Are You with the Right Mate?

Elliott Katz was stunned to find himself in the middle of a divorce after two kids and 10 years of marriage. The Torontonian, a policy analyst for the Ottawa government, blamed his wife. "She just didn't appreciate all I was doing to make her happy." He fed the babies, and he changed their diapers. He gave them their baths, he read them stories, and put them to bed. Before he left for work in the morning, he made them breakfast. He bought a bigger house and took on the financial burden, working evenings to bring in enough money so his wife could stay home full-time.

He thought the solution to the discontent was for her to change. But once on his own, missing the daily interaction with his daughters, he couldn't avoid some reflection. "I didn't want to go through this again. I asked whether there was something I could have done differently. After all, you can wait years for someone else to change."

What he decided was, indeed, there were some things he could have done differently—like not tried as hard to be so noncontrolling that his wife felt he had abandoned decision-making entirely. His wife, he came to understand, felt frustrated, as if she were "a married single parent," making too many of the plans and putting out many of the fires of family life, no matter how many chores he assumed.

Ultimately, he stopped blaming his wife for their problems. "You can't change another person. You can only change yourself," he says. "Like lots of men today," he has since found, "I was very confused about my role as partner." After a few post-divorce years in the mating wilderness, Katz came to realize that framing a relationship in terms of the right or wrong mate is by itself a blind alley.

"We're given a binary model," says New York psychotherapist Ken Page. "Right or wrong. Settle or leave. We are not given the right tools to think about relationships. People need a better set of options."

Sooner or later, there comes a moment in all relationships when you lie in bed, roll over, look at the person next to you and think it's all a dreadful mistake, says Boston family therapist Terrence Real. It happens a few months to a few years in. "It's an open secret of American culture that disillusionment exists. I go around the country speaking about 'normal marital hatred.' Not one person has ever asked what I mean by that. It's extremely raw."

What to do when the initial attraction sours? "I call it the first day of your real marriage," Real says. It's not a sign that you've chosen the wrong partner. It is the signal to grow as an individual—to take responsibility for your own frustrations. Invariably, we yearn for perfection but are stuck with an imperfect human being. We all fall in love with people we think will deliver us from life's wounds but who wind up knowing how to rub against us.

A new view of relationships and their discontents is emerging. We alone are responsible for having the relationship we want. And to get it, we have to dig deep into ourselves while maintaining our connections. It typically takes a dose of bravery—what Page calls "enlightened audacity." Its brightest possibility exists, ironically, just when the passion seems most totally dead. If we fail to plumb ourselves and speak up for our deepest needs, which admittedly can be a scary prospect, life will never feel authentic, we will never see ourselves with any clarity, and everyone will always be the wrong partner.

by Rebecca Webber, Psychology Today |  Read more:

Image:uncredited

Light Rail Fits In

Tram tracks on many European cities are lined with grass, a practice that probably started in the 1980’s to bring greenery back to city space and at the same time, provide habitable zone for numerous insects and invertebrates. These swaths of green provide a host of benefits to any urban area, like reduce urban heat island effect, provide a permeable surface for storm water to infiltrate, reduce pollution and absorb noise generated by the grinding of metal wheels on metal tracks. Not to mention, they look incredibly good in comparison to concrete or asphalt.

Green tracks have become increasingly popular in Europe and can be seen in pretty much every major European cities from Barcelona to Frankfurt, Milan, St-Etienne and Strasbourg.

by Kaushik, Amusing Planet |  Read more:

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Lawyers Eye NSA Data as Treasure Trove for Evidence

The National Security Agency has spent years demanding that companies turn over their data. Now, the spy agency finds the shoe is on the other foot. A defendant in a Florida murder trial says telephone records collected by the NSA as part of its surveillance programs hold evidence that would help prove his innocence, and his lawyer has demanded that prosecutors produce those records. On Wednesday, the federal government filed a motion saying it would refuse, citing national security. But experts say the novel legal argument could encourage other lawyers to fight for access to the newly disclosed NSA surveillance database.

"What's good for the goose is good for the gander, I guess," said George Washington University privacy law expert Dan Solove. "In a way, it's kind of ironic."

Defendant Terrance Brown is accused of participating in the 2010 murder of a Brinks security truck driver. Brown maintains his innocence, and claims cellphone location records would show he wasn't at the scene of the crime. Brown's cellphone provider — MetroPCS — couldn't produce those records during discovery because it had deleted the data already.

On seeing the story in the Guardian indicating that Verizon had been ordered to turn over millions of calling records to the NSA last month, Brown's lawyer had a novel idea: Make the NSA produce the records.

Brown's lawyer, Marshall Dore Louis, said he couldn't comment while the trial was ongoing.

"Relying on a June 5, 2013, Guardian newspaper article ... Defendant Brown now suggests that the Government likely actually does possess the metadata relating to telephone calls made in July 2010 from the two numbers attributed to Defendant Brown," wrote U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenbaum in an order demanding that the federal government respond to the request on June 10.

The laws of evidence require that prosecutors turn over to the defense any records they have that might help prove a suspect's innocence.

"This opens up a Pandora's box," said Mark Rasch, former head of the Department of Justice Computer Crimes Unit, and now an independent consultant. “You will have situations where the phone companies no longer have the data, but the government does, and lawyers will try to get that data.” (...)

It's all part of the hazard of becoming, effectively, a backup server for all the nation's technology companies, said Solove.

by Bob Sullivan, NBC News |  Read more:

Image: NSA

Is Franz Kafka Overrated?

Edmund Wilson claimed that the only book he could not read while eating his breakfast was by the Marquis de Sade. I, for different reasons, have been having a difficult time reading Franz Kafka with my morning tea and toast. So much torture, description of wounds, disorientation, sadomasochism, unexplained cruelty, appearance of rodents, beetles, vultures, and other grotesque creatures—all set out against a background of utter hopelessness. Distinctly not a jolly way to start the day. Kafka doesn’t make for very comforting reading at bedtime, either.

Hypochondriac, insomniac, food faddist, cripplingly indecisive, terrified by life, obsessed with death, Franz Kafka turned, as best he was able, his neuroses into art. As a character in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “A Friend of Kafka” says, Kafka was “Homo sapiens in his highest degree of self-torture.” Still, the consensus remains that Franz Kafka is a modern master—a master, more specifically, in the modernist tradition, housed in the same pantheon as Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, Mallarmé, and other artists who have radically altered contemporary understanding of the world.

Kafka created “obscure lucidity,” Erich Heller wrote in his book on Kafka. “His is an art more poignantly and disturbingly obscure,” he added, “than literature has ever known.” One thinks one grasps Kafka’s meaning, but does one, really? All seems so clear, yet is it, truly? A famous aphorism of Kafka’s reads: “Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.” Another runs: “A cage went in search of a bird.”

As with Kafka’s aphorisms, so with his brief parables. The parables, Walter Benjamin wrote, are “never exhausted by what is explainable; on the contrary, he took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings.” Whatever these precautions may have been, they were inadequate, for the works of Franz Kafka—apart perhaps only from the Bible and the works of Shakespeare—may be the most relentlessly interpreted, if not overinterpreted, in the modern world.  (...)

Kafka, the critic Jeremy Adler holds, is “less dazzling than Proust, less innovative than Joyce, [but his] vision is more stark, more painful, more obviously universal than that of his peers.” Kafka’s universality derives from his high level of generality. Places are not named; most characters go undescribed; landscapes, sere and menacing, appear as they might in nightmares. Joyce and Proust work from detail to generality; Kafka works from generality to detail, giving his fiction the feeling that something deeply significant is going on, if only we could grasp what precisely it is.

“The vicinity of literature and autobiography could hardly be closer than it is with Kafka,” Erich Heller wrote. “Indeed, it almost amounts to identity.” The broader lineaments of Kafka’s autobiography are well known. Taken together, they constitute a life of nearly unrelieved doubt and mental suffering. (...)

Benjamin, Begley, Heller, Friedländer, and other critics who take Kafka’s greatness as self-evident agree that Kafka cannot be either explained or judged in the same way as other literary artists. Benjamin believed that “Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author from the outset; rather, the author tried to derive such a meaning from them in ever-changing contexts and experimental groupings.”

Kafka felt that his talent was “for portraying my dream-like inner life.” But dreams, however gripping, are aesthetically unsatisfying.

“In Kafka’s fiction,” Friedländer writes, “the Truth remains inaccessible and is possibly nonexistent.” Begley, remarking on an object referred to as “Odradek” in a five-paragraph exercise of Kafka’s called “The Cares of a Family Man,” writes: “Some things cannot be explained.” Of “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka’s most famous story, Heller writes: “It defies any established intellectual order and familiar form of understanding, and thus arouses the kind of intellectual anxiety that greedily and compulsively reaches out for interpretations.” In his Times Literary Supplement review, Josipovici, noting that 100 years have passed since Kafka wrote his story “The Judgment,” adds: “We are probably no nearer to understanding that or any other of his works today than his first readers were, nor should we expect to be.”

Kafka, in other words, is given a pass on criticism. The argument is that he cannot finally be explained, but merely read, appreciated, and reread until his meaning, somehow, washes over you. But what if this meaning seems oddly skewed and in our day even outmoded, in the way great literature never is?

by Joseph Epstein, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: MVM

Aoife O'Donovan

Miguel Ferrera
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Sea of Bikes Swamps Amsterdam

About 6:30 weekday mornings, throngs of bicycles, with a smattering of motor scooters and pedestrians, pour off the ferries that carry bikers and other passengers free of charge across the IJ (pronounced “eye”) harbor, clogging the streets and causing traffic jams down behind Amsterdam’s main train station.

“In the afternoon it’s even more,” moaned Erwin Schoof, a metalworker in his 20s who lives in the canal-laced center of town and battles the chaos daily to cross to his job.

Willem van Heijningen, a railway official responsible for bikes around the station, said, “It’s not a war zone, but it’s the next thing to it.”

This clogged stream of cyclists is just one of many in a city as renowned for bikes as Los Angeles is for automobiles or Venice for gondolas. Cyclists young and old pedal through narrow lanes and along canals. Mothers and fathers balance toddlers in spacious wooden boxes affixed to their bikes, ferrying them to school or day care. Carpenters carry tools and supplies in similar contraptions and electricians their cables. Few wear helmets. Increasingly, some are saying what was simply unthinkable just a few years ago: There are too many bikes.

While cities like New York struggle to get people onto bikes, Amsterdam is trying to keep its hordes of bikes under control. In a city of 800,000, there are 880,000 bicycles, the government estimates, four times the number of cars. In the past two decades, travel by bike has grown by 40 percent so that now about 32 percent of all trips within the city are by bike, compared with 22 percent by car.

Applauding this accomplishment, a Danish urban planning consultancy, Copenhagenize Design, which publishes an annual list of the 20 most bike-friendly cities, placed Amsterdam in first place this year, as it has frequently in the past. (The list consists mostly of European cities, though Tokyo; Nagoya, Japan; and Rio de Janeiro made the cut. Montreal is the only North American city included.)

But many Amsterdamers say it is not so much the traffic jams like those at the morning ferry that annoy them most, but the problem of where to park their bikes once they get to where they’re going, in a city with almost more water than paved surfaces.

“Just look at this place!” said Xem Smit, 22, who for the past year has struggled to maintain order at a municipal bike parking lot in the heart of town, waving a hand at bikes chained to lampposts, benches, trees and almost any other permanent object across a tree-lined square between the stock market and the big De Bijenkorf department store.

by John Tagliabue, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Pavel Prokopchik for The New York Times

Ricardo Fernandez Ortega
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Tony Bennett, George Michael

On Friendship

[ed. I like the term "carbonation" in reference to a certain type of friend. I share that inclination.]

“Let’s just be friends,” lovers proverbially say when breaking up, even if their empathy is shredding and they mainly mean to try not to sabotage each other by blabbing their secrets wholesale. Friends spread their arms, not their legs, but otherwise move in the opposite direction from sundered lovers, becoming unreserved. You’ll know when your friends’ kids are taking their SATs or applying for a first job, and you don’t begrudge the number of alternative pals they see. The other day a man I drove across the country with in a Model A Ford 60 years ago called me up “to use up some cell-phone minutes” he had. Like calories, friendships keep us warm, and serve as a badge of normality.

“He has lots of friends,” we’ll mention in recommending somebody, whether a plumber or a stockbroker: he’s okay, he’ll lend an ear, he won’t leave a customer in the lurch. Lending an ear is essential in mainline friendships, and less disruptive than lending money. “I’m always here for you” is the desired pledge (like the colloquial promise “I have your back”) of best-friendship, a category often lasting at least until marriage, if not beyond. The personalities that occupy the niche—nerd or happy-go-lucky—might change according to the phases of life, but draw a nostalgic smile in our mind’s eye when we remember them. (...)

“How are you?” is the current universal greeting in America, yet not to answer “Fine” would violate the social compact in a minor way because almost nobody who asks wants to know if you’re not. If you can’t keep your marbles together, agencies exist to do it for you. Friends are for when the question isn’t rote, however, and the “Me, myself, and I” of childhood fame feels buffaloed. You and the cat are watching a hummingbird feeder out the window; yet you need more to get up and fight the day. Call a fellow vinyl collector, card player, Little League coach. Yes, the specialist told us on the spectrum of autism it’s a milder kind. … So he sez it was only a one-night stand; he didn’t expect me to cry. … My skills are dated or outdated, whichever term they used. … I was so happy for a second, I couldn’t speak, didn’t try, but then he died. … I wonder if 40 is too late to apply for the ministry? Is it silly to inquire? … The school apologized for letting him go home on the bus. They didn’t realize it was a concussion. … A friend pauses to listen, his grin of solace not a tic.  (...)

In adulthood, friendships originate adventitiously: at the water cooler or neighborhood association. My closest in old age began when a pizza counterman made fun of my stutter and I returned out of curiosity to see why he would. It turned out that he needed affection so badly, he felt compelled to outrage strangers to test their loyalty; after testing mine, he became wonderfully generous, recounting dozens of typewriter-ready stories I could make use of, from war lore to which of the ladies in the Laundromat had turned tricks (he said) in her youth.

He protected my house from robbery or vandalism during hunting season, while mending relations with his children, estranged to various degrees, rehearsing with me his explanations to them beforehand. His fireman father had thrown his mother down the cellar stairs, so although he was Irish, a local Jersey mafia don adopted him as a mascot for landscaping or driving hijacked trucks from Point A to Point B. His mother, when he was small, used to take him to a Catholic cemetery to pee on the graves of the nuns who’d mistreated her at their orphanage, slamming her fingers in a door, and so forth—another memory his combat stint in Korea didn’t soften. In reparative interludes we made friends—the verb is kinetic—till the pistol he carried no longer tempted him toward Russian roulette. But he still drove customers away if he could, skinning the raccoons and coyotes he trapped on the sandwich board at his greasy spoon, so that if people wandered in asking for a pastrami hero, John could point at the naked carcass he was cutting at: “Pick your part!” It decreased sales. (...)

I like carbonation in my friends: out-on-a-limb idealism or a traveler’s itch, a shivery past or libertarian streak, with frostbite scars, perhaps, or a veteran’s fatalistic flinch when a car backfires. The “vibes” people speak of seem natural to me. When you intuit that somebody you hadn’t expected is approaching before they reach your door, or realize that a person, silent, elsewhere in the house, needs a hug, it’s not “extrasensory perception” but telepathy to antennae we haven’t pinpointed, a force field we haven’t quantified, which also warns us, when we’re hurrying down a city street, about unseen dangers around the corner: potential collisions, muggers, flimflammers, whatever.

by Edward Hoagland, The American Scholar |  Read more:

Photo by Maureen Lunn

Ekco AD-65 Radio
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Remembering Lorna Colbert

[ed. A touching tribute that could apply to many mothers.]

Physics’s Pangolin

Theoretical physics is beset by a paradox that remains as mysterious today as it was a century ago: at the subatomic level things are simultaneously particles and waves. Like the duck-rabbit illusion first described in 1899 by the Polish-born American psychologist Joseph Jastrow, subatomic reality appears to us as two different categories of being.

But there is another paradox in play. Physics itself is riven by the competing frameworks of quantum theory and general relativity, whose differing descriptions of our world eerily mirror the wave-particle tension. When it comes to the very big and the extremely small, physical reality appears to be not one thing, but two. Where quantum theory describes the subatomic realm as a domain of individual quanta, all jitterbug and jumps, general relativity depicts happenings on the cosmological scale as a stately waltz of smooth flowing space-time. General relativity is like Strauss — deep, dignified and graceful. Quantum theory, like jazz, is disconnected, syncopated, and dazzlingly modern.

Physicists are deeply aware of the schizophrenic nature of their science and long to find a synthesis, or unification. Such is the goal of a so-called ‘theory of everything’. However, to non-physicists, these competing lines of thought, and the paradoxes they entrain, can seem not just bewildering but absurd. In my experience as a science writer, no other scientific discipline elicits such contradictory responses. (...)

Many physicists are Platonists, at least when they talk to outsiders about their field. They believe that the mathematical relationships they discover in the world about us represent some kind of transcendent truth existing independently from, and perhaps a priori to, the physical world. In this way of seeing, the universe came into being according to a mathematical plan, what the British physicist Paul Davies has called ‘a cosmic blueprint’. Discovering this ‘plan’ is a goal for many theoretical physicists and the schism in the foundation of their framework is thus intensely frustrating. It’s as if the cosmic architect has designed a fiendish puzzle in which two apparently incompatible parts must be fitted together. Both are necessary, for both theories make predictions that have been verified to a dozen or so decimal places, and it is on the basis of these theories that we have built such marvels as microchips, lasers, and GPS satellites.

Quite apart from the physical tensions that exist between them, relativity and quantum theory each pose philosophical problems. Are space and time fundamental qualities of the universe, as general relativity suggests, or are they byproducts of something even more basic, something that might arise from a quantum process? Looking at quantum mechanics, huge debates swirl around the simplest situations. Does the universe split into multiple copies of itself every time an electron changes orbit in an atom, or every time a photon of light passes through a slit? Some say yes, others say absolutely not.

Theoretical physicists can’t even agree on what the celebrated waves of quantum theory mean. What is doing the ‘waving’? Are the waves physically real, or are they just mathematical representations of probability distributions? Are the ‘particles’ guided by the ‘waves’? And, if so, how? The dilemma posed by wave-particle duality is the tip of an epistemological iceberg on which many ships have been broken and wrecked.

Undeterred, some theoretical physicists are resorting to increasingly bold measures in their attempts to resolve these dilemmas. Take the ‘many-worlds’ interpretation of quantum theory, which proposes that every time a subatomic action takes place the universe splits into multiple, slightly different, copies of itself, with each new ‘world’ representing one of the possible outcomes.

When this idea was first proposed in 1957 by the American physicist Hugh Everett, it was considered an almost lunatic-fringe position. Even 20 years later, when I was a physics student, many of my professors thought it was a kind of madness to go down this path. Yet in recent years the many-worlds position has become mainstream. The idea of a quasi-infinite, ever-proliferating array of universes has been given further credence as a result of being taken up by string theorists, who argue that every mathematically possible version of the string theory equations corresponds to an actually existing universe, and estimate that there are 10 to the power of 500 different possibilities. To put this in perspective: physicists believe that in our universe there are approximately 10 to the power of 80 subatomic particles. In string cosmology, the totality of existing universes exceeds the number of particles in our universe by more than 400 orders of magnitude.

Nothing in our experience compares to this unimaginably vast number. Every universe that can be mathematically imagined within the string parameters — including ones in which you exist with a prehensile tail, to use an example given by the American string theorist Brian Greene — is said to be manifest somewhere in a vast supra-spatial array ‘beyond’ the space-time bubble of our own universe.

What is so epistemologically daring here is that the equations are taken to be the fundamental reality. The fact that the mathematics allows for gazillions of variations is seen to be evidence for gazillions of actual worlds.

This kind of reification of equations is precisely what strikes some humanities scholars as childishly naive. At the very least, it raises serious questions about the relationship between our mathematical models of reality, and reality itself.

by Margaret Wertheim, Aeon | Read more:
Illustration by Claire Scully

Cannizzarite
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Fake Shop Fronts in Ireland

[ed. Economic Potemkin Villages]

Local councils in Northern Ireland have painted fake shop fronts and covered derelict buildings with huge billboards to hide the economic hardship being felt in towns and villages near the golf resort where G8 leaders will meet this month.

Northern Ireland's government has spent £2m (€2.3m) tackling dereliction over the past two years, the environment department said.

Some buildings have been demolished and others have been given a facelift in an attempt to make areas more attractive.

Almost a quarter of "dereliction funds" were freed up for local councillors in Co Fermanagh in anticipation of Britain hosting the annual Group of Eight leaders’ summit there on 17-18 June.

More than 100 properties have been spruced up.

In the one-street town of Belcoo, the changes are merely cosmetic.

At a former butcher's shop, stickers applied to the windows show a packed meat counter and give the impression that business is booming.

Across the street, another empty unit has been given a makeover to look like a thriving office supply shop. Locals are unimpressed.

"The shop fronts are cosmetic surgery for serious wounds. They are looking after the banks instead of saving good businesses," said Kevin Maguire, 62, an unemployed man who has lived all his life in Belcoo.

"Where would you see a shop front in Northern Ireland like this anyway? It's more like something you'd find in Belgravia or Chelsea," he said, referring to elite districts of London.

The fakes are not the first of their kind in Northern Ireland.

Last year, smart-looking shop fronts appeared in a series of derelict Belfast stores along the main route from the city centre to the grand Stormont parliament building.

"Northern Ireland is in the international spotlight so it is entirely right that we should portray it in the best light possible," Northern Ireland Environment Minister Alex Attwood said in a statement.

by RTE News/Ireland |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Sizing Up Big Data, Broadening Beyond the Internet

In his young career, Jeffrey Hammerbacher has been a scout on the frontiers of the data economy.

In 2005, Mr. Hammerbacher, then a freshly minted Harvard graduate, did what many math and computing whizzes did. He went to Wall Street as a “quant,” building math models for complex financial products.

Looking for a better use for his skills, Mr. Hammerbacher departed to Silicon Valley less than a year later and joined Facebook. He started a team that began to mine the vast amounts of social network data Facebook was collecting for insights on how to tweak the service and target ads. He called himself and his co-workers “data scientists,” a term that has since become the hottest of job categories.

Facebook was a fabulous petri dish for data science. Yet after two and a half years, Mr. Hammerbacher decided it was time to move on, beyond social networks and Internet advertising. He became a founder of Cloudera, a start-up that makes software tools for data scientists.

Then, starting last summer, Mr. Hammerbacher, who is now 30, embarked on a very different professional path. He joined the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan as an assistant professor, exploring genetic and other medical data in search of breakthroughs in disease modeling and treatment.

The goal, Mr. Hammerbacher said, is “to turn medicine into the land of the quants.”

The story is the same in one field after another, in science, politics, crime prevention, public health, sports and industries as varied as energy and advertising. All are being transformed by data-driven discovery and decision-making. The pioneering consumer Internet companies, like Google, Facebook and Amazon, were just the start, experts say. Today, data tools and techniques are used for tasks as varied as predicting neighborhood blocks where crimes are most likely to occur and injecting intelligence into hulking industrial machines, like electrical power generators.

Big Data is the shorthand label for the phenomenon, which embraces technology, decision-making and public policy. Supplying the technology is a fast-growing market, increasing at more than 30 percent a year and likely to reach $24 billion by 2016, according to a forecast by IDC, a research firm. All the major technology companies, and a host of start-ups, are aggressively pursuing the business.

Demand is brisk for people with data skills. The McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projects that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired, by 2020.

Yet the surveillance potential of Big Data, with every click stream, physical movement and commercial transaction monitored and analyzed, would strain the imagination of George Orwell. So what will be society’s ground rules for the collection and use of data? How do we weigh the trade-offs involving privacy, commerce and security? Those issues are just beginning to be addressed. The debate surrounding the recent disclosure that the National Security Agency has been secretly stockpiling telephone call logs of Americans and poring through e-mail and other data from major Internet companies is merely an early round.

Big Data is a vague term, used loosely, if often, these days. But put simply, the catchall phrase means three things. First, it is a bundle of technologies. Second, it is a potential revolution in measurement. And third, it is a point of view, or philosophy, about how decisions will be — and perhaps should be — made in the future.

by Steve Lohr, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Financial Sector Thinks It’s About Ready To Ruin World Again

Claiming that enough time had surely passed since they last caused a global economic meltdown, top executives from the U.S. financial sector told reporters Monday that they are just about ready to completely destroy the world again.

Representatives from all major banking and investment institutions cited recent increases in consumer spending, rebounding home prices, and a stabilizing unemployment rate as confirmation that the time had once again come to inflict another round of catastrophic financial losses on individuals and businesses worldwide.

“It’s been about five or six years since we last crippled every major market on the planet, so it seems like the time is right for us to get back out there and start ruining the lives of billions of people again,” said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. “We gave it some time and let everyone get a little comfortable, and now we’re looking to get back on the old horse, shatter some consumer confidence, and flat-out kill any optimism for a stable global economy for years to come.”

“People are beginning to feel at ease spending money and investing in their futures again,” Blankfein continued. “That’s the perfect time to step in and do what we do best: rip the heart right out of the world’s economy.”

According to sources, the overwhelming majority of investment bankers are “ready to get the ball rolling” by approving a host of complex and poorly understood debt-backed securities that are doomed to quickly default, as well as issuing startlingly high-risk loans certain to drive thousands of companies into insolvency.

Top-level executives also told reporters that when it comes to depleting the life savings of millions of people and sending every major national economy into a tailspin, they feel “refreshed and raring to go.”

“The other day I actually overheard someone on the sidewalk utter the words ‘I’m saving up for retirement,’ and right away I thought to myself, ‘Well, time to get down to work,’” said Morgan Stanley chairman James P. Gorman, adding that the increasing number of individuals entertaining ideas of starting their own businesses or buying houses was the financial sector’s cue to set off another devastating global recession. “We’re definitely thinking on a huge scale again, because we all really enjoy toying with the livelihoods of millions of people overseas and forcing them to wonder why reckless, split-second decisions made thousands of miles away dictate their whole country’s socioeconomic future.”

“Plus, it’ll be nice to finally wipe out the Euro once and for all this time,” Gorman added.

While most private equity firms, investment banks, and hedge funds are reportedly still undecided on the precise route to take in order to torpedo the job market and crash all international stock exchanges, sources confirmed they are nearly in position to resume gambling away trillions of dollars belonging to the American populace.

“We’ve got a lot of options on the table; it’s just a matter of picking which one we want to use to paralyze every single sector of the world economy,” said Capital One executive vice president Peter Schnall. “We already burst the dot-com and housing bubbles, so this time we can maybe mix it up by popping the education bubble and shattering the lives of everyone with outstanding student loans. Or maybe we’ll artificially inflate prices of stocks in social media companies and then pull the rug out, bankrupting every investor tied to companies like Facebook and Twitter. Or do both.”

“On second thought, maybe we’ll wipe out the housing market again too, just for the hell of it,” Schnall quickly added. “Might as well, right?”

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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John Mayer

[ed. Single from his new album. Nice song, but I'll never be able to listen to it again without thinking about the so-called exercise routine "prancercise" (which I'd never heard of before). As this article states, the intro is quite bizzare. Here's an alternate version if you find this one too troubling.]

So You've Decided to Drink More Water

[ed. Repost. I've been trying to do this, maybe not eight glasses a day but a couple of bottles at least. Charming essay.]

On the first day, you make the decision. “I’m going to drink more water,” you say. “Eight glasses a day, to start with. Maybe more.” Suddenly you realize the break room has gone silent. The sun sinks below the horizon as a sign of respect. You begin right away, finishing the cup of water already in your hand.

The next morning, you open your eyes after eight uninterrupted hours of deep sleep. The sun spills through the window onto the fresh white linens on your bed, and a glass of water sits on your nightstand, sparkling in the morning light. You drink it and realize that you no longer have the urge to eat breakfast. The water is enough.

Later, on the subway, a beautiful, serene older woman comes over to you and lays her gloved hand gently on your arm. “Your skin,” she murmurs. “It’s positively glowing. So fresh. So luminous. May I ask — it’s water, isn’t it?” You smile. She plants a tender kiss on your forehead and glides away.

A week passes. You go in for your yearly physical. “I don’t understand,” your doctor mutters as she looks at your chart. “A woman your age — it just doesn’t make any sense.” You shift nervously on the papered table. “Your body doesn’t have a single toxin. They’ve all disappeared. It’s as if something just ... flushed them away overnight.” She shakes her head. “I’m not even sure how to tell you this. Have you found yourself experiencing a decreased appetite lately? Difficulty finishing meals?” You nod, unsure of where this is going. “This is extremely rare, but your entire digestive system has been transmuted into pure mother-of-pearl.”

“I see,” you say slowly. You pull a bottle of water out of your purse and take a sip, and her face breaks into a relieved smile. “You didn’t tell me you’d started drinking water! Eight glasses of water a day? Of course! Is that why every inch of your skin is radiating a soft and healthy glow?” You nod again. She laughs and takes off her stethoscope. “I can see we won’t be needing this anymore!”

You start to carry water with you everywhere. Sometimes after getting home from work you drink from the kitchen faucet in great, hiccuping gulps. In no time at all you’ve moved from eight cups a day to a few gallons. Anyone else might have died of hyponatremia by now, but not you. You only grow stronger and more beautiful.

Every publication in the world, from The Lancet to Maxim to Mother Jones, wants to know your secret. “Tell us,” they beg you. Their eyes are hungry (thirsty?). “We have to know. How do you do it?” You sigh exquisitely. “I just like to drink water,” you tell them. Still their eyes bore into yours, pleading. “Sometimes I put a slice of cucumber or lemon in it. For the taste.” Upon hearing these words, an envious Anna Wintour sets herself on fire.

Grown men sink to their knees as you pass, their faces crumpling into shameless sobs. Mothers lift their children up to you in mute and expectant appeal. You bless them all.

Every country in the world bans the drinking of any beverage other than water. All droughts cease; deserts erupt in a riot of frondescence. You twirl in delight, slowly at first, round and round, as the entire world joins you in drinking more water. Everyone is drinking more water now. A soft, cool rain begins to fall. “She’s the one,” you hear someone whisper before you ascend to a plane of existence where human vocalizations no longer mean anything to you. “The one who drinks a lot of water.”

by Mallory Ortberg, The Hairpin | Read more:
Image: credit misplaced