Saturday, June 1, 2013
The Death Instinct
McLaren and Westwood renamed their clothing shop SEX and began to sell ripped clothing, dirty t-shirts and repurposed S&M outfits. You could walk into SEX and buy all the gear that would make you look just like a member of The Sex Pistols. The “look” that McLaren saw in The New York Dolls, in Richard Hell and in Johnny Rotten was central to what became known as “punk.” Punk was a fashion before it became a subculture, a politics, a style of music. (...)
If punk is more than just fashion, it leads us to another question. What is fashion? According to Andrew Bolton and the people who put the show together at the Met, fashion is a form of freedom and self-expression. Punk was therefore important to fashion because it opened up new possibilities. Any kid could rip up some jeans and stick clothespins in a shirt and become the master of his or her destiny. Punk, so this thinking goes, made everyone into a designer and made any attire possible. The current Do-It-Yourself ethos within fashion and the culture at large is a direct result of the freedom given to us by punk. That’s the way Punk: Chaos to Couture sees it.
But fashion is only about freedom and self-expression on the surface. At its core, fashion is a kind of death drive. The number one imperative of fashion is, after all, to produce something new every season. This means killing the style of the last season. This process is relentless—some would say exhausting. The styles that are killed off are inevitably recycled down the line, only to be killed again in a cyclical process that never ends. (...)
Fashion took off as an industry around the same time that Nietzsche was thinking about nihilism. Fashion works well in a society that is unsure about its highest values because fashion has nothing to do with values. The point of fashion is to produce style. No style is inherently better than any other style. One can’t be better than another, since every style is only good for the moment. There is a democratic spirit to fashion for this reason, and a sense of freedom. But the freedom of fashion has a desperate quality. The newest style in fashion is fresh for the brief period in which it is new. Then it must be discarded.
The excitement of fashion is the constant excitement of novelty. But the flip side of this excitement is exhaustion, boredom. When Malcolm McLaren discovered Richard Hell in New York City in the 1970s, he loved Hell’s broken down and carefree look. One of the words McLaren used to describe Hell was “bored.” McLaren said, “He was this wonderful, bored, drained, scarred, dirty guy with a torn and ripped t-shirt.” You see that look on the faces of many classic punk rockers. They were dirty and bored. In many ways, the boredom was more unsettling than the anger. Sid Vicious could look scary when he put on a scowl and flipped you the bird. But he looked truly terrifying when he stared blankly into the camera lens, caring not at all whether he — or you — lived or died.
by Morgan Meis, The Smart Set | Read more:
Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Friday, May 31, 2013
You Will Never Sleep With a Woman Who Looks Like That
"You should just be called the Padres, not all that bullshit about credit unions," my dad said, as he drove me to the field on the opening day of the season when I was eleven years old.
"But the credit union pays for us to have a team," I said.
"Yeah, well, I pay for you to do everything, and you don't see me making you wear a shirt with my giant goddamned face on it."
"That would be a weird shirt," I said.
"Please. You wear all kinds of dopey shirts, and — what the fuck am I talking about right here? The shirt's not real, I'm just making a point. You got your gear?" he asked, pulling up to the field.
Saturdays were filled with a full lineup of games, all of which the league's players were required to attend, so my parents could drop me off bright and early and then do whatever they wanted all day until my game. The prospect of a morning to himself was very exciting for my dad.
"There's a lot of good teams this year, I think," I said, continuing our conversation as we arrived at the fields.
He reached over me and popped open my door.
"Fascinating. Now out of the car. Vamoose. Out! Out! Have fun and don't screw with anyone bigger than you. I'll be in the stands when your game starts," he said.
I put my hand up for a high five, and he used that hand to push me out of the car. Then his Oldsmobile screeched away up the street, like he was fleeing the scene of a double homicide.
When we weren't playing in a game, most of the Little Leaguers would keep busy playing tag in between the two fields or eating a spicy linguiça sausage made by the local Portuguese family that ran the snack shack above the field.
Every once in a while, someone would raise talk of venturing into the canyon that sat about fifty yards beyond the outfield fences. We were all scared of the canyon. It was packed with trees that grew so close together their branches became intertwined like a bundle of snakes. The canyon's ground was muddy, and it emitted an odor that registered somewhere between "maple syrup" and "rest-stop bath room." It was a group of cannibals short of being the perfect setting for an Indiana Jones film.
Every kid you ran into had a different theory about what lurked inside the canyon walls. "My brother found a pile of poo there that he said was too big to be dog poo or cat poo, but not big enough to be human poo. He said it's probably wolf poo," said my friend Steven as we waited for the game ahead of us to finish so we could take the field.
"Your brother's an idiot," said Michael, the chubby catcher on my team, who always wore his hat backward, so that the back of it came down right above his dark-green eyes. "A bunch of gays live in there. That's where they butt-fuck each other."
"What? Why wouldn't they do that at their house?" I asked.
"I don't know, I'm not a homo. But if you want to get butt-fucked, go into that canyon," he responded, inhaling a bite of sausage that would have killed a lesser twelve-year-old.
At that point in my life, the only two things that scared me were the movie Arachnophobia and that canyon. I tried to never get too close to it, for fear that something might reach out of the forest and pull me in. If I absolutely had to go near to chase an errant throw, my neck would stiffen and my breath would quicken as my body prepared to flee. I decided to run the theories about its inhabitants past my father to see if he had a scientific opinion on the matter.
"Why would gay people screw each other in a canyon filled with wolves?" my dad asked me as he drove us home after my game, my mom sitting beside him in the passenger seat.
"No, that's not what I said. One kid said there were wolves. It was a different kid who said the thing — "
"Hey, look at me, I'm screwing. My pants are off. Oh shit, there's an angry fucking wolf. Does that make any goddamn sense to you?"
"No. But that's not — "
"Plus," my dad interrupted again, "I don't even think wolves are indigenous to this area. Your school takes field trips. You ever heard them say shit to you about wolves? You gotta think about these things critically, son."
"No, I do. I didn't think that the wolves were — "
My mom turned to face me in the backseat. "Also, Justy, you know that homosexuals have sex just like heterosexuals do: in the privacy of their homes. Not in the woods."
"Although sometimes straight people do screw each other in the woods. Mostly when you're in high school, though," my dad added.
I decided to drop the conversation. But that week, on two consecutive nights, I had nightmares about the canyon. Each involved me finding something terrifying in a clearing at the center. In the first dream, I stumbled upon an aquarium that had a screaming Patrick Swayze trapped inside of it, begging me for help, but I was too scared to approach him. In the second, I was confronted by a large squid that had two or three sets of human legs. After that last dream I shot up out of bed, wide awake. I tried falling back to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes I pictured the canyon, then Swayze, then Squidman.
Hoping it would relax me, I tiptoed out of my bedroom to grab some water from the kitchen. I was still shaken from the dream, and the shapes of the shadows on the hallway wall looked ominous. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something move, and I froze in place. It's just a shadow that looks like a person, I told myself. It's not a person.
"What in the hell are you doing?"
I shrieked like a frightened monkey and jumped back, crashing into the bookcase behind me. As my eyes adjusted I realized that the shadow was my dad, sitting in total darkness in the La-Z-Boy chair that faced the windows to our backyard.
"Jesus H. Christ. Calm down, son. What the hell is wrong with you?"
"I had a freaky dream," I said, trying to catch my breath. "What are you doing?"
"I'm sitting in the dark drinking a hot toddy. What the hell does it look like?"
"Why are you doing that right now? It's the middle of the night."
"Well, contrary to popular fucking belief, I enjoy a little time to myself, so I wake up early so I can have it. Clearly I'm going to have to start waking up earlier."
"Oh. Well, sorry. Didn't mean to bother you," I said, turning to head back to bed, glass of water forgotten.
"No apologies necessary," he said.
Maybe it was the bourbon in the hot toddy, or the serenity of the darkness all around him, but at that moment my dad seemed uncharacteristically at ease.
"Can I ask you a question?" I said, turning to face him again.
"Fire away."
"If something's freaking you out, what do you do to not freak out about it?"
"Is this about that Arachnophobia movie, again? I told you, a spider that large couldn't sustain itself in an urban environment. The ecosystem is too delicate. Not fucking plausible."
"It's not about Arachnophobia. It's just — if something's freaking you out, how do you get it to not freak you out?"
He raised his mug of hot toddy to his lips and took a big slurp.
"Well, scientifically speaking, human beings fear the unknown. So, whatever's freaking you out, grab it by the balls and say hello," he said.
I had no idea what that meant, and even in the dimly lit living room he could tell.
"I'm saying, if something's scaring you out, don't run from it. Find out everything you can about it. Then it ain't the unknown anymore and it ain't scary." He paused. "Or I guess it could be a shitload scarier. Mostly the former, though."
As I padded down the hallway back to my room, I knew what had to be done: I had to enter the canyon. There was just no way I was going it alone.
by Justin Halpern, Grantland | Read more:
Photo: courtesy Justin Halpern
Natalie Maines: A Dixie Chick Declares War on Nashville
In 1986, while George W. Bush was busy finding Jesus and swearing off alcohol, a spunky little blond girl named Natalie Maines was finishing sixth grade in sleepy Lubbock, Texas. At a graduation ceremony, one of her favorite teachers offered a mock prediction: She would be elected president of the United States, then get "kicked out of office for excessive talking." For Maines, who instead grew up to be the Dixie Chicks' lead singer, then the most vilified woman in Dixie, and now, at age 38, a fledgling solo artist, the story proves one thing: "I was born outspoken. It followed me my whole life."
For nearly seven years, though, in the wake of the Chicks' last album, 2006's Taking the Long Way, she was uncharacteristically quiet. Instead of recording new music or touring (outside of scattered Chicks dates), Maines was at home: raising two kids while her husband, former Heroes star Adrian Pasdar, pursued his acting career; gardening in her lush Brentwood backyard; folding laundry while she listened to Howard Stern on the radio. "People have a very romantic idea of what they'd do if they could sing," she says, displaying no apparent exertion as she trots up a nearly vertical section of a hiking trail in the Santa Monica Mountains, a few minutes from home. "But I'm a mom, and it takes a lot of time." She claims, with a laugh, that she put out her rock-dominated solo debut, Mother, largely to get people to stop bugging her to make new music. "I didn't think I had time in my life for this," she says. "I sing all the time. But maybe nobody's hearing it, because I'm singing in my car or in my house or whatever. I don't need the roar of the crowd, and I don't need to hear cheers to feel validated."
Six mornings a week, Maines hikes this vertiginous five-mile-long path, which offers a brutal workout and a Lord of the Rings-worthy view that stretches for miles, even on today's cool and overcast spring morning. Maines is as fed up with country music as anyone still in a group called the Dixie Chicks could possibly be, but she still craves the wide-open spaces she used to sing about. Or else she just needs someplace big and quiet to process all that's happened to her. "It's probably good for her mentally, to kind of air her brain out," says her dad, Lloyd Maines, a famed steel guitarist and producer in his own right. "And she looks to me like she's in the best shape of her life." It's almost silent up here, except for the crunch of our feet on the dirt trail, the panting of her dogs, Mabel (a white Labrador) and Banjo (a friendly, dreadlocked puli, a breed introduced to her by Taking the Long Way producer Rick Rubin), and my own increasingly labored breathing. "I usually run the second part," Maines says. "But I won't make you do that!"
When fellow hikers pass by, they offer no more than friendly nods – no one recognizes her. Maines has a blunt-force haircut she compares to Rachel Maddow's, and is wearing a blue windbreaker over a sleeveless sweatshirt, a gray tee, running shorts and yellow-and-blue-neon running shoes. She looks, at the moment, more like an unusually attractive high school volleyball coach than anyone's idea of a star. "The short hair fits my personality more," she says. "I think maybe, with long hair, it was a role – I was playing dress-up a bit." (...)
For anyone who really knew her, it was no surprise when, on March 10th, 2003, Maines stood onstage in London, on the eve of the Iraq War, and made a casual comment, punctuated with a smile: "Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." For country-radio programmers, and at least a hysterical minority of fans, it was as if she'd French-kissed Saddam Hussein while setting fire to a puppy wrapped in the American flag. An unprecedented boycott and high-tech lynching followed – often overtly sexist, with drown-the-witch overtones: Bill O'Reilly calling them "callow, foolish women who deserve to be slapped around" wasn't even the worst of it. As chronicled in the superb 2006 documentary Shut Up and Sing, Maines and her bandmates handled it with strength and grace, touring in the face of death threats, playing with their young kids backstage while protesters screamed and smashed CDs outside the venues. Recorded with the controversy fresh in their minds, the barely-country Taking the Long Way turned out to be one of the Chicks' best albums, slapping down their critics while winning five Grammys and selling 2.5 million copies despite near-zero country-radio support.
But the backlash left inevitable scars. "I joke that I have PTSD, but there's probably truth in that joke," Maines says, blue eyes shining. "It all put an ugly light on people that I was kind of happily naive to. But when I was going through it, I really didn't feel like it was affecting me. I was in fight mode and battle mode, and I felt, you know, I was right, and free to say what I want to say." She went into therapy in the past few years. "Not just stuff with the controversy, but I think I've always been sort of a person that just pushes the feelings down, and then they do eventually come back up. So I didn't have tools to know how to deal with them or acknowledge them. I always like to pretend everything's OK. I'm a shyer person now, less trusting." (...)
Harper and Maines never discussed genre: "The words 'rock,' or 'country,' or 'soul' . . . none of that ever came up," says Harper. But as co-producer, Maines knew exactly what she wanted it all to sound like, even singing melodies for guitar solos and bass lines – and she was quite certain that she never wanted to make anything resembling a country album again. "I can't listen to our second album," she says, referring to the Chicks' 1999 breakthrough, Fly. "Because I was really, like, embracing country and really waving that country flag. My accent is so out of control on that album. I'm like, 'Who is that?'"
When the Bush controversy hit, Maines was stunned. "I always thought they accepted us in spite of the fact that we were different," she says. "It shocked me and kind of grossed me out that people thought I would be a conservative right-winger, that I'd be a redneck. But at that time, people didn't ask us things like, 'What do you think of gay marriage?' If they had, they would have learned how liberal I was. But I was so confused by who people thought I was and what I had been putting out there."
Afterward, she started acting out. "There was a part of me that was like, 'Oh, this isn't OK? Fuck that.' I didn't know the cat was in the bag, but it felt so good that the cat was out of the bag. Then I definitely just went, 'Oh, really? You don't like that? Well, how about this? Not only do I not like this president, I love gay people! And I'm pro-legalization of marijuana and all drugs! Yeah, let me blow your mind.'"
For nearly seven years, though, in the wake of the Chicks' last album, 2006's Taking the Long Way, she was uncharacteristically quiet. Instead of recording new music or touring (outside of scattered Chicks dates), Maines was at home: raising two kids while her husband, former Heroes star Adrian Pasdar, pursued his acting career; gardening in her lush Brentwood backyard; folding laundry while she listened to Howard Stern on the radio. "People have a very romantic idea of what they'd do if they could sing," she says, displaying no apparent exertion as she trots up a nearly vertical section of a hiking trail in the Santa Monica Mountains, a few minutes from home. "But I'm a mom, and it takes a lot of time." She claims, with a laugh, that she put out her rock-dominated solo debut, Mother, largely to get people to stop bugging her to make new music. "I didn't think I had time in my life for this," she says. "I sing all the time. But maybe nobody's hearing it, because I'm singing in my car or in my house or whatever. I don't need the roar of the crowd, and I don't need to hear cheers to feel validated."Six mornings a week, Maines hikes this vertiginous five-mile-long path, which offers a brutal workout and a Lord of the Rings-worthy view that stretches for miles, even on today's cool and overcast spring morning. Maines is as fed up with country music as anyone still in a group called the Dixie Chicks could possibly be, but she still craves the wide-open spaces she used to sing about. Or else she just needs someplace big and quiet to process all that's happened to her. "It's probably good for her mentally, to kind of air her brain out," says her dad, Lloyd Maines, a famed steel guitarist and producer in his own right. "And she looks to me like she's in the best shape of her life." It's almost silent up here, except for the crunch of our feet on the dirt trail, the panting of her dogs, Mabel (a white Labrador) and Banjo (a friendly, dreadlocked puli, a breed introduced to her by Taking the Long Way producer Rick Rubin), and my own increasingly labored breathing. "I usually run the second part," Maines says. "But I won't make you do that!"
When fellow hikers pass by, they offer no more than friendly nods – no one recognizes her. Maines has a blunt-force haircut she compares to Rachel Maddow's, and is wearing a blue windbreaker over a sleeveless sweatshirt, a gray tee, running shorts and yellow-and-blue-neon running shoes. She looks, at the moment, more like an unusually attractive high school volleyball coach than anyone's idea of a star. "The short hair fits my personality more," she says. "I think maybe, with long hair, it was a role – I was playing dress-up a bit." (...)
But the backlash left inevitable scars. "I joke that I have PTSD, but there's probably truth in that joke," Maines says, blue eyes shining. "It all put an ugly light on people that I was kind of happily naive to. But when I was going through it, I really didn't feel like it was affecting me. I was in fight mode and battle mode, and I felt, you know, I was right, and free to say what I want to say." She went into therapy in the past few years. "Not just stuff with the controversy, but I think I've always been sort of a person that just pushes the feelings down, and then they do eventually come back up. So I didn't have tools to know how to deal with them or acknowledge them. I always like to pretend everything's OK. I'm a shyer person now, less trusting." (...)
When the Bush controversy hit, Maines was stunned. "I always thought they accepted us in spite of the fact that we were different," she says. "It shocked me and kind of grossed me out that people thought I would be a conservative right-winger, that I'd be a redneck. But at that time, people didn't ask us things like, 'What do you think of gay marriage?' If they had, they would have learned how liberal I was. But I was so confused by who people thought I was and what I had been putting out there."
Afterward, she started acting out. "There was a part of me that was like, 'Oh, this isn't OK? Fuck that.' I didn't know the cat was in the bag, but it felt so good that the cat was out of the bag. Then I definitely just went, 'Oh, really? You don't like that? Well, how about this? Not only do I not like this president, I love gay people! And I'm pro-legalization of marijuana and all drugs! Yeah, let me blow your mind.'"
by Brian Hyatt, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Photo: Mark Seliger
Behind the 'Internet of Things' Is Android—and It's Everywhere
Ken Oyadomari’s work space at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., looks like a triage tent for smartphones. Parts from dozens of disassembled devices are strewn on workbenches. A small team of young engineers picks through the electronic carnage, carefully extracting playing card-size motherboards—the microprocessing heart of most computers—that will be repurposed as the brains of spacecraft no bigger than a softball. Satellites usually cost millions of dollars to build and launch. The price of Oyadomari’s nanosats, as they’ve become known, is around $15,000 and dropping. He expects them to be affordable for high school science classes, individual hobbyists, or anyone who wants to perform science experiments in space.
A big reason nanosats are so small and cheap: They run on Google’s Android operating system, familiar to anyone who’s shopped for a smartphone or tablet. It’s the No. 1 mobile OS by a wide margin; Android handsets outsell Apple’s iPhones globally by about 4 to 1. Impressive as those numbers are, they actually understate Android’s prevalence, because increasingly it’s the operating system behind just about anything with a computer chip. Along with Oyadomari’s nanosats, three of which recently went into orbit, Android runs espresso makers, video game consoles, refrigerators, rifles that post video to Facebook, and robotic harvesters for farms.
Android is becoming the standard operating system for the “Internet of things”—Silicon Valley’s voguish term for the expanding interconnectedness of smart devices, ranging from sensors in your shoe to jet engine monitors. As each of these devices hits the market, Google further outflanks Apple and Microsoft as the dominant software player in a connected world.
Android’s risen so fast in part because Google gives away the software to device makers and developers. Google is counting on making money from ads and other services on Android phones and tablets. The software is also open-source: Anyone can tinker with the code and use it in any gadget they want. The NASA engineers fine-tuned the operating system to require less power, letting their tiny satellites run for days on a handful of batteries. “If we can have satellites that are really small and really cheap, it will be interesting to see what some guy in his garage will be able to do with them,” says Oyadomari. (...)
Google isn’t the only tech company to introduce its own minimalist, Linux-based operating system. Years ago, Intel developed a version of Linux for mobile called Moblin, while Nokia built another version called Maemo. Palm’s WebOS also had Linux at its core. As usually happens with operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows on PCs in the 1990s, tech companies coalesced around one product. For just about everything that isn’t a server or a PC, the winner is Android.
Jim Zemlin, executive director of the nonprofit Linux Foundation, says Android has conquered the device market from the bottom up. The operating system ran on 75 percent of the smartphones—162 million units—shipped during the first quarter of this year, according to the research firm IDC. While iPhones and iPads come in very few versions and only from Apple, Android-powered mobile hardware of all shapes and sizes and brands has flooded the marketplace. The companies that build components have had to scramble to make sure everything they make functions well with all those gadgets. The result is a huge and growing number of hardware makers and software companies becoming expert in all things Android. “Every screen variant, mobile chip, and sensor known to man has been tuned to work with Android,” Zemlin says. “There’s this network effect, so that now anyone who wants to make a custom product can take Android and morph it into anything.”
A big reason nanosats are so small and cheap: They run on Google’s Android operating system, familiar to anyone who’s shopped for a smartphone or tablet. It’s the No. 1 mobile OS by a wide margin; Android handsets outsell Apple’s iPhones globally by about 4 to 1. Impressive as those numbers are, they actually understate Android’s prevalence, because increasingly it’s the operating system behind just about anything with a computer chip. Along with Oyadomari’s nanosats, three of which recently went into orbit, Android runs espresso makers, video game consoles, refrigerators, rifles that post video to Facebook, and robotic harvesters for farms.Android is becoming the standard operating system for the “Internet of things”—Silicon Valley’s voguish term for the expanding interconnectedness of smart devices, ranging from sensors in your shoe to jet engine monitors. As each of these devices hits the market, Google further outflanks Apple and Microsoft as the dominant software player in a connected world.
Android’s risen so fast in part because Google gives away the software to device makers and developers. Google is counting on making money from ads and other services on Android phones and tablets. The software is also open-source: Anyone can tinker with the code and use it in any gadget they want. The NASA engineers fine-tuned the operating system to require less power, letting their tiny satellites run for days on a handful of batteries. “If we can have satellites that are really small and really cheap, it will be interesting to see what some guy in his garage will be able to do with them,” says Oyadomari. (...)
Google isn’t the only tech company to introduce its own minimalist, Linux-based operating system. Years ago, Intel developed a version of Linux for mobile called Moblin, while Nokia built another version called Maemo. Palm’s WebOS also had Linux at its core. As usually happens with operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows on PCs in the 1990s, tech companies coalesced around one product. For just about everything that isn’t a server or a PC, the winner is Android.
Jim Zemlin, executive director of the nonprofit Linux Foundation, says Android has conquered the device market from the bottom up. The operating system ran on 75 percent of the smartphones—162 million units—shipped during the first quarter of this year, according to the research firm IDC. While iPhones and iPads come in very few versions and only from Apple, Android-powered mobile hardware of all shapes and sizes and brands has flooded the marketplace. The companies that build components have had to scramble to make sure everything they make functions well with all those gadgets. The result is a huge and growing number of hardware makers and software companies becoming expert in all things Android. “Every screen variant, mobile chip, and sensor known to man has been tuned to work with Android,” Zemlin says. “There’s this network effect, so that now anyone who wants to make a custom product can take Android and morph it into anything.”
by Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image via:
Senseless
[ed. See also, this Duck Soup post: Are Cycle Helmets Really Useful?]
About a year ago my 14-year-old daughter needed a new bicycle helmet. Her skull and level of sophistication had both outgrown her old pink flowery one. We paid a visit to the local bike shop. On a far wall our options were stacked five high and 10 wide: multivented Specialized models, slick red and black designs by Giro, brightly colored versions manufactured by Bell. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to the prices, which ranged from $40 to $120.
"Do any of these provide better protection than the others?" I asked the guy working the floor. "Does price reflect safety?"
I trust the guy working the floor. Over the years he's sold me tubes, tires, lube, shoes, gloves. He knows his merchandise.
"Not really," he said. "They all pass the same certification test." The difference, he told us, is in style, fit, comfort, and ventilation.
That struck me as odd. We live in an age of near-comical product differentiation. You can buy cough syrup in 14 formulas, coffee in dozens of permutations. Yet when it comes to bike helmets, I later learned, we're all wearing decorative versions of the same Model T: a thick foam liner (actually expanded polystyrene, or EPS) attached to a thin plastic outer shell. The basic setup hasn't changed much since the first one was sold in 1975.
That classic design deserves serious plaudits. The $40 helmet is one of the great success stories of the past half-century. Like seat belts, air bags, and smoke detectors, bike helmets save countless lives every year. They do a stellar job of preventing catastrophic skull fractures, plus dings and scrapes from low-hanging tree branches and other common nuisances.
But what about concussions? A friend of mine, Sheilagh Griffin, commutes on her bike and races cyclocross on weekends. During a recent race she had lost control and flown over the bar. Though she'd been wearing a helmet, headaches plagued her for the next few days. Her doctor diagnosed a concussion. Twenty years ago that wasn't such a big deal. It was a shake-it-off injury. You popped two aspirin and saddled up again the next day.
That has changed. Sheilagh's doctor told her to stop racing until the headaches subsided. And then sit out for one or two more weeks, to decrease the odds of a vastly more problematic second concussion. (...)
Standing in the shop, my thoughts turned to my daughter's precious brain. Most of us reflexively strap on helmets assuming they'll protect us. But how well do they actually do the job? I wanted to know if the technology and design of the headwear had kept up with our growing understanding of what goes on inside our skulls. I started asking questions.
Over the past year I toured helmet labs, interviewed brain researchers and government regulators, and pored over dusty volumes in medical archives. What I found was troubling.
Statistics don't tell the whole story, but they're a good place to start.
Stat #1: More people are riding. Between 1995 and 2009, the annual number of bike trips in the United States grew by 30 percent, and the number of daily bike commuters grew by 60 percent.
Stat #2: Despite that growth, until recently bicycle-traffic deaths were declining. From 1995 to 1997, an average of 804 cyclists in the United States died every year in motor-vehicle crashes. During an equivalent three-year period from 2008 to 2010, that average fell to 655. The number went up in 2011, but there's evidence that cycling is becoming safer. That's partly a result of more bike lanes and other infrastructure, and partly because more riders make roads safer for cyclists. But at least some of the decline can be attributed to helmet use. By 1999 half of all riders were wearing them—up from just 18 percent eight years earlier—and that figure almost certainly increased as many cities passed mandatory-helmet laws. (No reliable survey on helmet use has been published since 1999.)
Here's the trouble. Stat #3: As more people buckled on helmets, brain injuries also increased. Between 1997 and 2011 the number of bike-related concussions suffered annually by American riders increased by 67 percent, from 9,327 to 15,546, according to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, a yearly sampling of hospital emergency rooms conducted by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
Of course, concussions are more readily diagnosed now than they were 15 years ago. That likely accounts for some of the increase. It's also possible that some of the 149 fewer riders killed every year survived to get lumped into the brain-injury category. But that still leaves thousands unaccounted for. We're left with this stark statistical fact: The concussion rate among bicycle riders has grown faster than the sport.
About a year ago my 14-year-old daughter needed a new bicycle helmet. Her skull and level of sophistication had both outgrown her old pink flowery one. We paid a visit to the local bike shop. On a far wall our options were stacked five high and 10 wide: multivented Specialized models, slick red and black designs by Giro, brightly colored versions manufactured by Bell. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to the prices, which ranged from $40 to $120.
"Do any of these provide better protection than the others?" I asked the guy working the floor. "Does price reflect safety?"I trust the guy working the floor. Over the years he's sold me tubes, tires, lube, shoes, gloves. He knows his merchandise.
"Not really," he said. "They all pass the same certification test." The difference, he told us, is in style, fit, comfort, and ventilation.
That struck me as odd. We live in an age of near-comical product differentiation. You can buy cough syrup in 14 formulas, coffee in dozens of permutations. Yet when it comes to bike helmets, I later learned, we're all wearing decorative versions of the same Model T: a thick foam liner (actually expanded polystyrene, or EPS) attached to a thin plastic outer shell. The basic setup hasn't changed much since the first one was sold in 1975.
That classic design deserves serious plaudits. The $40 helmet is one of the great success stories of the past half-century. Like seat belts, air bags, and smoke detectors, bike helmets save countless lives every year. They do a stellar job of preventing catastrophic skull fractures, plus dings and scrapes from low-hanging tree branches and other common nuisances.
But what about concussions? A friend of mine, Sheilagh Griffin, commutes on her bike and races cyclocross on weekends. During a recent race she had lost control and flown over the bar. Though she'd been wearing a helmet, headaches plagued her for the next few days. Her doctor diagnosed a concussion. Twenty years ago that wasn't such a big deal. It was a shake-it-off injury. You popped two aspirin and saddled up again the next day.
That has changed. Sheilagh's doctor told her to stop racing until the headaches subsided. And then sit out for one or two more weeks, to decrease the odds of a vastly more problematic second concussion. (...)
Standing in the shop, my thoughts turned to my daughter's precious brain. Most of us reflexively strap on helmets assuming they'll protect us. But how well do they actually do the job? I wanted to know if the technology and design of the headwear had kept up with our growing understanding of what goes on inside our skulls. I started asking questions.
Over the past year I toured helmet labs, interviewed brain researchers and government regulators, and pored over dusty volumes in medical archives. What I found was troubling.
Statistics don't tell the whole story, but they're a good place to start.
Stat #1: More people are riding. Between 1995 and 2009, the annual number of bike trips in the United States grew by 30 percent, and the number of daily bike commuters grew by 60 percent.
Stat #2: Despite that growth, until recently bicycle-traffic deaths were declining. From 1995 to 1997, an average of 804 cyclists in the United States died every year in motor-vehicle crashes. During an equivalent three-year period from 2008 to 2010, that average fell to 655. The number went up in 2011, but there's evidence that cycling is becoming safer. That's partly a result of more bike lanes and other infrastructure, and partly because more riders make roads safer for cyclists. But at least some of the decline can be attributed to helmet use. By 1999 half of all riders were wearing them—up from just 18 percent eight years earlier—and that figure almost certainly increased as many cities passed mandatory-helmet laws. (No reliable survey on helmet use has been published since 1999.)
Here's the trouble. Stat #3: As more people buckled on helmets, brain injuries also increased. Between 1997 and 2011 the number of bike-related concussions suffered annually by American riders increased by 67 percent, from 9,327 to 15,546, according to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, a yearly sampling of hospital emergency rooms conducted by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
Of course, concussions are more readily diagnosed now than they were 15 years ago. That likely accounts for some of the increase. It's also possible that some of the 149 fewer riders killed every year survived to get lumped into the brain-injury category. But that still leaves thousands unaccounted for. We're left with this stark statistical fact: The concussion rate among bicycle riders has grown faster than the sport.
by Bruce Barcott, Bicycling | Read more:
Photo: Jonathan Sprague
Letter To A Young Programmer Considering A Startup
If you’re in your late teens or early twenties, you’ve grown up in a world that has come to idealize startups, their founders, and the people who go to work at them.
If you’re in school, maybe you’ve felt pressure or been incentivized to drop out and join or start a company. If you’re already out in the working world, perhaps you feel that your non-startup job is in some way inadequate, or that you’re missing out on valuable experience and potential wealth.
The generation you’ve grown up in has, for the past few years, teetered on the brink of being “lost”. Jobs are scarce, and going to university offers no assurance of landing one. Big, old corporations are no longer guaranteed safe havens in which to build a career. Startups seem, through the lens of the media, like the only sign of life in an otherwise dying landscape. I understand their appeal.
Everyone’s path is different, and your choices are your own. That said, you aren’t making your choices in a vacuum. Here are some things to consider that, in my experience, you’re less likely to hear about working in startups.
If you’re in school, maybe you’ve felt pressure or been incentivized to drop out and join or start a company. If you’re already out in the working world, perhaps you feel that your non-startup job is in some way inadequate, or that you’re missing out on valuable experience and potential wealth.The generation you’ve grown up in has, for the past few years, teetered on the brink of being “lost”. Jobs are scarce, and going to university offers no assurance of landing one. Big, old corporations are no longer guaranteed safe havens in which to build a career. Startups seem, through the lens of the media, like the only sign of life in an otherwise dying landscape. I understand their appeal.
Everyone’s path is different, and your choices are your own. That said, you aren’t making your choices in a vacuum. Here are some things to consider that, in my experience, you’re less likely to hear about working in startups.
A startup is just a means to an end.
I recently interviewed a young man. I asked him where he wants to be in four years. “Running my own company,” he said without hesitation. I asked why. “Because entrepreneurship is in my blood,” he replied. There was no mention of what his hypothetical company would do, what problem it would solve for people. His goal was business for the sake of business. That’s what he had gone to school for, after all.
People are fulfilled by their work when they operate with a sense of purpose. So much of our understanding of the psychology of success is around setting goals and keeping those goals at top of mind: visualizing the moment of accomplishment, tracking our progress towards it, having others hold us accountable to reaching it. Goals give shape to our individual futures.
Maybe a startup is the best way to meet a goal, and maybe it isn’t. If the goal of the young man described above is to run a business – any business! – then perhaps a startup is indeed his best path forward. For others, though, I often wonder if they’re fitting their goals into the format of a startup because it’s an approach that’s lauded, admired, and easily understood (if not easily accomplished). (...)
A startup job is the new office job. Startup culture is the new corporate culture.
Startups are portrayed as an exciting, risky, even subversive alternative to traditional corporate work. Startups are thought of as more free, more open and flexible. Some companies surely begin that way, but a few interviews at later-stage startups will make clear just how quickly they ossify into structures that look very much like the organizations that came before them. (...)
Business school graduates like the young man I interviewed are going directly from college to startups, if they even finish school at all. Business majors, traditionally risk-averse, now say they don’t want to work for big companies. But startups are the new big company. They are, as I’ll describe below, the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with an office job. Just realize what you’re signing up for. When the company-provided keg runs dry, the free lunches are making you fat, and playing the Xbox in the break room is no longer as fun as it used to be, what then? When you find that you now report to a politicking middle manager and not the inspiring CEO who interviewed you, will you still want to be there? Is a supposedly novel working environment enough to sustain you? When everywhere you might consider working looks more or less the same, is the novelty even there? (...)
Startups are part of the system, not a rebellious wrench in the cogs.
The funding for startups – that is, the money that pays your prospective salary – comes from somewhere. Wealthy individuals and institutions invest in startups as just another asset class. The futurist Bruce Sterling recently quipped that “start-ups are full of [young] people working hard to make other people rich – Baby Boomer financiers mainly”. While that might be an overly general and cynical take it’s by no means untrue. (...)
There is nothing inherently disruptive about a venture-backed startup. The startup system is just another system; an alternative to the corporate ladder with just as many rungs to climb. Some startups may end up dramatically reshaping a market, but then so might an incumbent player or an active regulator.
The now-perennial celebration of startup-driven disruption begs the question: if we accept that disruption is even happening, are we better off in the resulting disrupted market? Have we solved a problem, or have we shifted the problem elsewhere? Have we created value while furthering justice and equality, thus yielding enduringly positive change? Or have we merely made one group of wealthy people slightly more rich at the expense of another group of wealthy people? Are we creating a better future or just scrambling up the present?
I recently interviewed a young man. I asked him where he wants to be in four years. “Running my own company,” he said without hesitation. I asked why. “Because entrepreneurship is in my blood,” he replied. There was no mention of what his hypothetical company would do, what problem it would solve for people. His goal was business for the sake of business. That’s what he had gone to school for, after all.
People are fulfilled by their work when they operate with a sense of purpose. So much of our understanding of the psychology of success is around setting goals and keeping those goals at top of mind: visualizing the moment of accomplishment, tracking our progress towards it, having others hold us accountable to reaching it. Goals give shape to our individual futures.
Maybe a startup is the best way to meet a goal, and maybe it isn’t. If the goal of the young man described above is to run a business – any business! – then perhaps a startup is indeed his best path forward. For others, though, I often wonder if they’re fitting their goals into the format of a startup because it’s an approach that’s lauded, admired, and easily understood (if not easily accomplished). (...)
A startup job is the new office job. Startup culture is the new corporate culture.
Startups are portrayed as an exciting, risky, even subversive alternative to traditional corporate work. Startups are thought of as more free, more open and flexible. Some companies surely begin that way, but a few interviews at later-stage startups will make clear just how quickly they ossify into structures that look very much like the organizations that came before them. (...)
Business school graduates like the young man I interviewed are going directly from college to startups, if they even finish school at all. Business majors, traditionally risk-averse, now say they don’t want to work for big companies. But startups are the new big company. They are, as I’ll describe below, the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with an office job. Just realize what you’re signing up for. When the company-provided keg runs dry, the free lunches are making you fat, and playing the Xbox in the break room is no longer as fun as it used to be, what then? When you find that you now report to a politicking middle manager and not the inspiring CEO who interviewed you, will you still want to be there? Is a supposedly novel working environment enough to sustain you? When everywhere you might consider working looks more or less the same, is the novelty even there? (...)
Startups are part of the system, not a rebellious wrench in the cogs.
The funding for startups – that is, the money that pays your prospective salary – comes from somewhere. Wealthy individuals and institutions invest in startups as just another asset class. The futurist Bruce Sterling recently quipped that “start-ups are full of [young] people working hard to make other people rich – Baby Boomer financiers mainly”. While that might be an overly general and cynical take it’s by no means untrue. (...)
There is nothing inherently disruptive about a venture-backed startup. The startup system is just another system; an alternative to the corporate ladder with just as many rungs to climb. Some startups may end up dramatically reshaping a market, but then so might an incumbent player or an active regulator.
The now-perennial celebration of startup-driven disruption begs the question: if we accept that disruption is even happening, are we better off in the resulting disrupted market? Have we solved a problem, or have we shifted the problem elsewhere? Have we created value while furthering justice and equality, thus yielding enduringly positive change? Or have we merely made one group of wealthy people slightly more rich at the expense of another group of wealthy people? Are we creating a better future or just scrambling up the present?
Image: Shutterstock via Wired
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Quote of the Day
“What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?” CEO Rex Tillerson said at the oil giant’s annual meeting Wednesday.
by David Koenig, TPM | Read more:
Image: Donna McWilliam
Japanese Vegetable Pancakes (Okonomiyaki)
[ed. I'd think ready-made tonkatsu or hoisin sauce would work equally as well.]
Okonomiyaki are traditionally served squeezed with a generous criss-cross of Japanese mayonnaise and a okonomiyaki sauce, tangy-sweet-salty mixture I’d liken to Japanese barbecue sauce, which is sold in bottles but I attempted to cobble together a version from recipes I found online, below. Please forgive me if the flavor isn’t perfect; I am new to it, but we loved it, just the same. Pancakes are then sprinkled with bonito flakes, seaweed flakes or even pickled ginger, but we enjoyed ours with a finely slivered scallion and toasted sesame seeds. I imagine they’d also be good with bites dipped in a simpler dumpling dipping sauce.
Yield: 4 large pancakes or I am really sorry, but I forgot to count, but I’d say at least 12, probably 14, smaller ones
Pancakes
1/2 small head cabbage, very thinly sliced (1 pound or 5 to 6 cups shreds) which will be easiest on a mandoline if you have one
4 medium carrots, peeled into ribbons with a vegetable peeler
5 lacinato kale leaves, ribs removed, leaves cut into thin ribbons
4 scallions, thinly sliced on an angle
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
6 large eggs, lightly beaten
Canola, safflower or peanut oil for frying
Tangy Sauce
1/4 cup ketchup
1 1/2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce (note: this is not vegetarian)
1/4 teaspoon dijon mustard
1 tablespoon rice cooking wine or sake
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon honey (use 2 if you like a sweeter sauce)
1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
Make the pancakes: Toss cabbage, carrot, kale, scallions and salt together in a large bowl. Toss mixture with flour so it coats all of the vegetables. Stir in the eggs. Heat a large heavy skillet on medium-high heat. Coat the bottom with oil and heat that too.
To make a large pancake, add 1/4 of the vegetable mixture to the skillet, pressing it out into a 1/2- to 3/4-inch pancake. Gently press the pancake down flat. Cook until the edges beging to brown, about 3 minutes. 30 seconds to 1 minute later, flip the pancake with a large spatula. (If this is terrifying, you can first slide the pancake onto a plate, and, using potholders, reverse it back into the hot skillet.) Cook on the other side until the edges brown, and then again up to a minute more (you can peek to make sure the color is right underneath).
To make small pancakes, you can use tongs but I seriously find using my fingers and grabbing little piles, letting a little batter drip back into the bowl, and depositing them in piles on the skillet easier, to form 3 to 4 pancakes. Press down gently with a spatula to they flatten slightly, but no need to spread them much. Cook for 3 minutes, or until the edges brown. Flip the pancakes and cook them again until brown underneath.
by Smitten Kitchen | Read more:
Images: uncredited
(Adapted, just a little, from Josher Walker of Xiao Bao Biscuit, in Charleston, SC via Tasting Table)
GMO Wheat Found in Oregon
The US Agriculture Department said Wednesday that the genetically engineered wheat is safe to eat and there is no evidence that modified wheat entered the marketplace. But the department is investigating how it ended up in the field, whether there was any criminal wrongdoing and whether its growth is widespread.
"We are taking this very seriously," said Michael Firko of the Agriculture Department's animal and plant health inspection service.
A farmer discovered the genetically modified plants on his farm and contacted Oregon State University, which notified USDA early this month, Firko said.
No genetically engineered wheat has been approved for US farming. USDA officials said the wheat is the same strain as a genetically modified wheat that was legally tested by seed giant Monsanto a decade ago but never approved. Monsanto stopped testing that product in Oregon and several other states in 2005.
The discovery could have far-reaching implications for the US wheat industry if the growth of the engineered product turns out to be far-flung. Many countries around the world will not accept imports of genetically modified foods, and the United States exports about half of its wheat crop.
Oregon department of agriculture director Katy Coba said in a statement that the discovery is "a very serious development that could have major trade ramifications". The state exports about 90% of its wheat.
"I am concerned that a highly regulated plant material such as genetically modified wheat somehow was able to escape into a crop field," she said.
USDA officials declined to speculate whether the modified seeds blew into the field from a testing site or if they were somehow planted or taken there, and they would not identify the farmer or the farm's location. The Oregon department of agriculture said the field is in the eastern part of the state.
The discovery also could have implications for organic companies, which by law cannot use genetically engineered ingredients in its foods. Organic farmers have frequently expressed concern that genetically modified seed will blow into organic farms and contaminate their products.
by AP Washington, (via The Guardian) | Read more:
Photograph: Laszlo Balogh/Reuters
Welcome to the Real Space Age
At dawn one morning last November—just as the edge of Earth comprising Florida spun into the field of light bursting from roughly 93 million miles away—she emerged one last time from the monstrous doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building, twelve stories long but dwarfed. This was what had been billed as the “final mission” of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, a 9.8-mile journey to her final resting place at the Kennedy Space Center’s visitors’ complex. That Atlantis’s journey would begin at the VAB—525 feet tall, the largest single-story structure in the world, having sprouted a half-century ago in the frenzy of the space race, as stupendous an achievement as each of the space-faring rockets that would be assembled inside it—multiplied the emotion.
Very far away, still sheathed in its massive launch-apparatus exoskeleton, one could make out Launchpad 39A, site of the historic Apollo 11 moonwalking blastoff, where Atlantis had also taken off to orbit the Earth, once more and finally, in 2011, marking the last in NASA’s 30-year-old shuttle program. The other surviving orbiters, Discovery and Endeavor, had already completed their extraordinary processionals to museums in northern Virginia and Los Angeles (the latter requiring hundreds of trees cut and roadways reconfigured to accommodate its size). A throng of personnel was on hand, those who had built and maintained and flown her, including some of the 7,000 whose jobs were ending with the program. With signs and T-shirts that read WE LOVE YOU ATLANTIS and THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES and WE MADE HISTORY, they fell in behind her. Many wiped away tears as she crept along at two miles an hour, past the dense, still swampland that had, many times before, exploded along with her, the alligators and pigs and birds flushing at her ignition, the fish heaving themselves from the water, the light from the trail of fire flashing from their scales.
Now the procession was funereal. For NASA’s public-relations machine, desperate to engage Americans’ notoriously fickle interest, it would amount to an odd victory: Stories about Atlantis’s retirement appeared in media outlets across the globe, all written as obituaries. The events of the following evening were equally bleak: A formal dinner at the nearby Radisson commemorating the mission of Apollo 17, whose lunar module had closed its hatch 40 years earlier and ferried the last man back from the moon. In attendance were ten surviving Apollo astronauts, an extraordinary group to say the least, the only men to have traveled to the moon, now gray-haired or bald. Their fears for the nation’s space future were well aired; many of them—including the famously reticent Neil Armstrong, whose recent death had cast a significant pall—had written letters to President Obama saying his space policy portended the nation’s “long downhill slide to mediocrity.” Just as China rushes to land on the moon by the end of this decade, the astronauts noted ruefully, the U.S. is now essentially vehicleless. For a taxpayer-funded fare of almost $71 million per seat, American astronauts are now taxied to the International Space Station by their former archenemies, the Russians, aboard the old, reliable Soyuz rockets against which NASA once raced. The delivery of cargo is now outsourced to private companies. In a tear-stained column titled “In an Earthbound Era, Heaven Has to Wait,” the Times’s Frank Bruni said that for Americans already “profoundly doubtful” and “shaken,” the shuttle’s end “carries the force of cruel metaphor, coming at a time when limits are all we talk about. When we have no stars in our eyes.”
All of which made the scene I’d observed in a desert town in southern New Mexico a week earlier even more exceptional.
In a landscape redolent of Mars, a group of scientists, many of them young NASA astronauts recently decamped to private industry, practically evangelized about this very moment: Unbeknownst to most of the world, after decades of failed Jetsons-esque promises of individual jetpacks for all, people—civilians, you and me, though with a good deal more means—are finally about to ascend to the heavens. If the twentieth-century space race was about the might of the American government, the emerging 21st-century space age is about something perhaps even more powerful—the might of money. The necessary technology has converged in the hands of a particularly boyish group of billionaires whose Right Stuff is less hard-boiled test-pilot, more high-tech entrepreneuring wunderkind—and whose individual financial means eclipse those of most nations. A massive industry is coalescing around them. Towns and states and even some countries are fighting one another for a piece of it. In New Mexico, workers are putting the finishing touches on the first of at least ten spaceports currently under construction around the world. More than 800 people have paid as much as $200,000 apiece to reserve seats on commercial flights into space, some of which are expected to launch, at long last, within a year. Space-travel agents are being trained; space suits are being designed for sex appeal as much as for utility; the founder of the Budget hotel chain is developing pods for short- and long-term stays in Earth’s orbit and beyond. Over beers one night, a former high-ranking NASA official, now employed by Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin transportation conglomerate, put it plainly: “We happen to be alive at the moment when humanity starts leaving the planet.”
Very far away, still sheathed in its massive launch-apparatus exoskeleton, one could make out Launchpad 39A, site of the historic Apollo 11 moonwalking blastoff, where Atlantis had also taken off to orbit the Earth, once more and finally, in 2011, marking the last in NASA’s 30-year-old shuttle program. The other surviving orbiters, Discovery and Endeavor, had already completed their extraordinary processionals to museums in northern Virginia and Los Angeles (the latter requiring hundreds of trees cut and roadways reconfigured to accommodate its size). A throng of personnel was on hand, those who had built and maintained and flown her, including some of the 7,000 whose jobs were ending with the program. With signs and T-shirts that read WE LOVE YOU ATLANTIS and THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES and WE MADE HISTORY, they fell in behind her. Many wiped away tears as she crept along at two miles an hour, past the dense, still swampland that had, many times before, exploded along with her, the alligators and pigs and birds flushing at her ignition, the fish heaving themselves from the water, the light from the trail of fire flashing from their scales.
Now the procession was funereal. For NASA’s public-relations machine, desperate to engage Americans’ notoriously fickle interest, it would amount to an odd victory: Stories about Atlantis’s retirement appeared in media outlets across the globe, all written as obituaries. The events of the following evening were equally bleak: A formal dinner at the nearby Radisson commemorating the mission of Apollo 17, whose lunar module had closed its hatch 40 years earlier and ferried the last man back from the moon. In attendance were ten surviving Apollo astronauts, an extraordinary group to say the least, the only men to have traveled to the moon, now gray-haired or bald. Their fears for the nation’s space future were well aired; many of them—including the famously reticent Neil Armstrong, whose recent death had cast a significant pall—had written letters to President Obama saying his space policy portended the nation’s “long downhill slide to mediocrity.” Just as China rushes to land on the moon by the end of this decade, the astronauts noted ruefully, the U.S. is now essentially vehicleless. For a taxpayer-funded fare of almost $71 million per seat, American astronauts are now taxied to the International Space Station by their former archenemies, the Russians, aboard the old, reliable Soyuz rockets against which NASA once raced. The delivery of cargo is now outsourced to private companies. In a tear-stained column titled “In an Earthbound Era, Heaven Has to Wait,” the Times’s Frank Bruni said that for Americans already “profoundly doubtful” and “shaken,” the shuttle’s end “carries the force of cruel metaphor, coming at a time when limits are all we talk about. When we have no stars in our eyes.”
All of which made the scene I’d observed in a desert town in southern New Mexico a week earlier even more exceptional.
In a landscape redolent of Mars, a group of scientists, many of them young NASA astronauts recently decamped to private industry, practically evangelized about this very moment: Unbeknownst to most of the world, after decades of failed Jetsons-esque promises of individual jetpacks for all, people—civilians, you and me, though with a good deal more means—are finally about to ascend to the heavens. If the twentieth-century space race was about the might of the American government, the emerging 21st-century space age is about something perhaps even more powerful—the might of money. The necessary technology has converged in the hands of a particularly boyish group of billionaires whose Right Stuff is less hard-boiled test-pilot, more high-tech entrepreneuring wunderkind—and whose individual financial means eclipse those of most nations. A massive industry is coalescing around them. Towns and states and even some countries are fighting one another for a piece of it. In New Mexico, workers are putting the finishing touches on the first of at least ten spaceports currently under construction around the world. More than 800 people have paid as much as $200,000 apiece to reserve seats on commercial flights into space, some of which are expected to launch, at long last, within a year. Space-travel agents are being trained; space suits are being designed for sex appeal as much as for utility; the founder of the Budget hotel chain is developing pods for short- and long-term stays in Earth’s orbit and beyond. Over beers one night, a former high-ranking NASA official, now employed by Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin transportation conglomerate, put it plainly: “We happen to be alive at the moment when humanity starts leaving the planet.”
by Dan P. Lee, New York Magazine | Read more:
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic
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