Thursday, November 14, 2013
The Socialite Network
Vogt’s high-class mobility is on full display on A Small World, the self-consciously exclusive social network that he has invested in and now chairs. ASW has tried for years to become the go to site for young global professionals who are, or are in the process of becoming, very rich. It works under the assumption that rather than confining itself to one country or geographic region, a certain class of internationals—referred to interchangeably as “global nomads,” “citizens of the world,” or, more frequently, the “global elite”—shares certain migratory patterns, like an exotic flock of birds whose tastes and consumption habits matter much more than the shape of their nests or the color of their feathers. There’s the New York-Dubai-Zurich banking circuit; the Paris-Milan-Tokyo fashion circuit; the perhaps less visible but equally lucrative Basel-Boston pharma belt; and the Geneva-Vienna-New York-Nairobi diplomatic circuit. Spend enough time in this world and you’ll notice there are no countries—only cities.
Vogt’s vision extends beyond the success of his startup. He’s trying to create a real-life “small world,” and he’s populating it by invitation, reflecting back the image jet-setters have of themselves, and their sense of who belongs. A hierarchy emerges in Vogt’s targets for inclusion: there are the heirs and heiresses and socialites; the bankers, lawyers, and up-and-coming entrepreneurs; the models and actors; and miscellaneous hangers-on who may or may not have attended Swiss private schools. (...)
ASW’s target user exemplifies this person, whose ethos implies class and money without the requisite worldliness, understanding, or empathy. And this person doesn’t even necessarily see the world as it really is. If you went on an ASW tour of the planet, chances are you’d find the same things everywhere: rooftop bars, expensive bottles of vodka, a sterile hotel room.
There’s a stark, almost comical contrast between this world and, say, Marx’s conception of a global society. Instead of a movement for people around the world to recognize each other as equals though a common oppression or sense of duty to create a better world, we have a site where elite citizens of different nations unite to rise above economic austerity, political conflict, and lame nightlife.
The existence of ASW highlights the almost limitless personal advantages to traveling, seeing the world, and not pledging allegiance to an artificial idea of a country. Ideally, these are things that all people, not just a small, rarefied group, could enjoy, but at present the most visible challenges to state sovereignty are initiated by the rich. Globalization, driven by the private sector, turns Mitt Romney’s quip that corporations are people, too, on its head: people with means will eventually start acting like LLCs—nimble, mobile, and acquisitive.
by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Dissent | Read more:
Image: liljc716, 2009, Flickr creative commons
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Christian, Not Conservative
[ed. Gilead would certainly rank in my top 10 of books (the ones you read again and again, as needed.]
It was a spontaneous acknowledgement of Robinson’s prominence in American life and letters, another honor atop the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and host of other prizes her work has collected. For a writer whose novels barely have plots and whose essays plumb the thought of John Calvin, Robinson is astonishingly popular—and not just among readers who share the president’s politics.Her conservative admirers include Jeffrey Hart, emeritus professor of English at Dartmouth and a contributor for over 50 years to National Review, in whose pages he hailed Robinson’s 2004 novel Gilead as a “masterpiece.” In Gilead, Hart found a rare spiritual gravity: “Despite the unaccommodating phase of ordinary culture through which we live,” he writes, Robinson’s “subject is holiness.”
As he explains further in his critical work The Living Moment, Robinson’s novel “consists entirely of a long letter written by the Reverend John Ames; it does have a plot, but it does not drive the reader urgently ahead. Rather, the letter, while recounting incidents, establishes a meditative pace, inviting you to read patiently, and soon with wonder. Precisely that is the philosophical point of the book: the experience of wonder, of Being.”
Gilead not only won the Pulitzer but sold enough copies to become “one of the most unconventional conventionally popular novels of recent times”—as James Wood put it in the New Yorker—thanks to passages like this one, near the end of the book (and of Ames’s life):
Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? … Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave—that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.Chief among the “precious things” Robinson honors is America’s religious heritage. She is in a sense a culture warrior, striving against what her essays call our “impulse … to disparage, to cheapen and to deface, and to falsify, which has made a valuable inheritance worthless.” (...)
The thread that unites these concerns is a tradition neglected today by left and right: liberal Christianity. Though the themes of Robinson’s work resonate with “crunchy conservatives” and others who emphasize virtues like duty, rootedness, and tradition, the author herself is a member of what she calls “that shaken and diminishing community, liberal Protestantism.”
The decline of the Protestant mainline churches has transformed American religion since the protagonist of Gilead wrote his letter in 1956, as has the political polarization of Christianity. While there are exceptions—a small “secular right,” a more substantial religious left—in general the more often an American goes to church, the more likely he or she is to vote Republican. In 2012, the overwhelming majority of religiously unaffiliated voters (70 percent) cast their ballots to re-elect Obama; an even larger majority of white evangelicals (80 percent) voted Republican.
Yet Robinson grounds her liberalism in her Calvinist tradition. She responded by email to a question from TAC about the identification of American Christians with the right:
Well, what is a Christian, after all? Can we say that most of us are defined by the belief that Jesus Christ made the most gracious gift of his life and death for our redemption? Then what does he deserve from us? He said we are to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek. Granted, these are difficult teachings. But does our most gracious Lord deserve to have his name associated with concealed weapons and stand-your-ground laws, things that fly in the face of his teaching and example? Does he say anywhere that we exist primarily to drive an economy and flourish in it? He says precisely the opposite. Surely we all know this. I suspect that the association of Christianity with positions that would not survive a glance at the Gospels or the Epistles is opportunistic, and that if the actual Christians raised these questions those whose real commitments are to money and hostility and potential violence would drop the pretense and walk away.Though Robinson has written that she is “extremely reluctant” to talk about her faith, “chiefly because my belief does not readily reduce itself to simple statements,” her work is suffused with her religious sensibility: distrustful of over-precise dogma, emphasizing spiritual wonder and acts of love.
by Robert Long, American Conservative | Read more:
Image: Sewanee: The University of the South / Flickr
Farm Confessional: I’m an Undocumented Farm Worker
I grew up in Santiago Yosondua, Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. I went to school through third grade, my dad was killed when I was 11, and we didn’t even have enough food to eat. So I went off to work at 12 in Mexico City as a live-in maid for a Spanish family. I’d go back each year to Oaxaca to visit my mom, and the migrants who’d come back from the United States would buy fancy cars and nice houses, while my mom still slept on a mat on the floor in our hut. A coyote told me he could take me to the United States for $1,800. So I went north in 1999, leaving my four-year-old son behind with my mother. I was 26. (...)
On all the harvests, men and women work side-by-side doing the same job, and women work just as fast as the men. I’ve been harassed one time: when a boss who drove us out to the field every day wanted to hug me, and said he wouldn’t charge me the $8 a day for the ride if I’d go out with him. (Most of us don’t have driver’s licenses, so the contractors organize rides to work.) I left the job. In California, especially in Fresno and Madera counties, there’s an abundance of farm jobs. So you don’t have to do one you don’t like.
I’ve seen on the news that some Congress members or American citizens say undocumented workers are taking their jobs. We’re not taking their jobs. In the 14 years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen an American working in the fields. I’ve never seen anyone work like Mexicans. In restaurants and construction, you’ll find Salvadorans and Guatemalans, but in the fields, it’s almost all Mexicans.
The work is hard — but many jobs are hard. The thing that bothers me more is the low pay. With cherries, you earn $7 for each box, and I’ll fill 30 boxes in a day — about $210 a day. For blueberries, I’ll do 25 containers for up to $5 each one — $125 a day. With grapes, you make 30 cents for each carton, and I can do 400 cartons a day – $120 a day. Tomatoes are the worst paid: I’ll pick 100 for 62 cents a bucket, or about $62 a day. I don’t do tomatoes much anymore. It’s heavy work, you have to bend over, run to turn in your baskets, and your back hurts. I say I like tomatoes — in a salad. Ha. With a lot of the crops, the bosses keep track of your haul by giving you a card, and punching it every time you turn in a basket.
by Odilia Chavez as told to Lauren Smiley, Modern Farmer | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Don't Forget, We're Still at War
The book is part tribute to the joys of Christmas, part how-to guide for oppressed Christians looking for ways to fight back against whiny and litigious secularists, and part manifesto on the general superiority of Christianity over atheism. Palin, throughout, appears incapable of fathoming why a business catering to people from all walks of life may prefer to use inclusive holiday-season language in promotional items, or why a non-Christian may not appreciate a government institution expressing a preference for Christianity over other religions. To hear her tell it, such attitudes imperil America's dedication to religious freedom itself. Click around on the Christmas tree below to hear some of the book's more memorable lines.
by Dan Amira, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Harper Collins
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
The Snowden Leaks and the Public
It is harder than you might think to destroy an Apple MacBook Pro according to British government standards. In a perfect world the officials who want to destroy such machines prefer them to be dropped into a kind of giant food mixer that reduces them to dust. Lacking such equipment, The Guardian purchased a power drill and angle grinder on July 20 this year and—under the watchful eyes of two state observers—ripped them into obsolescence.
It was hot, dusty work in the basement of The Guardian that Saturday, a date that surely merits some sort of footnote in any history of how, in modern democracies, governments tangle with the press. The British state had decreed that there had been “enough” debate around the material leaked in late May by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. If The Guardian refused to hand back or destroy the documents, I, as editor of The Guardian, could expect either an injunction or a visit by the police—it was never quite spelled out which. The state, in any event, was threatening prior restraint of reporting and discussion by the press, no matter its public interest or importance. This was par for the course in eighteenth-century Britain, less so now.
In our discussions with government officials before July 20 we had tried to impress on them that, apart from being wrong in principle, this attempt at gagging a news organization was fruitless. There were, we told them, further copies of the Snowden material in other countries. We explained that The Guardian was collaborating with news organizations in America. Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first dealt with Snowden, lived in Rio. The filmmaker Laura Poitras, who had also been in contact with the former NSA analyst, had more material in Berlin. What did they imagine they were achieving by smashing up a few hard drives in London?
The government men said they were “painfully aware” that other copies existed, but their instructions were to close down the Guardian operation in London by destroying the computers containing information from Snowden. At some level I suspect our interlocutors realized that the game had changed. The technology that so excites the spooks—that gives them an all-seeing eye into billions of lives—is also technology that is virtually impossible to control or contain. But old habits die hard—hence the appeal of using the courts to stop publication. Both the 1917 US Espionage Act and the 1911 British Official Secrets Act—each with roots in wartime sedition and spy fever—cast a long shadow.
America has its own difficulties with journalists and their sources. But it is, nevertheless, a kinder environment for anyone trying to inform the sort of public debate regarding security and privacy that, post-Snowden at least, everyone seems to agree is desirable. The main advantage in the US is that it is, I hope, unthinkable that the American government would try to prevent publication in advance. A written constitution, the First Amendment, and the Supreme Court judgment in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971 have all played their part in establishing protections that are lacking in the UK. Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, is not going to be buying drills and angle grinders anytime soon.
And so the reporting goes on, much of it edited out of New York, as before, by our US editor, Janine Gibson. What’s gradually being revealed is that in the last ten or so years the US and UK governments, working in close collaboration, have been seeking to put entire populations under some form of surveillance. The apparent aim is to be able to collect and store “all the signals all the time”—that means all digital life, including Internet searches and all the phone calls, texts, and e-mails we make and send each other.
Some of it is data, some of it is so-called metadata—information about who sent a communication to whom, from where to where, not about specific contents. But as Stewart Baker, the former general counsel of the NSA, said in a recent discussion in New York, these are tricky distinctions. “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life,” he said with admirable candor. “If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content…. [It’s] sort of embarrassing how predictable we are as human beings.”
by Alan Rusbridger, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: James Ferguson
It was hot, dusty work in the basement of The Guardian that Saturday, a date that surely merits some sort of footnote in any history of how, in modern democracies, governments tangle with the press. The British state had decreed that there had been “enough” debate around the material leaked in late May by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. If The Guardian refused to hand back or destroy the documents, I, as editor of The Guardian, could expect either an injunction or a visit by the police—it was never quite spelled out which. The state, in any event, was threatening prior restraint of reporting and discussion by the press, no matter its public interest or importance. This was par for the course in eighteenth-century Britain, less so now.In our discussions with government officials before July 20 we had tried to impress on them that, apart from being wrong in principle, this attempt at gagging a news organization was fruitless. There were, we told them, further copies of the Snowden material in other countries. We explained that The Guardian was collaborating with news organizations in America. Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first dealt with Snowden, lived in Rio. The filmmaker Laura Poitras, who had also been in contact with the former NSA analyst, had more material in Berlin. What did they imagine they were achieving by smashing up a few hard drives in London?
The government men said they were “painfully aware” that other copies existed, but their instructions were to close down the Guardian operation in London by destroying the computers containing information from Snowden. At some level I suspect our interlocutors realized that the game had changed. The technology that so excites the spooks—that gives them an all-seeing eye into billions of lives—is also technology that is virtually impossible to control or contain. But old habits die hard—hence the appeal of using the courts to stop publication. Both the 1917 US Espionage Act and the 1911 British Official Secrets Act—each with roots in wartime sedition and spy fever—cast a long shadow.
America has its own difficulties with journalists and their sources. But it is, nevertheless, a kinder environment for anyone trying to inform the sort of public debate regarding security and privacy that, post-Snowden at least, everyone seems to agree is desirable. The main advantage in the US is that it is, I hope, unthinkable that the American government would try to prevent publication in advance. A written constitution, the First Amendment, and the Supreme Court judgment in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971 have all played their part in establishing protections that are lacking in the UK. Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, is not going to be buying drills and angle grinders anytime soon.
And so the reporting goes on, much of it edited out of New York, as before, by our US editor, Janine Gibson. What’s gradually being revealed is that in the last ten or so years the US and UK governments, working in close collaboration, have been seeking to put entire populations under some form of surveillance. The apparent aim is to be able to collect and store “all the signals all the time”—that means all digital life, including Internet searches and all the phone calls, texts, and e-mails we make and send each other.
Some of it is data, some of it is so-called metadata—information about who sent a communication to whom, from where to where, not about specific contents. But as Stewart Baker, the former general counsel of the NSA, said in a recent discussion in New York, these are tricky distinctions. “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life,” he said with admirable candor. “If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content…. [It’s] sort of embarrassing how predictable we are as human beings.”
by Alan Rusbridger, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: James Ferguson
Chase Isn't the Only Bank in Trouble
I've been away for weeks now on a non-financial assignment (we have something unusual coming out in Rolling Stone in a few weeks) so I've fallen behind on some crazy developments on Wall Street. There are multiple scandals blowing up right now, including a whole set of ominous legal cases that could result in punishments so extreme that they might significantly alter the long-term future of the financial services sector.
As one friend of mine put it, "Whatever those morons put aside for settlements, they'd better double it."
Firstly, there's a huge mess involving possible manipulation of the world currency markets. This scandal is already drawing comparisons to the last biggest-financial-scandal-in-history (the Financial Times wondered about a "repeat Libor scandal"), the manipulation of interest rates via the gaming of the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor. The foreign exchange or FX market is the largest financial market in the world, with a daily trading volume of nearly $5 trillion.
Regulators on multiple continents are investigating the possibility that at least four (and probably many more) banks may have been involved in widespread, Libor-style manipulation of currencies for years on end. One of the allegations is that traders have been gambling heavily before and after the release of the WM/Reuters rates, which like Libor are benchmark rates calculated privately by a small subset of financial companies that are perfectly positioned to take advantage of their own foreknowledge of pricing information.
A month ago, Bloomberg reported that it had observed a pattern of spikes in trading in certain pairs of currencies at the same time, at 4 p.m. London time on the last trading day of the month, when WM/Reuters rates are released. From the article:
Guardian Care Homes, a British "residential home care operator," is suing the British bank Barclays for over $100 million for allegedly selling the company interest rate swaps based on Libor, which numerous companies have now admitted to manipulating, in a series of high-profile settlements. The theory of the case is that if Libor was not a real number, and was being manipulated for years as numerous companies have admitted, then the Libor-based swaps banks sold to companies like Guardian Care are inherently unenforceable.
A ruling against the banks in this case, which goes to trial in April of next year in England, could have serious international ramifications. Suddenly, cities like Philadelphia and Houston, or financial companies like Charles Schwab, or a gazillion other buyers of Libor-based financial products might be able to walk away from their Libor-based contracts. Basically, every customer who's ever been sold a rotten swap product by a major financial company might now be able to get up from the table, extend two middle fingers squarely in the direction of Wall Street, and simply walk away from the deals.
Nobody is mincing words about what that might mean globally. From a Reuters article on the Guardian Care case
And virtually simultaneous to that, JP Morgan Chase disclosed that it is currently the target of no fewer than eight federal investigations, for activities ranging from possible bribery of foreign officials in Asia to allegations of improper mortgage-bond sales to . . . the Libor mess. "The scope and breadth of risky practices at JPMorgan are mind-boggling," Mark Williams, a former Federal Reserve bank examiner, told Bloomberg.
The point of all of this is that any thought that the potential Chase settlement might begin a period of regulatory healing for it and other Wall Street banks appears to be wildly mistaken. If anything, the scope of potential liability for all the major banks, particularly in these market-rigging furors, appears to be growing in all directions.
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone | Read more:
As one friend of mine put it, "Whatever those morons put aside for settlements, they'd better double it."Firstly, there's a huge mess involving possible manipulation of the world currency markets. This scandal is already drawing comparisons to the last biggest-financial-scandal-in-history (the Financial Times wondered about a "repeat Libor scandal"), the manipulation of interest rates via the gaming of the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor. The foreign exchange or FX market is the largest financial market in the world, with a daily trading volume of nearly $5 trillion.
Regulators on multiple continents are investigating the possibility that at least four (and probably many more) banks may have been involved in widespread, Libor-style manipulation of currencies for years on end. One of the allegations is that traders have been gambling heavily before and after the release of the WM/Reuters rates, which like Libor are benchmark rates calculated privately by a small subset of financial companies that are perfectly positioned to take advantage of their own foreknowledge of pricing information.
A month ago, Bloomberg reported that it had observed a pattern of spikes in trading in certain pairs of currencies at the same time, at 4 p.m. London time on the last trading day of the month, when WM/Reuters rates are released. From the article:
In the space of 20 minutes on the last Friday in June, the value of the U.S. dollar jumped 0.57 percent against its Canadian counterpart, the biggest move in a month. Within an hour, two-thirds of that gain had melted away.
The same pattern – a sudden surge minutes before 4 p.m. in London on the last trading day of the month, followed by a quick reversal – occurred 31 percent of the time across 14 currency pairs over two years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. For the most frequently traded pairs, such as euro-dollar, it happened about half the time, the data show.
The recurring spikes take place at the same time financial benchmarks known as the WM/Reuters (TRI) rates are set based on those trades…The Forex story broke at a time when the industry was already coping with price-fixing messes involving oil (the European commission is investigating manipulation of yet another Libor-like price-setting process here) and manipulation cases involving benchmark rates for precious metals and interest rate swaps. As Quartz put it after the FX story broke:
For those keeping score: That means the world's key price benchmarks for interest rates, energy and currencies may now all be compromised.Perhaps most importantly, however, there's a major drama brewing over legal case in London tied to the Libor scandal.
Guardian Care Homes, a British "residential home care operator," is suing the British bank Barclays for over $100 million for allegedly selling the company interest rate swaps based on Libor, which numerous companies have now admitted to manipulating, in a series of high-profile settlements. The theory of the case is that if Libor was not a real number, and was being manipulated for years as numerous companies have admitted, then the Libor-based swaps banks sold to companies like Guardian Care are inherently unenforceable.
A ruling against the banks in this case, which goes to trial in April of next year in England, could have serious international ramifications. Suddenly, cities like Philadelphia and Houston, or financial companies like Charles Schwab, or a gazillion other buyers of Libor-based financial products might be able to walk away from their Libor-based contracts. Basically, every customer who's ever been sold a rotten swap product by a major financial company might now be able to get up from the table, extend two middle fingers squarely in the direction of Wall Street, and simply walk away from the deals.
Nobody is mincing words about what that might mean globally. From a Reuters article on the Guardian Care case
"To unwind all Libor-linked derivative contracts would be financial Armageddon," said Abhishek Sachdev, managing director of Vedanta Hedging, which advises companies on interest rate hedging products. (...)Here at home, virtually simultaneous to the Rabobank settlement, Fannie Mae filed a suit against nine banks – including Barclays Plc (BARC), UBS AG (UBSN), Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, Deutsche Bank AG, Credit Suisse Group AG, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan – for manipulating Libor, claiming that the mortgage-financing behemoth lost over $800 million due to manipulation of the benchmark rate by the banks.
And virtually simultaneous to that, JP Morgan Chase disclosed that it is currently the target of no fewer than eight federal investigations, for activities ranging from possible bribery of foreign officials in Asia to allegations of improper mortgage-bond sales to . . . the Libor mess. "The scope and breadth of risky practices at JPMorgan are mind-boggling," Mark Williams, a former Federal Reserve bank examiner, told Bloomberg.
The point of all of this is that any thought that the potential Chase settlement might begin a period of regulatory healing for it and other Wall Street banks appears to be wildly mistaken. If anything, the scope of potential liability for all the major banks, particularly in these market-rigging furors, appears to be growing in all directions.
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Getty
Thanksgiving in Mongolia
When my connecting flight landed in Mongolia, it was morning, but the gray haze made it look like dusk. Ulaanbaatar is among the most polluted capital cities in the world, as well as the coldest. The drive into town wound through frozen fields and clusters of felt tents—gers, they’re called there—into a crowded city of stocky, Soviet-era municipal buildings, crisscrossing telephone and trolley lines, and old Tibetan Buddhist temples with pagoda roofs. The people on the streets moved quickly and clumsily, burdened with layers against the bitter weather.I was there to report a story on the country’s impending transformation, as money flooded in through the mining industry. Mongolia has vast supplies of coal, gold, and copper ore; its wealth was expected to double in five years. But a third of the population still lives nomadically, herding animals and sleeping in gers, burning coal or garbage for heat. Until the boom, Mongolia’s best-known export was cashmere. As Jackson Cox, a young consultant from Tennessee who’d lived in Ulaanbaatar for twelve years, told me, “You’re talking about an economy based on yak meat and goat hair.”
I got together with Cox on my first night in town. He sent a chauffeured car to pick me up—every Westerner I met in U.B. had a car and a driver—at the Blue Sky Hotel, a new and sharply pointed glass tower that split the cold sky like a shark fin. When I arrived at his apartment, he and a friend, a mining-industry lawyer from New Jersey, were listening to Beyoncé and pouring champagne. The place was clean and modern, but modest: for expats in U.B., it’s far easier to accumulate wealth than it is to spend it. We went to dinner at a French restaurant, where we all ordered beef, because seafood is generally terrible in Mongolia, which is separated from the sea by its hulking neighbors (and former occupiers) China and Russia. Then they took me to an underground gay bar called 100 Per Cent—which could have been in Brooklyn, except that everyone in Mongolia still smoked indoors. I liked sitting in a booth in a dark room full of smoking, gay Mongolians, but my body was feeling strange. I ended the night early.
When I woke up the next morning, the pain in my abdomen was insistent; I wondered if the baby was starting to kick, which everyone said would be happening soon. I called home to complain, and my spouse told me to find a Western clinic. I e-mailed Cox to get his doctor’s phone number, thinking that I’d call if the pain got any worse, and then I went out to interview people: the minister of the environment, the president of a mining concern, and, finally, a herdsman and conservationist named Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, who became a folk hero after he fired shots at mining operations that were diverting water from nomadic communities. I met him in the sleek lobby of the Blue Sky with Yondon Badral—a smart, sardonic man I’d hired to translate for me in U.B. and to accompany me a few days later to the Gobi, where we would drive a Land Rover across the cold sands to meet with miners and nomads. Badral wore jeans and a sweater; Munkhbayar was dressed in a long, traditional deel robe and a fur hat with a small metal falcon perched on top. It felt like having a latte with Genghis Khan.
In the middle of the interview, Badral stopped talking and looked at my face; I must have been showing my discomfort. He said that it was the same for his wife, who was pregnant, just a few weeks further along than I was, and he explained the situation to Munkhbayar. The nomad’s skin was chapped pink from the wind; his nostrils, eyes, and ears all looked as if they had receded into his face to escape the cold. I felt a little surge of pride when he said that I was brave to travel so far in my condition. But I was also starting to worry.
I nearly cancelled my second dinner with the Americans that evening, but I figured that I needed to eat, and they offered to meet me at the Japanese restaurant in my hotel. Cox was leaving the next day to visit his family for Thanksgiving, and he was feeling guilty that he’d spent a fortune on a business-class ticket. I thought about my uncomfortable flight over and said that it was probably worth it. “You’re being a princess,” Cox’s friend told him tartly, but I couldn’t laugh. Something was happening inside me. I had to leave before the food came.
I ran back to my room, pulled off my pants, and squatted on the floor of the bathroom, just as I had in Cambodia when I had dysentery, a decade earlier. But the pain in that position was unbearable. I got on my knees and put my shoulders on the floor and pressed my cheek against the cool tile. I remember thinking, This is going to be the craziest shit in history.
I felt an unholy storm move through my body, and after that there is a brief lapse in my recollection; either I blacked out from the pain or I have blotted out the memory. And then there was another person on the floor in front of me, moving his arms and legs, alive. I heard myself say out loud, “This can’t be good.” But it looked good. My baby was as pretty as a seashell.
He was translucent and pink and very, very small, but he was flawless. His lovely lips were opening and closing, opening and closing, swallowing the new world. For a length of time I cannot delineate, I sat there, awestruck, transfixed. Every finger, every toenail, the golden shadow of his eyebrows coming in, the elegance of his shoulders—all of it was miraculous, astonishing. I held him up to my face, his head and shoulders filling my hand, his legs dangling almost to my elbow. I tried to think of something maternal I could do to convey to him that I was, in fact, his mother, and that I had the situation completely under control. I kissed his forehead and his skin felt like a silky frog’s on my mouth.
I was vaguely aware that there was an enormous volume of blood rushing out of me, and eventually that seemed interesting, too. I looked back and forth between my offspring and the lake of blood consuming the bathroom floor and I wondered what to do about the umbilical cord connecting those two things. It was surprisingly thick and ghostly white, a twisted human rope. I felt sure that it needed to be severed—that’s always the first thing that happens in the movies. I was afraid that if I didn’t cut that cord my baby would somehow suffocate. I didn’t have scissors. I yanked it out of myself with one swift, violent tug.
In my hand, his skin started to turn a soft shade of purple. I bled my way across the room to my phone and dialled the number for Cox’s doctor. I told the voice that answered that I had given birth in the Blue Sky Hotel and that I had been pregnant for nineteen weeks. The voice said that the baby would not live. “He’s alive now,” I said, looking at the person in my left hand. The voice said that he understood, but that it wouldn’t last, and that he would send an ambulance for us right away. I told him that if there was no chance the baby would make it I might as well take a cab. He said that that was not a good idea.
Before I put down my phone, I took a picture of my son. I worried that if I didn’t I would never believe he had existed.
by Ariel Levy, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Jeffrey Decoster
Monday, November 11, 2013
Artful Dodger
About a month ago, following a rather dissatisfying evening, I found myself scurrying to the subway. I was crossing Astor Place in downtown Manhattan when I came across a strange scene. It was about midnight, and parked by the curb on a side street was a rental truck. I was approaching the front of the truck but I could see a small knot of people behind it, and they all seemed rather excited by what was going on. Like any good New Yorker, I'd thought I'd lucked into the chance to buy some nice speakers, 3000-count sheets or some other, umm, severely discounted merchandise. Wallet in hand, I came round the truck and had a gander, and realized I couldn't have been more wrong.
For the interior of the truck had been transformed into a jungle diorama. There were plants and flowers, which looked real, and stony cliffs, which did not. But there was a small waterfall that plashed gently into a pool, and recorded birdsong playing from hidden speakers, as well as the somewhat unnerving sight of insects and butterflies buzzing about the interior. Far in the background were painted a bridge, a sun, a mountain, and a rainbow.As delighted as I was (because serendipity insists that such a discovery is always partly thanks to me), I still didn't really know what was up. Next to me was an Italian gentleman with an enormous camera, who had just about wet himself with excitement. "It's him! It's him!" he said, giggling like a schoolgirl. "Who?" "Banksy! We've been chasing after this all day." I don't really know what it means to chase after street art but, once Banksy's name had been floated, I realized that I'd stumbled across one of several dozen Easter eggs the reclusive artist had begun laying all over the city for the month of October.
This "residency," in Banksy's own words, is sparely documented on a website thrown up for the occasion, but the site doesn't reflect the kerfuffle caused by those who have come into contact with the works or their interlocutors. Without attempting to define the quality that makes art great, I will humbly suggest that, for the present discussion, it may be that it becomes a mirror in which society has no choice but to view itself. I realize how horrifically unoriginal this is. As a defense, consider that Banksy's anonymity makes this not just inevitable, but desirable.(...)
Such a brutally enforced anonymity means we have already played into his hands. Banksy's work neither asks for permission or forgiveness, and the intrinsically ephemeral nature of street art generates a scarcity economy par excellence. This virtuous circle has continued its widening gyre, as the value of his works now far outstrips those of his contemporaries on the international art market. In turn, this gives Banksy a larger megaphone with which to sound his trickster yawp. In a sense, Banksy is a prime beneficiary of his countryman's dictum, "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
So when everyone is talking about it, there's a good chance that what's really at stake is not Banksy's art, which at its best has the conceptual bite of an above-average New Yorker cartoon, and at its worst is just dead on arrival (two examples from the recent stint in New York include a kludgy reference to the Twin Towers, and balloon-letter throw-up of his name made from – wait for it – balloons). Nor is there anything very compelling in the yawning of the critics, as exemplified by Jerry Saltz, or the outrage of NYC's teeming graffiti underground, who are understandably upset at the idea of a British Invasion of their turf. Of far greater interest is what happens to the art once it has been put out there – that is, when the city's collective, chaotic decision-making apparatus swings into full force.
by Misha Lepetic, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
Image: Banksy
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Privacy Isn’t a Right
Privacy isn't your right anymore. We sold it for pictures of cats and the ability to tell anyone in the free world what we had for breakfast.
I'm not saying it was a bad trade, either. The Internet as we know it came about through the monetization of metadata—information about us—instead of by replicating traditional models of content sales. As a result the Internet exploded into a plethora of useful services and platforms of every shape, size, and description. What's more, it was a great leveler—nobody had more valuable personal information than anybody else, so everyone was able to trade it in for the same kinds of services.
The problem with all this is that "privacy" as a notion was abdicated the instant you clicked "agree" to the online services agreement you didn't read. And yet most consumers haven't yet realized that their date has left the restaurant and they're stuck with the bill.
Part of the reason for that is that Big Data has finally begun to produce some very real, tractable, monetizable techniques. As an example, see a couple of patents Microsoft filed several years ago. Roughly described, the first one allows the company to put a number on any identity's ability to influence others around a particular word or topic. So for the word cheese, you might have a high score of 88 because you run a popular cheese blog, whereas I might be lactose intolerant and only have a score of 17. The second patent is more interesting: It allows Microsoft to dynamically price a good or service based on your score.
This means that if you go online to buy some cheese, Microsoft can ask Kraft if it wants to give you a big discount in the hopes that you'll say something nice about its cheese and thus drive up sales. Conversely, if I go to buy some cheese, it can ask Kraft if it wants to jack up the price to the point where I'm unlikely to buy it, to save the embarrassment of a potentially bad review. Is that wrong? Is it a violation of privacy? Materially, it no longer matters. We clicked "agree" and now they legally can—and by doing so make a whole lot more money.
This emphasis on our data and its uses as a marketing tool has grown so fast and so far that competitors to the traditional credit card companies are now starting to drive down their collective margins by consistently underbidding one another. Square (a company whose dongle plugs into your phone and lets you accept credit card payments), Simple (an online-only bank), and others are happy to charge less of a percentage of each transaction because they know they'll be able to make up the lost profit through resale of the metadata they've collected—the "who bought what from whom, where, and when." It's not by accident that they emphasize the use of mobile phones (which have built-in GPS) for facilitating their transactions and Web browsers (which connect to all your other online identities) for managing related funds.
At least these "insights" are happening in a restricted online space, you might think. After all, I can certainly choose not to spend my time looking at ads on Facebook. But you'd be mistaken. Many stores use infrared cameras to determine what products you look at and for how long before you buy. Cell service providers have started reselling information about what data you access on your phone at which physical location. For example, Telefonica, one of Europe's largest cellphone providers, recently released a product called Smart Steps that would tell retailers who entered their stores and when, allowing them to tailor products, promotions, and staffing.
On the face of it, a lot of this can, as with online advertising, be chalked up to companies simply wanting to be better able to give us what we want. After all, most people don't complain about getting useful search results from Google or helpful product suggestions from Amazon. But it may not be in our best interest to be sold as much as we can buy at the highest price we can afford. (...)
But a better option might be to simply raise our prices. We can limit how our personal information is gathered and utilized, and in doing so we can demand that it be purchased at higher rates than just access to Instagram. It may not mean cold hard cash (at least not at first), but we can certainly expect more premium services, more discreet advertising, or even just better control over who gets our data and for what purposes.
by Josh Klein, Slate | Read more:
Image: Siri Stafford/Digital Vision/Thinkstock
I'm not saying it was a bad trade, either. The Internet as we know it came about through the monetization of metadata—information about us—instead of by replicating traditional models of content sales. As a result the Internet exploded into a plethora of useful services and platforms of every shape, size, and description. What's more, it was a great leveler—nobody had more valuable personal information than anybody else, so everyone was able to trade it in for the same kinds of services.
The problem with all this is that "privacy" as a notion was abdicated the instant you clicked "agree" to the online services agreement you didn't read. And yet most consumers haven't yet realized that their date has left the restaurant and they're stuck with the bill.Part of the reason for that is that Big Data has finally begun to produce some very real, tractable, monetizable techniques. As an example, see a couple of patents Microsoft filed several years ago. Roughly described, the first one allows the company to put a number on any identity's ability to influence others around a particular word or topic. So for the word cheese, you might have a high score of 88 because you run a popular cheese blog, whereas I might be lactose intolerant and only have a score of 17. The second patent is more interesting: It allows Microsoft to dynamically price a good or service based on your score.
This means that if you go online to buy some cheese, Microsoft can ask Kraft if it wants to give you a big discount in the hopes that you'll say something nice about its cheese and thus drive up sales. Conversely, if I go to buy some cheese, it can ask Kraft if it wants to jack up the price to the point where I'm unlikely to buy it, to save the embarrassment of a potentially bad review. Is that wrong? Is it a violation of privacy? Materially, it no longer matters. We clicked "agree" and now they legally can—and by doing so make a whole lot more money.
This emphasis on our data and its uses as a marketing tool has grown so fast and so far that competitors to the traditional credit card companies are now starting to drive down their collective margins by consistently underbidding one another. Square (a company whose dongle plugs into your phone and lets you accept credit card payments), Simple (an online-only bank), and others are happy to charge less of a percentage of each transaction because they know they'll be able to make up the lost profit through resale of the metadata they've collected—the "who bought what from whom, where, and when." It's not by accident that they emphasize the use of mobile phones (which have built-in GPS) for facilitating their transactions and Web browsers (which connect to all your other online identities) for managing related funds.
At least these "insights" are happening in a restricted online space, you might think. After all, I can certainly choose not to spend my time looking at ads on Facebook. But you'd be mistaken. Many stores use infrared cameras to determine what products you look at and for how long before you buy. Cell service providers have started reselling information about what data you access on your phone at which physical location. For example, Telefonica, one of Europe's largest cellphone providers, recently released a product called Smart Steps that would tell retailers who entered their stores and when, allowing them to tailor products, promotions, and staffing.
On the face of it, a lot of this can, as with online advertising, be chalked up to companies simply wanting to be better able to give us what we want. After all, most people don't complain about getting useful search results from Google or helpful product suggestions from Amazon. But it may not be in our best interest to be sold as much as we can buy at the highest price we can afford. (...)
But a better option might be to simply raise our prices. We can limit how our personal information is gathered and utilized, and in doing so we can demand that it be purchased at higher rates than just access to Instagram. It may not mean cold hard cash (at least not at first), but we can certainly expect more premium services, more discreet advertising, or even just better control over who gets our data and for what purposes.
by Josh Klein, Slate | Read more:
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