Friday, June 28, 2013
Room for Sex
The suburb’s respectability was a huge attraction for me at the anxious moment of buying a flat. But after a few years of living there, that same respectability had become a bore. Then it became oppressive. The buildings began to represent a desiccated social life, defined by emotional reserve and obligation. Patrolled by curtain-twitching killjoys, Morningside seemed determined to put a stop to fun of any kind.
In retrospect, Morningside itself probably had little to do with it. Moving there coincided with the moment at which my wife and I became fully grown adults. It was a structural problem. With two careers, two kids and no money, there was little time for pleasures, sex included. Of course, we bore it all stoically and, after a while, we learned together that this was simply what adult life was like, a mess of contradictory demands, with neither the time nor the space in which they might all be satisfied. We were hardly alone: every other couple we knew seemed to find themselves in the same situation. Still, our feelings were real enough, and being an academic, I set to reading about them.
It’s odd how little architects have had to say on the subject of sex. If they’re routinely designing the buildings in which sex happens, then you might expect them to spend more time thinking about it. Buildings frame and house our sexual lives. They tell us where and when we can, and cannot, have sex, and with whom. To escape buildings for sex — to use a park, a beach, or the back seat of a car — is a transgression of one kind or another. Most of us keep sex indoors and out of sight.
An important early find in my reading was Mating in Captivity (2006) by Esther Perel, the New York-based sex therapist. According to Perel, sex wastes time, needs space, and (most intriguingly) is inhibited by too much intimacy. All these things have implications for architecture, which in the West has been coloured by the language of efficiency for at least a century. By contrast, in Perel’s terms, sex was profligacy and decadence. She also remarked that ‘sexual desire and good citizenship don’t play by the same rules’.
This struck a chord. I had long been bothered by the architectural concern for civility. The sudden proliferation in the 2000s of National Lottery-funded public spaces in the UK seemed to be rooted in a longing to return to Edwardian times, with all the attendant anxieties about sex and class. This longing was abundantly clear in Foster and Partners’ redevelopment of Trafalgar Square (2003): a magnificent architectural project, but one that limited human behaviour to the polite promenade. Perel’s understanding of the limits of civility, from a sexual point of view, helped me to form a powerful critique of architecture. In sum, architecture was principally about order; sex was not.
by Richard J. Williams, Aeon | Read more:
Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation complex in Marseilles (1952). Photo by Stephen Burrows
On Early Warning Signs
At a closed meeting held in Boston in October 2009, the room was packed with high-flyers in foreign policy and finance: Henry Kissinger, Paul Volcker, Andy Haldane, and Joseph Stiglitz, among others, as well as representatives of sovereign wealth funds, pensions, and endowments worth more than a trillion dollars—a significant slice of the world’s wealth. The session opened with the following telling question: “Have the last couple of years shown that our traditional finance/risk models are irretrievably broken and that models and approaches from other fields (for example, ecology) may offer a better understanding of the interconnectedness and fragility of complex financial systems?”
Science is a creative human enterprise. Discoveries are made in the context of our creations: our models and hypotheses about how the world works. Big failures, however, can be a wake-up call about entrenched views, and nothing produces humility or gains attention faster than an event that blindsides so many so immediately.
Examples of catastrophic and systemic changes have been gathering in a variety of fields, typically in specialized contexts with little cross-connection. Only recently have we begun to look for generic patterns in the web of linked causes and effects that puts disparate events into a common framework—a framework that operates on a sufficiently high level to include geologic climate shifts, epileptic seizures, market and fishery crashes, and rapid shifts from healthy ecosystems to biological deserts.
The main themes of this framework are twofold: First, they are all complex systems of interconnected and interdependent parts. Second, they are nonlinear, non-equilibrium systems that can undergo rapid and drastic state changes.
Consider first the complex interconnections. Economics is not typically thought of as a global systems problem. Indeed, investment banks are famous for a brand of tunnel vision that focuses risk management at the individual firm level and ignores the difficult and costlier, albeit less frequent, systemic or financial-web problem. Monitoring the ecosystem-like network of firms with interlocking balance sheets is not in the risk manager’s job description. Even so, there is emerging agreement that ignoring the seemingly incomprehensible meshing of counterparty obligations and mutual interdependencies (an accountant’s nightmare, more recursive than Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on first?”) prevented real pricing of risk premiums, which helped to propagate the current crisis.
Science is a creative human enterprise. Discoveries are made in the context of our creations: our models and hypotheses about how the world works. Big failures, however, can be a wake-up call about entrenched views, and nothing produces humility or gains attention faster than an event that blindsides so many so immediately.Examples of catastrophic and systemic changes have been gathering in a variety of fields, typically in specialized contexts with little cross-connection. Only recently have we begun to look for generic patterns in the web of linked causes and effects that puts disparate events into a common framework—a framework that operates on a sufficiently high level to include geologic climate shifts, epileptic seizures, market and fishery crashes, and rapid shifts from healthy ecosystems to biological deserts.
The main themes of this framework are twofold: First, they are all complex systems of interconnected and interdependent parts. Second, they are nonlinear, non-equilibrium systems that can undergo rapid and drastic state changes.
Consider first the complex interconnections. Economics is not typically thought of as a global systems problem. Indeed, investment banks are famous for a brand of tunnel vision that focuses risk management at the individual firm level and ignores the difficult and costlier, albeit less frequent, systemic or financial-web problem. Monitoring the ecosystem-like network of firms with interlocking balance sheets is not in the risk manager’s job description. Even so, there is emerging agreement that ignoring the seemingly incomprehensible meshing of counterparty obligations and mutual interdependencies (an accountant’s nightmare, more recursive than Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on first?”) prevented real pricing of risk premiums, which helped to propagate the current crisis.
A parallel situation exists in fisheries, where stocks are traditionally managed one species at a time. Alarm over collapsing fish stocks, however, is helping to create the current push for ecosystem-based ocean management. This is a step in the right direction, but the current ecosystem simulation models remain incapable of reproducing realistic population crashes. And the same is true of most climate simulation models: Though the geological record tells us that global temperatures can change very quickly, the models consistently underestimate that possibility. This is related to the next property, the nonlinear, non-equilibrium nature of systems.
Most engineered devices, consisting of mechanical springs, transistors, and the like, are built to be stable. That is, if stressed from rest, or equilibrium, they spring back. Many simple ecological models, physiological models, and even climate and economic models are built by assuming the same principle: a globally stable equilibrium. A related simplification is to see the world as consisting of separate parts that can be studied in a linear way, one piece at a time. These pieces can then be summed independently to make the whole. Researchers have developed a very large tool kit of analytical methods and statistics based on this linear idea, and it has proven invaluable for studying simple engineered devices. But even when many of the complex systems that interest us are not linear, we persist with these tools and models. It is a case of looking under the lamppost because the light is better even though we know the lost keys are in the shadows. Linear systems produce nice stationary statistics—constant risk metrics, for example. Because they assume that a process does not vary through time, one can subsample it to get an idea of what the larger universe of possibilities looks like. This characteristic of linear systems appeals to our normal heuristic thinking.
Nonlinear systems, however, are not so well behaved. They can appear stationary for a long while, then without anything changing, they exhibit jumps in variability—so-called “heteroscedasticity.” For example, if one looks at the range of economic variables over the past decade (daily market movements, GDP changes, etc.), one might guess that variability and the universe of possibilities are very modest. This was the modus operandi of normal risk management. As a consequence, the likelihood of some of the large moves we saw in 2008, which happened over so many consecutive days, should have been less than once in the age of the universe.
Our problem is that the scientific desire to simplify has taken over, something that Einstein warned against when he paraphrased Occam: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Thinking of natural and economic systems as essentially stable and decomposable into parts is a good initial hypothesis, current observations and measurements do not support that hypothesis—hence our continual surprise. Just as we like the idea of constancy, we are stubborn to change. The 19th century American humorist Josh Billings, perhaps, put it best: “It ain’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that just ain’t so.”
Most engineered devices, consisting of mechanical springs, transistors, and the like, are built to be stable. That is, if stressed from rest, or equilibrium, they spring back. Many simple ecological models, physiological models, and even climate and economic models are built by assuming the same principle: a globally stable equilibrium. A related simplification is to see the world as consisting of separate parts that can be studied in a linear way, one piece at a time. These pieces can then be summed independently to make the whole. Researchers have developed a very large tool kit of analytical methods and statistics based on this linear idea, and it has proven invaluable for studying simple engineered devices. But even when many of the complex systems that interest us are not linear, we persist with these tools and models. It is a case of looking under the lamppost because the light is better even though we know the lost keys are in the shadows. Linear systems produce nice stationary statistics—constant risk metrics, for example. Because they assume that a process does not vary through time, one can subsample it to get an idea of what the larger universe of possibilities looks like. This characteristic of linear systems appeals to our normal heuristic thinking.
Nonlinear systems, however, are not so well behaved. They can appear stationary for a long while, then without anything changing, they exhibit jumps in variability—so-called “heteroscedasticity.” For example, if one looks at the range of economic variables over the past decade (daily market movements, GDP changes, etc.), one might guess that variability and the universe of possibilities are very modest. This was the modus operandi of normal risk management. As a consequence, the likelihood of some of the large moves we saw in 2008, which happened over so many consecutive days, should have been less than once in the age of the universe.
Our problem is that the scientific desire to simplify has taken over, something that Einstein warned against when he paraphrased Occam: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Thinking of natural and economic systems as essentially stable and decomposable into parts is a good initial hypothesis, current observations and measurements do not support that hypothesis—hence our continual surprise. Just as we like the idea of constancy, we are stubborn to change. The 19th century American humorist Josh Billings, perhaps, put it best: “It ain’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that just ain’t so.”
by George Sugihara, Seed | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The All-American Bank Heist
[ed. Great story. I missed it when it originally appeared in GQ. Now that I'm more familiar with the area it has even more relevance.]
The ballsiest bank heist in recent memory started off without much fanfare at all.
It was a late September Tuesday, a much needed workday for the dozen guys huddled outside a strip mall in Monroe, Washington, a bedroom community some thirty miles northeast of Seattle. The men had all answered the same curious ad for employment, posted on Craigslist the week before. Its instructions were very specific: Applicants were told to gather in this exact spot, on a small patch of blacktop between the Jack in the Box and the Bank of America at 11 A.M. Not that any of the men thought much about the location. Like the rest of the country, Monroe was getting hammered by the recession, and these guys would meet anywhere if it meant nine days of work and $28.50 an hour.
The author of the post—someone from the Clean Monroe Beautification Project—went on: “All workers must purchase safety glasses or equivalent eye protection, ventilator mask, yellow safety vest, long sleeves and no shorts, along with proper foot protection.” After applying, each man received an e-mail from the supervisor, telling him to show up wearing ablue shirt. “If a project manager is not there,” it concluded, somewhat ominously, “do not leave.”
As the men waited, one landscaper was already going hard at it. He'd been there since before the others arrived, killing weeds outside the Jack in the Box, and he continued working the lawn until exactly 11:05 A.M., when a Brinks armored truck rolled up to the Bank of America branch next door. As the messenger got out and started wheeling bags of cash to the bank, the landscaper stopped spritzing, tossed aside his pesticide sprayer, and sprinted toward the truck. He was only a few paces from the guard when he fired enough pepper spray to stun a 1,000-pound grizzly bear. As the guard clawed at his eyes in pain, his attacker simply grabbed the bags, heavy with cash, and sprinted into the nearby woods.
The whole job took about thirty seconds.
When the police arrived a few minutes later, they surveyed an entire parking lot filled with landscapers matching the thief's description. “We just got scammed!” one shouted to detective Tim “Buzz” Buzzell. A sixteen-year veteran of the force with a lantern jaw and a linebacker's build, Buzz was used to chasing down the occasional stolen four-wheeler. This Thomas Crown Affair shit was new to him. With K9s barking, he ran down behind the strip mall where the crook was last spotted. Along the gravel leading to the woods, he found a trail of discarded items: a blue cap, a long brown wig, a white particle mask, sunglasses. The path stopped at the edge of Woods Creek, a narrow stream less than two feet deep. Buzz stood on the bank, watching the water ripple quietly over the jagged rocks.
An hour of searching, with helicopters circling overhead, turned up nothing. Then one of Buzz's patrol officers called him over to something floating in the water about 200 yards downstream. Buzz raced through the underbrush to where the creek flowed under the concrete pillars of a rusty and abandoned train trestle. Bobbing up against a fallen log was the crook's apparent and bizarre means of escape: a black-and-yellow inner tube, decorated with a picture of a bee next to the word hornet. A few feet away, a blue shirt and a two-way radio had been tossed on the creek's bank. Buzz and his partner, detective Barry Hatch, a former scuba instructor with formidable ears and a crew cut to show them off, stared blankly into the woods.
The bandit was gone, along with $400,000.
Word quickly spread across the Internet about Monroe's outrageous caper. A local radio caller named the crook D. B. Tuber, in homage to the famed 1970s bandit D. B. Cooper, who parachuted from a hijacked plane with $200,000. One blogger dubbed it “the most awesome robbery ever.” Another said the thief was a mastermind who pulled off a “Hollywood” heist.
The ballsiest bank heist in recent memory started off without much fanfare at all.
It was a late September Tuesday, a much needed workday for the dozen guys huddled outside a strip mall in Monroe, Washington, a bedroom community some thirty miles northeast of Seattle. The men had all answered the same curious ad for employment, posted on Craigslist the week before. Its instructions were very specific: Applicants were told to gather in this exact spot, on a small patch of blacktop between the Jack in the Box and the Bank of America at 11 A.M. Not that any of the men thought much about the location. Like the rest of the country, Monroe was getting hammered by the recession, and these guys would meet anywhere if it meant nine days of work and $28.50 an hour.The author of the post—someone from the Clean Monroe Beautification Project—went on: “All workers must purchase safety glasses or equivalent eye protection, ventilator mask, yellow safety vest, long sleeves and no shorts, along with proper foot protection.” After applying, each man received an e-mail from the supervisor, telling him to show up wearing ablue shirt. “If a project manager is not there,” it concluded, somewhat ominously, “do not leave.”
As the men waited, one landscaper was already going hard at it. He'd been there since before the others arrived, killing weeds outside the Jack in the Box, and he continued working the lawn until exactly 11:05 A.M., when a Brinks armored truck rolled up to the Bank of America branch next door. As the messenger got out and started wheeling bags of cash to the bank, the landscaper stopped spritzing, tossed aside his pesticide sprayer, and sprinted toward the truck. He was only a few paces from the guard when he fired enough pepper spray to stun a 1,000-pound grizzly bear. As the guard clawed at his eyes in pain, his attacker simply grabbed the bags, heavy with cash, and sprinted into the nearby woods.
The whole job took about thirty seconds.
When the police arrived a few minutes later, they surveyed an entire parking lot filled with landscapers matching the thief's description. “We just got scammed!” one shouted to detective Tim “Buzz” Buzzell. A sixteen-year veteran of the force with a lantern jaw and a linebacker's build, Buzz was used to chasing down the occasional stolen four-wheeler. This Thomas Crown Affair shit was new to him. With K9s barking, he ran down behind the strip mall where the crook was last spotted. Along the gravel leading to the woods, he found a trail of discarded items: a blue cap, a long brown wig, a white particle mask, sunglasses. The path stopped at the edge of Woods Creek, a narrow stream less than two feet deep. Buzz stood on the bank, watching the water ripple quietly over the jagged rocks.
An hour of searching, with helicopters circling overhead, turned up nothing. Then one of Buzz's patrol officers called him over to something floating in the water about 200 yards downstream. Buzz raced through the underbrush to where the creek flowed under the concrete pillars of a rusty and abandoned train trestle. Bobbing up against a fallen log was the crook's apparent and bizarre means of escape: a black-and-yellow inner tube, decorated with a picture of a bee next to the word hornet. A few feet away, a blue shirt and a two-way radio had been tossed on the creek's bank. Buzz and his partner, detective Barry Hatch, a former scuba instructor with formidable ears and a crew cut to show them off, stared blankly into the woods.
The bandit was gone, along with $400,000.
Word quickly spread across the Internet about Monroe's outrageous caper. A local radio caller named the crook D. B. Tuber, in homage to the famed 1970s bandit D. B. Cooper, who parachuted from a hijacked plane with $200,000. One blogger dubbed it “the most awesome robbery ever.” Another said the thief was a mastermind who pulled off a “Hollywood” heist.
Australia, Go to Your Room
I’d like to tell you a story about my country, Australia.
We’re healthy, and things are going well on many fronts. We weathered the GFC better than most nations, with low unemployment (5.5% in May 2013), a strong dollar, contained inflation, and solid economic growth. In 2012, the International Monetary Fund said Australia had the strongest economy in the developed world.
Also, we’re in a state of political disarray.
Until the night of Wednesday 26 June 2013, when there was a coup, our Prime Minister was Julia Gillard. She was Australia’s first female leader and, as it happens, unmarried, childless, an atheist, and from a working-class background. She is a redhead, not skinny, and not young. None of those things should have mattered; they all did.
Gillard’s trip to the top was controversial and dramatic. She has been compared to Lady Macbeth and, while that’s a twisting of the original tale, she did first stand on the podium with blood on her hands.
by Kirsten Alexander, Open Field via Medium | Read more:
Image: Northern Daily Leader
Thursday, June 27, 2013
How BP Got Screwed on Gulf Oil Spill Claims
One of McLean’s clients, a real estate agent in Brandon, Fla., an hour from the Gulf, wants $80,000 from BP, reflecting a revenue dip in 2010 that “had nothing to do with the spill,” the attorney candidly admits. (The culprit was the bursting of the Florida real estate bubble.) Under the settlement, though, “that’s a good claim,” McLean says, “and we’re going to get paid.”
He has millions of reasons to be confident. A construction company in northern Alabama, 200 miles from the coast, was recently awarded $9.7 million, even though it does no work near the Gulf of Mexico, according to court records. Attorneys are submitting claims on their own behalf. A law office in central Louisiana that actually enjoyed improved profits in 2010 collected $3.3 million. The compensation process is confidential, so claimants’ identities aren’t a matter of public record, though the amounts are.
The blowout of the Macondo well cost 11 men their lives and, according to the government, spewed 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf. It shut down fisheries and despoiled beaches. Oystermen and charter boat captains lost months and, in some cases, years of work. While much of the Gulf economy has recovered, degraded oil remains in coastal marshes in Louisiana. Some ruined small businesses never reopened.
BP apologized and opened its checkbook to make amends. One component of the company’s response, an economic-damages fund initially expected to dole out $7.8 billion, now appears likely to cost billions more, BP said in an appellate court brief filed in May. The British company blames the overage on Patrick Juneau, a Louisiana-based court-appointed administrator whom it accuses of compensating “fictitious and inflated losses.” On June 21, the controversy intensified when Juneau suspended an attorney on his staff amid allegations of kickbacks. Juneau announced that he’s investigating. People familiar with the situation but who are not authorized to speak on the record say the FBI has been alerted.
Even as it continues a cheerful quarter-billion-dollar print and television ad campaign about how the Gulf has returned to normal, BP is crying foul. “It was never our intention for the company to become an open cash register for every claim or project anyone could dream up,” says spokesman Geoff Morrell. Locals say BP may have been naive. “This is Louisiana, after all,” says Danny Abel, a longtime New Orleans plaintiffs’ lawyer not involved in the case. “A big foreign company with deep pockets and you’re surprised there’s a feeding frenzy? Come on, man.”
by Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Photo: NASA
Michele Wie Still Puttering Along
After four amateurs hit their drives, the group's lone professional, ranked 100th in the world, stepped up to the tee. Clad in an orange Nike polo shirt, with a dyed-pink ponytail pulled through her cap, she took a couple of practice swings with a fairway wood. The young golfer examined the hole, a sharp dogleg right, and took her stance.
Up close, her swing is a marvel to behold. At six feet tall, her lean frame gives her the ability to create a long and fluid motion, with incredible extension. Her flexibility is off the charts.
But the end result of that magnificent roundhouse swing on the 12th tee was a wayward drive, which tailed away from the center. She leaned, trying to coax it back toward the fairway, to no avail.
Michelle Wie found the rough -- a place that she has become all too familiar with.
The fact that she's a dismal 144th in driving accuracy on the LPGA tour only begins to tell the story of what is wrong with Michelle Wie's game. In no statistical category does she presently rank in the top 25. At 44th in putts per round, 68th in greens in regulation, and 82nd in sand saves, she is completely out of sync from tee to green.
Those dreadful stats have, not surprisingly, translated to poor results. In 10 starts this year prior to the ShopRite, Wie missed the cut five times. Her best finish was a tie for 28th at the LPGA Lotte, in her home state of Hawaii. She'd amassed less than $30,000 in purse earnings in 2013. Two seasons ago, she made roughly that amount per tournament.
Somehow, Wie, now 23, has managed to remain incredibly upbeat -- at least when she's between the ropes. During the ShopRite pro-am, she frequently offered encouragement to her playing partners. At one point, when one of the amateurs was struggling, Wie spoke to him for several minutes, in an effort to get him to relax and have fun. It worked: He began to play better after the chat.
"People get nervous when they play in pro-ams," Wie said. "There's no need to be embarrassed. I try to remind them to have fun out there."
It's possible that the specter of playing with the one-time wunderkind intimidated the amateur. The daunting seaside layout and the spectacular views offered at a number of the holes may also have contributed to his nerves. One thing that certainly couldn't be blamed, though, was the size of the gallery. Michelle Wie's parents, mother Bo and father B.J., were the only two spectators.
They stood approximately 50 yards apart as they watched their daughter's tee shot on 12. These positions are the norm. They are seldom together on the course. Many times, they're actually on opposite sides of the hole, in an effort to secure prime viewing positions. On pro-am day, with no one else in the gallery, this was not an issue. Still, they frequently kept their distance. And after the shot was hit, they made their way down the fairway with an intensity normally reserved for Sunday at Augusta.
Wie followed her errant tee shot with a mediocre approach on the par-4, 40 feet away from the flag. She walked down the fairway, taking practice swings with an invisible club, searching for the form that propelled her into the national consciousness a decade ago, when she was just 13 and played in the final group at the prestigious Kraft Nabisco Championship -- an LPGA major. Looking lost, Michelle Wie called out for help.
"Omma!" The Korean word for mom.
Omma was close by. She usually is.
Image: Getty Images
Goodbye Miami
When the water receded after Hurricane Milo of 2030, there was a foot of sand covering the famous bow-tie floor in the lobby of the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach. A dead manatee floated in the pool where Elvis had once swum. Most of the damage occurred not from the hurricane's 175-mph winds, but from the 24-foot storm surge that overwhelmed the low-lying city. In South Beach, the old art-deco buildings were swept off their foundations. Mansions on Star Island were flooded up to their cut-glass doorknobs. A 17-mile stretch of Highway A1A that ran along the famous beaches up to Fort Lauderdale disappeared into the Atlantic. The storm knocked out the wastewater-treatment plant on Virginia Key, forcing the city to dump hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Biscayne Bay. Tampons and condoms littered the beaches, and the stench of human excrement stoked fears of cholera. More than 800 people died, many of them swept away by the surging waters that submerged much of Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale; 13 people were killed in traffic accidents as they scrambled to escape the city after the news spread – falsely, it turned out – that one of the nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, an aging power plant 24 miles south of Miami, had been destroyed by the surge and sent a radioactive cloud over the city.
The president, of course, said Miami would be back, that the hurricane did not kill the city, and that Americans did not give up. But it was clear to those not fooling themselves that this storm was the beginning of the end. With sea levels more than a foot higher than they'd been at the dawn of the century, South Florida was wet, vulnerable and bankrupt. Attempts had been made to armor the coastline, to build sea walls and elevate buildings, but it was a futile undertaking. The coastline from Miami Beach up to Jupiter had been a little more than a series of rugged limestone crags since the mid-2020s, when the state, unable to lay out $100 million every few years to pump in fresh sand, had given up trying to save South Florida's world-famous beaches. In that past decade, tourist visits had plummeted by 40 percent, even after the Florida legislature agreed to allow casino gambling in a desperate attempt to raise revenue for storm protection. The city of Homestead, in southern Miami-Dade County, which had been flattened by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, had to be completely abandoned. Thousands of tract homes were bulldozed because they were a public health hazard. In the parts of the county that were still inhabitable, only the wealthiest could afford to insure their homes. Mortgages were nearly impossible to get, mostly because banks didn't believe the homes would be there in 30 years. At high tide, many roads were impassable, even for the most modern semiaquatic vehicles.
But Hurricane Milo was unexpectedly devastating. Because sea-level rise had already pushed the water table so high, it took weeks for the storm waters to recede. Salt water corroded underground wiring, leaving parts of the city dark for months. Drinking-water wells were ruined. Interstate 95 was clogged with cars and trucks stuffed with animals and personal belongings, as hundreds of thousands of people fled north to Orlando, the highest ground in central Florida. Developers drew up plans for new buildings on stilts, but few were built. A new flexible carbon-fiber bridge was proposed to link Miami Beach with the mainland, but the bankrupt city couldn't secure financing and the project fell apart. The skyscrapers that had gone up during the Obama years were gradually abandoned and used as staging grounds for drug runners and exotic-animal traffickers. A crocodile nested in the ruins of the Pérez Art Museum.
And still, the waters kept rising, nearly a foot each decade. By the latter end of the 21st century, Miami became something else entirely: a popular snorkeling spot where people could swim with sharks and sea turtles and explore the wreckage of a great American city.
Even more than Silicon Valley, Miami embodies the central technological myth of our time – that nature can not only be tamed but made irrelevant. Miami was a mosquito-and-crocodile-filled swampland for thousands of years, virtually uninhabited until the late 1800s. Then developers arrived, canals were dug, swamps were drained, and a city emerged that was unlike any other place on the planet, an edge-of-the-world, air-conditioned dreamland of sunshine and beaches and drugs and money; Jan Nijman, the former director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Miami, called 20th-century Miami "a citadel of fantastical consumption." Floods would come and go and hurricanes might blow through, but the city would survive, if only because no one could imagine a force more powerful than human ingenuity. That defiance of nature – the sense that the rules don't apply here – gave the city its great energy. But it is also what will cause its demise.
You would never know it from looking at Miami today. Rivers of money are flowing in from Latin America, Europe and beyond, new upscale shopping malls are opening, and the skyline is crowded with construction cranes. But the unavoidable truth is that sea levels are rising and Miami is on its way to becoming an American Atlantis. It may be another century before the city is completely underwater (though some more-pessimistic scientists predict it could be much sooner), but life in the vibrant metropolis of 5.5 million people will begin to dissolve much quicker, most likely within a few decades. The rising waters will destroy Miami slowly, by seeping into wiring, roads, building foundations and drinking-water supplies – and quickly, by increasing the destructive power of hurricanes. "Miami, as we know it today, is doomed," says Harold Wanless, the chairman of the department of geological sciences at the University of Miami. "It's not a question of if. It's a question of when."
by Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images
Social Media’s Wildest 24 Hours
For 24 hours, the world of social media rocked like a roller coaster off its tracks. The outbursts of rage over the Supreme Court’s decision to annul a key section of the Voting Rights Act Tuesday morning had barely subsided before environmentalists began obsessively tweeting every nuance of President Obama’s climate change speech a few hours later. As afternoon became evening, Wendy Davis’ filibuster in the Texas Legislature became a legend-in-the-making, complete with a stunning chaotic denouement watched in real time streaming video by hundreds of thousands. The following morning, a rolling tide of ecstasy and joy swept across the Internet within seconds of the news that the Supreme Court had ruled the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.
Of course, I should be clear: This was my world of social media. We are filtered by whom we follow and friend. If I associated with a different motley crew, the cries of joy and rage could easily flip places. Social conservatives believe that what happened in Texas Wednesday night was a travesty of democracy and that Jesus is weeping in dismay over the prospect of a flood of gay marriage in California. And they’re on Twitter too.
But something is still happening here. The social media noise and clamor — 9,000 tweets per second on DOMA right after the Court’s decision! — over the past 24 hours isn’t just partisan froth. Our society and politics are headed in a direction; there is a clear narrative in play. And social media is influencing, reinforcing and assisting that narrative. If, as Martin Luther King so famously said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” then what we’ve witnessed (and tweeted and liked) over the last 24 hours is social media increasing its leverage over that laborious transition. Heisenberg understood this: You can’t observe something without affecting it. And we’re observing more now than ever before.
Is that too bold? Calculating the political consequences of our social-media filtered world is tricky. Can we really say that Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and Imgur chatter are influencing political change? Or are they just reflecting what’s already happening? One more conservative judge on the Supreme Court, after all, and DOMA still stands. The evisceration of the Voting Rights Act is a giant backward step. President Obama made what many environmentalists considered a solid promise not to approve the Keystone pipeline, but would all the anguished tweets in the world make a damn bit of difference if he weaseled out of that promise in the weeks to come? My social media friends might be ready to elect Wendy Davis as president in 2016, but most of the country still has no idea who the woman is.
But let’s look at the big picture. The Republican Party depends on socially conservative white males as the bedrock of its political support. But everyone knows that the country at large is getting more diverse. Young people, women and minorities — who, by and large, trend more liberal on social issues — have delivered the presidency to Democrats two elections in a row. Plug all the sound and fury on social media in the last 24 hours into that framework, and you will see something that must make conservative politicians very, very nervous: A changing country that is increasingly self-aware and on the alert.
Of course, I should be clear: This was my world of social media. We are filtered by whom we follow and friend. If I associated with a different motley crew, the cries of joy and rage could easily flip places. Social conservatives believe that what happened in Texas Wednesday night was a travesty of democracy and that Jesus is weeping in dismay over the prospect of a flood of gay marriage in California. And they’re on Twitter too.But something is still happening here. The social media noise and clamor — 9,000 tweets per second on DOMA right after the Court’s decision! — over the past 24 hours isn’t just partisan froth. Our society and politics are headed in a direction; there is a clear narrative in play. And social media is influencing, reinforcing and assisting that narrative. If, as Martin Luther King so famously said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” then what we’ve witnessed (and tweeted and liked) over the last 24 hours is social media increasing its leverage over that laborious transition. Heisenberg understood this: You can’t observe something without affecting it. And we’re observing more now than ever before.
Is that too bold? Calculating the political consequences of our social-media filtered world is tricky. Can we really say that Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and Imgur chatter are influencing political change? Or are they just reflecting what’s already happening? One more conservative judge on the Supreme Court, after all, and DOMA still stands. The evisceration of the Voting Rights Act is a giant backward step. President Obama made what many environmentalists considered a solid promise not to approve the Keystone pipeline, but would all the anguished tweets in the world make a damn bit of difference if he weaseled out of that promise in the weeks to come? My social media friends might be ready to elect Wendy Davis as president in 2016, but most of the country still has no idea who the woman is.
But let’s look at the big picture. The Republican Party depends on socially conservative white males as the bedrock of its political support. But everyone knows that the country at large is getting more diverse. Young people, women and minorities — who, by and large, trend more liberal on social issues — have delivered the presidency to Democrats two elections in a row. Plug all the sound and fury on social media in the last 24 hours into that framework, and you will see something that must make conservative politicians very, very nervous: A changing country that is increasingly self-aware and on the alert.
by Andrew Leonard, Salon | Read more:
Image: Facebook
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