Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Q&A: Tom Petty on His Rarities Tour
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers just wrapped up a series of 11 shows at the Beacon Theater in New York and the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles. Huge hits like "Free Fallin'" and "Don't Come Around Here No More" didn't make a single appearance. Instead, the show was built around rarities like "Rebels," "Wildflowers" and "A Woman in Love (It's Not Me)." The change of pace clearly reinvigorated the group, and they played some of their best shows in recent memory. Midway through the New York run, Petty paused to talk with Rolling Stone about the tour.
I would imagine you're having more fun at these shows than your usual arena shows .
Well, it's different, you know? Something different is really good these days. It's more intimate. There's a really free selection of material going on, and the crowds are great, so it's terrific fun.
On your last arena tour, did you get bored just doing the same hits every night?
Well, in all the tours, I always put in some new stuff and some stuff we haven't done. But you can sort of get into a routine where you kind of really know the show really well. I don't want to become a jukebox, but I do enjoy all the gigs. I can't say I don't enjoy them, but this is pretty exciting.
We've done this before at the Fillmore, and in Chicago some years back. It always breathes new life into things, and this is particularly good. We're really enjoying it.
by Andy Greene, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Kevin Winter/Getty Images
How I Met My Wife
Undaunted, the character retreats to his dorm to write a story about yet another character who is much like the first character who is much like the author, with the idea that a female character who is much like the first female character who is much like the girl in the workshop will read the story and understand that this literary version of himself represents his real self and that he is in love with her.
In the final scene, the girl suddenly understands—during workshop, no less—that the boy is in love with her, and she is powerfully moved by this knowledge. Everyone in the real workshop knows that the real girl would have to be blind and deaf and witless not to understand that this boy was in love with her, but this public declaration—this tender, ridiculous, marginally grammatical, potentially humiliating public declaration—nonetheless moves us.
The girl in the story is described as dark and astonishingly beautiful, while the actual girl is dark and pleasantly ordinary. But her youth holds to her powerfully and perhaps also holds an inclination to embrace men willing to make fools of themselves for that passing vitality—willing to punch people or write absurd stories—and wouldn’t she be a fool herself not to let them fight over her while she has the skin and the light in her eyes that distinguishes her for such a brief time (in this case, just twelve and a half double-spaced pages)?
We workshop witnesses like the story. Sort of. We’re interested, anyway, but we’re unable to have much of a conversation about craft or other such trivial matters, waiting until the girl decides to comment. When she raises her hand to speak, we grow quiet, the only noise the spring wind beyond the windows. Finally, she says, “The character is convincing . . . but kind of pathetic.”
Our hearts drop. We cannot help it. We are rooting for the boy. We hold our collective breath while she pauses, and it seems that even the weather outside the window ceases.
Then she adds, “But it’s hard not to like him.” She smiles at the young man, and the class relaxes. We even offer a trickle of laughter.
But the young man isn’t laughing, and his smile is sad, as if he understands that he is now entering the remainder of his life and it will be an effort to live up to the gesture that started him on this path. Not that he could ever articulate this, at least not for years, and only then if he continues to take creative writing. All he knows at the moment is that he will not, after all, have to live without the girl.
Everyone in the class is happy that he gets to indulge his foolish love at the expense of the punching boy and to the possible detriment of the smiling girl, who is smarter and a better writer, and who will be young and irresistible exactly once.
Why are we drawn to stories about people falling in love? There are likely a host of reasons, but here’s a good one: marriage, when observed from a place of solitude, has the power of dream. Solitary people fall in love with couples, imagining their own lives transformed by such a union. And once the transformation finally happens, people need to talk about it, telling not only their families, friends, and strangers on the bus but also themselves—repeating it to make it real, to investigate the mystery of marital metamorphosis. And they get good at the telling. People who cannot otherwise put together an adequately coherent narrative to get you to the neighborhood grocery will nonetheless have a beautifully shaped tale of how he met she (or he met he, or she met she) and became we.
by Robert Boswell, Tin House | Read more:
Image Marcellus Hall via:
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Margaretha Barbara Dietzsch (Nurenberg 1726-1795) ~ Dandelion With a Moth and a Smaller Green Moth via British Museum
via:
"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.
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
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
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.”
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
Monday, June 17, 2013
The Gift of Doubt
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.
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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.
Image via:
My Life as an Amateur Taxidermist
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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
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Open Wide
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.”
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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