Inside The New Yorker

The office feels like a bubble. There is an incredible hush here, the quiet starkly at odds with the bustle of Times Square, where The New Yorker office occupies two floors of the Condé Nast Building.

On the floor I visit, the only area that is not dead quiet is the magazine’s legendary fact-checkers department, where people are talking on the phone. The New Yorker is “a living thing”, the magazine’s editorial director Henry Finder tells me. “There’s a certain resistance to indirection,” he says in response to a question on the magazine’s style and possible friction with writers, “but we know that to be a real writer is to be concerned about not sounding like everybody else, and The New Yorker prides itself above all else on being a magazine of writing, not just information. We’re not just decanting knowledge, we’re purveying stories.” Finder says that indirection, according to the magazine founder and first editor Harold Ross, is the tendency to presuppose a fact that has not been established.

The New Yorker has been around since 1925, and has about 1.1 million subscribers now, Finder tells me. For much of its existence, it has been considered a well- respected magazine, a symbol of discernment, and its heft has only grown in recent times. Finder has been with The New Yorker since 1994, and took over as editorial director in 1997. That is a year before David Remnick took over from Tina Brown as editor of the magazine, and it is Finder that Remnick directs me to, when I ask who edits him.

Remnick and I first met earlier this year, on a small plane to Jaipur, and had a conversation ranging from the problems of Kingfisher Airlines to luck in careers to writing and fiction to the fall of communism in Russia and much else besides.

This time it is a more structured chat, but no less eclectic in range. I start by asking him what he makes of the grim prophecies about journalism. “We are all prone to, victim to, and sometimes joyously involved in our devices, both for good reasons and stupid reasons and in between, and find ourselves looking at and reading things that are maybe not the most edifying things in the world,” he says. “But the whole magazine is devoted to the proposition that there is a large number of people, thank God, who want depth and want deep reporting, or when it comes to fiction, deep emotional involvement, because human beings require it. We require more than soundbites and banalities and clichés and brevity and tweets and all the rest.”

“We need it,” he exclaims. “Because it helps us be human. And understand ourselves more thoroughly and operate at a higher plane. I mean, I’m an idealist about this,” he says, while acknowledging that business matters and day-to-day concerns running a magazine are far from idealistic. (...)

You can be sure The New Yorker takes its quotes seriously. Enter the legendary fact-checking department. It all started with a piece found to be “riddled with errors,” according to the head of the fact checking department, Peter Canby, who says he cannot divulge more of the story. Everything, from long pieces to cartoons to poetry… everything is checked. When it comes to a cartoon, there are details, like which side of a blazer the buttons are on, or in a poem, historical references. Wherever there is a fact, it can be checked.

The New Yorker has 16 fact checkers, including Canby, who started out working as a ‘checker’ part time. He split the job with someone, as they both also focused on their own writing. Canby’s book on Maya Indians, The Heart of the Sky: Travels Among the Maya was published in 1992. He started working at The New Yorker again in 1994 and says he does think being a writer helps him in this job. “I would say most people here, to some degree, aspire to be writers. Many of them are successful. Many of them have gone on to be editors at The New Yorker or elsewhere. So it’s a very talented group, with, for me, too much turnover.”

He looks for generalists, he says, highlighting the language expertise. “We have lots of languages here, we always have. To some degree we are kind of captive to our reputation. We have, I think, typically between seven and eight or nine languages spoken fluently to varying degrees, including French and Spanish. We have a German speaker now, also a Mandarin speaker and an Urdu speaker. That isn’t really strictly necessary for us, because we can hire translators for our foreign pieces, but it seems to be part of our sensibility,” he says.

“I also hire for other things. Naturally, people who want to be in this department typically have a literature background or history or something, but we also want people who know economics and science,” he says, emphasising that checkers have to be fast learners. “A lot of this magazine is put together on a very very tight schedule, and our schedules change at an almost frightening rate. We get very long and complicated pieces coming late one week and, say, closing the next Thursday, that are, say, 10,000 words or 12,000 word [pieces] and I’ll have to put two or three checkers on those.”

What they do on those pieces is not just look at the details, but also at the way arguments are constructed. “I’ve come to think of it as reporting in reverse. We kind of take the piece apart, take it down to its components and put it back together again.”

by Amrita Tripathi, Open | Read more:

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The Republic of Samsung

So sprawling is Samsung’s modern-day empire that some South Koreans say it has become possible to live a Samsung-only life: You can use a Samsung credit card to buy a Samsung TV for the living room of your Samsung-made apartment on which you’ll watch the Samsung-owned pro baseball team.

Samsung is South Korea’s greatest economic success, and, more recently, the subject of major controversy. Economists, owners of small- and medium-size businesses, and some politicians say Samsung no longer merely powers the country but overpowers it, wielding influence that nearly matches that of the government.

Debate over how to curb the size and power of Samsung and other family-run conglomerates has become the key issue in South Korea’s Dec. 19 presidential election, with polls showing that about three in four voters say they feel negatively about the country’s few behemoth businesses. Candidates are sparring over how far to go to constrain them.

Samsung draws the greatest scrutiny because it is by far the largest chaebol — the Korean term for corporate groups that were jump-started with government support — and because it is wildly prosperous as the rest of the economy slows down. The conglomerate contributes roughly a fifth of South Korea’s gross domestic product.

Some Koreans call the country “The Republic of Samsung.”

Famous globally for its electronics, Samsung would be one of the largest conglomerates in almost any country. But within its tiny home country, the size of Virginia, it acts more as a do­-everything monolith, building roads and oil rigs, operating hotels and amusement parks, selling insurance, making not only the world’s best-selling smartphone, the Galaxy, but also selling key components to Apple for the iPhone — even as the two battle in a series of lawsuits.

In its domestic market, Samsung is far ahead of Apple. Only one in 10 South Korean smartphone users has an iPhone. (Samsung holds about 33 percent of the global smartphone market, while Apple accounts for about 17 percent. In the United States, Apple controls 34.3 percent of the smartphone market. )

Critics say Samsung elbows into new industries, knocking out smaller businesses, limiting choices for Korean consumers and sometimes colluding with fellow giants to fix prices while bullying those who investigate. They also see in Samsung the picture of closed-door wealth, a family affair in which Chairman Lee Kun-hee is passing power to his son.

“You can even say the Samsung chairman is more powerful than the South Korean president,” said Woo Suk-hoon, host of a popular economics podcast. “Korean people have come to think of Samsung as invincible and above the law.”

by Chico Harlan, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

Skate Fever

I suffer from a seasonal illness that was once very common in Britain but is now rare. It still afflicts the Dutch, though, in the thousands. It strikes me like delirium, when the lakes nearby freeze over and the ice issues an imperative: Carpe diem! Get your skates on! Love, yawns, and suicides, they say, are all infectious. So is play, and skate fever is a highly contagious form. The industrious, beware.

In the Welsh hills where I live, years can pass without the waters freezing, but this one and last were both skating winters—a few precious days of frost and rapture. If joie de vivre could be distilled to one image alone, it would be a skating party sliding down the hill to wake the lake. Last year on a clear night, I skated with friends by moon- and starlight, lanterns scattered around the edge of the lake like fireflies, and we wore full evening dress plundered from charity shops: feathers, fascinators, and fake furs. Wrapped up and amazed, the wrigglers and rugglers (small children and puppies) stayed at the edge, near the soup and the wood fire on the lakeshore. Though the “ecstasy”—in its root “standing apart from”—comes from skating out to the lake’s center and farther to its far and silent shores, across the Zuiderzee.

This kind of joy is superfluous and therefore absolutely necessary. It is the deep meaning of revelry and play, as the historian Johan Huizinga wrote in his masterpiece Homo Ludens. Culture itself “arises in the form of play.” “Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.” Flemish paintings of ice merriment depict lovers and children and horse-drawn sleighs; the Dutch still hold carnivals on ice. In homage to Homo Ludens, we skated in the time between Christmas and New Year, honoring the play ethic rather than the work, the ludic revolution rather than the industrial, racing one another and improvising a new form of hockey with a skinny, squeaking rubber chicken. A local farmer came on skis, someone else tried to fly a kite, puppies slipped comically on the ice, and children slid and pushed each other over.

Skating oscillates between the twin arts of conviviality and of solitude: you can join up with the carnivaliers for hot chocolate laced with brandy, then swing away on a trajectory of glorious freedom, a world apart (“All, alone, together,” wrote E. E. Cummings in his poem “skating”). One skating day this past year, I was circling the center of a lake and found my movement mirrored in the sky, as a bird of prey, similarly alone, was curious and circling overhead.

Wild skating, as opposed to rink skating, always suggests this twofoldness: the water which freezes and thaws, the crisp breath in and the steamy breath out, life above in the air and death below the ice. You swing a long arc out to the left and a curve back to the center; a long arc out to the right and a curve back to the center, each skate leaving slender S’s, cut into the ice like cold calligraphy. The twofoldness is an image of balance, a balance which, skaters know, comes best from movement.

Skating, diving, and dreaming are all forms of flying. “When to his feet the skater binds his wings …” wrote the aptly named poet Robert Snow, who is not to be confused with Robert Frost (“Style is the mind skating circles round itself as it moves”) or indeed with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“The Frost performs its secret ministry,/Unhelped by any wind.”) The god Mercury was, according to Coleridge, the first maker of skates, and every skater has wings at their feet. The flight is compelling to watch: huge numbers of spectators turn out for ice races in Holland, and millions of people around the world watch figure-skating championships in the Winter Olympics—perhaps not so much for the element of competition but for the momentary quality of flight, of sheer grace. While out wild skating, the birds (accustomed to watching us trudge) hover and gaze at skaters as we humans become occasional flyers on the evanescent ice.

In the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, the sense of swift movement in the skaters is such that, about 450 years later, they look as if they’re moving. The eye jumps from figure to figure, each caught in a slightly different pose, the effect like the early animation “thumb cinema,” flip books which rely on the eye’s persistence of vision to give the impression of speed. “Peasant Bruegel,” as he has become known, paints the equality of ice games. This is an open carnival of the commons where even poverty cannot stifle the zest of play which steams through the boisterous carnivaliers with such immediacy you can almost hear them laughing.

People have been skating for thousands of years. Skates fashioned from the shank or rib bones of animals have been found throughout Scandinavia and Russia, including some thought to date back to 3000 bc. Similar finds have been made in Britain, where the first written record of skating occurs in a work by the twelfth-century monk, William Fitzstephen. Writing about the children of London attaching bones to their ankles, he observed, “They fly across the ice like birds … then attack each other until one falls down.” Some things never change.

by Jay Griffiths, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: Dutch skater Jaap Eden, c. 1890.

The True Cost of Empire

“Are you monitoring the construction?” asked the middle-aged man on a bike accompanied by his dog.

“Ah, sì,” I replied in my barely passable Italian.

“Bene,” he answered. Good.

In front of us, a backhoe’s guttural engine whined into action and empty dump trucks rattled along a dirt track. The shouts of men vied for attention with the metallic whirring of drills and saws ringing in the distance. Nineteen immense cranes spread across the landscape, with the foothills of Italy’s Southern Alps in the background. More than 100 pieces of earthmoving equipment, 250 workers, and grids of scaffolding wrapped around what soon would be 34 new buildings.

We were standing in front of a massive 145-acre construction site for a “little America” rising in Vicenza, an architecturally renowned Italian city and UNESCO world heritage site near Venice. This was Dal Molin, the new military base the U.S. Army has been readying for the relocation of as many as 2,000 soldiers from Germany in 2013.

Since 1955, Vicenza has also been home to another major U.S. base, Camp Ederle. They’re among the more than 1,000 bases the United States uses to ring the globe (with about 4,000 more in the 50 states and Washington, D.C.). This complex of military installations, unprecedented in history, has been a major, if little noticed, aspect of U.S. power since World War II.

During the Cold War, such bases became the foundation for a “forward strategy” meant to surround the Soviet Union and push U.S. military power as close to its borders as possible. These days, despite the absence of a superpower rival, the Pentagon has been intent on dotting the globe with scores of relatively small “lily pad” bases, while continuing to build and maintain some large bases like Dal Molin.

Americans rarely think about these bases, let alone how much of their tax money -- and debt -- is going to build and maintain them. For Dal Molin and related construction nearby, including a brigade headquarters, two sets of barracks, a natural-gas-powered energy plant, a hospital, two schools, a fitness center, dining facilities, and a mini-mall, taxpayers are likely to shell out at least half a billion dollars. (All the while, a majority of locals passionately and vocally oppose the new base.)

How much does the United States spend each year occupying the planet with its bases and troops? How much does it spend on its global presence? Forced by Congress to account for its spending overseas, the Pentagon has put that figure at $22.1 billion a year. It turns out that even a conservative estimate of the true costs of garrisoning the globe comes to an annual total of about $170 billion. In fact, it may be considerably higher. Since the onset of “the Global War on Terror” in 2001, the total cost for our garrisoning policies, for our presence abroad, has probably reached $1.8 trillion to $2.1 trillion.

by David Vine, TomDispatch |  Read more:

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Gustavo Torner, Sin título. De la serie de “Clara oscuridad”
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Paul Almásy
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Game of the Century: Notre Dame vs. Alabama

Protecting a 24-23 lead in the final minutes of the 1973 Sugar Bowl against Alabama, underdog Notre Dame faced a pivotal third-and-8 at its 3-yard line.

From the broadcast booth, Howard Cosell, in the overtly theatric tone he summoned for moments like these, bellowed into his microphone: “This is the dream matchup: Notre Dame-Alabama. At Notre Dame, football is a religion. At Alabama, it is a way of life.”

Thirty-nine years ago, there was a college football national championship game arranged not by computer rankings or a rubric of poll results like this season’s Alabama-Notre Dame matchup for the Bowl Championship Series title, but by the kind of primitive challenge heard in a sandlot.

In 1973, Bear Bryant, coach of undefeated Alabama, sent a wily message from the tradition-rich football fields of the Deep South to a single football-centric university in northern Indiana. Bryant was taking his No. 1-ranked squad to the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, and his stated opponent of choice was a team that Alabama had never played: Notre Dame.

The undefeated, untied Fighting Irish, who entered the 1973 bowl season ranked third, had been tempted by a more lucrative offer from the Orange Bowl. But a dare was a dare, especially one with the national championship on the line. Notre Dame Coach Ara Parseghian committed his team to the Sugar Bowl matchup, a contest immediately billed as the game of the century.

“It was the North against the South, Bear Bryant against Ara Parseghian, the Baptists against the Catholics,” Parseghian said last week from his home in Florida. “It had all these compelling comparisons. And it was played on New Year’s Eve, not New Year’s Day, so we had the national stage to ourselves.”

Bryant called it “the biggest game in the South’s history.”

Parseghian said a host of coaches from north of the Mason-Dixon line, and across the country, called to offer encouragement.

“None of them had gone down there and beat Bear,” Parseghian said, laughing.

by Bill Pennington, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Joe Raymond/Associated Press

Andrea Mierswa and Markus Kluska
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Good Gas, Bad Gas

The last rays of sun filter through the snow-covered spruces along the shore of Goldstream Lake, just outside Fairbanks, Alaska. Out on the lake Katey Walter Anthony stares at the black ice beneath her feet and at the white bubbles trapped inside it. Large and small, in layer upon layer, they spread out in every direction, like stars in the night sky. Walter Anthony, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, grabs a heavy ice pick and wraps the rope handle around her wrist. A graduate student holds a lighted match above a large bubble; Walter Anthony plunges the pick into it.

Gas rushing from the hole ignites with a whoomp that staggers her. “My job’s the worst, because usually you catch on fire,” she says, smiling. In the gathering twilight she and her team ignite one bubble after another.

The flames confirm that the bubbles are methane, the main component of natural gas. By counting and measuring them, Walter Anthony is trying to gauge how much methane is rising from Goldstream Lake—and from the millions of similar lakes that now occupy nearly a third of the Arctic region. The Arctic has warmed much faster than the rest of the planet in recent decades, and as the permafrost has melted, old lakes have grown and new ones have formed. Methane bubbles from their muddy depths in a way that is hard to quantify—until the first clear ice of fall captures a snapshot of the emissions from an entire lake.

Sometimes as Walter Anthony walks that ice, in Alaska, Greenland, or Siberia, a stamp of her boot is enough to release an audible sigh. Some lakes, she says, have “hot spots” where the methane bubbling is so strong that ice never forms, leaving open holes big enough to spot from an airplane. “It could be 10 or 30 liters of methane per day from one little hole, and it does that all year,” she says. “And then you realize there are hundreds of spots like that and millions of lakes.” By venting methane into the atmosphere, the lakes are amplifying the global warming that created them: Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Carbon dioxide is the main one, because the atmosphere holds 200 times as much of it. But a given amount of methane traps at least 25 times as much heat—unless you burn it first. Then it enters the atmosphere as CO₂.

That’s the other side of this Jekyll-and-Hyde story: A lot of methane is being burned these days. In the past decade the technology called hydraulic fracturing, “fracking” for short, has enabled drillers in the United States to extract natural gas from deeply buried shales they couldn’t tap before. Natural gas supplies have surged; prices have plummeted. Fracking is now spreading around the world, and it’s controversial. The gas boom has degraded landscapes and polluted water. But it has also had environmental benefits. Natural gas burns much cleaner than coal. In part because American power plants have been switching from coal to cheap gas, U.S. emissions of CO₂ from fossil fuels fell last year, even as the world set another record.

The catch is, methane emissions are rising. What’s coming out of Arctic lakes is troubling, Walter Anthony says, because some of it seems to be coming not from bottom mud but from deeper geologic reservoirs that had hitherto been securely capped by permafrost—and that contain hundreds of times more methane than is in the atmosphere now. Still, most methane emissions today come from lower latitudes, and most are related more directly to human activities. A growing amount seems to be leaking, for instance, from gas wells and pipelines. Just how warm Earth gets this century will hinge in part on how we balance the good and bad of methane—on how much of it we capture and burn, and how much we inadvertently let loose.

By Marianne Lavelle, National Geographic | Read more:
Photograph by Mark Thiessen

Do My Tweets Really Matter?

“Find a band to manage. Understand the news. Study Japanese. Practise the harp,” reads Sasha’s to-do list in Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From the Goon Squad. Egan distills in four short sentences a prevalent kind of anxiety. Sasha’s goals require her to possess multiple shades of talent and skill, and the list is poignant because we know it’s unlikely she’ll actually do these impressive to-dos. Had the list read, “Become a better teacher. Walk more frequently. Remember people I love,” its poetic impact would have been quite different. But Egan wishes us to anticipate the miniature tragedy awaiting Sasha just as it awaits us all during lives in which there is never time to download all the photographs; lives in the context of which, like Sasha, we find it hard to “understand the news”, not solely because we are wise to the fact we are not hearing the whole story, but because the concept of “understanding” entails a purposive change in behaviour in order to make it feel meaningful.

A new book by Anne Cvetkovich, Depression, A Public Feeling (Duke University Press, £15.99), sets out to challenge “contemporary medical notions” of depression “that simultaneously relieve one of responsibility (it’s just genes or chemicals) and provide agency (you can fix it by taking a pill)”. Depression, she says, “can be seen as a category that manages and medicalises” the feelings associated with “keeping up with corporate culture and the market economy, or with being completely neglected by it”. A section in which Cvetkovich describes her own depression is followed by chapters that focus on contemporary artists and also on a number of writers, each of whom suffered from depression and writer’s block. In anatomising her “lived experience” of writer’s block, Cvetkovich invites the reader to ask whether, despite the trade-specific terminology, this is still a symptom exclusive to writers.

In a celebrated essay published in Harper’s magazine in 1996, Jonathan Franzen describes being “a local kid returning to St. Louis on a fancy book tour”. This was “obscurely disappointing” to him, but he said nothing, having “already realised that the money, the hype, the limo ride to a Vogue shoot weren’t simply fringe benefits. They were the main prize, the consolation for no longer mattering to the culture.” What kind of mattering would have been enough?  (...)

Franzen’s “obscure disappointment” developed into what he called “depression”. He is a writer, so it got pretty intellectual and complicated. He describes his emergence from this state in terms of his writing, as “a move from depressive realism”, in which “you decide that it’s the world that’s sick”, to “tragic realism . . . the most reliable indicator [of which] in a work of fiction, is comedy”. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described aspects of infantile development that bear comparison with Franzen’s ordeal. In order for a baby to emerge from a primitive mental state, which Klein called “paranoid-schizoid”, he must acknowledge the separateness and the coexisting virtues and flaws of his mother. This new consciousness comes with grief but it also engenders compassion and art, and one of its reliable indicators is comedy. Once experienced, the paranoid-schizoid state is not forgotten, however; it is recalled in adult life through paranoia or any state that seeks to locate an unequivocal badness outside the self. There have always been experiences afforded by a writing life – the omnipotent fantasy at the desk, the horrors of the mixed reviews – that seem to invite this recollection.

But as a psychotherapist I see people with solicitor’s block and banker’s block and designer’s block and surgeon’s block – and the pain is the same pain in each case. The variation is in its intensity, the circumstances in which it is experienced and the vocabulary used to describe it. The degree to which the “block” gives rise to “depression” in writers, or non-writers, may depend on each individual’s adjustment to the impossibility of “mattering” in any way that obliterates the fact of death, the possibility that there is no God and the minuteness of the self in the grand scale of time. Existential fears, like the literary ones that give them a specific iteration, may be a grown-up way of recalling the first experience of powerlessness, of “not mattering” to a mummy busy with an independent life.

When asked to name what sort of training is required to become a writer, Hemingway is said to have replied “an unhappy childhood”. Could it be that people are all somehow becoming more like individuals who have, historically, become writers? Could our lives all somehow be offering experiences very like writers’ experiences? No matter how extraordinary the circumstances in which they experience their “not mattering”, writers are themselves extraordinary only in the sense that our maladjustment to ordinary vulnerabilities requires such extraordinary palliation – whole lives spent toiling away at not very lucrative works of art. Tolstoy eventually gave up writing because he felt it distracted him from the more important work of prayer. He was probably right but it is hard to be so generous to his private soul as to wish away his art, even though its production must have required him to realise – even after Anna Karenina – that he still didn’t matter enough and there would need to be another book.

Cvetkovich notes the universal vulnerabilities exacerbated by the specific crises of her academic life – getting tenure, writing papers, teaching, publication. This widescreen perspective makes room for her abstract idea that “depression emerges in response to the demand that the self become a sovereign individual defined by the ability to create distinctive projects and agendas”. The consequence of this “demand” is that “those who fail to measure up . . . are pathologised as depressed”. Sasha’s to-do list captures precisely this contemporary desperation to “create distinctive projects”, which, if you don’t write a book, require a personalised and personally demanding array of accomplishments. And alongside this need to prove oneself sits the related longing to achieve a meaningful role in an unfathomable, media-imparted sense of the world. Or, in Egan’s excruciating abbreviation, to “understand the news”.

by Talitha Stevenson, The New Statesman |  Read more:

Photo: Getty Images

A Fringe Politician Moves to Japan’s National Stage

[ed. After decades of economic malaise this is not surprising.]

Shintaro Ishihara has been a rare, flamboyant presence in Japan’s otherwise drab political world for four decades. A novelist turned right-wing firebrand, he has long held celebrity status on the political margins, where he was known for dramatic flourish. He once signed a pact in blood to oppose diplomatic ties with China because of its communist government, and he published a book at the height of Japan’s economic power that lectured his countrymen on the need to end what he considered its postwar servility to the United States.

Now, at 80, Mr. Ishihara is leading a newly formed populist party and has emerged as a contender for prime minister, vowing to turn Japan into a more independent, possibly nuclear-armed nation. While political analysts deem him a long shot, they say the fact that he has gotten this far after decades of pushing what was seen as a fringe agenda is a worrying sign of how desperate this nation is for strong leadership after years of cascading troubles.

With his promises to restore Japan’s battered national pride, Mr. Ishihara has staked out an even more stridently nationalistic position than the current front-runner, Shinzo Abe, the leader of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, who has called for revising Japan’s pacifist constitution. Analysts worry that if Mr. Ishihara succeeds in his bid to become prime minister, he could weaken relations with the United States, yank Japan to the right and damage ties with China, which is already angered by his almost single-handedly rekindling a territorial dispute over an island chain.

But even if in the likely event that Mr. Ishihara loses, they say, his campaign could still have a lasting effect, bringing patriotic populism into the political mainstream of a nation that has shunned such open jingoism since its devastating defeat in World War II.

“This election will be a test of whether Japan is really losing its dovishness,” said Takeshi Sasaki, a politics professor at Gakushuin University in Tokyo. “There is so much irritation at how everything seems to be going wrong, and Japan is losing its pride. Politicians on the right like Ishihara and Abe are trying to fan these flames.”

The rise of the two hard-liners has already contributed to hand-wringing among liberals who are anxious that the foreboding sense that Japan is fast becoming an international has-been has left the Japanese vulnerable to long-suppressed nationalism. Even those who call those fears overblown acknowledge that anti-China feelings, which could be easily exploited, are rising as that country eclipses Japan, builds a formidable military and makes its territorial ambitions clear.

by Martin Fackler, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Issei Kato/Reuters

Philip-Lorca diCorcia
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Harry Gruyaert, Terrace of a local hotel, Gao, Mali, 1988
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The Gathering

Haleiwa Town, entry point for the North Shore of Oahu, is an easy 30-minute drive from the tropical urban sprawl of Honolulu. But drive through Haleiwa late in the year with an arsenal of boards strapped to the roof and the atmosphere suddenly feels heavier, more pressurized. This isn’t just a surf trip. You’ve ventured to the center of the surfing universe.

How this affects you depends on several things. The number of North Shore visits you’ve made in the past. Local connections. Your World Tour ranking, if applicable. Above all, your place on the sport’s invisible but finely calibrated scale of gnarliness. Badass veterans with reef scars on their feet and shoulders can usually keep the anxiety in check. The mood for most newcomers is roughly three parts dread to one part anticipation.

North Shore waves are famously big and powerful, but the truly distinctive feature here is how tightly clustered the breaks are. Beginning near the harbor mouth at Haleiwa and moving east, more than three dozen surf spots, many of them exceptional, are squeezed into what has long been called surfing's "Seven Mile Miracle." From late fall to early spring, the surf generally ranges from five to 15 feet. A few times, it jumps up to 20, or 30, or even 50 feet. Nowhere else does the velvet glove fit more snugly over the iron fist. Warm sand, aquamarine water, tropical blue skies, plumeria-scented trade winds—and beneath it all a vast submerged plateau of lava reef, knuckled and ribbed and crevassed, shaping North Pacific swells into fearsome and occasionally life-altering waves, especially at Waimea Bay, Sunset Beach, and Pipeline

With few exceptions, every wave rider of note from the past half-century has come to the North Shore. Long-gone people and events flicker constantly around the edges, just out of sight. Big wooden boards washing ashore at Laniakea like matchsticks after a cleanup set in the late fifties. A generation later, Barry Kanaiaupuni leaning into turns at Sunset Beach with enough force to peel his lips back from his teeth. Donny Solomon, a rookie from Southern California, punching through the lip of a 25-footer at Waimea in 1995, nearly safe on the wave’s far slope before getting sucked over the falls, backwards, to his death.

These days, roughly 500 surfers from around the world spend most of November and December on the North Shore. The surf media follows. Photographers, filmmakers, reporters, and bloggers focus on the North Shore the way the fashion media focuses on Paris and New York. A framework for the season is provided by the annual Triple Crown contest series, which concludes with the Pipeline Masters, the final stop on pro surfing’s ten-event world tour. Rides at Pipeline are short but spectacular, and often disastrous, and the reef itself is close to the narrow beach, which is backed by a row of vacation houses whose front porches look out to the lineup like Yankee Stadium box seats. Pipe has played host to a half-dozen nail-biting down-to-the-wire world-title finales. Kelly Slater has had his finest moments as a pro at the Masters, as did the recently deceased Andy Irons. The list goes all the way back to Gerry Lopez, the original tube-riding deity, who won the event twice in the early seventies.

by Matt Warshaw, Outside |  Read more:

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Keith Richards and wife Patti Hansen photographed by Bruce Weber
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My Superpower Is Being Alone Forever: Newly Single

Planning the end of a relationship is probably the closest many of us will ever get to knowing what it's like to plot a murder. Will they see it coming?, you wonder. Some of us are careless, impulsive relationship-murderers, and so the breakups happen spontaneously, the time and place as random as Clue cards. Others plan it all out, postponing, buying time until the perfect opportunity, thinking over the most humane method. Maybe you'll wait for the vernal equinox on account of your partner's Seasonal Affective Disorder. But then he or she might forever associate the sadness of the breakup with cherry blossoms and freshly graffiti'd "Nurse Jackie" posters, and who wants to do that to another person? The longer you wait, though, the more you have to pretend everything's fine, which is a fancy way of lying.

Oddly enough, the most honest moment in a relationship usually arrives once it's over. It's the "speak now or forever hold your peace" part of the wedding, only inverted. You tell the couple why they’re terrible for each other, and the couple is you. Suddenly, the preceding months or years have an air of unreality—like they never happened at all or turned out to be one long Christmas Ghost hallucination. When my last relationship ended, it didn't seem possible that, mere days before, I'd have probably dove into traffic to save a person I'd now dive headlong into a mound of summertime garbage just to avoid seeing at a crosswalk. Of course, being newly single sort of feels like diving into a pail of garbage all the time.

The first few days of being alone again hit like OxyContin withdrawal. Or, at the very least, like a juice cleanse. Only instead of toxins leaving my body, about a shallow lagoon of Merlot floods into it. All the many things I took for granted about the relationship appreciate in value as they suddenly become unavailable. So many inside jokes and dumb little rituals lined up in my mind like a continental breakfast buffet, wheeled away by an overly officious concierge just as I arrive, famished.

This absence manifests itself everywhere. I'm keenly aware of a certain G-chat window's negative space on my computer screen all day. Unfortunate coworker fashion choices go criminally underreported. The pertinent details of which falafel place I did for lunch are lost to the ages. My day's narrative simply loses its primary audience, as though cancelled due to low ratings and frequent profanity. I could continue the broadcast on Facebook, dispatching glossy post-breakup PR or the romantic distress bat-signal of Sade lyrics, but being heard is not the same as feeling known. Nothing can substitute for the presence of an actual human person who knows most of your secrets and still somehow wants to make out with you.

The interior of your average Love Cocoon is generously swathed in a level of comfort usually extended only to newborn infants and Greek shipping magnates. When this sensual haven falls away, returning back to the larger world is disorienting. You blink your dewy eyes in the light. You can't quite remember who you are, and nothing makes any sense. It's like snorting bath salts while suffering from Memento-disease; there's bound to be collateral damage. Merging with another person until you become each other's spirit animals subtly changes you in a bunch of ways that quietly annoy everyone else. The metamorphosis chips away at any individual quirks that might abrade the relationship. Gone is the part of you that used to make up silly songs in the shower or found kombucha kind of disgusting. Instead, there's this new you, smoothed-out and cocooned. You forget what you’re really like, having opted for what one person likes you to be like.

After you leave the Love Cocoon, it's bewildering to be out there; this new sanded-down you who is not really you. But then, like someone who has defected from Scientology or the Borg, you get your old identity back. Your rough edges return, extra stubbly. Perhaps some habits discarded during the relationship remain that way, but these mostly pertain to hairstyle. All the other decisions you now have to make alone again force you to reconnect with the person you were, the hardwired you, and take control of who you'll become. Whether it's any improvement at all is another story.

by Joe Berkowitz, The Awl | Read more:
Illustration: Joanna Neborsky

The Paradox of Going Outside

Before the bear came it was a grab bag of small miseries—the standard discomforts of a coastal person who basically spends his time inside. I wasn’t sure if I had gotten any sleep. My pack’s straps had abraded symmetric blisters on my collarbone. I had tweaked my back by lying on my side, and my legs by curling them up. I needed to go to the bathroom but kept deciding that it wasn’t worth the trouble. My body temperature had been oscillating wildly: I’d been getting cold, then putting on a layer or two, then sweating, then dropping into chills. And my stomach was churning—I hoped not from “beaver fever.”

But then, panic. A pounding, spiraling, helpless panic, the kind you might feel—that I once did feel—when bracing for impact on an airplane about to make an emergency landing.

Just outside our three-man tent I had heard the signatures of ursine curiosity: heavy footsteps, panting, and every so often a terrible silence in which the two of us, the thing and I, would freeze, and tighten, and turn the dials way up on all our senses and wonder what sort of mind was likewise poised on the other side of the thin fabric.

I had no useful equipment inside the tent and no plan and so I simply sat there and feared, and between the fearing hoped, this hope consisting in the image of dawn breaking, and the other guys waking up, and a swift hike through berry thickets back to our minivan, 5.2 miles away, where I’d find my way to the nearest town and get me some ostentatious comfort, something like a massage and an episode of Cheers. No, I thought, camping is not manful adventure, it’s misery—and the only tolerable risk of a bear attack is exactly zero.

This was a revolution in my thinking from even just a day before. That the western side of Glacier National Park was dense with bears was clear enough from the maps and signs, and clearer still from the dozen clumps of fresh scat along a nearby trail. My friend saw one just outside the campsite; so did that couple—they said it was massive. They said, too, that they heard another one poking around last night. In fact this place was so conspicuously teeming with bears that in the event of my tragic mauling my family and friends could very sensibly think to themselves, “He was asking for it.”

And of course I was. (...)

The trouble is, nature does not come naturally to people in my world. It is not something we just do, like walk. It’s a thing we sign up for, train for, save for—like, say, hockey. For us, going outside is a sport.

by James Somers, Outside |  Read more:

Photo: Daniel D. Snyder/Jakob Radlgrube