Someone's Been Siphoning Data Through a Huge Security Hole in the Internet

[ed. NSA hacking into fiber optic cables? That's like so yesterday.]

In 2008, two security researchers at the DefCon hacker conference demonstrated a massive security vulnerability in the worldwide internet traffic-routing system -- a vulnerability so severe that it could allow intelligence agencies, corporate spies or criminals to intercept massive amounts of data, or even tamper with it on the fly.

The traffic hijack, they showed, could be done in such a way that no one would notice because the attackers could simply re-route the traffic to a router they controlled, then forward it to its intended destination once they were done with it, leaving no one the wiser about what had occurred.

Now, five years later, this is exactly what has happened. Earlier this year, researchers say, someone mysteriously hijacked internet traffic headed to government agencies, corporate offices and other recipients in the US and elsewhere and redirected it to Belarus and Iceland, before sending it on its way to its legitimate destinations. They did so repeatedly over several months. But luckily someone did notice.

And this may not be the first time it has occurred -- just the first time it got caught.

Analysts at Renesys, a network monitoring firm, said that over several months earlier this year someone diverted the traffic using the same vulnerability in the so-called Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, that the two security researchers demonstrated in 2008. The BGP attack, a version of the classic man-in-the-middle exploit, allows hijackers to fool other routers into re-directing data to a system they control. When they finally send it to its correct destination, neither the sender nor recipient is aware that their data has made an unscheduled stop. (...)

BGP eavesdropping has long been a known weakness, but no one is known to have intentionally exploited it like this until now. The technique doesn't attack a bug or flaw in BGP, but simply takes advantage of the fact that BGP's architecture is based on trust.

To make it easy for e-mail traffic from an ISP in California to reach customers of an ISP in Spain, networks for these providers and others communicate through BGP routers. Each router distributes so-called announcements indicating which IP addresses they're in the best position to deliver traffic to, for the quickest, most efficient route. But BGP routers assume that when another router says it's the best path to a specific block of IP addresses, it's telling the truth. That gullibility makes it easy for eavesdroppers to fool routers into sending them traffic they shouldn't get.

When a user types a website name into his browser or clicks "send" to launch an e-mail, a router belonging to the sender's ISP consults a BGP table for the best route to the destination. That table is built from the announcements issued by ISPs and other networks declaring the range of IP addresses, or IP prefixes, to which they'll deliver traffic. The routing table searches for the destination IP address among those prefixes, and if two systems deliver traffic for the address, the one with the narrower, more specific range of prefixes "wins" the traffic.

For example, one ISP announces that it delivers to a group of 90,000 IP addresses, while another delivers to a subset of 24,000 of those addresses. If the destination IP address falls within both of these, the e-mail will get sent to the narrower, more specific one.

To intercept data, anyone with a BGP router or control of a BGP router could send out an announcement for a range of IP addresses he wished to target that was narrower than the chunk advertised by other network routers. The announcement would take just minutes to propagate worldwide and, just like that, data that should have headed to those networks would begin arriving to the eavesdropper's router instead.

Ordinarily, when an attacker tried to then forward the stolen traffic to its rightful destination, it would boomerang back to him, since other routers would still believe that his was the best destination for the traffic. But the technique demonstrated at DefCon, and now spotted in the wild, allows an attacker to send his announcement in such a way that it is delivered only to select routers. So, once the traffic passes through his router, it gets directed to its rightful destination through routers that never got the bogus announcement. The attack intercepts only traffic headed to target addresses, not from them.

by Kim Zetter, Wired UK |  Read more:

Image: Map courtesy of Renesys

Some Notes on the Making of Fried Chicken

[ed. I thought about this when my mom died: how the learned (and sometimes hard-earned) lessons of a lifetime get lost when a person dies. Some lessons do survive through a child or someone with a specific interest but most go extinct, like a language no one speaks anymore. Culture and technology evolve, creating and destroying, creating and destroying. My mom made chicken this way, right down to the self-deprecating comments, as if everything were part of the same recipe. How many lessons and traditions disappear because no one makes an effort to learn them, and the world they came from no longer exists.]

It is nine at night on my last day in the South before my great-aunt Nancy and I start making fried chicken. The whole thing came about this way: Suddenly, after eating Nancy’s cake for cousin Judy’s birthday, I was filled with unaccountable remembrance of how, years ago, almost as a kind of ritual, my grandmother used to tell me that if I wanted to make good fried chicken I should ask Nancy. “You mean Alice,” Nancy corrects when I ask her to tell me about chicken. “Everyone knows Alice's was the best.”

Maybe they do in some parts. Nancy and Alice and Grandma were sisters. But I never knew Alice well, and she’s been dead a long time, and from what I remember, she might not have been the sort of person I’d approach on a whim to ask how to make fried chicken. But I do remember my grandmother telling me to ask Nancy. And so now, two years after my grandmother’s death, I’m here with Nancy in her fluorescent-lit ranch bungalow on Vickrey Chapel Road on my last day in Greensboro.

I’m headed back to California tomorrow. I have lived in California and Brooklyn and Boston, but except for a summer right after graduate school, I have never lived in the South. I am only a Southerner by means of having three of my four grandparents, and many aunts and uncles and cousins, rooted in the stretch between Richmond, Virginia, and Wilmington, North Carolina; by way of hearing family accents and cadences and stories. I am only a Southerner by way of blood and lore. And Nancy, my grandmother’s baby sister, is the only one of six siblings well enough to hold the legends of her generation. She’s also the last one who can whip up perfect pimento cheese or a mouthwatering strawberry pie. In asking her to teach me some cooking, I’ve surprised myself by wanting some of her South in me, the way I surprise myself by finding a drawl with these cousins, by saying ya’ll and laughing on the porch with them, by the way I hanker for ham biscuits as soon as I am in their presence. I’ve surprised myself by suddenly having a real earnest deep and truthful desire to know the ways of chicken frying.

As this request wells up within me, it feels at once ancestral and strange. I don’t actually eat fried chicken, certainly not store- or restaurant-bought fried chicken. I live in California, for heaven’s sake. I live in Berkeley. I eat lean grilled proteins with a side of organic asparagus; wild-caught black cod with quinoa; tofu with soba noodles. When I don’t want to cook, I go out for salmon and crab sushi wrapped in Meyer lemon. But frying a chicken seems like an ancestral art, like knowing how to make a pie crust or a green tomato chutney, both of which I pride myself on knowing how to do. Here in my great-aunt’s house, here in Greensboro, I want to heed my grandmother’s injunction.

by Tess Taylor, Oxford American |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

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FAQ: All About The New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm

[ed. See also: SEO Changed Forever in 2013.]

Google has a new search algorithm, the system it uses to sort through all the information it has when you search and come back with answers. It’s called “Hummingbird” and below, what we know about it so far.

What’s a “search algorithm?”

That’s a technical term for what you can think of as a recipe that Google uses to sort through the billions of web pages and other information it has, in order to return what it believes are the best answers.

What’s “Hummingbird?”

It’s the name of the new search algorithm that Google is using, one that Google says should return better results.

So that “PageRank” algorithm is dead?

No. PageRank is one of over 200 major “ingredients” that go into the Hummingbird recipe. Hummingbird looks at PageRank — how important links to a page are deemed to be — along with other factors like whether Google believes a page is of good quality, the words used on it and many other things (see our Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors for a better sense of some of these).

Why is it called Hummingbird?

Google told us the name come from being “precise and fast.”

When did Hummingbird start? Today?

Google started using Hummingbird about a month ago, it said. Google only announced the change today.

What does it mean that Hummingbird is now being used?

Think of a car built in the 1950s. It might have a great engine, but it might also be an engine that lacks things like fuel injection or be unable to use unleaded fuel. When Google switched to Hummingbird, it’s as if it dropped the old engine out of a car and put in a new one. It also did this so quickly that no one really noticed the switch.

When’s the last time Google replaced its algorithm this way?

Google struggled to recall when any type of major change like this last happened. In 2010, the “Caffeine Update” was a huge change. But that was also a change mostly meant to help Google better gather information (indexing) rather than sorting through the information. Google search chief Amit Singhal told me that perhaps 2001, when he first joined the company, was the last time the algorithm was so dramatically rewritten.

What about all these Penguin, Panda and other “updates” — haven’t those been changes to the algorithm?

Panda, Penguin and other updates were changes to parts of the old algorithm, but not an entire replacement of the whole. Think of it again like an engine. Those things were as if the engine received a new oil filter or had an improved pump put in. Hummingbird is a brand new engine, though it continues to use some of the same parts of the old, like Penguin and Panda.

by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Other Side of the Story

Most of us have had one of those teachers. For one of my friends, it was the ninth grade biology instructor who inspired her to become a doctor; for another it was the art history teacher who introduced her to Rothko and a career as a museum curator. Details about those teachers’ classes almost never matter; they provide a different education, which outweighs the value of carefully composed lesson plans. Those teachers offer insight that has nothing to do with multiplication tables and nothing to do with grasping Shakespeare. Instead, they teach us the things we can’t find on Wikipedia or in textbooks. They teach us things that are real and genuine and valuable, things we have to learn about life, about people, and about ourselves. They show us the big stuff.

I had one of those teachers when I was fourteen. His name was Mr. Lehrer.*

Mr. Lehrer had just graduated from college when he stepped in as my middle school’s new eighth grade American history teacher, halfway through the school year. He was 23 years old, but his round, unblemished face made him look more like someone’s high school-aged brother than a grown-up with his own health insurance. Even without the Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots he would occasionally wear to school, Mr. Lehrer appeared inescapably unsophisticated. His wardrobe consisted of a country boy’s Sunday best: short-sleeve oxford shirts, pressed khaki pants, and brown round-toed shoes made of thermoplastic rubber. All of his slacks were oversized just enough to subvert whatever professional appearance he meant to convey, and his hair had a cowlick as prominent as his syrupy southern accent. Mr. Lehrer’s thin lips stayed sealed most of the time, but when he did speak the sound came not from vocal chords but from roots in the Texas Coastal Bend. He had the comportment of a farmhand, always equally proud and sheepish as he stood, stiff and silent, waiting to be told what to do.

Mr. Lehrer rarely gave orders, and few of my peers took him seriously. At any given moment, he could be found pleading for silence while students arranged their desks in uneven clusters to chat. We would gossip or paint our nails or dance to hip-hop as it buzzed through the speaker on someone’s T-Mobile Sidekick. The boys would turn daily assignments into paper airplanes while the girls made origami cranes and fortune-tellers, but no matter what shape the worksheets took they were neither completed nor handed in.

On the few occasions when Mr. Lehrer did attempt to enforce the rules, he would shout into the din of eighth grade chatter only to have his students ignore him. So, one day, he gave up and started to ignore us back. When the bell rang at the top of the hour each class period, Mr. Lehrer would seclude himself in a corner of the room and quietly read emails for the next 55 minutes. He looked less like a teacher and more like a disenchanted camp counselor, underpaid and trapped in a space too small for larger hopes.

Once Mr. Lehrer stopped trying to teach and started to condone our classroom debauchery, he became an object of fascination for my group of friends. Suddenly the new young teacher seemed interesting, or, at the very least, worth investigating. We began to surround his desk with our insipid adolescent babbling and our newly curvaceous bodies, asking him questions about his teenage years on his family’s farm or about his fiancée who worked as a nurse. We asked what it was like to grow up in a town with the population of our middle school, or if it was exciting to finally get a driver’s license, or how it felt to go to college and move away from home.

Shortly after my group of friends first invaded his corner, Mr. Lehrer warmed to us and began responding to our questions. He told us about the time he hit a deer while driving home down a dark dirt road, and he said that he moved to Houston for his fiancée even though his parents had raised him to detest city life. Eventually, Mr. Lehrer let us address him by his first name—Trace—and he allowed us to spend lunchtime every day in his classroom while he told us about his life. We sat perched on desktops while Mr. Lehrer talked, devouring our crustless PB&J sandwiches along with every word he said.

To us, Mr. Lehrer was omniscient: he had already written the chapter of his life that my friends and I were starting to scribble for ourselves. Tales about his teen adventures seemed novel and foreign and, yet, as if they might soon become our own—we just had to blow out one more round of birthday candles and open up our eyes. Mr. Lehrer represented the way boys would be when we got to the other side of high school, seemed to us like the kind of male friend we could expect to have one day, but who we were lucky to find so soon. We all liked Mr. Lehrer. Mr. Lehrer liked all of us.

But I could always tell he liked me the most.

by Jenny Kutner, Texas Monthly |  Read more:

Image: Tim Bower

John Bokor, The Fence Line 2010
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The Ghostwriting Business

On January 15, 2009, geese struck and disabled the engines of US Airways Flight 1549, forcing captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger to perform an emergency landing on the Hudson River. The smooth landing resulted in no casualties and remarkable pictures of the passengers and crew waiting on the plane’s wings in front of the Manhattan skyline. The “Miracle on the Hudson” received heavy media coverage that lifted Sullenberger to American hero status.

Nine months later, William Morrow published Sullenberger’s memoir Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters. Although one reviewer called the writing style “as methodical as one of Sully's checklists,” the book received high marks. But how did an amateur writer with a full schedule as a pilot, crash investigator, and CEO of a safety management consultancy find time to write a book in under nine months?

Just as he received assistance landing Flight 1549, Sullenberger had a co-pilot working on his book. On the cover of Highest Duty, just below Sullenberger’s name, it reads “With Jeffrey Zaslow.” Zaslow, who passed away in 2012, was a journalist and author whose name also appears on the cover of the memoirs of professor Randy Pausch and US Representative Gabrielle Giffords. He was, in other words, the person who most likely wrote the book: the ghostwriter.

Writers like Zaslow represent an open secret in book publishing and any content with a byline - that the title of author is often more of an executive position rather than an indication of who wrote the words on the page. Dictionaries define an “author” as either “a person who has written something” or “a person who starts or creates something, such as a plan or idea.” Readers assume the first, while publishers understand it’s the second.

In academia, professors come up with research ideas and analyze results, but research assistants and graduate students write the actual paper describing the outcome. Business executives drive the direction of projects but leave underlings to research and write reports that bear the executives’ names. Marketplaces called content mills allow companies to cheaply fill their websites with ghostwritten articles published under the name of a staff member. And nearly every book authored by a celebrity or politician is ghostwritten by a professional writer.

In book publishing, ghostwriters are no longer complete secrets. Many receive a byline and the more dignified title of contributor or even co-author. Investigating how the industry works, it’s hard to tell whether ghostwriting is becoming more common or just slightly more transparent. Many a writer has worried that publishers’ search for profits will lead them to denigrate all writers to ghostwriting status and embrace anything attached to a celebrity. But that fear seems misguided. Readers don’t seem ready to give up their romanticized view of authors anytime soon.

Ghostwriting 101

When a nonfiction author decides to write a book, she starts hunting for a story and writes up a book proposal. When a celebrity decides to pen her memoirs, she calls her agent.

The motivations for that call may differ. Many celebrities see dollar signs in book publishing. Authors receive an advance when they sign a book deal - essentially a guarantee on the expected royalties from book sales.1 Hillary Clinton received an $8 million advance for her memoir while Bill Clinton inked $15 million. Agents often auction the right to publish the book or memoir of a major figure to drive up the price. A bidding war between three publishing houses over Angelina Jolie’s memoir isrumored to have driven her advance up to $50 million. To avoid this, publishing houses sometimes make a large “pre-emptive bid” to secure a celebrity’s book without facing an auction. (...)

Ghostwriters exist for the same reason that Bill Gates doesn’t mow his own lawn: It’s just not worth his time. As the president of the Jenkins Group put it to us:

“The appeal is pretty clear. If you are an executive making $10 million a year, will you really stop working for two to three months to write a book? Or if you’re an athlete?”

Celebrities are also paying for a higher quality of writing than they could ever achieve. Every year, dozens of books are authored by celebrities, politicians, and business executives who haven’t written anything much longer than an email since college.

by Alex Mayyasi, Pricenomics | Read more:
Image: uncredited

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[ed. Be this guy.]

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[ed. Don't be this guy.]

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Tom Bagshaw
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The Dirty Secret of Black Friday 'Discounts'

When shoppers head out in search of Black Friday bargains this week, they won't just be going to the mall, they'll be witnessing retail theater.

Stores will be pulling out the stops on deep discounts aimed at drawing customers into stores. But retail-industry veterans acknowledge that, in many cases, those bargains will be a carefully engineered illusion.

The common assumption is that retailers stock up on goods and then mark down the ones that don't sell, taking a hit to their profits. But that isn't typically how it plays out. Instead, big retailers work backward with their suppliers to set starting prices that, after all the markdowns, will yield the profit margins they want.

The red cardigan sweater with the ruffled neck on sale for more than 40% off at $39.99 was never meant to sell at its $68 starting price. It was designed with the discount built in. (...)

Here's how it works, according to one industry consultant describing an actual sweater sold at a major retailer. A supplier sells the sweater to a retailer for roughly $14.50. The suggested retail price is $50, which gives the retailer a roughly 70% markup. A few sweaters sell at that price, but more sell at the first markdown of $44.99, and the bulk sell at the final discount price of $21.99. That produces an average unit retail price of $28 and gives the store about a 45% gross margin on the product.

Retailers didn't always price this way. It used to be that most items were sold at full price, with a limited number of sales to clear unsold inventory. That began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, when a rash of store openings intensified competition and forced retailers to look for new ways to stand out.

by Suzanne Kapner, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal

Welcome to the Memory Hole

What if Edward Snowden was made to disappear? No, I’m not suggesting some future CIA rendition effort or a who-killed-Snowden conspiracy theory of a disappearance, but a more ominous kind.

What if everything a whistleblower had ever exposed could simply be made to go away? What if every National Security Agency (NSA) document Snowden released, every interview he gave, every documented trace of a national security state careening out of control could be made to disappear in real-time? What if the very posting of such revelations could be turned into a fruitless, record-less endeavor?

Am I suggesting the plot for a novel by some twenty-first century George Orwell? Hardly. As we edge toward a fully digital world, such things may soon be possible, not in science fiction but in our world -- and at the push of a button. In fact, the earliest prototypes of a new kind of “disappearance” are already being tested. We are closer to a shocking, dystopian reality that might once have been the stuff of futuristic novels than we imagine. Welcome to the memory hole.

Even if some future government stepped over one of the last remaining red lines in our world and simply assassinated whistleblowers as they surfaced, others would always emerge. Back in 1948, in his eerie novel 1984, however, Orwell suggested a far more diabolical solution to the problem. He conjured up a technological device for the world of Big Brother that he called "the memory hole." In his dark future, armies of bureaucrats, working in what he sardonically dubbed the Ministry of Truth, spent their lives erasing or altering documents, newspapers, books, and the like in order to create an acceptable version of history. When a person fell out of favor, the Ministry of Truth sent him and all the documentation relating to him down the memory hole. Every story or report in which his life was in any way noted or recorded would be edited to eradicate all traces of him. (...)

Google Search...

In a sense, Google Search already “disappears” material. Right now Google is the good guy vis-à-vis whistleblowers. A quick Google search (0.22 seconds) turns up more than 48 million hits on Edward Snowden, most of them referencing his leaked NSA documents. Some of the websites display the documents themselves, still labeled “Top Secret.” Less than half a year ago, you had to be one of a very limited group in the government or contractually connected to it to see such things. Now, they are splayed across the web.

Google -- and since Google is the planet’s number one search engine, I'll use it here as a shorthand for every search engine, even those yet to be invented -- is in this way amazing and looks like a massive machine for spreading, not suppressing, news. Put just about anything on the web and Google is likely to find it quickly and add it into search results worldwide, sometimes within seconds. Since most people rarely scroll past the first few search results displayed, however, being disappeared already has a new meaning online. It’s no longer enough just to get Google to notice you. Getting it to place what you post high enough on its search results page to be noticed is what matters now. If your work is number 47,999,999 on the Snowden results, you’re as good as dead, as good as disappeared. Think of that as a starting point for the more significant forms of disappearance that undoubtedly lie in our future.

by Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch |  Read more:

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Circling

When the reality show Shark Tank premiered on ABC in August 2009, US unemployment was at a twenty-six-year high and still climbing. Today, the jobless rate has dropped off from those dire altitudes—somewhat—but this reflects a withered labor force more than it does any true economic revival. Wages lag behind inflation, wealth is concentrated among a tiny cohort, many of the jobs created since the financial crisis don’t pay very well, and a little fewer than half of all American households are just one major unforeseen expense away from skimming the poverty line.

All of which makes Shark Tank, now in its fifth season, a little hard to consume simply as entertainment, though it’s often highly entertaining on a week-to-week basis. On the show, adapted for American television from a Japanese reality format, inventors, creators and small-business owners try to extract money from a panel of venture capitalists, known on the show as “sharks,” in exchange for some percentage of ownership. The sharks hear from teenagers and MDs, parents and cowboys, beat cops and football players, and barefoot runners and homeless women. Each makes their case, describes their product or service with as much sales brio as they can muster, and waits hopefully for a shark to make an offer. Perhaps half the time, or maybe a bit more, people walk away with nothing. When the sharks do make a deal with a contestant, it’s usually in return for a much greater share of equity than the contestant was hoping to part with. Businesses that are already successful tend to attract investments. Businesses that have yet to prove themselves typically don’t get cash. Money, in short, goes to where money is, a rule of thumb that’s unlikely to surprise anyone.

You’d expect the show to get boring once you pick up on this pattern, but it doesn’t.Shark Tank shows people using their brains, in an SAT sort of way, much more than the average reality show. Every time the sharks hear a new pitch, they cross-examine the contestant on two fronts. First come the questions about the product itself: How does it work? What makes it different? Might that power cord pose a safety hazard to kids? Couldn’t a competitor just nail some boards together like this and make a cheaper version? If the contestant gives answers that satisfy the sharks, then the number grilling begins. What are your sales to date? How much did you net? What does it cost to acquire new customers? What’s your plan for growth? We get to see both the sharks and the contestants thinking on their feet, and along the way we learn about royalty structures, franchising strategies, the different categories of intellectual property, and other MBA-ish topics that we might have missed during our undergrad years reading Jane Jacobs.

Another pleasure of Shark Tank is the never-predictable nature of the business proposals themselves. Here are some of the hundred or so products pitched over the course of the fourth season: A tiny spatula with which you can dig uncooperative makeup out of the bottle. An ’80s-style arcade game console with a tap on the side that dispenses beer. A home tattoo removal kit that purports to break down the ink in your skin with halogen lights. An individually packaged waffle, to be sold at convenience stores, that contains as much caffeine as three cups of coffee. On Shark Tank, some ideas are good, some are bad, and some utterly mystify, but it’s heartening just to see so many ideas, presented back to back and by people who believe in them completely. (...)

You don’t need to watch too many scenes like this to realize that the sharks themselves are one of the less compelling aspects of Shark Tank. They’re certainly not as interesting as the producers seem to think. The sharks are the one element that’s constantly foregrounded, from the title on down: each episode begins with a montage explaining who they are and how they made their millions, and it’s not uncommon, following an emotionally charged pitch, for the camera to linger on the sharks’ bickering and bantering, rather than following up with the contestant who may have just made or lost the most important deal of her life. This emphasis on the house millionaires is one of the show’s greatest errors, because the fortunes and feelings of the sharks can never be a real engine of drama. Each shark, every episode, starts out rich and ends up the same way.

by Alex Eichler, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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[ed. man... how many times have I been down this street. Here's what you'll find at the end.]

Grade Inflation at Harvard

[ed. If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.. F. Scott Fitzgerald.]

The median grade at Harvard College is an A-, and the most frequently awarded mark is an A, Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris said on Tuesday afternoon, supporting suspicions that the College employs a softer grading standard than many of its peer institutions.

Harris delivered the information in response to a question from government professor Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 at the monthly meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

“A little bird has told me that the most frequently given grade at Harvard College right now is an A-,” Mansfield said during the meeting’s question period. “If this is true or nearly true, it represents a failure on the part of this faculty and its leadership to maintain our academic standards.”

Harris then stood and looked towards FAS Dean Michael D. Smith in hesitation.

“I can answer the question, if you want me to.” Harris said. “The median grade in Harvard College is indeed an A-. The most frequently awarded grade in Harvard College is actually a straight A.”

by Mattew Q. Clarida and Nicholas P. Fandos, Harvard Crimson | Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

Howlin' Wolf

[ed. Here's Clapton playing one of Wolf's killers "44"..]

The Secret Life of Grief

Eulogies ought to begin with a laugh, I decided, so this is how my eulogy began: with the story of how I learned that parents grow up, too.

My mom died on July 18, 2013, of pancreatic cancer, a subtle blade that slips into the host so imperceptibly that by the time a presence is felt, it is almost always too late. Living about 16 months after her diagnosis, she was "lucky," at least by the new standards of the parallel universe of cancer world. We were all lucky and unlucky in this way. Having time to watch a loved one die is a gift that takes more than it gives.

Psychologists call this drawn out period "anticipatory grief." Anticipating a loved one's death is considered normal and healthy, but realistically, the only way to prepare for a death is to imagine it. I could not stop imagining it. I spent a year and a half writing my mother a goodbye letter in my head, where, in the private theater of my thoughts, she died a hundred times. In buses and movie theaters, on Connecticut Avenue and 5th Avenue, on crosswalks and sidewalks, on the DC metro and New York subway, I lost her, again and again. To suffer a loved one's long death is not to experience a single traumatic blow, but to suffer a thousand little deaths, tiny pinpricks, each a shot of grief you hope will inoculate against the real thing.

A boundless black terror is how I imagined life without my mom. The history of grief, or what we know of it, is written by its greatest sufferers and ransacked with horror stories, lugubrious poetry, and downward-spiraling memoirs plunged in sadness. For some people, the death of a loved one is truly life-stopping, and I worried it would stop mine.For many of us, grief is something else: Resilience.

Then, in the weeks after she died, something strange happened. I did not plunge. Life did not stop. Instead, I felt something so unspeakably strange, so blasphemous, that I wondered if I could talk or write about it, at all. I felt okay.

Even stranger, I discovered, is that I wasn't strange, at all. Despite the warnings that grief would drag me through the prescribed five stages and discard me in a darker place, bereavement researchers have recently learned that we've been wrong about loss for centuries. For some, grief is a dull and unrelenting ache that fades—or doesn't. But for many of us, grief is something else. Grief is resilience.

If George Bonanno's office were discovered underground by a group of archaeologists, they would think they'd found a tomb. Volumes about death and mourning fill the wall-sized bookcase. Terra cotta figurines, excavated from Chinese burial sites, line the shelves, facing inward. At the center of the room, there is a full-size standing skeleton.

One afternoon in October, I visited Bonanno, perhaps the most renowned grief researcher in the United States, at Teachers College, Columbia University, to talk about his research. His lab might be trailblazing, but the mission is classically conservative. By studying grief like any other psychological condition, he has exposed the history of bereavement research to be a thread of fables."The more people engaged in their most intense emotions, the longer they would grieve. Laughter and smiling led to quicker recovering."

For centuries, grief has lived a secret life, hiding in plain view, even from our experts. Sigmund Freud coined the phrase "the work of grief," and ever since, there has lingered an idea that mourning is homework to do before we move on. The first systemic study of grief in the United States, by the Harvard psychiatrist Erich Lindemann, in 1942, described a horror show, marked by restlessness, hostility, hallucinations, and an overwhelming preoccupation with the dead. Lindemann had gathered a group of bereaved people—many of whom had lost friends in a recent night-club fire—and recorded his observations, motivated by the conviction that traumatic loss was a medical problem. Grievers who seemed normal in the weeks after, he claimed, were victims of dangerous repression.

Twenty years later, in the 1960s, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of loss would tattoo themselves onto the collective conscious of Americans. Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist, interviewed patients at a Chicago hospital about the experience of dying. She devised a theory of five periods, from anger to acceptance, with each stage serving an essential part in the mourning process. Her book, On Death and Dying, became a national bestseller, but it wasn't just a mess of shoddy science. It was shoddy science based on people who were dying, not people who were grieving.

Bonanno's work, which has redefined the science of grief research, revealed that Freud was wrong about work, Lindemann was wrong about repression, and Kubler-Ross was wrong about everything. The deepest grief is powerful, but sometimes short-lived, and most of us are wired to compartmentalize our most heart-breaking tragedies, even if it makes us feel ashamed to feel all right in the face of expectations that we feel terrible.

We are, both tragically and indispensably, born to grieve.

by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Arkadiusz Benedykt/flickr

The Period is Pissed

The period was always the humblest of punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce “I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.”

Say you find yourself limping to the finish of a wearing workday. You text your girlfriend: “I know we made a reservation for your bday tonight but wouldn’t it be more romantic if we ate in instead?” If she replies,

we could do that

Then you can ring up Papa John’s and order something special. But if she replies,

we could do that.

Then you should probably drink a cup of coffee: You’re either going out or you’re eating Papa John’s alone.

This is an unlikely heel turn in linguistics. In most written language, the period is a neutral way to mark a pause or complete a thought; but digital communications are turning it into something more aggressive. “Not long ago, my 17-year-old son noted that many of my texts to him seemed excessively assertive or even harsh, because I routinely used a period at the end,” Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, told me by email. How and why did the period get so pissed off?

It might be feeling rejected. On text and instant message, punctuation marks have largely been replaced by the line break. I am much more likely to type two separate messages without punctuation:

sorry about last night
next time we can order little caesars

Than I am to send a single punctuated message: 

I’m sorry about last night. Next time we can order Little Caesars.

And, because it seems begrudging, I would never type:

sorry about last night.
next time we can order little caesars.

“The unpunctuated, un-ended sentence is incredibly addicting,” said Choire Sicha, editor of the Awl. “I feel liberated to make statements without that emphasis, and like I'm continuing the conversation, even when I'm definitely not.”

Other people probably just find line breaks more efficient. An American University study of college students’ texting and instant messaging habits found they only used sentence-final punctuation 39 percent of the time in texts and 45 percent of the time in online chats. The percentages were even lower for “transmission-final punctuation”: 29 percent for texts and 35 percent for IMs. The same is likely true of Twitter, where the 140-character limit has made most punctuation seem dispensable.

“In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all,” Liberman wrote me. “In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like ‘This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.’”

by Ben Crair, TNR |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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