Operation Easter

On the afternoon of May 31, 2011, Charlie Everitt, an investigator for the National Wildlife Crime Unit in Edinburgh, Scotland, received an urgent call from a colleague in the Northern Constabulary, the regional police department whose jurisdiction includes the islands off the country’s western coast. The officer told Everitt that a nature-reserve warden on the Isle of Rum, twenty miles offshore, had reported seeing a man “dancing about” in a gull colony. Everitt looked at the clock. It was 4 p.m., too late to catch the last ferry, so he drove halfway to Mallaig, a tiny port town four hours away, where he could take the first boat out in the morning.

The Isle of Rum, a forty-one-square-mile rock, is inhabited by about forty people, many of them employed by the Scottish Natural Heritage, an environmental organization charged with protecting wildlife. Rum has red deer and an assortment of rare birds, including merlins and white-tailed sea eagles, and it is a principal breeding ground for the Manx shearwater, a seabird with a distinctly eerie call. For this reason, as Everitt knew, the place was also a target for egg collectors, a secretive network of men obsessed with accumulating and cataloguing the eggs of rare birds. (...)

At the turn of the twentieth century, as the conservation movement began raising awareness of endangered species, the collecting of wild-bird eggs came under scrutiny. In 1922 in London, Earl Buxton, addressing the annual meeting of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, warned of the “distinct menace” posed by egg-collecting members of the British Ornithologists’ Union, of which Lord Rothschild was a member. Indignant, Rothschild split off and, with the Reverend Francis Charles Robert Jourdain, a cantankerous Oxford-educated ornithologist who bore a scar across his forehead from falling off a cliff in search of an eagle’s nest, formed the British Oological Association. The group, which renamed itself the Jourdain Society after Jourdain died, in 1940, proclaimed that it was the only organization in the country dedicated to egg collecting.

It has not fared well. In 1954, the Protection of Birds Act outlawed the taking of most wild-bird eggs in the U.K. In 1981, some ninety species were declared Schedule 1; possession of their eggs, unless they were taken before 1954, is a crime. Meetings of the Jourdain Society, to which members wore formal attire and carried display cabinets full of eggs, became the target of spectacular raids and stings. By the nineteen-nineties, more than half of Jourdain Society members had egg-collecting convictions, according to the R.S.P.B. One member recently agreed to a radio interview only after insuring that his voice would be disguised.

“An awful lot of the ornithological knowledge we hold dear is based on the work of both professional and amateur naturalists over the course of the last two hundred years, and that involved significant amounts of collecting,” Russell said, as we passed an aisle with Jourdain’s eggs. “But today’s collectors are not what I would call ornithologists. These are obsessives who have chosen eggs as a particularly attractive thing. The suspect part of the attraction is that you’re not allowed to do it.” (...)

Despite Britain’s fervor for wildlife preservation, it has no central government agency like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In terms of fighting wildlife crime, its closest equivalent, the National Wildlife Crime Unit, created in 2006, has only eight full-time employees. Both the public and law enforcement rely on the R.S.P.B. investigative team to help prevent bird crimes.

Egg-collecting cases make up about twenty-five per cent of the team’s work, but egg collecting is the only wildlife crime that warrants an ongoing nationwide police initiative, called Operation Easter. The program, which Shorrock helped launch in 1997, has enabled the R.S.P.B. to combine decades’ worth of intelligence on egg collectors into a national police database. “It’s very rare in the U.K. to have a national police operation of this kind,” Alan Stewart, the police officer who started Operation Easter with Shorrock, told me. “The others are for drug trafficking, human trafficking, and football hooliganism.”

It had been a busy season for the investigators. Aside from the bust in Suffolk, the R.S.P.B. was guarding a red-backed-shrike nest in the South of England twenty-four hours a day. Two pairs of shrikes appeared in 2010, the first time the species had been seen nesting in the U.K. since the mid-nineteen-eighties; many blamed its disappearance on egg collectors. When word of their reappearance got out, dozens of people volunteered to protect the nests. “With all the crimes I’ve dealt with, egg collecting is always the one that upsets the public the most,” Shorrock, a former Manchester cop, told me.

On the table next to him was an embossed photo album titled “Egg Collectors and Their Associates.” Under one photograph of a group of men around a picnic table, someone had written, “Who are these guys?” Most egg collectors don’t seem interested in selling or even trading eggs, only in possessing them. “They’re not normal criminals,” Shorrock said. Thomas estimated that there were about fifty active collectors left. “We know who they are,” he added.

Between them, Thomas and Shorrock had been inside many of the collectors’ homes, some of them several times. It was like one big family, almost. Daniel Lingham, whose home contained thirty-six hundred eggs, broke into tears when Thomas and the police arrived in 2004. “Thank God you’ve come,” he said. “I can’t stop.”

by Julia Rubinstein, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photo: Richard Barnes

From Coast to Toast

Earlier this summer, on what passed for a clear morning in Los Angeles, Tom Ford, director of marine programs at the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Foundation, went to the Santa Monica Municipal Airport to catch a ride up the Pacific coast in a Beechcraft Bonanza G36. (Clad in a plaid shirt and chinos, he seemed not to be related to the designer.) “What a totally sweet glass cockpit,” he told the pilot, who was donating this flight through LightHawk, a nonprofit group dedicated to helping environmentalists document problems from the air. As Santa Monica drifted by below, its famous boardwalk and Ferris wheel appearing as though they were little pieces on a game board, the minuscule Bonanza headed toward the great blue ocean, which was gently undulating like a fresh duvet being fluffed on a bed. (...)

Suddenly, Malibu’s big beach-erosion calamity whipped into view. Broad Beach is about one mile long, with 114 homes built right up against the Pacific. These homes have always been owned by the biggest of Hollywood’s big names. Jack Lemmon, Steve McQueen, and Frank Sinatra (who liked to sit on the beach in his fedora) once lived here. Sinatra’s widow, Barbara, does still. Current residents include Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, Michael Ovitz, Sidney Sheinberg, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, the doctor who developed the cancer drug Abraxane and is L.A.’s richest man.

Over the past decade, Broad Beach residents estimate, they’ve lost up to 60 feet of their beach. This day, it wasn’t even high tide, and for the most part the waves lapped at a huge, 13-foot-high wall of rocks. The tiny bit of sand that Ford could spy between rock and ocean was dark gray; it had been wet recently and would soon be again. You couldn’t put a towel down without soaking your derrière. “I don’t call it Broad Beach anymore,” says Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena. “I call it Invisible Beach.” (...)

Nantucket, a disappearing spit of land deposited by melting glaciers 30 miles south of Cape Cod eons ago, has, like Malibu, long been a summer playground of the rich and famous. With its whale oil, Nantucket was once the uncontested Silicon Valley of its day, the supplier of light to America. Nowadays, Chris Matthews and David Gregory are seasonal residents, as is the 102-year-old Bunny Mellon (Matthews’s neighbor). There is a sprinkling of writers too: the late David Halberstam summered on the island, as now do Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Prize and The Quest, and columnist Russell Baker. (Vanity Fair contributing editor William D. Cohan, one of the authors of this piece, owns a home at 81 Baxter Road, just two doors south of the former Bluff House.)

In the early 2000s, as real-estate prices on the island shot into the stratosphere, rising as much as 20 percent a year, the summer people were increasingly made up of bankers, hedge-fund moguls, and industrialists, such as Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google; Roger Penske, the rental-truck and auto-racing magnate; David Rubenstein, one of the co-founders of the Carlyle Group; Bob Diamond, the former C.E.O. of Barclays P.L.C.; Lou Gerstner, the former C.E.O. of IBM; and Bob Greenhill, the Wall Street mogul. The late Mark Madoff, son of Bernie, used to summer on Nantucket. Current homeowners on Sconset Bluff include the extended family of fabled investor George Soros (they have three homes on the east side of Baxter Road); Amos Hostetter, one of the founders of Continental Cablevision; Jimmy Haslam, the owner of the N.F.L.’s Cleveland Browns and the C.E.O. of the Pilot Flying J truck-stop chain; and Norwood Davis, the retired chairman of Trigon Healthcare. Farther south on Baxter Road, where the erosion problems are less acute due to tidal flows and the curve of the land, lives Brian Simmons, the managing partner of the Chicago buyout firm Code Hennessy & Simmons. Michael Berman, the co-founder of George magazine, and his wife, interior designer Victoria Hagan, just built a new home off the bluff, across the street from Haslam and Davis, on Sankaty Head Road.

With such wealth and power concentrated among the homeowners along Baxter Road and in other areas with vulnerable shoreline elsewhere on the island, you’d think they could solve the erosion problem, but so far they have proved no match for Mother Nature and her fierce mission to reclaim the history-rich island for the Atlantic Ocean. A number of oceanfront homes in Madaket, at the southwestern corner of the island, look like Easter Island moais sticking out of the sand.

The burning question among island residents—one that pits the determined, deep-pocketed summer people against the working folks who live here year-round and occupy most of the positions in local government—is whether the politicians will finally allow the homeowners to spend their own money to save their multi-million-dollar homes with the stupendous views. So far, the answer has been a resounding no. Sarah Oktay, the managing director of the University of Massachusetts’s Nantucket Field Station and the influential vice-chairman of the island’s powerful Conservation Commission, which generally must approve any projects to stave off erosion, has been the principal thorn in the side of the rich homeowners. She is a pugnacious, determined, and articulate advocate for letting nature take its course. While she agrees measures can be taken to slow erosion, she argues, “Rarely can you stop it, and if you do stop it, you’re hurting someone else. It’s a natural process.”

by By William D. Cohan and Vanessa Grigoriadis, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Images: Mark Holtzman (left); George Riethof (right)

[ed. Traveling and wi-fi connections are likely to be hit or miss.]

James Corner from "Taking Measures Across The American Landscape"
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Google Logic: Why Google Does the Things it Does

“What does Google want?”

A favorite pastime among people who watch the tech industry is trying to figure out why Google does things. The Verge was downright plaintive about it the other day (link), and I get the question frequently from financial analysts and reporters. But the topic also comes up regularly in conversations with my Silicon Valley friends.

It’s a puzzle because Google doesn’t seem to respond to the rules and logic used by the rest of the business world. It passes up what look like obvious opportunities, invests heavily in things that look like black holes, and proudly announces product cancellations that the rest of us would view as an embarrassment. Google’s behavior drives customers and partners nuts, but is especially troubling to financial analysts who have to tell people whether or not to buy Google’s stock. Every time Google has a less than stellar quarter, the issue surges up again.

As I wrote recently when discussing Dell (link), it’s a mistake to assume there’s a logical reason for everything a company does. Sometimes managers act out of fear or ignorance or just plain stupidity, and trying to retrofit logic onto their actions is as pointless as a primitive shaman using goat entrails to explain a volcano.

But in Google’s case, I think its actions do make sense – even the deeply weird stuff like the purchase of Motorola. The issue, I believe, is that Google follows a different set of rules than most other companies. Apple uses “Think Different” as its slogan, but in many ways Google is the company that truly thinks differently. It’s not just marching to a different drummer; sometimes I think it hears an entirely different orchestra.

Google’s orchestra is unique because of three factors: corporate culture, governance, and personal politics. Let’s start with the culture.

by Michael Mace, Mobile Opportunity |  Read more:

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Enrique del Val
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Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too

At 11 on a weeknight earlier this year, her work finished, a slim, pretty junior at the University of Pennsylvania did what she often does when she has a little free time. She texted her regular hookup — the guy she is sleeping with but not dating. What was he up to? He texted back: Come over. So she did. They watched a little TV, had sex and went to sleep.

Their relationship, she noted, is not about the meeting of two souls.

“We don’t really like each other in person, sober,” she said, adding that “we literally can’t sit down and have coffee.”

Ask her why she hasn’t had a relationship at Penn, and she won’t complain about the death of courtship or men who won’t commit. Instead, she’ll talk about “cost-benefit” analyses and the “low risk and low investment costs” of hooking up.

“I positioned myself in college in such a way that I can’t have a meaningful romantic relationship, because I’m always busy and the people that I am interested in are always busy, too,” she said.

“And I know everyone says, ‘Make time, make time,’ ” said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity but agreed to be identified by her middle initial, which is A. “But there are so many other things going on in my life that I find so important that I just, like, can’t make time, and I don’t want to make time.”

It is by now pretty well understood that traditional dating in college has mostly gone the way of the landline, replaced by “hooking up” — an ambiguous term that can signify anything from making out to oral sex to intercourse — without the emotional entanglement of a relationship.

Until recently, those who studied the rise of hookup culture had generally assumed that it was driven by men, and that women were reluctant participants, more interested in romance than in casual sexual encounters. But there is an increasing realization that young women are propelling it, too. (...)

As lengthy interviews over the school year with more than 60 women at Penn indicated, the discussion is playing out in the lives of a generation of women facing both broader opportunities and greater pressures than perhaps any before, both of which helped shape their views on sex and relationships in college.

Typical of elite universities today, Penn is filled with driven young women, many of whom aspire to be doctors, lawyers, politicians, bankers or corporate executives like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg or Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer. Keenly attuned to what might give them a competitive edge, especially in a time of unsure job prospects and a shaky economy, many of them approach college as a race to acquire credentials: top grades, leadership positions in student organizations, sought-after internships. Their time out of class is filled with club meetings, sports practice and community-service projects. For some, the only time they truly feel off the clock is when they are drinking at a campus bar or at one of the fraternities that line Locust Walk, the main artery of campus.

These women said they saw building their résumés, not finding boyfriends (never mind husbands), as their main job at Penn. They envisioned their 20s as a period of unencumbered striving, when they might work at a bank in Hong Kong one year, then go to business school, then move to a corporate job in New York. The idea of lugging a relationship through all those transitions was hard for many to imagine. Almost universally, the women said they did not plan to marry until their late 20s or early 30s.

In this context, some women, like A., seized the opportunity to have sex without relationships, preferring “hookup buddies” (regular sexual partners with little emotional commitment) to boyfriends. Others longed for boyfriends and deeper attachment. Some women described a dangerous edge to the hookup culture, of sexual assaults and degrading encounters enabled by drinking and distinguished by a lack of emotional connection.

The women interviewed came from all corners of Penn’s population. They belonged to sororities (or would never dream of it), reported for the school newspaper, sang or danced in performance groups, played sports. Some spent almost every weekend night at a “downtown” (a fraternity party at a nightclub, where men paid for bottle service) or at a campus bar. Others preferred holing up in the library or hanging out with the theater crowd. They came from all over the country, and as far away as China and Africa. Some had gone to elite private high schools; others were on full scholarship. They came from diverse racial backgrounds, and several were first-generation immigrants. They were found in a wide variety of ways, from chance encounters in coffee shops to introductions from friends.

by Kate Taylor, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Elizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times

Untitled by Rebekah Seok
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Buena Vista Social Club

Woman with cat and peach by Peter Harskamp
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Zhao Shao’ang (1905-1998) and Yang Shanshen (1913-2004) Series: China Guardian Hong Kong 2012 Autumn Auctions
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Culinary School: The Pros and Cons of Culinary Education

Culinary school enrollment has swelled in recent years; more people than ever are chasing a dream of running a kitchen or flipping an omelette on television. And like most institutions of higher education, tuition rates have shot up as well.

The best known culinary schools in the country come with price tags that range anywhere from $35,000 to $54,000 for a two-year associate's degree or up to about $109,000 for a bachelor's degree. All this for a career path that traditionally starts with a $10 an hour job doing back-breaking work for insane hours and over holidays. And, while the salary does improve with time, cooking is rarely going to be a lucrative profession.

So is going to culinary school worth it? There's not one right answer to the long-debated question. It depends on a lot of factors, including the costs of culinary school, the alternatives, career aspirations, and temperament. There are passionate arguments on all sides.

Chefs, restaurateurs, educators, students, and newly-minted line cooks from across the country shared with Eater their thoughts on the value of culinary school. They all agreed that education is valuable, but their opinions differed on how to get it for the greatest value. What lies ahead is a look at the pros and cons of going to culinary school. (...)

Any time you're throwing down tens of thousands of dollars on education, it helps to know what you're doing with it. Perhaps even more so in the case of a trade like cooking. Tuition is high and average salaries for many jobs in the food service industry are low. A cost-benefit analysis for culinary school tuition will calculate differently for the cook who plans to work their way up the line in a New York City restaurant and the cook who wants to take a higher-paying corporate or private chef gig.

There are all kinds of jobs available to culinary school grads: working in all facets of a restaurant, from the line to the host stand to the wine cellar, pastry kitchen, and beyond; research and development for a corporation like McDonald's; overseeing the kitchen at a hotel, resort or on a cruise liner; and so much more. During the 2011-2012 academic year at the Culinary Institute of America, about 54 percent of incoming freshmen expressed interest in working in some capacity at an independent restaurant upon graduation, according to communications director Jeff Levine. Another 27 percent were interested in working at hotels or resorts, while 17 percent were considering careers at restaurant chains or other corporate food jobs. But, according to Levine, about 70 to 80 percent of CIA graduates do go to work in restaurant or hotel/resort kitchens when they leave Hyde Park.

So what are the average salary expectations for these two career paths? Well, according to the most recent Chef Salary Report on StarChefs.com, in 2010 an executive chef could stand to make $65,983 ($81,039 in hotels), a chef de cuisine had an average salary of $51,114 ($55,405 in hotels), a sous chef made $39,478 ($42,906 in hotels) and a pastry chef made $43,123 ($46,547 in hotels). For those hotel and corporate chefs who are making more than those who work in restaurants, culinary school may be less of a financial challenge.

It's worth pointing out, though, that it often takes years of working as a line cook for grim hourly wages before making that kind of money. And the survey notes that while salary levels for those who had obtained culinary degrees or certifications are higher than non-grads, it warns that "the salary gap — while increasing — isn't as big as you might think."

by Amy McKeever, Eater |  Read more:

Photo: Daniel Krieger

I look Good in my Pork Pie Hat

I look good in my pork pie hat. I do. People see me walking towards them on the sidewalk and they judge how much longer they will have to wait before they can compliment me in a voice that isn’t a yell.

Some days I borrow one of my dad’s fly-fishing flies and put it in the band and it adds color and flare and my girlfriend compliments it. Yes, I look good in my pork pie hat.

I look good in other hats too: baseball, fedora, driver’s, tweed, beanie. But the standby is my pork pie hat, which launches me into the upper crust of the crowd anywhere from concerts for very cool bands to dive bars to covertly drinking on public beaches.

Say, for instance, I’m at my friend’s underground restaurant. I’ll start to compliment him on his cooking and he’ll cut me off and say, “Dude, that hat. You look good in that.”

I’ll accept the compliment gracefully and play it off like I was unsure about wearing it or not. But really, I know I look phenomenal in it. I’ve always looked phenomenal in it. There was never any warm-up period for me and my pork pie hat.

“Are you in a band?” asks the grocer at my local bodega.

“Are you a poet?” asks the cute barista at my neighborhood café.

“Are you from New York?” asks the clerk at the pop-up store selling quirky T-shirts and boutique chewing gum.

“No,” I say. “Why do you ask?” Just pretending like I don’t know that it is my trusty pork pie hat that gives these people the impression that I am an urban artist who lives on rice and beans and passion for his creative pursuits, instead of on his father’s bank account and his grandfather’s clothing.

I see my pictures on Facebook: sepia-toned Instagrams of me at a backyard barbecue, at the park on a weekday afternoon, drinking cans of beer on my friend’s buddy’s sister’s porch. Yes. I look good in my pork pie hat.

I remember that day on the porch. It was chill and dope and rad. Two police officers walked by at some point. One gave me this long look that I knew meant, “Get a job, lazy ass. But damn, what a hat.”

This is not a passing trend. This is not my bow tie, or my duct tape shoes, or my mustache. This pork pie hat – my pork pie hat – is here to stay atop my slightly balding head, perched as a beacon of coolness and charm and uniqueness for many, many years to come.

by Ryan O'Neill, McSweeneys |  Read more:

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Post-Scarcity Economics by Tom Streithorst

When Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, “one third of the nation was ill-clothed, ill-housed, ill-fed” because close to one third of the nation was also unemployed. Were they all working, they could also be clothed, housed, fed. Conventional economics, what Keynes called the “Treasury View,” believed that supply should be driven down to the level of demand. Keynes and Roosevelt figured why not drive demand up to the level of supply instead? Combining idleness with scarcity was criminal. Instead, demand should be stimulated to meet the economy’s productive capacity.

World War II finally ended the Depression and proved Keynes right. New Deal deficit spending was too small, too timid to restore the animal spirits of entrepreneurs battered by years of debt deflation. War is the least productive, most destructive of human activities with negative economic benefit, but the US government, by printing money and using it to hire workers knocked unemployment, which had been close to 20 percent in 1938 down to barely over 1 percent six years later.

It is important to understand that making bombs and blowing up cities is not what shrunk unemployment. It was the printing of money, the hiring of workers, the creation of demand by deficit spending. Had the US government spent as much as it had on fighting Hitler on promoting the arts, or building schools or even digging ditches and then filling them, it would have had just as beneficial an economic effect as did the war. Blowing stuff up is the opposite of investment. From an economic point of view, bombs and bullets are purely consumption goods, not nearly as beneficial as education or infrastructure. The reason defence spending has become the common means of stimulating demand is largely political. Conservatives who cannot stomach deficit spending for any other reason are willing to forgo their hard money prejudices in time of national emergency.

When the war ended, policy makers feared that without the stimulus of defence spending, the United States and the world would sink back into recession. The end of wars had been the cause of economic slowdowns in 1818, after the Napoleonic Wars, and in 1919, after World War I, and indeed, 1946 saw the US GDP shrink slightly. But the economy soon recovered and for the next 25 years, the world experienced the greatest growth in its history. The fundamental source of Golden Age growth was rising incomes that brought millions out of poverty and into the middle class. Their demand for luxuries that were fast becoming necessities created a mass consumer market, and corporations grew rapidly by satisfying it. In 1939, 25 percent of Americans didn’t have running water, only 65 percent had indoor toilets, and none had television.

The rich grew richer during the Golden Age, but so did everyone else. Golden Age policies of progressive taxation, unionization, regulation are the opposite of what conservatives advocate today, but they were much more successful than the supply side policies that have dominated our more inequitable era. Inflation adjusted GDP growth was greater in the 1950s, 1960s, and even 1970s, than it ever has been since.

In the 1970s, for a variety of reasons, corporate profitability went south. The positive feedback loop that raised the income of workers and businessmen alike fell apart. The Golden Age depended on capital and labour cooperating, and both profiting. In the 1970s, their social pact fell apart. The inflation of that era can be seen as capital and labor each trying to shift the cost of oil price hikes to the other. At first, organized labour won that battle and grabbed a larger share of the pie. Workers, especially organized workers did well in the 1970s. Wage growth, even taking inflation into account, was greater than it ever has been since. Capital, on the other hand, had a terrible decade. From 1966 to 1982, the stock market fell more than three quarters in real terms. Bonds did even worse. With inflation greater than nominal interest rates, putting money into the bank meant that after a year you had less money than you put in. The 1970s were a bad decade to be rich. No wonder John Lennon sang about working class heroes. No wonder the children of millionaires dressed like farmers or factory workers. In the 1970s, a union cameraman made more money than most stockbrokers. But the glory days of labor were about to evaporate.

In 1980, capital struck back.

by Tom Streithorst, LA Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Jackson Browne

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koci hernandez on Flickr.
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[ed. Man, I would love a pair of these - great color combination. Vintage-Style Nikes]