstate Stalking Punishment and Prevention Act, which covers harassment that crosses state and national lines. While all of these laws are subject to the limitations of the First Amendment, the First Amendment generally doesn’t protect threats and harassment. If people are not being prosecuted for these acts, the fault lies in the social alchemy of law enforcement, the way the human prejudices of judges, juries, and prosecutors inflect the black letter. Put otherwise, the power is there—the cultural mores are what is preventing the laws from being successfully invoked.
by Michelle Dean, New Yorker | Read more:
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