Mindfulness: Getting Its Share of Attention

[ed. Hey, it's California. By the way, does anyone remember Serial? I miss Martin Mull.]

What is the sound of one hand texting?

As Soren Gordhamer patiently quieted a packed Wisdom 2.0 event in San Francisco in September for a guided meditation, a few in the communal meeting space known as the Hub couldn’t resist thumbing another message or two before pocketing their sacred devices. A willowy young brunette in a black T-shirt shot video of the crowd with her iPad from her front-row seat. Even after Mr. Gordhamer, who is tall with a sculptural face and Errol Flynn hair, urged the group to “come into presence,” his voice rising in emphasis, someone’s phone was buzzing like a dragonfly.

Mr. Gordhamer started Wisdom 2.0 in 2009 to examine how we can live with technology without it swallowing us whole. The wait lists for his panel talks and conferences now run into the hundreds.

The “Disconnect to Connect” meet-up was typical. The audience was mostly young, mostly from the Silicon Valley tech scene and entirely fed up with taking orders from Siri. “There was a time when phones didn’t tell you to do everything,” said Mr. Gordhamer, 45, as the conversation got rolling. “What’s work, what’s not work, it’s all become blurred.”

And yet, the problem may offer a solution. Loïc Le Meur, a French blogger and entrepreneur and the evening’s guest speaker, recommended a meditation app called Get Some Headspace. The program bills itself as the world’s first gym membership for the mind. “It’s a way to have a meditation practice without feeling weird about it,” said Mr. Le Meur. He was wearing Google Glass with only a hint of irony. “You don’t have to sit in a lotus position. You just press ‘play’ and chill out.”

Earlier that morning at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Chade-Meng Tan, a veteran engineer, was laughing about the demand for an in-house course he created called “Search Inside Yourself.” The seven-week class teaches mindfulness, a loose term that covers an array of attention-training practices. It may mean spending 10 minutes with eyes closed on a gold-threaded pillow every morning or truly listening to your mother-in-law for once. Google naturally sees it as another utility widget for staying ahead. “Whenever we put the class online, it sells out in 30 seconds,” Mr. Tan said. (...)

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist leader who introduced mindfulness to Westerners (Google got first dibs on him as a guest speaker), once said, “The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention.” Yet for the majority of sentient beings today, simply getting through an episode of “The Big Bang Theory” without tending multiple screens is a quasi-mystical triumph. Naturally, the architects of our electronic age approach the situation as if it were an engineering problem.

“This isn’t the old San Francisco hippie fluff,” said Mr. Tan, who started the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute as an extracurricular program in 2007. More than a thousand Googlers have gone through the course, which uses scientific research and the profit motive to entice coders and programmers to be here now.

Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies verify the benefits of mindfulness training, and Mr. Tan appeared familiar with all of them. Meditation thickens the brain’s cortex, it lowers blood pressure, it can heal psoriasis and “it can help you get a promotion,” he said. Companies like Goldman Sachs and Farmers Insurance also hire Mr. Tan and his team to teach techniques like pausing before sending important emails and silently wishing happiness upon difficult co-workers.

Mr. Tan’s official Google title is Jolly Good Fellow, which nobody can deny. During the interview, he sat cross-legged and barefoot at a conference table inside the Googleplex, and was never far from an enlightened one-liner. “People come to me with profound concerns like how do you get through 211 items on your to-do list,” he said. “I tell them, one item at a time, duh.”

It is easy for Mr. Tan to joke. With the financial benefits that come from being Google employee No. 107, he works only three days a week and concentrates more on giving away his wealth than growing it. “I don’t have much sympathy for miserable rich people because sharing money is the key to happiness,” he said. “For me, becoming rich was a wonderful experience, but then the thought became, now what?”

That’s a question Evan Williams said he asks himself frequently. The billionaire-to-be co-founder of Twitter is a regular at Wisdom 2.0 events and began meditating just over a year ago. His practice has made an impact in ways both profound and less so. Last month as Twitter was finalizing its paperwork to go public, Mr. Williams did the unthinkable for someone in his position. He took a 20-minute walk through San Francisco without his phone. “I was able actually to look around and think about things for most of that period,” he said. “I would have had many more fleeting anxieties doing that a year ago, but I’m better with those silences now.”

by David Hochman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Roman Muradov

Alexis Mire, Ignite.
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Gervasio Gallardo
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[ed. I should be dead soon...]
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The Secret Life of Everything: Where Your Stuff Comes From

At this stage of the early 21st century, when transparency has evolved from buzzword to business principle, when it’s possible to track anything just about anywhere, you might think it would be a simple matter to choose some everyday product—a cup of coffee, say, or a pen—and trace the paths taken by its parts and ingredients, from raw material extraction to assembly and their final delivery to you.

I thought so, and I was wrong, though instructively so. (...)

Sure, I knew that the stuff of our product-saturated world comes from somewhere else, typically not in my own United States. And I knew, though I hadn’t thought much about, how stuff going into the stuff comes from somewhere else, too, that a pair of Nikes made at a Vietnamese factory contains materials from all over the world.

But I hadn’t even considered what makes this possible: the inconceivably vast web of supply-chained relationships, intricate as any ecosystem, synchronized like the movements of so many mechanical watches. These supply chains, the ingenuity and industry they embody, are truly marvelous. They’re also quite opaque.

It’s easy to find out how things move—in the air, on the ground, across the seas. It’s far harder, if not downright impossible, to find the source. This is what I learned: At this stage of the early 21st century, we know where everything goes to, but not where it comes from.

After receiving the assignment, I tried to think of common products that would make for a good narrative. First to mind was Bit-o-Honey candy, at once folksy and agro-industrial artificial. I imagined buying some at a Brooklyn corner store, finding out who delivered it, figuring out who delivered to them, tracking the shipments back to a single factory and then digging back into the ingredients, finishing in some Iowa cornfield where the “honey” comes from.

Nestlé USA’s brand affairs didn’t want to talk about it, though. Neither was Starbucks inclined to shares the details of their lattés, or Kellogg’s their breakfast cereals. In the meantime, I dug into academic literature on supply chains and life-cycle analyses, figuring that someone must have done my work already—a Harvard Business Review case study, maybe, a white paper somewhere on a single well-documented product.

I couldn’t find any, nor could any supply chain experts I contacted think of one. The literature dealt with flows, not sources. It said stuff like, “GSCM is a large mixed-integer linear program that incorporates a global, multi-product bill of materials for supply chains with arbitrary echelon structure and a comprehensive model of integrated global manufacturing and distribution decisions.” I did learn, though, that I didn’t really understand what supply chains are.

I’d thought of them mostly in terms of delivering Amazon orders and keeping Staples stocked. Those are just endpoints, the final few steps of a waiter carrying a meal on a tray. And what I really didn’t get was that supply chains don’t just carry components and ingredients, but synchronize their movements. Shipping a box of pens to Staples is the obvious part. Coordinating the arrival of barrels, caps, boxes, ink cartridges, and nibs (through which ink flows) at the pen factory—and also metal to the nib factory, oil to the plastics-maker, and so on—is the bulk of what supply chains do, and in the most efficient manner possible, with algorithms optimizing everything from shipping networks to the path of pallets through warehouses, with an eye to what happens when one of these many moving parts goes invariably astray. (See the Nautilus story “The Box That Built the Modern World” to read how containers helped make the modern supply chain possible.)

If you’re a brilliant young mathematician, one of the things you might do, if you don’t feel like theorizing about quantum physics or engineering suspension bridges or figuring out how genomes work, is move boxes. It blew my mind. So did the idea that, from a certain perspective, the actual products almost matter less than the informational structure that guides them.

To some readers, this might be old hat. To me it was like learning of a shadow world. Vivek Sehgal, a product strategist at Manhattan Associates, which counts Wal-Mart and Adidas among its customers, introduced me to an important phrase: logistics cluster. As car manufacturers once gathered in Detroit, or Internet companies in Silicon Valley, logistics—supply chain managers, IT providers, warehouses, shippers and truckers and dispatchers, the myriad businesses that support them—now concentrates in places like Memphis, Tenn.; Zaragoza, Spain; and Rotterdam, Holland, which in a few decades might be considered archetypal 21st century cities, our new Detroits. Sehgal likened them to the Silk Road of antiquity.

Sehgal also shared a Wall Street Journal article on how an unexpected blip in the chip chain ricocheted through a just-in-time-reliant electronics industry in early 2009. In the span of a few months, the industry laid off 20 million factory workers. Economies contorted across Asia.

Perhaps, I thought, I could write about a cell phone or tablet—but no. Kenneth Kraemer and Greg Linden, co-authors of “The Distribution of Value in the Mobile Phone Supply Chain,” disabused me of that notion. It was unrealistic. “Capturing all the logistics linkages for a mobile phone would take years,” said Linden. Even focusing on one part, a single display or chip, would be a daunting: They’re too complicated, and the companies secretive and distant.

by Brandon Keim, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Glyn Lowe

Olivia Locher, my life without wisdom teeth
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LDC Soundsystem

BarZii, Salmon Filet Necklace
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Broccoli’s Extreme Makeover

Even if it is possible to increase Americans’ desire for produce, little is being done to bring prices down to the point where selecting produce over processed food is a clear choice for millions of Americans. Blueberries that cost $5 a pint stack up poorly against the frozen pizza that can feed the whole family for the same cost. Yet the agricultural system offers precious little incentive to farmers wanting to grow more of the crops that would be better for us. From direct subsidy payments, to insurance when crops get blown away by bad weather, to research dollars for increasing yield and profitability, the deck is stacked against produce farmers.

In July, I traveled to upstate New York to meet Brian Reeves, a fourth-generation farmer with 1,500 acres, on part of which he grows a range of produce that he sells locally. As a general rule, Reeves said, he does not let visitors onto his farm before 10 a.m. during harvest season. The wisdom of that was made plain when I arrived. At 9 a.m., the place was a madhouse. Local grocers had placed orders for 12,000 pounds of tomatoes, blueberries and other produce to be delivered to 52 stores within 100 miles. But one of Reeves’s trucks had a flat. And a driver had loaded another truck with the wrong stuff, costing his crew a time-consuming reshuffle. On top of which, 117 boxes of squash were scheduled to be on the loading dock for delivery, but the golden zucchini was still in his fields, on the vines, being picked.

“It’s like that T-shirt says: ‘It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity,’ ” Reeves said when he, in turn, couldn’t remember the errand he wanted one of his drivers to run on the way back to the farm. And these were just the everyday glitches to contend with. Earlier this year, a freakish chill wiped out his entire crop of early cucumbers. Then his plans to pass on the running of the farm to his stepson, Jeffrey Reeves — home from Iraq and initially excited to become the fifth-generation Reeves to operate the farm — backfired when Jeffrey realized just how little time he would have for a social life. “Part of my reservation about being here is my happiness,” Jeffrey said, watching his stepfather work his way through the morning delivery, two phones and a clipboard in hand. “I can’t just be a machine.” (Not long after I visited the farm, Jeffrey left to get a degree in social work.)

It was perhaps not the best moment to be asking Reeves the question that brought me here: What would it take to get him to grow more? To till more land, buy more seed, run more irrigation lines, fight more pests, apply more fertilizer, endure more inspections, fix more old tractors, fill out more paperwork, miss more summer-leisure fun and generally wear himself further down in order to grow more produce so people could eat better.

The paradox of this last point was not lost on him. His own meals, especially during the summer months, were a wreck: coffee for breakfast, Mountain Dew for lunch, baked beans for dinner eaten straight from the can to save time for sleep — though he does get to snack on his crops. But Reeves is in many ways perfectly qualified to ponder the problems of increased production. The farm that he runs with his three brothers and one of their sons is an example of the kind of nonindustrial farm that’s necessary in a revamped vision of American food production and consumption. Last year, Reeves turned out 420,000 pounds of tomatoes, 65,000 pounds of strawberries and 2.4 million ears of sweet corn. And while they have a nice little farm stand just outside the small town of Baldwinsville, with a quaint patch of pick-your-own organic blueberries behind the sales shed, they mostly sell their crops to big grocers, including Tops, Price Chopper, Wegmans and, biggest of all, Walmart.

Reeves is particularly proud of being Walmart’s first farm supplier in the area, even if that adds significantly to his workload, from filling huge orders to enduring their painstaking food-safety audits. Only a fraction of his output is organic, but more would qualify with minor adjustments in his already-cautious use of pesticides and fertilizers. “I’m a personnel manager, bookkeeper, salesperson, computer guy, logistician and food-safety expert,” he said. “I didn’t sign up for that. I signed up for the sunshine, to grow crops and get my hands dirty. And that’s why I’m not as happy as I used to be. But I want this farm to be successful.”

What’s most telling about Reeves’s farm, though, when it comes to the question of produce supply and price structures, is that more than half of the land he owns, about 800 acres, is rented to farmers who grow soybeans and field corn, the type that’s used to make animal feed or corn syrup for soda and cookies or is turned into ethanol. The abundance of corn on Reeves’s land reflects its dominance nationwide. Ninety-seven million acres are planted with corn that goes toward syrup, cattle feed and ethanol, compared with the 240,000 acres planted for spinach, broccoli and cabbage.

by Michael Moss, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Victors & Spoils

The End of the Waffle House

On the last morning, before the waffle irons went cold and the pictures came down, before the lock refused to lock, before the claw crashed through the roof, the old man paced.

Tap, tap, tap. Bud Powell’s aluminum cane led the way as he circled the floor of Bloomington’s Waffle House. His Waffle House.

That Wednesday in September, the owner didn’t know what to do with himself. The smell of frying oil, the same greasy perfume that had greeted customers for 46 years, wafted into his nose as he wandered past the vinyl booths. He sat down, then stood
up again.

Bud — everyone called him Bud — checked on the dwindling supply of breakfast sausage, peered into the nearly empty freezers, tried to explain to his regulars why it had to be this way.

“It’s time,” he said over and over.

At 79, Bud was tired. Except for Christmas, the restaurant was always open, day and night. Now a developer wanted to replace it with another apartment building for college kids. The offer was too good to pass up.

“Where are we gonna eat?” the old-timers kept asking.

“I don’t know,” Bud said. “Where am I gonna eat?”

This had been his place for 16,767 mornings. None ever felt like this.

The weariness showed in his eyes, behind the wire rim glasses and in the hunch of his shoulders. After the Waffle House was torn down, he knew that he wouldn’t see most of his customers again.

Tap, tap, tap. Bud plodded past the grill, where the last of the eggs sizzled. The ever-dependable waitresses whizzed by, balancing plates, like today was no different.

Most of the students had stopped visiting years ago. The smoking ban forced out the puffers. Many of the regulars grew so old that they died or went to nursing homes.

Once Bud decided to close, it all slipped away even faster. Some of his staff had taken other jobs. The gumballs emptied out of the shiny red machine. No one bothered to mark the white board with the daily special.

They would close at precisely 3 p.m. Bud checked his watch, ignoring the broken wall clock, its hands frozen for more years than he could remember, stuck in time. 

It suited the place.

by Jessica Contrera, IDS |  Read more:

Image: Anna Teeteri

Banksy, October 2013.
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Gueorgui Pinkhassov, INDIA. Rajasthan. Jaisalmer. 1995

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Food Fighter

Kyoto, Japan—The meal begins simply, almost religiously: a bowl of rice, a plate of pickles, a pot of green tea. Pour the tea over the rice and take a sip, then pinch a half moon of daikon between your chopsticks. Later comes a plate of tofu scraps dressed with green onions and dried fish, a seaweed salad, and a small bowl of miso soup.

This is obanzai, Japanese home-style cooking, but the cook is no ordinary homemaker: Setsuko Sugimoto is the matriarch of one of the oldest families in Kyoto, a city where everyone knows exactly how far your family goes back. Her home is older than the United States and protected by the Kyoto government. Tonight’s dinner stretches back to the Edo period, and to prove it she drops before me a telephone book–thick copy of the original recipes her family has preserved for 10 generations. “These are the traditions that we are starting to lose,” she tells me.

Not more than a few blocks from Sugimoto’s centuries-old home is a thicket of unwelcome invaders: Starbucks slinging monster soy lattes, a pizza delivery chain prepping seafood pies, a rainbow array of 24-hour convenience stores, portals of warmed-over carbohydrates and general gastronomic mischief. It’s a familiar tale: waves of brutish Western culture crashing on the shores of foreign countries and encroaching upon their long-held traditions. But the phenomenon is all the more striking here in Kyoto, in the heart of one of the world’s richest culinary cultures, with cooking traditions that stretch back millennia and more Michelin stars per capita than any other city in the world.

But Kyoto and the rest of Japan are not prepared to see their food yield to the mitigating forces of the modern world. Sugimoto is a part of a formidable coalition of government officials, nonprofit organizations, scholars, and food luminaries who have been working for two years on a proposal to include washoku—the traditional dining cultures of Japan—on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s list of “intangible world heritages.” On Thursday, they received word that their bid had advanced to the final stage, making Japanese cuisine all but certain to win this prized UNESCO designation in early December. It may seem a benign marker, but the UNESCO program is itself not without controversy. Moreover, it begs the question: Can a U.N. body’s imprimatur do anything to protect something as intangible as a style of cooking?

by Matt Goulding, Slate | Read more:
Image: Matt Goulding

Big Mother is Watching You

The other day, my eleven-year-old son handed me my iPhone with an accusatory air, as if to say: So this is what you people do behind our backs. While he was looking at stocks, he came across a news item reporting that AT&T, with another company, was about to introduce a snap-around-the-wrist, GPS-tracking, emergency-button-featuring, watch-like thingie for children. It’s called FiLIP, comes in bright colors, and has two-way calling and parent-to-child texting. It allows you to set safe zones, so that you’re alerted when your child enters or leaves a designated area.

A little stunned, I checked it out online. FiLIP, I found, is far from the first such gizmo; this one just has more bells and whistles than most. “The world used to be a little simpler,” went its mom-and-apple-pie pitch. “Kids ran free and returned at dinnertime, and parents didn’t worry so much. But today, parents are under more pressure than ever. ... FiLIP has a simple mission—to help kids be kids again, while giving parents an amazing new window into their children’s lives.” Right. And the Invisible Fence collar on my late lamented cairn terrier let my dog be a dog.

All parents have to let their children off the leash eventually—to let them go out unsupervised, to grant them free-ish range on the Internet. That moment always comes before you’re ready for it. For me, it came after a ninth birthday, when we hooked up a Nintendo Wii, then discovered, months later, that it could be used to roam the Internet. Another point was reached toward the end of elementary school, when my children announced that they were the very last kids in their class to get a smartphone. I stalled. Then my son showed me the FiLIP ad, and I discovered a universe of options.

For the iPhone I will soon be buying him, I can get an iPhone Spy Stick, to be plugged into a USB port while he sleeps; it downloads Web histories, e-mails, and text messages, even the deleted ones. Or I can get Mobile Spy, software that would let me follow, in real time, his online activity and geographical location. Also available are an innocent-looking iPhone Dock Camera that would recharge his battery while surreptitiously recording video in his room, and a voice-activated audio monitor, presumably for the wild parties he’s going to throw when his father and I go out of town.

by Judith Shulevitz, TNR |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Harry Callahan, Untitled (Atlanta), 1984
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NSA Broke Into Yahoo, Google Data Centers

[ed. Out. Of. Control. The NSA's revealed data gathering activities are the biggest threat to democracy I think I've ever experienced. Not to mention business - with tech companies pushing consumers and corporations to migrate to the "cloud" where everything now mostly resides on NSA servers. Good luck with that. See also: Europe Erupts and NSA Chief wants Media Stopped; and Angry Over U.S. Surveillance, Tech Giants Bolster Defenses]

The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, The Washington Post reported Wednesday, citing documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

A secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, indicates that NSA sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters. In the last 30 days, field collectors had processed and sent back more than 180 million new records — ranging from "metadata," which would indicate who sent or received emails and when, to content such as text, audio and video, the Post reported Wednesday on its website.

The latest revelations were met with outrage from Google, and triggered legal questions, including whether the NSA may be violating federal wiretap laws.

"Although there's a diminished standard of legal protection for interception that occurs overseas, the fact that it was directed apparently to Google's cloud and Yahoo's cloud, and that there was no legal order as best we can tell to permit the interception, there is a good argument to make that the NSA has engaged in unlawful surveillance," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of Electronic Privacy Information Center. The reference to 'clouds' refers to sites where the companies collect data.

The new details about the NSA's access to Yahoo and Google data centers around the world come at a time when Congress is reconsidering the government's collection practices and authority, and as European governments are responding angrily to revelations that the NSA collected data on millions of communications in their countries. Details about the government's programs have been trickling out since Snowden shared documents with the Post and Guardian newspaper in June.

The NSA's principal tool to exploit the Google and Yahoo data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency's British counterpart, GCHQ. The Post said NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.

by Lolita C. Baldor, Yahoo News |  Read more:

Image: AP/Google

Mario Cravo Neto
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Helmut Newton, Karen Mulder & Yves Saint Laurent
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Bertien van Manen, A Hundred Summers a Hundred Winters, Tomsk, Russia railway station, 1992
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