Three Tweets for the Web

[ed. See also: 2013 The Year 'the Stream' Crested.]

The arrival of virtually every new cultural medium has been greeted with the charge that it truncates attention spans and represents the beginning of cultural collapse—the novel (in the 18th century), the comic book, rock ‘n’ roll, television, and now the Web. In fact, there has never been a golden age of all-wise, all-attentive readers. But that’s not to say that nothing has changed. The mass migration of intellectual activity from print to the Web has brought one important development: We have begun paying more attention to information. Overall, that’s a big plus for the new world order.

It is easy to dismiss this cornucopia as information overload. We’ve all seen people scrolling with one hand through a BlackBerry while pecking out instant messages (IMs) on a laptop with the other and eyeing a television (I won’t say “watching”). But even though it is easy to see signs of overload in our busy lives, the reality is that most of us carefully regulate this massive inflow of information to create something uniquely suited to our particular interests and needs—a rich and highly personalized blend of cultural gleanings.

The word for this process is multitasking, but that makes it sound as if we’re all over the place. There is a deep coherence to how each of us pulls out a steady stream of information from disparate sources to feed our long-term interests. No matter how varied your topics of interest may appear to an outside observer, you’ll tailor an information stream related to the continuing “stories” you want in your life—say, Sichuan cooking, health care reform, Michael Jackson, and the stock market. With the help of the Web, you build broader intellectual narratives about the world. The apparent disorder of the information stream reflects not your incoherence but rather your depth and originality as an individual. (...)

With the help of technology, we are honing our ability to do many more things at once and do them faster. We access and absorb information more quickly than before, and, as a result, we often seem more impatient. If you use Google to look something up in 10 seconds rather than spend five minutes searching through an encyclopedia, that doesn’t mean you are less patient. It means you are creating more time to focus on other matters. In fact, we’re devoting more effort than ever before to big-picture questions, from the nature of God to the best age for marrying and the future of the U.S. economy.

Our focus on cultural bits doesn’t mean we are neglecting the larger picture. Rather, those bits are building-blocks for seeing and understanding larger trends and narratives. The typical Web user doesn’t visit a gardening blog one day and a Manolo Blahnik shoes blog the next day, and never return to either. Most activity online, or at least the kind that persists, involves continuing investments in particular long-running narratives—about gardening, art, shoes, or whatever else engages us. There’s an alluring suspense to it.What’s next? That is why the Internet captures so much of our attention.

Indeed, far from shortening our attention spans, the Web lengthens them by allowing us to follow the same story over many years’ time. If I want to know what’s new with the NBA free-agent market, the debate surrounding global warming, or the publication plans of Thomas Pynchon, Google quickly gets me to the most current information. Formerly I needed personal contacts—people who were directly involved in the action—to follow a story for years, but now I can do it quite easily.

Sometimes it does appear I am impatient. I’ll discard a half-read book that 20 years ago I might have finished. But once I put down the book, I will likely turn my attention to one of the long-running stories I follow online. I’ve been listening to the music of Paul McCartney for more than 30 years, for example, and if there is some new piece of music or development in his career, I see it first on the Internet. If our Web surfing is sometimes frantic or pulled in many directions, that is because we care so much about so many long-running stories. It could be said, a bit paradoxically, that we are impatient to return to our chosen programs of patience.

Another way the Web has affected the human attention span is by allowing greater specialization of knowledge. It has never been easier to wrap yourself up in a long-term intellectual project without at the same time losing touch with the world around you. Some critics don’t see this possibility, charging that the Web is destroying a shared cultural experience by enabling us to follow only the specialized stories that pique our individual interests. But there are also those who argue that the Web is doing just the opposite—that we dabble in an endless variety of topics but never commit to a deeper pursuit of a specific interest. These two criticisms contradict each other. The reality is that the Internet both aids in knowledge specialization and helps specialists keep in touch with general trends.

The key to developing your personal blend of all the “stuff” that’s out there is to use the right tools. The quantity of information coming our way has exploded, but so has the quality of our filters, including Google, blogs, and Twitter. As Internet analyst Clay Shirky points out, there is no information overload, only filter failure. If you wish, you can keep all the information almost entirely at bay and use Google or text a friend only when you need to know something. That’s not usually how it works. Many of us are cramming ourselves with Web experiences—videos, online chats, magazines—and also fielding a steady stream of incoming e-mails, text messages, and IMs. The resulting sense of time pressure is not a pathology; it is a reflection of the appeal and intensity of what we are doing.

by Tyler Cowen, Wilson Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: TechBuffalo

Georgia O'Keeffe, “Black Place lll”, 1944

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The Internet Hates Me

I moved to New York City, and I needed to make money. I wasn’t having luck getting a job. It's a common tale.

My solution was to grab my typewriter that I bought at a yard sale for 10 dollars and bring it to a park. I’d write stories for people, on the spot—I wouldn’t set a price. People could pay me whatever they wanted. I knew that I had the gift of writing creatively, very quickly, and my anachronistic typewriter (and explanatory sign) would be enough to catch the eye of passersby. Someone might want something specific; they might just want a story straight from my imagination. I was prepared for either situation.

I started at Washington Square Park. My cousin joined, which was particularly nice, since it started raining and he held an umbrella over my head. Barely anyone stopped, but there was a grand piano player and dancers to contend with. So I tried the 5th and 59th street entrance to Central Park, and was lost among the Statues of Liberty, the bubble guys, the magicians, the stand-up comic, the free hugs guy, the jugglers. At the Hans Christian Andersen memorial statue, I was writing post-card size stories for grade schoolers, mostly in the vein of Pokémon and Disney. I didn’t make a lot of money—only enough money to grab a slice of pizza on the way home.

When I set up at the High Line, I had lines of people asking for stories. At seven to 10 minutes per a story, I had to tell people to leave and come back. It surprised me when they would do just that. I never had writer’s block, although sometimes I would stare off into space for the right word, and people watching would say, “Look! He’s thinking!” Writing is usually a lonely, solitary act. On the High Line with my typewriter, all the joy of creating narrative was infused with a performer’s high—people held their one-page flash fictions and read them and laughed and repeated lines and translated into their own languages, right in front of me. Perhaps other writers would have their nerves wracked by instant feedback on rough drafts, but all I could do was smile.

Each time I went, I’d walk home, my typewriter case full of singles, my fingers ink-stained. Lots of people were worried about copycats—what if I saw someone “stealing” my idea? I tried to soothe them. If every subway guitarist had fights about who came up with the idea to play an acoustic cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” the underground would be a violent place. More violent than it already is. Others, perhaps drawn by the sounds of the typewriter, would stop and just talk to me, watch me compose a story for someone else. Then they'd shake their head and tell me that the idea and the execution were “genius.”

Of course, the Internet could be counted on to take me down a peg.

I woke up one day not long after I started "Roving Typist" to a flurry of emails, Facebook posts, text messages and missed calls. A picture of me typewriting had made it to the front page of Reddit. For those who don’t know, being on the front page of Reddit is hallowed ground—the notoriety of being on the front page can launch careers, start dance crazes, inspire Hollywood. In other words, ending up on the front page of Reddit meant a decent chunk of the million-plus people who log on daily saw my picture.

Posted under the headline “Spotted on the Highline” was me.

It’s a pretty good picture, I thought. Although my shoes are beat up and missing their laces, my hands are
frozen in a bizarre position, and that day was too hot for clothes that photograph well, I look deep in thought. Unfortunately, the two cute girls I was writing a story for are cropped out.

And so was my sign.

My sign said: “One-of-a-kind, unique Stories While You Wait. Sliding Scale – Donate What You Can!”

Without the sign, without the context, I definitely look like someone who is a bit insane. That’s how I thought of it, before I clicked to look at the hundreds of replies; I figured people were probably wondering why I would bring my typewriter to a park. And when I started reading the comments, I saw most people had already decided that I would bring my typewriter to the park because I'm a “fucking hipster.” Someone with the user handle “S2011” summed up the thoughts of the hive mind in 7 words: “Get the fuck out of my city.”

Illmatic707 chimed in: I have never wanted to fist fight someone so badly in my entire life.

Leoatneca replied: Bet 90% of his high school did to. It's because of these guys that bullying is so hard to stop.

As a member of the first generation to freely and gladly share my pictures, videos and thoughts online, I’d always—until now, anyway—adopted a “What’s the worst that could happen?” attitude, mixed with an “Everyone else is doing it!” mentality towards my online presence. Many of the best things in my life couldn’t have happened without sharing these pieces of myself online—meeting favorite authors at bars thanks to Twitter, getting another chance at a lost crush thanks to Facebook. And yet, I still felt thrown when I was presented with an image of myself that I couldn’t control. Yes, I know that I am pretty much always being watched (especially at a beautiful tourist attraction in New York City, doing something partly designed to attract attention) but that didn’t prepare for me for the reality of seeing myself taken out of context.

I did worry, when I started typewriting, that my stories would make it online somehow, and they would be ripped to shreds by literary, high-minded commenters. In this unrealistic dream world, I was going to defend their quick composition, their status as literary souvenirs of the city, the difficulty in writing a story while the person who is paying you looks over your shoulder, and another two or three people ask you questions while kids are asking if they can “just press one key.”

Of course I sat back down. Of course I read every single comment. I did not ready myself mentally for a barrage of hipster-hating Internet commenters critiquing me for everything: my pale skin, my outfit, my hair, my typing style, my glasses. An entire sub-thread was devoted to whether or not I had shaved legs. It was not the first time I had been labeled a “hipster.” I often wear tight jeans, big plastic-frame glasses, shirts bought at thrift stores. I listen to Vampire Weekend, understand and laugh at the references in "Portlandia." I own and listen to vintage vinyl. The label never bothered me on its own. But with each successive violent response to the picture of me, I realized that hipsters weren't considered a comically benign undercurrent of society. Instead, it seemed like Redditors saw hipsters and their ilk as a disease, and I was up on display as an example of depraved behavior. (...)

The reaction, then, had nothing to do with hipsters. It was a hatred of people that need to stand out for standing-out's sake. That realization was at once positive and negative—people didn't hate me because I was a hipster, they hated me because I looked like I was nakedly desperate for attention, and had gone about that attention-grabbing by glomming on to marginalized trends.

by C.D. Hermelin, The Awl |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Astrogirl, Kacper Kiec
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New York Turning Into a Trailer Park

[ed. I'm sorry, you just have to laugh. See also: Trailer park living invades New York.]

New York — Steven Cintron kicks back on a small sofa a mere couple feet from his kitchen table. The breather from his construction job is welcome, even if cramped like everything else in New York City.

The couch doubles as a bed for his pit bull, Bruno. Cintron's own queen-size mattress is shoved in the back with the TV, a hunched walk past the mini-fridge, three-burner stove and closet-size bathroom.

Cintron's roughly 200-square-foot pad isn't just any tiny apartment in the Big Apple. It's an RV — meant more for roaming American highways than wedging into parallel parking spots.

As the most expensive city in the country gets even pricier, Cintron and other New Yorkers are taking drastic steps to survive the most brutal real estate market in the United States. They are ditching sky-high rents and buying secondhand recreational vehicles.

"I've got everything," said Cintron, a husky 34-year-old with a close-cropped beard and gold chain, as his fan and portable air conditioner whir. "I'm comfortable here."

Cintron was looking for a new place to live last spring after splitting up with his girlfriend. Unable to find an affordable apartment that would also allow his dog, he found inspiration in a friend who owns an RV. So he bought a 1996 Gulf Stream Ultra posted on Craigslist for $5,000.

He wound up parking near Brooklyn's tony Park Slope neighborhood, where he grew up but now can't afford to rent. A new Whole Foods is sprouting a few blocks from an artisanal pickle store and organic juice bar.

By turning to mobile apartments, RV dwellers are something of real estate pioneers in New York. RVs give New Yorkers a way into hip or exclusive neighborhoods they otherwise might not be able to afford. They don't have to worry about nagging landlords, rent hikes or upstairs neighbors tap-dancing at midnight.

But there are obvious trade-offs. Getting electricity takes some effort. Heating during the winter can get costly. Mail may need to be delivered to relatives' places or post office boxes. There's also the issue of how to hook up sewage lines.

And RVs may not offer much social cachet.

"The ladies aren't really kicking down the door," said Rick Hall, who gave up on trying to find an apartment before he moved to New York to study at St. John's University. Hall bought the RV from a friend when he was still in Ohio and parked his home near the school's campus in Queens.

New Yorkers have long struggled to find affordable shelter in a city bursting at the seams with more than 8 million people. They have crammed extra roommates into bifurcated living rooms, converted closets into bedrooms and moved into house boats. Greg Kloehn, an artist based in Oakland, won worldwide media attention when he transformed a Dumpster into a miniature bungalow for when he visits the East Coast.

by Andrew Tangel, LA Times |  Read more:

Image:: J.C. RIce

piergilfourquie
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Tax Breaks Power PGA Tour Giving

The PGA Tour's nonprofit business model has allowed it to avoid paying up to $200 million in federal taxes over the past 20 years, and its tournaments -- designed to benefit local charities -- operate in ways that fall short of acceptable charitable practices, an "Outside the Lines" analysis of IRS data finds.

The tour's charitable giving is a centerpiece of its golf events, tournament telecasts and website. The professional golf organization touts nearly $2 billion in donations over 75 years.

Yet that philanthropy has been bolstered by millions of dollars of annual tax breaks for the PGA Tour and its tournaments, which often are run by charities that spend far more on prizes, catering and country clubs than they do on sick kids, wounded vets or economic development. In one case, running a PGA tournament actually caused a charity to lose money -- more than $4.5 million over two years, the analysis found. (...)

"The lion's share of the money is going to big prizes, cash prizes for athletes and all the promotion around it, so it's really pathetic, actually," Charity Navigator president Ken Berger said. "Every single taxpayer in this country ultimately is bearing the burden of having to pay the taxes for this wildly inefficient organization that's giving so little to charity." (...)

On the PGA Tour's website, the very first tab -- "Charity" -- takes readers to a page where they can see the charities each tournament supports. The charities range from big names such as St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and Shriners Hospitals for Children to a scholarship program for caddies and local United Way chapters.

Using tournaments to raise money for charity dates to a $10,000 donation made by the Palm Beach Invitational in 1938; running each tournament as a charity became PGA Tour policy in 1979. That charitable structure helps attract sponsors, volunteers and fans, Votaw said.

"It's a means to an end, and the end is to benefit any number of charities that, in turn, help countless lives," he said.

Here's how it works: Take the FedEx St. Jude Classic in Memphis, Tenn. A nonprofit by the name of Youth Programs Inc. was formed in 1960 as a 501(c)(3) organization, which is the same public charity category as your local humane society, cancer research fundraising group, homeless shelter or Boys & Girls Clubs.

On its publicly available IRS form, the purpose of Youth Programs Inc. is to "host an annual professional PGA Tour sports event for the benefit of charitable organizations." In 2011, it made $15.3 million, about 89 percent of that from the golf tournament. It spent $15.3 million, which included about $6 million in prize money for the golfers and $5 million in TV promotion. It spent close to $1 million on tournament production and $500,000 on food and beverages, most likely at a discount, because Youth Programs is also exempt from paying sales tax in Tennessee.

The amount actually spent on charity -- the money given to St. Jude's -- was $1.5 million, or 10 percent of tournament expenses. Only $253,742 of that was actual cash to the research hospital. The rest went to St. Jude ads aired during the televised tournament, pro-am entry fees and air travel for celebrities.

by Paula Lavigne, ESPN, Outside the Lines |  Read more:

Image: ESPN

Love Love Love

The weekend after Thanksgiving, when I was officially about ten weeks pregnant, I went on a bike ride in the rain with the boy whose genetic material was taking hold in my uterus. We rode together over the Golden Gate Bridge, and it started to rain. When I got tired part of the way up the Marin Headlands, he rode up behind me and started pushing me up the hill. He was so strong, and it was raining so hard, I felt like I was back in Oregon, where we’d met, and I thought about how nice it would be if I could just be in love with him. About what an athletic baby the little group of cells in my body would turn into. About how if I loved him, he would love me, and this little alien creature could turn into a human that absolved us both of the treacherous things we’d done to each other and to the people we loved. My legs were covered in mud, and my bike gloves felt like wet diapers, and I could imagine a little baby being born and everyone loving it and everyone knowing that I had slept with this guy and the story we told everyone would be about our complicated beginning, but the baby would make it okay. My dad as a grandpa. My brother, an uncle. My mom, the perfect grandma.

We turned downhill and the rain didn’t let up, and when we went through the tunnel, I let him get ahead of me. I thought about the things I did really like about him: He is cute. He rides a bike. He agrees with me on everything except for the one time I was for Hilary and he was for Barack. He once said he thought I was intimidatingly smart. He’s fun to have sex with. But those are just things really, and a person is more than muscles and politics and sex and compliments. A dad is, anyway.

When we rode back over the bridge, it was getting dark, and I didn’t have any lights. I said, “This is getting dangerous,” and he looked at me seriously, dramatically, and said, “You have no idea.”

Then I realized that the problem wasn’t his girlfriend or our history. The problem wasn’t that he was unavailable to me. The problem was that I didn’t think that what we were doing was dangerous. Not emotionally, not physically, not to my existence. Even pregnant with his hypothetical child, I was completely removed from him. He was putting what felt like his whole life on the line for one bike ride, a few hours of time with me, and I had never risked anything for him. Not once. He looked so serious, skidding on the bridge, through the dark pounding rain, and for a second, I knew he really would do it, throw everything away with that other girl and his plans for law school and the respect of his family and his friends, if I had ever said, “I love you. Be with me.”

The rain dripped down my face, and below us the San Francisco Bay boiled, and I remembered being in love. I remembered screaming, crying, when the person I loved was leaving me. “You are killing me from your life by leaving!” I yelled. “Why are you killing me? Why do you hate me so much to kill me from your life?”

When you love someone and they leave you, you scream. You barricade the door. You cut off your hair and stop eating. You smoke all the cigarettes. The boy on the Golden Gate Bridge had left me various times. Always, I was just sort of relieved.

by Lizzy Acker, The Rumpus |  Read more:

Image: Lara Odell

Viviane Sassen, Foreplay
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Death Knocks

(The play takes place in the bedroom of the Nat Ackermans' two-
story house, somewhere in Kew Gardens. The carpeting is wall-to-
wall. There is a big double bed and a large vanity. The room is 
elaborately furnished and curtained, and on the walls there are 
several paintings and a not really attractive barometer. Soft theme 
music as the curtain rises. Nat Ackerman, a bald, paunchy fifty-
seven-year-old dress manufacturer is lying on the bed finishing off 
tomorrow's Daily News. He wears a bathrobe and slippers, and 
reads by a bed light clipped to the white headboard of the bed. The 
time is near midnight. Suddenly we hear a noise, and Nat sits up 
and looks at the window.)

Nat: What the hell is that?
(Climbing awkwardly through the window is a sombre, caped 
figure. The intruder wears a black hood and skintight black clothes. 
The hood covers his head but not his face, which is middle-aged and 
stark white. He is something like Nat in appearance. He huffs 
audibly and then trips over the windowsill and falls into the room.)
Death (for it is no one else): Jesus Christ. I nearly broke my neck.
Nat (watching with bewilderment): Who are you?
Death: Death.
Nat: Who?
Death: Death. Listen—can I sit down? I nearly broke my neck. I'm 
shaking like a leaf.
Nat: Who are you?
Death: Death. You got a glass of water?
Nat: Death? What do you mean, Death?
Death: What is wrong with you? You see the black costume and 
the whitened face?
Nat: Yeah.
Death: Is it Halloween?
Nat: No.
Death: Then I'm Death. Now can I get a glass of water—or a 
Fresca?
Nat: If this is some joke —
Death: What kind of joke? You're fifty-seven? Nat Ackerman? One 
eighteen Pacific Street? Unless I blew it —where's that call sheet? (He 
jumbles through pocket, finally producing a card with an address on 
it. It seems to check.)
Nat: What do you want with me?
Death: What do I want? What do you think I want?
Nat: You must be kidding. I'm in perfect health.
Death (unimpressed): Uh-huh. (Looking around) This is a nice 
place. You do it yourself?
Nat: We had a decorator, but we worked with her.
Death (looking at picture on the wall): I love those kids with the 
big eyes.
Nat: I don't want to go yet.
Death: You don't want to go? Please don't start in. As it is, I'm 
nauseous from the climb.
Nat: What climb?
Death: I climbed up the drainpipe. I was trying to make a 
dramatic entrance. I see the big windows and you're awake reading. I 
figure it's worth a shot. I'll climb up and enter with a little—you know 
. . . (Snaps fingers)
Meanwhile, I get my heel caught on some vines, the drainpipe 
breaks, and I'm hanging by a thread. Then my cape begins to tear. 
Look, let's just go. It's been a rough night.
Nat: You broke my drainpipe?
Death: Broke. It didn't break. It's a little bent. Didn't you hear 
anything? I slammed into the ground.
Nat: I was reading.
Death: You must have really been engrossed. (Lifting newspaper 
Nat was reading) "NAB COEDS IN POT ORGY." Can I borrow this?
Nat: I'm not finished.
Death: Er—I don't know how to put this to you, pal . . .

Searching for Michelangelo

Michelangelo’s David is a large sculpture. He’s close to 17 feet tall. Since 1873, David has stood on a large pedestal at the Accademia Gallery in Florence. The pedestal makes him seem even taller than his 17 feet. It is strange, really, that David should be so tall. As everybody knows, Goliath was the giant, not David. David was more or less a little guy. He was a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance, as the Book of Samuel tells us. David manages to kill the giant Philistine warrior Goliath by hitting him in the head with a stone. Then David takes the giant’s sword and chops his head off. Saul, king of the Jews at the time, wonders, “Who is this kid?” That’s the biblical story of David and Goliath.

Michelangelo chose to make David — the giant-killer — into a giant himself. Mostly this has to do with accidents of history and dumb luck. There was a huge piece of marble lying around Florence in the 15th century. A couple of sculptors had tried to make a statue of it. But the block was tricky to work with, so tall and thin. No artist was yet up to the task. In 1501, Michelangelo, 26 years old at the time, said he could do the job. He promised to bring David out of the marble.

David was a special figure for Florentines. This was Italy during the Renaissance: a collection of city-states and principalities usually at war with one another. This was a time of warrior popes and family feuds that killed hundreds. The people of Florence wanted to see themselves in David. Florence was the little city that could stand up to all the others. Plus, Florence had the powerful banking family, the Medici, to deal with. The Medici were always threatening to dominate Florence, economically and politically. In the late 15th century, the city kicked the Medici out of Florence. Defying the Medici was another David-like act. Problem was, the Medici had already commissioned a sculpture of David. That’s the famous statue by Donatello. With the ousting of the Medici, the people of Florence wanted to commission their own David. They wanted to take back the symbol for themselves.

So, Michelangelo solved two problems at once. He solved the technical problem of making a giant sculpture out of a giant block of marble. And he solved the problem of political symbols by creating a statue so overwhelming to behold that David would forever be associated with the Republic of Florence. The irony is that Michelangelo had learned to sculpt under the patronage of the Medici family, but his most famous work was a repudiation of their claims over the city.

Spectacular as David’s body is in Michelangelo’s sculpture, I think you have to see the body as basically a pillar. Because the block of marble that Michelangelo was working with was tall and thin, Michelangelo had to make a tall, thin David. Michelangelo did his best to make the figure supple, tense with motion. He gave David’s hip a little twist and had him stand in a classic contrapposto, the majority of his weight on the right leg. But in the end, David’s body conveys a tremendous sense of pillar-like verticality. The pillar of David’s body holds up an enormous head. David’s body is very much for his head. You don’t notice this so much if you look at the sculpture straight on. Standing right in front of his torso, David’s head is turned to the left and his facial features look almost benign. But if you move to the side and look at David from his left, the face really comes alive. David is fierce, even slightly crazed.

David looks out, presumably at the approaching Goliath. His body is loose, but ready to move. He sees what he has to do. In a few minutes, it will all be over. If only life were this easy all the time. A clear task. A young body at the command of a brave heart. Matter and spirit united in decisive action. That is the way heroes must feel.

Florence felt that way about itself in the early 16th century. Michelangelo felt that way about himself in the early 16th century. The man and the city held themselves in high regard. (...)

A few years after Michelangelo finished David, the Medici found their way back to power in Florence. Michelangelo had designed the fortifications that were meant to keep Florence safe from the Medici and whatever army they raised to come back. But the Medici were too rich, too powerful. They came back. Michelangelo moved to Rome. He was working with the Popes, who were in cahoots with the Medici. Despite his allegiance to Florence, Michelangelo was constantly engaged in projects meant to glorify the Medici name, like the famous Medici Chapel. Michelangelo was implicated in all of it; the dirty politics, the money, the bullshit, the beauty. A slave to the Popes. A slave to the Medici. A slave to his own genius.

by Morgan Meis, The Smart Set | Read more:
Image:Michelangelo's David

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The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder

After more than 50 years leading the fight to legitimize attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Keith Conners could be celebrating.

Severely hyperactive and impulsive children, once shunned as bad seeds, are now recognized as having a real neurological problem. Doctors and parents have largely accepted drugs like Adderall and Concerta to temper the traits of classic A.D.H.D., helping youngsters succeed in school and beyond.

But Dr. Conners did not feel triumphant this fall as he addressed a group of fellow A.D.H.D. specialists in Washington. He noted that recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the diagnosis had been made in 15 percent of high school-age children, and that the number of children on medication for the disorder had soared to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990. He questioned the rising rates of diagnosis and called them “a national disaster of dangerous proportions.”

“The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,” Dr. Conners, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, said in a subsequent interview. “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”

The rise of A.D.H.D. diagnoses and prescriptions for stimulants over the years coincided with a remarkably successful two-decade campaign by pharmaceutical companies to publicize the syndrome and promote the pills to doctors, educators and parents. With the children’s market booming, the industry is now employing similar marketing techniques as it focuses on adult A.D.H.D., which could become even more profitable.

Few dispute that classic A.D.H.D., historically estimated to affect 5 percent of children, is a legitimate disability that impedes success at school, work and personal life. Medication often assuages the severe impulsiveness and inability to concentrate, allowing a person’s underlying drive and intelligence to emerge.

But even some of the field’s longtime advocates say the zeal to find and treat every A.D.H.D. child has led to too many people with scant symptoms receiving the diagnosis and medication. The disorder is now the second most frequent long-term diagnosis made in children, narrowly trailing asthma, according to a New York Times analysis of C.D.C. data.

Behind that growth has been drug company marketing that has stretched the image of classic A.D.H.D. to include relatively normal behavior like carelessness and impatience, and has often overstated the pills’ benefits. Advertising on television and in popular magazines like People and Good Housekeeping has cast common childhood forgetfulness and poor grades as grounds for medication that, among other benefits, can result in “schoolwork that matches his intelligence” and ease family tension.

A 2002 ad for Adderall showed a mother playing with her son and saying, “Thanks for taking out the garbage.”

The Food and Drug Administration has cited every major A.D.H.D. drug — stimulants like Adderall, Concerta, Focalin and Vyvanse, and nonstimulants like Intuniv and Strattera — for false and misleading advertising since 2000, some multiple times.

Sources of information that would seem neutral also delivered messages from the pharmaceutical industry. Doctors paid by drug companies have published research and delivered presentations that encourage physicians to make diagnoses more often that discredit growing concerns about overdiagnosis.

Many doctors have portrayed the medications as benign — “safer than aspirin,” some say — even though they can have significant side effects and are regulated in the same class as morphine and oxycodone because of their potential for abuse and addiction. Patient advocacy groups tried to get the government to loosen regulation of stimulants while having sizable portions of their operating budgets covered by pharmaceutical interests.

What makes A.D.H.D. ads so effective? Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a Harvard professor, analyzes several ads and discusses how many of them play on parents’ common fears about their children.

Companies even try to speak to youngsters directly. Shire — the longtime market leader, with several A.D.H.D. medications including Adderall — recently subsidized 50,000 copies of a comic book that tries to demystify the disorder and uses superheroes to tell children, “Medicines may make it easier to pay attention and control your behavior!”

Profits for the A.D.H.D. drug industry have soared. Sales of stimulant medication in 2012 were nearly $9 billion, more than five times the $1.7 billion a decade before, according to the data company IMS Health.

Even Roger Griggs, the pharmaceutical executive who introduced Adderall in 1994, said he strongly opposes marketing stimulants to the general public because of their dangers. He calls them “nuclear bombs,” warranted only under extreme circumstances and when carefully overseen by a physician.

by Alan Schwarz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: IMS Health

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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