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Rhett Lynch, Self Portrait, 2007
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Marc Chagall, Over the Town. In my dreams, 1918
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Why Black Friday Is a Behavioral Economist’s Nightmare

There are many, many reasons not to participate in Black Friday. Maybe you like sleeping in and spending time with family more than lining up in a mall parking lot at 2 a.m. Maybe you object on humanitarian grounds to the ever-earlier opening times, which force employees of big-box retailers to cut their holidays short by reporting to work in the middle of the night. (Or, increasingly, on Thanksgiving itself.)

But among the most potent reasons no sane person should participate in Black Friday is this: It is carefully designed to make you behave like an idiot.

The big problem with Black Friday, from a behavioral economist's perspective, is that every incentive a consumer could possibly have to participate — the promise of "doorbuster" deals on big-ticket items like TVs and computers, the opportunity to get all your holiday shopping done at once — is either largely illusory or outweighed by a disincentive on the other side. It's a nationwide experiment in consumer irrationality, dressed up as a cheerful holiday add-on.

As Dan Ariely explains in his book, Predictably Irrational, "We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains."

This applies to shopping on the other 364 days of the year, too. But on Black Friday, our rational decision-making faculties are at their weakest, just as stores are trying their hardest to maximize your mistakes. Here are just a few of the behavioral traps you might fall into this Friday:

The doorbuster: The doorbuster is a big-ticket item (typically, a TV or other consumer electronics item) that retailers advertise at an extremely low cost. (At Best Buy this year, it's this $179.99 Toshiba TV.) We call these things "loss-leaders," but rarely are the items actually sold at a loss. More often, they're sold at or slightly above cost in order to get you in the store, where you'll buy more stuff that is priced at normal, high-margin levels.

That's the retailer's Black Friday secret: You never just buy the TV. You buy the gold-plated HDMI cables, the fancy wall-mount kit (with the installation fee), the expensive power strip, and the Xbox game that catches your eye across the aisle. And by the time you're checking out, any gains you might have made on the TV itself have vanished. (...)

Irrational escalation: This behavioral quirk is also known as the "sunk cost fallacy," and it means that people are bad at knowing when to give up on unprofitable endeavors. This happens a lot on Black Friday. If you've already made the initial, bad investment of getting up at 2 a.m., driving to the mall, finding parking, and waiting in line for a store to open, you'll be inclined to buy more than you initially came for. (Since, after all, you're already there, and what's another few hundred dollars?)

Pain anesthetization: One of my favorite pieces of shopping-related research is a 2007 paper called "Neural Predictors of Purchases" [PDF] which used fMRI scans of shoppers' brains to show how deeply irrational the purchasing process is. Researchers found that if a shopper saw a price that was lower than expected, his medial prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for decision-making) lit up, while higher-than-expected prices caused the insula (the pain-registering part) to go wild. That brain activity had a strong correlation to whether or not the shoppers ended up buying the products or not.

Economists typically think of consumer choice as dispassionate cost-benefit analysis by rational market actors — a bunch of people saying to themselves, "Will having this $179.99 TV now create more pleasure than having the $179.99 in my bank account to do other things in the future?" — but the 2007 study shows that shoppers don't actually behave that way at all. In fact, they're choosing between immediate pleasure and immediate pain.

That explains why, on Black Friday, retailers pull out every trick in their playbook to minimize the immediate pain of buying: instant rebates, in-house credit cards with one-time sign-up discounts, multi-year layaway plans, and the like. The problem, of course, is that those methods of short-term anesthetization often carry long-term consequences — like astronomically high interest rates and hidden fees.

by Kevin Roose, New York Magazine |  Read more:

Photo: Unknown

Japan's Ninjas Heading for Extinction

Japan's era of shoguns and samurai is long over, but the country does have one, or maybe two, surviving ninjas. Experts in the dark arts of espionage and silent assassination, ninjas passed skills from father to son - but today's say they will be the last.

Japan's ninjas were all about mystery. Hired by noble samurai warriors to spy, sabotage and kill, their dark outfits usually covered everything but their eyes, leaving them virtually invisible in shadow - until they struck.

Using weapons such as shuriken, a sharpened star-shaped projectile, and the fukiya blowpipe, they were silent but deadly. (...)

Hollywood movies such as Enter the Ninja and American Ninja portray them as superhumans who could run on water or disappear in the blink of an eye.

"That is impossible because no matter how much you train, ninjas were people," laughs Jinichi Kawakami, Japan's last ninja grandmaster, according to the Iga-ryu ninja museum.

Kawakami is the 21st head of the Ban family, one of 53 that made up the Koka ninja clan. He started learning ninjutsu (ninja techniques) when he was six, from his master, Masazo Ishida.

"I thought we were just playing and didn't think I was learning ninjutsu," he says.

"I even wondered if he was training me to be a thief because he taught me how to walk quietly and how to break into a house."

Other skills that he mastered include making explosives and mixing medicines.

"I can still mix some herbs to create poison which doesn't necessarily kill but can make one believe that they have a contagious disease," he says.

Kawakami inherited the clan's ancient scrolls when he was 18.

While it was common for these skills to be passed down from father to son, many young men were also adopted into the ninja clans.

There were at least 49 of these but Mr Kawakami's Koka clan and the neighbouring Iga clan remain two of the most famous thanks to their work for powerful feudal lords such as Ieyasu Tokugawa - who united Japan after centuries of civil wars when he won the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600.

by Mariko Oi, BBC News |  Read more:

Illustration: Unknown

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On Being Not Dead

One night last year I called my friend Oliver and told him to meet me on the roof of our apartment building. He lives three flights down from me. I had pulled together a simple dinner — roast chicken, good bread, olives, cherries, wine. We ate at a picnic table. I’d forgotten wineglasses, so we traded swigs out of the bottle. It was summer. The sun was setting on the Hudson. Neighbors were enjoying themselves at nearby tables. The breeze was nice. The surrounding cityscape looked like a stage set for a musical.

What is the opposite of a perfect storm? That is what this was, one of those rare moments when the world seems to shed all shyness and display every possible permutation of beauty. Oliver said it well as we took up our plates and began heading back downstairs: “I’m glad I’m not dead.” This came out rather loudly, as he is a bit deaf. Even so, he looked surprised by his own utterance, as if it were something he was feeling but didn’t really mean to say aloud — a thought turned into an exclamation.

“I’m glad you’re not dead, too,” said a neighbor gaily, taking up the refrain. “I’m glad we’re all not dead,” said another. There followed a spontaneous raising of glasses on the rooftop, a toast to the setting sun, a toast to us.

I suppose it’s a cliché to say you’re glad to be alive, that life is short, but to say you’re glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness.

After all, there are many ways to die — peacefully, violently, suddenly, slowly, happily, unhappily, too soon. But to be dead — one either is or isn’t.

The same cannot be said of aliveness, of which there are countless degrees. One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause — to memorize moments of the everyday.

I think now about that summer night on the roof 15 months ago, and how many people I have known or loved that I’ve lost since then: my mother, three friends, two neighbors and, a few weeks ago, a friend who was like a second mother to me. This last one has been tough, more so for being unexpected. Her many friends and relatives came together for a memorial one afternoon last week. It was beautiful, joy-filled. Irishman that I am, I wept all the way through. Oh, well. I’ve come to believe that a good cry is like a carwash for the soul.

by Bill Hayes, NY Times |  Read more:

Enchanted Aisles

Why do people love Trader Joe’s so much? To understand the quirky chain’s success, you have to look to its founder, Joe Coulombe—and then to a former German mogul named Theo Albrecht. Grab some edamame and pull up a chair

A man named Joe Coulombe purchased a string of six convenience stores named Pronto and reshaped them into a grocery business that would become the city’s most influential food provider. His early experiments at the new Trader Joe’s were fitful: He sold Bible bread for 69 cents and Playboy at 10 percent off; he developed Kodacolor prints and ran weekly specials on can openers. What Coulombe eventually landed on sounds simple today, but no one had thought of it before: He grafted the gourmet store onto the convenience store onto the health food store onto the liquor store (dropping, of course, the Playboy).

He told anyone who would ask him, “I sell food, where other markets sell groceries,” and beneath one fluorescent lighting system he gathered the cuisines of Mexico, Italy, China, Greece, France, and Japan long before most Angelenos had heard of sushi or tasted pad thai. He sold whole bean coffee years before Starbucks debuted in 1971, and he became the country’s largest importer of Dijon mustard and Brie—the latter because cheese was still considered health food in the ’70s.

In short, Coulombe built a lifestyle acculturation machine the likes of which had never been seen. Walking his bright aisles, shoppers have assimilated unfamiliar cuisines, ambitious food ethics, and new farming practices. If you grew up in L.A. in the ’70s, you were initiated at Trader Joe’s into French wine, English cheese, olive oil, and handmade dolmas. If you moved to L.A. in the 1980s or ’90s, you discovered a store already as iconic as palm trees and sunny days, a clientele as scrappy and aspiring or ill fitting as yourself, and a neighborhood larder that was as cheap as it was cosmopolitan. And if you finally settled down over the past decade to start a family, you watched the store become a moral compass around which a better life can be led buying organic strawberries, cage-free eggs, grass-fed beef, free-trade coffee, soy-based ice cream, kosher guacamole hummus, and vegan panang curry. The market influences eating habits as it does social routines—why else does every cocktail party open, Stepford Wives style, with the same array of Trader Joe’s hors d’oeuvres?  (...)

Albrecht’s furtiveness at Trader Joe’s stems from the devastation of Essen in World War II, Germany’s postwar deprivation, and the political terror witnessed in Europe in the 1970s, when such groups as the Red Army Faction targeted industrialists like Albrecht with kidnapping and assassination, driving some into hiding. This is Albrecht’s half of the company, the self-preserving mystery at the back of the store. Trader Joe’s will not admit that Albrecht or his family ever owned the grocery chain. It will also not concede that Joe Coulombe founded the business. The corporate Web site describes only a fantasy merchant named “Trader Joe” who opened the first store. Employees can be fired if they speak to a journalist about their job, and the corporation refuses to name the providers of the 3,000 or so Trader Joe’s-brand items on its shelves. (The company does not make its own products.) Those providers, in turn, are muzzled by nondisclosure contracts. Trader Joe’s won’t even confirm that there are 3,000 items on its shelves—an eccentric trait at best, once you try envisioning, say, Apple (another steadfastly mum company) refusing to tell consumers how many products it sells. Nevertheless, the place is a warm utopia. Stepping into a Trader Joe’s after visiting a supermarket is akin to crossing the state line from New York into Vermont.

For a meager grocery store, Trader Joe’s has a supernova persona. It’s not Whole Foods, a culinary Neiman Marcus whose prices can leave you feeling mugged. It’s not Fresh & Easy, where Home Depot-style savings have been passed along by replacing workers with DIY checkout scanners. It’s certainly not Ralphs. We prize Trader Joe’s because it has auspiciously pulled off being none of the above. Yes, the parking lots are a misery, the store passageways a crush. Unless you’ve negotiated tight aisles in one of the original stores, you don’t know the meaning of “tortuous serpentine commercial space.” But for those weaned on Trader Joe’s, this is the epitome of the experience: If you can’t smash into someone while reaching for the mochi, it’s not a Trader Joe’s; all that sanctioned rubbing up against strangers produces a frisson of small-town life, the missing element in our metropolis. There’s a plucky in-house newspaper—The Fearless Flyer—offering campy stories of goings-on, and there are kids’ drawing contests, raffles, balloons (balloons!), a kitchen putting out aromatic samples of pie, and snapshots of grinning regulars pinned to the walls. All that’s needed is a knowing geezer warming himself by a blazing potbelly stove in the corner (no doubt he’s currently being product tested). Where supermarket workers suffer from an empty enthusiasm forced on them by management—“Can I help you to your car with that aspirin bottle?”—at Trader Joe’s we get genuine, convivial employees whose relationship with their stores exhibits the kind of intimacy most of us share only with our smartphones. They are nonunion but compensated better than many unionized grocery workers: Part-timers at Trader Joe’s can receive $20 an hour with full benefits, and store managers top out with an annual salary of $130,000, with matching 401Ks—pay that more than makes up for being called “first mate” and “captain” in public.

by Dave Gardetta, LA Magazine (2011) |  Read more:

Illustration by Tomasz Walenta

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Deineka, Alexander (Russian, 1899-1961) - The Road to the South - 1930
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The Lying Disease

Valerie was lying in her boyfriend's bed early on the morning of September 16, 2010, when she detected what 12 percent of women will face in their lifetime: a tiny lump buried in her left breast.

She didn't panic. She was only 36 and healthy in a typical Northwest way—ate organic, biked 100 miles a week—and her annual breast exam had been blessedly lump-free only four months earlier. And when Valerie called her boyfriend over to cop a feel, he couldn't detect the lump. Neither could the nurse practitioner who examined her later that afternoon. Neither did the mammogram he ordered. It was an ultrasound that finally confirmed what Valerie had felt: a pebble-sized mass that turned out to be stage 2A, HER2+ invasive ductal carcinoma—in layman's terms, a rare, aggressive form of breast cancer that is notoriously difficult to treat.

The mass was so small, her doctor said it was a miracle she'd detected it at all. Then, "when he saw my lymph node, everything changed in the room," Valerie remembers. The cancer had already spread to her left arm. "He said, 'You have breast cancer, it's extremely aggressive, and you have an MRI scheduled for 4 p.m. today. Be there.'"

The following week was a blur of bone scans, blood tests, PET scans, and other tests and terminology that are all but indecipherable for those who aren't profoundly sick or working in medicine. It was a week spent calling relatives, crying long-distance, and adjusting to the abrupt new reality that she might die—soon. And, if she lived, it would be without breasts or the possibility of ever getting pregnant.

"That was probably the hardest to hear—that I could never have children," Valerie says. "I've always wanted to have children."

The bleak news was compounded by the fact that she'd been recently laid off from her job and that, as a relatively new Seattle transplant, most of her family and friends were across the country in South Carolina.

"I didn't have an immediate support system beyond my boyfriend and my cats," she says. "The isolation gets to you—you can't get a hug over the phone. It makes you dwell."

Which is why, two days after her diagnosis, Valerie began to blog about her battle with cancer. She wanted to keep her family abreast of her treatment and, hopefully, find support from someone going through the same physical and emotional struggle she was. She named her Tumblr blog CatsNotCancer because she loves cats (not cancer). Over the course of the next year, Valerie would bluntly document her daily ups and downs: How she named her breasts and the cancerous lymph node she would ultimately have chopped off; her ceremonious Viking boob funeral, where she lit boob-shaped candles and set them adrift in Lake Washington as guests snacked on boob-adorned cupcakes; the shaving of her beautiful red hair for Locks of Love ("I couldn't bear to watch it fall out"); her body's refusal to heal after her first radical mastectomy; how cat purrs help heal a mutinous body; the triumph of revealing her scarred, altered chest on Tumblr for its infamous "Topless Tuesday" shots.

"People see commercials and advertisements with cherubic bald women waving pink ribbons, but that's not talking about breast cancer and the realities of going through active treatment," Valerie explains. "After a few weeks, I discovered that I had a new mission: help people see the grim realities of cancer, so maybe they'd remember to cop a feel at their own breasts or book a checkup."

That mission began with a good-bye letter to her breasts:

"I looked at Mabel this morning (I named my left breast Mabel—my right one is Hazel) and I feel this weird mixture of anger and loss," Valerie wrote less than a month after her diagnosis. "And then I look at Hazel and feel sad too—she's being spared tomorrow but her day is coming very soon. And I wonder how I'm going to feel after the surgery when I see this void where my breasts once were. I have no idea... But I do know this. Tomorrow is the first real step toward defeating this dragon. And I have to view this as war—it is war. And tomorrow is the first battle. So for today, and just today, I'm going to allow myself a little self-pity. I may cry (and when I cry, I cry—think the Ben Stiller scene from Something About Mary. Seriously.) and I may pout. But come tomorrow morning, it's game on. I declare war. And I intend to win."

Valerie's posts were reposted, commented on, circulated around online cancer support groups. CatsNotCancer quickly gained more than 2,100 followers on Tumblr, partly because of her content and partly because Valerie took the time to respond to everyone who left messages on her blog looking for guidance, help, or empathy.

That's how she met Beth three months later, in December 2010.

"She was a fellow blogger who introduced herself and said she was going through treatment for lymphoma," Valerie recalls. "I had just undergone my fourth round of chemo and I was feeling really sick—I had no energy, and my mood was in the dumps. It was an accomplishment to put up a blog post during the day."

Nevertheless, she responded to Beth's overture of friendship, and for the first week, their communication was benign. The 19-year-old Wisconsin native, who appeared physically healthy in photographs, talked about her daily struggles with balancing lymphoma treatments and college classes (she wanted to become a psychologist), and the two talked companionably about their favorite TV show, Lost.

Then one day, Valerie received a note from Beth via Tumblr that simply read, "Can you get pregnant while on chemo?"

It struck a chord.

"I wrote her back and said, 'Well, I can't get pregnant while on chemo...' but I admitted that I didn't know her treatment and couldn't know what she was going through," Valerie says. "I did think that chemo would be really, really bad for a fetus. I mean, it's poison." She urged Beth to contact her oncologist immediately.

Instead, Beth messaged her again, intimating that she'd gotten pregnant after being raped by her uncle.

"I immediately sent her my phone number and personal e-mail address and urged her to call me," Valerie says. Beth called within minutes, and the two had their first phone conversation, during which Beth haltingly explained that her uncle had abused both her and her 6-year-old cousin (his daughter). Over the phone, Beth sounded very young and painfully shy, and yet: "She was almost casual about the whole thing," Valerie recalls. "She was hesitant to even call what happened rape."

E-mails forwarded to me by Valerie confirm her account. "Well, I guess its rape then because I did not want that at all," Beth wrote in an e-mail sent the day after their phone conversation, on December 30, 2010. "That word is so gross sounding to me. It makes me so angry. Like the whole thing is just gross, but secondly, I could have gotten really sick from that! Inconsiderate."

Beth ended the e-mail "Blah, blah, rant over lol :)."

It put Valerie on alert. "I kept thinking 'inconsiderate' is one of the last words I'd use to describe rape," Valerie says. Her skepticism grew when she received a follow-up e-mail from Beth on December 31 that read, "Well...I am officially pregnant. This is my worst nightmare. Horrible. I want to die. I am mortified :("

Mortified?

Despite her suspicions, she continued to e-mail Beth.

"I was trying to keep an open mind," Valerie says. "I'd only known this girl a few weeks, and it sounded like she had people in her life mistreating her. I just wanted to offer what support I could."

And who was she to judge the coping mechanisms of a 19-year-old cancer patient and struggling full-time student who spent Christmas being raped by her uncle?

But while Beth e-mailed daily updates on her mortifying pregnancy—"Aborting it is what [my doctor] would recommend his daughter to do. He doesn't think I could handle it mentally or physically. Blah blah."—Valerie contacted her own oncologist about the content she'd read on Beth's blog. She remembers one about Beth throwing up blood between classes at school, then skipping to the hospital to get a five-unit blood transfusion. "My doc was like, 'There's no way in hell that's happening,'" Valerie says. An adult has 11 to 13 units of blood in their body, total, and from the pictures she'd posted, Beth was a petite woman. If she'd lost half the blood in her body, she'd die, not be home in time to blog about it before dinner.

Nor would the average lymphoma patient have the energy to be a full-time student while undergoing treatment, or risk exposing herself to hundreds of germy students while actively being treated for cancer of the immune system.

But Valerie didn't confront Beth with suspicions that she was faking her sickness. Instead, to preserve her own health and sanity, she abruptly stopped answering Beth's e-mails, texts, and phone calls. "Her lying was so alien as a concept, the idea of outing her horrified me," she says. "Part of me thought, 'There's something horribly wrong with her, and if she is being abused, I don't want to make life harder on her.'"

In response, Valerie says Beth went "totally apeshit."

Munchausen syndrome takes its name from an 18th-century German baron who was famous for embellishing tales of his military exploits to anyone who'd listen. But it wasn't until 1951 that Baron Munchausen became widely associated with another crop of pathological liars: people who go to incredible lengths to fake illness or psychological trauma for the express purpose of attracting medical attention and sympathy from other people. Munchausen sufferers don't just shave their heads and say, "Look! Cancer!" They alter their medical records, starve themselves, install catheters and chemo ports, even convince doctors to perform unnecessary surgeries on them—anything to legitimize the fantasy of their sickness.

by Cienna Madrid, The Stranger |  Read more:
Illustration: Paul Hoppe

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Squirrel Rice Paddle

実用性抜群、4本足で直立する「リスのしゃもじ」 - ケータイ 
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Bike Polo: The World's Fast Growing Sport (That's Played on Wheels with Mallets)

It's an unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon in late October. I'm standing in Garfield Park on Chicago's West Side, the titular park at the center of a neighborhood known equally for its world-class plant conservatory and stubborn poverty. It's generally quiet, despite the sunshine; two joggers amble by, a man asks me (and everyone else he can track down) for $10, another sits on a bench drinking something hidden in a brown bag, a few teens hoop across the way. The biggest crowd in sight is gathered around a pair of faded tennis courts surrounded by scuffed hockey boards. There are two dozen people hanging around, the majority of whom sport tattoos and skinny jeans, the prevailing uniform of urban cyclists. They're here to chase a roller hockey ball, while riding bikes, swinging homemade mallets.

To my untrained eye, it looks like a game nine-year-olds would dream up one bored summer day. David Goldmiller, a court regular, likens the scene to an early episode of Ken Burns' Baseball documentary, where “a bunch of guys were drinking beer and whacking a ball around, making up rules and calling it a fucking game.” The atmosphere is genial. I'm offered a beer immediately, pot smoke hangs in the air, and onlookers talk shit to each other while tweaking bike gears. But after watching the action for a few hours, seeing cyclists weave around the court in tight spirals and shovel off no-look passes, it becomes obvious that these are athletes who know exactly what they're doing. They are playing a sport that requires balance, coordination, and endurance. They are playing a sport that they think is poised for dramatic growth. They are playing a sport one veteran calls “perfect for our time and place.”

They are also playing a sport very few people know exists.

The first hardcourt bike polo match was played 13 years ago in a Seattle stockroom at the dot-com retailer Kozmo. The small crew of bike messengers employed by the long-since-defunct company did not have grand ambitions when they came up with the idea; all they wanted was a fun way to kill time between deliveries. While the players were in no way regal, the game they concocted was nominally descended from polo, the Sport of Kings, invented by the Persians 1,500 years ago and popularized in the 19th century by British colonialists and then, later, by Ralph Lauren. It also shared similarities with cycle polo, a strain of the equine game played with bicycles instead of horses that gained traction during the turn-of-the-century cycling craze--particularly in England--and was featured as a demonstration sport at the 1908 Summer Olympics. Traditional cycle polo's popularity peaked long ago, and never spread widely outside of Europe.

The bored messengers at Kozmo weren't overly concerned with traditional bike polo, and came up with their own rules. Two teams of three lined up on either side of the stockroom straddling their work bikes and holding crude mallets made of wood or bamboo. A set of cones on each baseline served as goals. A roller hockey ball was placed at center court. [1] On the count of three, one cyclist from each side pedaled furiously to reach the ball first, “jousting” for possession. With that, the game was underway.

The messengers in Seattle did prohibit a few tactics, and those infractions haven't changed dramatically in the years that followed. To score, an offensive player must hit the ball across the goal line using only the narrow end of the mallet. (If a player knocks it in with the wide end of the mallet, it's called a "shuffle,” and his team forfeits possession.) Whenever a player's foot touches the ground, he must briefly “tap out" by slapping with his mallet a designated area on the court, either in the middle or along the boards. Contact is allowed so long as it's “like-to-like”: body-to-body, bike-to-bike, mallet-to-mallet. (No t-boning your opponent's legs with your bike, in other words.) The first team to five wins. The only other guiding principle, which almost every player I spoke with remembers learning on his or her first day, was “don't be a dick.”

by Adam Doster, The Classical |  Read more:

Photo credit: unknown

What a Little Land Can Do

The poorest people in the world are those who don’t have land. In India, landlessness is a better predictor of poverty than illiteracy or belonging to castes at the bottom of society. At least 17 million rural households in India are completely landless, living on others’ land and working as sharecroppers or day laborers tending other peoples’ crops.

Landlessness is a huge problem all over the world. More equal distribution of land is a valuable goal — it is efficient in both fighting poverty and producing food.

But redistributing land is one of the most difficult and controversial of all political tasks. A history of land reform is a history of revolution. The concentration of land in the hands of the rich is a prime source of conflict. When a leftist movement has won, its first action has often been land reform — the further to the left the new government, the less likely it is to compensate landowners (and the more likely to shoot them, which was the norm in China and the Soviet Union).

But confiscatory land reform is not the only kind. Many programs have paid landowners market value for their land. Perhaps the world’s most influential architect of a more democratic land reform is the University of Washington law professor Roy Prosterman, who founded the Rural Development Institute, now known as Landesa. Prosterman and his group have worked with dozens of countries to design market-based land reform. But his ideas, too, have been used for political ends; if you know Prosterman’s name, it’s because you’ve heard of Land to the Tiller, the United States-backed land reform in Vietnam during the war. The United States adopted Prosterman’s ideas in Vietnam, the Philippines and El Salvador to turn peasants away from leftist guerrillas.

Today, political forces are arrayed against land reform. India, for example, had a land reform program since the 1960s that set ceilings on land ownership. The government could expropriate anything above the ceiling; compensation was typically well below market value. But the law was put to wide use only in the few states with Communist governments. “With very small exceptions, the ceiling surplus approach was not going anywhere because people who owned the land and stood to lose were much more politically powerful than those who were going to gain,” said Tim Hanstad, the president and chief executive of Landesa.

Democratic land reform has a different problem: buying large swaths of land at market price is too costly. But hundreds of millions of people still lack land. Is there a more politically realistic way to help them? Landesa thinks there is. (...)

In 2000, Landesa began researching the impact of microplots in India. It then took its findings to the governments of four states and encouraged them to try a different kind of land reform. “The conventional wisdom had been that in order to provide meaningful benefits you’d need a full-size farm,” said Hanstad. “But when families had a small fraction of an acre they are often able to use that as a big bump up and foundation for a path out of poverty.”

“The family gets a permanent address,” said Supriya Chattopadhyay, who manages advocacy and communications for Landesa in West Bengal. “That’s very important — if a family wants to get any support from a government program, the first thing it needs is a permanent address.” Women traditionally do not leave their homes to work, so having a garden right outside their door gives the family a second income, he said. “And they get social recognition, social dignity” — for some families the most important factor of all.

The government doesn’t have to spend much to buy a tenth of an acre — in India, between $200 and $600. And there is no expropriation, so the program does not lower property values, cause legal uncertainties about ownership or create political opposition. Landesa has worked with four state governments in India to help them set up microplot programs — so far, about 200,000 families have received one.

by Tina Rosenberg, NY Times |  Read more:
Photos: Landsea.org

Richard Estes (American, b. 1932), Urban Landscapes No. 3, 1981. Screenprint.
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Rockwell Kent (American, 1882-1971), Tierra del Fuego, South America [Dome Island]. Oil on canvas, 86.4 x 110.8 cm
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Assume Joke Dead

Why is the political class so obsessed with being funny?

On the evening of October 3, millions of people—most of the American political press included—turned on their televisions, sat down at their computers, logged on to Twitter, and began cracking jokes. Ninety minutes and ten million updates later, the first presidential debate would be the most-tweeted about political event in Twitter’s six-year history. For this, we can thank Big Bird.

“I love Big Bird,” Mitt Romney said while calling for the elimination of federal subsidies for public broadcasting. Immediately, journalists—and bloggers and pundits and regular citizens—began churning out wisecracks. “I wonder if Mitt and Ann Romney are going to celebrate tonight by eating, say, Big Bird,” The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof quipped. The punch lines were followed almost immediately by parody Twitter accounts, like @BigBirdRomney, @FiredBigBird, and @FireMeElmo. One such account, @BigBird, had nearly 14,000 followers by the end of the night—putting it in the top 1 percent of Twitter users by popularity (and on par with The New York Times Magazine national correspondent Mark Leibovich). These anonymous jokesters had some good lines, but many more bad ones. “Romney will fire Big Bird and Cookie Monster and replace them with the replacement refs #bigbird,” tweeted @FiredBigBird.

By the time someone photo-shopped an image of Big Bird strapped to the roof of the Romney family station wagon, it was clear: We Are All Andy Borowitz Now. Journalists have always tried to sneak clever turns of phrase past persnickety copy editors, but Twitter allows even those obliged to adhere to the bone-dry standards of legacy media outlets to show the entire world how witty they are—and maybe even win a pat on the back from the management types who’ve decided that social media represents the newsroom’s future. The result: a cult of cleverness, where a good joke is rewarded with retweets and new followers, the two main metrics of social-media clout. I’m certainly among those spending far too much time attempting to rack up both. Still, it often seemed as though every reporter, blogger, and pundit in the country spent every waking hour of the campaign just making fun of everything.

In elections past, the sort of stuff reporters joke about—Joe Biden telling a Virginia rally it could win North Carolina; Mitt Romney admiring clouds—might have ended up in pool reports, seen and appreciated only by other journalists. The Internet gives the campaign press ways to publicize the weird details that otherwise might not make it into print. The behind-the-curtain material that makes The Boys on the Bus and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 so readable is now more often than not shared with the world in real time.

But in those books, weird details generally served a better understanding of a candidate’s character; on Twitter, they reduce a candidate to his stupidest moments for a quick laugh. And at a certain point (let’s say that point was when Time released photos of Paul Ryan dressed like Poochie, the “cool dog” character from the “Simpsons”) the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” routine subsumed the other part of campaign coverage, where you explain the state of the race and the issues involved to normal people. At the second presidential debate on October 16, it all happened again, when Romney said “binders full of women”: @BigBirdRomney retweeted the freshly minted @Romney_Binder ten times that night. When the third presidential debate finally rolled around and Obama told Romney “we also have fewer horses and bayonets,” he was speaking in readymade hashtags.

by Alex Pareene, TNR |  Read more:

Illustration: David Cowles