Internment Camp

For a very brief period not too long ago I was the “chief of research” at a glossy yet rugged men’s lifestyle magazine. An industry darling, this “practical guide to the sensory thrills and psychological rewards of an active physical life” (as its 1995 National Magazine Award write-up swooned), was one of the most celebrated and award-laden start-ups in recent memory. As they say in the industry, Men’s Journal was “a very hot book.”

Not coincidentally, it was also an advertiser’s wet dream—a place where we took press releases at their word, where we re-shot photos for “personal grooming” stories because the toothbrushes didn’t look “exciting” enough, and where being a “complete guide for high-performance living” (we used this phrase seriously) meant giving lavish coverage to every sexy consumer product we could get our comp-crazy hands on. In the pages of this morally bankrupt advertorial, this himbo of a magazine, you could, any given month, learn that speed-skiing was not only fun but fulfilling (“Courage wasn’t what would propel me down Willamette. Innocence. I would become innocent.”); read about the religious significance of mountain-biking equipment (“There’s a Zen-like mystery about Giro’s new Helios helmet.”); be the first to know that this particular style of Nikes was much better than the one we said was the best ever a month ago (this one uses aircraft tubing!); and discover all the reasons why Howie Long is a really good actor.

But do not be impressed by the lofty title I held there. “Research chief” was pure euphemism for “the-fact-checker-whose-head-will-roll-if-anything-goes-wrong.” In charge of the “legal invulnerability and factual accuracy” of the magazine, the bulk of my days involved determining whether octopi have pancreases (they don’t), what the hell “aircraft tubing” actually is (nobody knows), and if ex-Oakland Raider wide receiver Warren Wells would sue us for calling him “compulsively felonious” (playing it safe, we ultimately cut the “compulsively” and never heard from him).

I was also partly in charge of finding interns to send our faxes, answer our phones, and, among other sundry responsibilities, go shopping for the products in photo shoots that we couldn’t get comped. Compared to fact-checking, hiring interns was difficult stuff. Not because no one was willing, mind you. On the contrary, I was spoiled for choice. The applicants would walk in, these college kids, recent graduates, and grad students, always punctual and always white, sheepish but confident, polite, and well-fragranced. They would hand me clips from their school newspapers while I looked over their résumés, which always went something like this:

Interview Magazine
May ’95 to Sept ’95
Summer Intern

CBS News
Oct ’94 to May ’95
Fall Intern

The Village Voice
May ’94 to August ’94
Summer Intern

“Very impressive,” I would say. By my quick calculations they had contributed, conservatively, five or six thousand dollars worth of uncompensated work to various media conglomerates. I would tell them that they surely have all the “experience” they would ever get by following this strategy, and that while I had positions open (who doesn’t have unpaid positions open?), I was reluctant to fill them with people who were already competent cub writers, reporters, editors, and fact-checkers. They should have been demanding jobs a long time ago. They would try not to look too crestfallen at this news. They would explain to me that they were indeed the perfect person to work for me for free. Hell, they sometimes said, they had been doing it so long that they were good at it by now.

by Jim Frederick, The Baffler |  Read more:

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Concussions Lawsuit Settlement Lets NFL off the Hook

It's a testament to the NFL's massive financial success that they can claim victory while still agreeing to hand over $765 million. The truth is, that if the massive proposed settlement, to be paid out to former NFL players and their families, holds up it will be a huge win for the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell. As evidence grows that NFL players risk serious life-altering health risks due to concussions and other serious injuries, this settlement, which undoubtedly will help the players involved and their families, effectively ends the first major threat to the NFL's current existence without forcing the league to make meaningful changes.

At first glance it might seem like the NFL has lost big time here, having been forced to pay out $765 million to over 4,500 former players, with that total before factoring in lawyer fees, "to fund medical exams, concussion-related compensation, and a program of medical research''. While this would come out to about $170,000 per player if handed out equally to each player, it's been reported that the actual payouts would be tied to the individual's specific medical conditions. Plus that estimate also factors in around $75 million of the settlement would go towards medical tests and there would be around $10 million leftover for further scientific research.

So, make no mistake, this is a significant amount of money, don't expect Roger Goodell to pull a Randy Moss and joke about paying it out in "straight cash homey", However, even a quick look at the NFL's finances makes it very clear that this will not be a crippling blow. The NFL made $9.5 billion last year alone. In relative terms this is a small price to pay to avoid confronting the fact that they have literally been killing their employees. On top of this, around half of this money will be doled out over the course of the next 17 years, severely lessening the immediate financial consequences for the league. (...)

As Grantland's Bill Barnwell notes, this settlement allows them to pay off the plaintiffs without acknowledging any liability, pretty much the best case scenario imaginable. Not admitting fault gives the NFL a much better chance at defeating future lawsuits, which are nearly inevitable.

The timing is perfect as well. By resolving this lawsuit before the start of the NFL regular season, Goodell ensures that at least this particular story won't distract fans from the on-field product, which is as popular and profitable as it has ever been, once the real games begin.

by Hunter Felt, The Guardian |  Read more:

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Googling Yourself Takes on a Whole New Meaning

Here’s what you see if you look at my face: a skinny titanium headband stretched across my forehead. It looks like a futuristic pair of sunglasses, minus the lenses. On my right-hand side there’s a computer, a metal frame with a small, clear cube of plastic perched just over my eye. When I tilt my head upward a bit, or run my finger along the side of the frame, the cube lights up. What I see, floating six inches in front of me, is a pinkish, translucent computer screen. It gives me access to a few simple apps: Google search, text messaging, Twitter, a to-do list, some hourly news headlines from CNN (“See a Truck Go Airborne, Fly Over Median,” “Dolphin Deaths Alarm Biologists”). Beside the screen is a teensy camera built into the frame of the glasses, ready to record anything I’m looking at.

Google Glass is the company’s attempt to mainstream what the tech industry calls wearable computing, to take the computer off your desk or out of your pocket and keep it in your field of view. In a world where we’re already peering at screens all day long, pecked at by alerts, the prospect of an eyeball computer can provoke a shudder. But over several weeks of using the device myself, I began to experience some of the intriguing — and occasionally delightful — aspects of this new machine. I got used to glancing up to start texting and e-mailing by addressing its surprisingly accurate voice-transcription capabilities. (I admit I once texted my wife while riding my bicycle.) I set up calendar reminders that dinged in my ear. I used an app that guided me back to my car in a parking lot. I sent pictures of magazine articles to Evernote, so I would have reminders of what I’d read. I had tweets from friends float across my gaze.

Despite my quick adoption, however, only rarely did I accomplish something with Glass that I couldn’t already do with, say, my mobile phone. When I first heard about the device, I envisioned using it as a next-level brain supplement, accessing brilliant trivia during conversations, making myself seem omniscient (or insufferable, or both). This happened only occasionally: I startled a friend with information about the author of a rare sci-fi book, for example. But generally I found that Googling was pretty hard; you mostly control Glass with voice commands, and speaking queries aloud in front of others was awkward.

The one thing I used regularly was its camera. I enjoyed taking hands-free shots while playing with my kids and street scenes for which I would probably not have bothered to pull out my phone. I streamed live point-of-view video with friends and family. But it also became clear that the camera is a social bomb. One friend I ran into on the street could focus only on the lens pointing at her. “Can it see into my soul?” she asked. Later, she wrote me an e-mail: “Nice to see you. Or spy you spying, I guess.”  (...)

The earliest prototypes of Glass were made by taking the components from phones running Android — Google’s mobile operating system — and gluing them to a pair of safety goggles, with a huge L.C.D. in front of one eye. Heft was a hurdle: the prototypes were more than five and a half ounces, creating an untenable amount of “nose-borne weight,” to use an industry term. “If it doesn’t meet a minimum bar for comfort and style, it just doesn’t matter what it will do,” Lee said. Nobody would wear it all day long.

To shrink the device and make it more attractive, Lee hired Isabelle Olsson, a Swedish industrial designer known for her elegant, stripped-down aesthetic. She wasn’t told what she was being hired for. On her first day at work, Olsson was shown the safety-goggle prototype. When she pulled it out of a box and put it on to show me, she looked like a mad scientist.

“My heart skipped a beat,” she said with a laugh. “As a very nontacky person, this idea overwhelmed me a little bit. I’m going to wear a computer on my face? I really felt like we need to simplify this to the extreme. Whatever we can remove, we will remove.” (...)

Google started selling Glass this spring. Two thousand went to software developers; 8,000 went to people who submitted to Google short descriptions of what they’d do with Glass; those selected paid $1,500 for it. (I received mine this way and paid full price.) Once users began wandering into public life a few months ago, gazing into their glowing eye-screens, it became possible to begin answering the question: how would people use wearable computers in their everyday lives?

by Clive Thompson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Grant Cornett for The New York Times

Facebook to Update Privacy Policy, but Adjusting Settings Is No Easier

[ed. Why anyone would continue to use a service so obviously manipulative is beyond me.]

Facebook announced Thursday that it planned to enact changes to its privacy policies on Sept. 5.

But the social network’s famously difficult privacy controls will not become any easier to navigate.

Mostly, the new data use policy and statement of rights and responsibilities lay out more clearly the things that Facebook already does with your personal information, Ed Palmieri, the company’s associate general counsel for privacy, said in an interview. “The updates that we are showing in the red lines are our way to better explain the products that exist today,” he said.

In some ways, the company is making it more clear that it uses a wide variety of personal data about its 1.2 billion users to deliver advertising, including things they share and do, what they like, how they interact with ads and applications, and even demographic data inferred from everything else.

Facebook also said that it might use its customers’ profile photos to help their friends tag them in photos. Those photos are already public, but Facebook does not currently use them to help recognize faces when photos are uploaded to the service. “This will make the product better for people,” Mr. Palmieri said. “You can still opt out of it.”

But the company is also deliberately deleting information about specific privacy controls. Instead, Mr. Palmieri said, Facebook decided it was better to send users to various other pages, such as one on advertising, to learn more about privacy issues and how to adjust the controls.

For example, the data use policy will no longer offer a direct path to the control for opting out of your name and activities on the site being used as endorsements on ads sent to your friends.

by Vindu Goel, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Art in Science

Resorcinal, Daphnia and Volvox, and human sperm.

via: Biocanvas

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Joni Mitchell

[ed. Seriously great... from the Shadows and Light tour.] 

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