Dickson Payne, Popeye
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Shyscraper

[ed. The New York Times declined to publish this op-ed piece so it appeared on Banksy's site instead, along with other art from his month long stay.]

Lou Reed (March 2, 1942 – October 27, 2013)

[ed. Lou Reed, Velvet Underground Leader and Rock Pioneer, Dead at 71.]

Objectified

Three weeks ago, renowned graffiti artist Banksy started a 30-day “show” in New York entitled Better Out Than In: an Artist’s Residency on the Streets of New York. Each day the enigmatic and elusive artist (we still don’t know his identity) posts a picture to his website and Instagram account of a new piece gracing some part of New York. On the first day of the Instagram account, which now has over 200,000 followers, Banksy posted a photo of his first work, with his comment, “The street is in play Manhattan 2013 #banksyny.” Indeed, Banksy has used the street walls of NYC as canvas for whimsical pieces, from a dog pissing on a hydrant with a dialogue bubble reading “You complete me,” to a plastic heart-shaped balloon with band aids on it. Banksy also availed himself of original sculptures, like Ronald McDonald receiving a shoe shine, and makes a clever use of trucks. One Banksy piece is an installation on wheels: a truck driving through the city streets with stuffed livestock-animal dolls with their cute heads sticking out of the sides, seemingly on their way to the slaughter, and another he calls a mobile garden, a dirty looking delivery track carrying an spray-painted oasis in its carriage. Yet, in all the attempts at playfulness an overwrought seriousness has crept into the project. Many Banksy devotees appear offended—almost personally slighted—by how some New Yorkers deign to treat these pristine works of art.

Indeed, some of Banksy’s installments have been either painted over, or painted on, or tagged by other graffiti artists. The way the pieces are embedded into the city’s environment, it is perhaps unsurprising that just a day after the first Banksy went up, it was painted over; the piece was tagged, “(c) PHATLIPP Sweaty palms made me lose the love of my life ):” This one guy tagged a few pieces, which elicited more graffiti responses, these making fun of him, but also an outpouring of hate and vitriol on the Internet. (A representative comment from one commenter on Banksy’s Instagram: “Fuck those jealous losers that ruin your art. They are just mad that their ugly scribbles don’t get the attention you get.”) Even when more creative additions and replication went up as with Banksy’s, “Concrete Confessional”, people still felt affronted by what they perceived as defacing of art. That many people, en masse have taking to denigrating anyone who might think to tag, or add to, or otherwise “deface” a precious Banksy betrays a static and empty (though understandable) idea of art, an idea that undermines the greatness of graffiti. (...)

Graffiti art, let’s remember, is purposefully one of the less controlled and more transient of art forms. It is inherently communal, whether in the enjoyment or in its genesis and longevity. Performance art, of course, is more fleeting by definition, but both graffiti and performance art take away much of the control from the artist, whether limiting themselves in time or creating a painting that will necessarily be under the community’s control. Both though, tend to raise a strange frustration in people, perhaps because these forms so diverge from our traditional notions of art as eternal, as belonging in a museum. Graffiti takes the city as its canvas, the walls, alleyways, and windows of lived life, an intrusion of art into the stuffiness of the city, but always as part of the city. To then treat it as an objet d’art, to quarantine it off, transforms it and takes it out of its natural and proper context. Banksy once wrote, “Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they’re having a piss.” But can you imagine the outrage if someone were to take a piss on or even next to one of the new Banksies?

In the last two weeks, owners of buildings with Banksy art have taken to hiring guards, putting up plexiglass, rolling gates, and ropes to create lines, all of which is practical and perhaps understandable but undermines much of the purpose of these 30 days. All of these protections simply turn these outdoors, public pieces into indoor museum pieces, introducing a sterility that subverts the spirit of the project. These tactics isolate the art from the bustling environment. The viewer becomes passive, just another viewer waiting in line, no longer a participant. From a theoretical perspective, this all seems backwards. The owners of the building, from the perspective of the actual graffiti art, ought to hold no more rights than the community in deciding what to do with the graffiti.

by Joe Winkler, Guernica |  Read more:

Image: from Flickr via Dan Brady

Miguel Rio Branco, 1994. Havana.
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Alex Webb
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JPMorgan Reaches Deal With Agency Over Loans

[ed. See also: Reparations From Banks. I guess this is what passes for regulatory oversight and restitution these days. Despite the oddness of seeing two governmental agencies engaged in a public dispute over how hard to slap J.P's wrist, the fact remains that $13 billon in fines is no small potatoes. That alone should give pause to consider just how enormous the company's transgressions have been (and perhaps still are). I say, book 'em Dano...to the full extent of the law (and even more, were it possible).]

JPMorgan Chase has secured important concessions in a $13 billion settlement over its mortgage practices, allowances that could ultimately reduce the bank’s financial burden and leave the government itself on the hook for a small portion of the cost.

The concessions emerged on Friday in an agreement with one of the federal regulators suing JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank. The regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, ran ahead of a broader deal that the Justice Department and other authorities were negotiating with the bank.

The housing agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, extracted a $5.1 billion payout on Friday.

But unlike other regulators pursuing the bank, it did not require JPMorgan to admit wrongdoing. And in a provision buried in the settlement, the agency effectively allows JPMorgan to try later to recoup about $1 billion from another federal regulator: the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

The results show that, even as JPMorgan is facing an onslaught from the government, the bank is seeking to contain the fallout — and is succeeding on some fronts.

In a statement, JPMorgan called the deal “an important step towards a broader resolution” with the Justice Department and the other government authorities.

And for its part, the housing agency, while not responding to questions about the wording of the agreement, also heralded the settlement. “This is a significant step as the government and JPMorgan Chase move to address outstanding mortgage-related issues,” Edward J. DeMarco, the acting director of the housing agency, said in a statement. Yet the housing agency’s announcement also suggests that the government may be split over how to punish the bank for misrepresenting the quality of mortgage securities it sold to investors before the 2008 financial crisis. The Justice Department, which has orchestrated the $13 billion settlement, is conversely demanding that JPMorgan not pass on its liabilities to the F.D.I.C.

JPMorgan has been locked in a legal battle with the F.D.I.C. over mortgage securities sold by Washington Mutual. In a deal that the F.D.I.C. orchestrated, JPMorgan bought the failed bank at the height of the financial crisis in 2008, just months after it acquired Bear Stearns. By JPMorgan’s account, the F.D.I.C. agreed that it would shoulder some liabilities from Washington Mutual. The agency disputes that notion and is fighting the bank in court.

The bank’s legal stance has now carried over into the negotiations over the $13 billion mortgage settlement.

Because the settlement deal with the housing regulator involves mortgage securities sold by Washington Mutual, JPMorgan could try to push some of the settlement cost onto the F.D.I.C. And the deal with the housing agency does not explicitly prevent the bank from doing so.

by Ben Protess and Peter Eavis, NY Times Dealbook |  Read more:

Image: Mike Segar/Reuters

Kanye West Knows You Think He Sounded Nuts

Here are three stories.

I'm 9 or 10 and my mother and I are on a cross-country road trip when we decide to stop for breakfast at a small roadside diner in Mississippi. I'm too young to be aware of the charged atmosphere of racial tension, but something feels odd. It feels odd when the people in the diner—most of whom are white—turn to look at my white mother and me, her brown son, as we enter and make our way to a table. It feels odd when my mom asks if there are raisins to put in her oatmeal and the waitress irritatedly spits, "No!" It feels so odd, in fact, that my mother asks our server if something is wrong: "No!" she barks again. It feels odd when the woman throws down the bill when we're done eating. No one calls us names. No one threatens us. The surly waitress has even specifically told us nothing is wrong. But when we return to the car my visibly shaken mom pulls a canister of pepper spray out of the glove compartment and tests it on the ground to make certain it's functioning properly.

Years later, in high school, I'm headed to a party in my friend Spencer's convertible. It's a warm Arizona evening, and the hot wind is blowing through our hair; we're laughing and listening to rap music. A gum wrapper from somewhere in the car catches a gust of air and takes flight. I'm sure it hasn't even landed before a police car pulls us over, and soon my two black friends and I have flashlights in our faces.

"You think you can litter around here?" one white officer asks.

"You mean that gum wrapper?" I ask back. "I'm very sorry that happened, sir, but this is a convertible. It was a mistake." He writes me a ticket.

A month ago, I'm at a dive bar in Brooklyn. My white friend tells me on the way over that the last time he'd been at this particular bar, a week or two before, he was so drunk he'd danced wildly in the middle of place and belted out songs along with the jukebox—his wife and young son were out of town and he was cutting loose. I order a round of beers for our party. We drink them and another friend, a Middle Eastern man with a mop of curly black hair, goes to order another round. When I see it's taking him longer to order than it should, I walk up to the bar and ask what's wrong.

"Your friend here's too drunk," the bartender says. "I'm cutting him off." My friend—having spent years in Germany, no stranger to beer—has had less to drink than anyone else in our party.

"Then I'll buy a round," I tell the bartender.

"You're too drunk, too," he says. "You're both cut off."

I survey the room. "I'm not sure it's a coincidence that you're cutting off the only two brown people in the whole bar," I say.

"I don't have a prejudiced bone in my body," the bartender says.

We walk back and tell our friends what's happened. Two of them—a white woman and a white man who's had a comparable amount to drink as me—order two beers apiece, no questions asked. Despite the fact that we've now got four new beers, nobody much feels like drinking them, and so we leave. I'm served at two more bars that night, and at both I wonder to myself if these bartenders are being unscrupulously generous with an obviously inebriated man. Are my brown friend and I really drunker than all of our friends? Are we shameful? Are we the wasted minorities in a bar full of unprejudiced white people who want us out of there?

I think one of the most damaging effects America's omnipresent racism has on a person's psyche isn't the brief pang of hurt that comes from being called a slur, or seeing a picture of Barack Obama portrayed by a chimpanzee. Those things are common and old-fashioned, and when they happen I tend to feel sadder than angry, because I'm seeing someone who engages with the world like a wall instead of a human being. Rather, I think what's far more corrosive and insidious, the thing that lingers in the back of my mind the most, is the framework of plausible deniability built up around racism, and how insane that plausible deniability can make a person feel when wielded. How unsure of oneself. How worried that you might be overreacting, oversensitive, irrational.

by Cord Jefferson, Gawker |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Jacob Lawrence, Pool Parlor, 1942
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Jonas Wood, Schindler Apts, 2013
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7 Ways To Be Insufferable On Facebook

The memory is vivid.

New Year's Day, 2013. I'm going about my afternoon pleasantly, when I open my email and a friend has forwarded me what she calls a particularly heinous Facebook status from her newsfeed, written by someone we'll call Daniel. It read:

2012 was a biggg year for me. I left my amazing job at NBC to move back to Chicago. I started dating my angel, Jaime Holland. I started yoga (thanks Jake Fisher & Jonah Perlstein!). I wrote an album with Matthew Johannson. Wrote another album I'm proud of. I got to hang with Owen Wilson, and worked with Will Ferrell on an amazing project. Had a conversation about Barack Obama with David Gregory. Danced. Joined a kickball team. Won a couple awards. Helped my sister plan her summer trip. Swam a lot. Golfed a little. Cried more than you would think. Read The World According to Garp. Saw Apocolypse Now. Went to Miami for the NBA Finals. Drank the best orange juice I've ever had with Davey Welch. Tweeted. Went to amazing weddings in Upstate New York. Drank a ridiculous amount of milk. Learned how to make sand art. Saw a great light show. Saw the Angels and Lakers. Fell in love with Jawbone Up. Cooked with Jaime. Gardened with Jaime. Watched Homeland with Jaime. Wrestled with Jaime. Laughed for hours with Jaime. Fell in love with Jaime's family. Worked on a play. Played World of Warcraft. Did some improv. Played a ton of the guitar. Really just had a wild, amazing year. What a world.

By the time I finished reading, I realized that my non-phone hand was clutching tightly to my forehead, forcefully scrunching my forehead skin together. I had the same facial expression I'd have on if someone made me watch a live event where people had their skin slowly peeled off.

It was everything bad about everything, all at once.

But instead of distancing myself from the horror, I soaked in it. I read it again and again, fascinated by how something could be so aggressively unappealing.

It made me think about what makes terrible Facebook behavior terrible, and why other Facebook behavior isn't annoying at all. It comes down to a pretty simple rule:

A Facebook status is annoying if it primarily serves the author and does nothing positive for anyone reading it.

To examine this a bit, let’s start by discussing the defining characteristics of statuses that are not annoying.

To be unannoying, a Facebook status typically has to be one of two things:

1) Interesting/Informative

2) Funny/Amusing/Entertaining

You know why these are unannoying? Because things in those two categories do something for me, the reader. They make my day a little better.

Ideally, interesting statuses would be fascinating and original (or a link to something that is), and funny ones would be hilarious. But I’ll happily take mildly amusing—at least we're still dealing with the good guys.

On the other hand, annoying statuses typically reek of one or more of these five motivations:

1) Image Crafting. The author wants to affect the way people think of her.

2) Narcissism. The author’s thoughts, opinions, and life philosophies matter. The author and the author’s life are interesting in and of themselves.

3) Attention Craving. The author wants attention.

4) Jealousy Inducing. The author wants to make people jealous of him or his life.

5) Loneliness. The author is feeling lonely and wants Facebook to make it better. This is the least heinous of the five—but seeing a lonely person acting lonely on Facebook makes me and everyone else sad. So the person is essentially spreading their sadness, and that’s a shitty thing to do, so it’s on the list.

Facebook is infested with these five motivations—other than a few really saintly people, most people I know, myself certainly included, are guilty of at least some of this nonsense here and there. It's an epidemic.

To lay out the most common types of offenses— 7 Ways to be Insufferable on Facebook:

by wait but why |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Julien Claessens. Nina Ricci Fall/Winter 2008 backstage.
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Alao Yokogi 3/98
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How to Make Money for Nothing Like Wall Street

Remember credit default swaps? The derivatives that some hedge funds (and banks) used to make not-so-small fortunes betting against the housing market. The derivatives that, in the process, multiplied subprime losses, and made it impossible to know just where they'd turn up. The derivatives that sunk AIG.

Yeah, those derivatives.

These "financial weapons of mass destruction," as Warren Buffett called them, turn out to be pretty simple, in theory. Credit default swaps (CDS) are just insurance on a loan. So when you buy a CDS, you're betting against a loan. And it doesn't have to be a loan you made. You can bet against a loan someone else made too. It'd be as if you could take out car insurance on someone you think is a bad driver. So if the loan defaults, you stand to make money. And if there's no default, you just wind up coughing up premium after premium, paying for car insurance on your good driver who never gets in an accident.

What could go wrong here? Plenty. For one, CDS have been traded one-on-one, not over exchanges, so it's been hard to know just who owes what. This opacity was a big part why banks stopped lending to each other during the financial crisis — they didn't know who'd been stuck holding the subprime bag (or if it was them). For another, you could sell more CDS protection than you could ever afford to pay out if everything went bad. (This was AIG's $180 billion mistake). But there are some pretty simple fixes here, and the industry has adopted some of them. CDS trades are now publicly reported, and go through clearinghouses that require collateral. So CDS are more transparent, and it's harder to sell them if you can't afford to pay them.

But even with these financial shock absorbers, there are still lots of clever-and-probably-legal-but-ethically-dubious ways to game CDS. Here are the two most devious.

1. Buy CDS on a bond, and then bribe the borrower to temporarily default. This is like taking out insurance on your neighbor's car and bribing him to get in an accident. You get the insurance, and then you kick some money back to him to upgrade his car.

Sound far-fetched? It's not. It's essentially what a unit of the Blackstone Group did with the Spanish gaming operator, Codere SA. First, Blackstone bought insurance on Codere’s bonds, so it stood to make a nice bit of money if Codere missed an interest payment. But how do you make a company miss an interest payment? Well, Blackstone took over one of Codere's revolving loans, as a hostage, and told the gaming company: "We'll force you to pay back this entire revolving loan unless you kindly miss the next interest payment on your bonds." It was a clever ransom. And guess what? The clever ransom worked. The interest payment came late. Blackstone made $15.6 million from its CDS. And as for Codere, they turned out fine, too. Blackstone agreed to restructure its bonds, and reward the company for good behavior with another $48 million loan.

by Matthew O'Brien, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Reuters

All Can Be Lost: The Great Forgetting

The first automatic pilot, dubbed a “metal airman” in a 1930 Popular Science article, consisted of two gyroscopes, one mounted horizontally, the other vertically, that were connected to a plane’s controls and powered by a wind-driven generator behind the propeller. The horizontal gyroscope kept the wings level, while the vertical one did the steering. Modern autopilot systems bear little resemblance to that rudimentary device. Controlled by onboard computers running immensely complex software, they gather information from electronic sensors and continuously adjust a plane’s attitude, speed, and bearings. Pilots today work inside what they call “glass cockpits.” The old analog dials and gauges are mostly gone. They’ve been replaced by banks of digital displays. Automation has become so sophisticated that on a typical passenger flight, a human pilot holds the controls for a grand total of just three minutes. What pilots spend a lot of time doing is monitoring screens and keying in data. They’ve become, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators.

And that, many aviation and automation experts have concluded, is a problem. Overuse of automation erodes pilots’ expertise and dulls their reflexes, leading to what Jan Noyes, an ergonomics expert at Britain’s University of Bristol, terms “a de-skilling of the crew.” No one doubts that autopilot has contributed to improvements in flight safety over the years. It reduces pilot fatigue and provides advance warnings of problems, and it can keep a plane airborne should the crew become disabled. But the steady overall decline in plane crashes masks the recent arrival of “a spectacularly new type of accident,” says Raja Parasuraman, a psychology professor at George Mason University and a leading authority on automation. When an autopilot system fails, too many pilots, thrust abruptly into what has become a rare role, make mistakes. Rory Kay, a veteran United captain who has served as the top safety official of the Air Line Pilots Association, put the problem bluntly in a 2011 interview with the Associated Press: “We’re forgetting how to fly.” The Federal Aviation Administration has become so concerned that in January it issued a “safety alert” to airlines, urging them to get their pilots to do more manual flying. An overreliance on automation, the agency warned, could put planes and passengers at risk.

The experience of airlines should give us pause. It reveals that automation, for all its benefits, can take a toll on the performance and talents of those who rely on it. The implications go well beyond safety. Because automation alters how we act, how we learn, and what we know, it has an ethical dimension. The choices we make, or fail to make, about which tasks we hand off to machines shape our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world. That has always been true, but in recent years, as the locus of labor-saving technology has shifted from machinery to software, automation has become ever more pervasive, even as its workings have become more hidden from us. Seeking convenience, speed, and efficiency, we rush to off-load work to computers without reflecting on what we might be sacrificing as a result.

Doctors use computers to make diagnoses and to perform surgery. Wall Street bankers use them to assemble and trade financial instruments. Architects use them to design buildings. Attorneys use them in document discovery. And it’s not only professional work that’s being computerized. Thanks to smartphones and other small, affordable computers, we depend on software to carry out many of our everyday routines. We launch apps to aid us in shopping, cooking, socializing, even raising our kids. We follow turn-by-turn GPS instructions. We seek advice from recommendation engines on what to watch, read, and listen to. We call on Google, or Siri, to answer our questions and solve our problems. More and more, at work and at leisure, we’re living our lives inside glass cockpits.

by Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Kyle Bean

Twitter Illiterate? Mastering the @BC’s

Using Twitter sounds so simple. Type out no more than 140 characters — the maximum allowed in a single tweet — and hit send. That’s all, right?

Not quite. Twitter’s interface may look simple, but it is not, and its complexity has turned off many people who tried the service. This is a problem because one of the big questions facing Twitter before it starts trading as a public company, perhaps as early as next month, is whether it can attract enough users to become a robust outlet for advertising dollars. Although Twitter brings in money from advertising, it does not yet sell enough ads to make a profit.

Still, in the few years since it started, Twitter has quickly gained users. People and organizations of many stripes — celebrities like Justin Bieber, brands like Oreo, even the economist Jeffrey Sachs — have flocked to Twitter to share information and thoughts.

In a prospectus released for investors last week, the company said its worldwide monthly users grew to 232 million in the third quarter, up from closer to 200 million early this year. According to a Pew survey, the percentage of American Internet users on Twitter as of May was 18 percent, more than double the percentage in November 2010.

But those numbers are a far cry from those attained by Facebook, a top rival. Facebook has more than a billion users, and according to a Pew survey, Facebook was used by 67 percent of American Internet users as of late last year.

Will Twitter become a platform used by the masses? Maybe the best way to answer that question is to use the service yourself. Here’s a primer.

by Hanna Ingber, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Minh Uong

Yuri Kudrin
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[ed. From the continuing series: Adventures in Dysfunctional Parenting.]

The Missing Piece to Changing the University Culture

As graduate students, we have become disillusioned with our academic training. We began graduate school full of ambition, drive and optimism but have long since come to realize that we have joined a system that does not meet our diverse interests. We yearn for a community that supports creativity and the expression of future career goals instead of one with a narrow, focused interest.

Current PhD training programs are focused primarily on the academic career track despite its disheartening outlook: the number of awarded PhDs is significantly outpacing the available positions, fiscal pressures have slowed the growth of available independent research jobs and the time it takes to earn a PhD has not improved over the past two decades. Each year, there are seven times more PhDs awarded in science and engineering than there are newly available faculty positions (Fig. 1). As a result, only about 25% of biomedical sciences PhD recipients are in tenure-track positions five years after earning their degree. The percent of PhDs starting postdoctoral fellowships, however, has not changed, with close to 70% of life science PhDs pursuing a postdoc after graduation in 2010 (ref. 4), which suggests that PhD students are unsure of their career goals or unequipped for a nonacademic career. In addition to the discouraging job prospects, the time required to complete a PhD adds to the bleak outlook. Despite a downward trend, the average time to degree in life sciences and engineering is still high, with half of PhD candidates requiring seven years or more to complete their degree; one-third of candidates who begin will never finish. With over 40% of graduate students indifferent or unsatisfied to some degree with their graduate school experience, it is clear that initiatives must be taken to revamp the research training paradigm.

Since 1982, almost 800,000 PhDs were awarded in science and engineering (S&E) fields, whereas only about 100,000 academic faculty positions were created in those fields within the same time frame. The number of S&E PhDs awarded annually has also increased over this time frame, from ~19,000 in 1982 to ~36,000 in 2011. The number of faculty positions created each year, however, has not changed, with roughly 3,000 new positions created annually.

by Maximiliaan Schillebeeckx, Brett Maricque & Cory Lewis, Nature Biotechnology | Read more:

Image: Schillbeeckx, Maricque and Lewis