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The Death Of Blogs? Or Of Magazines?

As part of his “eulogy for the blog”, Marc Tracy touches upon the evolution of the Dish – which he praises as “a soap opera pegged to the news cycle”:

[T]oday, Google Reader is dying, Media Decoder is dead, and Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish is alive in new form. This year, Sullivan decided that he was a big enough brand, commanding enough attention and traffic, to strike out on his own. At the beginning of the last decade, the institutions didn’t need him. Today, he feels his best chance for survival is by becoming one of the institutions, complete with a staff and a variety of content. What wasn’t going to work was continuing to have, merely, a blog. 

We will still have blogs, of course, if only because the word is flexible enough to encompass a very wide range of publishing platforms: Basically, anything that contains a scrollable stream of posts is a “blog.” What we are losing is the personal blog and the themed blog. Less and less do readers have the patience for a certain writer or even certain subject matter.

I wish he had some solid data to back that point up. Of course, blogs have evolved – and this one clearly has from its early days. What began as one person being mean to Maureen Dowd around 12.30 am every night is now an organism in which my colleagues and I try to construct both a personal and yet also diverse conversation in real time. But that doesn’t mean the individual blogger – small or large – is disappearing. Our entire model requires, as it did from the get-go, links to other sites and blogs – and we have not detected a shortage.

One reason we have had to grow and evolve – and this started as far back as 2003 – is that the web conversation has grown exponentially since this blog started (when Bill Clinton was president). Yes, many bloggers now get employed by more general sites, or move on to more complex forms (think of Nate Silver, a lone blogger when the Dish first championed his work and now part of an informational eco-system). But every page on the web is equally accessible as every other page. Blogs will never die – but they might form a smaller part of a much larger online eco-system of discourse.

My own view is that one particular form of journalism is actually dying because of this technological shift – and it’s magazines, not blogs. When every page in a magazine can be detached from the others, when readers rarely absorb a coherent assemblage of writers in a bound paper publication, but pick and choose whom to read online where individual stories and posts overwhelm any single collective form of content, the magazine as we have long known it is effectively over.

Without paper and staples, it doesn’t fall apart so much as explodes into many pieces hurtling into the broader web. Where these pieces come from doesn’t matter much to the reader. So what’s taking the place of magazines are blog-hubs or group-blogs with more links, bigger and bigger ambitions and lower costs. Or aggregated bloggers/writers/galley slave curators designed by “magazines” to be sold in themed chunks. That’s why the Atlantic.com began as a collection of bloggers and swiftly turned them all into chopped up advertizing-geared “channels.” That form of online magazine has nothing to do with its writing as such or its writers; it’s a way to use writers to procure money from corporations. And those channels now include direct corporate-written ad copy, designed to look as much like the actual “magazine” as modesty allows.

by Andrew Sullivan, The Dish |  Read more:

Photo: uncredited

How Wall Street Defanged Dodd-Frank

The mood was triumphant on the morning of July 21, 2010, when Barack Obama, not quite two years into his presidency, strode to a podium inside the Ronald Reagan Building, a few blocks from the White House. As he prepared to sign the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act—the sweeping legislative package designed to prevent another spectacular financial collapse—into law, the president first acknowledged the miracle of having a bill to sign at all. “Passing this…was no easy task,” he told the crowd of hundreds. “We had to overcome the furious lobbying of an array of powerful interest groups and a partisan minority determined to block change.”

Indeed, some 3,000 lobbyists had swarmed the Capitol in hopes of killing off pieces of the proposed bill—nearly six lobbyists for every member of Congress. For Michael Barr, then an assistant secretary at the Treasury Department, the trench warfare spurred by Dodd-Frank left him shellshocked. “You pick a page at random,” says Barr, now a law professor at the University of Michigan, “and I’ll tell you about all the issues on that page where the fighting was intense.” Remarkably, despite the onslaught, Dodd-Frank “got stronger rather than weaker the closer we got to passage, which is incredibly unusual,” says Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, one of a handful of advocacy groups that fought tenaciously for the bill.

That sense of victory barely lasted barely the morning. The same financial behemoths that had fought so ferociously to block Dodd-Frank were not going to let the mere fact of the bill’s passage ruin their plans. “Halftime,” shrugged Scott Talbott, chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, a lobbying group representing 100 of the country’s largest financial institutions. It was 5:30 am on a Friday when a joint House-Senate conference committee approved the bill’s final language. By Sunday, an industry lawyer named Annette Nazareth—a former top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission whose firm counts JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs among its clients—had already sent off a heavily annotated copy of the 848-page bill to colleagues at her old agency. According to a congressional staffer whose boss was a key architect of Dodd-Frank, Nazareth is one of two “generals” running the campaign to undo the bill. The other is Eugene Scalia, a fearsome litigator and son of the Supreme Court justice.

After Dodd-Frank’s passage, lobbyists for the big banks and industry trade groups divided themselves into eighteen working groups, each organized around a different element of the new law. “That’s when the real work began,” Talbott tells me. One working group focused on derivatives reform, including the requirement that these complex financial instruments now be sold on open exchanges in the fashion of stocks and bonds. Another focused on efforts to hammer out the so-called Volcker Rule, which would limit the ability of federally insured banks to wager on risky ventures. A third tackled the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), created to protect ordinary consumers from Wall Street deceptions involving mortgages, credit cards and other major profit centers for the banks.

In the months leading up to Dodd-Frank’s passage, the big story was the staggering sums of money being spent by the industry to defeat the bill—more than $1 billion on lobbying alone, according to one estimate. Yet, incredibly, the financial sector dramatically increased its spending after Dodd-Frank was signed. Whereas commercial banks such as Wells Fargo, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, along with their trade groups, spent $55 million lobbying in 2010 (the year Dodd-Frank became law), they would collectively spend $61 million in 2011 and again in 2012, according to OpenSecrets.org. The twenty-eight lobbyists Talbott has on the payroll at the Financial Services Roundtable makes it relative small fry. The American Bankers Association has ninety-one lobbyists representing its interests, while the US Chamber of Commerce has 183. Goldman Sachs has fifty-one lobbyists, JPMorgan Chase sixty, and even the obscure-sounding Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association is armed to the teeth, hiring the services of forty-nine lobbyists.

Even so, those numbers don’t begin to capture the army of people being paid exorbitant sums to beat back reform. “The lobbyists are just the point of the spear,” said Ed Mierzwinski, director of consumer programs for the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). “There are also the regulatory lawyers, the research staffs, the PR people and all those loyal think tank supporters shilling for the banks.”

Dodd-Frank’s Achilles’ heel is that it leaves the tough work of writing the actual regulations to existing federal agencies like the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had failed so miserably at protecting the public interest in the run-up to the 2008 crash, as well as to backwater independent agencies like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which was tasked with regulating a derivatives market that played a central role in the collapse of the global economy.

The story of how Wall Street lobbyists worked the halls of Congress, blocking the appointment of Elizabeth Warren, Obama’s first choice to head the CFPB, or pushing bills aimed at defanging Dodd-Frank, is fairly well-known by now. But it was the stealthy work of battalions of regulatory lawyers, who descended on the private offices of regulators deep inside the bureaucracy, that has proven more crucial to the industry’s effort to pick off pieces of Dodd-Frank. There, a kind of ground war has been going on for almost three years, with the regulators waging hand-to-hand combat to defend every clause and comma in Dodd-Frank, and the lawyers fighting to insert any loophole they can to protect their clients’ extraordinary profits. This is how the miracle that was the making of Dodd-Frank—hailed as the most comprehensive financial reform since the 1930s—became a slow-moving horror movie called “The Unmaking of Dodd-Frank”: a perfect case study of the ways an industry with nearly unlimited resources can avoid a set of tough-minded reforms it doesn’t like.

by Gary Rivlin, The Nation |  Read more:

AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

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Simons - Psycho Candy from Hugo Jøzwicki on Vimeo.

[ed. Club life...Copenhagen.]

Red Star

[ed. Haven't seen it, but it looks, um ...interesting.]

Red Star Motel is the clever, action-packed series by Beijing photographer Chi Lei, “Chili”, that reads like an unraveling drama brimming with sex, drugs, murder and chaos.

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First Live Performance of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

[ed. Damn, I miss grunge.]

It’s over 20 years ago now that Nirvana’s video for “Smells like Teen Spirit” debuted on MTV’s 120 Minutes and, for better or worse, inaugurated the grunge era. The video arrived as a shock and a thrill to a generation too young to remember punk and sick of the steady stream of cheesy corporate dance music and hair metal that characterized the late-80s. For everyone outside the small Seattle scene that nurtured them and the tape-trading kids in the know, the band seemed to arrive out of nowhere as a total angst-ridden package, and the MTV video, by first-time director Samuel Bayer, seemed bracingly anarchic and raw at the time.

But a look at the first live performance of “Teen Spirit” (above) makes it seem pretty tame by comparison. The video’s a little grainy and low-res, which suits the song just fine. Live, “Teen Spirit’s” disturbing undertones are more pronounced, its quiet-loud dynamics more forceful, and the energy of the crowd is real, not the thrashing around of a bunch of teenage extras. Not a cheerleader in sight, but I think this would have grabbed me more than the pep rally-riot-themed MTV video did when it debuted a few months later. Despite their anti-corporate stance, Nirvana was a casualty of their own success, eaten up by the machinery they despised (...)Also don’t miss Nirvana’s Home Videos: An Intimate Look at the Band’s Life Away From the Spotlight (1988).

via: Open Culture

Ron Terner
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The 'Public Safety Exception'

[ed. And why it matters.]

The initial debate over the treatment of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev focused on whether he should be advised of his Miranda rights or whether the "public safety exception" justified delaying it. In the wake of news reports that he had been Mirandized and would be charged in a federal court, I credited the Obama DOJ for handling the case reasonably well thus far. As it turns out, though, Tsarnaev wasn't Mirandized because the DOJ decided he should be. Instead, that happened only because a federal magistrate, on her own, scheduled a hospital-room hearing, interrupted the FBI's interrogation which had been proceeding at that point for a full 16 hours, and advised him of his right to remain silent and appointed him a lawyer. Since then, Tsarnaev ceased answering the FBI's questions.

But that controversy was merely about whether he would be advised of his Miranda rights. Now, the Los Angeles Times, almost in passing, reports something which, if true, would be a much more serious violation of core rights than delaying Miranda warnings - namely, that prior to the magistrate's visit to his hospital room, Tsarnaev had repeatedly asked for a lawyer, but the FBI simply ignored those requests, instead allowing the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group to continue to interrogate him alone:

"Tsarnaev has not answered any questions since he was given a lawyer and told he has the right to remain silent by Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler on Monday, officials said.

"Until that point, Tsarnaev had been responding to the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, including admitting his role in the bombing, authorities said.A senior congressional aide said Tsarnaev had asked several times for a lawyer, but that request was ignored since he was being questioned under the public safety exemption to the Miranda rule."

Delaying Miranda warnings under the "public safety exception" - including under the Obama DOJ's radically expanded version of it - is one thing. But denying him the right to a lawyer after he repeatedly requests one is another thing entirely: as fundamental a violation of crucial guaranteed rights as can be imagined. As the lawyer bmaz comprehensively details in this excellent post, it is virtually unheard of for the "public safety" exception to be used to deny someone their right to a lawyer as opposed to delaying a Miranda warning (the only cases where this has been accepted were when "the intrusion into the constitutional right to counsel ... was so fleeting – in both it was no more than a question or two about a weapon on the premises of a search while the search warrant was actively being executed"). To ignore the repeated requests of someone in police custody for a lawyer, for hours and hours, is just inexcusable and legally baseless.

As law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky explained in the Los Angeles Times last week, the Obama DOJ was already abusing the "public safety" exception by using it to delay Miranda warnings for hours, long after virtually every public official expressly said that there were no more threats to the public safety. As he put it: "this exception does not apply here because there was no emergency threat facing law enforcement." Indeed, as I documented when this issue first arose, the Obama DOJ already unilaterally expanded this exception far beyond what the Supreme Court previously recognized by simply decreeing (in secret) that terrorism cases justify much greater delays in Mirandizing a suspect for reasons well beyond asking about public safety.

But that debate was merely about whether Tsarnaev would be advised of his rights. This is much more serious: if the LA Times report is true, then it means that the DOJ did not merely fail to advise him of his right to a lawyer but actively blocked him from exercising that right. This is a US citizen arrested for an alleged crime on US soil: there is no justification whatsoever for denying him his repeatedly exercised right to counsel. And there are ample and obvious dangers in letting the government do this. That's why Marcy Wheeler was arguing from the start that whether Tsarnaev would be promptly presented to a federal court - as both the Constitution and federal law requires - is more important than whether he is quickly Mirandized. Even worse, if the LA Times report is accurate, it means that the Miranda delay as well as the denial of his right to a lawyer would have continued even longer had the federal magistrate not basically barged into the interrogation to advise him of his rights.

by Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Reuters

Advanced Style

Most of us are aware that there are two types of old these days. There is baby-boomer old, an audacious, aspirational sort of old. Common depictions include couples sky-diving for their 40th anniversaries; Richard Branson doing all manner of macho rich-guy nonsense; and the woman of a certain age on a seashore holding a fluttering piece of voile toward the winds of freedom.

Then there is old old, a realm often belonging to the parents of the baby boomers. This is nursing-home old. This is prunes-for-breakfast old. This is “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up” old.

Yet a few months ago, arriving on my desk like so many pounds of zeitgeist, an unlikely third way appeared in the form of a coffee-table book called “Advanced Style.” The book features old people, often very old people, mainly women, photographed on the street, dressed up lively for the winters of their lives. They are buttressed by pullquotes like: “When you are younger, you dress for other people. When you are older, you dress for yourself.” One photo is of a 100-year-old woman holding a seasoned ostrich purse in one hand and a walking stick in the other; her facial expression suggests a certain curiosity as to why in God’s name this boychik with a digital camera wants so much to take her picture.

“Advanced Style” was created by a 31-year-old street-style photographer from San Diego named Ari Seth Cohen. He started the project as a photo blog, and both the “Advanced Style” book and blog share the standout quality of being so of their time that they feel nearly peculiar — at once familiar and like nothing you’ve ever seen.

“Advanced Style” has sold out four printings since it was first published last spring. Its popularity has made Cohen — by all photographic evidence something of a nebbish, a guy who says that if he hadn’t made it in the style world, he would have gone to work at a nursing home — one of New York City’s more unlikely tastemakers. (...)

It would be easy to make the mistake of thinking new interest in the aged exists simply because the boomers, still the largest generation in the Western Hemisphere, are now careering into seniorhood. But it’s worth remembering that, notwithstanding their aging, the boomers are still the generation that gave us the famous boardroom credo “Nobody wants to see old people on TV/in the movies/in advertisements.” In the 1980s, the peak years of boomer creative influence, if you were on television with more than six decades to your name, you were most likely flying into a snowy moonscape pulled by reindeer. “The Golden Girls” was what it meant to be acceptably ancient on prime time. Rue McClanahan was a fit 51 when she took the role of Blanche Devereaux on that show.

So it’s not the new old who are driving this fascination. It’s the young. Scratch the surface of youth culture, and a kind of Eldertopia is revealed, a pro-aged paradise lovingly promoted by people who are themselves not even close to middle-aged.

by Mireille Silcoff, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Beatrix Ost via:

Advanced Style Web Site

Archangel Angela by studio Judith
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Chuck Berry & Nirvana by Mark Seliger
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Sorry, Siri: How Google Is Planning to Be Your New Personal Assistant

The responsive relationship between user and data that Huey is describing -- the conversational default -- is "kind of the next step for where search is going," Scott Huffman, Google's vice president of engineering, told me. Google's engineers, he said, have long been preoccupied with the idea of search not just as a box on a screen, but as a personal, and personalized, assistant. And "as we thought about it," he says, "a really great assistant brings you information before you ask for it." An assistant, ideally, knows your desires even better, and even sooner, than you do: Siri, but smarter. So Google has applied that longstanding workplace logic to the mobile devices that help you navigate the world. The basic idea of Google Now, Huffman says -- and the logic that is driving its extension across different mobile platforms -- is Google working "as a powerful assistant that wants to help me get through my day."

Which does not mean (um, yet?) a Google product that can read your mind, or even your voice. The capabilities here are still very much in their early stages. But the extension of Google Now, and the double-down on its approach to search, suggests how Google sees itself within an environment that finds the firm's core competency -- searching the Internet -- competing with new waysof organizing the world's information. Ways that often treat information exactly as it is: discursive and dynamic and, ultimately, personal. "Google Now is probably the first example of a new generation of intelligent software," Hugo Barra, director of product management for Android, put it. Will you hit traffic in your regular commute? Google would like to warn you. Is there a cool museum nearby? Google would like to tell you. Has your flight been delayed? Google would like to break the bad news.

With its investments in Google Now, Google is moving away from, or at least expanding, the interface that has driven search since its earliest days -- "keywords in a box," Huffman puts it -- to something the firm hopes will be more sophisticated and intuitive and, for better or for worse, friction-free. This is, or it's trying to be, the Google that knows you. The Google that reads you. The Google that treats you, to some extent, as the site to be indexed. "Our goal," Larry Page put it in a recent earnings call, "is to get you the right information, at just the right time."

Google is betting that, armed with its deep knowledge of users and the world they live in, it will understand what "just the right information" and "just the right time" actually are -- almost as well as, and sometimes even better than, you do.

One key component of that bet is a related technology: voice control. More than half of the U.S. population now owns smartphones with voice capabilities, a Google rep pointed out to me, and -- per a survey the firm conducted -- two in three of them are aware of those capabilities. Already, Google's voice commands allow users to do things like set timers, send texts, dictate notes, and, of course, search for stuff on the Internet. But there's a broader market to be tapped here, Google believes. "Voice commands are going to be increasingly important," Page declared during the same earnings call, noting the obvious ("it's just much less hassle to talk than type").

After all, one of the most crucial skills of a good assistant is communication: He or she has to be able to listen and reply to you effectively for anything else to make much difference. Haptic commands, fingers on a keyboard or screen, can be a clunky way to have a conversation, Huffman points out, "whereas voice is much more natural." That's not merely a matter of convenience. Voice lends itself to a kind of dialogue -- to an interaction with a device that seems to take place on relatively human terms -- much more readily than fingers do. Siri may be far from perfect, but it (she?) is onto something big in that respect. Voice, Huffman says, is "just a much more powerful way to interact with a mobile device."

by Megan Garber, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Coming Out: NBA Center Jason Collins

I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay.

I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn't the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, "I'm different." If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I'm raising my hand.

My journey of self-discovery and self-acknowledgement began in my hometown of Los Angeles and has taken me through two state high school championships, the NCAA Final Four and the Elite Eight, and nine playoffs in 12 NBA seasons.

I've played for six pro teams and have appeared in two NBA Finals. Ever heard of a parlor game called Three Degrees of Jason Collins? If you're in the league, and I haven't been your teammate, I surely have been one of your teammates' teammates. Or one of your teammates' teammates' teammates.

Now I'm a free agent, literally and figuratively. I've reached that enviable state in life in which I can do pretty much what I want. And what I want is to continue to play basketball. I still love the game, and I still have something to offer. My coaches and teammates recognize that. At the same time, I want to be genuine and authentic and truthful.

Why am I coming out now? Well, I started thinking about this in 2011 during the NBA player lockout. I'm a creature of routine. When the regular season ends I immediately dedicate myself to getting game ready for the opener of the next campaign in the fall. But the lockout wreaked havoc on my habits and forced me to confront who I really am and what I really want. With the season delayed, I trained and worked out. But I lacked the distraction that basketball had always provided.

The first relative I came out to was my aunt Teri, a superior court judge in San Francisco. Her reaction surprised me. "I've known you were gay for years," she said. From that moment on I was comfortable in my own skin. In her presence I ignored my censor button for the first time. She gave me support. The relief I felt was a sweet release. Imagine you're in the oven, baking. Some of us know and accept our sexuality right away and some need more time to cook. I should know -- I baked for 33 years.

When I was younger I dated women. I even got engaged. I thought I had to live a certain way. I thought I needed to marry a woman and raise kids with her. I kept telling myself the sky was red, but I always knew it was blue.

I realized I needed to go public when Joe Kennedy, my old roommate at Stanford and now a Massachusetts congressman, told me he had just marched in Boston's 2012 Gay Pride Parade. I'm seldom jealous of others, but hearing what Joe had done filled me with envy. I was proud of him for participating but angry that as a closeted gay man I couldn't even cheer my straight friend on as a spectator. If I'd been questioned, I would have concocted half truths. What a shame to have to lie at a celebration of pride. I want to do the right thing and not hide anymore. I want to march for tolerance, acceptance and understanding. I want to take a stand and say, "Me, too."

by Jason Collins with Franz Lidz, Sports Illustrated | Read more:
Photo: Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images

Blima Efraim - Hemingway Cat in a Bath
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Bags of Cash

For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.

Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”

The United States was not alone in delivering cash to the president. Mr. Karzai acknowledged a few years ago that Iran regularly gave bags of cash to one of his top aides.

At the time, in 2010, American officials jumped on the payments as evidence of an aggressive Iranian campaign to buy influence and poison Afghanistan’s relations with the United States. What they did not say was that the C.I.A. was also plying the presidential palace with cash — and unlike the Iranians, it still is.

American and Afghan officials familiar with the payments said the agency’s main goal in providing the cash has been to maintain access to Mr. Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the agency’s influence at the presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in Afghanistan’s highly centralized government. The officials spoke about the money only on the condition of anonymity. (...)

Like the Iranian cash, much of the C.I.A.’s money goes to paying off warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban. The result, American and Afghan officials said, is that the agency has greased the wheels of the same patronage networks that American diplomats and law enforcement agents have struggled unsuccessfully to dismantle, leaving the government in the grips of what are basically organized crime syndicates.

by Matthew Rosenberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Anja Niedringhaus/Associated Press

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Battle for Buddha

When Janice Marturano conducted the “mindful leadership experience” workshop last January at the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland, she was hoping for an audience of 20—at most. “I was prepared for one or two,” the founder and executive director of the Washington-based Institute for Mindful Leadership admits. She needn’t have worried. There was a lineup; people were even turned away. More than 70 of the world’s most influential people crammed into the room, many standing for 90 minutes to learn “techniques for developing focus, clarity and compassion.” The next morning, Marturano led a meditation—a Davos first—that drew 40 people, two-thirds of whom had never meditated before.

The spectre of masters of the universe chanting Om at Davos serves as only one measure of how “mindfulness” has become the new Western mantra. The technique, linked to Buddhist practice, teaches being present in the moment, always attentive to, and accepting one’s thoughts and responses, without judgment. In a 1977 study, mindfulness pioneer Jack Kornfeld presented the approach as a remedy to Western excesses, or “the egoistic, hedonic treadmill of continually avoiding discomfort and seeking pleasure from outside sources that are ultimately unsatisfying and short-lived.”

Mindfulness entered the medical mainstream in the 1980s as a clinically proven method for alleviating chronic pain and stress. Since then, it has metastasized into an omnibus panacea—to help children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder concentrate, soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder recover and, now, Fortune 500 executives compete. In Paul Harrison’s upcoming documentary, The Mindfulness Movie, psychologist Guy Claxton frames the benefits in mercantile terms: “At the most basic level, mindfulness enables you to get value for money out of life,” he says.

What has gripped Western attention is mindfulness’s ability to improve performance—of Olympic athletes, parents, and even nations, as promised in U.S. Congressman Tim Ryan’s 2012 bestseller, Mindful Nation: How a simple practice can help us reduce stress, improve performance and recapture the American spirit. Institutions and companies are racing to adopt “mindful” practices—among them Google, the U.S. military and Monsanto. Jeff Weiner, CEO of the social-networking site LinkedIn, is a disciple, boasting that “compassion” and “listening to others” are now his central management tenets.

A mindfulness industry has taken root, seen in a boom in corporate coaching, “yin” yoga (which develops mindfulness by holding poses at a point of intensity for five to 10 minutes) and books such as Raji Lukkoor’s Inner Pilgrimage: Ten Days to a Mindful Meand 10 Mindful Minutes by actress Goldie Hawn, who runs a mindfulness foundation. The first mass-market magazine devoted to the topic, Mindful, has just launched; the first issue of the Halifax-based bimonthly bills itself as “your guide to less stress and more joy” with features such as “The science of changing your brain.” Publisher Jim Gimian says he wants to send “a very broad message that mindfulness is a lifestyle, a broadly appealing part of life and not something esoteric or foreign.” Even the ads are “curated” to reflect this message, he says; placing a full-page ad for women’s clothing line Eileen Fisher on the first page was strategic: the company also advertises in Vogue.

The trend to mindfulness would seem to signal mass recognition of the need to slow down and pay attention in a turbo-driven, reactive society. Yet its migration from ashram to boardroom is not without tensions. High-profile Buddhists are taking off the gloves, albeit thoughtfully; they say mindfulness is part of a continuum—one of the seven factors of enlightenment—not a self-help technique or “a path which can lead to bigger profits,” as the Financial Times put it. And long-time practioners worry that mindfulness repackaged as a quick fix or a commercial platform could in fact lead to mindlessness, and reinforce the very problems it’s trying to heal.

by Anne Kingston, Macleans |  Read more: 

Illustration by Taylor Shute

The Impossible Decision

Graduate students are always thinking about the pleasures and travails of grad school, and springtime is a period of especially intense reflection. It’s in the spring, often in March and April, that undergraduates receive their acceptance letters. When that happens, they turn to their teachers, many of them graduate students, for advice. They ask the dreaded, complicated, inevitable question: To go, or not to go?

Answering that question is not easy. For graduate students, being consulted about grad school is a little like starring in one of those “Up” documentaries (“28 Up,” ideally; “35 Up,” in some cases). Your students do the work of Michael Apted, the series’s laconic director, asking all sorts of tough, personal questions. They push you to think about the success and failure of your life projects; to decide whether or not you are happy; to guess what the future holds; to consider your life on a decades-long scale. This particular spring, the whole conversation has been enriched by writers from around the Web, who have weighed in on the pros and cons of graduate school, especially in the humanities. In addition to the usual terrifying articles in the advice section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, a pair of pieces in Slate—“Thesis Hatement,” by Rebecca Schuman, and “Thesis Defense” by Katie Roiphe—have sparked many thoughtful responses from bloggers and journalists. It’s as though a virtual symposium has been convened.

I’m a former humanities graduate student myself—I went to grad school in English from 2003 through 2011 before becoming a journalist, and am still working nights on my dissertation—and I’m impressed by the clarity of the opinions these essays express. (Rebecca Schuman: “Don’t do it. Just don’t”; Katie Roiphe: “It gives you a habit of intellectual isolation that is… useful, bracing, that gives you strength and originality.”) I can’t muster up that clarity myself, though. I’m very glad that I went to graduate school—my life would be different, and definitely worse, without it. But when I’m asked to give students advice about what they should do, I’m stumped. Over time, I’ve come to feel that giving good advice about graduate school is impossible. It’s like giving people advice about whether they should have children, or move to New York, or join the Army, or go to seminary.

Maybe I’ve been in school too long; doctoral study has a way of turning your head into a never-ending seminar, and I’m now capable of having complicated, inconclusive thoughts about nearly any subject. But advice helps people when they are making rational decisions, and the decision to go to grad school in English is essentially irrational. In fact, it’s representative of a whole class of decisions that bring you face to face with the basic unknowability and uncertainty of life.

by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by Michael Crawford