Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Booz Allen, the World's Most Profitable Spy Organization
It’s safe to say that most Americans, if they’d heard of Booz Allen at all, had no idea how huge a role it plays in the U.S. intelligence infrastructure. They do now. On June 9, a 29-year-old Booz Allen computer technician, Edward Snowden, revealed himself to be the source of news stories showing the extent of phone and Internet eavesdropping by the National Security Agency. Snowden leaked classified documents he loaded onto a thumb drive while working for Booz Allen at an NSA listening post in Hawaii, and he’s promised to leak many more. After fleeing to Hong Kong, he’s been in hiding. (He didn’t respond to a request for comment relayed by an intermediary.)
The attention has been bad for Booz Allen’s stock, which fell more than 4 percent the morning after Snowden went public and still hasn’t recovered. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Select Committee on Intelligence, has called for a reexamination of the role of private contractors in intelligence work and announced she’ll seek to restrict their access to classified information. Booz Allen declined to comment on Snowden beyond its initial public statement announcing his termination.
The firm has long kept a low profile—with the federal government as practically its sole client, there’s no need for publicity. It does little, if any, lobbying. Its ability to win contracts is ensured by the roster of intelligence community heavyweights who work there. The director of national intelligence, James Clapper—President Obama’s top intelligence adviser—is a former Booz Allen executive. The firm’s vice chairman, Mike McConnell, was President George W. Bush’s director of national intelligence and, before that, director of the NSA. Of Booz Allen’s 25,000 employees, 76 percent have classified clearances, and almost half have top-secret clearances. In a 2003 speech, Joan Dempsey, a former CIA deputy director, referred to Booz Allen as the “shadow IC” (for intelligence community) because of the profusion of “former secretaries of this and directors of that,” according to a 2008 book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. Today Dempsey works for Booz Allen.
It’s possible that fallout from the Snowden revelations will lead to significant changes in intelligence contracting. The Senate intelligence committee has been pressuring spy agencies for years to reduce their reliance on contractors. And in the age of the sequester, even once untouchable line items such as defense and intelligence spending are vulnerable to cuts.
Yet conversations with current and former employees of Booz Allen and U.S. intelligence officials suggest that these contractors aren’t going anywhere soon. Even if Snowden ends up costing his former employer business, the work will probably just go to its rivals. Although Booz Allen and the rest of the shadow intelligence community arose as stopgap solutions—meant to buy time as shrunken, post-Cold War agencies tried to rebuild after Sept. 11—they’ve become the vine that supports the wall. As much as contractors such as Booz Allen have come to rely on the federal government, the government relies on them even more.
Edward Snowden was not hired as a spy. He’s a mostly self-taught computer technician who never completed high school, and his first intelligence job was as a security guard at an NSA facility. In an interview in the Guardian, he says he was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency for his computer skills to work on network security. In 2009 he left for the private sector, eventually ending up at Booz Allen. The job he did as a contractor for the NSA appears to have been basic tech support and troubleshooting. He was the IT guy.
People in intelligence tend to divide contract work into three tiers. In the first tier are the least sensitive and most menial jobs: cutting the grass at intelligence facilities, emptying the trash, sorting the mail. In classified facilities even the janitors need security clearances—the wastebaskets they’re emptying might contain national secrets. That makes these jobs particularly hard to fill, since most people with security clearances are almost by definition overqualified for janitorial work.
Snowden, with his computer expertise, fit in the middle tier: people with specialized skills. When the U.S. military first began ramping up its use of contractors during the Vietnam War, these jobs made up much of the hiring—the Pentagon was desperate for repairmen for its increasingly complex weapons and transport systems. Also in this tier are translators, interrogators, and investigators who handle background checks for government security clearances. Firms such as CSC and L-3 Communications specialize in this tier. Booz Allen competes for some of that work, but it tends to focus on the highest tier: big contracts that can involve everything from developing strategies to defeat al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to designing software systems to writing speeches for senior officials. Tier three contractors often are, for all intents and purposes, spies—and sometimes spymasters.
by Drake Bennett and Michael Riley, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Image via: Wired
The attention has been bad for Booz Allen’s stock, which fell more than 4 percent the morning after Snowden went public and still hasn’t recovered. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Select Committee on Intelligence, has called for a reexamination of the role of private contractors in intelligence work and announced she’ll seek to restrict their access to classified information. Booz Allen declined to comment on Snowden beyond its initial public statement announcing his termination.The firm has long kept a low profile—with the federal government as practically its sole client, there’s no need for publicity. It does little, if any, lobbying. Its ability to win contracts is ensured by the roster of intelligence community heavyweights who work there. The director of national intelligence, James Clapper—President Obama’s top intelligence adviser—is a former Booz Allen executive. The firm’s vice chairman, Mike McConnell, was President George W. Bush’s director of national intelligence and, before that, director of the NSA. Of Booz Allen’s 25,000 employees, 76 percent have classified clearances, and almost half have top-secret clearances. In a 2003 speech, Joan Dempsey, a former CIA deputy director, referred to Booz Allen as the “shadow IC” (for intelligence community) because of the profusion of “former secretaries of this and directors of that,” according to a 2008 book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. Today Dempsey works for Booz Allen.
It’s possible that fallout from the Snowden revelations will lead to significant changes in intelligence contracting. The Senate intelligence committee has been pressuring spy agencies for years to reduce their reliance on contractors. And in the age of the sequester, even once untouchable line items such as defense and intelligence spending are vulnerable to cuts.
Yet conversations with current and former employees of Booz Allen and U.S. intelligence officials suggest that these contractors aren’t going anywhere soon. Even if Snowden ends up costing his former employer business, the work will probably just go to its rivals. Although Booz Allen and the rest of the shadow intelligence community arose as stopgap solutions—meant to buy time as shrunken, post-Cold War agencies tried to rebuild after Sept. 11—they’ve become the vine that supports the wall. As much as contractors such as Booz Allen have come to rely on the federal government, the government relies on them even more.
Edward Snowden was not hired as a spy. He’s a mostly self-taught computer technician who never completed high school, and his first intelligence job was as a security guard at an NSA facility. In an interview in the Guardian, he says he was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency for his computer skills to work on network security. In 2009 he left for the private sector, eventually ending up at Booz Allen. The job he did as a contractor for the NSA appears to have been basic tech support and troubleshooting. He was the IT guy.
People in intelligence tend to divide contract work into three tiers. In the first tier are the least sensitive and most menial jobs: cutting the grass at intelligence facilities, emptying the trash, sorting the mail. In classified facilities even the janitors need security clearances—the wastebaskets they’re emptying might contain national secrets. That makes these jobs particularly hard to fill, since most people with security clearances are almost by definition overqualified for janitorial work.
Snowden, with his computer expertise, fit in the middle tier: people with specialized skills. When the U.S. military first began ramping up its use of contractors during the Vietnam War, these jobs made up much of the hiring—the Pentagon was desperate for repairmen for its increasingly complex weapons and transport systems. Also in this tier are translators, interrogators, and investigators who handle background checks for government security clearances. Firms such as CSC and L-3 Communications specialize in this tier. Booz Allen competes for some of that work, but it tends to focus on the highest tier: big contracts that can involve everything from developing strategies to defeat al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to designing software systems to writing speeches for senior officials. Tier three contractors often are, for all intents and purposes, spies—and sometimes spymasters.
by Drake Bennett and Michael Riley, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Image via: Wired
Only the Lonely
In the end loneliness is the most terrible and contradictory of my problems. I hate having only myself to come home to. If I have a book to write, it’s fine. I’m up so early in the morning that even I pop out for an early supper I am happy to go straight to bed, eager to be up and writing at dawn the next day. But otherwise…
It’s not that I want a sexual partner, a long-term partner, someone to share a bed and a snuggle on the sofa with – although perhaps I do and in the past I have had and it has been joyful. But the fact is I value my privacy too. It’s a lose-lose matter. I don’t want to be alone, but I want to be left alone. Perhaps this is just a form of narcissism, vanity, overdemanding entitlement – give it whatever derogatory term you think it deserves. I don’t know the answer.
I suppose I just don’t like my own company very much. Which is odd, given how many times people very kindly tell me that they’d put me on their ideal dinner party guestlist. I do think I can usually be relied upon to be good company when I’m out and about and sitting round a table chatting, being silly, sharing jokes and stories and bringing shy people out of their shells.
But then I get home and I’m all alone again.
I don’t write this for sympathy. I don’t write it as part as my on going and undying commitment to the cause of mental health charities like Mind. I don’t quite know why I write it. I think I write it because it fascinates me.
And perhaps I am writing this for any of you out there who are lonely too. There’s not much we can do about it. I am luckier than many of you because I am lonely in a crowd of people who are mostly very nice to me and appear to be pleased to meet me. But I want you to know that you are not alone in your being alone.
Loneliness is not much written about (my spell-check wanted me to say that loveliness is not much written about – how wrong that is) but humankind is a social species and maybe it’s something we should think about more than we do. I cannot think of many plays or documentaries or novels about lonely people. Aah, look at them all, Paul McCartney enjoined us in Eleanor Rigby… where do they all come from?
The strange thing is, if you see me in the street and engage in conversation I will probably freeze into polite fear and smile inanely until I can get away to be on my lonely ownsome.
Make of that what you will.
It’s not that I want a sexual partner, a long-term partner, someone to share a bed and a snuggle on the sofa with – although perhaps I do and in the past I have had and it has been joyful. But the fact is I value my privacy too. It’s a lose-lose matter. I don’t want to be alone, but I want to be left alone. Perhaps this is just a form of narcissism, vanity, overdemanding entitlement – give it whatever derogatory term you think it deserves. I don’t know the answer.I suppose I just don’t like my own company very much. Which is odd, given how many times people very kindly tell me that they’d put me on their ideal dinner party guestlist. I do think I can usually be relied upon to be good company when I’m out and about and sitting round a table chatting, being silly, sharing jokes and stories and bringing shy people out of their shells.
But then I get home and I’m all alone again.
I don’t write this for sympathy. I don’t write it as part as my on going and undying commitment to the cause of mental health charities like Mind. I don’t quite know why I write it. I think I write it because it fascinates me.
And perhaps I am writing this for any of you out there who are lonely too. There’s not much we can do about it. I am luckier than many of you because I am lonely in a crowd of people who are mostly very nice to me and appear to be pleased to meet me. But I want you to know that you are not alone in your being alone.
Loneliness is not much written about (my spell-check wanted me to say that loveliness is not much written about – how wrong that is) but humankind is a social species and maybe it’s something we should think about more than we do. I cannot think of many plays or documentaries or novels about lonely people. Aah, look at them all, Paul McCartney enjoined us in Eleanor Rigby… where do they all come from?
The strange thing is, if you see me in the street and engage in conversation I will probably freeze into polite fear and smile inanely until I can get away to be on my lonely ownsome.
Make of that what you will.
by Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles | Read more:
Image via:
The Borg Of The Digital World
You might never join Facebook, but a zombie you — sewn together from scattered bits of your personal data — is still sitting there in sort-of-stasis on its servers waiting to be properly animated if you do sign up for the service. Or waiting to escape through the cracks of another security flaw in Facebook’s systems.
Facebook is a crowd-fueled, data-mining machine that’s now so massive (1.11 billion monthly active users as of March 2013) that it doesn’t matter if you haven’t ever signed up yourself to sign over your personal data. It has long since passed the tipping point where it can act as a distributed data network that knows something about almost everyone. Or everyone who leaves any kind of digital/cellular trace that can be fed into its data banks.
Chances are someone you have corresponded with — by email or mobile phone — has let Facebook’s data spiders crawl through their correspondence, thereby allowing your contact data to be assimilated entirely without your knowledge or consent. One such example was flagged to TechCrunch on Saturday when one of the users was informed by Facebook they had been affected by its latest breach found it had harvested an email address they had never personally handed over.
This behaviour casts Facebook as the Borg of the digital world: resistance is futile. It also underlines exactly why the NSA wants a backdoor into this type of digital treasure trove. If you’re going to outsource low-level surveillance of everyone, then Facebook is one of a handful of tech companies large enough to have files on almost everyone. So really, forget the futuristic Borg: this ceaseless data-harvesting brings to mind the dossier-gathering attention to detail of the Stasi.
by Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis
What about the ratings agencies?
That's what "they" always say about the financial crisis and the teeming rat's nest of corruption it left behind. Everybody else got plenty of blame: the greed-fattened banks, the sleeping regulators, the unscrupulous mortgage hucksters like spray-tanned Countrywide ex-CEO Angelo Mozilo.
But what about the ratings agencies? Isn't it true that almost none of the fraud that's swallowed Wall Street in the past decade could have taken place without companies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's rubber-stamping it? Aren't they guilty, too?Man, are they ever. And a lot more than even the least generous of us suspected.
Thanks to a mountain of evidence gathered for a pair of major lawsuits by the San Diego-based law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, documents that for the most part have never been seen by the general public, we now know that the nation's two top ratings companies, Moody's and S&P, have for many years been shameless tools for the banks, willing to give just about anything a high rating in exchange for cash.
In incriminating e-mail after incriminating e-mail, executives and analysts from these companies are caught admitting their entire business model is crooked.
"Lord help our fucking scam . . . this has to be the stupidest place I have worked at," writes one Standard & Poor's executive. "As you know, I had difficulties explaining 'HOW' we got to those numbers since there is no science behind it," confesses a high-ranking S&P analyst. "If we are just going to make it up in order to rate deals, then quants [quantitative analysts] are of precious little value," complains another senior S&P man. "Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card[s] falters," ruminates one more.
Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together. These gigantic companies – also known as Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations, or NRSROs – have teams of examiners who analyze companies, cities, towns, countries, mortgage borrowers, anybody or anything that takes on debt or creates an investment vehicle.
Their primary function is to help define what's safe to buy, and what isn't. A triple-A rating is to the financial world what the USDA seal of approval is to a meat-eater, or virginity is to a Catholic. It's supposed to be sacrosanct, inviolable: According to Moody's own reports, AAA investments "should survive the equivalent of the U.S. Great Depression."
It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.
That this happened is even more amazing because these companies naturally have powerful leverage over their clients, as they are part of a quasi-protected industry that enjoys massive de facto state subsidies. Largely that's because government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission often force private companies to fulfill regulatory requirements by retaining or keeping in reserve certain fixed quantities of assets – bonds, securities, whatever – that have been rated highly by a "Nationally Recognized" ratings agency, like the "Big Three" of Moody's, S&P and Fitch. So while they're not quite part of the official regulatory infrastructure, they might as well be.
It's not like the iniquity of the ratings agencies had gone completely unnoticed before. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission published a case study in 2011 of Moody's in particular and discovered that between 2000 and 2007, the agency gave nearly 45,000 mortgage-backed securities AAA ratings. One year Moody's doled out AAA ratings to 30 mortgage-backed securities every day, 83 percent of which were ultimately downgraded. "This crisis could not have happened without the rating agencies," the commission concluded.
Thanks to these documents, we now know how that happened. And showing as they do the back-and-forth between the country's top ratings agencies and one of America's biggest investment banks (Morgan Stanley) in advance of two major subprime deals, they also lay out in detail the evolution of the industrywide fraud that led to implosion of the world economy – how banks, hedge funds, mortgage lenders and ratings agencies, working at an extraordinary level of cooperation, teamed up to disguise and then sell near-worthless loans as AAA securities. It's the black box in the American financial airplane.
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Victor Juhasz
Huey Lewis's Old, Weird America
I had seen him in the flesh once before, back when Huey Lewis and the News was touring in support of the album Hard at Play in 1991. I was 13 years old and Lewis was my first favorite rock star. He played at the not-intimate Marcus Amphitheater in Milwaukee, which seats approximately 12 times more people than Wisconsin Dells's Crystal Grand Music Theatre, and was built in the aftermath of a dangerously overcrowded concert that Lewis performed on the grounds in the summer of 1984 — about the time his most popular record, Sports, rose to the top of the Billboard album charts. That concert drew 30,000 people to a space suited for 15,000. (The Marcus Amphitheater could accurately be described as "The House That Huey Built," though I've never heard it actually described that way.)
Wisconsin Dells doesn't have close to 30,000 people in the entire town, which is situated in the south-central part of the state, about a two-hour drive west of Milwaukee. As Wisconsin's tourism hub, its population swells in the summer months depending on the weather — an area dense with woodlands, lakes, water parks, and wax museums, Wisconsin Dells is a relatively cheap place to take the kids on vacation, though omnipresent storm clouds chased away visitors in early June like a great white shark stalking a beach community. Still, all but 100 or so tickets were sold for the night's Huey Lewis and the News concert several hours before showtime. Towns like this are Huey's bread and butter these days.
Many of those ticket buyers were coming to hear the songs from Sports played from front to back. While Sports isn't usually mentioned among the most popular musical blockbusters of the '80s, it belongs in that company. Of the album's nine tracks, five charted in the Top 20: "I Want a New Drug," "The Heart of Rock & Roll," "Heart and Soul," "If This Is It," and "Walking on a Thin Line." (One of those songs might be playing on the "cool FM" oldies radio station in your town at this very second.) Sports was one of only five no. 1 albums during all of 1984, the fewest number in history. The others were Michael Jackson's Thriller, the Footloose soundtrack, Prince's Purple Rain, and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. Huey Lewis held the summit for only one week, but Sports sold 6 million records in '84 alone (on the way to topping 10 million), good for second on the year-end sales list behind Thriller.
"We were opening for .38 Special when Sports was out, and the crowds were finally coming to see us." Lewis says. He sits on a small love seat opposite a wall lined with mirrors and partially concealed by a rack of stage clothes, and relaxes his right hand after hurriedly autographing 50 CD booklets from the recent Sports reissue. "We went out on an arena and coliseum tour, and we were killing them every night because our record was growing by the day. We would show up at the hall at seven and eat the crew meal, put on our clothes at 7:45, go out from eight to nine o'clock and just tear it up, and get as many encores as we want. To their credit, if .38 Special were super-mad about it, they would suck it up and play their show real hard."
Lewis recalls telling his bandmates at the time, "'This is as good as it gets, man. Just have fun with this right here.' And I've been in the business for long enough to know that that's true."
Lewis does not sound bitter when he says this. He's a little older than you remember — the lines on his forehead are deeper, his voice more sandpapery, and he untucks his almond brown button-up shirt to hide his 62-year-old paunch. (He also apparently keeps his collection of Skittles-colored, proto-Arsenio suit jackets in mothballs. They are nowhere in sight in his dressing room.) But for the most part, in appearance and demeanor, Lewis is unchanged from the handsome, confidently smirking cool-dad figure on the cover of Sports. For much of his life, Lewis has been cursed with a face that looks eternally 41, but he's now reached the point where this is a good thing. In person, he's friendly, though not particularly gregarious — he prefers not to do interviews on show days, which is difficult because nearly every day is a show day. After tonight's concert, the band will shower, the crew will load out, and Lewis's 25-person caravan (which he refers to as his "small business") will hop back on their buses and drive 403 miles to Anderson, Indiana, for tomorrow night's gig at a horse track and casino. In the next seven days, Lewis will play five shows in places like Paducah, Kentucky, and Quapaw, Oklahoma, along with bigger cities like Dallas and Cincinnati. Even with the gaudy 1980s sales statistics, Huey Lewis and the News has the work ethic of a 2010s indie band.
by Steven Hyden, Grantland | Read more:
Photo: Getty Images
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Tuesday, June 25, 2013
What Paintbrush Makers Know About How to Beat China
As I toured Israel Kirschner’s Bronx paintbrush factory earlier this month, I couldn’t stop feeling amazed that it was still in business. Many days, Kirschner feels the same way. The charming, energetic 69-year-old joked about his ancient equipment (“That could be 100 years old,” he said of a bristle-cleaning machine); his two least-committed employees, his son and daughter (“They come late, they leave early”); and how his business has been increasingly undercut by Chinese manufacturers. After introducing me to his star brush maker, Fermin Gil, a Mexican immigrant who “can just see” when a brush isn’t right, Kirschner handed me a one-inch boar-bristle brush with a wooden handle. A Chinese manufacturer sells it for 30 cents. If he made it himself, he told me, it would cost significantly more.Chinese manufacturers long ago wreaked havoc on the U.S. textile, apparel, toy and electronics industries, but the disruption came slowly to the brush business. There are simply so many types of brushes for so many applications that many Chinese manufacturers thought the business wasn’t worth the hassle. For decades, China lagged behind in the main categories (toothbrushes, brooms, mops and, of course, paintbrushes) and only dominated the lowest rung of the business — extracting bristles from boars. “It’s dirty, smelly, foul work,” David Parr, executive director of the American Brush Manufacturers Association, told me. “Nobody wants to go to West Texas to try to catch a boar and figure out how to get the bristles off him.”
The collapse of the housing market in 2007 and the subsequent recession turned out to be a boon for China’s brush exports. With far less construction and far fewer jobs, not as many people needed paintbrushes (or brooms or toothbrushes). Those who did need them chose cheap imports over more expensive products made in America. Retailers, who stood to make more from the cheaper products, jumped at the opportunity to sell them. Now everyone in the business has to account for the Chinese.
That’s a familiar story for U. S. manufacturing. The strange thing here is that there are still more than 200 brush, broom and mop makers in the U.S. These companies have employed two strategies to stave off Chinese competition: 1) change everything all the time, or 2) don’t ever change a thing. Kirschner hasn’t changed a thing. He makes brushes the very same way, employing many of the same machines, that his father did 50 years ago. He told me that he sticks with the old ways because, unlike with toys and T-shirts, a big chunk of the brush business caters to professionals who aren’t merely shopping for price but rather for quality. Michael Wolf, who runs the Greco Brush Company, a supplier to professional house painters, told me that his customers need to know before each job that every single bristle on every single brush will be attached properly. One loose fiber left on a wall can damage a painter’s reputation, which in turn can hurt Wolf’s too. Wolf said that he can buy brushes for between a quarter and a dollar cheaper in China, but he is never sure exactly what he’ll get. Some orders are shoddy; others never arrive. So Greco sticks with the company he knows. “My father did business with his father back in the ’50s,” Wolf told me. “We’re keeping it going, the two of us.”
At the other end of the business is Lance Cheney, 53, the fourth-generation president of Braun Brush, who told me that he would close his company rather than make the same kind of brush, the same way, for 50 years. He is constantly creating innovative brushes so that he never has any competition. Cheney makes a beaver-hair brush that’s solely for putting a sheen on chocolate. He sells an industrial croissant-buttering brush and a heat-resistant brush that can clean hot deep fryers. His clients, he said, now include General Mills (he made a brush for their cereal-manufacturing line) and the energy industry (a line of expensive brushes for cleaning pipes in nuclear reactors). He even developed Brush Tile, fuzzy panels used in artistic wall hangings. He said his proudest creation is a tiny brush that helped Mars rovers dust debris from drilling sites. When Cheney sees other firms making one of his brushes, he often drops the product rather than enter a price war. Braun Brush, he said, has grown at 15 to 20 percent annually for the past five years.
Kirschner’s don’t-change-a-thing strategy has not brought anything like this kind of growth. Last year, he says, “was a disaster.” As was this spring. But June, so far, has been “unbelievably good.” Many of his customers are governmental agencies that prefer “Made in the U.S.A.” products or have precise needs that Chinese imports can’t yet fill. Some of the paint on New York City subways and Texas prisons, for example, was applied by Kirschner brushes.
As I walked through the Kirschner Brush Manufacturing Company factory, I began to think — despite all the doom-and-gloom stories — about just how many similar companies are still plugging along this way in the U.S. There are still more than 200,000 small factories, like Kirschner’s, that provide a solid, if rarely heralded, base line of American business. (At last count, there were 139 brush, broom and mop makers in the country with fewer than 20 employees.) Many of them do things the old way, using old machines (paid off long ago) in old factories, holding on to customers by serving some tiny niche. I recently met a man in Pennsylvania who has a decent business making metal hooks for paint cans using a 50-year-old monstrosity of a machine. In Jamestown, N.Y., I visited a factory that makes metal exhaust hoods for laboratories. The owner, who was in semi-retirement, told me that he would never start such a business today but that because he already had the building, the machines and the workers, he could reasonably turn a profit.
In a sense, the competitive advantage of these companies is that they are not all that ambitious. It’s a strategy that we also sometimes see with various service providers, like tax accountants who are able to find enough customers who don’t like using Turbo Tax and don’t want to pay some big firm, or realtors who have been in a neighborhood forever and don’t use the hard-sell approach of younger brokers. Of course, this isn’t the sexiest strategy, and these businesses rarely expand and are unlikely to help the economy grow. And every year a few drop by the wayside.
by Adam Davidson, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration by Jasper Rietman
Welcome Home
You're back! Isn't it great? Isn't it great to be back in your old room? Or in the room next to your old room, because your old room is now your stepdad's office and the place where he's allowed to TiVo sports? Isn't it great?!
You made it out of Brooklyn without a stick-and-poke tattoo, which is something only a select few can say, so give yourself a little pat on the back. A little pat on the back where that stick-and-poke would have gone. You thought about it. About getting your best friend's initials, or an outline of Brooklyn, or an outline of that Brooklyn coffee shop you loved, or an outline of a cup of coffee and your favorite novel inside the outline of the Brooklyn coffee shop inside the outline of Brooklyn with the slogan “Ain't Nowhere Better, Ladies!” (a slogan you would have made up about Brooklyn while you were drunk on tequila gimlets and your best friend was sticking/poking you). And the best part about making it out without a tattoo, is that now, when your mom walks in on you naked three times in one morning, you have nothing to hide! Go ahead mom! Check this out! The same body you diapered, the same ass you wiped, the same vagina you looked at under a microscope or whatever you did 26 years ago! No need to knock! Absolutely nothing has changed! (Except your bedroom. Which is now your stepdad's sports-watching room.)
You made it out and you're back home, and you're starting to understand why people love exercising so much. You never loved exercising before, but now it's like a religion for you. Exactly like a religion. Like the way Judaism is your religion, where you mostly ignore it and then once in a while you use it to get out of things or as an excuse for telling an off-color joke. And now! Now, exercise is serving a similar purpose, when there's nowhere to go and your house feels smaller and smaller and you can hear your mom downstairs yell up at you “I'm calling my cell phone! Feel for vibrations!” and you've looked through your high school yearbooks eighteen times screaming “WHAT WENT WRONG?” Just get on that exercise bike and pedal the pain away. Just cycle yourself into oblivion. And when your dad calls and says “Let's talk about your health insurance,” just pant heavily and say “I'm on the ol' bike, let me get back to you!” (It doesn't matter if you're actually on the bike. Just like it doesn't matter whether you're actually keeping kosher or you just don't want to eat that weird-looking ham.)
There's not a lot of space for beer in the family fridge. No one else drinks beer, really. You learned how to drink beer in college, and for four years after college, and all you've done for the last 8 years really (sorry, Mom) is drink beer. So you make a family contribution and purchase a six-pack. You stuff it in the vegetable drawer, next to some lettuce your mom picked from her garden. Squished together, the Sierra Nevada and the organic Bibb inside the drawer, a metaphor for you and your mother, living squished together in a house. Or something. Her voice echoes in your head: “You know if I wasn't your mom, we'd be BFFs.” Something she said three days before: “Don't think of me as your mom. Think of me as your fun roommate! Your mom-mate.” That echoes, too.
There are leftovers, though. Always. And if you say really loudly, “I wish we had some chocolate,” sometimes chocolate will actually appear. It will actually appear on your nightstand every day for a week. And one day you'll realize you forgot to change the Brita filter, and you forgot to pay the internet bill this month, and you forgot to set out a mouse trap (a humane one, relax), and you forgot to go grocery shopping. But someone will have already changed the Brita filter, and no one's asking you to pay for your internet, and there are no mice, and the fridge is pre-stocked with so much quinoa you could take an all-quinoa bath. And maybe every time you see your dad, he'll say “Hey, you look great! You know you don't need to exercise so much.” And you'll start to think you really do look great! And one day, if your blush cracks in your purse and gets pink powder everywhere and you have a very important job interview and can't leave the house without your cheeks looking a little pinkish because you have some weird hang-ups, your mom will probably have some blush in her drawer. And a purse you can borrow. She'll probably have other things too, things you haven't bought in 8 years. Luxurious things, like q-tips and cuticle cream. And actually maybe her bathroom will be like running through a Sephora on a very special episode of Supermarket Sweep. And maybe your step-dad is a psychiatrist and he'll say things like, “How are you?” but he'll say it in a way where he looks deeply into your soul and so every night you'll spill your guts about how hard it is to leave your best friends of 8 years behind and move back home. How it sometimes feels like you're 15 again and sometimes it feels like you're 45 and you should just give up. How you can't help but feel like you're doing it all wrong. And so he'll listen, and you won't have to pay for the session. And your mom will offer you a selection of teas.
by Emma Barrie, The Hairpin | Read more:
Image: uncredited
You made it out of Brooklyn without a stick-and-poke tattoo, which is something only a select few can say, so give yourself a little pat on the back. A little pat on the back where that stick-and-poke would have gone. You thought about it. About getting your best friend's initials, or an outline of Brooklyn, or an outline of that Brooklyn coffee shop you loved, or an outline of a cup of coffee and your favorite novel inside the outline of the Brooklyn coffee shop inside the outline of Brooklyn with the slogan “Ain't Nowhere Better, Ladies!” (a slogan you would have made up about Brooklyn while you were drunk on tequila gimlets and your best friend was sticking/poking you). And the best part about making it out without a tattoo, is that now, when your mom walks in on you naked three times in one morning, you have nothing to hide! Go ahead mom! Check this out! The same body you diapered, the same ass you wiped, the same vagina you looked at under a microscope or whatever you did 26 years ago! No need to knock! Absolutely nothing has changed! (Except your bedroom. Which is now your stepdad's sports-watching room.)You made it out and you're back home, and you're starting to understand why people love exercising so much. You never loved exercising before, but now it's like a religion for you. Exactly like a religion. Like the way Judaism is your religion, where you mostly ignore it and then once in a while you use it to get out of things or as an excuse for telling an off-color joke. And now! Now, exercise is serving a similar purpose, when there's nowhere to go and your house feels smaller and smaller and you can hear your mom downstairs yell up at you “I'm calling my cell phone! Feel for vibrations!” and you've looked through your high school yearbooks eighteen times screaming “WHAT WENT WRONG?” Just get on that exercise bike and pedal the pain away. Just cycle yourself into oblivion. And when your dad calls and says “Let's talk about your health insurance,” just pant heavily and say “I'm on the ol' bike, let me get back to you!” (It doesn't matter if you're actually on the bike. Just like it doesn't matter whether you're actually keeping kosher or you just don't want to eat that weird-looking ham.)
There's not a lot of space for beer in the family fridge. No one else drinks beer, really. You learned how to drink beer in college, and for four years after college, and all you've done for the last 8 years really (sorry, Mom) is drink beer. So you make a family contribution and purchase a six-pack. You stuff it in the vegetable drawer, next to some lettuce your mom picked from her garden. Squished together, the Sierra Nevada and the organic Bibb inside the drawer, a metaphor for you and your mother, living squished together in a house. Or something. Her voice echoes in your head: “You know if I wasn't your mom, we'd be BFFs.” Something she said three days before: “Don't think of me as your mom. Think of me as your fun roommate! Your mom-mate.” That echoes, too.
There are leftovers, though. Always. And if you say really loudly, “I wish we had some chocolate,” sometimes chocolate will actually appear. It will actually appear on your nightstand every day for a week. And one day you'll realize you forgot to change the Brita filter, and you forgot to pay the internet bill this month, and you forgot to set out a mouse trap (a humane one, relax), and you forgot to go grocery shopping. But someone will have already changed the Brita filter, and no one's asking you to pay for your internet, and there are no mice, and the fridge is pre-stocked with so much quinoa you could take an all-quinoa bath. And maybe every time you see your dad, he'll say “Hey, you look great! You know you don't need to exercise so much.” And you'll start to think you really do look great! And one day, if your blush cracks in your purse and gets pink powder everywhere and you have a very important job interview and can't leave the house without your cheeks looking a little pinkish because you have some weird hang-ups, your mom will probably have some blush in her drawer. And a purse you can borrow. She'll probably have other things too, things you haven't bought in 8 years. Luxurious things, like q-tips and cuticle cream. And actually maybe her bathroom will be like running through a Sephora on a very special episode of Supermarket Sweep. And maybe your step-dad is a psychiatrist and he'll say things like, “How are you?” but he'll say it in a way where he looks deeply into your soul and so every night you'll spill your guts about how hard it is to leave your best friends of 8 years behind and move back home. How it sometimes feels like you're 15 again and sometimes it feels like you're 45 and you should just give up. How you can't help but feel like you're doing it all wrong. And so he'll listen, and you won't have to pay for the session. And your mom will offer you a selection of teas.
by Emma Barrie, The Hairpin | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Anatomy of the Euro Crisis
“Ten years into its existence, the Euro is a resounding success. The single currency has become a symbol of Europe, considered by Euro-area citizens to be among the most positive results of European integration….” Barely five years after the European Commission issued this 2008 celebration of its new currency, the statement seems highly ironic. Europe is locked in a struggle for the survival of the euro—and indeed, for the prosperity of the continent and its people. German chancellor Angela Merkel does not exaggerate when she says that “the euro crisis is the greatest test Europe has faced since the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957”—the foundation of the European Economic Community (EEC).
Across southern Europe, millions of families are living in misery, as rates of unemployment exceed 25 percent in Greece and Spain and approach 15 percent in Portugal (and, on the western periphery, in Ireland), while the salaries of teachers, nurses, and other public employees are slashed, and firms go bankrupt in unprecedented numbers. The suicide rate in Greece has doubled during the past three years. This economic stagnation is now depressing performance even in Germany, normally the engine of the European economy; gross domestic product (GDP) in the 17 Eurozone countries is forecast to contract this year.
How did the Europeans get into this mess—and how are they going to get out of it? There are no obvious answers—indeed, the regional variation in the answers usually given across Europe is telling. But deeper analysis can be illuminating, not only about the euro crisis itself, but about that unique political construction that is the European Union (EU).
“Rules Rule”: Putting a Theory into Practice
Reading about the euro in the financial press is like watching Rashomon, that marvelous Japanese film about memory and forgetting. Many who once applauded the monetary union now condemn it. Today, everyone agrees that the institutional structure of economic and monetary union (EMU) is inadequate. Why then did the Europeans agree to it in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992?
Monetary union was adopted as much for political reasons as for economic ones. The EU members were dissatisfied with the previous system that fixed their exchange rates within narrow bands—a system that provided monetary stability but required painful negotiations when current-account imbalances arose between the member states; moreover, some governments resented the dominant role played by the German Bundesbank in this process. Ironically (in retrospect), the move to EMU was in some respects an effort to escape this need for transnational negotiations about economic policy.
Reading about the euro in the financial press is like watching Rashomon, that marvelous Japanese film about memory and forgetting. Many who once applauded the monetary union now condemn it. Today, everyone agrees that the institutional structure of economic and monetary union (EMU) is inadequate. Why then did the Europeans agree to it in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992?
Monetary union was adopted as much for political reasons as for economic ones. The EU members were dissatisfied with the previous system that fixed their exchange rates within narrow bands—a system that provided monetary stability but required painful negotiations when current-account imbalances arose between the member states; moreover, some governments resented the dominant role played by the German Bundesbank in this process. Ironically (in retrospect), the move to EMU was in some respects an effort to escape this need for transnational negotiations about economic policy.
by Peter A. Hall, Harvard Magazine | Read more:
Photograph by Panayiotis Tzamaros/Demotix/Corbis
Fashion Week Spring 2014
[ed. My nephew modeling for Armani. I think he's done in Milan now, Paris up next. What an interesting life.]
Monday, June 24, 2013
Privacy and the Threat to the Self
In the wake of continuing revelations of government spying programs and the recent Supreme Court ruling on DNA collection – both of which push the generally accepted boundaries against state intrusion on the person — the issue of privacy is foremost on the public mind. The frequent mantra, heard from both media commentators and government officials, is that we face a “trade-off” between safety and convenience on one hand and privacy on the other. We just need, we are told, to find the right balance.
This way of framing the issue makes sense if you understand privacy solely as a political or legal concept. And its political importance is certainly part of what makes privacy so important: what is private is what is yours alone to control, without interference from others or the state. But the concept of privacy also matters for another, deeper reason. It is intimately connected to what it is to be an autonomous person.
What makes your thoughts your thoughts? One answer is that you have what philosophers sometimes call “privileged access” to them. This means at least two things. First, you access them in a way I can’t. Even if I could walk a mile in your shoes, I can’t know what you feel in the same way you can: you see it from the inside so to speak. Second, you can, at least sometimes, control what I know about your thoughts. You can hide your true feelings from me, or let me have the key to your heart.
The idea that the mind is essentially private is a central element of the Cartesian concept of the self — a concept that has been largely abandoned, for a variety of reasons. Descartes not only held that my thoughts were private, he took them to be transparent — all thoughts were conscious. Freud cured us of that. Descartes also thought that the only way to account for my special access to my thoughts was to take thoughts to be made out of a different sort of stuff than my body — to take our minds, in short, to be non-physical, distinct from the brain. Contemporary neuroscience and psychology have convinced many of us otherwise.
But while Descartes’s overall view has been rightly rejected, there is something profoundly right about the connection between privacy and the self, something that recent events should cause us to appreciate. What is right about it, in my view, is that to be an autonomous person is to be capable of having privileged access (in the two senses defined above) to information about your psychological profile — your hopes, dreams, beliefs and fears. A capacity for privacy is a necessary condition of autonomous personhood.
To get a sense of what I mean, imagine that I could telepathically read all your conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings — I could know about them in as much detail as you know about them yourself — and further, that you could not, in any way, control my access. You don’t, in other words, share your thoughts with me; I take them. The power I would have over you would of course be immense. Not only could you not hide from me, I would know instantly a great amount about how the outside world affects you, what scares you, what makes you act in the ways you do. And that means I could not only know what you think, I could to a large extent control what you do.
That is the political worry about the loss of privacy: it threatens a loss of freedom. And the worry, of course, is not merely theoretical. Targeted ad programs, like Google’s, which track your Internet searches for the purpose of sending you ads that reflect your interests can create deeply complex psychological profiles — especially when one conducts searches for emotional or personal advice information: Am I gay? What is terrorism? What is atheism? If the government or some entity should request the identity of the person making these searches for national security purposes, we’d be on the way to having a real-world version of our thought experiment.
But the loss of privacy doesn’t just threaten political freedom. Return for a moment to our thought experiment where I telepathically know all your thoughts whether you like it or not From my perspective, the perspective of the knower — your existence as a distinct person would begin to shrink. Our relationship would be so lopsided that there might cease to be, at least to me, anything subjective about you. As I learn what reactions you will have to stimuli, why you do what you do, you will become like any other object to be manipulated. You would be, as we say, dehumanized.
This way of framing the issue makes sense if you understand privacy solely as a political or legal concept. And its political importance is certainly part of what makes privacy so important: what is private is what is yours alone to control, without interference from others or the state. But the concept of privacy also matters for another, deeper reason. It is intimately connected to what it is to be an autonomous person.What makes your thoughts your thoughts? One answer is that you have what philosophers sometimes call “privileged access” to them. This means at least two things. First, you access them in a way I can’t. Even if I could walk a mile in your shoes, I can’t know what you feel in the same way you can: you see it from the inside so to speak. Second, you can, at least sometimes, control what I know about your thoughts. You can hide your true feelings from me, or let me have the key to your heart.
The idea that the mind is essentially private is a central element of the Cartesian concept of the self — a concept that has been largely abandoned, for a variety of reasons. Descartes not only held that my thoughts were private, he took them to be transparent — all thoughts were conscious. Freud cured us of that. Descartes also thought that the only way to account for my special access to my thoughts was to take thoughts to be made out of a different sort of stuff than my body — to take our minds, in short, to be non-physical, distinct from the brain. Contemporary neuroscience and psychology have convinced many of us otherwise.
But while Descartes’s overall view has been rightly rejected, there is something profoundly right about the connection between privacy and the self, something that recent events should cause us to appreciate. What is right about it, in my view, is that to be an autonomous person is to be capable of having privileged access (in the two senses defined above) to information about your psychological profile — your hopes, dreams, beliefs and fears. A capacity for privacy is a necessary condition of autonomous personhood.
To get a sense of what I mean, imagine that I could telepathically read all your conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings — I could know about them in as much detail as you know about them yourself — and further, that you could not, in any way, control my access. You don’t, in other words, share your thoughts with me; I take them. The power I would have over you would of course be immense. Not only could you not hide from me, I would know instantly a great amount about how the outside world affects you, what scares you, what makes you act in the ways you do. And that means I could not only know what you think, I could to a large extent control what you do.
That is the political worry about the loss of privacy: it threatens a loss of freedom. And the worry, of course, is not merely theoretical. Targeted ad programs, like Google’s, which track your Internet searches for the purpose of sending you ads that reflect your interests can create deeply complex psychological profiles — especially when one conducts searches for emotional or personal advice information: Am I gay? What is terrorism? What is atheism? If the government or some entity should request the identity of the person making these searches for national security purposes, we’d be on the way to having a real-world version of our thought experiment.
But the loss of privacy doesn’t just threaten political freedom. Return for a moment to our thought experiment where I telepathically know all your thoughts whether you like it or not From my perspective, the perspective of the knower — your existence as a distinct person would begin to shrink. Our relationship would be so lopsided that there might cease to be, at least to me, anything subjective about you. As I learn what reactions you will have to stimuli, why you do what you do, you will become like any other object to be manipulated. You would be, as we say, dehumanized.
by Michael P. Lynch, NY Times | Read more:
Image via:
Deeda Blair’s Elegance of Conviction
In researching my last book, “Far From the Tree,” I became close to Harry and Laura Slatkin, whose work on behalf of people with autism — co-founding a charter school, establishing the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain — has set a new standard for parent activism. When I asked Laura how she came to such a vision for medical crusading, she gave credit to Deeda Blair. Four years ago, the Slatkins invited my husband and me to dinner with their muse. Deeda mixes austerity with intimacy, and at that first dinner, I found her both aloof and engaging; she seemed to offer only an impression of herself, but to see the rest of us more boldly than we’d intended. Several accomplished scientists were in the klatch that evening, and Deeda asked questions with her characteristic quiet intensity, as though she were conducting discreet but critical interviews on behalf of the Nobel committee. Her style is at once embracing and exclusive, as though it excluded most of the world but not you, whoever you might be on this particular evening.
Deeda was hardly brought up to be an activist. She grew up in Chicago, went to the Academy of the Sacred Heart for Girls to be educated and made her debut in 1949. She attended a two-year junior college, and lived a vigorously social life, traveling widely. Soon after her disastrous first marriage ended, she met her true love, William McCormick Blair Jr., at Eunice and Sargent Shriver’s house. Bill was a partner at a law firm with Adlai Stevenson at the time, and was a Kennedy intimate; Eunice was the chaperone through their courtship. Shortly after Bill was appointed Kennedy’s ambassador to Denmark, Deeda married him at Frederiksborg Castle. Bill was later Johnson’s ambassador to the Philippines. Deeda brought tremendous style to her ambassadorial posts; WWD called her “a peacock among the wrens.”
In the meanwhile, Bill had introduced her to the medical philanthropist Mary Lasker, who helped build up the National Institutes of Health and led the War on Cancer. Deeda told me that at Sacred Heart, she had worn “the world’s ugliest uniform” and had not been allowed to study biology, and she reacted against the first problem with couture and against the second with Mary Lasker. She and Lasker were soon the best of friends, summering together in the South of France at Villa Fiorentina. Lasker had a gift for leading people with power to those who could conceptualize medical quandaries; she would have Greta Garbo and Princess Grace to dinner with Michael DeBakey (the distinguished heart surgeon) or James Watson (the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA). Lasker saw that Deeda could carry that tradition forward. In 1965, Deeda became vice president of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation.
Lasker was on the National Cancer Advisory Board, so Deeda focused initially on cancer research. She met the scientists, asked them questions, read their papers. When she visited New York, she would stay with Lasker, who would introduce her to more physicians. “Mary asked a great friend, David Karnofsky, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, to take me on,” Deeda recalled. “And that was the most extraordinary learning experience — whether it was rounds, whether it was lectures, whether he was showing me how to dissect chicken embryos and look for liver damage. He made me feel that there was a role for a layperson.” Soon enough, Deeda was on the Breast Cancer Task Force treatment committee, where she was the only woman. She also served for 12 years on the board of the American Cancer Society, where she was on the research committee. She began going to jury meetings for the Lasker Awards, the most prestigious medical prize in the United States. She was a voracious learner.
Soon oncologists were talking about the sudden uptick in a previously exotic cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma, occurring mostly among gay men. Deeda was there for the initial meetings on the subject, which led her to be in the front lines of emerging AIDS research.
She joined the visiting committee at the Harvard School of Public Health and worked with the H.I.V. team there, which was led by Max Essex. “AIDS was the first time I ever really asked anyone for money,” Deeda said. “We needed to know how it was transmitted, and Max wanted to study that. And I asked Mary Lasker for $50,000. A couple of years later, I identified another foundation, asked them for lunch and behaved like the most appalling female. ‘You have been so generous, you’ve done this, you’ve done that. And I hate to ask you for one more thing.’ And I really did. I was so embarrassed that tears were going down my cheeks. I said, ‘We’ve got to have a laser cell sorter.’ And then I rattled off what a laser cell sorter was. And they said, ‘Deeda, stop. We will do everything in our power to get you your laser cell sorter.’ And they did it.”
Deeda soon established a trademark style. Who else would introduce Nobel laureates to Hubert de Givenchy? Who else would come home from the Paris couture shows with $267,000 for an automatic sequencer to identify African variants of H.I.V.? Daniel Romualdez, her Yale-educated architect and interior designer, said, “One cannot overestimate how much she has done for AIDS — she was among the first people of her stature deeply involved with fund-raising and working with researchers when people in society would not even mention the illness.” Essex once wrote that Deeda always had “an understanding of the whole interlocking process of getting things done … and sees one thing always — hope.”
by Andrew Soloman, NY Times Magazine | Read more:
Photograph by Julia Hetta
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