Jesus Raves

Five PM at the Sloppy Tuna and the Christians are party ready. The house music started bumping around 11 AM—because it is Saturday in Montauk, and summertime—but five o’clock is the golden hour, when everyone is sundrunk and loose and beautiful. Girls in cutoff shorts and bikini tops throw their arms around boys in Wayfarers, and sway. The dance floor is jammed and everything is spilling, the effect being that it seems to be raining PBR, and the mixture of sweat and sand and other people’s beer feels gritty and intoxicating on the skin. The light comes through the crowd slantwise because the sun is setting just past the railing that separates the dance floor from the beach, and while the heat and the stick and the pressing in of bodies is uncomfortable, the visual is stunning: a jungle of skin and light and air thick with energy that is not quite joie de vivre and not quite a collective, ecstatic denial of mortality but something ineffable and in-between.

Pastor Parker Richard Green is standing near the entrance, by the railing where there’s a view of the water, drinking a beer. He’s 26 and almost aggressively healthy looking. Tawny of skin, blue of eye, blond of crew cut, he looks like he’s straight from the manufacturer, a human prototype intended to indicate the correct proportion of biceps to shoulders. His brow is square and his jaw is square, and maybe even his whole head is kind of square, but he’s pulling it off.

Next to him is Jessi Marquez, also blond, also tawny. Her face is familiar from stock photographs of sunkissed girls with highlights—wispy hair, round blue eyes, a smile to please—but mysteriously hard to place, as though the lens tilted. Her chin is soft, not angular; her teeth are slightly crooked. On her wrist she has tattooed Grace, and her right shoulder reads And then some, because she wants to remember that God will provide everything you need . . . and then some.

Parker and Jessi have managed to locate the girl in the dancing mass who seems most out of control. She’s coke thin, maybe heroin thin, and dazey and wild, jumping up and down and waving her stick arms. They’re discreet about it—they stand near her group of friends on the dance floor and catch her as she bounces back and forth—and because they don’t invite her to church directly, and Parker, in his board shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, is no one’s vision of a pastor, she doesn’t realize. If she knew she were speaking to a pastor and his bride-to-be, she might not be screaming into his ear, “I love you so fucking much I’m going to jizz all over your fucking face no really I am Imma come and rub it all over your fucking face.”

“You’re like my new favorite person,” Jessi tells her. “You’re like a composite of all our friends. We’re gonna be best friends. Give me your number.” Cokethin stops running in circles for a minute and does this, and then shouts, “Text me you have to text me right now so I have your number too.”

“I am,” Jessi says. “I am texting you. You’re gonna come out with us tonight and then you’re going to spend all day with us tomorrow.” Tomorrow, Sunday.

“I’m gonna text you did you text me you have to text me.”

“I already texted you. I texted you two minutes ago.”

Cokethin accepts the challenge. “I texted you an hour ago.”

“I texted you yesterday.”

“I texted you years ago.”

“I texted you before you were even born! I texted you when you were in your mother’s womb!” With this Jessi wins. Cokethin screams for good measure and then announces, “I’m going now but I’ll see you guys later because you’re my new best friends kbye,” and whirls away off the dance floor and into the road.

They stare after her and then laugh. Satisfied, Jessi leans over and says to Parker, “Now that’s how you make a Christian.”

Parker laughs and shrugs. “Yeah,” he says. “In Montauk, that’s pretty much how it works.” (...)

The leopard-print jeans have everything to do with this moment. As does the iPad glowing on the pulpit and the fonts on the projector overhead and the choice of a venue with an enormous, shiny bar in the lounge area. Because if Liberty’s success, both worldly and otherworldly, rests on its ability to deliver people to God, to “grow His kingdom,” then its most important task is to become the kind of club that people want to join.

This is why the pastors refuse flatly to talk politics. When asked about gay marriage, Paul Andrew replied that he wants Liberty to be known by what it’s for, not against. Rhema Trayner told a congregation in the spring, “Doctrine is not a point of unity, and no one will ever have perfect theology. I don’t come to church because we agree on every single issue. I come to church because we are family.” I asked my friend Tim, a member of Liberty’s house band since the earliest meetings, if it was really possible that a church that believes in healings and premarital abstinence has no agenda about abortion or contraception or homosexuality. Tim, who works for Reuters and also DJs at clubs all over downtown Manhattan, suggested gently that I was missing the point. “To be fair, I don’t know,” he said. “But I do know that the only person never welcome to come to Liberty is someone who is physically dangerous,” he told me. “That’s the only kind of person not allowed in the building.”

It’s all so likeable. A church designed to make people feel comfortable, included, and inspired. A church that wants to demonstrate at every turn that following Jesus will expand your life, not restrict it. Come on, they say. Just raise your hand.

by Jordan Kisner, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: The Sloppy Tuna by Jordan Kisner

HAYASHI Takahiko 1988
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State of Deception

Why won’t the President rein in the intelligence community?

In the days after 9/11, General Michael Hayden, the director of the N.S.A., was under intense pressure to intercept communications between Al Qaeda leaders abroad and potential terrorists inside the U.S. According to the inspector general’s report, George Tenet, the director of the C.I.A., told Hayden that Vice-President Dick Cheney wanted to know “if N.S.A. could be doing more.” Hayden noted the limitations of the fisa law, which prevented the N.S.A. from indiscriminately collecting electronic communications of Americans. The agency was legally vacuuming up just about any foreign communications it wanted. But when it targeted one side of a call or an e-mail that involved someone in the U.S. the spy agency had to seek permission from the fisa court to conduct surveillance. Tenet later called Hayden back: Cheney wanted to know what else the N.S.A. might be able to do if Hayden was given authority that was not currently in the law.

Hayden resurrected a plan from the Clinton years. In the late fall of 1999, a large body of intelligence suggested that Osama bin Laden was planning multiple attacks around New Year’s Eve. The Clinton Administration was desperate to discover links between Al Qaeda operatives and potential terrorists in the U.S., and N.S.A. engineers had an idea that they called “contact chaining.” The N.S.A. had collected a trove of telephone metadata. According to the N.S.A. report, “Analysts would chain through masked U.S. telephone numbers to discover foreign connections to those numbers.”

Officials apparently believed that, because the U.S. numbers were hidden, even from the analysts, the idea might pass legal scrutiny. But the Justice Department thought otherwise, and in December of 1999 it advised the N.S.A. that the plan was tantamount to electronic surveillance under fisa: it was illegal for the N.S.A. to rummage through the phone records of Americans without a probable cause. Nonetheless, the concept of bulk collection and analysis of metadata was born. During several meetings at the White House in the fall of 2001, Hayden told Cheney that the fisa law was outdated. To collect the content of communications (what someone says in a phone call or writes in an e-mail) or the metadata of phone and Internet communications if one or both parties to the communication were in the U.S., he needed approval from the fisa court. Obtaining court orders usually took four to six weeks, and even emergency orders, which were sometimes granted, took a day or more. Hayden and Cheney discussed ways the N.S.A. could collect content and metadata without a court order.

The Vice-President’s lawyer, David Addington, drafted language authorizing the N.S.A. to collect four streams of data without the fisa court’s permission: the content of Internet and phone communications, and Internet and phone metadata. The White House secretly argued that Bush was allowed to circumvent the fisa law governing domestic surveillance thanks to the extraordinary power granted by Congress’s resolution, on September 14th, declaring war against Al Qaeda. On October 4th, Bush signed the surveillance authorization. It became known inside the government as the P.S.P., the President’s Surveillance Program. Tenet authorized an initial twenty-five million dollars to fund it. Hayden stored the document in his office safe.

Over the weekend of October 6, 2001, the three major telephone companies—A. T. & T., Verizon, and BellSouth, which for decades have had classified relationships with the N.S.A.—began providing wiretap recordings of N.S.A. targets. The content of e-mails followed shortly afterward. By November, a couple of weeks after the secret computer servers were delivered, phone and Internet metadata from the three phone companies began flowing to the N.S.A. servers over classified lines or on compact disks. Twenty N.S.A. employees, working around the clock in a new Metadata Analysis Center, at the agency’s headquarters, conducted the kind of sophisticated contact chaining of terrorist networks that the Clinton Justice Department had disallowed. On October 31st, the cover term for the program was changed to stellarwind.

Nearly everyone involved wondered whether the program was legal. Hayden didn’t ask his own general counsel, Robert Deitz, for his opinion until after Bush signed the order. (Deitz told Hayden he believed that it was legal.) John Yoo, a Justice Department lawyer, wrote a legal opinion, the full text of which has never been disclosed, arguing that the plan was legal. When Deitz tried to obtain the text, Addington refused his request but read him some excerpts over the phone. Hayden never asked for the official legal opinion and never saw it, according to the inspector general’s report. In May, 2002, the N.S.A. briefed Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the incoming chief of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, about the program. She was shown a short memo from the Department of Justice defending its legality, but wasn’t allowed to keep a copy. The N.S.A.’s inspector general later said he found it “strange that N.S.A. was told to execute a secret program that everyone knew presented legal questions, without being told the underpinning legal theory.”

by Ryan Lizza, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Heads of  State

Deniece Williams

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Against 'Long-Form Journalism'

I have had it with long-form journalism. By which I mean—don’t get me wrong—I’m fed up with the term long-form itself, a label that the people who create and sell magazines now invariably, and rather solemnly, apply to their most ambitious work. Reader, do you feel enticed to plunge into a story by the distinction that it is long? Or does your heart sink just a little? Would you feel drawn to a movie or a book simply because it is long? (“Oooh—you should really read Moby-Dick—it’s super long.”) Journalists presumably care about words as much as anyone, so it is mysterious that they would choose to promote their stories by ballyhooing one of their less inherently appealing attributes. Do we call certain desserts “solid-fat-form food” or do we call them cakes and pies? Is baseball a long-form sport? Okay, sure—but would Major League Baseball ever promote it as that? So why make a ripping yarn or an eye-popping profile sound like something you have to file to the IRS?

This choice of words matters, I think, not only because of the false note it sounds about particular stories but also because of the message it sends to the world about magazines’ sense of purpose these days. The term long-form has come to stand for narrative and expository and deeply reported journalism during the same period—over the past 20 years, and particularly the past 10—that magazines have had, as the politicians say, some challenges. I think this wrong turn in our taxonomy is a sign of, and may even contribute to, the continuing commercial upheaval and crisis in confidence. The story of the transition from an industry that was within memory so exuberant and ambitious—so grandiose, really, in its conception of its cultural and societal role—that it could declare itself to be inventing a “New Journalism,” to an industry wringing its hands over preserving something called “long-form journalism,” does not sound like a long-form story with a happy ending. It certainly doesn’t sound like one I’d want read, much less live through. “New Journalism” is a stirring promise to the wider world; “long-form” is the mumbled incantation of a decaying priesthood.In the digital age, making a virtue of mere length sends the wrong message to writers as well as readers. (...)

This is a particularly ripe moment to rethink our terminology (and I should own up to the fact that I still lapse into using the dreaded term myself) because deeply reported narrative and essayistic journalism is suddenly all the rage. Far from fading away, it shows signs of an energy and imagination not seen since the heyday of New Journalism. Last year, it was not any magazine but the sports department of The New York Times that pulled off the most digitally ambitious accomplishment in feature journalism, “Snow Fall,” a narrative of skiers buried in an avalanche that was told through the layering of words, video, and graphics. The story brought in countless readers and a Pulitzer Prize. (Actually, you can count the readers—the Times said “Snow Fall” generated 3.5 million page views in one week.) Digital upstarts like Buzzfeed and The Verge have started turning to “long-form” editors to create big features. Heralding “a coming renaissance of long-form journalism,” the twitchy news site Politico hired away the editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine last summer to commission writerly, deeply reported stories. “High-impact, magazine-style journalism is not a throwback to the past,” Politico’s editors declared in a memo that should chasten the hand-wringers. “It is a genre that is even more essential in today’s hyperkinetic news environment. It is a style of reporting and a mindset about illuminating what matters most that has a brilliant future.”

Is this just a fad, maybe even a fraud? Cynics would say that publishing a few big feature stories is a shortcut to respectability, and they’d be correct. But realists, I’m happy to say, would comment further that such features work: They draw in a lot of readers. As networks of human beings displace search algorithms, editors are discovering that not just headlines but overall quality matters more and more, whether a story is short or long. If you hope to entice a real person to pass your story on to a friend, then reporting matters, writing matters, and design matters. As journalism and its distribution through the Web evolve, the most meaningful distinction is turning out to be not short versus long but good versus bad.

by James Bennet, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: hobvias sudoneighm/Flickr

Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a Hit

Everyone thinks they know the tragic story of James Dean: he died young and violently, he embodied the ennui and angst of the postwar generation, and his image lives on as a hollow signifier of youthful rebellion. But most don’t understand how the timing of his death, and the very specific timing of his films, turned a tragic death into a cultural crater—one that would be widened and exploited by the publishing industry.

In the early 1950s, Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando tore through Hollywood, establishing themselves as “angry young men” who refused to hew to a classic understanding of Hollywood acting or behavior. They were astounding onscreen: both had a visceral, emotive magnetism. Critics loved them, execs were confused by them, and girls went nuts for them. Part of it was palpable sex, especially Brando’s, but it was also the vulnerability. These young men were just as sensitive as every teen girl dreamed their boyfriend would be. Brando and Clift raged against structural limitations, mostly to do with class, that may or may not have been relatable to most teenage girls, but it was the way these men crumbled, and the hope that the love of a good woman could put them back together, that animated so much female (and unspoken male) desire.

With his rebellious image, James Dean is often grouped with Clift and Brando, but he was seven years younger than Brando and eleven years younger than Clift, and his childhood during the war years would always distance him. Clift and Brando were in their late teens and early twenties during the Second World War; neither served, but it was a defining experience in a way it could never be for Dean. It was this sense of “missing out” that structured Dean’s image and performances. He didn’t have a war—so what did he have? People called that unspeakable lack “rebelliousness,” but it was always something more: which is precisely why his image, even flattened out by endless movie posters, endures. (...)

The Dean image, and the publishing industry that sprang up around it, was never really about rebellion. It was about sex—unspoken and romantic. Take this fan’s assessment, from a 1956 issue of Coronet:

I hate all the boys compared to Jimmy. I keep looking for him in other boys. He was intelligent and smart. He spoke so softly. I don’t know, he was just perfect, like in his pictures. He wasn’t too tall or too short. He didn’t talk like a hep cat. When you were with Jimmy you knew he was listening to you when he spoke. He was conscious you were there.

It’s remarkably similar to the way teenage girls have talked and continue to talk about a certain type of film idol, ones with beautiful faces and sensitive dispositions—David Cassidy, Davy Jones, Michael Jackson, Ricky Martin, River Phoenix, Johnny Depp Leonardo DiCaprio, Zac Efron, Justin Bieber—who only desire to listen and be listened to in return. It’s still sex, sublimated and sold as poetry.

Which is precisely why young, sexually uninitiated teens like them: sex is terrifying. Brando, who seemed to sweat sex, was terrifying. But Dean offered a means of channeling sexual energy into something far less threatening. Because many, even most, tween girls, whether in 1950 or today, don’t want to actually have sex so much as think about it, and by “think about it” I mean “think about the way he’ll look at you.” The beautiful, often androgynous stars, even closeted stars never forced the issue; they just wanted to hold your hand.

by Anne Helen Petersen, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Jimi Hendrix - photo by Eddie Kramer - 1968
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22 Hours in Balthazar

It’s 5 a.m. on a Friday morning, and I’m looking at the “vault.” It’s not actually a vault, but it used to be, back when this was a bank. Now it’s used to store wine, glassware and plates for Balthazar. Erin Wendt, the restaurant’s general manager, took me here, rounding off a tour of its underground hinterland, a warren of storage rooms that have been colonized, piece by subterranean piece, since the 180-seat brasserie opened in 1997. Beneath the dining room on Spring and Crosby Streets, and moving west, there is a cavernous prep kitchen, the chef’s office, six walk-in fridges and one walk-in freezer, a bakery prep station and delivery room, a laundry area, a rather bleak staff break room, kegs and soda lines, managers’ offices, a room seemingly dedicated to storing menus and menu sleeves and, finally, beneath Broadway, a half-block away from the dining room, the vault. You can hear the N, Q and R trains trundling by with remarkable clarity.

For now, everything is quiet at Balthazar. The last guests from the night before left just a few hours ago, and the nighttime porters are still finishing their thorough scrub of the restaurant. But the delivery trucks are starting to arrive all over again, idling on Crosby. Men in lifting belts wheel hand trucks stacked high with food from across the globe: 80 pounds of ground beef, 700 pounds of top butt, 175 shoulder tenders, 1 case of New York strips, all from the Midwest; 5 pounds of chicken livers, 6 cases of chicken bones, 120 chicken breast cutlets; 30 pounds of bacon; 300 littleneck clams, 110 pounds of mussels from Prince Edward Island, another 20 pounds from New Zealand, 50 trout, 25 pounds of U10 shrimp (fewer than 10 pieces per pound), 55 whole dorade, 3 cases of escargot, 360 Little Skookum oysters from Washington State, 3 whole tunas, 45 skates, 18 black sea bass, 2 bags of 100 to 120 whelks, 45 lobster culls. That’s just the fish and meat order.

Produce comes in, too — 50-pound cases of russets from Idaho stacked head high and six deep; spinach, asparagus, celery, mushrooms, tomatoes — as do dry goods, dairy and some 500 pounds of insanely expensive peanut oil for the French fries. The restaurant employs six stewards to deal with deliveries and storage alone; they weigh goods and check them against invoices, putting everything in its proper place, keeping the Health Department happy. At a typical restaurant, as much as one-third of the overhead goes to food costs, and so efficiency is an imperative. “Monday, you’ll see,” Kelvin Arias, the head steward, tells me, “all the walk-ins will be empty.”

SoHo has so thoroughly become a pleasure ground for the global 1 percent that it’s easy to forget, architecture aside, that it was once a manufacturing district. Before Keith McNally, the serial restaurateur who supposedly “invented downtown” Manhattan, opened Balthazar, the building at 80 Spring housed a tannery. Upstairs was a leather wholesaler; downstairs a vast sweatshop. “There were about 200 women down there on sewing machines,” McNally says.

Yet in many ways, Balthazar still operates like a factory. Quite literally, raw materials enter through one side early each morning, moving through various stations, where 150 to 200 employees, each playing a narrowly defined role, produce finished, value-added and marked-up goods and serve them directly to end users. During the busy season — roughly fall Fashion Week to Memorial Day — the restaurant spends $90,000 a week on food to feed some 10,000 guests.

Over the course of what I will be repeatedly told is a slow day, 1,247 people will eat here. (Normally, it’s about 1,500.) But within a narrow range, Balthazar knows how many people will come through its doors every single day of the week, and it can predict roughly what it will sell during every meal. It mass-produces high-quality food and pushes it out to customers, and its production numbers are as predictable as the system that churns out the food itself. Just about everyone who works at Balthazar calls it a machine.

by Willy Staley, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Marvin Orellana for The New York Times

Banking over Fox Glacier (by Mathieu Chardonnet)
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Google’s Road Map to Global Domination

A Frenchman who has lived half his 49 years in the United States, Vincent was never in the Marines. But he is a leader in a new great game: the Internet land grab, which can be reduced to three key battles over three key conceptual territories. What came first, conquered by Google’s superior search algorithms. Who was next, and Facebook was the victor. But where, arguably the biggest prize of all, has yet to be completely won.

Where-type questions — the kind that result in a little map popping up on the search-results page — account for some 20 percent of all Google queries done from the desktop. But ultimately more important by far is location-awareness, the sort of geographical information that our phones and other mobile devices already require in order to function. In the future, such location-awareness will be built into more than just phones. All of our stuff will know where it is — and that awareness will imbue the real world with some of the power of the virtual. Your house keys will tell you that they’re still on your desk at work. Your tools will remind you that they were lent to a friend. And your car will be able to drive itself on an errand to retrieve both your keys and your tools.

While no one can say exactly how we will get from the current moment to that Jetsonian future, one thing for sure can be said about location-awareness: maps are required. Tomorrow’s map, integrally connected to everything that moves (the keys, the tools, the car), will be so fundamental to their operation that the map will, in effect, be their operating system. A map is to location-awareness as Windows is to a P.C. And as the history of Microsoft makes clear, a company that controls the operating system controls just about everything. So the competition to make the best maps, the thinking goes, is more than a struggle over who dominates the trillion-dollar smartphone market; it’s a contest over the future itself. (...)

Microsoft’s Streetside debuted in 2006 with a photographic rendering of parts of Seattle and San Francisco. Google’s Street View arrived a year later, with five cities: San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver. Google eventually overwhelmed Microsoft with a more aggressive surveying program. Street View now covers 3,000 cities in 54 countries, and it has gone beyond streets and onto train tracks, hiking trails, even rivers. A section of the Amazon was the first river, appearing last year; the Thames made its debut in October; and the Colorado will be available by the end of the year. “We want to paint the world,” Vincent says. When I asked him what level of resolution we were talking about, he said, “About one pixel to the inch.”

By threading photograph after photograph along the lines that mark the byways and highways on the map, Vincent and his team are making, in effect, one large photograph of the globe. It’s a neat trick, perhaps even the next conceptual leap for cartography, but like most things Google spends a lot of money on, very likely to be more useful that it first appears. Like most people when they first encounter Street View, O’Reilly used it to check out the photo of his house. But then, he says, he later began to see the potential of the data collected by Google and to imagine more and more uses for it.

by Adam Fisher, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Dan Winters for The New York Times

Rene Gruau, 'Moonlight Lady' 1962.
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The Medicinal Benefits of Psychedelic Drugs

[ed. From the Ask Anything series on Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Dish. Additional videos are listed below.]

In today’s video from drug researcher Rick Doblin, he surveys some little known but promising psychedelic treatments, including one that might dramatically improve end of life care.

• What is the biggest myth about psychedelic drugs?
• How important is some kind of guidance when it comes to having a beneficial psychedelic experience?
• What has been the most encouraging finding from your research on psychedelics?
• What will it take for national policy towards psychedelics to change?
• Are there any promising psychedelics that are not widely known about yet?

Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana and his Master’s thesis on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana vs. the oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients. His undergraduate thesis at New College of Florida was a 25-year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment, which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences. 

His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people, and eventually to become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist. He founded MAPS in 1986, and currently resides in Boston with his wife and three children.

by Andrew Sullivan, The Dish |  Read more: 

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Wool But Were Afraid to Ask

Clara Parkes graduated with a liberal arts degree, had a stint teaching English and then found herself in the fast-paced Bay Area tech industry, putting her writing chops to work for start-ups. But she realized she had gone down the “wrong path.” Cutting her losses, she moved to Maine (which has “a heavy duty wool culture”) in 1998, where she took up knitting with a vengeance.

Now, 15 years later she runs an online magazine and newsletter, Knitters Review, and is the author of four books about knitting, including “The Knitters Book of Wool.” Parkes talks to Modern Farmer about her favorite fiber.

Modern Farmer: How do you tell a quality wool product from something that’s lower on the scale?

Clara Parkes: If you’re concerned about truly high-end, stick with merino [Named for the Merino sheep from which it is harvested]. Because that’s the finest grade of wool that’s on the commercial market and the finest in terms of softness. The thing is, the finer a sweater is, the faster it’s going to wear out on you. Give merino a chance. Our tendency is to look for super soft, soft, soft. So our hands will immediately go to the cashmere sweaters. You can actually get something that will last four times as long and is more likely better made in a lot of ways and costs half the price if you just put away the cashmere and look for the wool merino. (...)

MF: Do you have any favorite wool buys?

CP: My guilty secret shop would be Uniqlo. They make a really great, very inexpensive wool pullover, turtleneck and cardigan. They last forever. They’re very thin. I travel with them. They wear well, they don’t pill, they keep you warm. On the other end of the spectrum is someplace like Ibex in terms of beautiful garment design from a company that takes care in sourcing their fibers from good people.

MF: Do you always want a 100 percent wool garment, or are blends good, too?

CP: The only time a blend becomes useful is if it has to do with the function of a fabric. Like 10 percent nylon can be a good thing, but above 20 it begins to impact the way it feels against your skin. Some people say the very best blend is 50/50 cotton and wool because each has qualities that compliment the others shortcomings. I would be wary of what I call ‘why bother blends.’ It’s like 10 percent this, 10 percent that, kitchen sink. Let’s toss some angora in there; let’s toss some silk in there, some bamboo. It becomes more of a mad scientist than really giving you a fitting second skin against your body.

by Andy Wright, Modern Farmer |  Read more:

Image: Flickr/sand_and_sky

‘And How Does That Make You Feel?’ The Cost of Therapy

Opinions and descriptions of therapy vary as much as the individuals who engage it: It’s medical; it’s personal; it’s a luxury; it’s a necessity; it can be tremendously helpful and beneficial; it can be expensive.

Logan and Martha have discussed how depression affects them (and their money). There’s another money factor involved here: When you want or need to go to therapy, how much is it going to cost you?

Therapy involves trusting someone with your deeply personal thoughts, your secrets and your raw self. Yet therapy is bracketed by commerce—it is a service, and a source of revenue and expenses, with insurance adding another twist in the process. If I quantified the comfort and help I get from therapy, that number would be far higher than what I can afford to spend. Money and value play a tricky game here: I want excellent care and support; I also want to minimize my out-of-pocket costs.

When I decided to see a therapist in New York, I had three options:

• See a therapist who did not accept my insurance
• Pursue a low-cost alternative, like a student training program or referral center
• Find an in-network therapist.

I figured out these options after stumbling into the office of a pricey out-of-network therapist. I met with this therapist based on a recommendation from someone in the field, and I liked her right away. Scratch that, I loved her. She looked like she could be my aunt, she totally got me, and she was going to fix everything! I could feel my problems melting away—right up until she told me she charged $220 per 45-minute session, and did not accept insurance.

It was a rude awakening. I had assumed that insurance would cover my visits, and didn’t think to ask about fees until the end of our first session. I briefly considered if I could make this work, but the thought of spending $900 each month for these sessions practically had me breaking out in hives. For $900, I could buy 100 Chipotle burritos! (Though probably more like 85 burritos with guac—they really get you on the guac.) Still, the ups and downs of eating three burritos a day would be stressful, as would worrying every month about coming up with enough money to pay for therapy. It was hard to walk away from someone I felt could really help me, but practically, I needed a lower cost option.

by Deb Weiss, The Billfold |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Le Corbusier
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George Carlin

Let’s talk about your material. Do jokes and premises just come to you, or do you actively sit and try to think of funny things?

It comes to me. Part of my leaving the media on all day is a way of…my mind has trained itself to have a very sensitive system of radar about certain words, expressions, topics, and areas of discussion that come up. There are things that interest me more than others, and then there are things that jump out. There’s one thing I learned about the mind as a young man, when I quit school. I read a book – half of it, anyway – called Psycho-Cybernetics. The author said that the brain is a goal-seeking and problem-solving machine, and if you put into it the parameters of what it is you need or want or expect, and you feed it, it will do a lot of work without you even noticing. Because the brain does that. It forms neural networks. There are areas in your brain that communicate with one another because of a need they perceive that they have – if you have trained yourself passively or actively, which I have – to look for certain kinds of things to say, and certain kinds of things to compare. Because a lot of comedy is comparing – the things that are cultural or social or language-oriented, or just plain silly. My brain got used to the fact that that made it feel good – that I liked finding those things. So the brain does networking on its own where those connections get made, and pretty soon there’s an automatic process going on all the time that leaves out a lot of unimportant or less interesting areas, and concentrates on areas it has trained itself to passively look for. Because it knows that when it finds one of them, you’re going to feel good! Oh, boy, I found another one! Let’s go back to work and find some more of these for him. What I do is, I collect my notes. I have about 1,300 separate files in my computer – they change from week to week, because I combine or expand files – and they are 44 years worth of collecting thoughts, notions, ideas, pieces of data, and material. Anything I think might have promise for my writing sometime in the future goes on a piece of paper, and that becomes a stack of papers, and that gets a topic title. The scientist is at work with the little artist – he’s got a scientist buddy – and this guy’s indexing things and figuring out categories, and that stuff goes in the computer. And every time you see it, touch it, look at it, or think of it, it gets deeper in the brain, the network gets deeper, and at some point, it gets to be a telling mass that says to you, “OK. Take a look at this now. This is gonna be funny. You got enough data, take a look at this.” So I’m drawn to something and start writing about it, and then you really start writing, and that’s when the real ideas pounce out, and new ideas, and new thoughts and images, and then bing, ba-bam ba-boom, that’s the creative part.

by Larry Getlen, SplitSider |  Read more:

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Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986), Clam and Mussel, 1926.
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