Marcel Duchamp, Réseaux des stoppages étalon, (Network of Stoppages) Oil and pencil on canvas, 148.9 x 197.7 cm, 1914, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
via:
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Brian Eno and Ha-Joon Chang
Eno met Chang through an editor at the latter's publisher. The 49-year old economist is something of a star in that increasingly starry calling, ever since the publication of his 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism – a book described by the Guardian as "a masterful debunking of some of the myths of capitalism". Born in South Korea and now teaching at Cambridge University, Chang admits to being a fan of early Roxy Music – but, as soon becomes apparent, he and Eno have more in common than that.
Brian Eno: There's an issue we're both interested in – this middle ground between control and chaos. Some economists say you can only have a control model or a chaos model, that you're either a socialist or it's all about the free market. Whereas you say: "Let's find a place in between."
This happens to be an issue with the music I make. It's made for a place somewhere between architecture and gardening. It's not a situation where I'm finessing every tiny detail. I basically set a process in motion and then watch it happen. A lot of the design work is prior to the thing starting, rather than trying to keep control of it once it has started. You try to design the process carefully enough so you get the results you want and don't have to intervene.
Ha-Joon Chang: That's the approach I use in my economics. Central planners thought they could control everything, but there are always elements of uncertainty and surprise. But they then try to control even those. At the other extreme, we have those free-market economists who think there need to be less rules – even that it's OK to kill your competitor. Then you have a system that runs amok because everyone is cheating everyone in trying to beat them. The illusion that this rule-less system can organise itself has been proven completely mistaken – but we still have people wanting to believe in these extremes.
BE: And people saying, well, if you don't believe in that one, you must believe in this one.
HJC: I've read quite a few readers' reviews of my book on Amazon, saying, "Ah, he criticises the free market, he advocates central planning." I don't do that for a minute! But this is our black and white, dichotomous way of thinking – which has really been harmful.
BE: One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right. What gets the results you want? And for me, it isn't top-down architecture that does that – but it's not chaos, either. I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do. It turns out that anything that is called free anything isn't really. It's just constraints that you don't recognise.
by Caspar Llewellyn Smith, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Martin Godwin
Valerie Trierweiler: Affairs of State
His girlfriend, Valérie Trierweiler, a 47-year-old former political journalist and television talk-show host, knows how to dress for the cameras. Trierweiler agreed to help Hollande pick out a suit and tie, but added pointedly: "Don't expect me just to be doing this from now on."
It is an anecdote that neatly encapsulates France's new first lady. Beneath the exquisite exterior – the immaculately coiffed hair, the subtle make-up, the open-necked shirts with precisely the right number of buttons left undone – there lies a steely resolve to be much more than just a presidential consort. "She's a person who has always lived by herself, for herself," explains Alix Bouilhaguet, who co-authored La Frondeuse (The Troublemaker), a recent biography of Trierweiler. "[She] is incapable of living in the shadow of a partner – even when her partner is the president."
For those of us on this side of the Channel who have become used to seeing party leaders wheel out their wives for a simpering pre-conference kiss, Trierweiler's refusal to play the role of pliant wife is refreshing. But in France, it has done her no favours: a recent poll forVSD magazine found that 67% of French people had a negative view of her.
France can still be a profoundly sexist society where women are expected to fit neatly into certain pigeonholes. Trierweiler, who is neither an unapologetic career-woman nor a devoted wifelet who has forsaken her own ambitions for the sake of her man (and, by extension, the country) poses an impossible conundrum for the electorate. To them, her actions can seem confusing and contradictory. On one hand, she is a strong, assertive woman who made her way up through the ranks from modest beginnings. On the other, she is capable of outbursts of jealousy and neediness, played out on the national stage to the embarrassment of her partner and his voters. No one knows quite what to make of her.
Partly, Trierweiler is a victim of her own uncertain status. She and Hollande remain unmarried and he is on record as saying he believes marriage is a "bourgeois" institution. As such, she has no official standing as first lady and yet she has been forced to give up her job as a political journalist for Paris Match so as to avoid accusations of bias. Instead, she writes the odd book review for the magazine, insisting that she must continue to support her children (three teenage boys from her second marriage to fellow journalist and academic Denis Trierweiler). But the editor has announced he will not be renewing her contract at the end of the year. Recently, she has been talking of wanting to take up "humanitarian" work – that fail-safe option for spouses of powerful men who need to be kept occupied.
Throughout it all, she continues to have her own office in the Elysée Palace and five personal assistants – the cause of much grumbling in the press at a time of cutbacks. The former first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy recently urged the couple to marry in order to make things "simpler".
But the French electorate has also been taken aback by allegations published in La Frondeuse that Trierweiler was reportedly sleeping with a married conservative minister, Patrick Devedjian, while she was having a relationship with Hollande. At the time, Hollande was still living with Ségolène Royal, the mother of his four children and a senior Socialist politician in her own right. Trierweiler is suing the authors over the so-called "ménage a six". Still, the rumours remain. And although extra-marital dalliances are viewed tolerantly by the Parisian chattering classes, there is an underlying sense – unfair, perhaps – that Trierweiler relies on her feminine wiles to get ahead.
by Elizabeth Day, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Olivier Douliery-Pool/Rex Features
How Does Nate Silver Do It?
Now the interwebs are abuzz with Nate Silver praise. Gawker proclaims him “America’s Chief Wizard.” Gizmodo humorously offers 25 Nate Silver Facts (sample: “Nate Silver’s computer has no “backspace” button; Nate Silver doesn’t make mistakes”). IsNateSilverAWitch.com concludes: “Probably.”
Was Silver simply lucky? Probably not. In the 2008 elections he scored 50/51, missing only Indiana, which went to Obama by a mere 1%.
How does he do it? In his CFAR-recommended book The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, but Some Don’t, Silver reveals that his “secret” is bothering to obey the laws of probability theory rather than predicting things from his gut.
An understanding of probability can help us see what Silver’s critics got wrong. For example, Brandon Gaylord wrote:
Silver… confuses his polling averages with an opaque weighting process… and the inclusion of all polls no matter how insignificant – or wrong – they may be. For example, the poll that recently helped put Obama ahead in Virginia was an Old Dominion poll that showed Obama up by seven points. The only problem is that the poll was in the field for 28 days – half of which were before the first Presidential debate. Granted, Silver gave it his weakest weighting, but its inclusion in his model is baffling.Actually, what Silver did is exactly right according to probability theory. Each state poll provided some evidence about who would win that state, but some polls — for example those which had been accurate in the past — provided more evidence than others. Even the Old Dominion poll provided some evidence, just not very much — which is why Silver gave it “his weakest weighting.” Silver’s “opaque weighting process” was really just a straightforward application of probability theory. (In particular, it was an application of Bayes’ Theorem.)
by Luke and Gwern Branwern, CFAR | Read more:
A Different Justice
Norway's criminal justice system is, obviously, quite distinct from that of, say, the U.S.; 21 years is the maximum sentence for anything less severe than war crimes or genocide. Still, it's more than that: the entire philosophy underpinning their system is radically different. I don't have an answer for which is better. I doubt anyone does. But Americans' shocked response to the Breivik sentence hints at not just how different the two systems are, but how deeply we may have come to internalize our understanding of justice, which, whatever its merits, doesn't seem to be as universally applied as we might think.
The American justice system, like most of those in at least the Western world, is built on an idea called retributive justice. In very simplified terms (sorry, I'm not a legal scholar), it defines justice as appropriately punishing someone for an act that's harmful to society. Our system does include other ideas: incapacitating a criminal from committing other crimes, rehabilitating criminals to rejoin society, and deterring other potential criminals. At its foundation, though, retributive justice is about enforcing both rule of law and more abstract ideas of fairness and morality. Crimes are measured by their damage to society, and it's society that, working through the court system, metes out in-turn punishment. Justice is treated as valuable and important in itself, not just for its deterrence or incapacitative effects. In a retributive system, the punishment fits the crime, and 21 years in a three-room cell doesn't come close to fitting Breivik's 77 premeditated murders.
Criminals are not primarily wrongdoers to be punished, but broken people to be fixed.Norway doesn't work that way. Although Breivik will likely be in prison permanently -- his sentence can be extended -- 21 years really is the norm even for very violent crimes. The much-studied Norwegian system is built on something called restorative justice. Proponents of this system might argue that it emphasizes healing: for the victims, for the society, and, yes, for the criminal him or herself. Sounds straightforward enough, but you might notice that there's nothing in there about necessarily punishing the criminal, and in fact even takes his or her needs into account.
"Restorative justice thus begins with a concern for victims and how to meet their needs, for repairing the harm as much as possible, both concretely and symbolically," explains a 1997 academic article, by a scholar of restorative justice named Howard Zehr, extolling the systems' virtues. In the Breivik trial, this meant giving every victim (survivors as well as the families of those killed) a direct voice. Victims were individually represented by 174 court-appointed lawyers. The court heard 77 autopsy reports, 77 descriptions of how Breivik had killed them, and 77 minute-long biographies "voicing his or her unfulfilled ambitions and dreams." In an American-style retributive system, the trial is primarily about hearing and evaluating the case against the criminal. Norway does this too, but it also includes this restorative tool of giving space to victims, not as evidence, but to make the trial a forum for those victims to heal and to confront the man who'd harmed them. The trial itself is about more than just proving or disproving guilt, but about exorcising the victims' suffering.
What about the criminal? Of course, Norway is locking Breivik away in part to keep him safely cordoned off from society. Beyond that, the restorative "model encourages offenders to understand the consequences of their actions or to empathize with victims," Zehr explains. That begins with the trial, where he or she is encouraged to grapple with the wrongness of their actions; Breivik gave no sign of doing this, a remorseless, fist-pumping neo-Nazi to the very end. The process continues during the incarceration, which is treated less as a form of punishment than as a sort of state-imposed rehabilitation. It's not a categorial difference from the American model, which includes a number of rehab and therapeutic offerings, but, with Breivik about to enjoy some not insignificant creature comforts in his three-room cell, the emphasis is clearly distinct.
The pleasant-sounding experience of being in Norwegian prison isn't some sign of Scandinavian weakness or naïveté; it's precisely the point. A comfortable cell, clean and relaxing environment, and nice daily activities such as cooking classes are all meant to prepare the criminal for potentially difficult or painful internal reformation. Incarceration, in this thinking, is the treatment for whatever social or psychological disease led them to transgress. The criminals are not primarily wrongdoers to be punished, but broken people to be fixed.
by Max Fisher, The Atlantic | Read more:
North Kohala Nurtures Music and Arts
[ed. I've always loved Hawi, and John Keawe is a slack-key guitar master - every album of his that I own is excellent.]
All the better for local musicians and artists to hide away and find their Polynesian muses.
This lush district at the Big Island of Hawaii's north shore is isolated from the busy Kona Coast by the ranch-dotted, horse-heaven hill that is Kohala, an extinct volcano. On its windward side, it squeezes up like an accordion into deep and wild valleys navigated only by ancient trails.
A two-lane road transits the frozen-in-time, tin-roof towns of Hawi and Kapa'au and ends at an overlook and trailhead above the kiwi-green Pololu Valley.
Nearby, on a windswept point looking toward Maui, King Kamehameha I was born in the 1750s. To protect him from chiefs jealous of his royal destiny, protectors fled with the infant to raise him in the remote backcountry beyond Pololu.
To this day, North Kohala cradles island culture and intact native families, and this road less traveled nurtures the souls of musicians and artists whose work is emblematic of Hawaii.
You need a reason
"The important thing about Kohala is it's a dead-end road and you have to have a reason to come up here," says David Gomes, a musician whose Portuguese great-grandparents came from the Azores to work a now-defunct sugar plantation that was Kohala's economic lifeblood for 100 years. "That makes the community a little tight place. They're sweet, tolerant, forgiving people. Kohala is literally and figuratively the end of the road for some."
Gomes, who grew up with the remote valleys as his playground and who still loves to hike them, spends peaceful days crafting masterful guitars and ukuleles in a cluttered workshop off a quiet lane above Hawi (say "Huh-vee"). He has a dual cultural connection to the ukulele: Before being popularized in Hawaii in the 1800s, ukuleles came from Portugal.
by Brian J. Cantwell, Seattle Times | Read more:
Photo: Brian J. Cantwell
Building a Better Vibrator
The offices of Jimmyjane are above a boarded-up dive bar in San Francisco's Mission district. There used to be a sign on a now-unmarked side door, until employees grew weary of men showing up in a panic on Valentine's Day thinking they could buy last-minute gifts there. (They can't.) The only legacy that remains of the space's original occupant, an underground lesbian club, is a large fireplace set into the back wall. Porcelain massage candles and ceramic stones, neatly displayed on sleek white shelves alongside the brightly colored vibrators that the company designs, give the space the serene air of a day spa.
Ethan Imboden, the company's founder, is 40 and holds an electrical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins and a master's in industrial design from Pratt Institute. He has a thin face and blue eyes, and wears a pair of small hoop earrings beneath brown hair that is often tousled in some fashion. The first time I visited, one April morning, Imboden had on a V-neck sweater, designer jeans and Converse sneakers with the tongues splayed out -- an aesthetic leaning that masks a highly programmatic interior. "I think if you asked my mother she'd probably say I lined up my teddy bears at right angles," he told me.
Imboden was seated next to a white conference table, reviewing a marketing graphic that Jimmyjane was preparing to email customers before the summer season. Projected onto a wall was an image that promoted three of Jimmyjane's vibrators, superimposed over postcards of iconic destinations -- Paris, the Taj Mahal, a Mexican surf beach -- with the title: "Meet Jimmyjane's Mile High Club: The perfect traveling companions for your summer adventures." The postcard for the Form 2, a vibrator Imboden created with the industrial designer Yves Behar, was pictured alongside the Eiffel Tower with the note: " Bonjour! Thanks to my handy button lock I breezed through my flight without making noise or causing an international incident. See you soon, FORM 2."
Jimmyjane's conceit is to presuppose a world in which there is no hesitation around sex toys. Placing its products on familiar cultural ground has a normalizing effect, Imboden believes, and comparing a vibrator to a lifestyle accessory someone might pack into their carry-on luggage next to an iPad shifts people's perceptions about where these objects fit into their lives. Jimmyjane products have been sold in places like C.O. Bigelow, the New York apothecary, Sephora, W Hotels, and even Drugstore.com. Insinuating beautifully designed and thoughtfully engineered sex toys into the mainstream consumer landscape could push Americans into more comfortable territory around sex in general. Jimmyjane hopes to achieve this without treading too firmly on mainstream sensibilities. (...)
Through their design, Imboden wants to convey the sense that these are carefully considered objects--that someone is looking out for our sexual well-being, even if we have been conditioned to have low expectations. "I jokingly say this is an area where you really don't want to disappoint your customers," Behar told me. "And I think this is an industry that has treated its customers really badly." The Form 2 takes a symmetrical, organic form but they avoid emulating anatomy, because while "the penis is very well designed to accomplish what it needs to accomplish, a vibrator doesn't actually need to do those same things," Imboden said. One function it was not designed to accomplish was to stimulate a woman's G spot, but even if it did, mimicking male genitalia treads on psychological territory that Imboden would rather avoid. "While on the one hand that has its own excitement, there becomes a third person," he said, noting that some men feel threatened by an object they perceive to be a substitution for themselves. "People aren't necessarily seeking to have a threesome. Our goal has really been for the focus to be on you and your sensations and the interaction with your partner and not really to pull attention to the product itself. That's an element of why we make the products as quiet as they are. It's also why we make them visually quiet." Representational objects, like taxidermy hanging in a lodge, take up psychic space; figurative forms leave fantasy open to one's own interpretation. "Staying away from body shapes," Imboden explained, "is a way of keeping open provocative possibility, as opposed to narrowing it down to a provocative prescription."
Ethan Imboden, the company's founder, is 40 and holds an electrical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins and a master's in industrial design from Pratt Institute. He has a thin face and blue eyes, and wears a pair of small hoop earrings beneath brown hair that is often tousled in some fashion. The first time I visited, one April morning, Imboden had on a V-neck sweater, designer jeans and Converse sneakers with the tongues splayed out -- an aesthetic leaning that masks a highly programmatic interior. "I think if you asked my mother she'd probably say I lined up my teddy bears at right angles," he told me.Imboden was seated next to a white conference table, reviewing a marketing graphic that Jimmyjane was preparing to email customers before the summer season. Projected onto a wall was an image that promoted three of Jimmyjane's vibrators, superimposed over postcards of iconic destinations -- Paris, the Taj Mahal, a Mexican surf beach -- with the title: "Meet Jimmyjane's Mile High Club: The perfect traveling companions for your summer adventures." The postcard for the Form 2, a vibrator Imboden created with the industrial designer Yves Behar, was pictured alongside the Eiffel Tower with the note: " Bonjour! Thanks to my handy button lock I breezed through my flight without making noise or causing an international incident. See you soon, FORM 2."
Jimmyjane's conceit is to presuppose a world in which there is no hesitation around sex toys. Placing its products on familiar cultural ground has a normalizing effect, Imboden believes, and comparing a vibrator to a lifestyle accessory someone might pack into their carry-on luggage next to an iPad shifts people's perceptions about where these objects fit into their lives. Jimmyjane products have been sold in places like C.O. Bigelow, the New York apothecary, Sephora, W Hotels, and even Drugstore.com. Insinuating beautifully designed and thoughtfully engineered sex toys into the mainstream consumer landscape could push Americans into more comfortable territory around sex in general. Jimmyjane hopes to achieve this without treading too firmly on mainstream sensibilities. (...)
Through their design, Imboden wants to convey the sense that these are carefully considered objects--that someone is looking out for our sexual well-being, even if we have been conditioned to have low expectations. "I jokingly say this is an area where you really don't want to disappoint your customers," Behar told me. "And I think this is an industry that has treated its customers really badly." The Form 2 takes a symmetrical, organic form but they avoid emulating anatomy, because while "the penis is very well designed to accomplish what it needs to accomplish, a vibrator doesn't actually need to do those same things," Imboden said. One function it was not designed to accomplish was to stimulate a woman's G spot, but even if it did, mimicking male genitalia treads on psychological territory that Imboden would rather avoid. "While on the one hand that has its own excitement, there becomes a third person," he said, noting that some men feel threatened by an object they perceive to be a substitution for themselves. "People aren't necessarily seeking to have a threesome. Our goal has really been for the focus to be on you and your sensations and the interaction with your partner and not really to pull attention to the product itself. That's an element of why we make the products as quiet as they are. It's also why we make them visually quiet." Representational objects, like taxidermy hanging in a lodge, take up psychic space; figurative forms leave fantasy open to one's own interpretation. "Staying away from body shapes," Imboden explained, "is a way of keeping open provocative possibility, as opposed to narrowing it down to a provocative prescription."
by Andy Issacson, The Atlantic | Read more:
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Unsung Heroes
[ed. How many have heard of Ms. King and her accomplishments? Not a lot, I'd imagine; and not me until recently. I wish we had a rock star category for scientists. See also, her fight against gene patenting.]
King began her career with a degree in mathematics (cum laude) from Carleton College. She completed her doctorate in 1973 at the University of California, Berkeley in genetics, after her advisor Allan Wilson persuaded her to switch from mathematics to genetics. In her doctoral work at Berkeley (1973), she demonstrated through comparative protein analysis that chimpanzees and humans are 99% genetically identical, a finding that stunned the public at the time, revolutionized evolutionary biology, and is today common knowledge. King's work supported Allan Wilson's view that chimpanzees and humans diverged only five million years ago, and King and Wilson suggested that gene regulation was likely responsible for the significant differences between the species, a prescient suggestion since borne out by other researchers.
King completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) before accepting a faculty appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, as professor of genetics and epidemiology (1976–1995).
While on the faculty at Berkeley, King demonstrated in 1990 that a single gene on chromosome 17, later known as BRCA1, was responsible for many breast and ovarian cancers—as many as 5-10% of all cases of breast cancer may be hereditary. The discovery of the "breast cancer gene" revolutionized the study of numerous other common diseases; prior to and during King's 16 years working on this project, most scientists had disregarded her ideas on the interplay of genetics with complex human disease. Genetics had been used in diseases with a single genetic tie, such as Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis, and sickle-cell anemia, but researchers were skeptical about genetics' utility in the more common kinds of diseases that included multiple genetic factors and environmental factors as well.
The technique King developed to identify BRCA1 has since proven valuable in the study of many other illnesses, and King has built on to that research by identifying BRCA2, and extending her technique to other diseases and conditions.
Since 1990 King has also begun working in collaboration with scientists around the world to identify genetic causes of hearing loss and deafness. They successfully cloned the first nonsyndromic deafness-related gene in 1997. King continues to work with scientists Karen Avraham in Israel and Moien Kanaan in the West Bank, modeling international scientific cooperation in conjunction with conducting scientific research. Hereditary deafness is common amongst Arab communities, providing good study populations to understand the genetics.
King has also worked on the Human Genome Diversity Project, which seeks to delineate the distinctions between individuals in order to further understanding of human evolution and historical migrations.
At the request of Dr. William Maples, King was also involved in DNA investigations of the first party of Romanov remains exhumed in 1991 in Ekaterinburg, Russia.
King remained at Berkeley until 1995, when she took an appointment as the American Cancer Society Research Professor at the University of Washington.
King first applied her genetics skills to human rights work in 1984, when she and her lab began working with Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo) in Argentina to use dental genetics to identify missing persons, ultimately identifying and returning to their homes more than 50 children. The missing persons included at least 59 children, most born to women targeted and "disappeared" by the Argentine military dictatorship during the eight-year "dirty war" of the 1970s and 1980s. These children, after being removed from their imprisoned mothers, were often illegally "adopted" by military families without their mothers' consent. Las Abuelas ("the grandmothers") had gathered data trying to identify the children, and every Thursday, marched to the central plaza in Buenos Aires ("Plaza de Mayo") to demand the return of their grandchildren. The Argentinian government would not return the children without "proof" of kinship, however, and King's technique, using mitochondrial DNA and human leukocyte antigen serotyping genetic markers from dental samples, proved invaluable. The Supreme Court of Argentina in 1984 determined that King's test had positively identified the relationship of Paula Logares to her family, establishing the precedent for the ultimate reunification of dozens of families with their stolen children.
Start Me Up Once More
There are arena concerts scheduled in London (Nov. 25 and 29) and Newark (Dec. 13 and 15). There are documentaries new (on HBO) and old (on DVD), as well as a comprehensive retrospective of Rolling Stones films and videos at the Museum of Modern Art from Nov. 15 to Dec. 2. There are even two new Stones songs recorded this year: “Doom and Gloom,” a Jagger song that mentions fracking, and “One More Shot,” written by Mr. Richards.
In one way the Stones have been doing the same thing for half a century: playing obstinately unpolished rock ’n’ roll. It’s American music — blues, country, R&B, gospel — refracted through English sensibilities while ditching decorum and riding the backbeat. Yet around that music, every conceivable meaning has changed.
What once was taken as radical, wanton, even dangerous has become old-school and privileged; tickets for the band’s two shows at the Prudential Center in Newark run $95 to $750 plus fees. (The Dec. 15 show will also be a pay-per-view broadcast.) The songs that once outraged parents are now oldies to pass on to the grandchildren. “You’d gone all the way from ‘It’s too dangerous to go’ to people bringing their children” to shows, Mr. Jagger said from Paris. “It became a family outing.” And a band that was once synonymous with a riotous volatility has become — despite all commercial, cultural and chemical odds — a symbol of stability. Members now describe the band with an unexpected word for the Rolling Stones: discipline. “It requires quite a bit of discipline to be a Rolling Stone,” Mr. Richards said. “Although it seems to be shambolic, it’s a very disciplined bunch.”
Interviewed separately, the guitarist Ronnie Wood, who joined the band in 1975, agreed. “No matter what was going on the outside, no matter how much we whooped it up,” he said, “we felt a responsibility, and we still do, to make great music.”
Simple familiarity, through the passage of time and generations, is one reason the Stones’ popularity has endured. Yet since the late 1980s, when the Stones pulled themselves together to make “Steel Wheels” and return to the stadium circuit, arguably every tour and album has been largely a victory lap for what they accomplished in their first 20 years.
By then Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards had forged a catalog of great songs as diverse as — for starters — “The Last Time,” “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Ruby Tuesday,” “No Expectations,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Brown Sugar” and “Gimme Shelter.” There’s no naïveté in Stones songs; they have worn well.
The band’s box office potential is unmistakable. Latter-day Stones studio albums, when they get around to making them — the last one was “A Bigger Bang,” back in 2005 — have each sold at least a million copies in the United States without major hit singles. Mr. Richards’s 2010 autobiography, “Life,” topped The New York Times’s best-seller list — and deserved to, with its frank and kaleidoscopic mingling of music lore, drug chronicles, romance, strife, loyalty, score-settling and improbable survival. The Stones dependably sell out arena tours. The fascination continues.
Nostalgia and durable songs are part of the Stones’ perpetual appeal. So are the big-stage rock spectacles that the Stones helped pioneer, with inflatable appendages, pyrotechnics or perhaps a cherry-picker lifting Mr. Jagger over the crowd. (Now Taylor Swift rides one.)
It doesn’t hurt ticket sales that Mr. Jagger, at 69, is still limber enough to prance, twitch and shimmy all over a stage; when Maroon 5 had a hit with “Moves Like Jagger,” younger listeners needed no footnote. In a heartening sight for his less spry contemporaries and baby boomer fans, Mr. Jagger had enough rock-star rambunctiousness to steal the show completely from hit makers less than half his age at the 2011 Grammy Awards. (“That’s pretty easy,” Mr. Jagger said from Paris. “If you’re only doing one number, you can tear anything up.”) Video from the Stones’ first concert since 2007, on Oct. 25 at the club Le Trabendo in Paris, shows a band that’s grizzled and scrappy but still game.
Onstage and, far more often than not, in the studio, the Rolling Stones keep their sound loose: it’s practiced and not to be mistaken for sloppy, precisely imprecise. Above Charlie Watts’s drumming the band’s two guitars share a musical cat’s cradle, constantly twining, unraveling, reconfiguring. “We’re always sliding between rhythm and lead,” Mr. Richards said. “It’s an intuitive thing, instinctive. You couldn’t map it.”
by Jon Pareles, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Credit: Bob Gruen
The Mad Max Economy
[ed. See also, Market-Based Disaster Justice.]
Folks here don’t wish disaster on their fellow Americans. They didn’t pray for Hurricane Sandy to come grinding up the East Coast, tearing lives apart and plunging millions into darkness.
But the fact is, disasters are good business in Waukesha. And, lately, there have been a lot of disasters.
This Milwaukee suburb, once known for its curative spring waters and, more recently, for being a Republican stronghold in a state that President Obama won on Election Day, happens to be the home of one of the largest makers of residential generators in the country. So when the lights go out in New York — or on the storm-savaged Jersey Shore or in tornado-hit Missouri or wherever — the orders come pouring in like a tidal surge.
It’s all part of what you might call the Mad Max Economy, a multibillion-dollar-a-year collection of industries that thrive when things get really, really bad. Weather radios, kerosene heaters, D batteries, candles, industrial fans for drying soggy homes — all are scarce and coveted in the gloomy aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and her ilk.
It didn’t start with the last few hurricanes, either. Modern Mad Max capitalism has been around a while, decades even, growing out of something like old-fashioned self-reliance, political beliefs and post-Apocalyptic visions. The cold war may have been the start, when schoolchildren dove under desks and ordinary citizens dug bomb shelters out back. But economic fears, as well as worries about climate change and an unreliable electronic grid have all fed it.
Driven of late by freakish storms, this industry is growing fast, well beyond the fringe groups that first embraced it. And by some measures, it’s bigger than ever.
Businesses like Generac Power Systems, one of three companies in Wisconsin turning out generators, are just the start.
The market for gasoline cans, for example, was flat for years. No longer. “Demand for gas cans is phenomenal, to the point where we can’t keep up with demand,” says Phil Monckton, vice president for sales and marketing at Scepter, a manufacturer based in Scarborough, Ontario. “There was inventory built up, but it is long gone.”
Even now, nearly two weeks after the superstorm made landfall in New Jersey, batteries are a hot commodity in the New York area. Win Sakdinan, a spokesman for Duracell, says that when the company gave away D batteries in the Rockaways, a particularly hard-hit area, people “held them in their hands like they were gold.”
Folks here don’t wish disaster on their fellow Americans. They didn’t pray for Hurricane Sandy to come grinding up the East Coast, tearing lives apart and plunging millions into darkness.
But the fact is, disasters are good business in Waukesha. And, lately, there have been a lot of disasters.This Milwaukee suburb, once known for its curative spring waters and, more recently, for being a Republican stronghold in a state that President Obama won on Election Day, happens to be the home of one of the largest makers of residential generators in the country. So when the lights go out in New York — or on the storm-savaged Jersey Shore or in tornado-hit Missouri or wherever — the orders come pouring in like a tidal surge.
It’s all part of what you might call the Mad Max Economy, a multibillion-dollar-a-year collection of industries that thrive when things get really, really bad. Weather radios, kerosene heaters, D batteries, candles, industrial fans for drying soggy homes — all are scarce and coveted in the gloomy aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and her ilk.
It didn’t start with the last few hurricanes, either. Modern Mad Max capitalism has been around a while, decades even, growing out of something like old-fashioned self-reliance, political beliefs and post-Apocalyptic visions. The cold war may have been the start, when schoolchildren dove under desks and ordinary citizens dug bomb shelters out back. But economic fears, as well as worries about climate change and an unreliable electronic grid have all fed it.
Driven of late by freakish storms, this industry is growing fast, well beyond the fringe groups that first embraced it. And by some measures, it’s bigger than ever.
Businesses like Generac Power Systems, one of three companies in Wisconsin turning out generators, are just the start.
The market for gasoline cans, for example, was flat for years. No longer. “Demand for gas cans is phenomenal, to the point where we can’t keep up with demand,” says Phil Monckton, vice president for sales and marketing at Scepter, a manufacturer based in Scarborough, Ontario. “There was inventory built up, but it is long gone.”
Even now, nearly two weeks after the superstorm made landfall in New Jersey, batteries are a hot commodity in the New York area. Win Sakdinan, a spokesman for Duracell, says that when the company gave away D batteries in the Rockaways, a particularly hard-hit area, people “held them in their hands like they were gold.”
by Andrew Martin, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Why Private Email Accounts are a National Security Issue
All of this might sound a little overly apprehensive – really, U.S. national security is compromised because the CIA director’s personal Gmail account might have been a little easier to hack? – until you start looking at the scale and sophistication of foreign attempts to infiltrate U.S. data sources. Chinese hacking efforts, perhaps the best-known but nowhere near the only threat to U.S. networks and computers, suggest the enormous scope and ferocious drive of foreign government hackers.
Some Americans who have access to sensitive information and who travel to China describe going to tremendous lengths to minimize government efforts to seize their data. Some copy and paste their passwords from USB thumb drives rather than type them out, for fear of key-logging software. They carry “loaner” laptops and cellphones and pull out cellphone batteries during sensitive meetings, worried that the microphone could be switched on remotely. The New York Times called such extreme measures, which also apply in other countries, “standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies.”
by Max Fisher, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images)
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