[ed. Well, that was quick. Whatever it decides to do, Facebook just keeps pushing the boundaries of user patience. Eventually, many (like myself) will just give up. It's too bad because FB is really a great innovation. Maybe there's another FB ver.2 waiting in the wings? See the post below on SnapChat.]
Instagram sought to calm a growing furor among its more than 7 million users by saying it would clarify a new, controversial privacy policy. The policy would have given the popular Facebook-owned service the ability to profit from and control images posted through the popular photo-sharing app.
On Tuesday, the company announced it would reword language from the policy and terms of service that said: “A business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos … and/or any other actions you take … without any compensation to you.” Announced Monday, the rule had been set to go into effect on Jan. 16—and was interpreted by many users to mean that Instagram would take user photos and sell them.
But Kevin Systrom, an Instagram co-founder, wrote in a post on the company's blog that it was never the company's intention to sell photos but rather to use a customer's information to allow businesses and other users to advertise to them as a way of gaining followers. He called the initial wording of the agreement "confusing" and "our mistake."
He added, "To be clear: It is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear. The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this, and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question."
It was not immediately clear, however, if Instagram's peace offering would be enough to appease thousands of users who were in open revolt over the app's proposed rule changes. Monday's announcement had sent many of the photo-sharing app’s most prolific users into a frenzy, prompting dozens of celebrities and well-known photographers who have adopted Instagram as a journalistic tool to threaten to delete their accounts. (Full disclosure: I am an enthusiastic user of Instagram, having posted on it more than 1,000 photos of the 2012 presidential campaign.)
There are two times in your life when you’d be likely to encounter the term “continuing care retirement community”: in your later decades, when a fall or a hospital visit makes clear that your house is no longer a safe environment, or in your thirties, when on an unremarkable Sunday evening your parents call to tell you that they’ve decided to stop living in the shadow of your father’s health and resolved to move somewhere that can better serve their changing needs.
A CCRC is essentially the equivalent of organic farming for elder care. It’s not quite a retirement community, nor is it exactly a nursing home either. Pioneered by the LifeCare Corporation in 1971, a CCRC is a vast self-contained campus, complete with housing options ranging from airy cottages to hotel-style apartments, dining facilities, and acres of nature-paths. Amenities rival those of a small city, if a small city was built entirely by AARP The Magazine: There are woodshops and pottery studios for hobbyists, simulcast operas and visiting professors for intellectuals, weekly get-togethers for social butterflies, language classes, dances, and independent lending libraries. Cafeteria menus are designed by executive chefs–even the inoffensive wall-art is made on premises.
But the more important function of a CCRC is to provide a comprehensive logistical answer to the end of life—a complete package deal, if you will. While most residents arrive as fully functional retirees with pastimes and furniture and plans for the future, they soon embark on the journey of medical services that will unavoidably define their penultimate years. This begins with occasional in-home nursing visits and progresses steadily through motorized wheelchairs and special diets, minor surgeries and regular physical therapy (strength training, aquarobics, neuromuscular re-education). At some point residents leave their homes for a central facility where rooms—or rather, apartments—are attended by a full-time staff of geriatric professionals. Eventually, they come to a building known as the skilled nursing annex, where doors are adorned with grandchildren’s cards and tiny dried flowers. Residents never exactly die; the community loses someone. Cottages are gut-renovated. Apartments get new paint, new carpet, new appliances. A new family arrives to vet floor plans and pricing options. To every season, etcetera, etcetera.
This year my mother turns sixty-six and my father seventy-one, marking the decennial anniversary of his botched heart-valve replacement surgery, a bottomless crisis resulting in a stroke that hobbled his left hand and foot, an aortic aneurysm, and a steady decrease in heart function every year. Average age of entry into a CCRC varies by location but is generally between seventy-eight and eighty-two, making my parents among the youngest of potential residents. This is a concession they are willing to make. Insurance providers will barely look at my father’s medical records, much less extend to him the kind of long-term coverage he’ll almost certainly need in the near future. Live-in care is out of my parents’ price range, and my mother is fifteen years off from an actual nursing home. Though I’d envisioned them in their later years buying a condo and hiring occasional help, I now understand that’s not an option, and I can’t say I blame them. A CCRC is the best solution to a problem that doesn’t actually have one.
No organization officially records the size of the CCRC industry. The non-profit Leading Age comes closest, estimating that nearly a million Americans live in two thousand such facilities. And I’ve agreed to go tour them, helping my parents over the course of a weeklong, three-state trip to choose the place where they will spend the remainder of their lives.
[ed. Mobile photo app wars. SnapChat is a new one I'd never heard of, but it makes intuitive sense given the monetization and privacy issues swirling around social media.] SnapChat is an application (both on iOS and Android) that allows the members of the community to snap a photo and share it for someone else and that they have access to that photo for a few seconds, before vanishing. You respond by sharing your own photo and the loop continues. The perception of privacyand lack of permanence is one of the reason why sexting (as the kids would say) is so popular and one of the reasons why this app is blowing up, though CEO Spiegel says otherwise. As of Oct. 28, the company said that a billion photos had been exchanged over its network. December 12, 2012
[ed. Rocketing use statistics, and now, added video:]
A company [spokesperson] explained in a press release how video “Snaps,” as they’re called, will work:
“How this works: Instead of toggling back and forth between a photo and a video setting, we’ve combined them into one button. If you want to take a photo, just tap the button. If you want to capture video, hold the button down. When you’re done recording, lift your finger. Video snaps are up to ten seconds long, and like photo snaps, can only be viewed once in the application.”
Spiegel said adding video makes perfect sense for the app that lets users be themselves without much fear of recordings or images showing up around the web: December 14, 2012
[ed. Facebook wants a piece of the action:]
AllThingsD reported late Sunday night that Facebook is developing its own stand-alone photo-sharing app that’s similar to Snapchat, the popular app that lets users take and send photos that disappear from the recipient’s phone after a matter of seconds. It appears Facebook has noticed the attention Snapchat is getting, and the degree to which users are enamored by the idea of SMS-like vanishing photos.
Facebook is currently testing the app in-house and has plans to release it before the holidays, AllThingsD reported. A Facebook spokesman said Monday, “We’re not going to comment on rumor and speculation.” December 17, 2012
[ed. One of the reasons SnapChat is becoming such a big hit. Instagram's new terms of service allow it to use anything you produce for commercial gain:]
The new explanation goes into greater detail on what it means for Instagram to advertise “on, about, or in conjunction with your Content.” Here are the new terms:
“Some or all of the Service may be supported by advertising revenue. To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you. If you are under the age of eighteen (18), or under any other applicable age of majority, you represent that at least one of your parents or legal guardians has also agreed to this provision (and the use of your name, likeness, username, and/or photos (along with any associated metadata)) on your behalf.
You acknowledge that we may not always identify paid services, sponsored content, or commercial communications as such.” December 17, 2012
Last month, as I was driving down a backbreaking road between Goma, a provincial capital in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kibumba, a little market town about 20 miles away, I came upon the body of a Congolese soldier. He was on his back, half hidden in the bushes, his legs crumpled beneath him, his fly-covered face looking up at the sun.
The strangest thing was, four years ago, almost to the day, I saw a corpse of a Congolese soldier in that exact same spot. He had been killed and left to rot just as his comrade would be four years later, in the vain attempt to stop a rebel force from marching down the road from Kibumba to Goma. The circumstances were nearly identical: a group of Tutsi-led rebels, widely believed to be backed by Rwanda, eviscerating a feckless, alcoholic government army that didn’t even bother to scoop up its dead.
Sadly, this is what I’ve come to expect from Congo: a doomed sense of déjà vu. I’ve crisscrossed this continent-size country from east to west, in puddle jumpers, jeeps and leaky canoes. I’ve sat down with the accidental president, Joseph Kabila, a former taxi driver who suddenly found himself in power at age 29 after his father was shot in the head. I’ve tracked down a warlord who lived on top of a mountain, in an old Belgian farmhouse that smelled like wet wool, and militia commanders who marched into battle as naked as the day they were born and slicked with oil — to protect themselves from bullets, of course. And each time I come back, no matter where I go, I meet a whole new set of thoroughly traumatized people.
Some are impossible to forget, like Anna Mburano, an 80-year-old woman who was gang-raped a few years ago and screamed out to the teenage assailants on top of her: “Grandsons! Get off me!”
Congo has become a never-ending nightmare, one of the bloodiest conflicts since World War II, with more than five million dead. It seems incomprehensible that the biggest country in sub-Saharan Africa and on paper one of the richest, teeming with copper, diamonds and gold, vast farmlands of spectacular fertility and enough hydropower to light up the continent, is now one of the poorest, most hopeless nations on earth. Unfortunately, there are no promising solutions within grasp, or even within sight.
I didn’t always feel this way. During my first trip, in July 2006, Congo was brimming with optimism. It was about to hold its first truly democratic elections, and the streets of the capital, Kinshasa, were festooned with campaign banners and pulsating with liquid Lingala music that seemed to automatically sway people’s hips as they waited in line to vote. There was this electricity in the air in a city that usually doesn’t have much electricity. In poor, downtrodden countries accustomed to sordid rule, there is something incredibly empowering about the simple act of scratching an X next to the candidate of your choice and having a reasonable hope that your vote will be counted. That’s how the Congolese felt.
But the euphoria didn’t last — for me or the country. The election returned Mr. Kabila to power and nothing changed. I came back less than a year later and hired a dugout canoe to take me up the mighty Congo River, where I saw 100-foot-tall stalks of bamboo and spiders the size of baseballs. In the middle of the country, I came to appreciate how shambolic the state of Congo’s infrastructure really is. Rusty barges that used to ply the river now lie on the riverbanks with weeds shooting up through their ribs. The national railway, which used to haul away all the coffee and cotton and bananas that this country produces, is all but shuttered.
It comes as a shock at a certain point where you realize no matter how much you love these kids, you can’t do it by yourself, that this job of keeping our children safe and teaching them well is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community and the help of a nation.
And in that way we come to realize that we bear responsibility for every child, because we’re counting on everybody else to help look after ours, that we’re all parents, that they are all our children."
Daniel K. Inouye died today of a respiratory ailment at a Bethesda, Md., hospital, ending a life of remarkable service for his country and Hawaii that included sacrificing his right arm in World War II combat and spending 50 years as a U.S. senator. He was 88.
The senator succumbed to respiratory complications at 5:01 p.m. Eastern time at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center where he had been hospitalized since Dec. 9. Inouye was first brought to George Washington University Hospital on Dec. 6 after fainting in a Senate office. He was transferred to Walter Reed three days later.
A statement from his office said that his wife Irene Hirano Inouye and his son Ken were at his side and that last rites were performed by Senate Chaplain Dr. Barry Black.
When he was asked recently how he wanted to be remembered, he said, "I represented the people of Hawaii and this nation honestly and to the best of my ability. I think I did OK," according to the statement.
His last words were, "Aloha."
"Senator Inouye's family would like to thank the doctors, nurses and staff at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for the extraordinary care he received," the statement said.
Reaction to his death came swiftly from across the state and the nation.
”This keiki o ka aina, this child of Hawaii, has left us with a legacy I suspect we will never see again.” an emotional Gov. Neil Abercrombie said this afternoon.
Dante Carpenter, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Hawaii, "Our hearts are just full of grief, collectively as well as individually."
“We will all miss him, and that’s a gross understatement.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., becoming emotional on the floor of the Senate. “No one’s been a better American than Sen. Inouye,” he said.
Inouye leaves an unparalleled legacy in Hawaii history — including Medal of Honor winner, nine-term U.S. senator, and key figure in the Senate investigations of both the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals. As the longest-serving member of the Senate, the Hawaii Democrat was president pro tempore — third in line to the presidency.
His death is a huge loss for Hawaii which has come to rely on his decades of unwavering advocacy for the islands and his ability to direct billions of dollars in federal money to his home state. It was often said, only half-jokingly, that Hawaii had three major industries: tourism, the military, and Sen. Dan Inouye.
"He's long been known as a fierce protector of home-state interests," Christopher Deering, a political science professor at George Washington University in Washington, said before Inouye's death. "He's also been a highly respected inside player."
Daniel Ken Inouye was born in Honolulu on Sept. 7, 1924, to Japanese-American parents Hyotaro, a jewelry clerk, and Kame, a homemaker. He was named after biblical prophet Daniel and the Rev. Daniel Klinefelter, a Methodist minister who helped raised the orphaned Kame. Inouye's parents met at church and always preached family honor and discipline, a blend of Japanese tradition and Methodist sensibility. Inouye was the eldest of four siblings — sister May and brothers John and Robert — who grew up in Moiilili and McCully.
Although the family was poor and Inouye said he did not wear shoes regularly until he attended McKinley High School, he once wrote of his family ethos, "there was a fanatic conviction that opportunity awaited those who had the heart and strength to pursue it."
For many of his generation, the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor forever changed the trajectory of his life. Inouye had wanted to be a doctor and had taken a first-aid course from the American Red Cross, but once President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed in 1943 to let nisei volunteer for the war, Inouye volunteered for the Army and was assigned to what was to become one of the most decorated military units in history, the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
Inouye, a sergeant when the 442nd landed in Europe, was promoted to first lieutenant as the nisei unit moved through Italy, then France, then back to Italy in the waning days of the war.
In northern Italy in April 1945 as the war in Europe was coming to an end, Inouye moved his platoon against German troops near San Terenzo. Inouye crawled up a slope and tossed two hand grenades into a German machine-gun nest. He stood up with his tommy gun and raked a second machine-gun nest before being shot in the stomach. But he kept charging until his right arm was hit by an enemy rifle grenade and shattered.
"I looked at it, stunned and disbelieving. It dangled there by a few bloody shreds of tissue, my grenade still clenched in a fist that suddenly didn't belong to me anymore," Inouye wrote in his 1967 autobiography, "Journey to Washington," written with Lawrence Elliott.
Inouye wrote that he pried the grenade out of his right hand and threw it at the German gunman, who was killed by the explosion. He continued firing his gun until he was shot in the right leg and knocked down the hillside. Badly wounded, he ordered his men to keep attacking and they took the ridge from the enemy.
by Derrick DePledge, The Hawaii Star Advertiser | Read more:
“How well can we live,” Juliet Corson asked herself, “if we are moderately poor?” On the radical origins of home economics.
As it was for many who went to school in the early 1990s, my junior-high experience with home economics was brief. In theory, I liked cooking, but the idea of doing it in a dour classroom outfitted with fridges and Formica conjured visions of trembling Jell-O molds and glaucous mounds of pistachio-cream salad, crumbly refrigerated biscuits and mushy pinwheels of deviled ham, all tasting the way the cafeteria smelled. I registered for Beginning Consumer Sciences not out of a great love for things domestic but because I wanted to avoid physical education (the only other available elective) and to get an easy A. But my first assignment, broccoli salad, proved unexpectedly difficult: I glopped on too much Miracle Whip and burned the bacon, mistakes that earned me a C- and a gentle admonition to “follow the recipe.”
Thanks to the guidance of a teacher both cheerful and good-natured — as you inevitably must be when supervising a roomful of 13-year olds employing sharp knives and hot ranges — I managed to reverse my course. I soon found myself chopping, roasting, and frying with brio, turning out soggy but delicious pineapple upside-down cakes and loads of peanut brittle more salty than sweet.
As I was baking and cooking in that classroom, with its four small avocado-green ovens, little did I think that I was participating in something of cultural importance. But recently, academics and food critics have called for a return of home economics to high school curricula. In a 2011 National Public Radio interview, Michigan State University history professor Helen Zoe Veit sang the praises of instruction in the domestic arts. “Just by virtue of making foods at home,” she said, “you’re almost guaranteed to be making them much more healthfully than they would be if you buy them at a fast-food restaurant or in virtually any restaurant where fats and sugars are used in … enormous quantities.” In summer, Slate ran an article by Torie Bosch, who claimed that “home ec is more valuable than ever in an age when junk food is everywhere, obesity is rampant, and few parents have time to cook for their children.” What’s more, she argues, a course in home economics could help students to teach their cash-strapped families to stretch their dollar. Frugality and thrift, watchwords of austere times past, would once again see recession-wracked Americans through their present ill fortune.
Americans’ present ill fortune has persisted for a number of years now and threatens to grow worse, because most politicians appear to agree that present economic realities have made inevitable a rollback of New Deal programs. In a time of diminished prosperity, the thinking goes, citizens are summoned to tighten their belts further. Talk of austerity has the attractive effect of conflating notions of individual conduct with those of economic justice, and so shows itself utterly befitting a neoliberal age. Yet as history demonstrates, the present morality play involving a people perched perilously on a “fiscal cliff” has seen several dress rehearsals.
The association of clever cookery with economic security had long abided in pre-Roosevelt America. Early home economists thought a well-cooked roast could quell or eliminate everything from public drunkenness to factory riots. For them food was a way not only to ease the bitter pangs of poverty but also to curtail its more disruptive social repercussions. Juliet Corson, founder of the New York Cooking School, was one such advocate of better living through sensible-meal prep. The good life could be had through good cooking, she believed. Eager to show the working classes how to make the most of available foodstuffs that, thanks to the railroad’s aggressive expansion over the course of the 19th century, had increased in both variety and quantity, she penned one of the most popular cooking guides of the era, Fifteen-Cent Dinners for Workingmen’s Families(1877). Its simple, sensible advice helped thousands weather the period’s financial panics and made Corson one of the century’s most notable social reformers. (...)
After the onset of the 1873 depression, Corson offered her services to the Women’s Educational and Industrial Society of New York, which provided vocational training to women at a time when thousands of them needed to support themselves but lacked the knowledge and means. It sought to keep these women in work to prevent them from succumbing to “moral degradation,” as one contemporary circular phrased it. The school’s administrators tapped Corson to teach culinary arts. Having had little previous experience beyond that of making coffee and grilling steak, she turned to the best European cookbooks for guidance. “The thoroughness of the German and the delicacy of the French” impressed her, and she synthesized these two Continental influences into “a philosophy of her own.”
This philosophy proved immensely popular, because it informed an approach to cooking that appeared almost effortless. Just about anyone could whip up tasty, economical meals. Women flocked to hear Corson, whose instructional method was immersive. With basket in hand, she led her students to Fulton Market for lessons on selecting fresh meat, fish, and vegetables before adjourning to the cooking school, where, behind a brightly polished range topped with copper saucepans and boilers, she demonstrated how best to prepare them. So successful were her lessons that they attracted the notice of upper-class colleagues. They encouraged her not only to continue penning articles and books but also to open her own school, which she did in 1876.
Corson’s New York Cooking School, initially based in her own home, charged tuition on a sliding scale and taught both practical and more advanced cooking skills to everyone from ladies’ maids to young housewives. Her specialty, however, remained economical cookery. The 34-page Fifteen-Cent Dinners for Workingmen’s Families elaborated its finer points. “The cheapest kinds of food are sometimes the most wholesome and strengthening,” Corson insisted. On three nickels (the equivalent of $2.78 today) the poorest laborer could eat, if not like a king, then perhaps like his boss. “In Europe provinces would live upon what is wasted in towns here,” Corson lamented. Fifteen-Cent Dinners revealed veritable plenty in the midst of apparent dearth. Simply by eliminating waste, Corson claimed, a household could find nourishment to spare. (...)
Corson’s uniquely cosmopolitan approach to economical cookery won her audience’s approval. Critics hailed Fifteen-Cent Dinners as a panacea. The Chicago Tribune claimed that between its covers lay “the secret of economy which gives skill to conceal cheap things,” and another prominent newspaper, the Christian Union, assured readers that, if faithfully followed, the recipes would “put upon the rich man’s table food more nourishing and palatable than nine out of ten well-to-do people ever taste outside of first-class restaurants.” Yet Corson’s book failed to please union leaders, who accused its author of conspiring with capitalists to suppress wages, reasoning that if workers learned they could subsist quite well on 15 cents, they would lose interest in agitating for much more.
by Christine Baumgarthuber, The New Inquiry | Read more: Illustration: imp kerr
Jack White, the former frontman of the White Stripes and an influential figure among fellow musicians, liked to make things difficult for himself. He uses cheap guitars that won’t stay in shape or in tune. When performing, he positions his instruments in a way that is deliberately inconvenient, so that switching from guitar to organ mid-song involves a mad dash across the stage. Why? Because he’s on the run from what he describes as a disease that preys on every artist: "ease of use". When making music gets too easy, says White, it becomes harder to make it sing.
It’s an odd thought. Why would anyone make their work more difficult than it already is? Yet we know that difficulty can pay unexpected dividends. In 1966, soon after the Beatles had finished work on "Rubber Soul", Paul McCartney looked into the possibility of going to America to record their next album. The equipment in American studios was more advanced than anything in Britain, which had led the Beatles’ great rivals, the Rolling Stones, to make their latest album, "Aftermath", in Los Angeles. McCartney found that EMI’s contractual clauses made it prohibitively expensive to follow suit, and the Beatles had to make do with the primitive technology of Abbey Road.
Lucky for us. Over the next two years they made their most groundbreaking work, turning the recording studio into a magical instrument of its own. Precisely because they were working with old-fashioned machines, George Martin and his team of engineers were forced to apply every ounce of their ingenuity to solve the problems posed to them by Lennon and McCartney. Songs like "Tomorrow Never Knows", "Strawberry Fields Forever", and "A Day in the Life" featured revolutionary aural effects that dazzled and mystified Martin’s American counterparts.
Sometimes it’s only when a difficulty is removed that we realise what it was doing for us. For more than two decades, starting in the 1960s, the poet Ted Hughes sat on the judging panel of an annual poetry competition for British schoolchildren. During the 1980s he noticed an increasing number of long poems among the submissions, with some running to 70 or 80 pages. These poems were verbally inventive and fluent, but also "strangely boring". After making inquiries Hughes discovered that they were being composed on computers, then just finding their way into British homes.
You might have thought any tool which enables a writer to get words on to the page would be an advantage. But there may be a cost to such facility. In an interview with the Paris Review Hughes speculated that when a person puts pen to paper, "you meet the terrible resistance of what happened your first year at it, when you couldn’t write at all". As the brain attempts to force the unsteady hand to do its bidding, the tension between the two results in a more compressed, psychologically denser expression. Remove that resistance and you are more likely to produce a 70-page ramble. There is even some support for Hughes’s hypothesis from modern neuroscience: a study carried out by Professor Virginia Berninger at the University of Washington found that handwriting activated more of the brain than keyboard writing, including areas responsible for thinking and memory.
Our brains respond better to difficulty than we imagine. In schools, teachers and pupils alike often assume that if a concept has been easy to learn, then the lesson has been successful. But numerous studies have now found that when classroom material is made harder to absorb, pupils retain more of it over the long term, and understand it on a deeper level. Robert Bjork, of the University of California, coined the phrase “desirable difficulties” to describe the counter-intuitive notion that learning should be made harder by, for instance, spacing sessions further apart so that students have to make more effort to recall what they learnt last time. Psychologists at Princeton found that students remembered reading material better when it was printed in an ugly font.
I’m finding it a little hard to feel upset at the Banksy “exhibition” that was on display in Art Miami and its sister fair CONTEXT this past week. Others have found reasons to boycott the affair, and Marc and Sara Schiller, two street art aficionados I respect, wrote on Wooster Collective that they are calling out the Miami Art Fair for letting all this happen: “Knowing that Banksy has condemned the show, they could have easily rejected the exhibition and not legitimized the stolen artwork. But they didn’t. And this tells you a lot about what their motivations are.”
RJ Rushmore of Vandalog echoed the Schillers’ sentiment and then highlighted the possible monetary motive for the display:
… as the Schillers note, Banksy’s best work really only works when experienced in context in which it was intended (whether that intended context be on the street or in a gallery), and bringing these pieces indoors probably makes most of them much much much weaker than they were on the street.
This is certainly not the first time we’ve seen someone trying to make a buck off Banksy and it’s reasons like this that Banksy created Pest Control, a controversial committee which determines the authenticity of Banksy works on the market and which refuses to authenticate any street works or works not originally intended for resale.
Banksy, “Stop and Search” (2007), from Bethlehem, West Bank
I find the rejection of the display of these five iconic Banksy’s and the resulting anger a little misplaced. Certainly viewing the works in their original context would be desirable, but it’s also nearly impossible for most people. The work, like most street art, is often placed on private property, and in the process, the artist ceases to own it. The fate of the work is left in the hands of others, not the artist. This is the deal; it’s street art, after all. Where that work ends up is anyone’s guess. There was the obstacle of the art fair ticket price, but any American museumgoer is accustomed to paying to see art. Yes, these works were once free to see but so is almost all art before it enters a fair or museum. Then again, this is about other issues, in my opinion.
Street art by its very nature is an act of faith in the public trust. You place the work — most often illegally — in public, and you kiss it goodbye. A photo online is usually the only residue of most of the ephemeral work. As proof of this concept, all you have to do is look back to the 1970s and ’80s, which was a rich period for street art, and realize that little, if any, of the work from the streets remains. This, I believe, is unfortunate.
Keith Haring’s subway drawings exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum
Not all the work was lost, though, and this isn’t the first time that work taken from the street has been exhibited outside of its original context. Keith Haring’s white chalk on black paper subway drawings of the late 1970s and early ’80s were a critical part of his rise in the public’s imagination. Many people tore down the works from the streets, particularly in the subway stations, immediately after they were made, and some of those people had the intention to sell them ASAP. In recent years, those works have been showcased in high-end galleries, like the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, and earlier this year, the Brooklyn Museum’s Keith Haring show featured a whole room of them. I don’t think many people would argue that these works don’t deserve to be in either of those places.
But let’s not mistake the Banksy show for what it is and what it isn’t. It is no longer street art; it is a historic artifact much in the way Assyrian murals stripped of their original temples and public buildings are displayed in museums the world over. This is history, and this needs to be preserved.
The popularity of Banksy, I would argue, has propelled him into the realm of a cultural icon worthy of historic preservation. He’s the only artist since Warhol that has successfully become a household name, more so than Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. What we’re really arguing about, I believe, is how his legacy should survive and what role the artist should have in those decisions.
There are so many ways for speakers of English to see the world. We can glimpse, glance, visualize, view, look, spy, or ogle. Stare, gawk, or gape. Peek, watch, or scrutinize. Each word suggests some subtly different quality: looking implies volition; spying suggests furtiveness; gawking carries an element of social judgment and a sense of surprise. When we try to describe an act of vision, we consider a constellation of available meanings. But if thoughts and words exist on different planes, then expression must always be an act of compromise.
Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.
“Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimal,” John Quijada, a fifty-four-year-old former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, told me. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.
In his preface, Quijada wrote that his “greater goal” was “to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious intellectual effort: an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language.”
Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible. Ideas that could be expressed only as a clunky circumlocution in English can be collapsed into a single word in Ithkuil. A sentence like “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point” becomes simply “Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx.”
It wasn’t long after he released his manuscript on the Internet that a small community of language enthusiasts began to recognize what Quijada, a civil servant without an advanced degree, had accomplished. Ithkuil, one Web site declared, “is a monument to human ingenuity and design.” It may be the most complete realization of a quixotic dream that has entranced philosophers for centuries: the creation of a more perfect language.
Ithkuil’s first piece of press was a brief mention in 2004 in a Russian popular-science magazine called Computerra. An article titled “The Speed of Thought” noted remarkable similarities between Ithkuil and an imaginary language cooked up by the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein for his novella “Gulf,” from 1949. Heinlein’s story describes a secret society of geniuses called the New Men who train themselves to think more rapidly and precisely using a language called Speedtalk, which is capable of condensing entire sentences into single words. Using their efficient language to communicate, the New Men plot to take over the world from the benighted “homo saps.”
Soon after the publication of the Russian article, Quijada began to receive a steady stream of letters from e-mail addresses ending in .ru, peppering him with arcane questions and requesting changes to the language to make its words easier to pronounce. Alexey Samons, a Russian software engineer based in Vladivostok, took on the monumental task of translating the Ithkuil Web site into Russian, and before long three Russian Web forums had sprung up to debate the merits and uses of Ithkuil.
At first, Quijada was bewildered by the interest emanating from Russia. “I was a third humbled, a third flattered, and a third intrigued,” he told me. “Beyond that, I just wanted to know: who are these people?”
by Joshua Foer, The New Yorker | Read more: Photograph by Dan Winters.
One of the oldest chestnuts about inventions involves a 19th-century patent official who resigned because he thought nothing was left to invent. The yarn, which periodically pops up in print, is patently preposterous. “The story was an invention,” says Yoshiro Nakamatsu. “An invention built to last.”
He should know. Nakamatsu—Dr. NakaMats, if you prefer, or, as he prefers, Sir Dr. NakaMats—is an inveterate and inexorable inventor whose biggest claim to fame is the floppy disk. “I became father of the apparatus in 1950,” says Dr. NakaMats, who conceived it at the University of Tokyo while listening to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. “There was no mother.”
Though Dr. NakaMats received a Japanese patent in 1952, this virgin birth is disputed by IBM, which insists its own team of engineers developed the device in 1969. Still, to avoid conflicts, Big Blue struck a series of licensing agreements with him in 1979. “My method of digitizing analog technology was the start of Silicon Valley and the information revolution,” Dr. NakaMats says. His voice is low, slow and patronizing, solicitously deliberate. “I am a cross between Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci.”
The floppy is only a short subject in the nonstop invention film that’s running in Dr. NakaMats’ brain. Among his other creations (he will earnestly tell you) are the CD, the DVD, the fax machine, the taxi meter, the digital watch, the karaoke machine, CinemaScope, spring-loaded shoes, fuel-cell-powered boots, an invisible “B-bust bra,” a water-powered engine, the world’s tiniest air conditioner, a self-defense wig that can be swung at an attacker, a pillow that prevents drivers from nodding off behind the wheel, an automated version of the popular Japanese game pachinko, a musical golf putter that pings when the ball is struck properly, a perpetual motion machine that runs on heat and cosmic energy and...much, much more, much of which has never made it out of the multiplex of his mind.
Dr. NakaMats is the progenitor of one other novelty related to floppies: Love Jet, a libido-boosting potion that can be sprayed on the genitalia. The computer component and the mail-order aphrodisiac—and the cash they generate—have taken the inventor of NakaMusic, NakaPaper and NakaVision out of the ranks of the faintly bonkers basement crackpot. The two great financial successes in his perpetual printout of ideas, they give him credibility. Nobody dares to completely kiss off his wilder inventions.
Indeed, Dr. NakaMats has won the grand prize at the International Exposition of Inventors a record 16 times, or so he says, and has been feted all over the world. To commemorate his 1988 visit to the United States, more than roughly a dozen U.S. cities—from San Diego to Pittsburgh—held Dr. NakaMats Days. The State of Maryland made him an honorary citizen, Congress awarded him a Certificate of Special Recognition and then-president George H.W. Bush sent him a congratulatory letter. Dr. NakaMats even tossed out the first pitch at a Pittsburgh Pirates game.
Of all the tributes he says he has received, he is perhaps proudest of having been invested as a knight by the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, an ancient Roman Catholic charitable order. “Which is why I should be addressed as Sir Dr. NakaMats,” he explains.
He’s saying this from behind a desk in an office of Dr. NakaMats House, a central Tokyo high-rise of his own design. Naturally, the front gate is shaped like a colossal floppy disk.
His office is a riot of not-quite-finished projects. A blackboard is slathered in mathematical equations. File folders are piled on chairs. Copies of books he has written—among them, Invention of Politics and How to Become a Superman Lying Down—are scattered on the floor. Everywhere Dr. NakaMats goes, he dislodges great stacks of scientific papers last examined in, say, 1997. While rummaging for a diagram of his Anti-Gravity Float-Vibrate 3-Dimensional Sonic System, a heap of magazines starts a sort of tsunami across the room, dislodging other heaps in its path. He looks straight ahead, firm and unsmiling.
Dr. NakaMats is lean, moderately intense and 84 years old. He wears a sharp, double-breasted pinstriped suit, a striped red tie with matching pocket square and an expression like Ahab looking for a crew to hunt the white whale. Scrupulously polite, he offers a visitor from the United States a cup of Dr. NakaMats Brain Drink (“Lose weight. Smooth skin. Avoid constipation”) and a plate of intellect-enhancing Dr. NakaMats Yummy Nutri Brain Snacks.
By his count, Dr. NakaMats has clocked 3,377 patents, or three times as many as Thomas Edison (1,093 and no longer counting). “The big difference between Edison and me,” he says, matter-of-factly, “is that he died when he was 84, while I am now just in the middle of my life.”
