Georgia O’Keeffe, Taos, New Mexico, 1931
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Blueberry Corn Salad

[ed. I watched a cooking show last night and they served this dish along with a whole pan-fried rockfish. It looked delicious, even though the tv version was simpler -- just fresh corn, blueberries and arrugula. I would never have thought of this combination.]

This salad is light and refreshing. I love the pop of color and juiciness the blueberries add to the corn salad. The cucumbers also add a nice crunch. The salad is full of flavor thanks to the cilantro, jalapeño, red onion, and honey lime dressing.

Celebrate summer by making this Blueberry Corn Salad. It is simple to make and it can be made in advance which makes it perfect for summer bbq’s, picnics, and pool parties.
Yield: Serves 6-8

Simple summer salad with blueberries, sweet corn, cucumbers, cilantro, jalapeño, red onion, and a honey lime dressing.

Ingredients:

6 ears fresh sweet corn, husked
1 cup fresh blueberries
1 cucumber, sliced
1/4 cup finely chopped red onion
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and finely chopped
2 tablespoons lime juice
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon honey
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Directions:

1. In a large pot, bring water to boiling. Add corn. Cook for 5 minutes, or until tender. When cool enough to handle, cut corn from the cobs. Discard cobs.

2. In a large serving bowl, combine corn, blueberries, cucumber, red onion, cilantro, and jalapeno. To make the dressing, whisk together lime juice, oil, honey, cumin, salt, and pepper. Pour dressing over salad and stir until combined. Cover and refrigerate until ready to serve.

by Maria and Josh, TPTP |  Read more:

Image: TPTP

"Disruptive" the Most Pernicious Cliché of Our Time

Sometimes buzzwords become so pervasive they’re almost inaudible, which is when we need to start listening to them. Disruptive is like that. It floats in the ether at ideas festivals and TED talks; it vanishes into the jargon cluttering the pages of Forbes and Harvard Business Review. There’s a quarterly called Disruptive Science and Technology; a Disruptive Health Technology Institute opened this summer. Disruptive doesn’t mean what it used to, of course. It’s no longer the adjective you hope not to hear in parent-teacher conferences. It’s what you want investors to say about your new social-media app. If it’s disruptive, it’s also innovative and transformational.

We can’t often name the person who released a cliché into the linguistic ecosystem, but in this case we can, and we also know why he did it. He’s Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, and he wanted to explain why upstart enterprises drive better-established companies out of business. In his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen launched the phrase that has transmogrified the English language: “disruptive innovation.”

Christensen’s theory goes like this. When a company succeeds at making and selling a gizmo, it commits itself to developing ever better gizmos, because their higher price yields larger profits. But that leaves a hole in the market quickly exploited by newcomers. They make stripped-down gizmos and sell them to consumers who hadn’t been able to afford them before. The strappy company, having found new people to market to, grows; the senior company, having narrowed its appeal, shrinks; the challenger overtakes the incumbent; and the cycle starts anew. An old example of disruptive innovation is the disk-drive market of the 1980s. As disk drives shrank, the bigger-disk makers went out of business, even though the smaller disks were arguably inferior: They held less data and cost more per byte. A newer example is the tablet, which may be relegating personal computers to history.

Christensen’s theory still has a powerful appeal, because it explains something we’ve all seen happen, even marked off our own decades by: the churning of businesses from start-ups to powerhouses to irrelevance or near-irrelevance. Me, I equate my youth with Microsoft’s apparent lock on the future of computing; we now know how fleeting that moment was. Christensen also sidestepped the obsession with leadership that bedevils management theory, stressing the tragic inevitability of market forces over the comic mishaps of shortsighted executives. It’s not that CEOs are too stupid to see disruption coming; it’s that their companies aren’t set up to make, or make money from, the new gizmos.

At least at first, Christensen deployed disruption theory to help managers cope with the revolutionary ferment from below that Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” But disruptive is now slapped onto every act of cultural defiance or technical derring-do, whether it has to do with business or not, and Christensen has not tried to rein in the word’s inflation. On the contrary, he has been out-punditing the pundits, publishing book after book—each with many co-authors—in which disruption theory is brought to bear first on this sector, then on that one. In the past five years, he has homed in on the social institutions—schools, public-health organizations, and the halls of government itself—he deems ripe for disruption.

You can’t blame Christensen and his co-writers for all the dumb things said and done in the name of disruption. But you can spot some unsavory habits of mind in their prescriptions. For one thing, they possess an almost utopian faith in technology: online or “blended” learning; massive open online courses, or MOOCs; cool health apps; and so on. Their convictions seem sincere, but they also coincide nicely with the interests of the Silicon Valley venture-capital crowd. If you use technology to disrupt the delivery of public services, you open up new markets; you also replace human labor with the virtual kind, a happy thought for an investor, since labor is the most expensive line item in all service-industry budgets.

by Judith Shulevitz, TNR |  Read more:

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How Economics Can Save the Whales

A study of 11,135 fisheries showed that introducing catch share roughly halved the chance of collapse. The system caught on in the 1980s and 1990s after decades of other well-intentioned efforts failed. Economist H. Scott Gordon is usually credited with laying out the problem and the solution in 1954.

Modern environmental economists accuse their predecessors of forgetting about incentives. Catch-share schemes issue permits to individuals and groups to fish some portion of the grounds or keep some fraction of the total catch. If fishermen exceed their share, they can buy extra rights from others, pay a hefty fine or even lose their fishing rights, depending on the particular arrangement. The system works because it aligns the interests of individual fishermen with the sustainability of the entire fishery. Everybody rises and falls with the fate of the total catch, eliminating destructive rivalries among fishermen.

Environmental economists have lately turned their attention to Atlantic bluefin tuna and whales. The National Marine Fisheries Service has just proposed new regulations that would for the first time establish a catch-share program for the endangered and lucrative bluefin. And a group of economists is pushing for a new international agreement on whaling. (...)

In both cases the problem is overfishing. The bluefin tuna population has dropped by a third in the Atlantic Ocean and by an incredible 96 percent in the Pacific. And whaling, which is supposedly subject to strict international rules that ban commercial fishing and regulate scientific work, is making a sad comeback. The total worldwide annual catch has risen more than fivefold over the last 20 years.

Ben Minteer, Leah Gerber, Christopher Costello and Steven Gaines have called for a new and properly regulated market in whales. Set a sustainable worldwide quota, they say, and allow fishermen, scientists and conservationists alike to bid for catch rights. Then watch the system that saved other fish species set whaling right.

The idea outrages many environmentalists. Putting a price on whales, they argue, moves even further away from conservationist principles than the current ban, however ineffective. They’re wrong. “The arguments that whales should not be hunted, whatever their merits, have not been winning where it counts -- that is, as measured by the size of the whale population,” says economist Timothy Taylor, editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

by Evan Soltas, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images

The Pretenders

[ed. Chrissie Hynde love... Nate, remember Saratoga Springs?]

The Key to a Truly Great Chicken Wing

Americans are a wing-loving people. The Buffalo variety, by most accounts “invented” at the Anchor Bar in, yes, Buffalo, is the official food of our most sacred event of the year: the Super Bowl.

Wings have a higher ratio of skin to meat than almost any other cut of chicken, which is what makes them so appealing. In order to crisp the skin, you need to render out most of the fat that comes with it, otherwise you’ll get chewy wings instead of crunchy ones. A grill with one side that’s hot and one side that’s cool — one side with no or very little fire underneath it — is what you need: put the wings on the cool side, cover the grill and let the ovenlike heat melt the fat away through the grates without any fear of an intense flame burning the skin from below.

Because you’re not relying on this part for any browning, it’s O.K. to crowd the wings, even stacking them slightly if need be. The time it takes to render the fat and cook the wings through is more than enough to whip up one of the sauces here (including, you’ll be relieved to know, Buffalo), few of which require cooking. Make the sauce in a bowl large enough to accommodate the wings so you can toss them in from the first round on the grill.

by Mark Bittman, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Marcus Nilsson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Chris Lanier. Prop stylist: Angharad Bailey.

This Week's Recipes

Teriyaki Chicken Wings
Miso Chicken Wings
Barbecue Chicken Wings
Curry-Yogurt Chicken Wings
Chipotle-Lime Chicken Wings
Lemon-Garlic-Pepper Chicken Wings
Thai-Peanut Chicken Wings
Fish-Sauce-and-Black-Pepper Chicken Wings
Jerk Chicken Wings
Buffalo Chicken Wings
Korean-Style Chicken Wings
Garam Masala Chicken Wings

Derek Gores, Women's World
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Terry Rodgers, Immaculate Reflection 2006.
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Brett Amory
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Withdrawal Symptoms

When you’re booked into the Los Angeles County Jail, they put you in a cage with a wire gate, and you have to wait while they type up a whole bunch of stuff. You lie there and sit there, and then, when enough people are ready, the guards call out the names and you walk to another section, where they take your fingerprints. They do each finger and your whole hand, and they take your picture. Then you wait again, and there’s no place to sit. You lie on the cement floor, and people get sick—they’re vomiting. I was sick before I got busted—I was sick before I went and hocked my horn—so I was deathly ill by the time I was waiting. And it took thirty-six hours to be booked in.

The agony of kicking is beyond words. It’s nothing like the movies, The Man with the Golden Arm, or things you read: how they scream and bat their heads against the wall, and they’d give up their mother, and they want to cut their throats. That’s ridiculous. It’s awful but it’s quiet. You just lie there and suffer. You have chills and your bones hurt; your veins hurt; and you ache. When water touches you it feels as if it’s burning you, and there’s a horrible taste in your mouth, and every smell is awful and becomes magnified a thousandfold. You can smell people, people with BO, their feet, and filth and dirt. But you don’t scream and all that: “Kill my mother, my father, just get me a fix and I’ll do anything you want!” That’s outrageous.

The depression you feel is indescribable, and you don’t sleep. Depending on how hooked you are, you might go three weeks or a month without ever sleeping except for momentary spells when you just pass out. You’ll be shaking and wiggling your legs to try to stop the pain in the joints, and all of a sudden you’ll black out and you’ll have a dream that you’re somewhere trying to score. You’ll get the shit and the outfit, and you’ll stick it in your vein, and then the outfit will clog, or the stuff will shoot out the rubber part of the dropper, or somebody’ll get in the way—somebody stops you and you never get it into your arm. I used to dream that my grandmother was holding me and I was hitting her in the face, smashing her in the mouth—blood came out of her face—and I could never get the dope in. You’d have terrible dreams: you’d flash to a woman, your old lady; she’d become a dog and she’d have a peepee like a dog instead of a cunt like a woman; and all of a sudden you’d come and immediately you’d wake up, and you’d be sticky and dirty and wet.

The first time I went to the county jail I went seventeen days and nights without sleeping at all, I was so sick. I kept vomiting and couldn’t eat. Seventeen days and nights, and all they gave you was aspirin. You could get three of them at night when they had sick call come around. And at night they had salts and soda. You could get either one. Salts to make you go to the bathroom or soda to settle your stomach.

In the county jail for a while they had a kick tank. They’d lock you up in a solid cell all alone. I knew a young Chicano cat who got put in the kick tank, and he started vomiting. He vomited and vomited, and he called for the guards, but they ignored him. He kept vomiting and he ruptured a blood vessel in his stomach and bled to death, choked in his own blood. That’s the treatment that the dope fiend got.

I was once in jail with a Chinaman. He had been shooting “black” (opium) for years and years. Chinese didn’t get busted for a long time because the Chinese as a whole are much stronger than the whites and the blacks. But then some of the young Chinese got out and started shooting regular heroin, hanging out with the other dope fiends, and they got Americanized. And so, when they got busted they ratted on their elders. This Chinaman was an older guy; he looked like a skeleton, and he was really strung out. He was shaking so much he could hardly walk. They assigned him to a cell but he said, “I can’t bear the cell. Just put me on the freeway.” The freeway is the walkway that goes by the cells. They put him out there, and for two weeks he did nothing but sit in one position. He didn’t eat one bit of food. Every now and then he’d drink a little something, take some broth out of the stew. For two weeks he sat with his feet on the floor and his arms around his knees in a corner on the freeway not saying a word to anybody, sweat pouring off his face. When he got a little better I talked to him, and he said that he was trying to put himself into a trance, to leave his body, to get over the misery. I’ve seen guys put their pant legs into their socks and tie strings around them so no wind could get to their bodies. Then they would walk up and down the freeway for days, walk all night long, and they wouldn’t sleep for weeks except for these horrible moments.

So kicking is the most insidious thing. It’s a million times worse than they portray it. It’s not an outward, noisy anguish. It’s an inner suffering that only you, and, if there’s any such thing as God, like, maybe you and He know it.

by Art Pepper, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:
Excerpt from the autobiography Straight Life

The Mourning Forest, Naomi Kawase (2007)
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Gait 101: Learning to Run More Naturally

Many beginning runners remark about how much they enjoy the new experience. They care little about the nuances regarding form, technique, or proper gait. As long as they are moving, accumulating mileage over a sustained period of time, they feel content and satisfied. But at the advanced and elite level of running, the concept of gait takes on an entirely new dimension of complexity, constant questioning, and evaluation by a coach or oneself.

But what is exactly meant by the term “gait?” In running, gait is typically defined as moving posture– the whole body’s forward progress, including the foot strike and pelvic position, to arm swing, head and knee movement. It’s not unusual for coaches, kinesiologists and other biomechanics experts, and elite runners to dissect each component of one’s gait. From this assessment, each element of the gait that’s viewed as “flawed” is “corrected”—the runner is told to lift the knee to this position, swing the arms that way, or hold the elbows this way.

Yet nothing is more natural than the biomechanics of human running. Or should be. With every step a runner takes, the limbs, trunk, head and spine participate in various combinations of movement, ranging from flexion, extension, and rotation, to abduction and adduction, along with the feet, which pronate, supinate, invert and evert. Only by understanding the normal ranges of motion can one detect “abnormal” movements so as to help assess an injury or observe for the potential of future injury.

More importantly, there’s no ideal running form. While all humans have the same basic running pattern—just like other animals—your gait is yours alone. In fact, it’s easy to recognize your training partner from a distance, even before the face comes into focus, because you know his or her unique running fingerprint. Even looking at the best athletes in professional sports, there’s one common feature—everyone’s movements are slightly different. Each golfer follows the basic swing, while at the same time each has a swing all his or her own; the same for every high-jumper, baseball pitcher, tennis player, or marathoner.

That is, unless something interferes with movement.

When something causes the gait to go astray, two things happen. First, there is the risk of getting injured because it meant something went wrong, and it will be reflected in running form in a subtle—or sometimes more obvious—way. There might be irregular movement in the hip joint causing the pelvis to tilt more to one side than the other, more flexion of one knee than the other stressing the hamstring muscles, too much rotation of the leg causing the foot to flair outward excessively, and erratic arm movements. The most common reason for this is muscle imbalance, and it forces the body to compensate by contracting certain muscles to keep the imbalance from worsening.

The second problem is that the body’s energy is being used inefficiently. A flawed running form will raise the heart rate more than usual, making one fatigue quicker, and resulting in a slower pace. Stretching can disturb the gait too—by making a muscle longer with a loss of power. By stretching muscles before running, it’s very possible to cause muscle imbalance.

Physical interference is most often the result of bad shoes or muscle imbalance, sometimes both. Stretching can disturb the gait too—by making a muscle longer with a loss of power. By stretching muscles before running, it’s very possible to cause muscle imbalance.

Another factor affecting is gait is poor postural habit. We sit in chairs too long or slump at our desks. We stand with poor posture and even walk with an irregular gait—all because somewhere along the way we allowed our bodies to get lazy. For many, these bad habits carry over to running.

by Dr.Phil Maffetone, Natural Running Center |  Read more:

Image: Uncredited

Why Etsy's Brave New Economy is Crumbling

One of the biggest consumer markets in the world resides in a river valley about 200 miles southwest of Shanghai. You can find almost anything you want in Commodity City's half-million stalls: baby bibs, knitting supplies, sundry types of underwear, T-shirts, glitzy jewelry.

The market is the literal and figurative heart of Yiwu, a metropolis of 1.3 million people that bustles under the sticky, industrial haze of Zhejiang province. Journalist Tim Phillips has called Yiwu the "Wall Street" of China's counterfeit goods industry—an accurate, if somewhat narrow, label. The city's factories flood the shelves of Commodity City and the rest of the world with a lot more than just knock-off iPhones and pirated Hollywood DVDs. They relentlessly pump out the type of cheap consumer goods you're used to seeing at shopping mall kiosks and street-side trinket stands.

It's in part because of factory cities like Yiwu that Etsy, an online marketplace that specializes in handcrafted goods, has become so successful. Since launching in 2005, Etsy has ridden an Internet-powered counter-industrial revolution, adding a personal and DIY touch to goods—everything from sweaters to Christmas ornaments. Craftsmakers have fled to Etsy to escape the price-cutting effects of big-box stores and their walls of factory-made products.The crafts marketplace has formed an alternate commercial universe with 30 million members and nearly 1 million stores, all ostensibly running on human labor and handmade goods.

It goes without saying that If Yiwu-type products began infiltrating Etsy, they'd upend the market—the same way Walmart destroyed your local department store or Barnes & Noble ended the era of the corner book shop.

Take a look at the "Infinity Ring," a delicate brass loop coated with a silver sheen and topped with rhinestones and crystal. In pictures of the factory where it's made, you can see rows of workers in surgical masks bent over dusty tables, not far from bulky industrial machines. From ports in Ningbo and Shanghai, the Yiwu Daihe Jewelry Corp. exports the ring to anywhere in the world at 50 cents a piece.

You can buy it on Etsy's most popular jewelry store for $15.

How? To most Etsy users, the obvious answer is that Laonato, the store, is buying the rings wholesale from the factory, then pawning them off as handmade goods, reaping a monstrous 2,900 percent profit. That practice is known as "reselling," and it's a subject of intense controversy on the site. But like with a lot of things on Etsy—where the entire economy operates behind the shroud of the Internet—easily drawn assumptions and reality rarely align as neatly as you'd expect.

As its leaders struggle to redefine the company's corporate identity, the blurry, ungraspable truth about the Infinity Ring hints of a chronic ailment at Etsy's core—one that could undermine the company’s ambitious plans and the marketplace as a whole.

by Kevin Morris, Daily Dot |  Read more:

Image: Jason Reed

Yume32ki, Summer School
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R. Crumb, Can't You See I'm Reading? 1984.
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Junku Nishimura
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Brain to Brain Interface

University of Washington researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher.

Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard.

While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing.

“The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” Stocco said. “We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain.” (...)

Rao, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, has been working on brain-computer interfacing in his lab for more than 10 years and just published a textbook on the subject. In 2011, spurred by the rapid advances in technology, he believed he could demonstrate the concept of human brain-to-brain interfacing. So he partnered with Stocco, a UW research assistant professor in psychology at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.

On Aug. 12, Rao sat in his lab wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain. Stocco was in his lab across campus wearing a purple swim cap marked with the stimulation site for the transcranial magnetic stimulation coil that was placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls hand movement.

The team had a Skype connection set up so the two labs could coordinate, though neither Rao nor Stocco could see the Skype screens.

Rao looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game with his mind. When he was supposed to fire a cannon at a target, he imagined moving his right hand (being careful not to actually move his hand), causing a cursor to hit the “fire” button. Almost instantaneously, Stocco, who wore noise-canceling earbuds and wasn’t looking at a computer screen, involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. Stocco compared the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily to that of a nervous tic.

by Doree Armstrong and Michelle Ma, University of Washington | Read more:
Image: University of Washington

The Bee Hummingbird is the smallest bird on Earth.
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“Teuthology of the Deep” by Clara Jauquet

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The Failed Grand Strategy in the Middle East

In the beginning, the Hebrew Bible tells us, the universe was all "tohu wabohu," chaos and tumult. This month the Middle East seems to be reverting to that primeval state: Iraq continues to unravel, the Syrian War grinds on with violence spreading to Lebanon and allegations of chemical attacks this week, and Egypt stands on the brink of civil war with the generals crushing the Muslim Brotherhood and street mobs torching churches. Turkey's prime minister, once widely hailed as President Obama's best friend in the region, blames Egypt's violence on the Jews; pretty much everyone else blames it on the U.S.

The Obama administration had a grand strategy in the Middle East. It was well intentioned, carefully crafted and consistently pursued.

Unfortunately, it failed.

The plan was simple but elegant: The U.S. would work with moderate Islamist groups like Turkey's AK Party and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to make the Middle East more democratic. This would kill three birds with one stone. First, by aligning itself with these parties, the Obama administration would narrow the gap between the 'moderate middle' of the Muslim world and the U.S. Second, by showing Muslims that peaceful, moderate parties could achieve beneficial results, it would isolate the terrorists and radicals, further marginalizing them in the Islamic world. Finally, these groups with American support could bring democracy to more Middle Eastern countries, leading to improved economic and social conditions, gradually eradicating the ills and grievances that drove some people to fanatical and terroristic groups.

President Obama (whom I voted for in 2008) and his team hoped that the success of the new grand strategy would demonstrate once and for all that liberal Democrats were capable stewards of American foreign policy. The bad memories of the Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter presidencies would at last be laid to rest; with the public still unhappy with George W. Bush's foreign policy troubles, Democrats would enjoy a long-term advantage as the party most trusted by voters to steer the country through stormy times.

It is much too early to anticipate history's verdict on the Obama administration's foreign policy; the president has 41 months left in his term, and that is more than enough for the picture in the Middle East to change drastically once again. Nevertheless, to get a better outcome, the president will have to change his approach.

With the advantages of hindsight, it appears that the White House made five big miscalculations about the Middle East. It misread the political maturity and capability of the Islamist groups it supported; it misread the political situation in Egypt; it misread the impact of its strategy on relations with America's two most important regional allies (Israel and Saudi Arabia); it failed to grasp the new dynamics of terrorist movements in the region; and it underestimated the costs of inaction in Syria. (...)

This is dangerous. Just as Nikita Khrushchev concluded that President Kennedy was weak and incompetent after the Bay of Pigs failure and the botched Vienna summit, and then proceeded to test the American president from Cuba to Berlin, so President Vladimir Putin and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei now believe they are dealing with a dithering and indecisive American leader, and are calibrating their policies accordingly. Khrushchev was wrong about Kennedy, and President Obama's enemies are also underestimating him, but those underestimates can create dangerous crises before they are corrected.

by Walter Russell Mead, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: AP