Adrià Cañameras
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Dan Voinea
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Art Attack: The Story Behind Banksy

When Time magazine selected the British artist Banksy—graffiti master, painter, activist, filmmaker and all-purpose provocateur—for its list of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2010, he found himself in the company of Barack Obama, Steve Jobs and Lady Gaga. He supplied a picture of himself with a paper bag (recyclable, naturally) over his head. Most of his fans don’t really want to know who he is (and have loudly protested Fleet Street attempts to unmask him). But they do want to follow his upward tra­jectory from the outlaw spraying—or, as the argot has it, “bombing”—walls in Bristol, England, during the 1990s to the artist whose work commands hundreds of thousands of dollars in the auction houses of Britain and America. Today, he has bombed cities from Vienna to San Francisco, Barcelona to Paris and Detroit. And he has moved from graffiti on gritty urban walls to paint on canvas, conceptual sculpture and even film, with the guileful documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was nominated for an Academy Award.

Pest Control, the tongue-in-cheek-titled organization set up by the artist to authenticate the real Banksy artwork, also protects him from prying outsiders. Hiding behind a paper bag, or, more commonly, e-mail, Banksy relentlessly controls his own narrative. His last face-to-face interview took place in 2003.

While he may shelter behind a concealed identity, he advocates a direct connection between an artist and his constituency. “There’s a whole new audience out there, and it’s never been easier to sell [one’s art],” Banksy has maintained. “You don’t have to go to college, drag ’round a portfolio, mail off transparencies to snooty galleries or sleep with someone powerful, all you need now is a few ideas and a broadband connection. This is the first time the essentially bourgeois world of art has belonged to the people. We need to make it count.”

The Barton Hill district of Bristol in the 1980s was a scary part of town. Very white—probably no more than three black families had somehow ended up there—working-class, run-down and unwelcoming to strangers. So when Banksy, who came from a much leafier part of town, decided to go make his first foray there, he was nervous. “My dad was badly beaten up there as a kid,” he told fellow graffiti artist and author Felix Braun. He was trying out names at the time, sometimes signing himself Robin Banx, although this soon evolved into Banksy. The shortened moniker may have demonstrated less of the gangsters’ “robbing banks” cachet, but it was more memorable—and easier to write on a wall.

Around this time, he also settled on his distinctive stencil approach to graffiti. When he was 18, he once wrote, he was painting a train with a gang of mates when the British Transport Police showed up and everyone ran. “The rest of my mates made it to the car,” Banksy recalled, “and disappeared so I spent over an hour hidden under a dumper truck with engine oil leaking all over me. As I lay there listening to the cops on the tracks, I realized I had to cut my painting time in half or give it up altogether. I was staring straight up at the stenciled plate on the bottom of the fuel tank when I realized I could just copy that style and make each letter three feet high.” But he also told his friend, author Tristan Manco: “As soon as I cut my first stencil I could feel the power there. I also like the political edge. All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They’ve been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.”

by Will Elsworth-Jones, Smithsonian |  Read more:
Illustration: Banksy

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Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office?

The letter is mailed from Gold Hill, Oregon.

The eleven hundred residents of this lingering gold-rush town, mostly mechanics and carpenters and retail clerks in other places, wake with the sun and end their day with a walk to the aluminum mailbox bolted to a post at the edge of their yard. In between, Carrie Grabenhorst heads out of town on highway 99, follows the Rogue River, and turns right on Sardine Creek Road. She turns left at a large madrone tree and heads up a quarter mile of dirt road, takes the right fork, goes past the sagging red barn to a white clapboard house with green trim, where she takes a dog biscuit from her pocket and offers it to the large golden retriever. It's a Monday, about 2:00 p.m. The dog stops barking. This is the usual peace, negotiated after thousands of visits over eighteen years.

Often Grabenhorst's elderly customers are waiting at the door, or even by the mailbox, for her right-hand-drive Jeep to edge onto the shoulder. Many of them are alone all day. Their postal carrier is that one reliable human contact, six days a week. Some are older veterans. Quite a few have limited mobility, and it isn't uncommon for her to lend a hand with an errand; she's been known to pick up milk in town and bring it along with the mail. Grabenhorst drives seventy miles a day and makes 660 deliveries. On a typical day, that might include fifty packages of medicine.

Her route is one of 227,000 throughout America. On the South Side of Chicago, carriers walk cracked sidewalks, past empty lots and overfilled projects. In the suburbs of Phoenix, mail trucks deliver to banks of mailboxes outside gated communities. In Brooklyn, they pushed their carts up sidewalks and ducked into bodegas on September 11, as they always do. Residents say they were comforted to see their postal workers still making the rounds, the government still functioning. In rural Alaska, mail comes by snowmobile and seaplane. In chaps and a cowboy hat, Charlie Chamberlain leads a train of postal mules down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where a tribe of Havasupai Indians lives. Wearing blue trunks and a ball cap, Mark Lipscomb delivers letters by speedboat up and down the Magnolia River in Alabama.

Want to send a letter to Talkeetna, Alaska, from New York? It will cost you fifty dollars by UPS. Grabenhorst or Lipscomb can do it for less than two quarters: the same as the cost of getting a letter from Gold Hill to Shady Cove, Oregon, twenty miles up the road. It's how the postal service works: The many short-distance deliveries down the block or across the city pay for the longer ones across the country. From the moment Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster general in 1775, the purpose of the post office has always been to bind the nation together. It was a way of unifying thirteen disparate colonies so that the abolitionist in Philadelphia had access to the same information and newspapers as the slaveholder in Augusta, Georgia.

Today the postal service has a network that stretches across America: 461 distribution centers, 32,000 post offices, and 213,000 vehicles, the largest civilian fleet in the world. Trucks carrying mail log 1.2 billion miles a year. The postal service handles almost half of the entire planet's mail. It can physically connect any American to any other American in 3.7 million square miles of territory in a few days, often overnight: a vast lattice of veins and arteries and capillaries designed to circulate the American lifeblood of commerce and information and human contact.

Grabenhorst sports a few blond streaks in her brown bangs, which curl over her forehead, perfectly framing her azure eyes and chiseled cheekbones. Rural carriers don't wear official uniforms, so today she's in shorts and an Oregon State T-shirt. Letters arrive at the post office in Gold Hill already sequenced in the order Grabenhorst will deliver them, but the "flats" — magazines, catalogs, large envelopes — and packages do not, so in the back of the post office she and her two colleagues stand at their own three-sided bank of metal slots, hundreds of them, one for each address, and merge the separate streams — a process called "throwing the mail." (...)

In mid-November, the postmaster general, Patrick Donahoe, reported that the post office had lost $15.9 billion for the year and was operating on just a few days' cash flow, having reached its legal debt limit. He all but begged Congress to take action. Mail was down 5 percent from the year before, and wages and benefits and other worker-related costs were an unsustainable 80 percent of the postal service's $81 billion operating expenses.

But nobody wants to hear that more than 70 percent of those losses were for extraordinary budget obligations mandated by Congress, or that the postal service posted its thirteenth-straight quarter of productivity gains. In a nation obsessed with cutting budgets and government fat, there is no better target than the federal postal worker who will have her route delivering paper mail for life, and then try to pass it on to her daughter.

Eighty-five percent of America's critical infrastructure is controlled by the private sector. We let private companies fight our wars; we have 110,000 defense contractors in Afghanistan compared with 68,000 American troops. We let private companies lock up 16 percent of our federal inmates and instruct 10 percent of our students. They provide our phone service and Internet access and air travel and hospital care. Surely, many believe, private companies can deliver our mail better and faster and cheaper than the federal government.

If you work with actual pieces of mail — if you are a carrier, a handler, a clerk, but not an administrator — it is said that you "touch the mail." The postal service has more than half a million full-time workers and a hundred thousand contract employees, the vast majority of which are mail touchers. Each morning, Grabenhorst enters into a ledger she keeps at her workstation exactly how much mail she's thrown and will be delivering that day. In Washington, D.C., they count in billions of pieces, but carriers talk about mail volume in feet — the width of a mail stack laid on its edge, face to flap.

On this unremarkable Monday, she'd written 14.75 feet. She flipped the pages of the ledger back to the previous year, to the same date: 17.5 feet.

That we're sending less mail is not debatable. Nor is it debatable that the post office as we've known it for the past forty years, one built for speed and brute force in sorting and distributing an ever-surging flood of paper documents, is outdated in our digital world.

This isn't a story about whether we could live without the post office.

It's about whether we'd want to.

by Jesse Lichtenstein, Esquire |  Read more:

Photo: Jake Stangel

Pandora’s Boxes

A pair of scientists, sporting white clean-suits complete with helmets and face masks, approach a prefab agricultural greenhouse in a clearing at Duke University’s Research Forest. Inside are two long rows of wooden boxes the size of large horse troughs, which hold samples of the natural world that surrounds them—the pine groves and rhododendron thickets of North Carolina’s piedmont, which at this moment are alive with bird song.

Looking a lot like the government bad guys in E.T., the two men cautiously hover over a row of boxes containing native sedges, water grasses, and Zebra fish to spray a fine mist of silver nanoparticles over them. Their goal: to investigate how the world inside the boxes is altered by these essentially invisible and notoriously unpredictable particles.

The researchers are part of a multidisciplinary coalition of scientists from Duke, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Howard, Virginia Tech, and the University of Kentucky, headquartered at Duke’s Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology (CEINT), that represents one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to measure how nanoparticles affect ecosystems and biological systems.

So far the questions about whether nanoparticles are an environmental risk outnumber the answers, which is why the Duke scientists take the precaution of wearing clean-suits while dosing the boxes—no one’s sure what exposure to a high concentration of nanoparticles might do. Among the few things we do know about them are that they sail past the blood-brain barrier and can harm the nervous systems of some animals.

The regulation of nanoparticles has been recommended for more than a decade, but there’s no agreement on exactly how to do it. Meanwhile, the lid has already been lifted on nanotechnology. The use of man-made nanoparticles has spread into almost every area of our lives: food, clothing, medicine, shampoo, toothpaste, sunscreen, and thousands of other products.

Regulatory structures, both here and abroad, are completely unprepared for this onslaught of nanoproducts, because nanoparticles don’t fit into traditional regulatory categories. Additionally, companies often shield details about them by labeling them “proprietary”; they’re difficult to detect; we don’t have protocols for judging their effects; and we haven’t even developed the right tools for tracking them. If nanotechnology and its uses represent a frontier of sorts, it’s not simply the Wild West—it’s the Chaotic, Undiscovered, Uncontrollable West.

by Heather Millar, Orion |  Read more:

Image via Nanoparticles.org

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Facebook as a Window Into Social Media

Why is Facebook such a repeatedly bad actor in its relationship to its users, constantly testing and probing for ways to quietly or secretly breach the privacy constraints that most of its users expect and demand, strategems to invade their carefully maintained social networks? Because it has to. That’s Facebook’s version of the Red Queen’s race, its bargain with investment capital. Facebook will keep coming back and back again with various schemes and interface trickery because if it stops, it will be the LiveJournal or BBS of 2020, a trivia answer and nostalgic memory.

That is not the inevitable fate of all social media. It is a distinctive consequence of the intersection of massive slops of surplus investment capital looking desperately for somewhere to come to rest; the character of Facebook’s niche in the ecology of social media; and the path-dependent evolution of Facebook’s interface.

Analysts and observers who are content with cliches characterize Facebook as sitting on a treasure trove of potentially valuable data about its users, which is true enough. The cliched view is that what’s valuable about that data is names associated with locations associated with jobs associated with social networks, in a very granular way. That’s not it. That data can be mined easily from a variety of sources and has been mined relentlessly for years, before social media was even an idea. If an advertiser or company or candidate wants to find “professors who live in the 19081 area code who vote Democratic and shop at Trader Joe’s in Media” they can buy that information from many vendors. If that were all Facebook was holding, it wouldn’t have any distinctive wares, even imagined, to hock. All it could do is offer them at a bargain rate–and in the global economy, you can’t undercut the real bargain sellers of information. Not that this would keep Facebook from pretending like it has something to sell, because it has a bunch of potentially angry investors ready to start burning effigies.

What Facebook is holding is a type of largely unique data that is the collaborative product of its users and its interface. But if I were a potential buyer of such data, I’d approach my purchase with a lot of caution even if Facebook managed to once and for all trick or force its users into surrendering it freely to anyone with the money to spend. If my goal is to sell something to Facebook users, or to know something about what they’re likely to do in the future, in buying Facebook’s unique data, what I’m actually learning about is a cyborg, a virtual organism, that can only fully live and express inside of Facebook’s ecology. Facebook’s distinctive informational holding is actually two things: a more nuanced view of its users’ social networks than most other data sources can provide and a record of expressive agency.

On the first of these: the social mappings aren’t easily monetized in conventional terms. Who needs to buy knowledge about any individual’s (or many individuals’) social networks? Law enforcement and intelligence services, but the former can subpeona that information when it needs to and the latter can simply steal it or demand it with some other kind of legal order. Some academics would probably love to have that data but they don’t have deep pockets and they have all sorts of pesky ethical restrictions that would keep them from using it at the granular level that makes Facebook’s information distinctive. Marketers don’t necessarily need to know that much about social networks except when they’re selling a relatively long-tail niche product. That’s a very rare situation: how often are you going to be manufacturing a TARDIS USB hub or artisanal chipotle-flavored mustache wax and not know exactly who might buy such a thing and how to reach them?

Social networks of this granularity are only good for one thing if you’re an advertiser or a marketer: simulating word-of-mouth, hollowing out a person and settling into their skin like a possessing spirit. If that’s your game, your edge, the way you think you’re going to move more toothpaste or get one more week’s box office out of a mediocre film, then Facebook is indeed an irresistable prize.

The problem is that most of us have natively good heuristics for detecting when friends and acquaintances have been turned into meme-puppets, offline and online. Most of us have had that crawling sensation while talking to someone we thought we knew and suddenly we trip across a subject or an experience that rips open what we thought we knew and lets some reservoir, some pre-programmed narrative spill out of our acquaintance: some fearful catechism, some full-formed paranoid narrative, some dogma. Or sometimes something less momentous, just that slightly amusing moment where a cliche, slogan or advertising hook speaks itself from a real person’s mouth like a squeaky little fart, usually to the embarrassment of any modestly self-aware individual.

by Timothy Burke, Easily Distracted |  Read more:

Regulators Discover a Hidden Viral Gene in Commercial GMO Crops

How should a regulatory agency announce they have discovered something potentially very important about the safety of products they have been approving for over twenty years?

In the course of analysis to identify potential allergens in GMO crops, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has belatedly discovered that the most common genetic regulatory sequence in commercial GMOs also encodes a significant fragment of a viral gene (Podevin and du Jardin 2012). This finding has serious ramifications for crop biotechnology and its regulation, but possibly even greater ones for consumers and farmers. This is because there are clear indications that this viral gene (called Gene VI) might not be safe for human consumption. It also may disturb the normal functioning of crops, including their natural pest resistance.

What Podevin and du Jardin discovered is that of the 86 different transgenic events (unique insertions of foreign DNA) commercialized to-date in the United States 54 contain portions of Gene VI within them. They include any with a widely used gene regulatory sequence called the CaMV 35S promoter (from the cauliflower mosaic virus; CaMV). Among the affected transgenic events are some of the most widely grown GMOs, including Roundup Ready soybeans (40-3-2) and MON810 maize. They include the controversial NK603 maize recently reported as causing tumors in rats (Seralini et al. 2012).

The researchers themselves concluded that the presence of segments of Gene VI “might result in unintended phenotypic changes”. They reached this conclusion because similar fragments of Gene VI have already been shown to be active on their own (e.g. De Tapia et al. 1993). In other words, the EFSA researchers were unable to rule out a hazard to public health or the environment.

In general, viral genes expressed in plants raise both agronomic and human health concerns (reviewed in Latham and Wilson 2008). This is because many viral genes function to disable their host in order to facilitate pathogen invasion. Often, this is achieved by incapacitating specific anti-pathogen defenses. Incorporating such genes could clearly lead to undesirable and unexpected outcomes in agriculture. Furthermore, viruses that infect plants are often not that different from viruses that infect humans. For example, sometimes the genes of human and plant viruses are interchangeable, while on other occasions inserting plant viral fragments as transgenes has caused the genetically altered plant to become susceptible to an animal virus (Dasgupta et al. 2001). Thus, in various ways, inserting viral genes accidentally into crop plants and the food supply confers a significant potential for harm.

The Choices for Regulators

The original discovery by Podevin and du Jardin (at EFSA) of Gene VI in commercial GMO crops must have presented regulators with sharply divergent procedural alternatives. They could 1) recall all CaMV Gene VI-containing crops (in Europe that would mean revoking importation and planting approvals) or, 2) undertake a retrospective risk assessment of the CaMV promoter and its Gene VI sequences and hope to give it a clean bill of health.

It is easy to see the attraction for EFSA of option two. Recall would be a massive political and financial decision and would also be a huge embarrassment to the regulators themselves. It would leave very few GMO crops on the market and might even mean the end of crop biotechnology.

Regulators, in principle at least, also have a third option to gauge the seriousness of any potential GMO hazard. GMO monitoring, which is required by EU regulations, ought to allow them to find out if deaths, illnesses, or crop failures have been reported by farmers or health officials and can be correlated with the Gene VI sequence. Unfortunately, this particular avenue of enquiry is a scientific dead end. Not one country has carried through on promises to officially and scientifically monitor any hazardous consequences of GMOs (1).

Unsurprisingly, EFSA chose option two. However, their investigation resulted only in the vague and unreassuring conclusion that Gene VI “might result in unintended phenotypic changes” (Podevin and du Jardin 2012). This means literally, that changes of an unknown number, nature, or magnitude may (or may not) occur. It falls well short of the solid scientific reassurance of public safety needed to explain why EFSA has not ordered a recall.

Can the presence of a fragment of virus DNA really be that significant? Below is an independent analysis of Gene VI and its known properties and their safety implications. This analysis clearly illustrates the regulators’ dilemma.

by Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson, Independent Science News |  Read more:
Image: Cauliflower Mosaic Virus uncredited

Leah Giberson
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Gun Control and Gun Culture in America

But, you know, I do think that Newtown changed it. And I think Newtown changed it in a way that none of us really understands. And it is because of victims and the teachers. It is just that setting. It is just -- it's such an absolutely unimaginable setting.

And I just -- just on a personal note, on April 9, 1968, I was in Ebenezer Baptist Church when Martin Luther King's funeral -- a remarkable event. And two months later, I was working in California in Robert Kennedy's campaign when he was shot.

Martin Luther King was 39. Robert Kennedy was 42. That's -- 42 years after their being shot, 1,260,703 Americans died in firearms -- by firearms. In the total history of the United States in every war, in the Revolutionary, all the world's wars, 659,000 Americans have died in combat, twice as many in one-fifth the time.

And I think the president has the capacity and the standing at this point to make that case that we -- that this is not American exceptionalism, when we have five times -- four times as many people killed in this country as in the next 21 richest countries in the world in one year.

by Mark Shields, PBS Newshour (excerpt) |  Read more: 

Apple core - Julien Gudéa via Boum! Bang!
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Sterling Hundley
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The Luxury Rental Girlfriend

Jack is in his 30s. He’s good-looking, makes money and has a nice apartment, and in this city, what all that gets you is almost everything. He meets me on Greenwich Street one morning for black coffee. Two girls he knows come walking by. He smiles, and his blue eyes are warm, but on one girl’s face you can see that whole wringing week she waited for a call.

You’re Jack, and you take a girl out to dinner at Blue Ribbon, and she spends three hours deciding if you’re the kind of guy who will like her more if she sleeps with you or if she doesn’t. If you like her enough, it will mean East Hampton on Memorial Day and Nantucket on Labor Day and New Canaan for life. And God help her, there will be golden retrievers.

Jack can have any girl he wants. A blond event planner who wears heels on Sunday mornings. A former fit model who looks great in Hanes white. A yoga instructor who makes him spicy tempeh wraps with steamed kale on the side. There are girls who make great Bloody Marys and there are good girls who go to church on Sunday with their families, but last night they were at Jack’s. There are girls who ride horses and lawyers and designers and tall ones and short ones, stacking their needs up across his walls and then saying those are not needs, they are shadows.

So why does Jack prefer escorts?

One night Jack comes over to my apartment. He brings over a girl named Kimberly (her fake name) who says she’s 24 (her fake age). She’s wearing jeans, a black scoop-neck shirt and tall black suede boots. She looks like the part of Florida she’s from, sun-pressed and squeezed out into a glass.

She and Jack have this easy back-and-forth, sitting side by side at the kitchen table. They’ve known each other for about a year. He found her on Backpage.com, which is where people like Jack have gone since Craigslist shut down its Adult Services section.

The first time, she gave him oral sex. She came over to his big apartment, and it was a blinder date than usual because Jack was looking for a quick fix. Normally he does his homework, using Eros.com, which is an escort directory, and The Erotic Review, or TER, which is Yelp for the sex trade, where johns trade information about the escorts and offer specific statistics. Hair length? Photo accurate? Shaved? More than one guy at a time? Full, no-rush session?

Created a decade ago by a john who was tired of being misled, TER sees about 350,000 visitors a day, men between the ages of 35 and 55 with a median income of $80,000. They wax nostalgic about Mistress Natalie and Emma of New York, and if you pay for a membership, you too can read about how WkndWhacker found VIP Daisy’s breasts even fuller in the flesh than they looked on her website, and how the way she kissed was like “honey warming in his mouth.”

At first it seems like a niche thing, and then one night a bunch of guys have four Coors Lights and one general counsel says to another, “Wait, so what’s your TER handle?”

The guys refer to themselves as hobbyists. The hobby is sleeping with beautiful women and then reviewing and categorizing them. It’s as routine as Zagat, clinical in its ratings, exuberant in its quotables and so much a part of a hobbyist’s daily throttle that a group of escorts recently offered a holiday discount to johns who make donations to the K.I.D.S. Hurricane Sandy relief fund.

Many of the girls provide the Girlfriend Experience, or GFE. They rub your back and you take them to dinner, and they are in tune with politics, so you can say how you feel about Obamacare. You share some Kumamotos and Sancerre and then you cab back to the Waldorf.

There’s Venezuelan Goddess, who has long black hair and D-cup breasts in a lace demi and ankle cowboy boots. There is Bai Xi, who always pops up in the top 10; she’s small and Asian and replies to emails promptly. There is Jessica, with her Farrah Fawcett waves and Eastern Bloc lips. She says, “I have very long blonde hair & soft skin with amazing eyes & great smile. My outgoing personality will have you feeling very comfortable from the moment we meet, as if we have known each other for years.”

And that’s the main ticket. That’s why guys like Jack hire Jessicas for $1,000 a night instead of paying $200 for dinner with the lawyer who’s got a CrossFit addiction. The Bai Xis give you the same thing. Why go out with a Wife in Training when you can go out with the Perpetual Girlfriend? She puts out every time like she’s bucking for a rating, while the Wife in Training wants to know why you didn’t walk the four flights of her walk-up to collect her for dinner. She wants your mornings. The Girlfriend only needs your nights.

by Lisa Taddeo, New York Observer  |  Read more:

Illustration by Thomas Pitilli

Restaurants Turn Camera Shy

When it comes to people taking photographs of their meals, the chef David Bouley has seen it all. There are the foreign tourists who, despite their big cameras, tend to be very discreet. There are those who use a flash and annoy everyone around them. There are those who come equipped with gorillapods — those small, flexible tripods to use on their tables.

There are even those who stand on their chairs to shoot their plates from above.

“We get on top of those folks right away or else it’s like a circus,” Mr. Bouley said.

But rather than tell people they can’t shoot their food — the food they are so proud to eat that they need to share it immediately with everyone they know — he simply takes them back into his kitchen to shoot as the plates come out. “We’ll say, ‘That shot will look so much better on the marble table in our kitchen,’ ” Mr. Bouley said. “It’s like, here’s the sauce, here’s the plate. Snap it. We make it like an adventure for them instead of telling them no.”

Not every chef or restaurant owner is as accommodating, especially these days, as cameras have become as common as utensils. People are posting a shot of their quinoa salad online, or their ramen noodles on their blog. A growing backlash has prompted not only dirty looks from nearby diners, but also creative measures like Mr. Bouley’s and even some outright photo bans.

On a visit to Momofuku Ko, one diner thought nothing of subtly raising her iPhone and snapping a picture of her shaved foie. Like tens of thousands of others, she takes photos of her plates constantly, sometimes to the annoyance of her spouse, a chef.

“It just seemed very casual at Ko,” she recalled. The host was wearing jeans, hip-hop was on the playlist and a 12-year-old was sitting next to them. And this — this dish was the famous, fabulous shaved foie from the star chef David Chang. It only seemed natural to record it for posterity.

Then came the slapdown. A man in the open kitchen asked her to please put her phone away. No photos allowed.

“I was definitely embarrassed,” said the woman, who was so mortified that she spoke on condition of anonymity. Because the Michelin-starred restaurant is small — it seats only 12 — everyone at Ko witnessed the exchange. “I don’t want to be that person,” she added, stressing that she never, ever takes flash photography, never stands up for a shot and is always respectful of those around her. Since she is a part-owner of several restaurants, she knew why she was being chastised. “But I was caught off guard,” she acknowledged.

Mr. Chang is one of several chefs who either prohibit food photography (at Ko in New York) or have a policy against flashes (at Seiobo in Sydney, Australia, and Shoto in Toronto). High-end places like Per Se, Le Bernardin and Fat Duck discourage flash photography as well, though on a recent trip to the Thomas Keller restaurant Per Se, flashes were going off left and right, bouncing off the expansive windows overlooking Columbus Circle.

“It’s reached epic proportions,” says Steven Hall, the spokesman for Bouley and many other restaurants, who has worked in the business for 16 years. “Everybody wants to get their shot. They don’t care how it affects people around them.”

by Helene Stapinski, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Mark Matcho

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“Django Unchained”: Put-On, Revenge, and the Aesthetics of Trash

I have to face it: Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” is his most entertaining piece of moviemaking since “Pulp Fiction.” Some of it, particularly in the first half, is excruciatingly funny, and all of it has been brought off in a spirit of burlesque merriment—violent absurdity pushed to the level of flagrancy and beyond. That’s the place where Tarantino is happiest: out at the edge, playing with genre conventions, turning expectations inside out, ginning up the violence to exploitation-movie levels. The film is in two parts: the first half is a mock Western; the second is a mock-revenge melodrama about slavery, set in the deep South and ending in fountains of redemptive spurting blood. “Django” is a crap masterpiece, garrulous and repetitive, rich with jokes and cruelties, including some Old South cruelties that Tarantino invented for himself. It’s a very strange movie, luridly sadistic and morally ambitious at the same time, and the audience is definitely alive to it, revelling in its incongruities, enjoying what’s lusciously and profanely over the top.

What’s even stranger than the movie, however, is how seriously some of our high-minded critics have taken it as a portrait of slavery. Didn’t they notice that Tarantino throws in an “S.N.L.”-type skit about the Ku Klux Klan, who gather on their horses for a raid only to complain petulantly that they can’t see well out of their slitted white hoods? Or that Samuel L. Jackson does a roaring, bug-eyed parody of an Uncle Tom house slave in the second half? Or that the heroine of the movie, a female slave, is called Broomhilda von Shaft? Could Mel Brooks have done any better? (“Lili von Shtupp,” I suppose, is slightly better.) Yes, we are told that Broomhilda’s German mistress gave her the name and taught her German, but Tarantino is never more improbable than when he supplies explanations for his most bizarre fancies. Some of his characters spring from old genre movies, some spring full-blown from the master’s head. None have much basis in life, or in any social reality to speak of. (Remember the Jews who killed Nazis with baseball bats?) Yes, of course, there were killers in the Old West and cruel slave masters in the South—central characters in the movie—but Tarantino juices everything into gaudy pop fantasy. I enjoyed parts of “Django Unchained” very much, but I’m surprised that anyone can take it as anything more than an enormous put-on.

Much has already been written about the movie, but I would like to add a few notes of appreciation and complaint (don’t read past the middle of this post if you haven’t seen the movie).

1. Tarantino the Rhetorician

Tarantino loves elaborate rhetoric—the extremes of politeness, the exquisitely beautiful word, the lengthy, ridiculous argument that becomes funny precisely because it’s so entirely beside the point. Remember the stiff formalities among the criminals in “Reservoir Dogs”? Or the early conversation between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in “Pulp Fiction”? The two men are about to kill some punks who owe drug money to their boss. They stop to chat. The topic at hand: a man massaged the feet of the boss’s wife and, as punishment, was tossed out of a window. Is massaging a woman’s feet an offense worthy of death, like adultery? The thugs have quite a dispute about the matter; they could be bishops at the Council of Trent arguing the fine points of Church liturgy. Then they go ahead and blow the punks away. That’s the essential Tarantino joke—discourse and mayhem, punctilio and murder, linked together.

“Django” is set in 1858 and thereafter. A German bounty hunter, King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), poses as a dentist and spins around Texas, speaking perfect English. King Schultz is a mannerly scoundrel. When he encounters some white men transporting slaves through the dark woods, he says, “Among your company, I’m led to believe, there is a specimen I hope to acquire.” After shooting one of the white men, who howls in pain, he says, “If you could keep your caterwauling down to a minimum, I would like to speak to young Django.” Just as he did in “Inglorious Basterds,” in which Waltz was a polite S.S. killer, Tarantino writes fancy talk for this self-amused, highly elocutionary Austrian actor. The added comedy here is that the foreigner is so much more articulate than the tobacco-stained, scraggly-assed, lunkhead Americans he meets everywhere. He’s the Old World instructing the New in the fine points of etiquette and speech while enjoying the savage opportunities of the Wild West.

King Schultz teams up with Django, a slave he liberates, played by the growling Jamie Foxx (who doesn’t always seem to be in on the joke). The two travel around the West, killing wanted men for money. Schultz flimflams everybody, and in some cases shoots the person he’s teasing, popping him in the chest with a tiny pistol. Up until the middle of the movie, Tarantino comes close to moral realism: the cold-hearted Schultz is a complete cynic; he does what he does for money. We can accept that as some sort of truth. But then Schultz risks his life to help Django find his slave wife, who has been sold to a plantation owner in Mississippi, and the movie becomes nonsensical. The vicious comic cynicism of the first half gives way to vicious unbelievable sentiment in the second half. The murderous bounty hunter has a heart of gold.

by David Denby, New Yorker |  Read more:
Photo: Django Unchained

The Force: How Much Military is Enough?

The long history of military spending in the United States begins with the establishment of the War Department, in 1789. At first, the Secretary of War, a Cabinet member who, from the start, was a civilian, was called the Secretary at War, a holdover from the Revolution but also a prepositional manifestation of an ideological commitment: the department was chiefly to be called upon only if the nation was at war. Early Americans considered a standing army—a permanent army kept even in times of peace—to be a form of tyranny. “What a deformed monster is a standing army in a free nation,” Josiah Quincy, of Boston, wrote in 1774. Instead, they favored militias. About the first thing Henry Knox did when he became George Washington’s War Secretary was to draft a plan for establishing a uniform militia.

Beginning in 1822, congressional oversight was handled by two standing committees: one for the Army, the other for the Navy. A committee on the militia, established in 1815, was abolished in 1911—the militia itself having been essentially abandoned. Six years later, the United States entered the First World War, and the staggering devastation of that war raised both new and old fears about the business of arming men. In 1934, the publication of “Merchants of Death,” a best-seller and a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, contributed to the formation, that year, of the Senate Munitions Committee, headed by Gerald P. Nye, a North Dakota Republican. Not coincidentally, that was also the year Congress passed the National Firearms Act, which, among other things, strictly regulated the private ownership of machine guns. (Keeping military weapons out of the hands of civilians seemed to the Supreme Court, when it upheld the Firearms Act, in 1939, entirely consistent with the Second Amendment, which provides for the arming of militias.) For two years, Nye led the most rigorous inquiry into the arms industry that any branch of the federal government has ever conducted. He convened ninety-three hearings. He thought the ability to manufacture weapons should be restricted to the government. “The removal of the element of profit from war would materially remove the danger of more war,” he said. That never came to pass, partly because Nye was unable to distinguish his opposition to arms profiteering from his advocacy of isolationism, a position that had become indefensible.

Not until the Second World War did the United States establish what would become a standing army. And even that didn’t happen without dissent. In May of 1941, Robert Taft, a Republican senator from Ohio, warned that America’s entry into the Second World War would mean, ultimately, that the United States “will have to maintain a police force perpetually in Germany and throughout Europe.” Taft, like Nye, was an ardent isolationist. “Frankly, the American people don’t want to rule the world, and we are not equipped to do it. Such imperialism is wholly foreign to our ideals of democracy and freedom,” he said. “It is not our manifest destiny or our national destiny.” In 1944, when Nye ran for reëlection, he was defeated. Taft three times failed to win the Republican Presidential nomination. The Second World War demonstrated the folly of their vantage on foreign policy. It also made it more difficult to speak out against arms manufacturers and proponents of boundless military spending.

A peace dividend expected after the Allied victory in 1945 never came. Instead, the fight against Communism arrived, as well as a new bureaucratic regime. In 1946, the standing committees on military and naval affairs combined to become the Armed Services Committee. Under amendments to the National Security Act of 1947, which created the position of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the War Department, now housed for the first time in a building of its own, became the Department of Defense.

Meanwhile, during Senate hearings concerning the future of the national defense, military contractors such as Lockheed Martin—which was an object of Nye’s investigation in the nineteen-thirties, and built more than ten thousand aircraft during the Second World War—argued not only for military expansion but also for federal subsidies. In 1947, Lockheed Martin’s chief executive told a Senate committee that the nation needed funding for military production that was “adequate, continuous, and permanent.”

In the nineteen-fifties, at the height of both the Korean War and McCarthyism, the United States’ foreign policy had become the containment of Communism the world over, and military spending made up close to three-quarters of the federal budget. “Defense,” no less than “national security,” is a product and an artifact of the Cold War. So, in large part, is the budget for it.

by Jill Lepore, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Grant Cornett.

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