Sunday, March 17, 2013
SNAP Day
In the heart of downtown, Miguel Pichardo, 53, watched three trucks jockey for position at the loading dock of his family-run International Meat Market. For most of the month, his business operated as a humble milk-and-eggs corner store, but now 3,000 pounds of product were scheduled for delivery in the next few hours. He wiped the front counter and smoothed the edges of a sign posted near his register. “Yes! We take Food Stamps, SNAP, EBT!”
“Today, we fill the store up with everything,” he said. “Tomorrow, we sell it all.”
At precisely one second after midnight, on March 1, Woonsocket would experience its monthly financial windfall — nearly $2 million from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. Federal money would be electronically transferred to the broke residents of a nearly bankrupt town, where it would flow first into grocery stores and then on to food companies, employees and banks, beginning the monthly cycle that has helped Woonsocket survive.
Three years into an economic recovery, this is the lasting scar of collapse: a federal program that began as a last resort for a few million hungry people has grown into an economic lifeline for entire towns. Spending on SNAP has doubled in the past four years and tripled in the past decade, surpassing $78 billion last year. A record 47 million Americans receive the benefit — including 13,752 in Woonsocket, one-third of the town’s population, where the first of each month now reveals twin shortcomings of the U.S. economy:
So many people are forced to rely on government support.
The government is forced to support so many people.
The 1st is always circled on the office calendar at International Meat Market, where customers refer to the day in the familiar slang of a holiday. It is Check Day. Milk Day. Pay Day. Mother’s Day.
“Uncle Sam Day,” Pichardo said now, late on Feb. 28, as he watched new merchandise roll off the trucks. Out came 40 cases of Ramen Noodles. Out came 230 pounds of ground beef and 180 gallons of orange juice.
SNAP enrollment in Rhode Island had been rising for six years, up from 73,000 people to nearly 180,000, and now three-quarters of purchases at International Meat Market are paid for with Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards. Government money had in effect funded the truckloads of food at Pichardo’s dock . . . and the three part-time employees he had hired to unload it . . . and the walk-in freezer he had installed to store surplus product . . . and the electric bills he paid to run that freezer, at nearly $2,000 each month.
Pichardo’s profits from SNAP had also helped pay for International Meat Market itself, a 10-aisle store in a yellow building that he had bought and refurbished in 2010, when the rise in government spending persuaded him to expand out of a smaller market down the block.
by Eli Saslow, Washington Post | Read more:
Photo: uncredited
The Talk of the Irish
I had been there nearly forty years earlier, and the trip had confirmed the generally held high opinion of Irish verbal agility, wit, and garrulousness. “Are you American, then?” a butcher had asked me when I was buying a steak from him, in Schull, in the spectacular Southwest. “Yes,” I said. “Then of course I’ll be charging you twice as much,” he said. When I confessed to a little girl on a dirt road that the cows she was herding home made me, a city boy, a little nervous, she waited a bit until they were up the road and then pointed behind me and said, “Look out! The cows are comin’ for yeh.” And when I asked a train conductor on a platform if the train that had just left was the last one that day to somewhere or other, he said, “You’ll get no more.” (The Irish can be a little sharp, sometimes. Read William Trevor’s stories, if you haven’t.) I wanted to hear it again. I wanted to remind myself out of what lexical soil my heroes Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and Heaney had sprung.
So off I went, with my daughter, Lizi—her spelling, I assure you—twenty-five, who served as my left-hand-driving navigator and conversational memory bank. We landed at Shannon at nine in the morning and picked up our rental car. At the Avis counter, while Lizi was away getting coffee, the reservations person asked me, “Will your…er, daughter is she…be driving?” Lizi is five feet two, blonde, and pretty, unlike me in every way. “I know she doesn’t look like me but yes, she is my daughter,” I said, “but no, she won’t be driving.” Then, jet-lagged, I sort of blurted, “She’s adopted.” The face of the theretofore crabby-looking agent next to my agent lit up, and she said, “We have an adopted child, too—from Russia. He’s ten now, and as sweet as a bun. Aren’t we the lucky ones, then, you and I? They are like Christmas every day, don’t you think?”
We drove off through a correspondingly driving rain to Galway, about forty minutes away, with me drifting left and Lizi quietly correcting me. We checked in at the Nile Lodge Bed and Breakfast, in Salthill, a strip of seaside houses abutting Galway’s City Center. Centre. The Nile Lodge had been open for only a month or so. Lizi had found it online—we did most of our booking online—and it was absolutely wonderful, run by its owner, Maura, whose family house this capacious and elegant white building sitting atop a small hill had once been. It has only four rooms but doesn’t feel the least incarcerational, the way many B. & B.’s do.
At breakfast—and this full Irish breakfast is very full—Maura played, quietly, CDs of the traditional Irish music I like so much. She told us about the cheeses she was serving, including one with “just a touch of smoke,” and another “as creamy as, well, cream,” and then when we told her that we would be driving around Connemara that day, she pressed some of her CDs on us, and was gratifyingly surprised at what I knew about some of the musicians. She kept on revising her listening-recommendation priorities: “You must hear this one—do you know De Danaan? No, for Connemara, maybe this one would be best—it would go smoothly with the landscape. And then there’s this one—this man’s voice is like a burr; you must hear it. But wait—your coffee must be quite chilly by now, anyway—let me get you a new pot. Coffee that isn’t hot is cold.”
by Daniel Menaker, New Yorker | Read more:
Photo: Martin Parr/Magnum
Washed Away
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In the last moments of the Second World War, a few days after Hiroshima and just hours before Nagasaki, a Canadian airman named Robert Hampton Gray was shot down over Onagawa, a small town at the northeast limit of Japan’s main island, Honshu.
Decades later, a monument to Gray was erected there—the only such honor for a foreign combatant on Japanese soil and perhaps Onagawa’s only claim to fame outside the country. Even domestically, the town was mostly unknown until the ocean rolled over it on March 11, 2011.
Located where thickly forested mountains drop into the Pacific and submerged river valleys form a landscape of deep bays and narrow inlets, Onagawa is a relatively new port, founded in 1926, incorporating older fishing hamlets. For centuries, human settlers have been feeding off two fertile ocean currents that converge just offshore, carrying saury and silver salmon practically into their mouths. Less than 50 miles out, there is also a volatile section of seismic fault plane in the trench between the Pacific and Okhotsk plates.
In 1896 a major earthquake displaced seawater through the contours of the surrounding terrain, pushing waves inland and upward to the surrounding slopes. It happened again in 1933, seven years after Onagawa was established.
In both cases, devastated towns and villages were reconstructed at slightly higher elevations, and memorial stones were carved to warn future generations not to build so close to the waterline. But in minato machi, Japanese harbor towns, residents consider themselves people of the sea, and have always been inclined to return. And mountainous volcanic islands don’t leave developers much land to work with, except for low-lying coastal plains.
On May 22, 1960, an earthquake near Valdivia, Chile—still the most powerful ever recorded—sent destructive waves across the Pacific. When they reached northeast Japan the next day, they rose to heights of almost twenty feet, swamping Onagawa.
Town officials who lived through the “Chile tsunami” based disaster planning on that event, and assumed that twenty feet was about as high as tsunami waves would ever get. Breakwaters, seawalls, and evacuation shelters were configured accordingly.
But the earthquake that occurred in the offshore fault plane at 2:46 pm on March 11, 2011, was the most powerful in Japanese history. And the waves that followed 40 minutes later were the largest to strike this coast in more than a thousand years.
There were four or five waves, according to some witnesses, but just one, according to others—a possible effect of separate waves piling up and over each other. They rose to heights of 50, 60, 65 feet, depending on which post-tsunami survey you read. They drowned and dragged away almost 10 percent of Onagawa’s population—close to a thousand people—and destroyed more than 80 percent of its buildings. Tsutomu Yamanaka of the on-site relief agency Japan Platform described Onagawa as “the most damaged town on the coast.”
I went for the first time to Onagawa five weeks later. By then, the disaster was already dropping off the international news agenda. Reactor fires and failures at the crippled, flooded Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant had not sent radiation clouds across the Pacific, though it turned out that initial fears of meltdown were valid. Across the world, the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami of 2011 is now remembered by the name “Fukushima.”
Some 70 miles northeast of Fukushima and 30 miles closer to the epicenter, Onagawa had its own nuclear power plant. Its three reactors were “remarkably undamaged,” according to a study by the International Atomic Energy Agency. But the main port was effectively wiped off the map that afternoon, along with any number of smaller fishing villages. I wanted to see this for myself—a place in the modern world that had suddenly passed from existence. Like Pompeii, or, more fancifully, Atlantis.
Photo: Stephen Phelan
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Bar Examined
Steven J. Harper has been blessed with notably good timing.
Born smack in the middle of the Baby Boom, the Minneapolis native excelled in school, collected bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Northwestern University, then headed straight to Harvard Law School, where he was a classmate of future U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
Neither of Harper’s parents—a truck driver dad and a stay-at-home mom—got past high school. A working-class kid, Harper financed his future with student loans. By the time he graduated Harvard Law, magna cum laude, in 1979, the total debt he had incurred for his three degrees from Northwestern and Harvard came to about $16,000.
It paid off. Harper went straight from Harvard Law to Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago, where he had been a summer associate. His starting salary was $25,000. He flourished, and was mentored and trained as a litigator by sage elder partners who invested their time and energy in the new blood brought into the old-even-then firm. This was the start of the Reagan era, and the U.S. economy began to boom after a long malaise. The future for the bright young corporate litigator was sweet.
“I led what anyone would call a charmed life in the law,” Harper writes in his new book, The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis. “Then, as now, most people assumed that the legal profession offered financial security and a way to climb out of the lower or middle class. Career satisfaction, upward mobility, social status, financial security—who could ask for more?”
Harper spent his entire career at Kirkland & Ellis, made equity partner by the time he was thirty-four, and did so well financially that he was able to retire from the practice of law in 2010, when he was fifty-three years old. He now writes books. His latest seeks to warn bright young sons and daughters of midwestern truck drivers that they best not try to climb that ladder that served him so well.
Some of the rungs are broken, others greased and impossible slippery, and that ladder doesn’t stretch to any place you would want to be, really. The era of law being the safe and well-compensated “traditional default option for students with no idea what to do with their lives,” Harper notes, is over, even if the tens of thousands who still flood into law school each year stubbornly believe that these macro forces will somehow not apply to them.
by Elizabeth Lesly Stevens, Washington Monthly | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Born smack in the middle of the Baby Boom, the Minneapolis native excelled in school, collected bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Northwestern University, then headed straight to Harvard Law School, where he was a classmate of future U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
Neither of Harper’s parents—a truck driver dad and a stay-at-home mom—got past high school. A working-class kid, Harper financed his future with student loans. By the time he graduated Harvard Law, magna cum laude, in 1979, the total debt he had incurred for his three degrees from Northwestern and Harvard came to about $16,000.It paid off. Harper went straight from Harvard Law to Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago, where he had been a summer associate. His starting salary was $25,000. He flourished, and was mentored and trained as a litigator by sage elder partners who invested their time and energy in the new blood brought into the old-even-then firm. This was the start of the Reagan era, and the U.S. economy began to boom after a long malaise. The future for the bright young corporate litigator was sweet.
“I led what anyone would call a charmed life in the law,” Harper writes in his new book, The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis. “Then, as now, most people assumed that the legal profession offered financial security and a way to climb out of the lower or middle class. Career satisfaction, upward mobility, social status, financial security—who could ask for more?”
Harper spent his entire career at Kirkland & Ellis, made equity partner by the time he was thirty-four, and did so well financially that he was able to retire from the practice of law in 2010, when he was fifty-three years old. He now writes books. His latest seeks to warn bright young sons and daughters of midwestern truck drivers that they best not try to climb that ladder that served him so well.
Some of the rungs are broken, others greased and impossible slippery, and that ladder doesn’t stretch to any place you would want to be, really. The era of law being the safe and well-compensated “traditional default option for students with no idea what to do with their lives,” Harper notes, is over, even if the tens of thousands who still flood into law school each year stubbornly believe that these macro forces will somehow not apply to them.
by Elizabeth Lesly Stevens, Washington Monthly | Read more:
Image: uncredited
De Nimes: The Long Journey of Blue Jeans
Before we had low-rise, straight-leg, skinny, selvage, stretchy, resin-coated, lotion-infused, or mom jeans, there was simply jean—the fabric. The name likely originated from gênes, referring to Genoa, Italy, where sailors wore a twill blend of cotton, linen, and wool that came in a variety of stripes and colors.
Today’s jeans are made from heavier, all-cotton denim woven in a combination of indigo-dyed vertical yarn and natural horizontal yarn, resulting in the fabric’s white-speckled surface and pale underside. And although the original name for denim came from Nîmes, France—as in, de Nîmes—the fabric was most likely first produced in England.
Once the United States emancipated itself from British rule, the former colonists stopped importing European denim and began producing it themselves from all-American cotton, picked by slaves in the South and spun, dyed, and woven in the North. The Industrial Revolution was largely fueled by the textile trade, which almost singlehandedly upheld slavery. When the cotton gin mechanized processing in 1793, prices, already subsidized by slave labor, dropped dramatically. Cheap goods drove demand, and a vicious cycle ensued. In the period between the invention of the cotton gin and the Civil War, America’s slave population shot from 700,000 to a staggering 4 million.
After the Civil War, companies like Carhartt, Eloesser-Heynemann, and OshKosh slung cotton coveralls to miners, railroad men, and factory workers. A Bavarian immigrant named Levi Strauss set up shop in San Francisco selling fabric and work-wear. Jacob Davis, an entrepreneurial Reno tailor, bought Strauss’s denim to make workingman’s pants, and added metal rivets to prevent the seams from ripping open. Davis sent two samples of his riveted pants to Strauss, and they patented the innovation together. Soon after, Davis joined Strauss in San Francisco to oversee production in a new factory. In 1890, Strauss assigned the ID number of 501 to their riveted denim “waist overalls.” The Levi’s 501 blue jean—which would become the best-selling garment in human history—was born.
Initially, jeans were proletarian western work-wear, but wealthy easterners inevitably ventured out in search of rugged cowboy authenticity. In 1928, a Vogue writer returned East from a Wyoming dude ranch with a snapshot of herself, “impossibly attired in blue jeans… and a smile that couldn’t be found on all Manhattan Island.” In June 1935, the magazine ran an article titled “Dude Dressing,” possibly one of the first fashion pieces to instruct readers in the art of DIY denim distressing: “What she does is to hurry down to the ranch store and ask for a pair of blue jeans, which she secretly floats the ensuing night in a bathtub of water—the oftener a pair of jeans is laundered, the higher its value, especially if it shrinks to the ‘high-water’ mark. Another innovation—and a most recent one, if I may judge—also goes on in the dead of night, and undoubtedly behind locked doors—an intentional rip here and there in the back of the jeans.” (...)
And now, in the midst of the Great Recession, we have come full circle, with the fairly recent demand for nostalgic “heritage” jeans that recall the hardscrabble industrialism of the Great Depression: work shirts and overalls faded to shades of cornflower blue, and rough-hewn, no-nonsense, deep-dyed dungarees. Like their precursors from the 20s and 30s, these jeans seem imbued with a sad nostalgia for a bygone country (but maybe this time with a better fit). We’ve entered the Dorothea Lange era of fashion—clothed in flecked wool cardigans, formidable flannel shirts, and sturdy work boots, Depression-era from head to toe.
by Jenni Avins, Vice | Read more:
Photo courtesy of Advertising Archives
Today’s jeans are made from heavier, all-cotton denim woven in a combination of indigo-dyed vertical yarn and natural horizontal yarn, resulting in the fabric’s white-speckled surface and pale underside. And although the original name for denim came from Nîmes, France—as in, de Nîmes—the fabric was most likely first produced in England.Once the United States emancipated itself from British rule, the former colonists stopped importing European denim and began producing it themselves from all-American cotton, picked by slaves in the South and spun, dyed, and woven in the North. The Industrial Revolution was largely fueled by the textile trade, which almost singlehandedly upheld slavery. When the cotton gin mechanized processing in 1793, prices, already subsidized by slave labor, dropped dramatically. Cheap goods drove demand, and a vicious cycle ensued. In the period between the invention of the cotton gin and the Civil War, America’s slave population shot from 700,000 to a staggering 4 million.
After the Civil War, companies like Carhartt, Eloesser-Heynemann, and OshKosh slung cotton coveralls to miners, railroad men, and factory workers. A Bavarian immigrant named Levi Strauss set up shop in San Francisco selling fabric and work-wear. Jacob Davis, an entrepreneurial Reno tailor, bought Strauss’s denim to make workingman’s pants, and added metal rivets to prevent the seams from ripping open. Davis sent two samples of his riveted pants to Strauss, and they patented the innovation together. Soon after, Davis joined Strauss in San Francisco to oversee production in a new factory. In 1890, Strauss assigned the ID number of 501 to their riveted denim “waist overalls.” The Levi’s 501 blue jean—which would become the best-selling garment in human history—was born.
Initially, jeans were proletarian western work-wear, but wealthy easterners inevitably ventured out in search of rugged cowboy authenticity. In 1928, a Vogue writer returned East from a Wyoming dude ranch with a snapshot of herself, “impossibly attired in blue jeans… and a smile that couldn’t be found on all Manhattan Island.” In June 1935, the magazine ran an article titled “Dude Dressing,” possibly one of the first fashion pieces to instruct readers in the art of DIY denim distressing: “What she does is to hurry down to the ranch store and ask for a pair of blue jeans, which she secretly floats the ensuing night in a bathtub of water—the oftener a pair of jeans is laundered, the higher its value, especially if it shrinks to the ‘high-water’ mark. Another innovation—and a most recent one, if I may judge—also goes on in the dead of night, and undoubtedly behind locked doors—an intentional rip here and there in the back of the jeans.” (...)
And now, in the midst of the Great Recession, we have come full circle, with the fairly recent demand for nostalgic “heritage” jeans that recall the hardscrabble industrialism of the Great Depression: work shirts and overalls faded to shades of cornflower blue, and rough-hewn, no-nonsense, deep-dyed dungarees. Like their precursors from the 20s and 30s, these jeans seem imbued with a sad nostalgia for a bygone country (but maybe this time with a better fit). We’ve entered the Dorothea Lange era of fashion—clothed in flecked wool cardigans, formidable flannel shirts, and sturdy work boots, Depression-era from head to toe.
by Jenni Avins, Vice | Read more:
Photo courtesy of Advertising Archives
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Reposts
[ed. Slow news day so far, so here are some reposts from March and April, 2011. Check out the archives.]
Sex, Hastily, Then Beignets
It's Not a Secret
Tako Poke (Octopus Salad)
Shoot
The Sacred Child
Fancy Meatloaf
Good Thing
Sniffing Out a Menace
Better Handy Than Handsome
Does the Pope Matter?
When Cardinal Ratzinger was asked, before he became Pope Benedict XVI, if he was disturbed that many Catholics ignored papal teaching, he said he was not, since “truth is not determined by a majority vote.” But that is precisely how the major doctrines like those on the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection were fixed in creeds: at councils like that of Nicaea, by the votes of hundreds of bishops, themselves chosen by the people, before popes had any monopoly on authority. Belief then rose up from the People of God, and was not pronounced by a single oracle. John Henry Newman, in On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine (1859), argued that there had been periods when the body of believers had been truer to the faith than had the Church hierarchy. He was silenced for saying it, but his historical arguments were not refuted.
Catholics have had many bad popes whose teachings or acts they could or should ignore or defy. Orcagna painted one of them in hell; Dante assigned three to his Inferno; Lord Acton assured Prime Minister William Gladstone that Pius IX’s condemnation of democracy was not as bad as the papal massacres of Huguenots, which showed that “people could be very good Catholics and yet do without Rome”; and John Henry Newman hoped Pius IX would die during the first Vatican Council, before he could do more harm. Acton’s famous saying, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” was written to describe Renaissance popes.
With the election of a new pope, the press will repeat old myths—that Christ made Peter the first pope, and that there has been an “apostolic succession” of popes from his time. Scholars, including great Catholic ones like Raymond Brown and Joseph Fitzmyer, have long known that Peter was no pope. He was not even a priest or a bishop—offices that did not exist in the first century. And there is no apostolic succession, just the twists and tangles of interrupted, multiple, and contested office holders. It is a rope of sand. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, for instance, there were three popes, none of whom would resign. A new council had to be called to start all over. It appointed Martin V, on condition that he call frequent councils—a condition he evaded after he was in power.
by Garry Wills, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Peter Paul Rubens: Saint Peter
Friday, March 15, 2013
Food Truck Economics
Bobby Hossain’s day starts early. Along with his family, he runs a food truck called Phat Thai that serves his mother’s Thai recipes “with a modern twist.” Although he won’t be serving customers for nearly 4 hours, he wakes up by 7:30am. He is working a double shift in the truck (lunch and dinner), so his brother is on prep duty. Bobby buys any last minute supplies they need - ice, more bean sprouts - from Restaurant Depot while his brother cuts vegetables and slices meat at the kitchen space they use in a friend’s restaurant. His brother then drives the truck to their parents’ house. They load up and Bobby is on the road at 9:30.
From 11am-2pm they work at Mission Dispatch - a location in San Francisco’s Mission district that hosts food trucks. It brings in a dependable lunch crowd. Bobby’s mother cooks, his employee Frank takes orders, and Bobby hands out completed orders while helping the other two. After three hours, Phat Thai has served around 200 dishes. Once the lunch crowd dies down, they return to the commissary, a space where they can clean dishes and dispose of garbage. Bobby checks whether he needs to get more supplies for tomorrow, preps, and then drives the truck to North Beach. From 5pm-8pm they will sell Thai dishes alongside other food trucks at a “market” of food trucks organized by Off The Grid. On busy days, they won’t have a chance to eat lunch.
Although it’s only half as busy as lunch, Phat Thai sells dinner to a dense crowd of families and professionals returning from work. By the time they serve their last customer, clean up, and park the truck, it’s approaching midnight. It’s one of Bobby’s busiest days. He and his brother only do double shifts twice a week. Since dinner is less lucrative than lunch, on other days they finish selling food by 3pm and he can get home by 5pm.
Compared to the original American food trucks (a.k.a. roach coaches) that frequented construction sites and baseball stadiums, food trucks like Phat Thai are a different breed. Instead of cheap, greasy fare, they sell $10 dishes featuring organic ingredients and fusions of different regional cuisines. Since their emergence as a social media sensation in 2008, they have asserted themselves as a force in the food scene, employing celebrated chefs and inspiring countless food reviews.
As a service that strips all the overhead costs of a restaurant down to the minimum requirements for selling food to customers, food trucks are also an irresistible metaphor for lean startups: the Silicon Valley practice of quickly rolling out a minimum viable product, allowing customers to try it, and engaging with them to improve your offering. Just as the falling cost of creating a website or app lowered the barriers to entry in the tech industry, food trucks allow aspiring restauranters to quickly put their creations in front of customers with minimal financial barriers.
But given that starting a restaurant is essentially a respectable way to throw money down a hole, are food trucks just mini money pits? What does it take to start and run a food truck? Why is a sandwich in a paper tray $10? Will food trucks disrupt the restaurant industry or is there a bubble?
by Alex Mayyasi, Priceonomics Blog | Read more:
Photo: uncredited
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