Sunday, November 25, 2012
5 Charts About Climate Change That Should Have You Very, Very Worried
Here are some of the more alarming graphic images from the reports.
1. Most of Greenland's top ice layer melted in four days
During a week in the summer of 2012, Greenland's ice cap went from melting on its periphery to melting over its entire surface (World Bank)
These shots published in the World Bank report show an unusually large ice melt over a four-day period, when an estimated 97% of Greenland's surface ice sheet had thawed by the middle of July 2012. Normally, ice sheets melt around the outer margins first where elevation is lower and allow for warmer temperatures. The event is uncommon, though not unprecedented. A similar event happened in 1889, and before that, several centuries earlier. There are indications, however, that the greatest amount of melting during the past 225 years has occurred in the last decade.
Photo: Unknown
On National Day of Listening, How to Get Someone's Story
In the middle of a conversation a friend once stopped me and said, "Tell me back everything I just told you." I couldn't. Not long after, he passed away, which made the lesson especially poignant. Most of us don't spend enough time really listening.
Now, as a therapist, I listen to stories professionally. Today, on the National Day of Listening, everyone is supposed to share stories. David Isay, founder of StoryCorps -- a Macarthur Genuis and an unwavering idealist -- also founded National Day of Listening because "every life matters equally, every voice matters equally, every story matters equally."
The project recalls Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, to democratize oral history and create an archive of American voices. Since beginning in 2003, StoryCorps has recorded over 30,000 interviews from over 60,000 participants. In an interview David Isay said, "Listening to people reminds them that their lives matter."
The idea is simple: on the day after Thanksgiving family and friends often still gather together. The goal is to sit down for ten to twenty minutes with a loved one and really listen to their story.
The StoryCorps "Do-it-yourself guide" offers many wonderful questions for all types of interviews. And based on my personal mistakes as a young therapist, here are a few extra interview tips for today's National Day of Listening:
- Get comfortable, in a quiet place where you won't be interrupted. Cell phones off.
- Match body language. But do not do this so much that your interviewee says, "Did they teach you to imitate body language in therapy school?" Most communication happens non-verbally.
- Remind the person that you are there to listen and that they have an interesting story to tell. They do not have to "wow" you. They just need to be themselves and share what they know best (themselves).
- Start the questions off easy(ish), as in, "Tell me about your childhood."
- Do not start talking about yourself.
- Listen. Do not interrupt. Nod.
- Follow the emotion, go to what moves you.
- Later on, do not be afraid to ask hard questions. They do not have to answer.
- Some of the questions to ask a parent from the StoryCorps guide: "If you could do everything again, would you raise me differently?" "What was I like as a kid?" "What advice would you give me about raising my own kids?" "Are you proud of me?"
- Thank the person for sharing their story. Let them know their story is important. Tell them what moved you. Bring their story into the present. (...)
Video: StoryCorps/YouTube
On Growing Up White Trash
I am not white trash. I grew up white trash, though. When I was brought home from the hospital, I looked around the tiny lobby of our building and saw the dirty walls, the broken mailboxes, and the missing tiles on the floor. German shepherds wandered on the landings, and a beautiful girl wailed at a locked door to be taken back. I heard the radios blaring rock ballads from open apartment doors and the men standing in the doorways in their underwear, and I thought, great, I’ve been born into a poor family. But it didn’t seem so bad.
Growing up, all our furniture came from the garbage. We never threw anything out. How could you know what was garbage when our whole building looked like it was made from trash? The clock on the wall was a gangster that shot out machine gun noises on the hour. We had fake stained glass unicorns hanging from little suction cup hooks on the living-room window. We had stacks of old telephone books and a fish tank with no fish in it. It was typical white trash decor, shocking to no one. We weren’t exactly entertaining guests from other neighbourhoods.
By the time I was eleven, many of my friends were always being taken off to foster care when their moms had breakdowns or got arrested or had particularly shitty new boyfriends. Everybody had regular visits with social workers. In the summer, they gave us free passes to the amusement park. The Ferris wheel would turn around and around, filled with scared white trash children with their eyes closed—a little white trash solar system.
The white trash girls wore cut-off jean shorts and high heels over gym socks, and tied shoelaces around their wrists. The boys wore T-shirts with heavy metal bands, and jean jackets with silver-studded sleeves. All of the kids had bangs down to their noses. We never saw each other’s eyes. This was good for looking tough, and for hiding when you were crying. All of the kids had potty mouths. The only word not spoken out loud was “welfare.” A person could get stuck on it for years. You could be three generations on welfare.
When I turned thirteen and started noticing boys, I decided that my type was Judd Nelson as the teenage delinquent in The Breakfast Club. There weren’t any jocks or nerds around. I had a boyfriend named Shaun who wore a porkpie hat he had stolen off a snowman. He wrote the worst poetry on earth. He was in grade seven math for three years straight. He tried to sell photocopies of his drawings of ninjas on the street corner. Afterward, I dated Derek, who had a pet pigeon named Homer. He lived with his dad and slept on the couch. His dad kicked both of them out one day. Derek was sent to live in a foster home. I don’t know what happened to the pigeon.
When I was fifteen, I had a crush on a boy named Lionel who had a long scar on his arm where his dad had stabbed him when he was nine. He was known for having the high score on the Donkey Kong machine at the back of the corner store. He held up a gas station one night with his older brother. He came over with a suitcase full of stolen cigarettes and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
I went on a date with a boy named Paul. His grandmother was raising him. She wore a winter coat all year long, even in the house. The peeling wallpaper of their apartment was covered in cherry trees. There were cockroaches in the teacups that you had to shake out into the sink.
We didn’t judge each other because we were poor. It would be like yelling at someone because it was raining. I just felt pretty and light headed when those boys were around. They thought I was a genius because I was the only kid from our circle who did really well at school.
When you’re a child, you become best friends with whoever lives across the street. But when I started high school, I was placed in all the advanced classes, and I joined extracurricular activities like the chess club. I started to make friends from different backgrounds. We had more in common, like books and alternative movies, and they opened up different worlds to me.
When I was fifteen, I was walking down the street with a boy I had recently made friends with and sort of liked. He was middle class and very nerdy. I had always wanted to be friends with a nerd. According to all the movies, they liked and accepted everyone. Out of nowhere, he said, “My mother says you’re not going to do anything with your life.”
“What, is the woman a fortune teller? How could she possibly know something like that?”
“She says you’re white trash, like the rest of your family.”
The boy said it as if it shouldn’t even bother me. He said it in the way that you tell a dog it can’t sit at the table because it is a dog. He said it as if everyone knew my place in the world, so I must know it, too. I just stood there on the sidewalk, not making eye contact. I suddenly realized that my new friends had been looking down on me.
By Heather O'Neill, The Walrus | Read more:
Photo: Untitled (Door on William), 1979, from the Vancouver Nights series.
Atomic Bread Baking at Home
When Hana enters the small bakery I have borrowed for a day, I am dividing a loaf into 1.5-centimeter slices. The loaf's tranches articulate a white fanned deck, each one the exact counterpart of its fellows. The bread is smooth and uniform, like a Bauhaus office block. There are no unneeded flourishes or swags. Each symmetrical slice shines so white it is almost blue. This is a work of modern art. My ten-year-old daughter does not pause to say hello. She rushes to the cutting board, aghast, and blurts, "Its fake!" Then she devours a piece in three bites, and asks for more.I have just spent a day re-creating the iconic loaf of 1950s-era soft white industrial bread, using easily acquired ingredients and home kitchen equipment. With the help of a 1956 government report detailing a massive, multiyear attempt to formulate the perfect loaf of white bread, achieving that re-creation proved relatively easy. Until Hana's arrival, however, I did not fully understand why I was doing it. I had sensed that extracting this industrial miracle food of yesteryear from the dustbin of kitsch might have something to teach about present-day efforts to change the food system; that it might offer perspective on our own confident belief that artisanal eating can restore health, rebuild community, and generally save the world. But, really, it was reactions like Hana's that I wanted to understand. How can a food be so fake and yet so eagerly eaten, so abhorred and so loved?
Sliced white bread as we know it today is the product of early twentieth-century streamlined design. It is the Zephyr train of food. But, in the American imagination, industrial loaves are more typically associated with the late '50s and early '60s—the Beaver Cleaver days of Baby Boomer nostalgia, the Golden Age of Wonder Bread. This is not without justification: during the late '50s and early '60s, Americans ate a lot of it. Across race, class, and generational divides, Americans consumed an average of a pound and a half of white bread per person, every week. Indeed, until the late '60s, Americans got from 25 to 30 percent of their daily calories from the stuff, more than from any other single item in their diet (and far more than any single item contributes to the American diet today—even high-fructose corn syrup).
Only a few years earlier, however, as world war morphed into cold war, the future of industrial bread looked uncertain. On the cusp of the Wonder years, Americans still ate enormous quantities of bread, but, even so, government officials and baking-industry experts worried that bread would lose its central place on the American table. In a world of rising prosperity and exciting new processed foods, the Zephyr train of food looked a bit tarnished. And so, in 1952, hoping to offset possible declines in bread consumption, the U.S. Department of Agriculture teamed up with baking-industry scientists to launch the Manhattan Project of bread.
Conceived as an intensive panoramic investigation of the country's bread-eating habits, the project had ambitious goals: First, gain a precise, scientific understanding of exactly how much and what kind of bread Americans ate, when and why they ate it, and what they thought about it. Second, use that information to engineer the perfect loaf of white bread—a model for all industrial white bread to come.
After two years of preliminary research, focus groups, failed loaves, and exploratory taste tests around the country, the project reached its culmination in Rockford, Illinois. In the early '50s, all the whiz kids of market research flocked to Rockford. An industrial center built by European immigrants, daring inventors, and strong labor unions, the city was the stuff of middle-class dreams. Although its economy was far more industrial than the national average, it suited America's self-image to think of it as the country's most "typical" city, and sociologists obliged with the label. In 1949, Life magazine declared that Rockford was "as nearly typical of the U.S. as any city can be." This was a place where prototypical Americans could be viewed in their natural habitat.
Thus, in 1954, USDA investigators journeyed from Chicago and Washington, D.C., to the shores of the Rock River to select two test groups, each comprising three hundred families "scientifically representative" of a typical American community. Over the next two years, the market researchers would deploy all the techniques of their emerging field on these six hundred families. They tracked bread purchases, devised means of weighing every ounce of bread consumed by the test population, conducted long interviews with housewives, and distributed thousands of questionnaires. Most important, they created a double-blind experiment that asked every member of every family to assess five different white-bread formulas over six weeks. Four years and almost one hundred thousand slices of bread after the project's conception, a clear portrait of America's favorite loaf emerged. It was 42.9 percent fluffier than the existing industry standard and 250 percent sweeter.
This is the bread I sought to reproduce—"USDA White Pan Loaf No. 1"—the archetype of 1950s-vintage American bread. I'm far from the American heartland, however. I'm living in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. When the industrial-bread-baking bug bit me in this hot and unfamiliar place, I despaired at first. But Mexico is not as inappropriate a place to bake Cold War-era American white bread as you might think. In the early twenty-first century, U.S. companies no longer lead the world in the production of "American" bread. Today, the world's most dynamic producer of sliced white bread is a Mexican multinational—Grupo Bimbo. Headquartered in the elite Mexico City business district of Santa Fe, Bimbo has almost ten billion dollars in global sales, one hundred thousand employees, and operations in eighteen countries, from Chile to China. Since 1996, it has also quietly acquired many of the United States' most iconic bakery brands. After its takeovers of Weston Foods in 2009 and Sara Lee in 2011, the Mexican company poised itself to become the United States' largest industrial bread baker.
How white bread took root in the land of the corn tortilla is a long story, but, like the story of USDA White Pan Loaf No. 1, it is a story of the early Cold War. After World War II, U.S. officials, Rockefeller Foundation scientists, and the Mexican government collaborated to undermine the allure of communism with cheap, plentiful, industrially produced wheat. Infusions of high-tech U.S. baking equipment and know-how then allowed Mexican companies like Bimbo to turn that wheat into cheap, abundant bread. Who knows whether U.S. food policy actually helped prevent the spread of communism south of the Rio Grande, but it did create a country with a taste for white bread—and a company with the ability to lead the world in its production.
So while there may be no better place in the world to bake American industrial bread than Mexico, living here means that I'm far from my own oven, mixer, scale, and familiar ingredients. I turn for help to Monique Duval, owner of a tiny artisanal bakery in Merida, and one of the founding members of Slow Food Yucatan. She says she appreciates my irony and agrees to let me use her space. On the way, I pick up a loaf of Bimbo for good luck.
Surprisingly, the formula for "USDA No. 1," as I begin to call it, is relatively simple. The ingredients are straightforward and easily found: enriched white-bread flour, water, nonfat milk solids, sugar, lard, salt, and yeast. And, although the instructions are written for a fully automated bakery, I'm able to adapt them for home use (a complete recipe appears at the end of this article). Only one piece of the formula gives me trouble—something cryptically referred to as "yeast food." The name is misleading. "Yeast foods" are, in fact, a class of mineral salts and enzymes that don't so much "feed" Saccharomyces microbes as help them eat faster, longer, and more effectively by breaking starches into the simpler sugars yeast consumes, by creating a more amenable dining environment, or by promoting the formation of strong gluten strands to trap the carbon-dioxide gas produced after it eats.
Since I have no idea what the USDA bakers used for yeast food in the early '50s, or how to acquire it in Mexico, I resign myself to using humanity's oldest yeast food—sugar—as a substitute. Then, walking home from the gym the day before I am to begin my experiment, I stumble upon a mom-and-pop bakery-supply store. There, amid unlabeled bags of grains and white powders, I discover mejorante para pan blanco. Let's call it "the Magic Powder."
by Aaron Bobrow-Strain, The Believer | Read more:
Photo by Russell Lee. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress and the U.S. Farm Security Administration
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Why Black Friday Is a Behavioral Economist’s Nightmare
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 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.
"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
Friday, November 23, 2012
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by Sarah Pavis, McSweeney's | Read more:
[ed. Repost.]
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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.
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.
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
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
The Lying Disease
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.
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