"What Part of 'Politico' Do You Not Understand?"

The dominant mode of Washington journalism tends to both reflect and entrench the values of its era. The eminent writers and editors of the immediate postwar age, such as James Reston and Ben Bradlee, were often comfortable with the powerful, and that coziness came just as America itself was reaching the heights of its dominance. After Watergate, political journalism took on a more adversarial edge, which had the ironic effect of turning two of its practitioners into actual celebrities ,portrayed on the big screen by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. The Washington of today runs at warp-speed and hums with sound bites, and the current head of the pack, Politico, has only made it go faster.

Founded in 2007, the site refers to its mission as “driving the conversation.” That process works something like this: A story about, say, dunderheaded IRS practices will move quickly from the underlying facts to an extended examination of Washington’s reaction to those facts. Views are sought from a predictable cast of insiders; “perceptions” and “narratives” are dissected; the conventional wisdom is deftly enshrined. With any luck, political and media figures will respond to the initial article, driving the conversation some more. This is why adherents read Politicoobsessively: It is an accurate hourly distillation of what and how Washington thinks. It’s also why critics see Politico as a malignant influence on the capital, exacerbating its fixation on the petty.

Politico’s remarkable rise—its website gets between four and five million unique visitors each month—owes a good deal to two of its co-founders, editor-in-chief John F. Harris and executive editor Jim VandeHei. Before launching the site, both were esteemed reporters for The Washington Post. VandeHei had worked atThe Wall Street Journal before switching papers, and Harris, respected for his analytical chops, had authored a very fine biography of Bill Clinton. Around the time he co-founded Politico, Harris was also writing (with Mark Halperin) The Way to Win, a campaign book that was notable for its coinage of the “Freak Show” phenomenon, in which “there are deep incentives ... that reward extreme behavior and ... create a marketplace for political division.” In an age of media contraction, Politico has become the news organization best able to chronicle the Freak Show and thrive according to its terms.

Harris and VandeHei, both in their forties, have an easygoing rapport despite their distinct personalities. The gregarious Harris often took several seconds to answer the questions I posed during our two interview sessions at the Politico offices in Arlington, Virginia. VandeHei, in contrast, speaks quickly but with great precision. Over the course of our talks, they revealed their picks for the most media-savvy politicians working today, debated the gender politics of their newsroom, assessed the worthiness of Nate Silver, and vigorously defended Politico’s journalistic ethos and methods. They also discussed their ambitions for its next phase: In June, the site announced that it is establishing a division devoted to “deep, magazine-style journalism” to be led by Susan Glasser, formerly of Foreign Policy and the Post. Harris described this as an attempt to move “the conversation in more lasting ways”—which raises the question of whether Politico can move beyond the Freak Show.

by Issac Chotiner, New Republic |  Read more:

Image:  Jonathan Snyder

Stephen Magsig
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The Boss Stops Here

A nonhierarchical workplace may just be a more creative and happier one. But how would you feel if the whole office voted on whether to hire you—and when to give you a raise?

It’s a relatively safe assumption that most of us have, at one point in our lives, worked for a boss. There is comfort in the arrangement: Someone tells us what to do, and we do it. If we do it well—and “it” here could be anything from writing software to assembling a car—we may get a more spacious cube or more money, and if we do it poorly, we can expect to be let go. Above us, in an ever-narrowing spire, are the shift supervisors and floor managers and vice-presidents, each of whom is subject to his or her own unique hierarchical pressures, and above them is the CEO or president or otherwise-titled grand Pooh-Bah who dictates the rules that the rest of us must follow.

According to Nikil Saval, the author of Cubed, a forthcoming history of the modern office, the top-down management structure first proliferated in the U.S. in the rail era, as corporate barons struggled to maintain control of their sprawling new concerns. The easiest way to govern hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad, they discovered, was to erect a chain of command, which extended from the central office in New York or Chicago to the field offices on the frontier.

It was a strategy that also proved remarkably effective for the heads of large banks and telephone companies and eventually—I’m skipping a few decades here—PC manufacturers and soda-pop-makers and multinational data-­processing firms. There may even be some evidence that the tiered framework is hardwired into our brains. “Hierarchy is prominent across all species and all cultures in the world,” Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School, told me recently. “It reduces conflict, helps with role differentiation, and vastly increases coordination.” In other words, employees may need managers because managers define, either implicitly or explicitly, who people are as workers. (...)

The theory that too many bosses may be an obstacle and not a boon did not achieve widespread prominence until the early eighties. The reasons are multifarious, but business historians believe it had something to do with the economic recession, which gutted the ranks of the middle managers and in the process helped companies realize that all those bosses had actually been slowing things down. There was also an increasing sense that ­creativity—an invaluable commodity at the tech firms and software companies of the new “knowledge economy”—might be muffled by hierarchy. A tiered framework had worked fine for railway bosses, but it could have a frankly inhibiting effect on a team whose sole task was to build something new, often out of thin air. For that, you needed space, you needed support, and above all, you needed freedom. (...)

In 1980, less than 20 percent of the companies on the Fortune 1000 list boasted at least some sort of team management structure. By 1990, it was 50 percent. By 2000, it was 80 percent. “Companies were trying to figure out the best way to foster creativity, to effect rapid change, to deal with growing global competitiveness,” says Stephen Courtright, an assistant professor at Texas A&M, who specializes in the study of self-governing workplaces. “In many cases, that involved flat, horizontal management.”

But only in recent years have we really seen the ideal of the democratized workplace brought to its logical conclusion: companies that don’t just have fewer managers and bosses but have hardly any bosses at all.

by Matthew Shaer, New York Magazine |  Read more:
Illustration by Marc Boutavant

Tinctorial Textiles

[ed. Beyond the beautiful colors, I like the idea of using fabric panels for office design instead of aluminum and plastic cubicles].

Tinctorial Textiles is a new step in the research on natural pigment. Having mainly experimented with vegetable dyes in the past it was a new step to explore the area of plant dyes. 13 curtain panels executed in semi translucent wool overlap with other eachother to create colour blends between the panels.

Raw Color teamed up for the dyeing with Rubia Natural Colour, a dutch company specialised in the development of natural colour agents. The applied dyes are for one part taken from the companies palet and for the other part especially developed for the project.

The term tinctorial relates to most organic dyeing agents categorized by the term in their latin name. The dyes used in this project derive from three plants, madder root – 'Rubia tinctorum' for the reddish hues, woad – 'Isatis tinctoria' for the blueish hues and reseda – 'Reseda luteola' for the yellowish hues. All agents are purely applied in different concentrations to achieve more or less saturation. New shades are created by over-dyeing the fabric with two agents resulting in greens, purples and oranges.

The project was commissioned by interior designers Van Eijk & Van der Lubbe for the renewed spaces of the ABN Amro bank office in Eindhoven.

by Raw Color |  Read more:

h/t YMFY

Tricky Ways to Pull Down a Skyscraper

There are many ways to demolish a building, and some of them are spectacular: blowing it up from the inside so it collapses on itself, or smashing it to bits with a two-ton wrecking ball.

But here in Tokyo, a cheek-by-jowl city with many outdated high-rises and tough recycling and environmental restrictions, Japanese companies are perfecting what might be called stealth demolition. Some tall buildings are dismantled from the top down, the work hidden by a moving scaffold, others from the bottom up, the entire structure being slowly jacked down.

At times the techniques seem to defy gravity, or at least common sense, for although the buildings appear intact, they slowly shrink. The methods, which make for a cleaner and quieter work site, may eventually find favor in New York and other cities as aging skyscrapers become obsolete and the best solution is to take them down and rebuild.

The latest Tokyo high-rise to get the stealth treatment is the Akasaka Prince Hotel, a 40-story tower with a distinctive saw-toothed facade overlooking one of the city’s bustling commercial districts. Since last fall, its steel and concrete innards have been torn apart, floor by floor, starting near the top, by hydraulic shears and other heavy equipment. The building has been shrinking by about two floors every 10 days; this month it will be gone, to be replaced by two new towers.

Hideki Ichihara, a manager with Taisei Corporation, which developed the system being used to tear down the hotel, said the technique had environmental benefits and allowed for more efficient separation of metal, concrete and other recyclable materials. Another advantage is visual: The vanishing building looks normal for as long as possible. “We want people not to really see the demolition work,” he said. (...)

It is unclear whether demolition contractors in the United States will adopt any of the Japanese methods; even in Tokyo many buildings are demolished in more conventional ways. (With the new techniques, setting up the project can be more expensive, but the demolition often takes less time than with conventional methods.)

Herb Duane, a semiretired demolition consultant who writes frequently on the topic, said that Kajima’s ground-up technique might be problematic in a city like New York, where the weight of buildings is greater.

Bill Moore, a past president of the National Demolition Association and marketing director of Brandenburg Industrial Services, a demolition company, said that an Italian contractor had tried to interest American companies in a top-cap system that is similar to Taisei’s, to little effect. “Our environmental regulations are not that strict,” Mr. Moore said, and dust can be effectively contained by spraying with water.

One thing is clear, Mr. Moore said: Implosion by use of precisely placed explosives would not be used, nor would a wrecking ball. Both methods are largely forbidden in New York because of safety and environmental concerns, although this month officials allowed the first implosion in more than a decade, of an old Coast Guard apartment building on largely isolated Governors Island.

(In general, although implosion makes for great YouTube videos, it is appropriate in fewer than 2 percent of projects, Mr. Duane said. It is also occasionally unsuccessful, as it was last month in Brisbane, Australia, when a concrete silo had to be delicately nudged over by an excavator after explosive charges left it leaning precariously.)

Implosion is also outlawed in Tokyo, which is even more densely packed than New York. But the main impetus there for the new demolition techniques, said Dr. Seike of the University of Tokyo, was a recycling law that took effect in 2002.

In addition to valuable metals like steel, aluminum and copper, the law required that wood and concrete waste be recycled, even if the demolition contractors had to pay to do so. “People started to take recycling seriously,” Dr. Seike said. “And things have changed quite drastically with demolition.”

by Henry Fountain, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Taisei-Seibu JV

Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Eggs and Eyes,” 1983.
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The Gift of Doubt

In the mid-nineteenth century, work began on a crucial section of the railway line connecting Boston to the Hudson River. The addition would run from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Troy, New York, and it required tunnelling through Hoosac Mountain, a massive impediment, nearly five miles thick, that blocked passage between the Deerfield Valley and a tributary of the Hudson.

James Hayward, one of New England’s leading railroad engineers, estimated that penetrating the Hoosac would cost, at most, a very manageable two million dollars. The president of Amherst College, an accomplished geologist, said that the mountain was composed of soft rock and that tunnelling would be fairly easy once the engineers had breached the surface. “The Hoosac . . . is believed to be the only barrier between Boston and the Pacific,” the project’s promoter, Alvah Crocker, declared.

Everyone was wrong. Digging through the Hoosac turned out to be a nightmare. The project cost more than ten times the budgeted estimate. If the people involved had known the true nature of the challenges they faced, they would never have funded the Troy-Greenfield railroad. But, had they not, the factories of northwestern Massachusetts wouldn’t have been able to ship their goods so easily to the expanding West, the cost of freight would have remained stubbornly high, and the state of Massachusetts would have been immeasurably poorer. So is ignorance an impediment to progress or a precondition for it?

The economist Albert O. Hirschman, who died last December, loved paradoxes like this. He was a “planner,” the kind of economist who conceives of grand infrastructure projects and bold schemes. But his eye was drawn to the many ways in which plans did not turn out the way they were supposed to—to unintended consequences and perverse outcomes and the puzzling fact that the shortest line between two points is often a dead end.

“The Principle of the Hiding Hand,” one of Hirschman’s many memorable essays, drew on an account of the Troy-Greenfield “folly,” and then presented an even more elaborate series of paradoxes. Hirschman had studied the enormous Karnaphuli Paper Mills, in what was then East Pakistan. The mill was built to exploit the vast bamboo forests of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. But not long after the mill came online the bamboo unexpectedly flowered and then died, a phenomenon now known to recur every fifty years or so. Dead bamboo was useless for pulping; it fell apart as it was floated down the river. Because of ignorance and bad planning, a new, multimillion-dollar industrial plant was suddenly without the raw material it needed to function.

But what impressed Hirschman was the response to the crisis. The mill’s operators quickly found ways to bring in bamboo from villages throughout East Pakistan, building a new supply chain using the country’s many waterways. They started a research program to find faster-growing species of bamboo to replace the dead forests, and planted an experimental tract. They found other kinds of lumber that worked just as well. The result was that the plant was blessed with a far more diversified base of raw materials than had ever been imagined. If bad planning hadn’t led to the crisis at the Karnaphuli plant, the mill’s operators would never have been forced to be creative. And the plant would not have been nearly as valuable as it became.

“We may be dealing here with a general principle of action,” Hirschman wrote:

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.

And from there Hirschman’s analysis took flight. People don’t seek out challenges, he went on. They are “apt to take on and plunge into new tasks because of the erroneously presumed absence of a challenge—because the task looks easier and more manageable than it will turn out to be.” This was the Hiding Hand principle—a play on Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky. Then, trapped in mid-mountain, people discover the truth—and, because it is too late to turn back, they’re forced to finish the job.

by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by Ricardo Martinez.

George C. Scott - Dr. Strangelove (1964)
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The Highest Honor

[ed. Be sure to read the Q&A]

"Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are."

Edward Snowden • Offering his thoughts on the opinions of politicians like former Vice President Dick Cheney and Speaker Boehner who have criticized the man responsible for leaking information on the National Security Agency’s classified PRISM program. Snowden made the comments during a Q&A session moderated by The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald on Monday, and also discussed a myriad of other issues surrounding his decision to leak the PRISM information, including claims that he might be a Chinese spy. 

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My Life as an Amateur Taxidermist

I grew up and I took a course in bird taxidermy. I stuffed a duck: a proper handsome dude with a green head and white eyeliner and a long elegant neck that I accidentally tore in half at some point in the class. It currently hangs from a bent coat-hanger protruding from a high cupboard, forever about to land but unsure what to do with its wings. It looks like it’s screaming. Technically it turned out okay, in that I mean yes, okay, the wings wrenched high above his head don’t actually mirror the way duck wings move in real life, but despite it being my first go, it looked exactly like a duck. It was identifiable as a thing that used to say “quack”. Like an animal whose unfeasibly long penis you have Google image-searched long after your bedtime. You could tell this just by looking at him. You didn’t even have to get very close (which you wouldn’t want to do anyway on account of him smelling funky) (initially) (this goes away). There was no need to ask what it was, or what it used to be, or what happened to its face. My second attempt was different. (...)

Anyone who has not made these clumsy forays into DIY taxidermy has probably never wondered where the dead things come from. As self-appointed (in)expert, I will lift the veil. You’re welcome.

This is how a person who lives in the city and has no plans to kill any one-legged manky London pigeons end up with a more or less permanent avian coffin and a set of perturbed housemates who probably won't use those ice cubes after all:

The Internet. You discover that can buy a mole for a tenner on eBay. Three crows might cost you twenty. A badly photographed job lot of grim spoils from a game hunt spilled out onto a wet bathroom floor go for thirty. Merely searching for these things changes eBay’s profile on you and they start suggesting sheep thigh bones, dental picks and disembodied hawk feet. You stare at birds in the park like an unknown bearded man watches children through a primary school fence. You watch how their legs fit together, how their wings don’t go like how you made them go like when you got all excited while stuffing that duck. One day you might notice one of them dead on the grass. In real life. And the fact that you don’t have to put a bid on this thing or pay for postage makes your brain start thinking strange new thoughts. These are some of them that you have while standing completely still on Clapham High Street next to a dead crow while everybody else is not standing next to dead crows:

(We could pretend this is hypothetical but obviously that would be lying.)

I could go to Iceland over the road and buy some stuff and they would give me some plastic bags! I could take him home in said bags! All I’d have to do is ditch the choc ices! But what if somebody steals him...

And then your old sane self will pipe up on the other shoulder:

What about those people at the bus stop watching me interfering with a dead bird in the dark? What if it’s crowded on the Tube and what if the bus is crowded too, with me standing there with what was clearly a dead crow encased in one single sheath of low-grade plastic bag? And then what if I get home and my housemates are in the kitchen, and they ask me as I open the freezer drawer and shift their bags of bread and peas out of the way: “What’s in the bag?”

by Hayley Campbell, TNS |  Read more:

Image by Eddie Campbell

Open Wide

In cities and on the Web, distinctive shared spaces attract private capital, which erodes the very qualities that make them unique

Since the earliest days of Linux and of Wikipedia, conflicting attitudes to profit have co-existed with a commitment to digital sharing. Whether it’s source code, text, artistic works, or government data, some see the open digital commons as an ethical alternative to corporate production, while others believe that sharing and profit go together like wine and cheese. And now, as massively open online courses bring the rhetoric of digital openness to education and Web-based startups are making it easy to share apartments and cars and unused parking spaces and jobs, the seeds have been planted for a sharing economy whose flowering is welcomed both by idealists who value authenticity, sustainability and community sharing over commodity ownership and by venture capitalists looking to make their next fortune. Strange bedfellows.

Cities have long been sites of commons and commerce: full of trade and private enterprise but shaped by parks and streetscapes, neighborhoods and rhythms of daily life that grow from non-commodified sharing. In his 2012 book Rebel Cities, David Harvey observes how, in cities, “people of all sorts and classes mingle … to produce a common of perpetually changing and transitory life,” from the irrepressible energy of Manhattan to the café culture of Rome to Barcelona’s distinctive architecture to the symbolic meaning of modern Berlin. Yes, by 2009, volunteers had spent a hundred million hours building Wikipedia, but cities put this dramatic number into perspective: Every year the citizens of Canada alone volunteer roughly 20 Wikipedias for hospitals and children’s sports, for charities and the arts — the equivalent of more than a million full-time jobs in a population of 30 million — and there is no reason to believe that the count is complete or that Canada is exceptional.

The similarities between urban and digital worlds are not incidental. Both are cultural spaces, and cultural spaces have always been iceberg-like. Above the surface, market forces and state interventions; beneath, a mass of noncommercial activity organized, at least in part, as open commons. But while digital entrepreneurs look to the “Internet’s way of working” to disrupt the bricks and mortar of our cities, urban experiences have sober lessons for the digerati if they will listen: The relationship between commons and commerce is fraught with contradictions. Harvey never once mentions computer technology in his book, but his reflections on cities make a compelling case that money-making and sharing are far from natural allies, and that the role of openness must be questioned if commons-based production is to be a real alternative.

The economics of culture are those of monopolistic competition. Each and every cultural work is a unique creation and, like other unique goods, they offers the prospect of “monopoly rents” for any who can corner the market on that work. Open commons are themselves cultural works, and while the tending of commons is collective and non-commodified by definition, the commons itself is a magnet for private capital. As Harvey points out, “the common, even — and particularly — when it cannot be enclosed, can always be traded upon … the ambience and attractiveness of a city … is a collective product of its citizens [but] it is the tourist trade that commercially capitalizes upon that common.”

So a non-commercial common attracts commercial capital, but is this a problem? After all, open commons are not scarce resources, prone to depletion like clean water or ocean fish stocks. Your enjoyment of a city park or a downloaded song does not hinder me from enjoying the same. What turns the contradiction into a tragedy is that private capital tends to destroy the qualities that attracted it in the first place. While commons and commerce can never be completely disentangled, it is large-scale capital that is most damaging, and it is the commitment to openness that blocks off ways to prevent the damage.

Private capital damages open commons through three mechanisms. It erodes the common, it alienates the community that tends the common, and distorts the essential nature of the common.

Neighborhood diversity is an open commons prone to erosion. Harvey writes: “A community group that struggles to maintain ethnic diversity in its neighborhood and protect against gentrification may suddenly find its property prices (and taxes) rising as real estate agents market the ‘character’ of their neighborhood to the wealthy as multicultural, street-lively, and diverse. By the time the market has done its destructive work, not only have the original residents been dispossessed of that common which they had created (often being forced out by rising rents and property taxes), but the common itself becomes so debased as to be unrecognizable.”

by Tom Slee, TNI |  Read more:

Image: Stephen Shore, Church Street and Second Street (June 20, 1974)

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Nate Silver Offers Up a Statistical Analysis of Your Failing Relationship

While data shows that overall happiness in your relationship fell 8 more points, there is still a 31 percent chance of makeup sex this Friday, depending on average energy levels after work and how proactive you’re feeling (see chart). However, if you just order $18 of Chinese takeout like you did last weekend, projections show a 16.8 percent drop in possible intercourse and a whopping 74.2 percent upswing in Netflix-streaming, with both of you falling asleep long before the movie is over.

In an exit poll from Monday evening, exactly one half of the duo in attendance said they had an unfavorable opinion of the chosen restaurant—Arby’s—wondering if it was some sort of retribution, or if this is sadly what it’s come to.

Between the hours of 6 and 7 p.m. tonight, there was a 77.1 percent increase in annoyance and a 54 percent rise in revulsion based on the way you slurped your capellini, drank 65 percent too much wine and prattled on about your ex-girlfriend Sarah for some reason, even though she has a new boyfriend with a sailboat, and you’ve supposedly moved on, too. The logic here is that you are 44 percent over Sarah after 3 years, but there is only a 3.6 percent chance of her taking you back, which is reduced by nearly half of a percentage point every time she steps foot on that boat.

In a very local poll released just this week, 50 percent of those in your current relationship said it bothers them when you leave your shoes in the middle of the carpet and added that, if you could clean a dirty dish or two—putting in a minimal effort of just 5 minutes—stress would be reduced by 39 percent, along with a telling 54 percent decrease in shouting matches and escalating threats to leave forever.

You’ve lost nearly 100 hairs on your head every day since March, 2011, when the two of you met, which is almost 36,500 hairs in the last year and nearly 73,000 hairs in the last two years. This is, ultimately, why you’ll be 84 percent bald by the time you’re 45.

In a survey conducted with your partner’s biological parents between Tuesday and Wednesday, you are currently ranked seventh most popular on the list of known boyfriends, after Andrew R., Bryan, Kevin, Seth, Shawn and Kyle, but before Andrew Y. who refused to apply labels to relationships and wanted to “keep things loose.”

Of the seven ex-boyfriends listed above, two of them (Andrew R. and Seth) have sent a combined two emails to your girlfriend this month, totaling about 2,200 words, both of which have gone 100 percent unmentioned.

The aforementioned emails were placed in a folder marked “SAVE,” which actually contains 26 messages you’ve never seen, 23 of which would immediately increase your base paranoia by 87 percent.

by Jory John, McSweeny's |  Read more:

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Vintage Japanese matchbox label c1920s-1930s by crackdog on Flickr.
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Wilhelm Sasnal, Untiled - 2009
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Marcin Maciejowski
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Behind the Tweets: The Secretive People Behind S.F.'s Fog, Seagulls, and Bridges

During an event at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco in early November, a presenter screened a short film about San Francisco's fog. After the show concluded, before the sold-out crowd could even finish filing out of the auditorium, several people in the audience took to Twitter to tell the fog that it was featured in the show. And the fog, named Karl on Twitter, tweeted back, asking if the film was going to be available later for viewing. So while people have been calling out to the forces of nature for thousands of years, now they have the satisfaction of a response.

In the city, more than 50 people have at some point "become" the Twitter embodiment of things such as the Bay Bridge (@SFBayBridge), sea gulls at AT&T Park (@ATTSeagull), and other well-known San Francisco landmarks, buildings, streets, places, and animals. It's a fantasy world in which aspects of the city are brought to life at an intersection of psychology and technology. But across the board, the people who adopt these digital personas are serious about their secrecy. They want to erase any connection with their characters, perhaps so that others can better connect with them.

On a day in San Francisco when the fog crawls over the city, the Twitter account for @KarlTheFog will start getting tweets. Sometimes it's just comments about the fog, sometimes it's pictures and remarks about fog in other parts of the world. A ruined summer picnic is blamed simply on Karl, the name the account holder gave to the fog and the one that has stuck, creeping into the everyday language of San Franciscans. The name has grown popular enough that when Instagram instituted tagging of people in photos, a company blog post called out Karl the Fog as a "person" with an Instagram account who appears in photographs to be tagged.

The person behind the fog account, who answered questions via email and requested anonymity (to the point of not even revealing a gender), says some inspiration for what eventually became Karl came from the fake BP public relations account that sprang up after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in June 2010. "It was the first parody account I followed and thought the idea was brilliant and that I could do something like it," writes Karl's puppet-master. "I love the idea of blending fact and fiction and not knowing where one stops and the other begins." The final inspiration came after a bout of foggy weather. "Friends were whining about the most recent fogpocalypse and I was loving it. ... I've always thought of the fog as mysterious and romantic and looked forward to its arrival. Since everyone was complaining, I started thinking, 'I wish the fog had a chance to defend itself,' and that's when I created the Twitter account."

@KarlTheFog is one of the most active San Francisco "things" on social media, posting pointed commentary about the city's weather to its 17,000 followers: "Yesterday you got sunburned. Tonight you're bundled up in a hoodie. Welcome to San Francisco." and retweets comments about the fog, or lack thereof. The fog also has an Instagram account, on which it posts and reposts photos of itself.

Pamela Rutledge, the director of the Media Psychology Research Center and an adjunct faculty member at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, says the creation of Twitter accounts for things like the fog is like a type of performance art, "not much different than other types of theater, or perhaps stand-up." But the medium in which the characters are performing changes the interaction. "We don't think it's odd to find amusement in videos, comics, books, or magazines, but somehow Twitter seems different," she says. "The biggest difference is that it is interactive and allows for participation by the audience and co-creation of new content to further the story along, should the landmark, object, or dubious celebrity choose to engage at that level."

by Mike Billings, SF Weekly |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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