Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Dear Leader Dreams of Sushi
North Korea is a mythically strange land, an Absurdistan, where almost nothing is known about the people or, more important, their missile-launching leaders. There is, however, one man—a humble sushi chef from Japan—who infiltrated the inner sanctum, becoming the Dear Leader's cook, confidant, and court jester. What is life like serving Kim Jong-il and his heir? A strange and dangerous gig where the food and drink never stop, the girls are all virgins, and you're never really safe. We sent Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson to meet the man who survived all the craziness
The sushi chef was leaving his apartment when he noticed the stranger outside. He could tell by the man's suit—black and badly made—that he was North Korean. Right away, the chef was nervous. Even in his midsixties, the chef is a formidable man: He has thick shoulders, a broad chest; the rings on his strong hands would one day have to be cut off. But he'd long since quit wearing his bulletproof vest, and the last time a North Korean made the journey to visit him in Japan, a decade ago, he was there to kill him.
The chef's name, an alias, is Kenji Fujimoto, and for eleven years he was Kim Jong-il's personal chef, court jester, and sidekick. He had seen the palaces, ridden the white stallions, smoked the Cuban cigars, and watched as, one by one, the people around him disappeared. It was part of Fujimoto's job to fly North Korean jets around the world to procure dinner-party ingredients—to Iran for caviar, Tokyo for fish, or Denmark for beer. It was Fujimoto who flew to France to supply the Dear Leader's yearly $700,000 cognac habit. And when the Dear Leader craved McDonald's, it was Fujimoto who was dispatched to Beijing for an order of Big Macs to go.When he finally escaped, Fujimoto became, according to a high-level cable released by WikiLeaks, the Japanese intelligence community's single greatest asset on the Kim family, rulers of a nation about which stubbornly little is known. We don't know how many people live there. (Best guess: around 23 million.) It's uncertain how many people starved to death during the famine of the late '90s. (Maybe 2 million.) Also mysterious is the number of citizens currently toiling their way toward death in labor camps, places people are sent without trial or sentence or appeal. (Perhaps 200,000.) We didn't even know the age of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, until Kenji Fujimoto revealed his birth date. (January 8, 1983.)
What we know of North Korea comes from satellite photos and the stories of defectors, which, like Fujimoto's, are almost impossible to confirm. Though North Korea is a nuclear power, it has yet to build its first stoplight. The phone book hasn't been invented. It is a nation where old Soviet factories limp along to produce brand-new refrigerators from 1963. When people do escape, they tend to flee from the countryside, where life is more dangerous. Because people rarely defect from the capital, their stories don't make it out, which leaves a great mystery in the center of an already obscure nation. Which is why Fujimoto's is the rarest of stories.
This winter, I flew to Saku for a series of interviews with Fujimoto. I had spent six years researching North Korea for a novel, and in that time I had spoken with experts, aid workers, defectors—everyone with a story to tell about life there. Yet I hadn't spoken to Fujimoto. It was December when I arrived, and a dusting of snow blew through the town's car lots and bare-limbed apple orchards. Here, Fujimoto's friend owns a battered five-stool karaoke bar, and this is where we met. Inside, it was cold enough to see your breath. The toilet was a hole in the floor where urine, billowing steam, disappeared into darkness before freezing.
Fujimoto made us coffee, which helped, and through an interpreter I asked him what he knew about North Korea when, in 1982, he signed a one-year contract to teach sushi-making skills to young chefs in Pyongyang.
"I didn't know much about it," he said. "I knew that Kim Il-sung was the leader of the country. I knew about the thirty-eighth parallel. That's about it."
He couldn't recount ever having met a Korean. Still, he was restless at home, and the pay was good. So packing only his knives and clothes, he left his wife and daughters in Japan and flew to Pyongyang.
by Adam Johnson, GQ | Read more:
Image: Jungyeon Roh
Ben S. Bernanke: Baccalaureate Ceremony at Princeton University - The Ten Suggestions
I'll extend my best wishes to the seniors later, but first I want to congratulate the parents and families here. As a parent myself, I know that putting your kid through college these days is no walk in the park. Some years ago I had a colleague who sent three kids through Princeton even though neither he nor his wife attended this university. He and his spouse were very proud of that accomplishment, as they should have been. But my colleague also used to say that, from a financial perspective, the experience was like buying a new Cadillac every year and then driving it off a cliff. I should say that he always added that he would do it all over again in a minute. So, well done, moms, dads, and families.
This is indeed an impressive and appropriate setting for a commencement. I am sure that, from this lectern, any number of distinguished spiritual leaders have ruminated on the lessons of the Ten Commandments. I don't have that kind of confidence, and, anyway, coveting your neighbor's ox or donkey is not the problem it used to be, so I thought I would use my few minutes today to make Ten Suggestions, or maybe just Ten Observations, about the world and your lives after Princeton. Please note, these points have nothing whatsoever to do with interest rates. My qualification for making such suggestions, or observations, besides having kindly been invited to speak today by President Tilghman, is the same as the reason that your obnoxious brother or sister got to go to bed later--I am older than you. All of what follows has been road-tested in real-life situations, but past performance is no guarantee of future results.
1. The poet Robert Burns once said something about the best-laid plans of mice and men ganging aft agley, whatever "agley" means. A more contemporary philosopher, Forrest Gump, said something similar about life and boxes of chocolates and not knowing what you are going to get. They were both right. Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks he or she knows where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination. Look what happened to me: A dozen years ago I was minding my own business teaching Economics 101 in Alexander Hall and trying to think of good excuses for avoiding faculty meetings. Then I got a phone call . . . In case you are skeptical of Forrest Gump's insight, here's a concrete suggestion for each of the graduating seniors. Take a few minutes the first chance you get and talk to an alum participating in his or her 25th, or 30th, or 40th reunion--you know, somebody who was near the front of the P-rade. Ask them, back when they were graduating 25, 30, or 40 years ago, where they expected to be today. If you can get them to open up, they will tell you that today they are happy and satisfied in various measures, or not, and their personal stories will be filled with highs and lows and in-betweens. But, I am willing to bet, those life stories will in almost all cases be quite different, in large and small ways, from what they expected when they started out. This is a good thing, not a bad thing; who wants to know the end of a story that's only in its early chapters? Don't be afraid to let the drama play out.
by Ben S. Bernanke, Federal Reserve | Read more:
Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife
PD-1
The early success of a new class of cancer drugs, revealed in test results released here over the last several days, has raised hope among the world’s top cancer specialists that they may be on the verge of an important milestone in the fight against the disease.
The excitement has spread to Wall Street. Shares of Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb, which are developing such drugs, rose more than 3 percent on Monday after data from their studies was presented over the weekend at the meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
The drugs, still generally in early testing, work in an entirely new way, by unleashing the immune system to attack cancer cells much as it attacks bacteria. That could be an alternative to often-debilitating chemotherapy.
Finding ways to use the body’s own defenses has been a goal since the late 1800s, when a New York surgeon named William B. Coley noticed that cancer disappeared in a patient who had a severe bacterial infection.
He then began injecting bacteria into cancer patients to rev up their immune systems. His claims of success were disputed and most attempts since then to harness the immune system have not worked.
The new drugs work by disabling a brake on the immune system called the programmed death 1 receptor, or PD-1. And although the data presented at the meeting was from the earliest stage of testing only, the drugs were the center of attention here, with some doctors predicting that cancer treatment was about to shift.
“If you look five years out, most of this meeting will be about immunotherapy,” said Dr. Mario Sznol, a professor of medical oncology at Yale.
Analysts, who predict billions of dollars in sales, are trying to determine which of the three front-runners — Merck, Bristol-Myers and Roche — have the best drug and how soon the drugs could reach the market. Some think it could be as early as a year and a half from now.
“I think all of you recognize this is a very special moment in oncology,” Dr. Roger M. Perlmutter, head of research and development at Merck, told analysts Sunday at a standing-room-only meeting.
Harnessing the immune system is appealing for several reasons. It might be applicable to many different types of cancer. It might produce longer lasting remissions than can be achieved by chemotherapy or the newer targeted drugs. And it seems somehow more natural and holistic.
“It seems the right thing to do to stimulate our body’s defense rather than take some kind of poison,” said Therese Bocklage, a cancer patient and pathologist from Albuquerque.
The excitement has spread to Wall Street. Shares of Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb, which are developing such drugs, rose more than 3 percent on Monday after data from their studies was presented over the weekend at the meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.The drugs, still generally in early testing, work in an entirely new way, by unleashing the immune system to attack cancer cells much as it attacks bacteria. That could be an alternative to often-debilitating chemotherapy.
Finding ways to use the body’s own defenses has been a goal since the late 1800s, when a New York surgeon named William B. Coley noticed that cancer disappeared in a patient who had a severe bacterial infection.
He then began injecting bacteria into cancer patients to rev up their immune systems. His claims of success were disputed and most attempts since then to harness the immune system have not worked.
The new drugs work by disabling a brake on the immune system called the programmed death 1 receptor, or PD-1. And although the data presented at the meeting was from the earliest stage of testing only, the drugs were the center of attention here, with some doctors predicting that cancer treatment was about to shift.
“If you look five years out, most of this meeting will be about immunotherapy,” said Dr. Mario Sznol, a professor of medical oncology at Yale.
Analysts, who predict billions of dollars in sales, are trying to determine which of the three front-runners — Merck, Bristol-Myers and Roche — have the best drug and how soon the drugs could reach the market. Some think it could be as early as a year and a half from now.
“I think all of you recognize this is a very special moment in oncology,” Dr. Roger M. Perlmutter, head of research and development at Merck, told analysts Sunday at a standing-room-only meeting.
Harnessing the immune system is appealing for several reasons. It might be applicable to many different types of cancer. It might produce longer lasting remissions than can be achieved by chemotherapy or the newer targeted drugs. And it seems somehow more natural and holistic.
“It seems the right thing to do to stimulate our body’s defense rather than take some kind of poison,” said Therese Bocklage, a cancer patient and pathologist from Albuquerque.
by Andrew Pollack, NY Times | Read more:
Image via:
Monday, June 3, 2013
The Jargon of Junk Food
Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt.… So formulate products to deliver these. Perhaps add low cost ingredients to boost profit margins. Then “supersize” to sell more.… And advertise/promote to lock in “heavy users.” —Bob Drane, former vice president for new business strategy and development at Oscar Mayer, quoted in Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (Random House, 2013)
Most of us love food—many of us love food a little too much. Hence the dangerous rates of morbid obesity in the United States and elsewhere, an epidemic known as globesity. Those extra pounds generally come from the overconsumption of soft drinks, snack foods, and fast foods. The massive popularity of these so-called junk foods (a phrase that was added to the language menu in 1973) is a testament to the food industry’s talent for creating feel-good food.
Our diets may be richer for it, but so too is the English language, which now boasts many tasty new words and phrases cooked up by food industry scientists and technologists. (I’m indebted to New York Times reporter Michael Moss, particularly for his fascinating new book Salt Sugar Fat, for many of these terms.)
Food companies don’t want their customers to be obese, of course, but what they are dedicated to is increasing stomach share, or the market share within a food category. They’re certainly happy to use marketing techniques to do this, particularly up-and-down-the-street marketing where they get their product prominently displayed in every mom-and-pop shop and convenience store on a street. But processed-food companies increasingly turn to their legions of scientists to produce foods that we can’t resist. These food geeks tweak their products by varying the levels of the three so-called pillar ingredients—salt, sugar, and fat.
Why not just crank these ingredients up to 11 if we crave them so much? It turns out that although we generally do like more of them, when you go past a certain amount, we like the result less. That optimum amount of salt, sugar, or fat is called the bliss point. Scientists also adjust these ingredients as well as factors such as crunchiness to produce a mouthfeel—that is, the way the food feels inside a person’s mouth—that causes consumers to crave more. Technologists can also induce a flavor burst by altering the size and shape of the salt crystals themselves so that they basically assault the taste buds into submission.
The holy grail of junk-food science is vanishing caloric density, where the food melts in your mouth so quickly that the brain is fooled into thinking it’s hardly consuming any calories at all, so it just keeps snacking. In the process, packaged-food scientists want to avoid triggering sensory-specific satiety, the brain mechanism that tells you to stop eating when it has become overwhelmed by big, bold flavors. Instead, the real goals are either passive overeating, which is the excessive eating of foods that are high in fat because the human body is slow to recognize the caloric content of rich foods, or auto-eating: that is, eating without thinking or without even being hungry. (The opposite problem is being overhungry, where you’re so ravenous that you’ll basically eat anything that’s put in front of you.) Either way, if you end up with a food baby, a distended stomach caused by excessive overeating, you’ve made a fast-food executive somewhere very happy.
Most of us love food—many of us love food a little too much. Hence the dangerous rates of morbid obesity in the United States and elsewhere, an epidemic known as globesity. Those extra pounds generally come from the overconsumption of soft drinks, snack foods, and fast foods. The massive popularity of these so-called junk foods (a phrase that was added to the language menu in 1973) is a testament to the food industry’s talent for creating feel-good food.Our diets may be richer for it, but so too is the English language, which now boasts many tasty new words and phrases cooked up by food industry scientists and technologists. (I’m indebted to New York Times reporter Michael Moss, particularly for his fascinating new book Salt Sugar Fat, for many of these terms.)
Food companies don’t want their customers to be obese, of course, but what they are dedicated to is increasing stomach share, or the market share within a food category. They’re certainly happy to use marketing techniques to do this, particularly up-and-down-the-street marketing where they get their product prominently displayed in every mom-and-pop shop and convenience store on a street. But processed-food companies increasingly turn to their legions of scientists to produce foods that we can’t resist. These food geeks tweak their products by varying the levels of the three so-called pillar ingredients—salt, sugar, and fat.
Why not just crank these ingredients up to 11 if we crave them so much? It turns out that although we generally do like more of them, when you go past a certain amount, we like the result less. That optimum amount of salt, sugar, or fat is called the bliss point. Scientists also adjust these ingredients as well as factors such as crunchiness to produce a mouthfeel—that is, the way the food feels inside a person’s mouth—that causes consumers to crave more. Technologists can also induce a flavor burst by altering the size and shape of the salt crystals themselves so that they basically assault the taste buds into submission.
The holy grail of junk-food science is vanishing caloric density, where the food melts in your mouth so quickly that the brain is fooled into thinking it’s hardly consuming any calories at all, so it just keeps snacking. In the process, packaged-food scientists want to avoid triggering sensory-specific satiety, the brain mechanism that tells you to stop eating when it has become overwhelmed by big, bold flavors. Instead, the real goals are either passive overeating, which is the excessive eating of foods that are high in fat because the human body is slow to recognize the caloric content of rich foods, or auto-eating: that is, eating without thinking or without even being hungry. (The opposite problem is being overhungry, where you’re so ravenous that you’ll basically eat anything that’s put in front of you.) Either way, if you end up with a food baby, a distended stomach caused by excessive overeating, you’ve made a fast-food executive somewhere very happy.
by Paul McFedries, IEEE Spectrum, Read more:
Illustration by Greg Mably
The Right to Evade Regulation
Every time you fill a prescription at a drug store like Walgreens, the pharmacy keeps a record of the transaction, noting information such as your name, the drug, the dosage, and the issuing doctor. It’s a routine bit of bookkeeping, and for a long time it raised few eyebrows. Then a firm called IMS Health starting buying up the data. Mining pharmacy records, the company assembled profiles of hundreds of thousands of American doctors and millions of individual patients, with names and other identifying details encrypted. IMS Health turned around and sold access to those files to pharmaceutical companies, making it easier for the firms to target (and reward) the physicians most likely to prescribe expensive, brand-name drugs.
Eventually, doctors and state officials caught on to what IMS Health was doing. Where the company saw a business opportunity, they saw a strategy that violated patient privacy and could increase health care costs. Three states—New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont—decided in 2006 and 2007 to ban pharmacies from selling prescription records for commercial purposes. By late 2010, 26 other states were considering similar measures.
Had the issue remained subject to a normal democratic process, it would have continued to play out that way—through a gradual, state-by-state debate about whether so-called “prescription confidentiality” laws make for good policy. But IMS Health did not want that kind of fight. Instead, it filed separate suits against the three states that had first cracked down on its business, invoking the First Amendment. The selling of prescription records, the company asserted, is a form of free speech.
For most of U.S. history, such a claim would have been a dead letter in court. But when it comes to the First Amendment, we live in interesting times. In June 2011, the Supreme Court struck down the new data-protection laws, arguing that they discriminated against IMS Health. “The State,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority, “has burdened a form of protected expression. ... This the State cannot do.”
It was Kennedy, of course, who authored Citizens United, which established that independent political spending by corporations is shielded by the Bill of Rights as well. The IMS Health case, which drew much less attention, shows just how pervasive such free speech arguments have become. Once the patron saint of protesters and the disenfranchised, the First Amendment has become the darling of economic libertarians and corporate lawyers who have recognized its power to immunize private enterprise from legal restraint. It is tempting to call it the new nuclear option for undermining regulation, except that its deployment is shockingly routine.
Last summer, the tobacco industry used the First Amendment to have new, scarier health warnings on cigarette packaging thrown out on the grounds that the labels constituted a form of compelled speech. Ratings agencies like Standard and Poor’s and Fitch, whose erroneous and possibly fraudulent AAA ratings of worthless securities helped cause the banking crisis, have leaned heavily on a defense that deems their ratings mere opinions and therefore protected by the First Amendment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pushing to gut the disclosure requirements in new securities regulations, citing the free speech rights of hedge funds and publicly traded companies. Attorneys working for Google have argued that, since search results are speech, its rights are impinged by the enforcement of tort and antitrust laws. Southwest and Spirit airlines have employed the First Amendment to resist efforts to force them to list the full price of tickets. The incomplete, misleading cost, they have argued, is a form of free speech, too.
Fred Schauer of the University of Virginia calls such claims “First Amendment opportunism.” Free speech is a cherished American ideal; companies are exploiting that esteem, as he puts it, “to try to accomplish goals that are not so clearly related to speech.” The co-opting of the First Amendment has happened slowly, but not at all by accident. First, it was helped along by questionable court decisions. Today, it is being accelerated by a strange alliance between two groups: a new generation of conservative judges, who have repudiated the judicial restraint their forebears prized, and legendary liberal lawyers, like Floyd Abrams and Laurence Tribe, who, after building their reputations as defenders of free speech, are using their talents to deploy it as a tool of corporate deregulation.
Eventually, doctors and state officials caught on to what IMS Health was doing. Where the company saw a business opportunity, they saw a strategy that violated patient privacy and could increase health care costs. Three states—New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont—decided in 2006 and 2007 to ban pharmacies from selling prescription records for commercial purposes. By late 2010, 26 other states were considering similar measures.Had the issue remained subject to a normal democratic process, it would have continued to play out that way—through a gradual, state-by-state debate about whether so-called “prescription confidentiality” laws make for good policy. But IMS Health did not want that kind of fight. Instead, it filed separate suits against the three states that had first cracked down on its business, invoking the First Amendment. The selling of prescription records, the company asserted, is a form of free speech.
For most of U.S. history, such a claim would have been a dead letter in court. But when it comes to the First Amendment, we live in interesting times. In June 2011, the Supreme Court struck down the new data-protection laws, arguing that they discriminated against IMS Health. “The State,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority, “has burdened a form of protected expression. ... This the State cannot do.”
It was Kennedy, of course, who authored Citizens United, which established that independent political spending by corporations is shielded by the Bill of Rights as well. The IMS Health case, which drew much less attention, shows just how pervasive such free speech arguments have become. Once the patron saint of protesters and the disenfranchised, the First Amendment has become the darling of economic libertarians and corporate lawyers who have recognized its power to immunize private enterprise from legal restraint. It is tempting to call it the new nuclear option for undermining regulation, except that its deployment is shockingly routine.
Last summer, the tobacco industry used the First Amendment to have new, scarier health warnings on cigarette packaging thrown out on the grounds that the labels constituted a form of compelled speech. Ratings agencies like Standard and Poor’s and Fitch, whose erroneous and possibly fraudulent AAA ratings of worthless securities helped cause the banking crisis, have leaned heavily on a defense that deems their ratings mere opinions and therefore protected by the First Amendment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pushing to gut the disclosure requirements in new securities regulations, citing the free speech rights of hedge funds and publicly traded companies. Attorneys working for Google have argued that, since search results are speech, its rights are impinged by the enforcement of tort and antitrust laws. Southwest and Spirit airlines have employed the First Amendment to resist efforts to force them to list the full price of tickets. The incomplete, misleading cost, they have argued, is a form of free speech, too.
Fred Schauer of the University of Virginia calls such claims “First Amendment opportunism.” Free speech is a cherished American ideal; companies are exploiting that esteem, as he puts it, “to try to accomplish goals that are not so clearly related to speech.” The co-opting of the First Amendment has happened slowly, but not at all by accident. First, it was helped along by questionable court decisions. Today, it is being accelerated by a strange alliance between two groups: a new generation of conservative judges, who have repudiated the judicial restraint their forebears prized, and legendary liberal lawyers, like Floyd Abrams and Laurence Tribe, who, after building their reputations as defenders of free speech, are using their talents to deploy it as a tool of corporate deregulation.
by Tim Wu, TNR | Read more:
Inscription of the First Amendment (December 15, 1791) in front ofIndependence Hall in Philadelphia via Wikipedia
U.S. Open Will Test the Limits at Merion
St. George’s Episcopal Church is about 150 yards from the sixth green at the Merion Golf Club, where the United States Open will begin June 13.
The bells in the 81-year-old church tower ring every 30 minutes, a harmonic, if striking, clangor that interrupts the usual hush enveloping a putting green.
Imagine Tiger Woods poised over a crucial putt on the sixth hole during the final day of the Open. If his caddie has done his homework, he will not let Woods begin his stroke at the top or the bottom of the hour.
Because no one has told St. George’s to turn off its bells.
Over at the pivotal 18th tee, it will be a little more complicated charting the ambient sound. Caddies will need a commuter train schedule and a stopwatch to time the piercing air horn of a nearby train. Federal transportation safety regulations require the high-pitched air horn to blast at certain intervals. The trains, which pass various holes, are not stopping for the championship either.
This year’s United States Open will be different from any other in the modern history of the event, and not solely because of the potential auditory distractions.
The United States Golf Association, in an endorsement of old-style golf architecture and in a bold tribute to the game’s roots, has chosen to bring its signature championship to pocket-size and hemmed-in Merion.
The fabled East Course at the club, which hosted its first national championship in 1904, has been home to more national championships than any American site. But the last time the Open was at Merion, 32 years ago, the consensus was that the off-the-course extravaganza had grown so outsize, it would be the final time the modest club would see the event. The United States Open has grown exponentially since. (...)
The Merion grounds are about half the size of a 21st-century United States Open location. The club is confined by public roads, a bordering college, a meandering railway and dozens of homes.
In scale, bringing the modern United States Open to little Merion and its serene suburban environs is like bringing the Super Bowl to a small-college football field. And in this case, the Super Bowl comes for four consecutive days.
When the first tee shots rise into the air June 13, golf fans should be ready for things they have never seen before at a United States Open — and not just caddies reading putts with an eye on their wristwatches.
When was the last time a golfer in a major championship hooked a shot just 25 yards off line and landed in somebody’s patio barbecue grill? Or a second-floor bedroom? It’s possible on Merion’s 15th hole.
About 12,000 people live in the less than two square miles of Ardmore, the orderly, uncluttered Philadelphia suburb where the Merion Golf Club was built in 1896.
When the United States Open descends here, the number of security personnel, members of the news media, officials and volunteers will equal the community’s population. They will be joined by a clamorous congregation of 190,000 spectators, who over four days will flock to an immense corporate tent city, multiple hospitality villages, a 24,000-square-foot merchandising store and acres of temporary grandstands, spectator plazas and food courts. It is a golf-themed Mardi Gras wrapped within one of the year’s biggest sporting events — all encircled by nine miles of chain-link fencing.
But Merion is also hallowed golf ground, and returning American golf to its embryonic grass roots is expected to be part of the charm. This is where Bobby Jones completed his Grand Slam in 1930; where Ben Hogan launched his historic 1-iron at the 18th hole in 1950; where Lee Trevino pulled a fake snake from his golf bag before winning his playoff with Jack Nicklaus in 1971.
The whole idea is old time meets big time.
The bells in the 81-year-old church tower ring every 30 minutes, a harmonic, if striking, clangor that interrupts the usual hush enveloping a putting green.Imagine Tiger Woods poised over a crucial putt on the sixth hole during the final day of the Open. If his caddie has done his homework, he will not let Woods begin his stroke at the top or the bottom of the hour.
Because no one has told St. George’s to turn off its bells.
Over at the pivotal 18th tee, it will be a little more complicated charting the ambient sound. Caddies will need a commuter train schedule and a stopwatch to time the piercing air horn of a nearby train. Federal transportation safety regulations require the high-pitched air horn to blast at certain intervals. The trains, which pass various holes, are not stopping for the championship either.
This year’s United States Open will be different from any other in the modern history of the event, and not solely because of the potential auditory distractions.
The United States Golf Association, in an endorsement of old-style golf architecture and in a bold tribute to the game’s roots, has chosen to bring its signature championship to pocket-size and hemmed-in Merion.
The fabled East Course at the club, which hosted its first national championship in 1904, has been home to more national championships than any American site. But the last time the Open was at Merion, 32 years ago, the consensus was that the off-the-course extravaganza had grown so outsize, it would be the final time the modest club would see the event. The United States Open has grown exponentially since. (...)
The Merion grounds are about half the size of a 21st-century United States Open location. The club is confined by public roads, a bordering college, a meandering railway and dozens of homes.
In scale, bringing the modern United States Open to little Merion and its serene suburban environs is like bringing the Super Bowl to a small-college football field. And in this case, the Super Bowl comes for four consecutive days.
When the first tee shots rise into the air June 13, golf fans should be ready for things they have never seen before at a United States Open — and not just caddies reading putts with an eye on their wristwatches.When was the last time a golfer in a major championship hooked a shot just 25 yards off line and landed in somebody’s patio barbecue grill? Or a second-floor bedroom? It’s possible on Merion’s 15th hole.
About 12,000 people live in the less than two square miles of Ardmore, the orderly, uncluttered Philadelphia suburb where the Merion Golf Club was built in 1896.
When the United States Open descends here, the number of security personnel, members of the news media, officials and volunteers will equal the community’s population. They will be joined by a clamorous congregation of 190,000 spectators, who over four days will flock to an immense corporate tent city, multiple hospitality villages, a 24,000-square-foot merchandising store and acres of temporary grandstands, spectator plazas and food courts. It is a golf-themed Mardi Gras wrapped within one of the year’s biggest sporting events — all encircled by nine miles of chain-link fencing.
But Merion is also hallowed golf ground, and returning American golf to its embryonic grass roots is expected to be part of the charm. This is where Bobby Jones completed his Grand Slam in 1930; where Ben Hogan launched his historic 1-iron at the 18th hole in 1950; where Lee Trevino pulled a fake snake from his golf bag before winning his playoff with Jack Nicklaus in 1971.
The whole idea is old time meets big time.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
A Couple of Guys
“If Not For You,” Bob Dylan and George Harrison rehearsing for the Concert For Bangladesh, Aug. 1971.
via:
Consider the Foul
About one of every six pitches is hit out of play—inert, a do-over, a mentally discarded blip as the ball shanked foul is discarded into the stands. No other sport includes this regular pileup of outcomes empty of conclusive results.Another unique element: when a foul ball reaches the seats, the game breaks the fourth wall. Only in baseball does the action penetrate the crowd so routinely. And it is no easy action: catching a foul pop-up barehanded stings, and a screaming line drive into the seats can kill you. Most people at Durham Bulls Athletic Park don’t pay much attention to the game, at their own risk.
I recently started taking more notice of foul balls, tracking them on my score sheet along with all the other subparticulars I habitually tally: balls and strikes; first-pitch strikes; total pitches thrown per inning and per pitcher, broken down by balls and strikes; total swings; and swings-and-misses. There are plenty of reasons for this extensive annotation, but mainly it keeps me tuned into the action, pitch by pitch. (...)
Foul balls require more than just extra pitches; they also make pitchers expend more mental energy. When a hitter fouls off a pitch, he disrupts the rhythm of the pitcher, who has to watch and wait out the flight of the ball into the blurry periphery, and then wait again for the umpire to give him a new one—which he has to inspect, rub up, and so on. Pitchers can be finicky about the ball itself and will sometimes reject the one they’re given. (...)
From a wider perspective, fouls can help explain a pitcher’s overall work. Steve Geltz relieved Colome and threw a nine-pitch seventh inning. There were three foul balls—a high proportion, but not for him. Among Bulls pitchers, Geltz’s foul-ball rate is the highest, 23 percent. In the roughly average four-pitch at-bat, one of his pitches will be hit foul. Geltz relies on a fastball that seems to rise as it approaches the plate, partially because he’s short and doesn’t generate much downward plane. The high fastball is one of the easiest pitches for hitters to read: it stays at eye level longer and it’s very inviting to swing at. But located correctly, up at the top of the strike zone or just above it, it’s very hard to hit solidly. (“Chocolate mousse,” a Durham Bulls hitter once called them, because “it looks so good but it’s so bad for you.”) The result is a high rate of balls fouled up in the air, straight back or into the bleachers. Although Geltz doesn’t throw anywhere near as hard as Colome does, he gets even more strikeouts, not by pitch velocity or movement but by forcing hitters to foul off those tempting, almost taunting, high fastballs until finally they just miss one—which they are likely to do eventually if Geltz hits his target. (He’s kind of like the guy sitting in the dunking machine at the fair, daring you to sink him from sixty feet away.) Foul balls are probably not a deliberate part of Geltz’s strategy, but they are nonetheless essential to his success.
by Adam Sobsey, Paris Review | Read more:
Photo by Kate Joyce.
A Streetcorner Serenade for the Public Plaza
The department brought in some potted trees and chairs, closed off a short street and voilà, what had been a problem became a boon. Since the plaza opened last summer, crime has plummeted, Mr. Di Benedetto told me, crediting the local police precinct. He heads the New Lots Avenue Triangle Merchants Association.
“People use the place all the time now, meaning the area is watched and safe,” he said. “I’ve had my pizzeria since 1971, so I can tell you, this is a renaissance.”
Cities need public spaces like plazas. For years they have mostly been planned from the top down. In New York, zoning laws have carved many of these spaces from commercial developments, which have been given bonuses to include them. Mayor Bloomberg is pushing a new proposal to rezone east Midtown, near Grand Central, that is a variation on this same old trickle-down theme.
But fresh thinking has focused on cheap, quick, temporary and D.I.Y.-style approaches to creating public space — among these, curbside “parklets” in San Francisco and a communal farm on what had been a derelict parcel in the middle of Phoenix. “Small steps, big changes,” as Janette Sadik-Khan, the New York City Department of Transportation commissioner, described the logic of plazas like that at New Lots.
And guess what? A beer garden made out of freight containers on an empty plot turns out to be a lot more popular and better for a city than a sad corporate atrium with a few cafe tables and a long list of don’ts on the wall.
As more and more educated Americans, especially younger ones, are looking to move downtown, seeking alternatives to suburbs and cars, they’re reframing the demand for public space. They want elbow room and creative sites, cooked up by the community or, like the plaza program, developed from a democratic mix of top-down and bottom-up governance.
The other day I visited Michael Bierut, whose design firm, Pentagram, has drawn the maps that accompany the new bike-share program. Pentagram’s New York office faces Madison Square Park. Mr. Bierut remembered when the plaza program started to take over the pedestrian-unfriendly territory where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue, just next to the park. Traffic patterns improved, but he still thought the city was nuts to create plazas from concrete islands marooned between busy boulevards when there was already, right there, one of the most gorgeous parks in the city.
“Was I wrong,” he said, laughing.
The plazas outside his building are mobbed on warm days, with people even toting Shake Shack burgers out of the park to sit next to all the traffic — partly for the view (the Flatiron building one way, the Empire State Building the other) but also for the reason people gravitate to Trafalgar Square in London or the Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy.
To be in the middle of things.
“It’s why we congregate near the kitchen at a dinner party instead of in the living room,” said Andy Wiley-Schwartz, who directs the Department of Transportation’s plaza program. “That’s where you see people coming and going to the fridge to grab a beer and watch stuff happen.”
by Michael Kimmelman, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: New York City Department of Transportation
Saturday, June 1, 2013
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