Anderst Gjennestad aka Strøk
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Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface

The first real-world demo of Google Glass’s user interface made me laugh out loud. Forget the tiny touchpad on your temples you’ll be fussing with, or the constant “OK Glass” utterances-to-nobody: the supposedly subtle “gestural” interaction they came up with–snapping your chin upwards to activate the glasses, in a kind of twitchy, tech-augmented version of the “bro nod”–made the guy look like he was operating his own body like a crude marionette. The most “intuitive” thing we know how to do–move our own bodies–reduced to an awkward, device-mediated pantomime: this is “getting technology out of the way”?

Don’t worry, though–in a couple years, we’ll be apparently able to use future iterations of Glass much less weirdly. A Redditor discovered some code implying that we’ll be able to snap photos merely by winking. What could be more natural and effortless than that? Designers at Fjordspeculate that these kinds of body-based micro-interactions are the future of interface design. “Why swipe your arm when you can just rub your fingers together,” they write. “What could be more natural than staring at something to select it, nodding to approve something?… For privacy, you’ll be able to use imperceptible movements, or even hidden ones such as flicking your tongue across your teeth.”

These designers think that the difference between effortless tongue-flicking and Glass’s crude chin-snapping is simply one of refinement. I’m not so sure. To me they both seem equally alienating–I don’t think we want our bodies to be UIs.

The assumption driving these kinds of design speculations is that if you embed the interface–the control surface for a technology–into our own bodily envelope, that interface will “disappear”: the technology will cease to be a separate “thing” and simply become part of that envelope. The trouble is that unlike technology, your body isn’t something you “interface” with in the first place. You’re not a little homunculus “in” your body, “driving” it around, looking out Terminator-style “through” your eyes. Your body isn’t a tool for delivering your experience: itis your experience. Merging the body with a technological control surface doesn’t magically transform the act of manipulating that surface into bodily experience. I’m not a cyborg (yet) so I can’t be sure, but I suspect the effect is more the opposite: alienating you from the direct bodily experiences you already have by turning them into technological interfaces to be manipulated.  (...)

If this is starting to sound like philosophy, don’t blame me. In his book Where The Action Is, computer scientist Paul Dourish invokes Martin Heidegger (yikes!) to explain the difference between technology that “gets out of the way” and technology that becomes an object of attention unto itself. Heidegger’s concept of “ready to hand” describes a tool that, when used, feels like an extension of yourself that you “act through”. When you drive a nail with a hammer, you feel as though you are acting directly on the nail, not “asking” the hammer to do something for you. In contrast, “present at hand” describes a tool that, in use, causes you to “bump up against some aspect of its nature that makes you focus on it as an entity,” as Matt Webb of BERG writes. Most technological “interfaces”–models that represent abstract information and mediate our manipulation of it–are “present at hand” almost by definition, at least at first. As Webb notes, most of us are familiar enough with a computer mouse by now that it is more like a hammer–“ready to hand”–than an interface standing “between” us and our actions. Still, a mouse is also like a hammer in that it is something separate-from-you that you can pick up and set down with your hands. What if the “mouse” wasn’t a thing at all, but rather–as in the Fjord example of “staring to select”–an integrated aspect of your embodied, phenomenal experience?

by John Pavlus, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:

Image by Jason Brush

Call of the Sea

[ed. Beautiful web site, and there are marine snails around here like the ones pictured so I may give this recipe a try.]

Sometimes on Sundays I get the call of the sea, especially when the sun shines through my bedroom window as I wake up in the morning. The ocean is only a few minutes away and it’s as if the rays of the sun bring la mer closer to my home. On beautiful days like that, I love going to the market in Soulac-sur-Mer, a timeless belle époque sea-side village in Médoc.

For starters, I served lovely amandes de mer sautéed with garlic, olive oil and parsley with a dash of piment d’espelette. The poetic amandes de mer, in other words ‘sea almonds’, are called dog cockles in English. They have an almond-like flavor, and are cooked just like clams. While I was preparing lunch I couldn’t resist a few bulots, French marine snails that are so delightful dipped in a freshly whipped mayonnaise with a glass of crisp white wine. (...)

Daurade with herbs (serves 2)

1 daurade/ sea bream fish, approx 800-900 g, scaled and gutted
1 small onion, finely diced
1 tbsp mustard of Dijon
2 spring onions, sliced
2 garlic cloves, finely sliced
4 tbsp fresh lemon juice
Grated lemon zest from 1 lemon
8 sprigs of thyme
6 bay leaves
A handful of parsley
1 tbsp mustard
Sea-salt & black pepper

Preheat the oven to 210°C/ 410 F.

Place a large piece of aluminium foil onto a clean surface. Add an equal-sized layer of foil on top. Fold over the edges so they are secured together.
Place the fish onto the foil. Spoon one tablespoon of mustard and rub inside the fish cavity. Stuff the diced onion inside (keep 1 tbsp to scatter later on fish). Sprinkle fish with lemon zest, chopped parsley, thyme, diced onion, garlic, sliced spring onions and lemon juice. Drizzle olive oil all over fish, and add the bay leaves, inserting one in the fish cavity. Season with sea-salt and black pepper. Add another sheet of aluminium foil and carefully seal all edges of the foil to form an enclosed parcel. It should be tightly sealed so that the fish steams as it cooks without any steam escaping.
Place the fish in a roasting tray and transfer to the preheated oven for 20-25 minutes, depending on oven strength. When cooked, remove from the oven and place onto a large serving plate. Carefully undo the foil.
Sprinkle chopped fresh parsley and squeeze fresh lemon juice. Serve immediately with steamed vegetables.

by Mimi Thorrisson, Manger |  Read more:

Photos: Mimi Thorisson

E1116 (via rskm)
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A History of Like

If you blog, run a university home page, do e-commerce, write news articles for a local paper, have a local government site, or do nearly anything with the Internet, you’re pretty much required to have users “like” your pages. Otherwise, you’re going to be left out of the new economy of quantified affect. We live in what Carolin Gerlitz and Anne Helmond call a Like Economy, a distributed centralized Web of binary switches allowing us to signal if we like something or not, all powered by the now ubiquitous

But why “Like”? Why not “Love,” or “I agree,” or “This is awesome”? At first it seems like one of those accidents of popular culture, where an arbitrary boardroom decision eventually dictates our everyday language. In fact, one history of Facebook’s Like button presents it in these very terms: Facebook engineer Adam Bosworth noted that the button began as an Awesome button but was later changed to Like because like is more universal. If it had stayed Awesome, perhaps we’d be talking about an economy of Awesomes binding together the social Web and we would sound more like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles than Valley Girls.

There’s a deeper history to “like,” though, that is far older than Facebook. The marketing subfield of Liking Studies, which began before Internet use became mainstream, is key to understanding how this somewhat bland, reductive signal of affect became central to the larger consumer economy we live in. It also explains why Facebook will never install a Dislike button. (...)

For a largely empirical, positivist field such as marketing – which has pretensions of being a science, not an art –independent variables such as likability have value because of their perceived universal predictive power. With globalization, marketing is in greater need of just such a universal measure capable of predicting the success of global branding campaigns across cultural contexts. Cultural variations might change how marketers go about getting us to like brands, but the goal is always likability. (...)

So what is new about Facebook and the Like button? Oddly enough, it reveals too much. The great sin of Facebook is that it made “like” far too important and too obvious. Marketing is in part the practice of eliding the underlying complexity, messiness, and wastefulness of capitalist production with neat abstractions. Every ad, every customer service interaction, every display, and every package contributes to the commodity fetish, covering up the conditions of production with desire and fantasy. As such, Facebook may reveal too much of the underlying architecture of emotional capitalism. The Like button tears aside this veil to reveal the cloying, pathetic, Willy Lomanesque need of marketers to have their brands be well-liked. Keep liking, keep buying. Like us! Like us! Like us!

Liking in marketing was always meant to be a metonym for many other complex processes — persuasion, affect, cognition, recall — but it wasn’t meant to be exposed to the public as such. In Facebook, however, the “Like” button further reduces this reduction and makes it visible, making the whole process somewhat cartoonish and tiresome. The consequences can be seen in “Like us on Facebook to enter to win!” promotions and the obsession with Like counts among businesses large and small (not to mention the would-be “personal branded“).

by Robert W. Gehl, TNI |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

You Are What You Buy

The most widely read takedown of foodie-ism is probably B.R. Myers’ “The Moral Crusade Against Foodies,” which was published in the Atlantic a little over two years ago. Myers’ essay is an entertaining, even thrilling, bit of rhetoric: He cherry-picks several tone-deaf, unwittingly callous exaltations of overeating and indifference to suffering from the likes of Anthony Bourdain and Jeffrey Steingarten and then minces each citation into pulp with a well-tuned food processor of moral outrage. The scope of Myers’ argument against foodies is fairly narrow—he abhors their glorification of butchering and eating meat—but it’s little wonder his piece found an audience beyond vegans. The foodie—like his ubiquitous but hard-to-define cultural cousin, the hipster—is a figure many love to hate. But whereas hipsters irritate because they’re seen as being politically apathetic, devoid of any values to speak of, foodies are annoying for their air of moral superiority.

Alison Pearlman’s new book, Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America, is Myers’ stylistic opposite: dry, academic, factual, judicious. As such, it’s unlikely to find half the readership of Myers’ Atlantic piece. But the conclusions Pearlman draws in Smart Casual, bolstered by painstaking research, make it a much harsher commentary on foodie culture than Myers’ tour de force.

At first glance, Smart Casual is a limited, lopsided little book, just four chapters and 145 pages long. Pearlman’s self-appointed task is to examine the rise of omnivorous taste in fine dining—“omnivorous,” in this case, referring to the consumption of both traditionally highbrow and traditionally lowbrow culture. Just 50 years ago, fancy restaurants adhered to a strict formula: white tablecloths, French food (described on French-language menus), maître d’s who built careful reputations on their ability to cater to the right kind of people. Today, chefs are celebrated rather than maître d’s, and they build reputations on their creativity, not their adherence to tradition. What’s more, though chandeliers and complicated place settings persist in certain upscale eateries, expensive restaurants are characterized as often as not by eclectic interior design or even aggressively casual atmospheres. (Think of Mission Chinese Food’s original outpost in San Francisco, sharing a seating area with a dive-y Chinese takeout joint.) Pearlman, an art historian at Cal Poly Pomona, seeks to tease apart the causes and meanings of this sea change in the way the gourmet set eats. (...)

It used to be that human ingenuity was valued in the kitchen. Now, what matters more is chefs’ knowing the right producers and buying the right products. Culinary excellence can no longer be achieved simply by learning the right technique; it can be acquired only by knowing the right things to buy—and by, it needs hardly be said, shelling out however much money it takes to buy them. In this way, modern foodies’ materialistic definition of refinement is more exclusive than that of yesteryear’s dogmatic French cooking. What appears to be a celebration of the natural and the simple is in fact more constrictive and less attainable, because it depends not on talent but on means and access. (In this way, the evolution of culinary refinement reminds me of the concurrent evolution of women’s fashions, which used to let women hide imperfections by wearing girdles but now require women to maintain lithe frames without any artifice—an even more oppressive requirement.)

Materialism and agricultural name-dropping have not snuffed out all appreciation for skill—indeed, as Pearlman chronicles, the ascendance of ingredient worship has paralleled a polar-opposite trend, that of modernist cuisine. Born in Ferran Adria’s elBulli in Catalonia, Spain, and raised in American outposts like WD-50 in New York and Alinea in Chicago, modernism utilizes laboratory chemicals and equipment to give foods surprising appearances and textures. Modernists chefs are often hailed as avant-gardists, but the pieces Pearlman highlights in Smart Casual reveal a troublingly reactionary attitude. Deconstructed, disguised, minimized reinterpretations of Heath bars, doughnuts, cheesesteaks, and burgers simultaneously mock anyone unhip enough to prefer the original version and applaud their eater’s advanced palate and dainty appetite.

by L.V. Anderson, Slate |  Read more:

Illustration by Lisa Hanawalt

Boz Scaggs

Kitty Sabatier
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Housebreaking (Fiction)

Nothing is lost, and all is won, by a right estimate of what is real.
         —Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

Seamus lived in Wheaton, Maryland, in the last house on a quiet street that dead-ended at a county park. He’d bought the entire property, including a rental unit out back, at a decent price. This was after the housing market crashed but before people knew how bad it would get—back when he was still a practicing Christian Scientist, still had a job and a girlfriend he’d assumed he would marry. Now, two years later, he was single, faithless, and unemployed. The money his mother had loaned him for a down payment was starting to look more like a gift, as were the checks she’d been sending for the last year to help him cover the mortgage. His life was in disrepair, but for the first time in months he wasn’t thinking about any of that: he was sitting out back on a warm spring day with a woman. Her name was Charity, and she was a stranger.

Earlier that afternoon Seamus had been weeding by the driveway, and she’d stopped to ask him if the cottage in the backyard was available to rent. It was already rented, but soon they were on his deck, talking and sharing a six-pack Charity had been carrying and that she confessed she’d planned on drinking alone.

She wore cutoffs and a backpack—a faded green thing cinched around her waist. She had yellow hair, dark eyes, and a broad, easy smile that made it seem as if she would be perfectly comfortable anywhere but was especially pleased to find herself there, with him. He wasn’t a drinker, but in her presence he drank one beer and then another. By the third beer, he both wanted her desperately and suspected that no good could come of it—that to hunger for what you could touch was to invite disaster.

Charity lived in Arlington, with her ex-boyfriend and his aging mother. They’d been together ten years, she said, and the breakup was a rough one. She was trying to find a place as far away from them as possible but still on the Metro. “I just need to be out of that house,” she said, offering Seamus the last beer.

He said he was already drunk.

“You’re pretty tall for that,” she said. “You must not drink a lot.”

“I used to be a Christian Scientist.” He regretted the words as soon they were out of his mouth. People mixed Christian Science up with Scientology, or said things like, Is that the religion where you don’t believe in doctors?—as if he had refused to acknowledge doctors’ very existence.

Charity said that she’d had a Christian Science friend in high school; the religion had always reminded her of Buddhism. Buddhism had always reminded Seamus of Christian Science, and he said so. “Only Christian Science is unrelentingly positive. The world’s a harmonious place.”

“I imagine that’s a hard view to maintain,” Charity said, “once you start looking around.”

Yes, he said, it was.

Even after Seamus stopped taking care of his house, he had kept up the exterior for his tenants. Now, in the late-afternoon light, he could see how pretty the backyard looked: the little brick pathway that led to the blue and white cottage tucked back among the trees, beyond that the woods, shimmering green and gold in the late-afternoon sun.

“My ex’s house has the gravitational pull of a black hole,” Charity said. “I can’t believe I’m still here.”

“Congratulations,” Seamus said. Then he asked her to stay for dinner.

For months Seamus’s friends had been telling him he was depressed, and as soon as he stepped into his kitchen he saw what they meant: shades drawn, empty takeout boxes piled in the trash, the refrigerator looming in the dim light like a grimy white thumb. A year ago, he used to cook every night, but now all he could find was a package of ground beef rotting in the crisper and a can of pumpkin sitting inexplicably on the bottom shelf. In the freezer he located a month-old chicken and a stick of butter that he had bought one afternoon in a bout of hopefulness so brief that it had passed by the time he got home.

He defrosted the chicken in the microwave, sliced butter and stuffed it under the skin, and slid the whole thing into the oven to roast. When he turned around, Charity was standing so close behind him that he almost jumped. She had on her backpack. “I should leave.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m kind of a mess right now. You don’t need that.”

“Don’t tell me what I need,” he said, surprised by how forceful he sounded. She looked surprised, too, but when he reached out and pulled her toward him, she grinned.

by Sarah Frisch, Paris Review |  Read more:

House of Un-Representatives

Not long ago, the congressman from northeast Texas, Louie Gohmert, was talking about how the trans-Alaska oil pipeline improved the sex lives of certain wild animals — in his mind, the big tube was an industrial-strength aphrodisiac. “When the caribou want to go on a date,” he told a House hearing, “they invite each other to head over to the pipeline.”

Gohmert, consistently on the short list for the most off-plumb member of Congress, has said so many crazy things that this assertion passed with little comment. Last year, he blamed a breakdown of Judeo-Christian values for the gun slaughter at a cinema in Colorado. Last week, he claimed the Muslim Brotherhood had deep influence in the Obama administration, and that the attorney general — the nation’s highest law enforcer — sympathized with terrorists.

You may wonder how he gets away with this. You may also wonder how Gohmert can run virtually unopposed in recent elections. The answer explains why we have an insular, aggressively ignorant House of Representatives that is not at all representative of the public will, let alone the makeup of the country.

Much has been said about how the great gerrymander of the people’s House — part of a brilliant, $30 million Republican action plan at the state level — has now produced a clot of retrograde politicians who are comically out of step with a majority of Americans. It’s not just that they oppose things like immigration reform and simple gun background checks for violent felons, while huge majorities support them.

Or that, in the aggregate, Democrats got 1.4 million more votes for all House positions in 2012 but Republicans still won control with a cushion of 33 seats.

Or that they won despite having the lowest approval rating in modern polling, around 10 percent in some surveys. Richard Nixon during Watergate and B.P.’s initial handling of a catastrophic oil spill had higher approval ratings.

But just look at how different this Republican House is from the country they are supposed to represent. It’s almost like a parallel government, sitting in for some fantasy nation created in talk-radio land.

As a whole, Congress has never been more diverse, except the House majority. There are 41 black members of the House, but all of them are Democrats. There are 10 Asian-Americans, but all of them are Democrats. There are 34 Latinos, a record — and all but 7 are Democrats. There are 7 openly gay, lesbian or bisexual members, all of them Democrats.

Only 63 percent of the United States population is white. But in the House Republican majority, it’s 96 percent white. Women are 51 percent of the nation, but among the ruling members of the House, they make up just 8 percent. (It’s 30 percent on the Democratic side.)

It’s a stretch, by any means, to call the current House an example of representative democracy. Now let’s look at how the members govern:

by Timothy Egan, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: via

Wayne Bremser, eating lunch
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Guessing Game (unknown)
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Graphene Paint Could Generate Electricity

Scientists at the University of Manchester used wafers of graphene, the discovery of which won researchers a Nobel Prize, with thin layers of other materials to produce solar powered surfaces.

The resulting surfaces, which were paper thin and flexible, were able to absorb sunlight to produce electricity at a level that would rival existing solar panels.

These could be used to create a kind of “coat” on the outside of buildings to generate power needed to run appliances inside while also carrying other functions too, such as being able to change colour.

The researchers are now hoping to develop the technology further by producing a paint that can be put onto the outside of buildings.

But the scientists also say the new material could also allow a new generation of super-thin hand-held devices like mobile phones that can be powered by sunlight.

Professor Kostya Novoselov, one of the Nobel Laureates who discovered graphene, a type of carbon that forms sheets just one atom thick, said: “We have been trying to go beyond graphene by combining it with other one atom thick materials.

“What we have been doing is putting different layers of these materials one on top of the other and what you get is a new type of material with a unique set of properties.

“It is like a book – one page contains some information but together the book is so much more.

by Richard Gray, The Telegraph |  Read more:

Photo: The University of Manchester

The Real Tragedy

In the belief system called economics, it is an article of faith that commons are inherently tragic. Almost by definition, they are tragic because they are prone to overuse. What belongs to all belongs to none, and only private or state ownership can rescue a commons from the sad fate that will otherwise befall it.

The standard reference for this belief is an article that appeared in Science in 1968 called “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Though the author, Garrett Hardin, was a biologist, his article was strangely lacking in scientific inquiry. It was more like economics—an extrapolation from assumptions rather than an investigation of reality.

Hardin assumed that all commons are free-for-alls. He bid his readers to “picture” a hypothetical pasture peopled with hypothetical herders. These herders existed outside of any social structure and lacked even a capacity to talk with one another. They all behaved according to what the economics texts call “rationality”: they let their herds loose in the pasture in a single-minded effort to maximize their own gain, with no thought for the future or for anybody else. Under those assumptions, tragedy is a foregone conclusion.

What Hardin overlooked is that people do not necessarily behave as economists assume they do. As historian E. P. Thompson observed, Hardin failed to grasp “that commoners themselves were not without common sense.” Thompson was referring specifically to the common-field agriculture of his own England. Households had their own plots but shared land for hunting, foraging, and grazing. They pooled their implements and labor for joint maintenance and combined their herds to fertilize their respective plots. The destruction Hardin declared to be inevitable simply did not happen. To the contrary, the system worked well for hundreds of years. (...)

Hardin’s essay won applause in environmental quarters mainly because it was not really about the commons. It was a case for population control, and the tragedy thesis served as a grim parable to that end. From the start, however, anthropologists and others who actually studied commons objected to Hardin’s fabricated thesis; indeed, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize in economics for explaining the longevity of commons. Eventually, Hardin modified his stance. He acknowledged that overuse is not due to common ownership per se, but to the absence of rules governing access and use.

Overused commons do exist, of course. Fisheries are an example; the atmosphere is another. When overuse occurs, there generally has been a breakdown in the social structures that once governed use, or the scale of breakdown of such structures is difficult to establish.

Privatizing Commons

The real tragedy surrounding the commons has been the invasion by corporate, governmental, and other external forces. Native Americans did not eradicate the buffalo on the western plains; white hunters and soldiers did. Local people in Appalachia did not slice the tops off mountains; outside corporations did. It is therefore strange that the reigning ideology focuses on the self-destruction of commons when the scale of outside devastation is so much greater.

by Jonathan Rowe, Guernica |  Read more:
Image from Flickr via Jer Kunz

The Section: Knights of Soft Rock

By 1979, guitarist Waddy Wachtel thought he'd seen everything. He had shown up for morning studio sessions to find Warren Zevon already wasted; he'd seen California Gov. Jerry Brown, Linda Ronstadt's then-boyfriend, retreat from a room of stoned rockers after unexpectedly popping into one of Ronstadt's sessions; he'd walked offstage after playing with Carole King and into a brawl with her boyfriend. But he wasn't quite prepared for the strange, vexing behavior of James Taylor.

If anyone embodied the peaceful easy feeling of the decade, it was Taylor, whose inward-looking ballads and self-effacing stage presence hit the Seventies in its sweet spot. Women fell for the brooding guy on the cover of Sweet Baby James, men related to his reserved masculinity, and radio couldn't get enough of hits like "Handy Man" and "You've Got a Friend." But as Wachtel was learning on his first tour in Taylor's band, in 1979, another, far less relaxed Taylor lurked in the shadows. That Taylor was grappling with alcoholism and hard drugs and was in the midst of a troubled marriage to Carly Simon; their two-year-old son, Ben, had suffered from fevers in his infancy. Taylor had battled addiction before, and it was surfacing once again.

The hints of trouble began before the first show. Toasting the musicians and the tour at a local bar in Texas, Taylor downed two martinis in one gulp each. "I went, 'Uh-oh – that's not a good sign!'" recalls Wachtel, chilling in his home studio in the San Fernando Valley. At 65, he looks very much as he did in the 1970s: like a hippie librarian, with his round glasses and slight frame. On the bus the morning after gigs, Taylor would be seen nursing the same bottle from the night before. At one gig, Wachtel broke his pinky toe after tripping over stage cables and later asked Taylor for a painkiller from his stash. Taylor begrudgingly said yes – but Wachtel had to physically pry one out of Taylor's mouth when his boss wouldn't give it up. Then, one day when he was riding in the back seat of a car with Taylor, Wachtel watched as a female tollbooth clerk asked Taylor for an autograph. Looking groggy, Taylor scribbled something on a piece of paper, said, "Hi, darling, here you go," and handed it to her. Wachtel glanced over and saw what Taylor had scrawled: "You bitch, I'll kill you" – signed, sardonically, "James Taylor."

Wachtel still laughs at the memory: "He was hysterical!" But in a moment of seriousness, he says, "It was pretty intense. It was tough times."

For most of the Seventies, the singer-songwriter sound embodied by Taylor, Jackson Browne, King and Crosby, Stills and Nash dominated the charts and the radio, luring thousands of bell-bottomed fans to concert halls. Those acts – as well as Zevon, Ronstadt and many more – relied on a small, rarified group of backup musicians to shape that tight, gently rocking sound. Anyone who geeked out on liner notes back then will recognize the most prominent names: guitarist Danny Kortchmar, drummer Russell Kunkel, bassist Leland Sklar and keyboardist Craig Doerge – known collectively as "the Section" – plus Wachtel and stringed-instrument wizard David Lindley. One or more of them can be heard on seemingly every one of the era's defining tracks: King's "It's Too Late" and "Sweet Seasons"; Taylor's "You've Got a Friend" and his remake of "How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You)"; Browne's "Doctor My Eyes"; Zevon's "Werewolves of London"; Ronstadt's "Poor Poor Pitiful Me"; Joni Mitchell's "Carey"; and entire albums by Taylor (JT, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon) and Browne (Running on Empty, Hold Out).

"They were the best," says David Crosby, who hired all of them as part of his and Graham Nash's band. To Crosby, who worked with the previous generation of studio players in L.A., Kortchmar and crew were a different breed: truly sensitive musicians who knew how to get inside the emotion of a song. "They weren't just playing their instruments," he says. "That was a major change. It put them one up on all the session players before them. They took it way past 'That's a B flat.'"

Albums like Running on Empty set a high-water mark for skillful, soulful rock musicians. "It's one of my favorite records ever," says Dawes drummer Griffin Goldsmith, who had to learn the songs when his band backed Browne on tour. "It was so intimidating to play those songs because those tracks are incredible. It's a testament to what great players they are."

To critics, Taylor, Browne, and Crosby, Stills and Nash personified everything tame about Seventies rock, and the musicians who accompanied them were inevitably guilty by association. "We were the 'Mellow Mafia,'" says Kortchmar. He recalls a particularly nasty write-up of Taylor from the time: "We had [writer] Lester Bangs threatening to stab a bottle of Ripple into James. What the fuck is he talking about? James is doing 'Fire and Rain,' 'Country Road,' about Jesus and questions and deep shit."

"I can understand you have to put a label on something," says Kunkel, "but it wasn't mellow when we were playing with Warren Zevon or playing 'Running on Empty.'"

As much as the people who hired them, the Section were all strong, sometimes pugnacious characters: Kortchmar was the designated rocker, almost a Laurel Canyon version of Al Pacino; Sklar's mountain-man whiskers and Kunkel's balding pate, quasi-mullet and muscular upper arms were as totemic as the music. The records they helped craft may have been laid-back, but the scene backstage was often another matter. "When I think about the drunkenness and driving home from studios in the middle of the night, it's miraculous that we're here," says Wachtel. "You could get away with a lot back then."

by David Browne, Rolling Stone |  Read more: 

Photo: Michael Putland/Getty Images

Michel Lefebvre, a sisyphean task

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Luis Sanchis
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Streams of Consciousness

Social-media tools allow anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account to play a role in determining how many readers a story reaches. And online communities such as the heavily trafficked Reddit enable readers to submit links to their favorite content, and vote up or down the content submitted by others, thereby changing a given item’s prominence on the site. The result is that the mainstream-media oligopoly is now just one force deciding what “the news” is and how important a story or image might be.

“Over the last 100 years, you go from a point when a newspaper would be able to set the tone and the five top stories of the day, to what Walter Cronkite and his cohort would say on the evening news, and then to the explosion of cable news, and now the Internet,” says Gabriel Snyder, 36, the editor of The Atlantic Wire and former editor in chief of Gawker. “We’ve gone from having just a few handfuls of places that might set the agenda to this proliferation that is reaching a near infinite number of people who can define what the top story is today.”

Since many young people share on social media what they consume online, their notion of what makes an item good is tied to an outward, rather than inward-looking, set of priorities. “Media is now a way for readers to communicate, not just consume content,” says Jonah Peretti, 39, the founder of BuzzFeed who earlier helped to launch The Huffington Post. As he points out, people pause before sharing an article or video to ponder what it says about them that they are promoting it. “Social sharing is about your identity,” says Peretti. “You want to say, ‘Look, I’m smart, or charitable, or funny.’”

Callie Schweitzer, 24, director of marketing and communications for Vox Media, a fast-growing network of new online publications, agrees. “How we get and share news has become much more reflective of who we are,” she says. “People are proud to have gotten something first, and they want to be known for having found the cool piece of video first.” Also working to develop its editorial style with an eye toward shareability is Quartz, a business website launched last fall by Atlantic Media. Zach Seward, 27, a senior editor there, argues: “Putting the lede in the lede is burying the lede; get it in the headline! If there is a striking fact or statistic that tells the story, it should be the headline—the kind of thing you want to tweet.”

And what would you want to tweet? In essence, any factoid that a follower might find remarkable and therefore clickworthy. Pieces of content that pop on social media tend to have a certain “wow” factor. Editors routinely mention visuals—usually photographs, but sometimes charts or other graphics—as being enormously helpful in making something go viral in social media. Social-media companies agree. “Tumblr is a very visual medium,” says Mark Coatney, media outreach director for the image-friendly microblogging platform. “Twitter rewards words; Tumblr rewards visually presented info, whether great photography or graphics that grab your eye.”

Hard news—especially the depressing kind—is less popular than lighter lifestyle coverage on social media. “If you look at stories being shared, no one shares news,” observes Alex Leo, 30, head of Web products for Thomson Reuters Digital and a former senior editor at HuffPost. “No one ever emails ‘73 People Killed in Iraq.’ They email stories like ‘Sitting Kills You.’” Sure enough, on the day I spoke with Leo, The New York Times’s five most-emailed stories were a Style section feature called “The End of Courtship?”, a Travel section list of “46 Places to Go in 2013,” a column by Woody Allen riffing on hypochondria, and advice pieces on parenting and money management.

By posting observations and arguments on everything from personal blogs and discussion boards to Twitter feeds and comment threads, every young person is now, on some level, an amateur journalist. As bandwidth and connection speeds have increased, they are also publishing vast quantities of photos and videos with the help of services like Instagram, Flickr, and YouTube.

Increasingly, established news outlets are turning to these on-the-ground snippets of raw material to report on important social issues, from the Occupy protests to the presidential election. Twitter has famously been used for disseminating eyewitness accounts of events such as the Arab Spring uprising. Instagram, a swiftly growing service that is essentially Twitter for photographs instead of text, allows anyone to take a photo and effortlessly post it online. Instagram shots taken during Hurricane Sandy, for example, went viral on social-media outlets and were even published by mainstream news organizations. (...)

The New York Times has figured out at least one way to appeal to Tumblr’s photo-crazy users: “The Lively Morgue,” which posts several photographs from the Times’s vast archives every week. “That’s a way the Times can make a Times-y Tumblr blog, but fun and lively,” says Aron Pilhofer, 47, the newspaper’s editor of interactive news.

If you’re wondering why the Times cares about having a successful Tumblr presence, you’re clearly over 40. Tumblr, which the average middle-aged American has probably never heard of, is an Internet behemoth, heavily skewed toward the young. There are some 100 million Tumblr blogs, drawing 172 million monthly unique visitors. Roughly 60 percent of Tumblr’s audience is under the age of 34, and more than half of that group is under 24. “Go to where young people are; don’t expect them to come to you,” says Jessica Bennett, 31, executive editor of Tumblr until her department was eliminated in April.

In addition to being a forum for reaching younger readers, Tumblr is a launching pad for content throughout social media. When Starbucks announced that it was introducing a new larger cup size in 2011, graphic artist Andrew Barr of the National Post of Canada made an illustration showing that it was larger than the capacity of the average human stomach. A Web producer posted it to the National Post Art & Design Tumblr blog, and it was reblogged widely, picked up by the Huffington Post, Gizmodo, and Buzzfeed, and discussed by Anderson Cooper on CNN. It received thousands of retweets and Facebook likes.

So photos aren’t the only kind of image that goes viral. Rather it is content that makes the person you share it with feel something, whether shock, amazement, or delight. While that may mean random ephemera like the infamous video of a chain-smoking toddler in Indonesia, it can also describe serious enterprise reporting. Vice Media has broken through with short gonzo documentaries like The Vice Guide to Karachi. “We’re exploring the insanity of the modern condition,” says Jason Mojica, Vice’s lead video producer, adding that the Vice website tries to focus on “things that make you say, ‘Holy shit! I can’t believe this exists!’”

by Ben Adler, Columbia Journalism Review |  Read more:

Illustration: Daniel Chang

Gustav Vigeland (Vigeland Museum and Park, Oslo, Norway)

Photo by Tine Berge
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