How Fat has Become a Political Issue

Little did I anticipate that in releasing my new novel Big Brother I would once again stir up a hornet’s nest – buzzing right around my head.

It was inspired by the death of my older brother from complications of morbid obesity in 2009. The novel begins with a sister picking up her big brother at the airport and failing to recognize him. Her once lanky, handsome elder sibling has shown up weighing hundreds more pounds than when they last met. Like my previous novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, this book is partly a psychological mystery, asking, “What the hell happened?”

But the story inside a book is distinct from the story of the book’s publication. As of the first interview for the British promotion of Big Brother, the media’s focus rapidly shifted from the fiction (who cares about that?) to the author: when I eat, what I eat, how much I eat, how much I exercise, which exercises I do, and how many repetitions.

That first time, I had been tolerant of these curiously personal, positively mechanical questions on the assumption that in the profile this information would somehow be tied in with the themes I explore in the novel: the many reasons we eat other than for mere nutrition, the roles food plays in social and domestic dynamics, the complex relationship between the body and the self, the moral baggage we load on weight, and the alarming degree to which we now “size each other up” and make character judgments on the basis of whether someone is fat or thin.

But no. That interview and the subsequent articles it spawned elsewhere didn’t explore more philosophical matters, but were purely nosy and voyeuristic. Journalists and online commentators were fascinated by – and keenly suspicious of – the routines by which I maintain my private, 5-foot-2 physical plant. (In respect to my not especially interesting exercise habits, I was, it was implied in more than one paper, a liar.) Irrelevant information about the author’s dining proclivities even contaminated more than one review.

The publicity became yet another illustration of the problem the book explores. In an era saturated with the visual image, people in the public eye necessarily offer themselves up for scrutiny of their waistlines. The expression “public figure” has taken on a peculiar literalism, for fat has gone political. Being wide or narrow effectively lands you on one side or another of a violent cultural divide.

To appreciate just how loaded body size has become, let’s take two case studies: U.S. President Barack Obama and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. As they toured the Jersey shore’s newly rebuilt boardwalk last week, the President and the Republican who may have designs on his office displayed starkly contrasting physical versions of Big Men in government.

Despite all the multicourse state dinners, Mr. Obama remains a Slim Jim. Despite having lost 40 pounds since February, Mr. Christie remains a meatball hero.

Since going public about his lap-band procedure, Mr. Christie has insisted that his weight-loss surgery was motivated solely by private concerns: He owes it to his family to protect his health. Yet he is canny enough to realize that his contours would be an issue were he to run in 2016, and the shape of the high-profile silhouette isn’t as simple a business as thin/good, fat/bad.

Weight is entangled with class. Long gone are the days when beefiness was a badge of wealth and prosperity. Today’s elites are thin – which is why you pay through the nose at top-end restaurants for three leaves of arugula and a few flakes of fish, while all-you-can-eat buffets are dirt-cheap.

Among Mr. Obama’s red-state detractors, the President’s slight build may mark him as suspect even more so than his race. Educated salad-eaters on the coasts recognize in Mr. Obama a fellow traveller, but for pork lovers in the heartland that tall, svelte nattiness connotes a sense of superiority and an aloofness from ordinary folks. The modesty of the President’s real origins gets cancelled out.

(Fortunately, his wife’s comely, fit but bigger-boned frame provides a balance to this impression.)

For Mr. Christie, being flat-out fat has not stopped him from being elected governor of a populous state nor from being courted for the Republican nomination, and hitherto his heft may have proved an advantage. Fat makes him seem more down-to-earth, more a man of the people.

Though the governor is a lawyer whose background is middle-income, being big as a house seems to suggest that he is just a regular guy, an unpretentious Jersey boy with an instinctive grasp of the needs of the struggling. You’d like to have a beer with him. He’d help himself to a handful if you ordered peanuts.

Weight is also entangled with character. A lean physique implies a tendency to discipline, self-control and purposiveness. Culturally, we link slenderness not only to success but also to judgmentalism, joylessness, uptightness and vanity.

Men who are thin can seem prissy or effeminate. Mr. Obama’s narrowness is compensated by a resonant voice and gift for oratory, which lend his presence gravitas. Otherwise, he might seem to lack substance in a metaphorical sense. No one in politics courts a reputation as a “lightweight.”

Fat among the hoi polloi may appear to betray sloth, laziness and self-indulgence, but for male politicians displays of appetite can pay dividends – which is why candidates are often seen bolting down hot dogs and barbecue sandwiches on the campaign trail. Appetite indicates a zest for life, ambition, an appealing allegorical hunger for more than pot stickers – even, subtly, high levels of testosterone.

by Lionel Shriver, Globe and Mail |  Read more:

Image: Katy Lemay

Q&A: Harlan Ellison

[ed. Wow, somebody got an actual interview with Harlan Ellison. I've been a fan since college after reading I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and The Glass Teat. Enjoy... one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time.]

DW: Harlan, first of all, can you confirm that you are indeed the great Harlan Ellison?

HE: For all my sins – and I assure you, the only thing that has ever held me back from God-like greatness is my humility – I am the Harlan Ellison, the only one. I'm in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, right between Ellis Island and Ralph Ellison.

DW: Are you the writer of over 1,000 stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays and essays?

HE: Yeah, it's probably more like 1,800 now. I find that I have continued to write. I had 10 books last year, and that at my age I think is pretty good. While I always aspired to be Alexandre Dumas, if I reach the level of – I don't know, Donald Westlake – I'll be more than happy.

DW: You must have seen and done as much in speculative fiction as anyone, so can you tell us just what is speculative fiction?

HE: I will give you the only answer that there is. It is the game of "what if?". You take that which is known, and you extrapolate – and you keep it within the bounds of logic, otherwise it becomes fantasy – and you say, "Well, what if?". That's what speculative fiction is, and at its very best, it is classic literature, on a level with Moby Dick and Colette and Edgar Allan Poe.

DW: So it's definitely not fantasy.

HE: Fantasy is a separate genre, and it allows you to go beyond the bounds of that which is acceptable, where all of a sudden people can fly, or the Loch Ness Monster does not have a scientific rationale, but is a mythic creature. It is in the grand tradition of the oldest forms of writing we know, all the way back to Gilgamesh, the very first fiction we know, and the gods. Fantasy is a noble endeavour. Science fiction is a contemporary subset that goes all the way back to Lucian of Samosata, and Verne and Wells, and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

DW: It seems to be everywhere, with video games, massive movie franchises and millions of people going to conventions. So why is it so popular now?

HE: Well, we live in a technological age. Time has passed, and we have stepped over the ruins of our own societies, and our own civilisations, and we come now to the fruition of those things about which the human race has dreamed. We have flight and we have electronic assistants. The entertainment media – which are always very timorous and step very carefully out of fear and loathing – don't know what they're doing so much. So they go back, and they are catching up on the kind of science fiction – and they call it, in that ugly, ugly phrase, "sci-fi," which those who have worked in speculative fiction despise, it's like calling a woman a "broad" – they are catching up on ideas that were covered with hoarfrost 60 years ago. That's why you have an overabundance of zombies and walking dead, and world war and asteroids from space. They have not yet tackled any of the truly interesting discussions of humanity that are treated in speculative fiction. But they are a break from standard 19th, early 20th-century fiction, and so they seem fresh to an audience that is essentially ignorant. (...)

DW: In many of your stories there is the oppressor or the bully, who wants to have their way with humanity, with whoever is in the story. The worst of these, I think for me, is I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, which is a story of –

HE: Oh, yes, God. God is a shit.

DW: Yeah. It's a story you wrote in a single night. I read it in my teens in a hallucinatory state over the course of a single night. Is there something about – you have to be in this state to find that oppressive being out there? You have to find it in the night?

HE: Well, I wrote another story – I'm not steering away from the question, I'm answering it in an ancillary way, but I'll get right back to it – I wrote a whole book of stories called Deathbird Stories, which are retellings in a modern way of the godlike myths. And one of the short stories that I did, that is in the Best American Short Stories, is called The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore, and it is in a way my atheist tract. I'm a stiff-necked Jewish atheist, and I, like Mark Twain, do not believe that there is a great bearded avuncular spirit up there watching us carefully to see whether we masturbate or not. He's got better things to do creating star systems than to worry about whether we do Feng Shui with the furniture.

When I talk about God, I talk about him not believing in him. If there were a God, and you believed in him, and then instead of saying something ridiculous like, well, God has these mysterious ways, we are not meant to know what it is he's doing, or she's doing, or it's doing, I say, in defiance of Albert Einstein, yes, the universe does shoot craps – God does shoot craps with the universe. One day you'll win £200m in the lottery and the next day you'll get colon cancer. So when I wrote I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, I put God in the form of a master computer, AM – cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am – and had him preserve these half a dozen human beings, after having destroyed the world, to keep them down there and torment them forever, for having created him but giving him no place to go. And I believe – much to the annoyance of my various fervid aficionados – they wish I had more faith.

I say, I have faith in the human spirit, that something noble enough to have created Gaudí's cathedral in Barcelona is noble enough not to have to go to war over sheep in the Falklands. That's what I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream says. In fact I did a video game called I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, and I created it so you could not win it. The only way in which you could "win" was to play it nobly. The more nobly you played it, the closer to succeeding you would come, but you could not actually beat it. And that annoyed the hell out of people too.

[Laughter]

HE: I spend a lot of time annoying people. That's my job on this planet.

by Damien Walter, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photograph: Mark Hanauer/Corbis Outline

Mapping the Driving Forces of Chromosome Structure and Segregation in Escherichia coli

Abstract

The mechanism responsible for the accurate partitioning of newly replicated Escherichia coli chromosomes into daughter cells remains a mystery. In this article, we use automated cell cycle imaging to quantitatively analyse the cell cycle dynamics of the origin of replication (oriC) in hundreds of cells. We exploit the natural stochastic fluctuations of the chromosome structure to map both the spatial and temporal dependence of the motional bias segregating the chromosomes. The observed map is most consistent with force generation by an active mechanism, but one that generates much smaller forces than canonical molecular motors, including those driving eukaryotic chromosome segregation.

Introduction

The fitness of all organisms is dependent on the rapid and faithful replication and segregation of the genome to the daughter cells. Although it has long been appreciated that a mitotic spindle drives chromosome segregation in eukaryotic cells, the dominant mechanism exploited by prokaryotic cells is still debated. Active partitioning systems are known to segregate the low-copy-number plasmids (e.g. P1, R1-16 and F) and homologous systems have been found on the chromosomes of Caulobacter crescentus and Bacillus subtilis and a number of other bacteria (1–7). These active systems are believed to have some functional similarity to spindles but often appear to play a surprisingly limited role: for example, the par genes of B. subtilis are not essential. Intriguingly, no homologous system has yet been discovered in Escherichia coli, and a group of nucleoid structural and segregation genes, including mukBEF, seqA and matP, appear to have supplanted both the bacterial structural maintenance of chromosomes (SMC) and partitioning (par) genes in γ-proteobacteria, suggesting that other mechanisms of segregation may play an important role (8,9).

Much of what is known about the E. coli chromosome segregation mechanism is phenomenological and qualitative: In slow growing cells (generation time ∼120 min), the initial locus dynamics is characterized by a Stay-at-Home phenomena where the locus remains localized to mid-cell (10–16). Replication is initiated at the chromosomal origin of replication (oriC), and proceeds bi-directionally down the two arms of the circular chromosome (Figure 1Α) (17). After roughly 20 min of cohesion (18), newly replicated sister loci split and undergo rapid translocation towards the quarter cell positions (the mid-cell location after division). After reaching the quarter cell positions, oriC dynamics is again characterized by a Stay-at-Home phenomenon (11,15). In general the rest of the chromosome is replicated and segregated continuously and sequentially, such that genes sequentially closer to oriC are replicated and segregated earlier than distant genes (13,18). A number of subtle nucleoid structural transitions have also been reported (T1, T2 and T3), in which loci on the right arm of the chromosome split cooperatively (19,20).

In this article, we perform a quantitative analysis of the motion of oriC, one of the first loci to segregate (16,19). By combining time-lapse epi-fluorescence microscopy with high-throughput automated image analysis, we are able to capture oriC dynamics throughout the cell cycle for greater than an order-of-magnitude more cells than have ever been characterized. This collection of complete cell cycle trajectories facilitates the quantitative analysis of the locus motion summarized qualitatively above. We report the following findings: (i) Mean-Squared Displacement (MSD) analysis of the Rapid-Translocation phase of oriC motion shows sub-diffusive dynamics, rather than processive dynamics. (ii) Similar dynamics are observed for the actively partitioned plasmid R1-16 by MSD analysis, demonstrating that processive dynamics on times scales shorter than a cell cycle are not a prerequisite for active segregation mechanisms. (iii) A comparison of the step-size distribution between the Rapid-Translocation and Stay-at-Home phases of locus motion shows a distribution-wide bias towards the eventual destination, rather than the presence of large biased steps. (iv) Faithful segregation of the origin loci results from a small diffusional bias, a drift velocity, that switches from a restoring force, centred around mid-cell before locus segregation, to a restoring force centred around the quarter cell positions immediately proceeding locus splitting. The cell appears to identify the quarter cell positions in advance of the arrival of oriC suggesting the existence of a cellular landmark determining this position. Because the nucleoid is significantly remodelled during this period while the drift velocity remains qualitatively unchanged, it is unlikely that nucleoid structure (19,20) or chromosome entropy (21) is the dominant source of the diffusional bias and therefore suggests the existence of an additional as-yet undiscovered segregation mechanism in E. coli. The measurement of the drift velocity and the interpretation of this velocity in terms of a driving force provide the first clear biophysical picture of the dynamical changes that drive the segregation process and reconcile the seemingly conflicting observations of sub-diffusive MSD scaling and active segregation. We expect this analysis to be applicable not only to the interpretation of other chromosome dynamics problems, but also to sub-cellular stochastic motion in general.

by Nathan J. Kuwada PhD., et. al., Nucleic Acids Research |  Read more:
Image: Nathan J. Kuwada

West Coast of Ireland, Robert Henri - 1913
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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

A few years ago, in an introductory fiction workshop, my students and I witnessed a young man make relentless awkward attempts to get to know a young woman in the class. He was passionate and clumsy and his efforts were wholly transparent. When the time came for him to turn in his story, he submitted a piece about a young man much like himself who is hopelessly in love with a young woman much like the young woman in the class, and the two characters are in a creative writing workshop together. One night the male character shows up tipsy at the young woman’s house to ask if she will stroll with him in the warm night air and hold his hand, but the door is opened by her boyfriend, who answers for her with a punch to the jaw, sending the character flying and leaving a scrape on his chin—much like the scrape on the chin of the young man in my workshop.

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:

Margaretha Barbara Dietzsch (Nurenberg 1726-1795) ~ Dandelion With a Moth and a Smaller Green Moth via British Museum
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Jean-pierre Ceytaire
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"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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