Carol Rama
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Billionaire's Basements

Walking around the stuccoed streets of Kensington and Chelsea today, you are in for a surreal sight. The marching rows of doric columns, pedimented porticoes and dentilled cornices that define these imposing ranks of wedding-cake mansions have been joined by an unlikely addition to the classical architectural vocabulary.

Poking up at regular intervals, thrusting outwards from their moulded openings as if performing a salute to passers-by, are lines of angled conveyor belts. Slowly rumbling away, they reach high above the trees, pouring a continuous stream of rubble into the cradles of awaiting skips. You would be forgiven for thinking that the residents of the royal borough have established a kind of coal-mining cottage industry. Or maybe they're digging for gold?

"It is an absolute disgrace," says one elderly resident, out walking her freshly coiffed miniature poodle in between the rows of hoarded-off skips. "It feels like they've turned Kensington into a war zone."

The reason for all this quarrying is not the discovery of a coal-rich seam beneath the Wrenaissance streets, but the local enthusiasm for subterranean development. Over the past four years, this local authority alone has granted planning applications for more than 800 basement extensions, refused 90, and has a further 20 outstanding. It is the most densely populated borough in the country, with no room to build outwards, and no permission to build upwards – so the only way is down.

But this desire for digging isn't to everyone's liking. Last week a furore erupted when plans were released for a four-storey basement beneath a 19th-century schoolhouse in Knightsbridge, for Canadian former TV mogul David Graham.

Tripling the size of the property, this gargantuan pleasure cave would house a ballroom and swimming pool, with hot tub, sauna and massage room, as well as 15 bedrooms, seven bathrooms and 20 toilets, plunging deeper into the earth than the height of neighbouring homes.

"These plans are absolutely monstrous and unnecessary," said one neighbour, the Duchess of St Albans. "It's just absolute greed. No one needs that much space. Quite apart from that, the commotion is going to be dreadful."

"This is totally out of keeping with the relatively small size of other houses in the area," agreed a spokesman for the nearby Milner Street Area Residents Association. "Why should we all suffer just so one man can indulge his fantasy?"

Such fantasies are not restricted to this one man alone. The past five years have seen sprawling underground leisure lairs excavated across west London, from Knightsbridge to Belgravia, Fulham to Notting Hill. They contain playrooms and cinemas, bowling alleys and spas, wine cellars and gun rooms – and even a two-storey climbing wall. It is leading to a kind of iceberg architecture, a humble mansion on the surface just the visible peak of a gargantuan underworld, with subterranean possibilities only limited by the client's imagination.

"Houses in this part of London are trophy asset purchases," says Peter Preedy, associate director of residential property at Jones Lang LaSalle. "People don't want to move out, so they have to find a way of bringing everything they want into their homes. These mega basements are not about increasing the value of property – they are very personal things, which might in fact prove difficult to sell on."

One of the most personal plans – which itself set the precedent for this recent burrowing frenzy – dates back to 2008, when Foxtons founder Jon Hunt received permission for the most audacious basement of all, a colossal cellar to trump even the swankiest Beverley Hills crib.

Having bought a palatial villa on Kensington Palace Gardens, the most expensive street in the country, he was not to be outdone by his neighbours. Lakshmi Mittal's nearby "Taj Mittal" already featured an underground complex of Turkish baths and a pool lined with marble from the same quarry as the Taj Mahal. A few doors down, property mogul Leonard Blavatnik had bought up three former Russian Embassy buildings and since added an underground swimming pool, gym, private cinema and extensive garaging.

In a surreal competition of keeping up with the Joneses, billionaire-style, Hunt went one step further into the realms of fantasy. He proposed to dig a 22m-deep hole beneath his garden to house a tennis court, pool and gym, as well as a private museum for his collection of vintage Ferraris. The cavernous chamber would be illuminated from above, through the glass floor of a glistening rooftop infinity pool.

by Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian |  Read more:

Illustration: Ben Hasler

The Surveillance State Takes Friendly Fire

Last March, in a speech he delivered at a gathering orchestrated by In-Q-Tel, the venture-capital incubator of the Central Intelligence Agency, David Petraeus, the Agency’s director, had occasion to ruminate on “the utter transparency of the digital world.” Contemporary spooks faced both challenges and opportunities in a universe of “big data,” but he had faith in the “diabolical creativity” of the wizards at Langley: “Our technical capabilities often exceed what you see in Tom Cruise movies.” In the digital environment of the twenty-first century, Petraeus announced, “We have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy.”

For those of us who have been less bullish about the prospects of radical transparency, the serialized revelations that have unfolded since Friday—when Petraeus, who left the military as a four-star general, resigned from the C.I.A. because of an affair—are, to say the least, honeyed with irony. In the decade following September 11, 2001, the national-security establishment in this country devised a surveillance apparatus of genuinely diabolical creativity—a cross-hatch of legal and technical innovations that (in theory, at any rate) could furnish law enforcement and intelligence with a high-definition early-warning system on potential terror events. What it’s delivered, instead, is the tawdry, dismaying, and wildly entertaining spectacle that ensues when the national-security establishment inadvertently turns that surveillance apparatus on itself.

Of course, right now, the events and personages joined in a scandal that has already achieved an indelible Twitter moniker—#LovePentagon—are anything but transparent: we don’t yet know the name of the zealous, shirtless F.B.I. agent, or whether General John Allen sent thirty thousand pages of “inappropriate” e-mails to unpaid social liaison Jill Kelley, or merely several hundred “flirtatious” ones. But all this sordid laundry will come out soon enough, in part because of the Rottweiler tenacity of those of us in the press corps, but in part, also, because that is the nature of private affairs in a digital age. Eventually, they out—or, as Petraeus observed at the In-Q-Tel summit, “Every byte left behind reveals information.”

It would appear that Petraeus and his hagiographer-turned-running-mate-turned-mistress, Paula Broadwell, took precautions to avoid discovery of their relationship. They maintained multiple “alias” e-mail accounts and, according to the Associated Press, may have borrowed a bit of tradecraft from the Al Qaeda playbook—sharing an e-mail account, and saving messages for one another in a Draft folder, rather than running the risk of sending bytes across the ether.

But if we know that kind of subterfuge is being used by terrorists, then it’s almost axiomatically an inadequate counter-surveillance option. It’s not yet clear on precisely what legal authority the F.B.I. obtained access to Broadwell’s e-mail, but under the relevant federal statute, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the government need do little more than ask. Originally passed in 1986, the law is notoriously outdated, and considers any e-mail that is over a hundred and eighty days old to be “abandoned,” meaning that the author of the e-mail no longer has any reasonable expectation that it would remain private. So to obtain access to this e-mail, the F.B.I. doesn’t need a court order; it just needs to ask your e-mail provider. (To obtain more recent e-mail, authorities do need a warrant from a judge.) There is ample evidence that, in practice, this kind of broad authority has been abused. In a series of reports between 2007 and 2010, the F.B.I.’s inspector general has found that in seeking information from private communications providers, agents have often violated their own internal rules and guidelines, and have ensnared civilians who are only peripheral to their searches.

In this instance, the peripheral civilian was the director of the C.I.A. The picture of the F.B.I.’s investigation that emerges is one of a potential abuse of authority and conflict of interest, but also of a concept that would be quite familiar to Petraeus—mission creep. What began as a cyber-crime investigation, initiated at the behest of an F.B.I. agent who was a friend of Jill Kelley, morphs into a national-security investigation when it is discovered that Broadwell is the one sending menacing e-mails, and that she also happens to be consorting, sub-rosa, with America’s top spy.

by Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Adam Ferguson/The New York Times/Redux

If You Go Chasing Rabbits . . .

This love story, which is about science and not emotion, begins on Nov. 17, 1947, in an electronics lab in suburban New Jersey, when a man dunks a silicon wafer into a beaker of water and invents the modern semiconductor. Thus would become possible not only the storage of vast quantities of data, but its nearly instantaneous retrieval from remote-access sites such as the personal computer at which I sat one day in January 2001 and idly fed the name "Shari Basner" into an Internet search engine. (Nonspecific curiosity is a Darwinian adaptation of the human species.) Approximately 1.4 seconds later, the computer informed me that Shari lived a mere 25 miles away, precipitating an involuntary secretion of norepinephrine from my adrenal glands, which are located above the kidneys. Norepinephrine stimulates the heart.

I knew Shari Basner in 1958 and 1959, in Miss Endler's second-grade classroom in PS 26 in the Bronx. I was a very small and very bashful little boy, and Shari was the loveliest girl on Earth. She had silken chestnut hair and eyes like a fawn and a guileless smile of Crayola Red. Her physical presence awakened in me urges and longings as overpowering as they were indecipherable. I knew certain things, however: that I wished to spend eternity with this person, that we would have children through some mysterious and frightening process, and -- I remember this specifically -- that she would call me "darling."

I was only 7, but not without savvy. And so I promptly developed a two-tiered strategy to deal with these feelings: flight, and paralysis. I never spoke to her unless it was unavoidable, and on those occasions I exhibited the conversational skills of a Pleistocene hominid.

I was relieved of this hideous burden after second grade, as I recalled, when Shari and her family moved away. I never saw her again.

And here she was, on my computer screen. A single hit, but a solid one -- nailed by an account of a conference she'd chaired in 1998. Shari appeared to be an expert in business communications: diversity awareness, team-building, consensus forming, that sort of crap. She is married with kids -- as I am. She lives in Columbia. And this gave me an idea.

I would call her up and invite her to dinner. A date.

Once we were together, I would 'fess up to my crush, 42 years late. We'd laugh and laugh.

And I'd write about it, for Valentine's Day. It would be a dispassionate examination of the origins of romance and the phenomenon of juvenile infatuation.

You know, for science.

I dialed Shari's phone number, but before the first ring, I hung up.

No, that's not why. I am a grown-up now, for cripes' sake.

I simply decided I had not done enough research. I wasn't . . . ready.

The emotional relationships between human males and females can be a complex and imperfect thing, a fact I discovered when I telephoned Prof. Robert Billingham at his home. His wife answered. When I told her that I wished to interview her husband as an expert on the subject of romantic love, she burst out laughing.

At Indiana University, Billingham teaches adolescent and preadolescent human behavior. My crush on Shari, he said, was completely normal and ordinary, even at age 7. This sort of behavior is a matter of evolution and adaptation.

As recently as the 1400s, Billingham said, the median life expectancy was 24 years. "As soon as sexual maturity was in place, it was time to reproduce, or humans would cease to exist. The problem is that human biology hasn't changed one iota since then." We are still genetically programmed to have intense sexual curiosity at 12 or 13. Ages 7 through 11, he said, are a "practice period. The biology is being primed."

But why is it so awkward?

"Have you ever primed a pump? The water doesn't come out in a rush. There are false starts -- gurgles and burps and hiccups."

Yep, that's me, at 7.

by Gene Weingarten, Washington Post (2011) |  Read more:

Bob Marley

To Birds, Storm Survival Is Only Natural

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy and the spiteful me-too northeaster, much of the East Coast looked so battered and flooded, so strewed with toppled trees and stripped of dunes and beaches, that many observers feared the worst. Any day now, surely, the wildlife corpses would start showing up — especially birds, for who likelier to pay when a sky turns rogue than the ones who act as if they own it?

Yet biologists studying the hurricane’s aftermath say there is remarkably little evidence that birds, or any other countable, charismatic fauna for that matter, have suffered the sort of mass casualties seen in environmental disasters like the BP oil spill of 2010, when thousands of oil-slicked seabirds washed ashore, unable to fly, feed or stay warm.

“With an oil spill, the mortality is way more direct and evident,” said Andrew Farnsworth, a scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “And though it’s possible that thousands of birds were slammed into the ocean by this storm and we’ll never know about it, my gut tells me that didn’t happen.”

To the contrary, scientists said, powerful new satellite tracking studies of birds on the wing — including one that coincided with the height of Hurricane Sandy’s fury — reveal birds as the supreme masters of extreme weather management, able to skirt deftly around gale-force winds, correct course after being blown horribly astray, or even use a hurricane as a kind of slingshot to propel themselves forward at hyperspeed.

“We must remind ourselves that 40 to 50 percent of birds are migratory, often traveling thousands of miles a year between their summer and winter grounds,” said Gary Langham, chief scientist of the National Audubon Society in Washington. “The only way they can accomplish that is to have amazing abilities that are far beyond anything we can do.”

Humans may complain about climate change. Birds do something about it. “Migration, in its most basic sense, is a response to a changing climate,” Dr. Farnsworth said. “It’s finding some way to deal with a changing regime of temperature and food availability.” For birds, cyclones, squalls and other meteorological wild cards have always been a part of the itinerant’s package, and they have evolved stable strategies for dealing with instability.

by Natalie Angier, NY Times |  Read more:

Movie Review

“Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets, and then teams up with three strangers to kill again."

~ Synopsis of a  famous movie. You may have heard of it?

via: Pacific Standard

Panic Attack Leads to Golfer's First PGA Victory

On the practice range Friday, before the second round of Charlie Beljan’s final chance to avoid having to requalify for the PGA Tour, his throat tightened and his heart began hammering.

What happened next was one of the more frightening — and remarkable — rounds of golf ever caught on video. Beljan, 28, endured a five-hour stress test, staggering through 18 holes at the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals Classic in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. He sat down in the grass to catch his breath. Medical personnel in his gallery monitored his racing pulse. The fear of a possible heart attack dominated his thoughts.

He carded a 64, the second-lowest score of his rookie season, to take the lead, then left the grounds in an ambulance.

He spent the night in a hospital, with machines hooked up to his limbs and his golf shoes still on his feet. A battery of tests revealed nothing physically wrong with him. It was a panic attack.

And when Beljan was released on Saturday, he decided to put his nerves to the test for the final 36 holes.

When he returned to the course, he said, “I was crying on the range because I was so afraid these feelings would come back.”

For the next two rounds, Beljan fought bone-crushing fatigue and worry about his health to hang on for his first PGA Tour victory, a triumph over the most mental of games.

“I was just thinking about my health, one shot at a time, one hole at a time,” he said Monday in a telephone interview from his home in Mesa, Ariz. “And shoot, it worked out pretty well.”

by Karen Crouse and Bill Pennington, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Sam Greenwood/Getty Images

Gillian Ayres
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Cleve Gray
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Brad And Angie Go To Meet The African Pee Generator Girls

Angelina Jolie was so amazed. It was only once in a while that she saw something that really made her feel real. It was so hard to feel real sometimes. Pancakes sometimes made her feel real. But pancakes were troublesome. A slippery slope. She wrote that down in her blue Moleskine book. "Pancakes are a slippery slope."

She put her pen down and thoughtfully chewed the silky inside of her left cheek. She stared hard at the photo on her iPod of those beautiful, strong young African women who had just invented this amazing generator that made electricity out of human urine. She shook her head. It was amazing the things that people did in the face of adversity. She continued shaking her head, trying to comprehend the humanity of humanity.

"Be careful shaking your head," said her son Maddox, who was sitting on the other side of the enormous bed, watching "Homeland" on his iPad. "A shard of your beauty just hit me in the face." She barely heard him. She let her eye cast around the room for a moment. All her children were here, Maddox, Zahara, Shiloh, Pax, each with his or her iPad. Maddox was next to her on the bed, Zahara was stretched out along the foot. Pax was on one corner of a pink velvet couch, Shiloh on the other. All four were staring at their iPads. In the bedroom foyer, Knox and Vivienne were making a cat out of wooden blocks.

***

Angelina traced a pointer finger, its perfect oval nail painted with the Essie new-for-fall dark grey hue called "Stylenomics" lovingly over her own iPad screen. She cleared her throat. "These girls," she said, out loud to no one in particular. "Look at these girls. What amazing, strong young women. They have been through so much, but they still made this amazing generator that creates electricity out of urine."  (...)

The door to the man's master bath opened, and there stood Brad Pitt. In one hand was an iPad, in the other, a vaporizer.

“Oh Brad," Angie said, leaping up, running over to him, pulling at the sash of her red Galliano sweater with one hand, clutching her iPad with the other. "You have to look at these amazing inspiring young women. Look at them."

"Oh yeah. I read about that. Pretty cool."

Her face grew stern. "Brad, I need to understand that when you gaze at these girls, you see that their faces glow with fortitude, a stalwart commitment to dignity, and the resolve to create a better life for people everywhere.”

He looked at the photo for a second. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah. I…" Then he paused. He touched the pads of his fingers to his graying beard. “Wait, it says here that four girls created a generator that makes electricity outta pee. Well, there are only three girls in this here picture. Where’s the fourth one?”

"Oh my God," she said. "Brad. Where is she?"

"I don’t know, I was only joking. Hey, it’s okay."

"Brad, I don’t think this is okay. I think it’s not okay, okay?”

"Ange. I think she’s just… not in the picture. I think she just went to, I don’t know, get a soda or something."

She seemed reassured for a minute. She lay one finger on the rosy cushion of her lips, then let it trail down over her round, firm chin, down the length of her neck, and then to the hollow at the base of her throat, where it made worried circles. "Maybe that girl is okay, but if this is a true competitor to petroleum, those girls are in danger. We have to get to them."

The room was silent for a moment except for the sound of clicking.

"Brad," Angelina said. "We're going to Africa."

Fuck, he thought. "Okay," he said.

by Sarah Miller, The Awl | Read more:

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Michah Ganske, Greenpoint

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3D Photo Booth

Ever wanted a life-like miniature of yourself or loved ones? Now's your chance, thanks to Omote 3D, which will soon be opening what's described as the world's first 3D printing photo booth in Harajuku, Japan. There, visitors will have their bodies scanned into a computer, a process which takes about 15 minutes. Then the company prints your statuette on their 3D color printer in one of three sizes.

Of course, this "photo" booth isn't cheap – 3D printing is still a fairly expensive novelty, especially for prints of this quality. And you can forget about trying to scan fidgety children or pets, as the data would get all skewed from their movements. Check out the prices based on the sizes:

Small (Max. 10cm, 20g), US$264
Medium (Max. 15cm, 50g), US$403
Large (Max. 20cm, 200g), US$528

If that seems a bit steep, the company is offering discounts for couples and families. Before you leave, you'll also be given the chance to adjust the colors of the hair and clothing on the 3D model if you so desire.

by Jason Falconer, Gizmag |  Read more:

The Expendables

The word “foreign” in the name French Foreign Legion does not refer to faraway battlegrounds. It refers to the Legion itself, which is a branch of the French Army commanded by French officers but built of volunteers from around the world. Last summer I came upon 20 of them on a grassy knoll on a farm in France near the Pyrenees. They were new recruits sitting back-to-back on two rows of steel chairs. They wore camouflage fatigues and face paint, and held French assault rifles. The chairs were meant to represent the benches in a helicopter flying into action—say, somewhere in Africa in the next few years to come. Two recruits who had been injured while running sat facing forward holding crutches. They were the pilots. Their job was to sit there and endure. The job of the others was to wait for the imaginary touchdown, then disembark from the imaginary helicopter and pretend to secure the imaginary landing zone. Those who charged into the imaginary tail rotor or committed some other blunder would have push-ups to do immediately, counting them off in phonetic French—uh, du, tra, katra, sank. If they ran out of vocabulary, they would have to start again. Eventually the recruits would stage a phased retreat back to their chairs, then take off, fly around for a while, and come in for another dangerous landing. The real lesson here was not about combat tactics. It was about do not ask questions, do not make suggestions, do not even think of that. Forget your civilian reflexes. War has its own logic. Be smart. For you the fighting does not require a purpose. It does not require your allegiance to France. The motto of the Legion is Legio Patria Nostra. The Legion is our fatherland. This means we will accept you. We will shelter you. We may send you out to die. Women are not admitted. Service to the Legion is about simplifying men’s lives.

What man has not considered climbing onto a motorcycle and heading south? The Legion can be like that for some. Currently it employs 7,286 enlisted men, including non-commissioned officers. Over just the past two decades they have been deployed to Bosnia, Cambodia, Chad, both Congos, Djibouti, French Guiana, Gabon, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Kuwait, Rwanda, and Somalia. Recently they have fought in Afghanistan, as members of the French contingent. There is no other force in the world today that has known so much war for so long. A significant number of the men are fugitives from the law, living under assumed names, with their actual identities closely protected by the Legion. People are driven to join the Legion as much as they are drawn to it. That went for every recruit I met on the farm. Altogether there were 43, ranging in age from 19 to 32. There had been 48, but 5 had deserted. They came from 30 countries. Only a third of them spoke some form of French.

The language problem was compounded by the fact that most of the drill instructors were foreigners, too. It would be hard to find a more laconic group. The sergeant supervising the helicopter exercise had mastered the art of disciplining men without wasting words. He was a former Russian Army officer, a quiet observer who gave the impression of depth and calm, partly because he spoke no more than a few sentences a day. After one of the imagined helicopter landings, when a clumsy recruit dropped his rifle, the sergeant walked up to him and simply held out his fist, against which the recruit proceeded to bang his head.

The sergeant lowered his fist and walked away. The chairs took off and flew around. Toward the end of the afternoon the sergeant signaled for his men to dismantle the helicopter and head down a dirt road to the headquarters compound. They rushed to it, carrying the chairs. The farm is one of four such properties used by the Legion for the first month of basic training, all chosen for their isolation. The recruits lived there semi-autonomously, cut off from outside contact, subject to the whims of the instructors, and doing all the chores. They were getting little sleep. Mentally they were having a hard time. (...)

Before dawn the recruits set off in file through heavy rain. They wore bulky packs, with assault rifles slung across their chests. Boulanger navigated at the head of the column. I walked beside him and ranged backward down the line. The Russian sergeant brought up the rear, watching for strays. It was a slog, mostly on narrow roads through rolling farmland. Dogs kept a wary distance. When the column passed a herd of cows, some men made mooing sounds. That was the entertainment. Late in the morning the column entered a large village, and Boulanger called a halt for lunch in a churchyard. I had thought that people might come out to encourage them, and even warm them with offers of coffee, but rather the opposite occurred when some of the residents closed their shutters as if to wish the legionnaires gone. This fit a pattern I had seen all day, of drivers barely bothering to slow as they passed the line of exhausted troops. When I mentioned my surprise to Boulanger he said that the French love their army once a year, on Bastille Day, but only if the sky is blue. As for the foreigners of the Foreign Legion, by definition they have always been expendable.

The expendability can be measured. Since 1831, when the Legion was formed by King Louis-Philippe, more than 35,000 legionnaires have died in battle, often anonymously, and more often in vain. The Legion was created primarily to gather up some of the foreign deserters and criminals who had drifted to France in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. It was discovered that these men, who were said to threaten civil society, could be induced to become professional soldiers at minimal cost, then exiled to North Africa to help with the conquest of Algeria.

by William Langewiesche, Vanity Fair | Read more:

Photo: From Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images. Digital colorization by Lorna Clark

The drunk highway, Santa Fe, New Mexico
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Not a Badass, a Baker

Thursday morning, 3 a.m.: The alarm clock sounds and the Baker rises. He’s showered and dressed by 3:40, out the door of his Capitol Hill apartment by 10 minutes to 4. He walks the few blocks to his workplace at the corner of Olive and Howell briskly but without hurry. The Baker walks this way almost everywhere. He doesn’t own a car, doesn’t want to.

Absent the daytime warmth of Indian summer, the dark night air is sharp and cold, the city streets mostly vacant. Not counting the woman tossing newspapers out of the passenger-side window of her Toyota sedan, the reasons for a normal person to be functioning at this hour are dubious—usually desolation or desperation. The Baker is at ease in this temporal netherworld. Not comfortable in it—nothing outside a bed is comfortable at this hour—but present in its remove. He knows exactly what he’s doing here.

Shortly after 4 a.m., the Baker, Neil Robertson, 47 years old, slim and fastidious in sleek, clear-plastic-framed glasses, close-cropped hair and trim salt-and-pepper beard, opens the door to Crumble & Flake. He steps inside his bakery—a spartan space with grey concrete floors, sparkling white walls, and big, front-facing windows—and turns on the lights. He is alone in his world, exactly how he likes to be. As not-night yields to actual morning, Robertson puts into motion the alchemical forces of chemistry and combustion that will produce today’s goods. (...)

There’s a European proverb that goes something like “The baker is the only honest man in the kitchen.” It applies professionally—bakers can’t hide flaws under sauce or searing—as well as personally. Bakers are, generally speaking, of a kind.

“Very few friends, very little social life,” is how Robertson says he copes with the unconventional hours that his profession demands. “I’ve always been a loner.”

Neil Robertson is certainly an original. He was a graphic designer for almost two decades before switching careers 10 years ago. He studied pastry production in Chicago, baked professionally in Las Vegas at the Bellagio and then back in Seattle at Canlis. He opened Crumble & Flake eight months ago to immediate acclaim and long lines of people hoping for a taste of his pastry.

But he’s also an archetype: sober, meticulous, obsessed with perfection. (He spent seven years developing his chocolate chip recipe.) He describes himself not as an artist but a craftsman, less interested in self-expression than consistency. Contrast that with the rock star pretension of the restaurant chef, tattooed and willful and possessing big ideas about Food with a capital F.

“I’m not a badass. I’ll never be a badass. I’m a baker,” Robertson says. “I don’t aspire to fame or, you know, big awards. If I can look at my case and all the baking is done and say to myself, ‘Yeah, I made that. I’m proud of that. Dammit, it’s good stuff’—that gives me deep, deep satisfaction.”

Across the city at Café Besalu, James Miller exhibits some of the same characteristics—the innate perfectionism, the quiet pride. (Probably coincidence, but he also sports snazzy, plastic-framed glasses and short hair.)

“Bakers are the humble side of the kitchen,” Miller says. “Cooks are like the lead singer, bakers are more like the rhythm section.” As for the off-hours, “If you’re immersed in what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what the clock says.”

Consensus is that, in Seattle, Besalu bakes the croissant to beat. The place has been a fixture in Ballard for 12 years, as much a fast-paced production facility as a destination for a leisurely latte or lunch. Miller says that some of his customers have stopped at the shop every single day since it opened. He’s happy to have children come in and see bread made by hand that doesn’t come from a supermarket.

At 1:30 on a recent mid-week afternoon, a few 20-somethings huddle at a table within Besalu’s saffron-colored walls playing Boggle. At another table, a woman props her sock feet on a chair while painting a watercolor. Behind the counter, a young server takes coffee orders before pastry requests. A handful of baking assistants scurry around ovens and mixers. Miller is taking a break from measuring dough on a worn steel balance to chat with a guy in a North Face fleece. The place is brisk and relaxed simultaneously.

“Just like any artist would have an idea in their mind of what they want, I have an idea in mind of what I want to eat when I eat a croissant,” Miller tells me later. “It’s hard to explain. When I watch children here that are five years old eating a croissant, getting in there, tearing it apart, almost with these rituals, eating the inside first or the outside first, really enjoying it, I want to tell the adults, ‘That’s how you should do it.’”

Miller relates one customer’s experience: “He ate the croissant and said, ‘Now I know what Godzilla feels like when he eats a building. I could feel each floor collapsing in my mouth.’ That’s pretty good.”

Eating a Besalu croissant is an experience of sensual science. Its striated curvature appears surprisingly structured, architectural—a tiny, squishy Sydney Opera House. Its consistency occupies an ambiguous interim state of matter between solid and gas. Its flakes are long and fluttery like some kind of silicate mineral. Salt and sweet cream butter lean on either side of the tongue; the tongue is not quite sure how to behave in this ethereal, flavorful encounter. It emits a nostalgic smell of butter and bread. Also qualities more ineffable, like comfort and sophistication and expertise.

by Jonathan Zwickel, City Arts | Read more:

Photo by Nate Watters

Love on the March

I am forty-four years old, and I have lived through a startling transformation in the status of gay men and women in the United States. Around the time I was born, homosexual acts were illegal in every state but Illinois. Lesbians and gays were barred from serving in the federal government. There were no openly gay politicians. A few closeted homosexuals occupied positions of power, but they tended to make things more miserable for their kind. Even in the liberal press, homosexuality drew scorn: in The New York Review of Books, Philip Roth denounced the “ghastly pansy rhetoric” of Edward Albee, and a Time cover story dismissed the gay world as a “pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life.” David Reuben’s 1969 best-seller, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)”—a book I remember perusing shakily at the library—advised that “if a homosexual who wants to renounce homosexuality finds a psychiatrist who knows how to cure homosexuality, he has every chance of becoming a happy, well-adjusted heterosexual.”

By the mid-eighties, when I was beginning to come to terms with my sexuality, a few gay people held political office, many states had dropped long-standing laws criminalizing sodomy, and sundry celebrities had come out. (The tennis champion Martina Navratilova did so, memorably, in 1981.) But anti-gay crusades on the religious right threatened to roll back this progress. In 1986, the Supreme Court, upholding Georgia’s sodomy law, dismissed the notion of constitutional protection for gay sexuality as “at best, facetious.” aids was killing thousands of gay men each year. The initial response of the Reagan Administration—and of the mainstream media—is well summarized by a Larry Speakes press briefing in October, 1982:

Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement [from] the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that aids is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases? 

Mr. Speakes: What’s aids? 

Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it? 

Mr. Speakes: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)

By the time Reagan first spoke at length about aids, in May, 1987, the death toll in the U.S. had surpassed twenty thousand. What I remember most about my first sexual experience is the fear.

Today, gay people of a certain age may feel as though they had stepped out of a lavender time machine. That’s the sensation that hit me when I watched the young man in Tempe shout down a homophobe in the name of the President-elect. Gay marriage is legal in six states and in Washington, D.C. Gays can serve in the military without hiding their sexuality. We’ve seen openly gay judges, congresspeople, mayors (including a four-term mayor of Tempe), movie stars, and talk-show hosts. Gay film and TV characters are almost annoyingly ubiquitous. The Supreme Court, which finally annulled sodomy laws in 2003, is set to begin examining the marriage issue. And the 2012 campaign has shown that Republicans no longer see the gays as a reliable wedge issue: although Mitt Romney opposes same-sex marriage, he has barely mentioned it this fall. If thirty-two people were to die today in a mass murder at a gay bar, both Obama and Romney would presumably express sympathy for the victims—more than any official in New Orleans did when, back in 1973, an arsonist set fire to the Upstairs Lounge.  (...)

One fashionable explanation for the turnabout credits popular culture: out-and-proud celebrities and gay-friendly sitcoms have made straight Americans more comfortable with their other-minded neighbors. When, in May, Vice-President Joe Biden declared his support for gay marriage, prompting Obama to do the same, he said, “Things really begin to change . . . when the social culture changes. I think ‘Will & Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.” Not that long ago, though, Hollywood was regularly portraying gays and lesbians as flouncing sissies, pathetic suicide cases, and serial killers; Vito Russo documented that practice in his 1981 book, “The Celluloid Closet.” A decade later, I joined a demonstration, organized by the San Francisco chapter of Queer Nation, against the movie “Basic Instinct,” which was being filmed in the city, and whose plot featured homicidal lesbians. My activist career ended there, but the protest, and others like it, made headway. Belatedly, Hollywood stopped teaching America to fear homosexuality. The entertainment industry, far from leading the way, caught up with a new social reality.

Three-dimensional people are more persuasive than two-dimensional ones, as Biden surely knows. In the end, the big change likely came about because, each year, a few thousand more gay people make the awkward announcement to their families and friends, supplanting images from the folklore of disgust. My primary political moment happened when I wrote long, lugubrious letters to my closest friends, finally revealing the rest of me. In one, I came out in a footnote on the seventh page, amid pompous but heartfelt quotations from Wallace Stevens: “The greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire / Is too difficult to tell from despair.” Harvey Milk always said that this was how the revolution would happen: one lonely kid at a time.

by Alex Ross, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photos: Clockwise from top left: Terry Schmitt/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis; Fred W. McDarrah/Getty; Gregory Bull/AP; Michael Abramson/Time Life Pictures/Getty; Justin Sullivan/Getty

How I Learned a Language in 22 hours

There was a brief moment this summer, a little over a year after the publication of my first book, Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art And Science Of Remembering Everything, when I thought I had finally put the subject of my memory into my memory. No phone interview with an obscure midwestern talk radio station or lunchtime lecture in a corporate auditorium was going to prevent me from finally moving on to another topic and starting work on my next long-term project – inspired by my encounter with Mongousso – about the world's last remaining hunter-gatherer societies and what they can teach us.

As part of my research, I had begun planning a series of logistically complicated trips that would take me back to the same remote region where I had met Mongousso. My goal was to spend the summer living in the forest with him and his fellow Mbendjele pygmies. It's virtually impossible to find pygmies in northern Congo who speak French, much less English, and so in order to embed to the degree I was hoping, I needed to learn Lingala, the trade language that emerged in the 19th century as the lingua franca of the Congo basin. Though it is not the first language of the pygmies, Lingala is universally spoken across northern Congo – not only by the pygmies, but by their Bantu neighbors as well. Today, the language has about two million native speakers in both the Congos and in parts of Angola, and another seven million, including the Mbendjele pygmies, who use it as a second tongue.

You might think that learning a language with so many speakers would be an easy task in our global, interconnected age. And yet when I went online in search of Lingala resources, the only textbook I could find was a US Foreign Service Institute handbook printed in 1963 – when central Africa was still a front of the cold war – and a scanned copy of a 1,109-word Lingala-English dictionary. Which is how I ended up getting drawn back into the world of hard-core memorising that I had written about in Moonwalking.

Readers of that book (or the extract that ran last year in this magazine) will remember the brilliant, if slightly eccentric, British memory champion named Ed Cooke who took me under his wing and taught me a set of ancient mnemonic techniques, developed in Greece around the fifth century BC, that can be used to cram loads of random information into a skull in a relatively short amount of time. Ed showed me how to use those ancient tricks to perform seemingly impossible feats, such as memorising entire poems, strings of hundreds of random numbers, and even the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards in less than two minutes.

Since my book was published, Ed had moved on to other things and co-founded an online learning company called Memrise with a Princeton University neuroscience PhD named Greg Detre. Their goal: to take all of cognitive science's knowhow about what makes information memorable, and combine it with all the knowhow from social gaming about what makes an activity fun and addictive, and develop a web app that can help anyone memorise anything – from the names of obscure cheeses, to the members of the British cabinet, to the vocabulary of an African language – as efficiently and effectively as possible. Since launching, the site has achieved a cult following among language enthusiasts and picked up more than a quarter of a million users.

"The idea of Memrise is to make learning properly fun," Ed told me over coffee on a recent visit to New York to meet with investors. "Normally people stop learning things because of a bunch of negative feedback, such as worries about whether they'll actually get anywhere, insecurities about their own intelligence, and a sense of it being effortful. With Memrise, we're trying to invert that and create a form of learning experience that is so fun, so secure, so well directed and so mischievously effortless that it's more like a game – something you'd want to do instead of watching TV."

I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish, and that came only after five years of intense classroom study and more than half a dozen trips to Latin America. Still, I was determined to master Lingala before leaving for the Congo. And I had just under two and a half months to do it. When I asked Ed if he thought it would be possible to learn an entire language in such a minuscule amount of time using Memrise, his response was matter-of-fact: "It'll be a cinch."

by Joshua Foer, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photograph: Christopher Lane

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