Wednesday, July 17, 2013
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"Dune" Endures
As David Itzkoff noted in 2006, what’s curious about “Dune” ’s stature is that it has not penetrated popular culture in the way that “The Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars” have. There are no “Dune” conventions. Catchphrases from the book have not entered the language. Nevertheless, the novel has produced a cottage industry of sequels, prequels, and spin-offs, the production of which only accelerated after Herbert’s death in 1986. There are now eighteen novels in the “Dune” chronicles, not to mention screen adaptations, comic books, and countless board, video, and role-play games. The conversion of “Dune” into a franchise, while pleasing readers and earning royalties for the Herbert estate, has gone a long way toward obscuring the power of the original novel. (I gave up after the fourth installment, “God Emperor of Dune.”) With daily reminders of the intensifying effects of global warming, the spectre of a worldwide water shortage, and continued political upheaval in the oil-rich Middle East, it is possible that “Dune” is even more relevant now than when it was first published. If you haven’t read it lately, it’s worth a return visit. If you’ve never read it, you should find time to. (...)
Perhaps one explanation for “Dune” ’s lack of true fandom among science-fiction fans is the absence from its pages of two staples of the genre: robots and computers. This is not an oversight on Herbert’s part but, rather, a clever authorial decision. Centuries before the events described in the novel, humans revolted and destroyed all thinking machines. “The god of machine-logic was overthrown,” Herbert writes in an appendix, “and a new concept was raised: ‘Man may not be replaced.’ ” This watershed moment, known as the Butlerian Jihad, resulted in a spiritual awakening, which put into place the religious structures that ultimately produce the messiah, Paul Atreides. There is no Internet in Herbert’s universe, no WikiLeaks, no cyber war. This de-emphasis on technology throws the focus back on people. It also allows for the presence of a religious mysticism uncommon in science fiction. It’s a future that some readers may find preferable to our own gadget-obsessed present.
by Jon Michaud, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Haul Videos: Postcards from the End of the World?
I can’t truthfully say that there was a single one of these videos that I didn’t enjoy looking at. Besides the fact that I find other people’s outfit choices to be a good source of ideas for my own ever-shifting “look,” there’s something really beautiful about the existence of these videos. Actually I find all of YouTube touching that way. Something about the simple, I don’t know, faith that goes into believing that the nice little things you do are not only worth doing, but are also worth talking about or even helping other people learn to do. It’s amazing the things we can come together over: skateboarding down railings, blowing up bottles of soda with Mentos, performing that rude Cee Lo Green song in American Sign Language. There’s just so much to do.
But there is this other category of videos about clothing, and it’s called “hauls.” In a haul video, a person sits in front of her camera and holds up every piece of clothing she bought that day and describes where she got each item and how much she paid. Some of the hauls are collected on a day of shopping at regular stores—places where the stuff is new—and I tend to find those less interesting and actually a little distressing, considering how much new clothing can cost. It’s the hauls from a day of thrift store shopping (nope, still not using the word thrift as a verb) that get me excited. (...)
I’ll grant you, it is a weird, late-capitalist phenomenon. We don’t get to see the purchased thing being used, even, we just learn about the purchasing itself. If shopping—spending—has become a hobby, then haul videos are ... what? Digital fanzines? Skill-sharing workshops? Postcards from the end of the world? Nah, I don’t know. I think it’s just human. Telling someone what you did today is important, and if you don’t have enough people in your life then tumblr and Twitter and YouTube are there for you, and while it might be easy to denigrate that kind of internet behavior as socially stunted I think it’s pretty lucky that we have those ways of reaching out. My high school best friend was an eccentric girl named Sara, and she’s the one who taught me how to dress cool for cheap. One day after a few hours at the nearby Salvation Army stores (and Hole in her tape deck, and some awkward attempts at smoking cigarettes in her car) we went back to my house. I sort of blasted through the front door like the jerk that I was but coming in behind me, Sara said quietly, “Do you want to show your mom the stuff we got?” Sara’s mom died young, when she and I were still teenagers. I wasn’t in the habit of showing my mother the clothing I’d found—she doesn’t care about that stuff, not the way Sara’s mom did—and I remember not especially wanting to, at first, but after a moment thinking it was a really good idea.
by Katie Haegele, Utne Reader | Read more:
Image by Freaktography, licensed under Creative Commons
Monday, July 15, 2013
An Infantile Disorder
In Japan in the early 1990s, a young psychiatrist named Saitō Tamaki began seeing patients with a cluster of strange symptoms. Actually, he barely saw them at all; more often than not, other family members would approach him about a brother or a son who was afflicted with an unfamiliar state. Mostly men on the threshold of adulthood, they were retreating to their rooms, shrinking from all social contact or communication, and closing off into themselves, often for periods of a year or more. Not wanting to kill themselves but unable to live in society, these youths folded inward in an attempt to fit themselves away. Saitō began calling them hikikomori sainen, “withdrawn young men,” and in 1998 published a book with his findings called Shakaiteki hikikomori—Owaranai Shishunki, or Social Withdrawal—Adolescence Without End.
Saitō ventured a count: There were 1 million people in a state of withdrawal or hikikomori, about one percent of the Japanese population. Eighty percent of them were men; 90 percent were over 18. “Social withdrawal is not some sort of ‘fad’ that will just fade away,” Saitō wrote. It is “a symptom, not the name of an illness,” and “there has been no sign that the number of cases will decrease.” His book became a best seller in weeks. Hikikomori joined otaku (a person with obsessive interests) and karoshi (death from overwork) as a loan word in English to describe a new social phenomenon that at first appeared uniquely Japanese. A few American authors have picked up on it as an enigmatic or convenient trope (in books like Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger and Hikikomori and the Rental Sister by Jeff Backhaus, most recently). But only now has Saitō’s original work been translated, by Jeffrey Angles, published by University of Minnesota Press in March.
Culturally bound psychological phenomena always fascinate the press because they excite the categories of racism through a veneer of scientificity. But Saitō was explicit on this point: Though his patients’ symptoms all emerged in some way through the Japanese social order, there was nothing intrinsically Japanese about the phenomenon. In fact, he had coined the term hikikomori to translate work that an American psychologist had done on similar cases of acute social withdrawal and later joined it up with the sociological category of NEETs (not in education, employment, or training) in Britain. His internationalism slyly made room for an astonishing claim: The structure of age itself was beginning to break down. Japan might have been early to the trend, but it was an effect of the market, not any particular culture.
Age is the most generic attribute a person can have, but each age is also irreducibly personal. Every 35-year-old has been 16, but no one has ever been 16 in exactly the same way. No surprise: The experience is deeply striated by gender, race, and class, and then again by the most intimate hazards of family history and endocrinology. Even so, maturation feels so natural it’s hard to think about the work that it takes or that it could go any other way. But how you feel old is a historically recent development, embedded so close to our core we take it as synonymous with our selves.
The global spread of the teenager shows this. When the Sphinx had Oedipus solve the riddle of aging on his way to establishing the neurotic family, there were only three ages you could be in life: a child, adult, or old. But by the time the post-1945 social order was in place, the teenager stood apart, ready at hand to the market. Without a household of their own, they would consume and be thrown in or out of work as the business cycle demanded it. The unique teenage consciousness that accompanied this economic development gives away the tight integration of age in the structures that govern our lives and teach us how to understand ourselves. Being a teenager is not about how old you are. Age is a social form attuned to the market. And though it’s unevenly distributed, it operates supernationally.
Still, Saitō was curious. With touching excitement about the new possibilities opened up by the Internet (this was back in the late 1990s), he contacted colleagues abroad to see if they were seeing the same thing. Koreans wrote back: Yes, they said, and their compulsory military service had no effect on the spread of hikikomori. One French respondent wrote, No, his society would never produce withdrawal like that; another anonymously replied that it absolutely did but that in France, these people become homeless, not homebound. Jeffrey Angles chimes in too. In the translator’s note to the American edition, he shares the story of a student of his who went through a period of hikikomori, dropping out of high school in his senior year. With therapy he was later able to pull himself back into society and to college, but without a name for his experience, he had no explanation for what made him lose that time. A Thai psychiatrist wondered, “What do people in withdrawal do about their living expenses?” It was a reasonable question. Saitō found that their parents cover them.
Saitō’s book was otherwise modest in scope. It aimed to establish a working definition of the condition and provide practical steps for worried parents to follow. Without pathologizing withdrawn teens, Saitō suggested that the parents were equally implicated through their relationship with their child in what he called the “hikikomori system,” a self-reinforcing state of disconnection between child, family, and society. “As the individual takes shelter from the social body, it holds both the individual and the family in its grasp,” he says. But even though elective solitary confinement seems like it must stem from extreme trauma if not psychosis, Saitō insists that there is no mental illness involved. Instead, he links it to our “era of adolescence” and concludes that “‘social withdrawal’ is the pathology that best symbolizes our moment in time.”
Saitō ventured a count: There were 1 million people in a state of withdrawal or hikikomori, about one percent of the Japanese population. Eighty percent of them were men; 90 percent were over 18. “Social withdrawal is not some sort of ‘fad’ that will just fade away,” Saitō wrote. It is “a symptom, not the name of an illness,” and “there has been no sign that the number of cases will decrease.” His book became a best seller in weeks. Hikikomori joined otaku (a person with obsessive interests) and karoshi (death from overwork) as a loan word in English to describe a new social phenomenon that at first appeared uniquely Japanese. A few American authors have picked up on it as an enigmatic or convenient trope (in books like Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger and Hikikomori and the Rental Sister by Jeff Backhaus, most recently). But only now has Saitō’s original work been translated, by Jeffrey Angles, published by University of Minnesota Press in March.Culturally bound psychological phenomena always fascinate the press because they excite the categories of racism through a veneer of scientificity. But Saitō was explicit on this point: Though his patients’ symptoms all emerged in some way through the Japanese social order, there was nothing intrinsically Japanese about the phenomenon. In fact, he had coined the term hikikomori to translate work that an American psychologist had done on similar cases of acute social withdrawal and later joined it up with the sociological category of NEETs (not in education, employment, or training) in Britain. His internationalism slyly made room for an astonishing claim: The structure of age itself was beginning to break down. Japan might have been early to the trend, but it was an effect of the market, not any particular culture.
Age is the most generic attribute a person can have, but each age is also irreducibly personal. Every 35-year-old has been 16, but no one has ever been 16 in exactly the same way. No surprise: The experience is deeply striated by gender, race, and class, and then again by the most intimate hazards of family history and endocrinology. Even so, maturation feels so natural it’s hard to think about the work that it takes or that it could go any other way. But how you feel old is a historically recent development, embedded so close to our core we take it as synonymous with our selves.
The global spread of the teenager shows this. When the Sphinx had Oedipus solve the riddle of aging on his way to establishing the neurotic family, there were only three ages you could be in life: a child, adult, or old. But by the time the post-1945 social order was in place, the teenager stood apart, ready at hand to the market. Without a household of their own, they would consume and be thrown in or out of work as the business cycle demanded it. The unique teenage consciousness that accompanied this economic development gives away the tight integration of age in the structures that govern our lives and teach us how to understand ourselves. Being a teenager is not about how old you are. Age is a social form attuned to the market. And though it’s unevenly distributed, it operates supernationally.
Still, Saitō was curious. With touching excitement about the new possibilities opened up by the Internet (this was back in the late 1990s), he contacted colleagues abroad to see if they were seeing the same thing. Koreans wrote back: Yes, they said, and their compulsory military service had no effect on the spread of hikikomori. One French respondent wrote, No, his society would never produce withdrawal like that; another anonymously replied that it absolutely did but that in France, these people become homeless, not homebound. Jeffrey Angles chimes in too. In the translator’s note to the American edition, he shares the story of a student of his who went through a period of hikikomori, dropping out of high school in his senior year. With therapy he was later able to pull himself back into society and to college, but without a name for his experience, he had no explanation for what made him lose that time. A Thai psychiatrist wondered, “What do people in withdrawal do about their living expenses?” It was a reasonable question. Saitō found that their parents cover them.
Saitō’s book was otherwise modest in scope. It aimed to establish a working definition of the condition and provide practical steps for worried parents to follow. Without pathologizing withdrawn teens, Saitō suggested that the parents were equally implicated through their relationship with their child in what he called the “hikikomori system,” a self-reinforcing state of disconnection between child, family, and society. “As the individual takes shelter from the social body, it holds both the individual and the family in its grasp,” he says. But even though elective solitary confinement seems like it must stem from extreme trauma if not psychosis, Saitō insists that there is no mental illness involved. Instead, he links it to our “era of adolescence” and concludes that “‘social withdrawal’ is the pathology that best symbolizes our moment in time.”
At base, the problem is one of mounting surplus populations. This is not the eugenicist fever dream of overpopulation but a concept that Karl Marx developed alongside a critique of Thomas Malthus. Essentially, since the working day can only be extended so far, increases in productivity happen only through labor-saving innovation. Extended across time and populations, this means fewer and fewer people must be employed to make a profit. More and more people become not only unnecessary but an impediment to fleet, low-cost production. Like excess inventory, their labor power cannot be sold, so it must be written off or destroyed.
by Max Fox, TNI | Read more:
Image: Galia Offri
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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.”
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
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)
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Google Logic: Why Google Does the Things it Does
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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