Crime Fighting Social Networks

Chris Goodroe doesn’t do Facebook, and he doesn’t do Twitter. Online socializing isn’t his thing. But after watching his neighbors use the internet to bust a pair of burglars earlier this year, the Oakland attorney decided to make an exception for Nextdoor, a neighborhood social network that is increasingly being used to fight crime.

“This collective mentality that Nextdoor allows us from a crime and public safety standpoint is really beneficial,” says Goodroe. “It alerts neighbors of all ages and backgrounds to what’s out there.”

In the first wave of online social crime-fighting, police used networks like Facebook and Twitter to ask for help identifying images of suspects and to broadcast messages over a large area like an entire city. Now a new, more targeted set of networks like Nextdoor are allowing residents to better police themselves and police to reach residents more efficiently. “What we saw happening very early on with Nextdoor is people were coming to us saying, ‘We’d like to be able to include our local police officer in our neighborhood,’” says co-founder Sarah Leary, who estimates about 20 percent of Nextdoor content is related to crime and safety.

The scam run by the burglars in Goodroe’s neighborhood worked like this: Two men carrying magazines knock on a door. If a homeowner answers, he gets a pitch for magazine subscriptions from one guy while the other scopes his valuables. If no one answers, the burglars let themselves in.

In years past, few homeowners bothered reporting such vaguely fishy visits. But with Nextdoor small suspicions can be easily pieced together, fusing into a troublesome pattern.

“Time zero, someone posted something, saying, ‘It may be nothing but, you know, I had these people come to the door and they were suspicious because they were selling magazines but they couldn’t tell me what the charity was that they were doing it for,” Goodroe says. “Not more than 10 or 20 minutes later, someone else posted saying, ‘Yeah those people came to our place as well, it’s very weird.’”

“That happened to maybe three or four different homes. And finally one home, when these people came and knocked on the door, called the cops.”

Contacted by a Nextdoor user, the Oakland Police Department took a description, tracked down the suspects, and found them in the midst of a burglary. Goodroe, who now keeps a close eye on Nextdoor postings, credits the bust to the site.

Tools like Nextdoor and Nixle, a text and e-mail alert system used by police, are not just altering the landscape of social networking. They’re also changing the ways cities across the U.S. ensure safety — helping residents look out for one another, helping cops make highly targeted disclosures and inquiries, and turning the tables on criminals who have long availed themselves of sophisticated communications systems and carefully plotted strategies. The change is being driven less by cutting-edge technology than by new demands for police transparency, by budget cuts, and by calls for greater efficiency and efficacy on the part of law enforcement.

If crime-fighting social networks continue to attract users and spread geographically, they could help police departments reduce crime rates while forging deeper and more meaningful relationships with the communities they patrol.

by Ryan Tate, Wired |  Read more:

Illustration: Ross Patton/Wired

Michael Hedges

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Irony Is Wonderful, Terrific, Fantastic!

An op-ed appeared in The Times a couple of weeks ago, called "How to Live Without Irony," and it tore around the Internets like a brush fire. In this essay Christy Wampole, an assistant French professor at Princeton, complained and complained about the hipster, or "urban harlequin" as she styles him. He is "our archetype of ironic living," who "harvests awkwardness and self-consciousness." (...)

Earlier efforts to "banish irony" failed, Wampole claims.

The loosely defined New Sincerity movements in the arts that have sprouted since the 1980s positioned themselves as responses to postmodern cynicism, detachment and meta-referentiality. (New Sincerity has recently been associated with the writing of David Foster Wallace, the films of Wes Anderson and the music of Cat Power.) But these attempts failed to stick, as evidenced by the new age of Deep Irony.

Earlier in the piece, Wampole "loosely" defines Deep Irony as follows: "Throughout history, irony has served useful purposes, like providing a rhetorical outlet for unspoken social tensions. But our contemporary ironic mode is somehow deeper; it has leaked from the realm of rhetoric into life itself." Telling, that "somehow."

One would have thought that David Foster Wallace's whomping 1993 attack on irony ("E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"), perhaps the first (and best) salvo to be fired in this ludicrous battle, would have been enough to stop people writing about "toxic irony" ever again.

[...] American literary fiction tends to be about U.S. culture and the people who inhabit it. Culture-wise, shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive? [...] Or, in serious contemporary art, that televisual disdain for "hypocritical" retrovalues like originality, depth, and integrity has no truck with [...] the self-conscious catatonia of a platoon of Raymond Carver wannabes? [...] 

So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: "How very banal to ask what I mean." [...] And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony: [...] the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny.

What more needed to be said? Between Wallace's famous piece and Rorty's more rarefied analysis (in Contingency, Irony & Solidarity), nothing at all, with respect to the question. But Wallace's provisional answer, so often quoted, could stand some serious interrogating. Or a sound flogging, even.

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point.

To which I would respond: Mr. Wallace, have you ever considered that irony might actually be an aid to the treating of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction? Because you demonstrated that yourself, again and again.  (...)

Irony has its uses and is, in moderation, an absolutely necessary tool for maintaining what passes for sanity in the modern world. Furthermore, an ironic cast of mind is no impediment to holding passionate convictions. Or even sincerity and humility, in reasonable amounts. This idea that irony in and of itself is "toxic" has got to go, and pronto.

In fact the habitual degree of irony is barely adequate to comprehend the disappointment, the distance, the pitch-black comedy, the anger, between the disgrace of how the world is, how we ourselves are, and how we might like things to be. Without such tools, without the ability to concentrate and register our disillusionment and pain, how on earth will we separate ourselves from it all enough to envision a better way?

And yet, the world is not only a disgrace.

by Maria Bustillos, The Awl |  Read more:

Image: Unknown

Did the American Songbook Kill Jazz?

At first, it sounds like a mistake: The opening notes are blurred, like something has gone a bit wrong in either the playing or the recording. But after a few bars, we realize that these bent tones from a horn — with just a stark bass and drum behind them — are outlining one of the most hallowed of American standards. Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins is at the Village Vanguard, bashing through “What Is This Thing Called Love?” as if he could anticipate the punk rock that would come to this same neighborhood 20 years later. It’s an elegant song by Cole Porter, reduced to its skeleton. And “All the Things You Are” and “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise” get the same kind of rough, raw, harmonically daring treatment.

It’s the kind of thing jazz can do at its best — but something the music may be doing less and less of. Or too often and not well enough. The various factions that make up the jazz world — audiences, musician, writers, plus the teachers and students who seem to be the only groups growing in number — don’t have a consensus on the matter. But the jazz fraternity seems to know two things: Despite continued artistic quality, the audience around the music is dying. And the choice of what songs jazz musicians play — and what they don’t play — may be part of the problem.

Over the past few years, Rollins — perhaps the living jazz musician with the widest knowledge and deepest feeling for standards — has experienced a change of heart. “Jazz standards don’t have the same pull on the audience,” he says now. “I love the American songbook, but people don’t recognize them any more. So I feel we need more original music. Jazz has got to keep moving: It’s important to get new music, new melodies.” During the four weeks he spent in Europe this fall, Rollins played very few standards. “They’re still powerful to me, but to audiences, they’ve lost some of their power.”

The issue of song selection — as central to a repertory-driven art like jazz in a way that it’s not for, say, rock ‘n’ roll, which, since the Beatles, has been about original songwriting — has been talked about for years now. But it all became more pressing lately, with the emergence of several high-profile artists who reject or ignore the tradition of Porter, the Gershwins and Jerome Kern — or even the related lineage of songs by jazz musicians, such as Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” or Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight.”

There is no version of “Summertime” or “Autumn Leaves” on the latest record by bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding, who is, these days, quite literally the music’s cover girl. She won a Grammy for best new artist in 2011; this year, Spalding is on the cover of DownBeat magazine as artist of the year. She also put out the magazine’s album of the year with a record of mostly originals. The king of jazz’s avant-garde edge is Robert Glasper, a hip hop-inspired pianist whose latest album, “Black Radio,” features appearances by Erykah Badu and the rapper formally known as Mos Def. His earlier, less high-profile records includes some classic jazz numbers, but the most recognizable song on the album is not something by Harold Arlen or John Coltrane, but Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Keith Jarrett — up there with Rollins as probably the only jazz artist left who can fill a big concert hall without guest stars from the rock world — helped revive the standards repertoire during the ’80s and ’90s but since then has moved almost entirely to his own long-form compositions. There are certainly several established musicians who sell records or fill clubs by playing standards. Diana Krall is one of them. On her latest album cover, she wears black lingerie with a subtle S&M subtext, perhaps as a sort of apology for the eight-decades-old songs inside.

The issue has symbolic meaning, because with the dropping out of a shared body of songs, jazz has lost not only its common language – for decades, musicians getting together for the first time could count on each other knowing the changes to “I Got Rhythm” or hundreds of other songs. It’s also lost its emotional connection to its mid-century heyday, when high-quality, greater visibility and a solid canon reigned: Despite all of the warring schools, each of which had its pet repertoire, many of the musicians played the same songs, even if different teams rendered them differently.

And the loss may be more than symbolic, says a controversial recent article in the Atlantic. Ben Schwarz’s “The End of Jazz,” as it was headlined, is in the simplest sense a review of Ted Gioia’s “The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire,” at press time the best-selling jazz book in the country. (Full disclosure: Gioia is a friend, and I am thanked in his book’s acknowledgements.) As its title implies, though, Schwarz aims to measure the music for its coffin, as the American songbook — which has not much budged since about 1952 — and jazz fade out like tragic lovers separated by distance. Schwarz sees “no reason to believe that jazz can be a living, evolving form decades after its major source — and the source that linked it to the main currents of popular culture and sentiment — has dried up.” Jazz, like the songbook, Schwarz writes, “is a relic.”

by Scott Timberg, Salon |  Read more:

Photo Credit: Christian Bertrand via Shutterstock/Salon

untitled by our long nights on Flickr.
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Colonial rotifers showing eyespots and corona, magnification 200x - 500x. Ralph Grimm.
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Back to the Grind

The sampling, or “cupping,” of coffee is an intricate process. Demonstrating it one recent morning, George Howell places a precisely measured layer of freshly ground beans on the bottom of a glass, then sniffs, shakes, and sniffs again. Boiling water is poured on the coffee, and Howell puts his nose up close and inhales deeply. Then, surgeon-like, he uses two spoons to remove any bean debris or foam that’s floated to the surface of the glass. Next comes the stir: A spoon is rapidly submerged three times in the glass to allow the aromas to escape. Howell leans over, putting his face up against the edge of the glass as he stirs. As I attempt the maneuver alongside him, I wind up splashing coffee on my nose. Howell, laughing, tells me I’ve been baptized.

That’s not much of a stretch, actually. At various times, Howell has been called an “idol,” a “god,” and the “high priest” of the coffee bean. “George has this almost mystical obsession with coffee flavor,” says Peter Giuliano of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. “It’s totally inspiring to coffee people. He has a transcendent passion about coffee, and a quasi-religious zeal.”

In 1975 Howell opened the Coffee Connection, the Harvard Square café that would become a national model for the gourmet coffee experience. His revolutionary idea was to source high-quality beans and roast them lightly, allowing subtle, more nuanced flavors to emerge, a huge contrast with the nearly burned roasts that dominated the day. Howell was also one of the first roasters to source beans not just from particular countries, but from individual farms—each with a unique flavor profile, or terroir, owing to factors such as soil quality, latitude, altitude, and annual rainfall. So instead of mixing beans to create, say, a Costa Rican blend, Howell purchased from single-estate farms to create distinct brews.

His café was also the birthplace of still another industry-altering innovation: the Frappuccino. The trademarked blend of espresso, milk, ice, and sugar debuted in 1992 and quickly reshaped Boston’s coffee-consumption habits, eventually becoming the driving force behind an aggressive expansion of the Coffee Connection chain, which by 1994 had 23 locations throughout the Northeast. The drink also attracted the attention of a Seattle coffee company with national aspirations. In 1994 Starbucks made the Coffee Connection its first acquisition, paying $23 million for the chain and the rights to the Frappuccino name.

It’s been nearly 20 years since Howell sold the Coffee Connection, yet he remains an influential figure in what has become a specialty-coffee movement in this country. In the late ’90s, Howell was hired by the United Nations to improve the quality of Brazilian coffee beans, which inspired him to create Cup of Excellence, an international development program that helped set up the direct trade of beans from small coffee farmers to roasters. And just a few years after the noncompete agreement he signed with Starbucks expired in 2001, he opened a roastery in Acton called Terroir Coffee.

These days Howell is a fixture on the coffee-lecture circuit (yes, there is such a thing), and continues to be very much the coffee innovator. For example, he incubated the software program ExtractMoJo, which has become an industry standard by helping baristas pour coffee with the precision of a nuclear physicist. “He’s this celebrity,” says Merry “Corky” White, a Boston University anthropology professor who is an expert on international coffee culture. “People all over the world know his name.”

That may be so, but spend time with Howell and you quickly get the impression that, as far as he’s concerned, not nearly enough of them do. While waiting for his noncompete agreement to expire, Howell was forced to watch from the sidelines as it was Starbucks, and not the Coffee Connection, that ignited the American coffee revolution. And many of those beans he was busy sourcing as part of his work with the UN wound up being bought by the generation of high-quality independent roasters and retailers who sprung up after that revolution—the companies that today are spoken of by the coffee cognoscenti in the same reverent tones that nearly 40 years ago were reserved for Howell’s pioneering chain of cafés.

So now, at age 68, George Howell is setting out to reconquer the coffee world. He’s certain that he’s got the solution to the problem with the industry these days—that it’s been hijacked by latte elitists with no appreciation for the simple, pure, “noble” drink that’s been the love of his life and the source of his fortune. These coffee snobs instead push fussy coffee-based beverages with complicated combinations of milk, sugar, and foam, Italian-sounding names, and high profit margins. With the Frappuccino, Howell may have set off the nation’s addiction to what are essentially coffee milkshakes, but he’s every bit the purist, disdainful of the espresso and “latte art” crazes, and convinced that boring old drip coffee is, as ever, the pinnacle of the form.

Howell is determined to put the coffee back at the forefront of the coffee shop, starting with a new flagship café here in Boston that will elevate the drink to its rightful place next to wine. He envisions regular tastings and cuppings, formal lessons in the flavor profiles of beans from the different regions of the planet, and, in general, a daily celebration of all things coffee. His aim is to make the drinking of your morning brew a “30-minute pleasure trip.” He sees his concept spreading across the country, location by strategic location. It’s a bold plan from a visionary coffee entrepreneur, but there are a few complications, chief among them the fact that it’s far from clear that anybody is really clamoring for yet another chain selling good coffee. With even McDonald’s elbowing its way into the “premium roast” game these days, it’s at least worth asking whether the market has become saturated. And even it if hasn’t, even if there is room for an innovative new concept, a lot of people close to Howell wonder whether he’s really the guy to lead the charge. In part, that’s because Howell has tried a comeback before. Nearly 10 years ago, he opened a restaurant and café in Lexington that wound up a costly failure. There are also questions about just how well Howell’s passion for unadorned drip coffee matches up with the tastes of the consumers who actually spend money in cafés. And finally, explains Howell’s friend Dan Cox, who is an industry analyst, there’s a concern that the coffee drinkers of today “don’t understand that you’re the old master. They really don’t care.”

by Janelle Nanos, Boston Magazine |  Read more:

Photo by Miller Mobley

Henrik Samuelsson. Rowing Bricks, 2012. Technique mixte, 180 x 216 cm.
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Josef Stoitzner (Austrian, 1884-1951), Aus den Tauern, c. 1915. Colour woodcut.
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Posthumous

In his 1988 book of essays, “Prepared for the Worst,” Christopher Hitchens recalled a bit of advice given to him by the South African Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. “A serious person should try to write posthumously,” Hitchens said, going on to explain: “By that I took her to mean that one should compose as if the usual constraints—of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and, perhaps especially, intellectual opinion—did not operate.” Hitchens’s untimely death last year, at the age of sixty-two, has thrown this remark into relief, pressing upon those of us who persist in writing the uncomfortable truth that anything we’re working on has the potential to be published posthumously; that death might not be far off, and that, given this disturbing reality, we might pay attention to it.

It’s not very nice of me to bring up death tonight, as we gather to celebrate ten emerging writers. Talented and accomplished as you all are, you’re just getting going, so why should I rain on your parade? Here’s why: because Gordimer’s advice about writing posthumously may be the best way to help your writing in the here-and-now. It may inoculate you against the intellectual and artistic viruses that, as you’re exposed to the literary world, will be eager to colonize your system.

All of the constraints Hitchens mentions have one thing in common: they all represent a deformation of the self. To follow literary fashion, to write for money, to censor your true feelings and thoughts or adopt ideas because they’re popular requires a writer to suppress the very promptings that got him or her writing in the first place. When you started writing, in high school or college, it wasn’t out of a wish to be published, or to be successful, or even to win a lovely award like the one you’re receiving tonight. It was in response to the wondrousness and humiliation of being alive. Remember? You were fifteen and standing beside a river in wintertime. Ice floes drifted slowly downstream. Your nose was running. Your wool hat smelled like a wet dog. Your dog, panting by your side, smelled like your hat. It was hard to distinguish. As you stood there, watching the river, an imperative communicated itself to you. You were being told to pay attention. You, the designated witness, special little teen-age omniscient you, wearing tennis shoes out in the snow, against your mother’s orders. Just then the sun came out from behind the clouds, revealing that every twig on every tree was encased in ice. The entire world a crystal chandelier that might shatter if you made a sound, so you didn’t. Even your dog knew to keep quiet. And the beauty of the world at that moment, the majestic advance of ice in the river, so like the progress of the thoughts inside your head, overwhelmed you, filling you with one desire and one desire only, which was to go home immediately and write about it.

Does that sound like you? O.K., but that’s only half the story. You’re also the college sophomore standing in a corner of a keg party in the basement of some desperate dorm. You’re standing in the corner because the light is dim. Dim light is a plus. In the hour or so before leaving your room, while you were lying on your bed innocently reading Flaubert, a zit of incomparable size and ferocity erupted in the middle of your forehead. The size of this blemish, its fiery and painful swollenness, were almost enough to keep you from coming to this party in the first place. Better to just stay in bed and read “Sentimental Education.” But there’s this person of interest you’re hoping to see at the party and you thought that maybe with a little concealer or by combing down your bangs you might be able to appear in public, so this is what you do, only to end up, sometime later, standing in the corner, feeling the zit on your forehead actually pulse, like a second heartbeat. Your friends come up to say, “Hi,” pretending not to notice. You love them for this. You begin to think that your existence on earth isn’t a total mistake when suddenly you spy the person of interest across the room. Here’s your chance. With your head down, like someone using a Geiger counter, you make your way across the room. As you pass the person of interest, you gather courage and lift your face, despite everything, but the person of interest is talking to somebody else, and so you keep on going, all the way out of the party and the dorm. And then you’re outside, under the black, unfeeling sky. In that moment there is no one as lonely, lovelorn, and unlovable as you; and yet this feeling of hopelessness mixes, oddly, with a perverse kind of hope, of resistance to the regrettable physical facts, and you’re filled with the desire to write something, to go back to your room and be like Flaubert, solitary and misanthropic and a God-damned genius.

That’s what you were probably like. I know you guys. We recognize each other.

by Jeffrey Eugenides, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Blues Cruise

The whole thing was white, and broken, that much was clear. A week after the presidential election, when the dreams of Republicans were dashed with President Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney, we were snorkeling in the blue waters of the Caribbean. In the distance was a shipwreck. “You could make out the pieces of it,” said Ralph Reed, the right-wing political operator who had bolstered the Evangelical Christian vote for Romney. “It was deep and murky.”

Jonah Goldberg, the National Review contributor and author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, also bore witness to the once-great vessel that foundered off the coast of Fantasy Island and was now sunken and covered in white barnacles. “I saw the silhouette of it,” he says.

But what, exactly, were we looking at? It was Friday, November 16. We were in Honduras, gazing at a wreck off a resort called Fantasy Island, near Mahogany Bay. Through my goggles, I watched Reed, in white swim trunks and black flippers, flap his way down through the extravagantly blue waters to the old sunken barge, part of the $64.95 Shore Excursion available to passengers aboard the m.s. Nieuw Amsterdam, an 86,000-ton cruise ship owned by Holland America Line. It was day five of the National Review magazine’s Post Election Cruise 2012, and the GOP’s recent problems were, mercifully, about 760 nautical miles away. The cruise, featuring the star columnists of William Buckley’s 57-year-old conservative biweekly, had been planned long in advance, and everybody had believed it would be a victory party. An ­e-mail from the magazine’s publisher arrived a few days before we embarked: “Do not despair or fret. At least not next week.”

Onboard the Nieuw Amsterdam, no one could follow his advice. “Who sent Obama here to destroy America?” a fiftysomething woman asked me one evening over dinner, as if it were a perfectly reasonable question. And here onboard the cruise ship, it was. If the Nieuw Amsterdam was a kind of ark of American alienation, at least it was an eminently comfortable one. The ship was a country unto itself, eleven stories high, 936 feet fore to aft, with eleven bars, six restaurants, two swimming pools, five hot tubs, a large café, and a library. There was the endless buffet on the Lido deck, slot machines and craps in the casino, an Asian lounge singer who did a mean “Copacabana,” a discothèque and a chamber-music cocktail lounge, cigars and Cognac by the pool, gift shops, and a full-service spa.

We departed Ft. Lauderdale on a Sunday, November 11, and began steaming to the southeast, headed for Half Moon Cay, a Bahaman beach resort owned by the cruise line, and thence southward, deeper into the Caribbean.

The cruise began with a cocktail mixer on the midship deck, Champagne glasses glowing in the pool lights. The crowd was noticeably older, a retirement crowd in ­vacation-wardrobe colors, with flashes of the idiosyncratic: a one-eyed man in retro Yves Saint Laurent glasses and a sixtysomething blonde in gold-lamé pants. Ralph Reed, resplendent in a blazer and billowing pleated pants, held court among his fans. “I did my job!” I overheard him say.

Many onboard could recall a time when Buckley himself had cruised alongside them, in the nineties, but his ghost now seemed far away, a benevolent but faded spirit. Most of the roughly 600 National Review cruisers, who’d signed up for what was billed as the “conservative cruise of a lifetime,” were in their prime during the Reagan years—the greatest days to be a conservative. Nostalgia and loss hung in the air, with much talk of endings, both personal and national. To sum up his feelings about the election, John Wohlstetter, a national-security author in his mid-sixties who had met Buckley several times (“utterly gracious, and he listened”), recalled the words of a long-­forgotten liberal lamenting a loss: “The people have spoken, the bastards.”

by Joe Hagan, New York Magazine |  Read more:

Photo: Joe Hagan

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Hunters in the Snow, 1565 (detail)
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Cold Pastoral (Fiction)

When Marina Keegan died, tragically, at the age of twenty-two, in a car accident in May, she had just graduated from Yale University and was about to start a job on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. 

We were in the stage where we couldn’t make serious eye contact for fear of implying we were too invested. We used euphemisms like “I miss you” and “I like you” and smiled every time our noses got too close. I was staying over at his place two or three nights a week and met his parents at an awkward brunch in Burlington. A lot of time was spent being consciously romantic: making sushi, walking places, waiting too long before responding to texts. I fluctuated between adding songs to his playlist and wondering if I should stop hooking up with people I was eighty per cent into and finally spend some time alone. (Read the books I was embarrassed I hadn’t read.) (Call my mother.) The thing is, I like being liked, and a lot of my friends had graduated and moved to cities. I’d thought about ending things but my roommate Charlotte advised me against it. Brian was handsome and smoked the same amount as me, and sometimes in the morning, I’d wake up and smile first thing because he made me feel safe.

In March, he died. I was microwaving instant Thai soup when I got a call from his best friend, asking if I knew which hospital he was at.

“Who?” I said. “Brian,” he said. “You haven’t heard?”

I was in a seminar my senior year where we read poems by John Keats. He has this famous one called “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where these two lovers are almost kissing, frozen with their faces cocked beneath a tree. The tragedy, the professor said, is in eternal stasis. She never fades, they never kiss; but I remember finding the whole thing vaguely romantic. My ideal, after all, was always before we walked home—and ironically, I had that now.

* * *

I watched as the microwave droned in lopsided circles, but I never took the soup out. Someone else must have. Charlotte, perhaps, or one of my friends that came over in groups, offering foods in imitations of an adult response and trying to decipher my commitment. I was trying, too. I’d made out with a guy named Otto when I was back in Austin over Christmas, and Brian and I had never quite stopped playing games. We were involved, of course, but not associated.

“What’s the deal?” people would shout over the music when he’d gone to get a drink, and I’d explain that there was no deal to explain.

“We’re hanging out,” I’d say, smiling. “We like hanging out.”

I think we took a certain pride in our ambiguity. As if the tribulations of it all were somehow beneath us. Secretly, of course, the pauses in our correspondence were as calculated as our casualness—and we’d wait for those drunken moments when we might admit a “hey,” pause, “I like you.”

“Are you O.K.?,” they asked now. Whispering almost, as if I were fragile. We sat around that first night sipping singular drinks, a friend turning on a song and then stopping it. I wish I could say I was shocked into a state of inarticulate confusion, but I found myself remarkably capable of answering questions.

“They weren’t dating,” Sarah whispered to Sam, and I gave a soft smile so they knew it was O.K. that I’d heard.

But it became clear very quickly that I’d underestimated how much I liked him. Not him, perhaps, but the fact that I had someone on the other end of an invisible line. Someone to update and get updates from, to inform of a comic discovery, to imagine while dancing in a lonely basement, and to return to, finally, when the music stopped. Brian’s death was the clearest and most horrifying example of my terrific obsession with the unattainable. Alive, his biggest flaw was most likely that he liked me. Dead, his perfections were clearer.

But I’m not being fair. The fact of the matter is I felt a strange but recognizable hole that grew just behind my lungs. There was a person whose eyes and neck and penis I had kissed the night before, and this person no longer existed. The second cliché was that I couldn’t quite encompass it. Regardless, I surprised myself that night by crying alone once my friends had left, my face pressed hard against my pillow.

by Marina Keegan, The New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration: Hannah K. Lee

Dave Matthews, Tim Reynolds

[ed. This has become sort of a Christmas tradition. Dave Matthews' Christmas Song.]

Christmas Song

She was his girl, he was her boyfriend
Soon to be his wife, make him her husband
A surprise on the way, any day, any day
One healthy little giggling, dribbling baby boy
The Wise Men came, three made their way
To shower him with love
While he lay in the hay
Shower him with love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love was all around

Not very much of his childhood was known
Kept his mother Mary worried
Always out on his own
He met another Mary who for a reasonable fee
Less than reputable was known to be
His heart was full of love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love was all around

When Jesus Christ was nailed to his tree
Said "Oh, Daddy-o, I can see how it all soon will be
I came to shed a little light on this darkening scene
Instead I fear I've spilled the blood of our children all around."
The blood of our children all around
The blood of our childrens all around

So I'm told, so the story goes
The people he knew were
Less than golden-hearted
Gamblers and robbers
Drinkers and jokers
All soul searchers
Like you and me
Like you and me

Rumors insisted that he soon would be
For his deviations taken into custody
By the authorities, less informed than he.
Drinkers and jokers, all soul searchers
Searching for love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love was all around

Preparations were made
For his celebration day
He said, "Eat this bread, and think of it as me
Drink this wine and dream it will be
The blood of our children all around,
The blood of our children all around.
The blood of our childrens all around

Father up above,
Why in all this anger do you fill me up with love, love, love?
Love, love, love
Love, love was all around

Father up above,
Why in all this hatred do you fill me up with love?
Fill me with love, love, yeah
Love, love, love
Love, love, and the blood of our children all around

The Coming Drone Attack on America

People often ask me, in terms of my argument about "ten steps" that mark the descent to a police state or closed society, at what stage we are. I am sorry to say that with the importation of what will be tens of thousands of drones, by both US military and by commercial interests, into US airspace, with a specific mandate to engage in surveillance and with the capacity for weaponization – which is due to begin in earnest at the start of the new year – it means that the police state is now officially here.

In February of this year, Congress passed the FAA Reauthorization Act, with its provision to deploy fleets of drones domestically. Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that this followed a major lobbying effort, "a huge push by […] the defense sector" to promote the use of drones in American skies: 30,000 of them are expected to be in use by 2020, some as small as hummingbirds – meaning that you won't necessarily see them, tracking your meeting with your fellow-activists, with your accountant or your congressman, or filming your cruising the bars or your assignation with your lover, as its video-gathering whirs.

Others will be as big as passenger planes. Business-friendly media stress their planned abundant use by corporations: police in Seattle have already deployed them.

An unclassified US air force document reported by CBS (pdf) news expands on this unprecedented and unconstitutional step – one that formally brings the military into the role of controlling domestic populations on US soil, which is the bright line that separates a democracy from a military oligarchy. (The US constitution allows for the deployment of National Guard units by governors, who are answerable to the people; but this system is intended, as is posse comitatus, to prevent the military from taking action aimed at US citizens domestically.)

The air force document explains that the air force will be overseeing the deployment of its own military surveillance drones within the borders of the US; that it may keep video and other data it collects with these drones for 90 days without a warrant – and will then, retroactively, determine if the material can be retained – which does away for good with the fourth amendment in these cases. While the drones are not supposed to specifically "conduct non-consensual surveillance on on specifically identified US persons", according to the document, the wording allows for domestic military surveillance of non-"specifically identified" people (that is, a group of activists or protesters) and it comes with the important caveat, also seemingly wholly unconstitutional, that it may not target individuals "unless expressly approved by the secretary of Defense".

In other words, the Pentagon can now send a domestic drone to hover outside your apartment window, collecting footage of you and your family, if the secretary of Defense approves it. Or it may track you and your friends and pick up audio of your conversations, on your way, say, to protest or vote or talk to your representative, if you are not "specifically identified", a determination that is so vague as to be meaningless.

What happens to those images, that audio? "Distribution of domestic imagery" can go to various other government agencies without your consent, and that imagery can, in that case, be distributed to various government agencies; it may also include your most private moments and most personal activities. The authorized "collected information may incidentally include US persons or private property without consent". Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told CBS:

"In some records that were released by the air force recently … under their rules, they are allowed to fly drones in public areas and record information on domestic situations."

This document accompanies a major federal push for drone deployment this year in the United States, accompanied by federal policies to encourage law enforcement agencies to obtain and use them locally, as well as by federal support for their commercial deployment. That is to say: now HSBC, Chase, Halliburton etc can have their very own fleets of domestic surveillance drones. The FAA recently established a more efficient process for local police departments to get permits for their own squadrons of drones.

Given the Department of Homeland Security militarization of police departments, once the circle is completed with San Francisco or New York or Chicago local cops having their own drone fleet – and with Chase, HSBC and other banks having hired local police, as I reported here last week – the meshing of military, domestic law enforcement, and commercial interests is absolute. You don't need a messy, distressing declaration of martial law.

by Naomi Wolf, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photograph: US navy/Reuters

From Us to You

[ed. I don't know...does anybody ever get one of these anymore? Maybe it's just me. Or maybe it's Facebook's fault (isn't everything?) -- the Christmas letter now gets dribbled out all year long.]

"I think we ought to write a Christmas letter this year," my wife said at the breakfast table the other morning.

"A Christmas letter. You know, like the kind the Huggins send out to all their friends every year."

I recalled the Huggins' Christmas letters: five page mimeographed reports on family activities for the preceding year, with the simple greetings of the season all but buried.

I hurried off to work before my wife could pursue the subject any further, but, that evening she presented me with a packet of letters including not only the recent efforts of the Huggins hut Christmas letters other families had sent us as well.

"Now you read these and see if you don't think it would be a good idea for us to do this instead of sending cards this Christmas," she said.

One would have been enough, for the letters were indistinguishable in style and content. Posing innocently as Christmas greetings, they were actually unabashed family sagas. The writers touched lightly on the misfortunes which their families suffered during the year, dwelt gladly on happy events, and missed no opportunity for self congratulation.

I haven't the slightest intention of writing a Christmas letter myself, but once I'd put a red or green ribbon in my typewriter, I'm sure I could turn one out in no time at all.

"OUR HOUSE TO YOURS!" is the standard beginning. Centered at the top of an 8 x 11" sheet of paper, it spares the writer the nuisance of penning salutations on the hundred or more copies he will doubtless send out. The exclamation mark is the first of dozens that will be used. No Christmas letter averages fewer than eighteen "!'s," "!!'s," or "(!)'s" a page.

The opening sentence always starts with the word "Well." "Well, here it is Christmas again!" is a favorite; or, "Well, hard as it is to realize, Christmas has rolled round once more!" A somewhat more expansive opening is "Well, Christmas finds us all one year older, but young as ever in the spirit of the Season!" Actually what is said is unimportant as long as the sentence starts with "Well," and ends, of course, with an exclamation mark.

Having taken due note of the season, the Christmas letter writer works immediately into his first main topic—the accidents which befell him and his family and the diseases they suffered during the year. He writes with cheerful fortitude. Broken arms and legs call forth the reminiscent chuckle, and childhood diseases open the way for humor of a sort. "As it must to all children," the Huggins wrote last Christmas, "the mumps came to Albert Jr. and to Susie. Fortunately they were taken sick during the spring vacation and didn't miss any school. We don't think they'd agree with our use of the word 'fortunately.' (Haha!)" The parenthetical "Ha ha!" or simply "Ha!" appears at least once in each paragraph of a Christmas letter.

by William J. Copithorne, The Atlantic |  Read more:

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