When the Earth Moved

On September 20, 1969, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, gave a lightly publicized speech in Seattle in which he remarked, “I am convinced that the same concern the youth of this nation took in changing this nation’s priorities on the war in Vietnam and on civil rights can be shown for the problem of the environment. That is why I plan to see to it that a national teach-in is held.” Nelson had been pushing environmental issues for some years, initially worried that water pollution was hurting fishing, canoeing, and other forms of outdoor recreation in his state. In 1963, as a freshman senator, he persuaded President John F. Kennedy to stage a national “conservation tour” to talk about the issue. Kennedy visited eleven states in five days, just two months before his assassination, but the trip was a bust: anemic crowds, little attention, and not much obvious passion from Kennedy himself.

But Nelson’s idea of a national teach-in took off, to an extent that surprised even him. On April 22, 1970, only seven months after his speech in Seattle, the teach-in, dubbed Earth Day, generated more than twelve thousand events across the country, many of them in high schools and colleges, with more than thirty-five thousand speakers. “Today” devoted ten hours of airtime to it. Congress took the day off, and two-thirds of its members spoke at Earth Day events. In all, millions of people participated. This activity was largely uncoördinated. Earth Day had a tiny national staff—a handful of young activists—and there were no big environmental groups around to get behind it. The staff imposed minimal central direction over the local activity, and chose not to put on a main event, like a march on Washington.

Adam Rome’s genial new book, “The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation” (Hill & Wang), brings to life another era. We’re as distant from Earth Day as the Battle of Gettysburg was from James Monroe’s reëlection, and Rome evokes a United States that feels, politically, like a foreign country. There were a number of liberal Republicans. Most active members of environmental groups were hunters and fishermen. The Sierra Club was an actual club that required new members to be proposed by old ones. The Environmental Defense Fund was two years old. Things like bottle recycling and organic food were exotic.

Earth Day’s success was partly a matter of timing: it took place at the moment when years of slowly building environmental awareness were coming to a head, and when the energy of the sixties was ready to be directed somewhere besides the Vietnam War and the civil-rights movement. A coterie of celebrated environmental prophets—Rachel Carson, David Brower, Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich—had already established themselves, and Rome reminds us of the larger context: a suburbanizing, middle-class nation was increasingly aware of the outdoors and prepared to define liberalism in more than purely economic terms.

Earth Day had consequences: it led to the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and to the creation, just eight months after the event, of the Environmental Protection Agency. Throughout the nineteen-seventies, mostly during the Republican Administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Congress passed one environmental bill after another, establishing national controls on air and water pollution. And most of the familiar big green groups are, in their current form, offspring of Earth Day. Dozens of colleges and universities instituted environmental-studies programs, and even many small newspapers created full-time environmental beats.

Then, forty years after Earth Day, in the summer of 2010, the environmental movement suffered a humiliating defeat as unexpected as the success of Earth Day had been. The Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, announced that he would not bring to a vote a bill meant to address the greatest environmental problem of our time—global warming. The movement had poured years of effort into the bill, which involved a complicated system for limiting carbon emissions. Now it was dead, and there has been no significant environmental legislation since. Indeed, one could argue that there has been no major environmental legislation since 1990, when President George H. W. Bush signed a bill aimed at reducing acid rain. Today’s environmental movement is vastly bigger, richer, and better connected than it was in 1970. It’s also vastly less successful. What went wrong?

by Nicholas Lehmann, New Yorker |  Read more: 

Photo: AP

Information Wants to be Free?

The Slow Death of the American Author

Last month, the Supreme Court decided to allow the importation and resale of foreign editions of American works, which are often cheaper than domestic editions. Until now, courts have forbidden such activity as a violation of copyright. Not only does this ruling open the gates to a surge in cheap imports, but since they will be sold in a secondary market, authors won’t get royalties.

This may sound like a minor problem; authors already contend with an enormous domestic market for secondhand books. But it is the latest example of how the global electronic marketplace is rapidly depleting authors’ income streams. It seems almost every player — publishers, search engines, libraries, pirates and even some scholars — is vying for position at authors’ expense.

Authors practice one of the few professions directly protected in the Constitution, which instructs Congress “to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The idea is that a diverse literary culture, created by authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can’t be threatened, is essential to democracy.

That culture is now at risk. The value of copyrights is being quickly depreciated, a crisis that hits hardest not best-selling authors like me, who have benefited from most of the recent changes in bookselling, but new and so-called midlist writers.

by Scott Turow, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
[ed. With this reply.]

Scientifc Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too)

The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects.

But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without the hyphen). The one they had signed up for featured speakers who were recruited by e-mail, not vetted by leading academics. Those who agreed to appear were later charged a hefty fee for the privilege, and pretty much anyone who paid got a spot on the podium that could be used to pad a résumé.

“I think we were duped,” one of the scientists wrote in an e-mail to the Entomological Society.

Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events.

Steven Goodman, a dean and professor of medicine at Stanford and the editor of the journal Clinical Trials, which has its own imitators, called this phenomenon “the dark side of open access,” the movement to make scholarly publications freely available.

The number of these journals and conferences has exploded in recent years as scientific publishing has shifted from a traditional business model for professional societies and organizations built almost entirely on subscription revenues to open access, which relies on authors or their backers to pay for the publication of papers online, where anyone can read them.  (...)

But some researchers are now raising the alarm about what they see as the proliferation of online journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee. They warn that nonexperts doing online research will have trouble distinguishing credible research from junk. “Most people don’t know the journal universe,” Dr. Goodman said. “They will not know from a journal’s title if it is for real or not.”

by Gina Kolata, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

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Tilda Swinton
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Gisele photographed by Liz Collins
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Study Points to a New Culprit in Heart Disease

It was breakfast time and the people participating in a study of red meat and its consequences had hot, sizzling sirloin steaks plopped down in front of them. The researcher himself bought a George Foreman grill for the occasion and the nurse assisting him did the cooking.

For the sake of science, these six men and women ate every last juicy bite of the 8-ounce steaks. Then they waited to have their blood drawn.

Dr. Stanley Hazen of the Cleveland Clinic, who led the study, and his colleagues had accumulated evidence for a surprising new explanation of why red meat may contribute to heart disease. And they were testing it with this early morning experiment.

The researchers had come to believe that what damaged hearts was not just the thick edge of fat on steaks, or the delectable marbling of their tender interiors. In fact, these scientists suspected that saturated fat and cholesterol made only a minor contribution to the increased amount of heart disease seen in red-meat eaters. The real culprit, they proposed, was a little-studied chemical that is burped out by bacteria in the stomach after people eat red meat. It is quickly converted by the liver into yet another little-studied chemical called TMAO that gets into the blood and increases the risk of heart disease.

That, at least, was the theory. So the question that morning was: Would a burst of TMAO show up in peoples’ blood after they ate steak? And would the same thing happen to a vegan who had not had meat for at least a year and who consumed the same meal?

The answers were: yes, there was a TMAO burst in the five meat eaters and no, the vegan did not have it. And TMAO levels turned out to predict heart attack risk in humans, the researchers found. The researchers also found that TMAO actually caused heart disease in mice. Additional studies with 23 vegetarians and vegans and 51 meat eaters showed that meat eaters normally had more TMAO in their blood and that they, unlike those who spurned meat, readily made TMAO after swallowing pills with carnitine.

“It’s really a beautiful combination of mouse studies and human studies to tell a story I find quite plausible,” said Dr. Daniel J. Rader, a heart disease researcher at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.

by Gina Kolata, NY Times |  Read more: 

Image: Rocky

via: Decoholic

Cougar Night in Silicon Valley

It’s late morning, and Peter Rudolph, the executive chef of Madera in the five-star Rosewood Sand Hill hotel in Silicon Valley, is commuting from San Francisco to Menlo Park. The hotel opened four years ago on Sand Hill Road—a veritable venture-capital office park—near Woodside, home to many tech billionaires. Surrounded by three of the wealthiest Zip Codes in the country, its high-design interiors and higher-powered happy hours have given a county known for coding a new sense of cool.

Halfway to the hotel, Rudolph pulls into Starbucks for his morning coffee. At the counter as he orders a tall Americano, Rudolph is surprised to see the word “Rosewood” scrawled in pen on the barista’s hand. Granted, he has just won a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence, but he is still curious as to why a Starbucks server half an hour away has tattooed himself with the hotel’s name. He has to ask.

“Excuse me, why do you have ‘Rosewood’ written on your hand?” Rudolph inquires.

“Because, dude,” the barista replies, “my friend told me if I go there on Thursday night I’m guaranteed to get lucky!”

Rudolph is dumbfounded—yet aware of what the guy is talking about. He had begun to see a pattern developing. Along with the usual lines of luxury cars came a crop of town cars and taxis dropping off ladies of a certain age—Thursday night at the Rosewood is what’s known locally as “Cougar Night.”

The hotel doesn’t exactly list it on its official calendar, of course. “There’s no question that we have become one of the regional hot spots for that scene on Thursday nights,” says Rosewood Sand Hill managing director Michael Casey. “But to call it Cougar Night to me is far too limiting for what really is the Beautiful People of Silicon Valley taking part in the social scene with the beauty of nature as a backdrop.”

***

It’s Thursday night at the Rosewood and huddles of women wrapped in dresses tight as sausage casings circulate around the lobby. A steady flow of sky-high stilettos and colorful minidresses come in the front door. All head to the dark barroom to the left of the entrance. By eight P.M. many are paired up with younger men. After a drink or two, couples move away from the bar, getting cozy on benches by the fireplaces or under blankets and heat lamps on the deck.

Many attribute the bar’s crush of singles to area matchmaker Amy Andersen—a self-declared “love concierge” and the founder of Linx Dating—who first helped designate the bar a singles’ destination.

Sipping a soda before one of their Thursday-night “meet-ups” at the Rosewood bar, Andersen’s business partner, Nina Ericson, describes the origins of Cougar Night. Ericson—a 50-year-old lawyer turned life coach—goes by the Twitter handle @DrDate2soulmate and often meets Andersen’s clients at the Rosewood spa café. She tells me it all started when the local venture capitalists wanted to find somewhere to go for drinks after work. Men make up 89 percent of venture-capital-firm partners, according to a 2011 survey by the National Venture Capital Association and Dow Jones Venture Source, and a demographic of mostly male, wealthy, well-known businessmen began reliably showing up for happy hour. Thursdays were the most consistent night and colleagues from up and down the road congregated in the comfortable bar overlooking the Santa Cruz Mountains. “Soon, women interested in the V.C.’s started coming,” says Ericson, “and it just turned into a crazy night.”

The Silicon Valley scene is unique. “On the East Coast it matters if you come from a good family or went to a good school,” Ericson continues. Here, not so much. Instead, she says, the venture capitalists who frequent the Rosewood worry about being wanted for their money. The women, on the other hand, tend to be assertive without the ability to turn it off. “They have a tough time being women,” she explains. “Most are very successful, and to succeed in corporate America you have to be strong. That’s fine, but guys might want to hire them, not take them home.”

So Andersen and Ericson set out to solve the problem. With its growing popularity, the Rosewood bar was the obvious setting. Four years ago, Andersen hosted her first “Link and Drink” event at the hotel. The announcement came in one of her seasonal newsletters, “Dating Confidential,” in 2009. She counseled the men beforehand to change out of their baggy Palo Alto polo shirts and exercise pants, to dress up, and put their best side forward. After further advising clients to “bleach your teeth” and “spray tan,” she invited them to the Portico patio at the newly opened hotel. It would be the first of many events at the hotel. Thus, the Rosewood scene—and its accidental by-product, Cougar Night—was born.

by Alexandra Wolfe, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Photograph by Justin Coit

A Thousand Kinds of Life: Culture, Nature, and Anthropology

In the latest twist in an unusually public academic dispute, one of the world’s most influential and highly regarded anthropologists resigned in protest from the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in late February. In quitting the academy, Marshall Sahlins took aim in part at the work of fellow anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, whose contentious memoir, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanamamö and the Anthropologists, was recently published by Simon & Schuster. But his action is also a skirmish in a much longer and very important debate over what it means to be human—a debate with consequences for the broader public discussion.

Sahlins, the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, said that he was leaving the 150-year-old academy for two reasons: the election of Chagnon to the NAS last year and the involvement of the NAS in research for the military. His action prompted an outpouring of petitions and statements of support from colleagues, including several hundred in Brazil.

The academy says that principled resignations like Sahlins’ are “rare”—so rare that the only precedent anyone could identify was famed Harvard biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin’s 1971 departure in protest against NAS military work related to the war in Vietnam. In the 1960s Sahlins himself was helping to launch campus teach-ins against the Vietnam War and to raise issues about the relationship of anthropology to the military. (...)

The publication of Chagnon’s memoirs prompted a third, successful attempt at resignation. Sahlins had objected to the NAS admitting Chagnon—formerly at the Universities of Michigan and of California at Santa Barbara, now at the University of Missouri—because of the quality of his research and his ethics in the field. Sahlins is also critical of both the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of sociobiology, more often referred to now as evolutionary psychology. A minority of anthropologists adopt its viewpoint. But many non-anthropologists—such as Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, and Jared Diamond—have used the work of Chagnon and like-minded anthropologists to reach a large audience.

Fundamentally, this group of writers and researchers see biology as destiny. They argue that biological evolution defines human nature through the inheritance of traits that provide individuals with a reproductive advantage—that is, with more offspring. (...)

Sahlins first weighed in against sociobiology in the mid-1970s with The Use and Abuse of Biology, but he has continued to pursue many of the same critical themes in recent books, such as What Kinship Is—And Is Not and The Western Illusion of Human Nature. He argues that human nature is culture—that is, the learned values, beliefs, and patterns of behavior that social groups follow or believe they should follow, as well as the capacity to change those ideas passed from previous generations. Culture—and not some special features of biological evolution, like a carnivore’s teeth or the short beak of a seed-eating bird—provides humans with a flexible, varied means of adapting to a wide and changing variety of circumstances.

Homo sapiens evolved biologically and mentally from our hominid ancestors over several million years within the context of the hominid tool-making culture. “What evolved was our capacity to realize biological necessities, from sex to nutrition, in the thousand different ways that different societies have developed,” Sahlins says. “Hence, culture, the symbolically organized modes of the ways we live, including our bodily functioning, is the specifically ‘human nature.’”

Sahlins argues against the sociobiologists’ neo-Hobbesian view of human nature as a war of all against all—with a brutal, competitive nature clashing with culture. This view of human nature has deep roots in Western cultural traditions, he writes, but it also projects a more modern capitalist view of self-interested, even selfish, behavior on both humanity and the rest of the natural world. In many other societies, people do not see the same sharp division between nature and culture. And all human societies have systems of kinship, which Sahlins defines as “mutuality of being,” meaning that “kinfolk are members of one another, intrinsic to each other’s identity and existence.”

“Symbolically and emotionally, kinfolk live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths,” Sahlins says. “Why don’t scientists base their ideas of human nature on this truly universal condition—a condition in which self-interest at the expense of others is precluded by definition, insofar as people are parts of one another?”

by David Moberg, Dissent |  Read more: 

Photo: Yanomami villagers at an indigenous expo in Caracas (Luigino Bracci, 2011, Flickr creative commons)

Erwin Blumenfeld, Untitled, Paris, c. 1937
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The Waterboys

And I will stroll the merry way and jump the hedges first
And I will drink the clear clean water for to quench my thirst
And I shall watch the ferry-boats and they'll get high
On a blue ocean, against tomorrow's sky

And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain
And I will never grow so old again
Oh sweet thing, sweet thing
My, my, my, my, my sweet thing

And I shall drive my chariot down your streets and cry
Hey, it's me! I'm dynamite and I don't know why
And you shall take me warm in your arms again
And I will not remember that I ever felt the pain

And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain
And never ever ever ever ever get so old again

Ooh
Sweet thing
Yeah yeah yeah...
Sweet thing
My my my...

And I will raise my hand up into the night time sky
And count the stars there shining in your eyes
Just to dig it all an' not to wonder, that's just fine
And I'll be satisfied not to read in between the lines

And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain
And never ever ever ever ever get so old again

Sugar-baby with your champagne eyes
And your saint-like smile....

[ed. I remember crossing the border into Juarez years ago looking for the public market and taking a wrong turn into some very tough neighborhoods. It was alarming then, it might be fatal today.]

Through the Looking Glass: The Mexican city of Juárez as seen through a bullet-pocked protective barrier from the American side of the international border. Juárez has been plagued by drug-related violence and thousands of murders over the past several years.
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brainwashed
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First Person Shooter

You hear a click, like the sound of a light switch. Or a pencil being snapped.

You’re facing away from it, looking straight ahead, just as you were instructed. The click and the searing pain you feel are nearly instantaneous. But your mind tricks you into thinking that there’s a distinct period between the click and your first realization that something’s gone very wrong. Maybe that’s because your shooter — friendly and supportive as he may be; congratulatory, even, that you’re dumb enough to volunteer for this — has prepared you for it, warned you that a pain like no other pain is about to strike you in a way you’ve never been struck before.

So you just stand there, waiting for it, on the wrong side of target practice.

When it hits you, no matter how much you expect it, it comes as a surprise — a literal shock, like a baseball bat swung hard and squarely into the small of your back. That sensation — which is actually two sharp steel barbs piercing your skin and shooting electricity into your central nervous system — is followed by the harshest, most violent charlie horse you can imagine coursing through your entire body. With the pain comes the terrifying awareness that you are completely helpless. You cannot move. You lose control of almost everything and the only place you can go is down, face first to the floor.

For five full seconds — an eternity — this continues. Thousands of volts commandeer your body and leave you convulsing, screaming for your life, helpless.

And when it’s over, you want nothing but quiet and calm. You look down at your crotch to make sure you haven’t pissed or shit yourself (you were warned of this possibility) and you’re glad to be clean.

But you don’t want to talk. You don’t want to stand. You don’t want to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down. You just want to be still. You just want to lie there. Motionless. Happy you’re alive. Glad it’s over.

That’s what it feels like to be hit with a Taser. (...)

In 1993, two Scottsdale, Arizona brothers, Rick and Tom Smith, bought the Taser name and patent rights from Cover, who was then in his seventies. They worked with Cover to make the Taser a non-firearm and, by 1998, the Smiths sold their first police Tasers to the Orlando Police Department. By 2001, Taser was a NASDAQ publicly traded company. In three years, Taser’s market cap went from less than $25 million to over $1 billion — a 3,900 percent increase. (...)

In 2005 the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation after more than 40 lawsuits were filed claiming Tasers had severely — and unnecessarily — harmed or killed victims. The company’s stock crumbled, dropping 78 percent. When the SEC dropped its investigation in 2006, the stock rebounded to a little less than half its peak. The investigation and subsequent stock plunge showed just how dependant Taser’s fortunes were on a single, controversial product. The company could continue to improve its flagship device, but it also needed to explore new ways to make money.

by Matt Stroud, The Verge |  Read more:

Image uncredited, Design by Scott Kellum and James Chae. Special thanks to Josh Laincz

A Modest Masterpiece

[ed. One of my favorites (along with the soundtrack)]

A year ago, Donald Trump's plan to plant a golfing resort on a strip of Aberdonian coastline hit a glitch. A farmer living in a trailer declined to sell up. A personal visitation from the gambling squillionaire resulted in a salty Anglo-Saxon exchange. Boy, would it be good to see the movie. Except that in a way we already have.

"Local Hero", in which a Texan oil company's attempt to buy up a whole Scottish village is thwarted by a lone white-haired beachcomber, is 25 years old. Half the film was shot up the road in the tiny port of Pennan (above)--nowadays billed, on undiscoveredscotland.co.uk, as the home of "Scotland's most famous phone box". The anniversary is worth celebrating not just because of the happy recurrence of its plot. Bill Forsyth's film is a modest masterpiece.

That's how I've always thought of it, anyway. I first saw "Local Hero" as a school leaver in 1983, and it has stayed in my head ever since, along with Mark Knopfler's bittersweet acoustic theme tune. At first, it seemed merely a comic gem. The joke was that the hicks are far cannier than they appear to MacIntyre, the cocksure emissary sent from Houston to negotiate. But the older you get, the more it looks like the darkest Nordic tragedy: having fallen for this bucolic paradise, the incomer is brutally exiled back to an inferno of skyscrapers and tailbacks.

It's a measure of how subversive a film it was that Forsyth got into trouble at the test screening in Seattle. "There was irritation", he recalls, "that this little upstart from Europe was having the gall to hint these things about the American way of life. MacIntyre was an everyman losing his personality in the glass tower of work. One guy got me against the wall and said, 'You don't have the right to play around with the American hero.'" (...)

"Local Hero" came about when the producer David Puttnam, who was about to win an Oscar for "Chariots of Fire", advised Forsyth that there would be studio money for a Scottish script with parts for a couple of American actors. One was the role of the star-gazing petro-mogul Felix Happer. "I wrote it with Burt Lancaster in my head from the very beginning," Forsyth says. "I'd read in an interview that he'd like to do some real comedy." He also drew on a recent deal struck with an oil consortium in Orkney. "The chief executive of the council realised he had a strong position and got the community a cut of the revenue and incredible things like care of libraries and community centres."

Thus was conceived the alluring figure of Gordon Urquhart, the savvy hotelier and accountant ("we tend to double up on jobs around here," as he explains). He was played, or beautifully underplayed, by Lawson. "Around that time it was quite hard to find a contemporary Scottish character who wasn't in wellies and a kilt or a Gorbals heavy," says Lawson. "I had hardly ever used my own voice. It's the most enjoyable experience I've ever had." The same endorsement comes from Riegert, who had to fight off Michael Douglas and half of Hollywood to land the part of MacIntyre. "If you could storyboard the best possible experience for an actor, this would be it," he says. "It was effortless. I recognised the material right off the page. My only question was how well could the director direct this movie?

by Jasper Rees, More Intelligent Life |  Read more:

Picture "Local Hero"

Seeing and Believing

UFO sightings reached their spate roughly within a decade of the release of Steven Spielberg’s spellbinding film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). One good reason to believe there were never any UFOS is that nobody sees them any more. Once, the skies were refulgent with alien craft; now they are back to their primordial emptiness, returning only static to the radio telescopes, and offering the occasional meteor shower to the wondering eye.

It isn’t only flying saucers that have receded into history. They are being followed, more gradually to be sure, by a decline in sightings of ghosts, recordings of poltergeists, claims of psychokinesis and the rest, as is regularly attested by organisations such as the Society for Psychical Research in London and the UK-wide research group Para.Science. Many of those with a vested interest in the supernatural industry naturally resist this contention, but there is far less credulity among the public for tales of the extraordinary than there was even a generation ago. The standard explanation attributes this to growing scepticism. But, as is only fitting for the paranormal, it might be that there are more mysterious forces at work.

In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), the foundational text of Parisian situationism, the French Marxist theorist Guy Debord argued that consumer culture had acquired the dimensions of an alternative reality: it had replaced the dull, grey world with its own, phantasmatic iridescence. It didn’t matter whether or not everybody genuinely could buy a part of the universal plenty. What mattered was the mythology, the illusion of bountiful possibility and limitless choice, wrapped up in a spectacularity borrowed from the film and television industries.

Debord was not the first to remark on this. When the social theorists of the Frankfurt School arrived in New York during their wartime exile in the 1930s, they found the giant billboard ads for toothpaste even more-nerve jangling than they had expected. Here was a culture entirely mortgaged to the secular spectacular. In previous centuries, what was visually remarkable stood for the other-worldly, the spiritual. The baroque façades and soaring spires of cathedrals, the carmines and cobalts of stained-glass windows with the sun streaming through them, devotional processions and carnival parades, gargoyles, misericords, miraculous relics — all attested that there was an intangible reality beyond the physical one, a reality that could at most be suggestively delineated in extraordinary sights. By the time of the European Enlightenment, the sublimity of nature, together with its representation in the bravura period of landscape painting, achieved the same effects. (...)

If the growing spectacularisation of media culture began to undermine belief in the spirit world, the widespread dissemination of video technology hastened its decline. Filming is now within the grasp of everybody with a smartphone. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) beadily observes the nothing that is all that seems to happen on deserted night-time streets. Video cameras used to be reserved for the signal events of a life (weddings, anniversaries, birthdays), but now scarcely anything is beneath the attention of YouTube. In the heyday of ghost stories, the elusive grail was a photograph or moving film of some spectral emanation. There should no longer be any technical obstacle to providing this, and yet all we see is the odd whitish blur that could as easily be a mark on the screen.

What these countervailing powers have brought about in postmodern society is the wrong kind of scepticism. A large element of rationalist doubt certainly accompanies the decline of interest in the paranormal, driven primarily by these cultural and, latterly, technological factors. Yet underlying that doubt itself is the growing incredulity with which people evaluate anything. Supermarket discounts appear to offer wines at half-price; products for smearing on your face purport to make you look younger — these are the all-too-evident mendacities. The homilies of party politicians at election time sound like the exclamatory drivel of PR companies. And the way this stuff has permeated culture as a whole has bred a widespread incurious scepticism. We now extend the same degree of undifferentiating refusal even to those phenomena that, while hard to credit, deserve to be heeded. Climate change might be the most obvious current instance but, at its most noxious, scepticism results in an unwillingness to believe in others’ suffering. The attitude of wholesale rejection, by which one might stand a chance of becoming impervious to fraud, is thus bought at the ever greater risk of nihilism.

by Stuart Walton, Aeon |  Read more:
Image: oorka | Shutterstock via:

Marvin Gaye

'I come up hard baby but now I'm cool'
'I didn't make it sugar playing by the rules'

The Bad-Boy Brand

Late in February, in the Ryugyong Chung Ju-yung Indoor Stadium, in Pyongyang, North Korea, ten thousand stiff-looking spectators in gray Mao suits gathered to watch a basketball game. Vice Media, the Brooklyn-based company, had arranged to have members of the Harlem Globetrotters—Anthony (Buckets) Blakes, Will (Bull) Bullard, and Alex (Moose) Weekes—play with North Korea’s national team. The company’s cameramen were in the crowd, filming for a weekly news-magazine series, “Vice,” that will air this spring on HBO. Not long before the game started, the crowd, which included the state’s diplomatic and military élite, began to chant “Manse!”—the traditional invocation that means “Ten thousand years, so long live Korea!” The otherworldly roar announced the entrance of North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, who succeeded his father in 2011. He sat on a dais, where he was joined by his wife, the former singer Ri Sol-ju, and, a few moments later, an unlikely guest of honor: the onetime Chicago Bulls star and cross-dresser Dennis Rodman. Although almost all foreign media is blacked out in North Korea, basketball is a popular sport, and the country’s ruling family are N.B.A. fanatics.

Rodman has a reputation for wild sartorial choices—pink hair, a wedding gown—but he was dressed with relative restraint. He wore a tuxedo jacket, black track pants, wraparound sunglasses, a black sequinned scarf, a black hat that said “USA,” and various lip and nose rings. At each dunk by a Globetrotter or three-pointer by a member of the North Korean team, the crowd erupted in screams. The game ended, as a basketball game cannot, in a tie, 110–110.

Afterward, Rodman, with one hand in his pocket, delivered a speech. “First of all,” he said, his words echoing in the immense stadium, “I would like to say thank you. It’s been very good to be here. You guys have been very, very kind to me and to my compadres from America.” He paused as his North Korean translator struggled with “compadres.” Rodman continued, “I’m sorry that my country and your country are not on good terms, but for me and—the country . . .” Seeming to lose his train of thought, Rodman turned and bowed in the direction of the Supreme Leader, who had been watching him with a slightly nervous expression. With a flourish of his fingers, Rodman said, “Sir, you have a friend for life.”

This cheerful scene—billed as “basketball diplomacy”—was soon complicated by developments in U.S.-North Korean relations. After Rodman’s visit, North Korea, which had recently been hit with tighter U.N. sanctions, scrapped its 1953 armistice with South Korea and threatened a preëmptive nuclear attack on the United States. Last week, Kim said, “The time has come to settle accounts with the U.S. imperialists.”

What had seemed like a bold P.R. stunt by Vice now looked like cozying up to a dangerous dictator. This was not helped by a report from Ryan Duffy, a Vice correspondent, on Kim Jong-un’s hospitality: “Dinner was an epic feast. Felt like about ten courses in total. I’d say the winners were the smoked turkey and sushi, though we had the Pyongyang cold noodles earlier in the trip and that’s been the runaway favorite so far.” Rodman, speaking to reporters in Pyongyang, professed his admiration for the Supreme Leader: “Guess what! I love him.” He added, “The guy’s really awesome.”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” a flabbergasted Dan Rather said, on CNN. U.S. News & World Report called the episode “More ‘Jackass’ Than Journalism,” and pointed out that, in light of the regime’s abuses and recent reports of cannibalism among a starving population, “those remarks and current headline on the Vice Web site that ‘North Korea has a friend in Dennis Rodman and Vice’ seem a bit, well, tasteless.”

Vice has never been celebrated for good taste. The company started in Montreal, in the mid-nineties, as a free magazine with a reputation for provocation. Once, after its editors were accused of sexism for featuring nude porn stars in the magazine, they posed nude as well. Current articles combine investigative reporting with a sensibility that is adolescent, male, and proudly boorish. Vice’s most recent issue, the Cultural Atrocities Issue, reads like a combination of National Geographic, High Times, and Penthouse Forum. It includes a photo shoot, titled “Home Entertainment,” of topless women posing with remote controls over their breasts, and a travel piece about the remote Kalash Valleys of Pakistan: “It’s not a nice place to live, but, as I discovered, it is a great place to party.”

In recent years, Vice has been engaged in an energetic process of growing up—both commercially and in terms of journalistic ambition. It now has thirty-five offices in eighteen countries, from Poland to Brazil. It operates a record label, which, in 2002, began putting out albums by such of-the-moment bands as Bloc Party and the Raveonettes; book and film divisions (Vice recently helped market the R-rated “Spring Breakers,” directed by Harmony Korine); a suite of Web sites; and an in-house ad agency. These ventures are united by Vice’s ambition to become a kind of global MTV on steroids. According to Shane Smith, Vice’s C.E.O., “The over-all aim, the over-all goal is to be the largest network for young people in the world.” (...)

Vice executives sometimes refer to their company as “the Time Warner of the streets,” and in the financial press there is occasional discussion about the price a potential sale might bring. A source familiar with the company’s finances estimates last year’s revenues at a hundred and seventy-five million dollars. In 2011, Vice was valued at two hundred million dollars, and last year Forbes speculated that the company might someday be worth as much as a billion dollars.

Not long after Rodman’s trip, I went to see Smith at the company’s headquarters, a set of converted warehouses in Williamsburg. Smith met me in the Bear Room, a conference room decorated with a Persian rug and a grizzly bear, now stuffed, that had been shot after surprising Vice producers filming in Alaska. Smith defended Vice and its reporters against charges of journalistic recklessness. Talking about Kim Jong-un, he said, “Look, the fact that he came is a big deal. The fact that we’re the only people to meet him is a big deal. The fact that we went to his house was a really big deal.” He went on, “Is it journalism? It depends on what the definition of journalism is.”

by Lizzie Widdicombe, New Yorker |  Read more: 
Photograph by Chris Buck.

Moon Rising over Fog Clouds, Elliott Daingerfield (1859–1932)
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