Must Cats Die So Birds Can Live?

Inside an animal-lover civil war.

All winter, Peter Marra’s children had been pestering him to get a cat. It was ironic, he thought as he walked up the snowy path to his modern farmhouse in Takoma Park, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. Especially now, when the country’s cat lobby had him pegged as the Josef Mengele of felines. In his years as a research scientist at the Smithsonian Zoo’s Migratory Bird Center, Marra had produced many studies on different threats to bird life, like glass buildings and wind turbines, but none received as much attention as those featuring cats. Since its publication in the January issue of the journal Nature Communications, his team’s paper, “The Impact of Free-Ranging Domestic Cats on Wildlife of the United States,” which placed the number of birds felled by felines at 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion per year, had been picked up by most major media outlets, including the New York Times. Marra was proud, although when he saw the front-page headline, “That Cuddly Kitty Is Deadlier Than You Think,” accompanied by a photo of a tabby with its jaws clenched around the neck of a rabbit, he braced himself for an onslaught.

Sure enough, the reaction from Alley Cat Allies, the country’s most powerful cat group, was swift and furious. “This study is part of a continuing propaganda campaign to vilify cats,” railed the group’s president, Becky Robinson, in a press release that, to the Smithsonian’s intense displeasure, made use of an incident in which one of Marra’s researchers was accused of cat poisoning to bolster a long-running claim that his group’s work was “a veiled promotion by bird advocates to ramp up the mass killing of outdoor cats.” (...)

People love cats. Always have. The remains of Felis catus, small carnivorous mammals descended from Near Eastern wildcats, have been found in 10,000-year-old Cypriot graves and mummified by the Egyptians, who worshipped them. They’ve been the subject of poetry by fourteenth-century Thai monks, Victorian etchings, and many an Internet meme. At first, people kept cats around for their hunting skills—the ancient Greeks used them to police grain silos for vermin the same way New York City bodegas use them to keep mice away from the cornflakes. But mostly, it was because they’re cute. Cats have those aw-inspiring pedomorphic qualities—big eyes, round foreheads, snubby noses—that trigger a nurturing instinct in humans, and they can convey an almost human intelligence, as anyone who has ever found themselves in a staring contest with one can attest. Still, for every person who sees mute understanding in a cat’s eyes, another finds them creepy. Cats are strangely polarizing beasts, as capable of inspiring hatred as love. Those who dislike them see them as sneaky, moody, manipulative, even off-puttingly feminine. But to the majority, cats are beloved. Currently, nearly 90 million occupy roughly one third of American homes, and while modern cat owners might not use the word worship regarding their pets, there are signs that we are again living in an age of cat deification, the most obvious being that we allow them to poop in boxes inside of our homes.

While people are clearly committed to their cats, it’s not always clear that cats feel the same way. While they may be coerced into wearing a baby bonnet or playing the piano, they generally defy direction—hence the expression “herding cats.” They tend to give the impression of having their own lives, and because cats, unlike dogs, aren’t required to be licensed or leashed, many owners indulge them, allowing them to come and go as they please. (...)

“The population has tripled over the past 40 years. Tripled,” says George Fenwick. Wild of eye and George Lucas of hair, Fenwick runs the American Bird Conservancy, an organization he founded back in the early nineties after watching his neighbor’s cat decimate his backyard bird population. While birds are the group’s primary focus, cats are a close second. An early campaign, Cats Indoors!, encouraged cat owners to keep their pets inside, and the animals remain a bête noire. The killer instinct that makes them valuable in controlled circumstances, the Conservancy argues, is a liability on the streets, where increasing numbers of ferals are wiping out other species. “For every cat on the street, 200 birds are killed annually,” says Fenwick, a font of such information. Sitting in the ABC office above a Chinese restaurant in Washington, he rattles off types at risk: ground-nesters like California least terns, cardinals, house wrens, endangered species like piping plovers. “The important thing to remember is that even when they are fed, they still kill,” he adds. “They kill for fun.” Fenwick likens cats, who were introduced to the environment by humans, to invasive species like kudzu in the Northeast or pythons in Florida. “It’s an immense ecological problem,” he says.

It’s a problem without an easy solution, especially when more and more animal shelters are embracing the “no kill” philosophy, in which strays are rehabilitated and put up for adoption. “Socializing” a cat that’s been living on the streets takes a tremendous amount of commitment, and many are beyond it—as Ludacris says, you can’t turn a ho into a housewife—and there are too many of them for the shelters to take in and let linger. Euthanasia was never that effective, so as long as people abandon cats and let them run around unsterilized, the population will keep refreshing itself.

For the past several years, animal activists have been trying something new. Around the time Fenwick was setting up ABC, a former social worker named Becky Robinson was parking her car in Northwest D.C. when she came upon a clowder of strays in an alley. “There were at least 54,” says Robinson, who is tall and lanky with a ruffled pixie haircut. “I could tell they were related because they were all black with a white stripe here,” she says, running her fingers down the front of her shirt. We were sitting in the Maryland offices of Alley Cat Allies, the group she founded after that night to advocate on behalf of what she calls “the forgotten ones,” largely through promoting a practice called “Trap, Neuter, Return.”

As its name suggests, Trap, Neuter, Return—TNR for short—consists of capturing stray cats, having them sterilized, and returning them to the “colony” whence they came. There, they are overseen by volunteers who provide food, water, and handmade shelters. The hypothesis is that once the procreation cycle is curbed, the colony will die out naturally. In the meantime, the feeding and spaying stops the nuisance behavior that irritated the neighbors, who are encouraged to think of them as “community cats.” “This is about coexisting,” says Robinson. “This is about compassion. This is about humanity, how we exist, how we interact. This is about respect for life.”

Robinson speaks with a soft Kansas accent and the conviction of a preacher, and over the past two decades, Alley Cat Allies has persuaded the ASPCA, the Humane Society, and sundry nonprofit organizations to officially endorse TNR. Additionally, “at least 300 municipalities have passed some kind of law that embraces it,” she says. Including New York City, which in 2011 passed Local Law 59, sanctioning TNR as a method of feline population control. (...)

Of course, that’s only one way to look at it. “That is, if you’ll pardon my French, complete bullshit,” says Ed Clark, Virginia accent booming across the Upper East Side bistro he’s stopped at on the way to Greenwich, where he’s giving a talk to donors to the Wildlife Center of Virginia, the animal hospital at which he sees, on average, 250 cat-inflicted injuries a year. “Have you ever seen a cat kill a bird?” he asks. “They slice ’em right down the middle.” He traces a line up his stomach. “Whoosh.”

Clark, the voluble onetime host of Animal Planet’s Wildlife Emergency, is part of a group of conservationists who have watched the popularity of TNR escalate with horror. To him and his cohort, its supporters have made a terrible Sophie’s choice: By enabling feral cats to live outside, they’re condemning other creatures to horrific deaths. “They’re wearin’ blinders and whistlin’ in the dark,” he says. “They’re absolving themselves of culpability because they don’t have to see it. They just let it happen outside.”

by Jessica Pressler, New York Magazine | Read more:

Illustration by Bigshot Toyworks

Evelyn De Morgan - Night and Sleep, detail
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Silent War

When the history of cyber-warfare comes to be written, its first sentence may go something like this: “Israel gave the United States an ultimatum.” For a number of years, intelligence reports intermittently indicated that Iran was getting closer to building a nuclear bomb, which the Israeli leadership views as an existential threat. In 2004, Israel gave Washington a wish list of weapons and other capabilities it wanted to acquire. The list—for various kinds of hardware but also for items such as aerial transmission codes, so that Israeli jets could overfly Iraq without having to worry about being shot down by U.S. warplanes—left little doubt that Israel was planning a military attack to stop Iran’s nuclear progress. President George W. Bush regarded such action as unacceptable, while acknowledging that diplomacy and economic sanctions had failed to change Iran’s mind.

Intelligence and defense officials offered him a possible third way—a program of cyber-operations, mounted with the help of Israel and perhaps other allies, that would attack Iran’s nuclear program surreptitiously and at the very least buy some time. As with the drone program, the Obama administration inherited this plan, embraced it, and has followed through in a major way. Significant cyber-operations have been launched against Iran, and the Iranians have certainly noticed. It may be that these operations will eventually change minds in Tehran. But the aramco attack suggests that, for the moment, the target may be more interested in shooting back, and with weapons of a similar kind.

Cyberspace is now a battlespace. But it’s a battlespace you cannot see, and whose engagements are rarely deduced or described publicly until long after the fact, like events in distant galaxies. Knowledge of cyber-warfare is intensely restricted: almost all information about these events becomes classified as soon as it is discovered. The commanding generals of the war have little to say. Michael Hayden, who was director of the C.I.A. when some of the U.S. cyber-attacks on Iran reportedly occurred, declined an interview request with a one-line e-mail: “Don’t know what I would have to say beyond what I read in the papers.” But with the help of highly placed hackers in the private sector, and of current and former officials in the military and intelligence establishments and the White House, it is possible to describe the outbreak of the world’s first known cyber-war and some of the key battles fought so far. (...)

For the U.S., Stuxnet was both a victory and a defeat. The operation displayed a chillingly effective capability, but the fact that Stuxnet escaped and became public was a problem. Last June, David E. Sanger confirmed and expanded on the basic elements of the Stuxnet conjecture in a New York Times story, the week before publication of his book Confront and Conceal. The White House refused to confirm or deny Sanger’s account but condemned its disclosure of classified information, and the F.B.I. and Justice Department opened a criminal investigation of the leak, which is still ongoing. Sanger, for his part, said that when he reviewed his story with Obama-administration officials, they did not ask him to keep silent. According to a former White House official, in the aftermath of the Stuxnet revelations “there must have been a U.S.-government review process that said, This wasn’t supposed to happen. Why did this happen? What mistakes were made, and should we really be doing this cyber-warfare stuff? And if we’re going to do the cyber-warfare stuff again, how do we make sure (a) that the entire world doesn’t find out about it, and (b) that the whole world does not fucking collect our source code?”

In September 2011, another piece of malware took to the Web: later named Gauss, it stole information and login credentials from banks in Lebanon, an Iranian ally and surrogate. (The program is called Gauss, as in Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, because, as investigators later discovered, some internal modules had been given the names of mathematicians.) Three months later, in December, yet another piece of malware began spying on more than 800 computers, primarily in Iran but also in Israel, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, and South Africa. This one would eventually be named Mahdi, after a reference in the software code to a messianic figure whose mission, according to the Koran, is to cleanse the world of tyranny before the Day of Judgment. Mahdi was e-mailed to individuals who worked in government agencies, embassies, engineering firms, and financial-services companies. In some cases, the Mahdi e-mails bore a Microsoft Word file attachment containing a news article about a secret Israeli-government plan to cripple Iran’s electrical grid and telecommunications in the event of an Israeli military strike. Other Mahdi e-mails came with PowerPoint files containing slides bearing religious images and text. Anyone who received these e-mails and clicked on the attachment became vulnerable to infection that could result in their e-mails, instant messages, and other data being monitored.

Time started running out for all this malware in 2012, when a man from Mali met with a man from Russia on a spring day in Geneva. The man from Mali was Hamadoun Touré, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency. He invited Eugene Kaspersky, the Russian C.E.O. of the cyber-security firm Kaspersky Lab, to discuss a partnership to perform forensic analysis on major cyber-attacks—“like a Stuxnet,” as Kaspersky recalls. Kaspersky says that Touré made no explicit mention of Iran, even though Stuxnet was an impetus for the collaboration.

by Michael Joseph Gross, Vanity Fair |  Read more:
Image: Getty Images

Paul Gauguin, Tahitian Landscape with a Mountain, 1893

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The Glorious Future of Shopping

The other day I ran out of toilet paper. You know how that goes. The last roll in the house sets off a ticking clock; depending on how many people you live with and their TP profligacy, you’re going to need to run to the store within a few hours, a day at the max, or you’re SOL. (Unless you’re a man who lives alone, in which case you can wait till the next equinox.) But it gets worse. My last roll of toilet paper happened to coincide with a shortage of paper towels, a severe run on diapers (you know, for kids!), and the last load of dishwashing soap. It was a perfect storm of household need. And, as usual, I was busy and in no mood to go to the store.

This quotidian catastrophe has a happy ending. In April, I got into the “pilot test” for Google Shopping Express, the search company’s effort to create an e-commerce service that delivers goods within a few hours of your order. The service, which is currently being offered in the San Francisco Bay Area, allows you to shop online at Target, Walgreens, Toys R Us, Office Depot, and several smaller, local stores, like Blue Bottle Coffee. Shopping Express combines most of those stores’ goods into a single interface, which means you can include all sorts of disparate items in the same purchase. Shopping Express also offers the same prices you’d find at the store. After you choose your items, you select a delivery window—something like “Anytime Today” or “Between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.”—and you’re done. On the fateful day that I’d run out of toilet paper, I placed my order at around noon. Shortly after 4, a green-shirted Google delivery guy strode up to my door with my goods. I was back in business, and I never left the house.After using it for a few weeks, it’s hard to escape the notion that a service like Shopping Express represents the future of shopping. (Also the past of shopping—the return of profitless late-1990s’ services like Kozmo and WebVan, though presumably with some way of making money this time.) It’s not just Google: Yesterday, Reuters reported that Amazon is expanding AmazonFresh, its grocery delivery service, to big cities beyond Seattle, where it has been running for several years. Amazon’s move confirms the theory I floated a year ago, that the e-commerce giant’s long-term goal is to make same-day shipping the norm for most of its customers. (...)

As I learned while using Shopping Express, the plan could be a hit. If done well, same-day shipping erases the distinctions between the kinds of goods we buy online and those we buy offline. Today, when you think of something you need, you have to go through a mental checklist: Do I need it now? Can it wait two days? Is it worth driving for? With same-day shipping, you don’t have to do that. All shopping becomes online shopping.

But that’s just the start. The longer-term promise of same-day shipping is that it will bring the same revolution to groceries that Amazon once brought to books and music. That advantage is remarkable selection. At supermarkets, shelf space is finite and expensive, which is why you can rarely find everything you need at a single store. Safeway, the big mid-market chain in my neighborhood, suffices for about three-quarters of purchases, but a lot of times I’m looking for specialty goods—higher quality seafood, some specific ethnic spice, fresh roasted coffee beans, high-end local bread, a snooty variety of coconut water—that requires a trip to Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, the Chinese or Indian market, or some other out-of-the-way place. (Look, people: First-world problems are still real problems.) Ideally, a single store would carry everything I need, but that’s not possible—there’s just not enough demand for fresh Indian curry leaves or live lobsters for my local Safeway to dedicate the necessary shelf space. But if a store could sell to everyone across a large metropolis, it could pool demand for even low-selling goods. This is the fantasy scenario for same-day shipping: It would create a one-stop shop for everything you’d ever want. It would give you access to the long tail of groceries.

Google and Amazon are trying to solve this problem in slightly different ways. Google’s service doesn’t maintain any local warehouses. Instead, everything you buy comes directly from a local store. To improve efficiency, the system tries to get your goods from the store located closest to your house. (The items I ordered from Target were shipped from a store 6 miles from my house.) Also, unlike AmazonFresh, Google Shopping Express does not yet sell milk, produce, and other perishables, but the company is working on ways to make that possible. It also seems likely that Google will try to expand selection by contracting with lots more retailers. The company seems to be thinking about the program in the same way it thinks about its online advertising system—in the future, any store that wants to join will be able to sign up to sell its goods through the system. In the same way that Google collects a few dollars when it sends a customer to an advertiser’s site on its search engine, Google takes a commission from the store for every purchase made through Shopping Express.

by Farhad Manjoo, Slate |  Read more:

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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A Letter to Verizon Customers

Today, President Obama issued the following letter to all Verizon customers:

Dear Verizon Customers,

Yesterday it came to light that the National Security Agency has been collecting millions of phone records from you each and every day. Since that news was released, many of you have called the White House with questions and concerns about this new program. To save my time and yours, here are answers to three of the F.A.Q.s (Frequently Asked Questions) we’ve been hearing from you:

1. Will I be charged extra for this service?

I’m happy to say that the answer is no. While the harvesting and surveillance of your domestic phone calls were not a part of your original Verizon service contract, the National Security Agency is providing this service entirely free of charge.

2. If I add a phone to my account, will those calls also be monitored?

Once again, the answer is good news. If you want to add a child or any other family member to your Verizon account, their phone calls—whom they called, when, and the duration of the call—will all be monitored by the United States government, at no additional cost.

3. Can the National Security Agency help me understand my Verizon bill?

Unfortunately, no. The National Security Agency has tried, but failed, to understand Verizon’s bills. Please call Verizon customer service and follow the series of electronic prompts.

by Andy Borowitz, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Pete Souza

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D-12.Apr.1993 19x39 cm. Pen drawing on parchment, collage 林孝彦. HAYASHI Takahiko. 1993 photo presented by Galerie Tokyo Humanité
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Don’t Take Your Vitamins

Last month, Katy Perry shared her secret to good health with her 37 million followers on Twitter. “I’m all about that supplement & vitamin LYFE!” the pop star wrote, posting a snapshot of herself holding up three large bags of pills. There is one disturbing fact about vitamins, however, that Katy didn’t mention.

Derived from “vita,” meaning life in Latin, vitamins are necessary to convert food into energy. When people don’t get enough vitamins, they suffer diseases like scurvy and rickets. The question isn’t whether people need vitamins. They do. The questions are how much do they need, and do they get enough in foods?

Nutrition experts argue that people need only the recommended daily allowance — the amount of vitamins found in a routine diet. Vitamin manufacturers argue that a regular diet doesn’t contain enough vitamins, and that more is better. Most people assume that, at the very least, excess vitamins can’t do any harm. It turns out, however, that scientists have known for years that large quantities of supplemental vitamins can be quite harmful indeed.

In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1994, 29,000 Finnish men, all smokers, had been given daily vitamin E, beta carotene, both or a placebo. The study found that those who had taken beta carotene for five to eight years were more likely to die from lung cancer or heart disease.

Two years later the same journal published another study on vitamin supplements. In it, 18,000 people who were at an increased risk of lung cancer because of asbestos exposure or smoking received a combination of vitamin A and beta carotene, or a placebo. Investigators stopped the study when they found that the risk of death from lung cancer for those who took the vitamins was 46 percent higher.

Then, in 2004, a review of 14 randomized trials for the Cochrane Database found that the supplemental vitamins A, C, E and beta carotene, and a mineral, selenium, taken to prevent intestinal cancers, actually increased mortality.

Another review, published in 2005 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that in 19 trials of nearly 136,000 people, supplemental vitamin E increased mortality. Also that year, a study of people with vascular disease or diabetes found that vitamin E increased the risk of heart failure. And in 2011, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association tied vitamin E supplements to an increased risk of prostate cancer.

Finally, last year, a Cochrane review found that “beta carotene and vitamin E seem to increase mortality, and so may higher doses of vitamin A.”

What explains this connection between supplemental vitamins and increased rates of cancer and mortality? The key word is antioxidants.

by Paul A. Offit, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sabine Dowek

Ed Ruscha
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Make Haste Slowly: The Kikkoman Creed

[ed. The history of soy sauce.]

Directed by Academy Award™ Nominated filmmaker Lucy Walker, Make Haste Slowly: The Kikkoman Creed tells the story of the rich heritage and family creed that shaped Kikkoman for over 300 years.

Isogaba maware is a Japanese axiom that translates into "Make Haste Slowly." It means to advance and grow, but to do so with tremendous thought and care. From its meticulous six-month natural brewing process to a heritage dating back to feudal Japan, Kikkoman has exemplified this philosophy since its humble beginnings in the seventeenth century.

Code Red

It’s 1:30 a.m. An orange extension cord curls out of Carleton Lounge. “It blew out,” an officer tells me. It supplies, or rather did supply, the power for a room of students who flew, bused, trained, or drove in for hackNY’s spring 2013 hackathon.

A hackathon is a 24-hour race to mash your code with other people’s data, and perhaps some hardware, to make something you hope will seem cool and won’t break when you’re onstage the next day, trying to win the approval of nine judges and hundreds of your bleary-eyed peers.

There are prizes—like Sphero, a robotic ball you can control with an Android phone—and money, but nothing more than $1,000. Tumblr and Foursquare are here, as is 4chan’s founder, Christopher Poole, aka “moot.” Most students come with friends; some work alone. Everyone is tired. A student sleeps on a windowsill, a pillow under his head and a pile of clementines at his feet. Another tells me, his blue eyes not blinking, “I’ll sleep whenever I can’t stay awake anymore.”

Twelve hours, 360 Red Bulls, and over 800 cans of soda later, the attendees crowd an auditorium to watch the demos. Some sit on the floor and some wander in and out of the lobby, crushing more free sandwiches into their mouths and backpacks. The smell of BO floats through the back of the room. The boy next to me puts his head in his lap and naps through most of the presentations. He tells me he didn’t sleep last night. His team doesn’t win a single prize.

This is a snapshot of programming at Columbia, where, as in many universities across the country, computer science is booming and hackathons like the one described here are springing up with unprecedented speed. Here, the number of students projected to graduate with a degree in CS has risen 50 percent in the past two years. So has the number of students registered for the introductory class, W1004 (commonly referred to as “ten-oh-four”). On the national level, the Computing Research Association reported an “astonishing” 29.2 percent increase in new computing undergraduate majors.

CS and programming have more widespread appeal than ever before. Startups are frequently acquired for millions of dollars—and sometimes, as in the case of Instagram, for $1 billion. Starting salaries for graduates of top schools are commonly close to six figures. CS has gained cultural appeal through The Social Network, which grossed more than $220 million worldwide. “We’re treated more and more as if we possess superpowers,” explains Sam Aarons, a School of Engineering and Applied Science junior studying CS and the owner of Print@CU. “I can’t even be at a family gathering without somebody asking me if I have any ideas for companies I want to start or if I want to be the next under-25 billionaire.”

Yet the flash and money mask, as they so often do, the sadder stories of loss and failure. Ilya Zhitomirskiy was the co-founder of Diaspora, which once threatened Facebook’s stronghold over social media. Aaron Swartz was arguably one of the co-founders of Reddit and led the campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act. Swartz was 26 when he killed himself. Zhitomirskiy was 22.

This past February, the Engineering student council released a newsletter containing a short paragraph saying that Tejraj Antooa, a computer science student who was not enrolled at the time, “perished on January 24, 2013 near his home in Elmont, Long Island.” The coroner’s office determined the cause of death was suicide. A flutter of Facebook activity expressed grief and anger, but after an aborted attempt to draft a letter criticizing the seemingly slow-acting administration, the formal conversation on campus ended. There was no memorial service. There was no space for discussion. (...)

What follows is by no means the experience of every undergraduate in the CS department. Not everybody is suffering. Not everybody is overlooked. Instead, these stories are meant to show the perspectives of the alienated or underrepresented who, if they are not merely silenced or told they are “wrong,” are placed on a shelf labeled “We’ll get to that later.”

by Kyla Cheung, The Eye (Columbia Daily Spectator) |  Read more:

Image: Suze Meyers

Waving My Tweak Flag High

Naissance de "Sympathy for the devil " (one+one... by cinocheproduction

[ed. Fascinating video by Jean-Luc Godard documenting the creative process behind the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil. If you find this article interesting be sure to read the comments section, too.]

In my years of writing and performing songs I’ve come to realize that small, even accidental, lyric changes can greatly improve (or screw up) a song. Sometimes I notice it in my own songs; an accident of vocal delivery on stage one night might turn a light bulb on and then remain an integral part of a song forever, leaving me to lament that my officially released album recording is weaker than the currently performed version.

This might be because of a mere couple words’ difference. Sometimes I notice it in other artists’ work when hearing an unearthed early demo version of a well-known song, or a slightly different live performance. Some tweaks are noticeable only to obsessives, but other tweaks, equally small in terms of how many words are changed, can become legendary. Woody Guthrie wrote a song in 1940 with the recurring tag line, “God blessed America for me,” and it sat ignored in his pile of unused songs for years. But with those few words changed to “This land was made for you and me,” the entire song became part of the bedrock of 20th-century songwriting.

Getting an insight into this process is part of why it’s a joy to see a songwriter’s original lyric sheet, like Bob Dylan’s 1965 original typed page of lyrics for “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which became widely accessible to public view when it was acquired by Christie’s for an auction in 2011 (it was valued at more than $50,000, but was ultimately removed from the sale). All of Dylan’s ballpoint pen corrections and additions surely made it a cooler, more valuable auction piece than if it had just burst from his forehead as a complete, finished work. Why? Because you are not just getting his handwriting, you are getting a map of the inner workings of the famously elusive Dylan’s mind at a specific moment in time. (...)

Sometimes small lyric changes are due to practical circumstance, but end up meaning more than perhaps intended. On June 4, 1968, for example, the Rolling Stones entered Olympic Studios in London to begin recording “Sympathy For the Devil,” which at that time included the lyric “I shouted out ‘Who killed Kennedy?’/when after all, it was you and me.” But within 24 hours Robert Kennedy too had been murdered, and the recorded lyric had to be changed to the plural, “Who killed the Kennedys?”

The original line can be seen as asking a specific, non-rhetorical question, which we just happen to still be asking: Who did kill John Kennedy? However, because Robert Kennedy’s killer was undeniably Sirhan Sirhan, the revised line, “Who killed the Kennedys?” still asks “who,” but in the new context that “who” seems to really ask “Why?” — no longer merely a police procedural question about facts but a more deeply resonant question about human nature: Why do such assassinations happen? It can be argued that the line now more clearly questions the general human spirit — not just the specific spirit of whoever shot J.F.K.

by Jeffrey Lewis, NY Times |  Read more:
Video: Jean-Luc Godard

Ryan Adams

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Winslow Homer: Coconut Palms, Key West (1886) Watercolor
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Massimo Nota
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The Cheapest, Happiest Company in the World

Joe Carcello has a great job. The 59-year-old has an annual salary of $52,700, gets five weeks of vacation a year, and is looking forward to retiring on the sizable nest egg in his 401(k), which his employer augments with matching funds. After 26 years at his company, he’s not worried about layoffs. In 2009, as the recession deepened, his bosses handed out raises. “I’m just grateful to come here to work every day,” he says.

This wouldn’t be remarkable except that Carcello works in retail, one of the stingiest industries in America, with some of the most dissatisfied workers. On May 29, Wal-Mart Stores employees in Miami, Boston, and the San Francisco Bay Area began a weeklong strike. (A Walmart spokesman told MSNBC the strike was a “publicity stunt.”) Workers at an Amazon.com fulfillment center in Leipzig, Germany, also recently held strikes to demand higher pay and better benefits. (An Amazon spokesman says its employees earn more than the average warehouse worker.) In its 30-year history, Carcello’s employer, Costco, has never had significant labor troubles.

CEO Craig Jelinek

Costco Wholesale, the second-largest retailer in the U.S. behind Walmart, is an anomaly in an age marked by turmoil and downsizing. Known for its $55-a-year membership fee and its massive, austere warehouses stocked floor to ceiling with indulgent portions of everything from tilapia to toilet paper, Costco has thrived over the last five years. While competitors lost customers to the Internet and weathered a wave of investor pessimism, Costco’s sales have grown 39 percent and its stock price has doubled since 2009. The hot streak continued through last year’s retirement of widely admired co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jim Sinegal. The share price is up 30 percent under the leadership of its new, plain-spoken CEO, Craig Jelinek.

Despite the sagging economy and challenges to the industry, Costco pays its hourly workers an average of $20.89 an hour, not including overtime (vs. the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour). By comparison, Walmart said its average wage for full-time employees in the U.S. is $12.67 an hour, according to a letter it sent in April to activist Ralph Nader. Eighty-eight percent of Costco employees have company-sponsored health insurance; Walmart says that “more than half” of its do. Costco workers with coverage pay premiums that amount to less than 10 percent of the overall cost of their plans. It treats its employees well in the belief that a happier work environment will result in a more profitable company. “I just think people need to make a living wage with health benefits,” says Jelinek. “It also puts more money back into the economy and creates a healthier country. It’s really that simple.” (...)

Like his predecessor, Jelinek, 59, preaches simplicity, and he has a propensity for aphorisms ending with “good things will happen to you.” “This isn’t Harvard grad stuff,” he says. “We sell quality stuff at the best possible price. If you treat consumers with respect and treat employees with respect, good things are going to happen to you.” He vows to continue Sinegal’s legacy and doesn’t seem to mind a widespread characterization of himself as a “Jim clone.” “We don’t want to be casualties like some of these other big retailers, like the Sears of the world and Kmart and Circuit City. We are in for the long haul,” he says.

by Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:

Image: Ryan Lowry