Income Inequality in America

[ed. Succinctly lays out the disparity in income that exists in America today. 1% of Americans have 40% of the nation's wealth, the bottom 80% have 7%.]

by John Aravosis, Americablog |  Read more:

Louis Émile Pinel De Grandchamp, Emina, Souvenir d'Orient. 1894
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Vanity Or Sanity? Self-Publishing In The Modern Age

The owner of my local bookshop recently tweeted, “If our cat said he had written a book, I wouldn't be that surprised. Every other fucker I know has.” I couldn’t have put it more acerbically myself. Although that doesn’t make me any happier to have to announce that I am one of those fuckers. When other writers ask me why I went the self-publishing route there’s usually a tentative hopefulness in the query; can that work now? Are you making any money? Did you jump or were you pushed? Unfortunately I have to say I was pushed; there’s no money yet - but it’s still early days.

It took two years of methodically going through the Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book, not once but twice, before I gave up on the idea of getting an agent. Received wisdom instructs that getting an agent is the only route to getting a publisher, because publishers’ slush piles (their teetering skyscrapers of unread manuscripts) have become agents’ slush piles - presumably because publishers no longer have the time or energy to pan the odd nugget of gold from the tons of slushy gravel. So, no agent; no publisher.

But why couldn’t I get an agent? Was there anything ostensibly wrong with my novel Etc Etc Amen? Obviously it’s impossible to be objective; I am a professional writer (The Independent, theartsdesk.com) and so technically it should have passed muster. And by the time I was taking my second trawl through the W&AY I’d picked up a fair number of extremely enthusiastic comments from other writers which I’d hoped would at least arouse some curiosity from these people. Alas, the general response was a template-rejection on the strength of the synopsis or opening chapter alone. I can categorically state that not a single agent I approached read the novel that they unanimously rejected.

As bad luck would have it, I completed EEA just as the country went into recession meltdown, so maybe that was a factor: almost immediately I got wind of the fact that no, that’s NO, first-time novelists were being offered contracts at the moment. Also one of the novel’s main themes might have counted against me: EEA has no truck with organised religion, frequently pointing at its absurdities and anachronisms in a blackly comic manner. Was the industry still running scared – post Satanic Verses - of publishing any fiction that could be perceived as anti-Islamic? Nick Cohen in his excellent You Can’t Read This Book certainly thinks so:

“Before Rushdie, publishers praised themselves for their business acumen in buying books that offended the authorities. After Rushdie, the smart business move was for a publishing house to turn down books that might offend religious zealots.”

EEA isn’t anti-Islamic – it’s simply anti-all deity-specific religions. But one thing I learnt early on in this process is that publishers want to quickly land on reasons not to publish your book rather than reasons to publish it. In other words, the job of that work experience kid just down from Oxford is to move on to the next manuscript as quickly as possible, because that next manuscript might be the next Hunger Games - or whatever other current success one publisher has that the other wants to replicate.

What else might have put them off? Well, there was my synopsis. In retrospect, the sorry 300-word effort I eventually squeezed out made EEA sound like a cliché-ridden rock novel that even I wouldn’t have touched with a mic stand. I agonised over writing this synopsis for weeks but could never find a way of conveying the full spirit of the book without going on for thousands of words. Unfortunately the briefest plot summary is all agents want, even if such a summary is doomed to make any novel sound like a great deal less than the sum of its parts.

Finally, EEA’s worst crime in their eyes is probably that it’s not easily categorisable: is it an airport novel with ideas above its station or a literary novel that’s too much fun for its own good? EEA is part murder mystery, part conspiracy thriller, part love story, part hate story and part religious satire. Not a problem in my eyes, but try convincing someone who’s unwilling to even read it that this is the case. I’d had arts critics from various broadsheet newspapers as well as a Whitbread Prize-winning novelist all say that EEA is something special. And only the other day an Italian woman informed me that she was translating it into Italian for her sister; she was so enamored by it. So why didn’t agents take the bait? Why didn’t they care that Jim Bob and Patrick Neate had registered their approval? One day I put this question to an agent whose rejection email had just landed in my inbox. His response was immediate:

“If you could get a quote from David Beckham saying he loved your book I could get you a publishing deal tomorrow.”

I doubt that these proudly cynical words tell you anything you didn’t know already about our stultifying celebrity culture, but placed on the table like that with such brutal finality made them seem quite shocking to me. After all, this is a novel not a pair of trainers. It was at this juncture that I started to think about Plan B. In recent years we have been told repeatedly that Plan B no longer has the credibility problem it used to. Plan B used to have to cower under the moniker ‘Vanity Publishing’, but now it’s stepped out into to the light as ‘Self Publishing’: what a difference a word makes. And what a difference a financial crisis makes.

Now that so few first-time novelists are being picked up by publishing houses - yet conversely it’s become relatively easy to get a book formatted for the increasingly popular Kindle and iPad - everyone and their …er…. cat can put their masterpiece out there for the world to either ignore or embrace. Not only that; a few of these authors are actually making money from their books. Admittedly it’s likely to be the writers who are industriously churning out teen vampire novels, chick litter (sic), or S&M lite, but one can still live in hope.

by Howard Male, The Quietus |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

Girlfriend Leads Photographer Around the World

Murad Osmann (@muradosmann on Instagram) is a Russian photographer and film producer (Hype Production) who has seen his personal photo series #followmeto on Instagram explode online in recent days. First it made the front page of Reddit, eventually spreading outwards to the likes of Mashable and other publications.

The story goes that Osmann’s girlfriend, Nataly Zakharova (@yourleo on Instagram), was getting tired of him always being preoccupied with his camera, literally resorting to dragging him by the hand to keep moving. This lead to the perspective we see in each shot of the series.

While many may find the photos a little ‘too’ over-processed, the concept is playful and a creative way to capture different places around the world. For the latest, follow Murad on Instagram @muradosmann

via: Twisted Sifter, Read more:

Back on the Trail

Late last year, a few days before Christmas, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford embarked on a delicate political mission. He went to see his ex-wife, Jenny.

It was only four years ago, in early 2009, that the couple were approaching their twentieth wedding anniversary and Sanford, a popular two-term Republican governor, was laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign. That was when, one afternoon in the governor’s mansion, Jenny went searching through some of her husband’s work papers and discovered a printed e-mail exchange between Mark and Maria Belén Chapur, the Argentine former television journalist with whom he was having an affair. (A sample of Sanford’s correspondence to Chapur: “I could digress and say that … I love your tan lines or that I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light.”) The rest of the world came to learn of Sanford’s infidelity five months later, at a surreal press conference in the South Carolina capital’s marble rotunda. There, Sanford admitted that he had not been “hiking along the Appalachian Trail,” as his office had told reporters who’d been inquiring about the awol governor’s whereabouts, but rather he had “spent the last five days of my life crying in Argentina” while visiting Chapur and “trying to get my heart right.” Sanford’s marriage was soon over—Jenny and the Sanfords’ four boys moved out of the governor’s mansion, and she filed for divorce—and so, it seemed, was his political career. By the time he left office at the end of his second term in 2011, Sanford recently told me, “I genuinely thought that was it for me in politics, and I don’t think it would take a rocket scientist to come up with that conclusion.”

But last December, Sanford says, a “rather miraculous chain of events” occurred: South Carolina senator Jim DeMint announced his resignation; then Governor Nikki Haley appointed as DeMint’s successor Congressman Tim Scott, who represented South Carolina’s First District—the same congressional district Sanford represented from 1995 to 2001 and whose vacant seat would be filled through a special election, with party primaries in March and the general election in May. Sanford began to prepare for a return to politics. The electoral sprint, he realized, would favor a candidate who started with high name recognition and deep coffers, and he has both.

So does Jenny. A former Lazard vice-president who gave up her banking career to raise a family, Jenny Sanford was a popular First Lady in South Carolina. Her political appeal deepened in the wake of her marriage’s implosion, as she became a Palmetto State version of Hillary Clinton, albeit one who did not stand by her man and did write a score-settling memoir. (A sample fromStaying True: “Mark joined me at one Lamaze class before deeming it a waste of his time since, as he explained, ‘I’ve spent many long nights helping cows give birth and I know what to do when the baby gets stuck.’ ”) Although she’s never held elected office, Jenny had been included on Haley’s short list of potential DeMint replacements. When she didn’t get the appointment, people immediately began mentioning her as a possible candidate for the newly open congressional seat. As an heiress to a power-tool fortune, she would even be able to self-finance. There was the distinct prospect of a “Sanford vs. Sanford” campaign.

Since their divorce, the Sanfords have barely been on speaking terms; when they do talk, it’s usually about the boys. But Mark went to meet with Jenny at her house this past December to discuss the congressional race. As he later explained it to reporters, he wanted to be magnanimous. “I sat down with her on the porch,” he told one, “and said, ‘If you have any thoughts about running for this, then I’m out, because I can’t think of anything more disastrous than for a husband and wife to run against each other.” He explained that it was only after he’d ascertained that Jenny wasn’t going to run that he decided to proceed with his campaign.

But Mark wanted more than just his ex-wife’s disavowal of interest. When he first ran for Congress in 1994, he installed Jenny as his campaign manager. He did this for reasons of economy—“You’re free,” he told her at the time—but she proved a natural at the job. She blossomed into a shrewd political strategist, running Mark’s subsequent campaigns and becoming his top adviser. Will Folks, a former Sanford press secretary, says, “There’s absolutely no way he would have ever won the congressional seat or been governor without her.”

According to Jenny, she had already told Mark she would be taking a pass on the race the day before, at the funeral of a mutual friend. So when Mark came to visit her, he arrived with a proposal. “Since you’re not running, I want to know if you’ll run my campaign,” he said. “We could put the team back together.”

Jenny told him, in so many words, that wasn’t going to happen. Mark made one last appeal.

“I could pay you this time,” he said.

by Jason Zengerle, New York Magazine |  Read more:
Photos: Chuck Grant, and Anne McQuary/Hey Baby Smile

The Perils of Perfection

"When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting” is the reassuring slogan greeting visitors at the Web site for LivesOn, a soon-to-launch service that promises to tweet on your behalf even after you die. By analyzing your earlier tweets, the service would learn “about your likes, tastes, syntax” and add a personal touch to all those automatically composed scribblings from the world beyond.

LivesOn may yet prove to be a parody, or it may fizzle for any number of reasons, but as an idea it highlights the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley today: what could be disrupted should be disrupted — even death.

Barriers and constraints — anything that imposes artificial limits on the human condition — are being destroyed with particular gusto. Superhuman, another mysterious start-up that could enliven any comedy show, promises to offer, as its co-founder recently put it, an unspecified service that “helps people be superhuman.” Well, at least they had the decency not to call it The Übermensch.

Recent debates about Twitter revolutions or the Internet’s impact on cognition have mostly glossed over the fact that Silicon Valley’s technophilic gurus and futurists have embarked on a quest to develop the ultimate patch to the nasty bugs of humanity. If they have their way, no individual foibles would go unpunished — ideally, technology would even make such foibles obsolete.

Even boredom seems to be in its last throes: designers in Japan have found a way to make our train trips perpetually fun-filled. With the help of an iPhone, a projector, a GPS module and Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor, their contrivance allows riders to add new objects to what they see “outside,” thus enlivening the bleak landscape in their train windows. This could be a big hit in North Korea — and not just on trains.

Or, if you tend to forget things, Silicon Valley wants to give you an app to remember everything. If you occasionally prevaricate in order to meet your clashing obligations as a parent, friend or colleague, another app might spot inconsistencies in your behavior and inform your interlocutors if you are telling the truth. If you experience discomfort because you encounter people and things that you do not like, another app or gadget might spare you the pain by rendering them invisible.

Sunny, smooth, clean: with Silicon Valley at the helm, our life will become one long California highway.

Last month Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s former marketing director, enthused about a trendy app to “crowdsource absolutely every decision in your life.” Called Seesaw, the app lets you run instant polls of your friends and ask for advice on anything: what wedding dress to buy, what latte drink to order and soon, perhaps, what political candidate to support.

Seesaw offers an interesting twist on how we think about feedback and failure. It used to be that we bought things to impress our friends, fully aware that they might not like our purchases. Now this logic is inverted: if something impresses our friends, we buy it. The risks of rejection have been minimized; we know well in advance how many Facebook “likes” our every decision would accumulate.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon Valley. Whatever their contribution to our maturity as human beings, decisions also bring out pain and, faced with a choice between maturity and pain-minimization, Silicon Valley has chosen the latter — perhaps as a result of yet another instant poll.

The only exception to the pain-minimization rule is when pain — or at least discomfort — must be induced to ensure that we behave honestly and consistently.

by Evgeny Morozov, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Gary Taxal

Population Distribution of USA

via: Visualizing Economics (click link for larger image)

h/t The Big Picture

Gil Scott Heron

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The Replacements

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“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it."
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

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Jack Vettriano, The Temptress, 2008. 

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Could This App Treat Depression?

Diego Pizzagalli spent a good chunk of 10 years at Harvard doing what most professors at elite institutions do: research. Specifically, research on depression. He's fMRI'd and EEG'd a lot of gray matter, but most of his work got stuck in the lab and never evolved into any real-world application. Then he developed something that was too good to let collect dust in the hallowed halls of academia: software that he says could help treat depression.

Now with the help of the Baltimore-based startup incubator Canterbury Road Partners, Pizzagalli is set to turn his lab invention into an app. MoodTune will be a series of simple games that when played regularly, can help treat depression, Pizzagalli and his colleagues say. Turn on the app for 15 minutes a day, play through some games, and maybe it could help. Maybe, they say, in some cases, it'd be all a depressed person would need. Could something that simple actually work?

Pizzagalli started working on depression in 1999 and released some of his most important papers in 2001. The papers focused on "biomarkers," signals of response in the brain to antidepressants and psychotherapy. Take a peek inside the brain, and you can see areas light up--or fail to light up--in response to treatments. Whether an area lights up or not predicts, with considerable accuracy, whether a treatment works, he says.

So, the thinking goes, what we if we illuminate those regions another way? The brain could readjust appropriately without the need for a pill. The anterior cingulate cortex is associated with depression and also works when snap decisions need to be made, Pizzagalli says, so perhaps having someone make snap decisions would help treat depression. He developed desktop software in his lab to test it out and was happy enough with the results to delve deeper into the technology.

Software like that could make for a "bottom-up" approach to depression treatment. It could "strengthen the circuitry" of the ruminative brain. It could break the cycle of dwelling seen in so many depressives. It could be the first treatment of its kind to go on the market. But to turn the research into anything tangible took some extracurricular assistance.

by Colin Lecher, PopSci |  Read more:

Photo: Center for Depression, Anxiety and Stress Research

LCD Soundsystem

[ed. repost]

Karen Tusinski On the Side White Poppies
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My Life As A Professional Cannabis Baker

I was pregnant when I left my last office job. I was chief of staff at a nonprofit tech organization, but I became disillusioned with that path, and after my daughter was born, I decided I would never to go back to a corporate environment. A friend of mine was baking edibles — that is, foods infused with marijuana — and had approached me a few times about getting involved.

I was reluctant because I knew that if I was going to do it, I had to go all out. I couldn't hide it from my family, and I didn't want to hide it from my family. I've been around marijuana and smoking for years, but I kept it private. I was going to step out of a closet in a way, and that was something I struggled with for a while. It took a little bit of courage. But my family was very supportive.

As soon as my daughter was old enough that I had a little more time, I started baking with marijuana, alongside my friend. At first, I would bake huge batches, but sometimes my cookies could sit around for weeks before they went anywhere. I knew I could develop a niche for myself by using fresh, quality ingredients (like freshly squeezed organic lemons from my mom's garden). Now I bake everything to order and deliver the goods fresh to a handful of medical marijuana clubs in my neighborhood.

For now, I sell only sweets. I have five cookies and bars: peanut butter oatmeal cookies, snickerdoodle cookies, lemon bars, brownies, and peanut butter brownies. The cakes are red velvet with cream cheese glaze cake, triple chocolate cake, carrot cake, lemon cake, and ginger cake. I just finalized a recipe for a Rice Krispie treat, and people love it, so I'll add that to the menu soon.

I make extractions using both butter and oil, so that I can have flexibility, depending on the recipe. The psychoactive ingredient in marijuana is THC, and that's what's getting into the butter and the oil when I do the extraction. Eating these is different than smoking pot, because the THC gets into your blood stream through your digestive system, which means it takes a little bit longer to hit you. When it does, you get an all-body high and it's very relaxing.

The oil I make takes nearly 24 hours all said and done, and I do it in a Crock-Pot — it's three cycles of heating on low for three hours, and then cooling for nine hours. The butter requires a little more babysitting. I use marijuana trim, which are the plant's small leaves and stems that the dispensaries trim away from the buds. I boil the trim in water first, because butter can't get hot enough on its own. After I add the butter, it's the same heating and cooling process as the oil on the stovetop. When the process is done, I strain out the leaves and let the let the mixture cool, allowing the butter to separate from the water. (...)

I donate my edibles to medical marijuana clubs for a recommended donation price to recoup my cost and be reimbursed for my time. To be a member and buy goods at a club, you need a recommendation from a doctor, which has to be renewed annually. The clubs offer my baked goods to their members for another recommended price, which is often double what they give me for them. My recommended donation is $5 or $6 for a package of three cookies; the members donate $10 or $12 for that same package. Baking edibles has been my only source of income for the last three years, but it took some time to build up the business. I like to barter as much as I can to get the cannabis. I need nearly half a pound of trim to make 6 pounds of butter or 10 cups of oil, and I was spending like $300 a pound for trim. Now I bake marijuana edibles in exchange for the marijuana. So yeah, I bake a lot.

These days, I bake 20 to 30 hours per week, and I can make maybe 15 dozen pastries. At my busiest, I was working 11-hour days. My husband and my mom had to help. Honestly, I'm not sure if I want to get back to that point. I'd like to find a happy medium.

by Emily Fleischaker, Buzz Feed | Read more:

Image by Joshua Ballinger

Coal Is History. Or Is It?

The conventional wisdom is that dirty, polluting coal is the fuel of the past, and that any day now the power plants that burn coal will be phased out and shut down.

Taking the place of coal will be clean-burning natural gas and clean, green solar and wind power.

Glancing at the headlines you might really think that this fantasy was coming to pass.

Why just today the Sierra Club is out with an announcement that its Beyond Coal campaign is halfway to its goal of shutting down a third of U.S. coal plants. Wow!

With 12,000 megawatts of new wind power last year and 30% growth in solar power, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions fell 3.7% in 2012.

President Obama in his State of the Union address said that he would “direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy” — most likely by continuing to tighten emissions controls, regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant and effectively banning any new coal-fired power plants.

Earlier this week the giant power utility AEP announced that, in a settlement with the EPA and several states, it was shuttering three coal-fired plants in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky with 2,000 megawatts of generation capacity. AEP will also be investing $5 billion to install new emissions reduction technology at some of its other coal plants. And to help replace the coal power it will build 200 mw of wind and solar installations. The Sierra Club called it a “major victory.”

The story sounds even better at the TennesseeValley Authority, which in 2012 reduced its coal consumption by 16% to about 30 million tons. It’s in the midst of retiring 2,000 mw of coal capacity by 2017. Last year it completed a new 1,000 mw gas-fired plant in Tennessee to help replace the four coal units retired at the same site. For the first time in memory TVA got less than half of its power from coal.

Thanks to natural gas prices (brought about by the boom in fracking) hitting a low of $1.85 per MMBtu last April, in 2012 generators switched a bunch of their electricity generation from coal to natural gas. Nationwide that switching amounted to an uptick of some 8 billion cubic feet a day of gas consumption, offsetting millions of tons of coal.

As a result, coal’s contribution to nationwide power generation fell to 37% in 2012 down from 49% in 2007. That’s a precipitous drop for an industry that operates on such a massive scale. Natural gas accounts for 30% of power generation fuel.

So we’re on our way to getting rid of coal, right?

Not at all.

by Christopher Helman, Forbes |  Read more:

Photo: Wikipedia