A Word of Advice ... on Advice

A few weeks ago, a neighbor I like very much came over for coffee. While inspecting the vast record and compact disc collection that takes up a large part of my living room, he suggested that I load all my CDs onto a server to clear away the clutter. He also said that I should convert my LPs to MP3 files and get wireless speakers installed in every room. I said thanks, those are really great suggestions. But I am never going to do any of this stuff.

My wife is always telling me that yoga will help relieve the pain in my lower back. She is almost certainly right. Yoga would probably be an immense help to my aching lower back. But I am never going to a yoga class.

People say that a man my age should be looking into annuities. Down the road, I won't want to deal with the stock market's volatility. They're probably on to something there. A steady stream of income would make a lot more sense than a portfolio filled with volatile equities. But I am never going to purchase an annuity.

Prompted by the unsolicited comments about my record collection, I got to thinking about the last time I had taken anyone's advice about anything. I couldn't remember. It was certainly far in the past. Maybe when I was a kid hitchhiking at night and a trucker told me to stop accepting rides. At night. From truckers.

Mostly, I could only remember advice I had ignored. Don't give up a great job. Don't give up another great job. Stop giving up great jobs, period. And don't write for right-wing publications; you'll be slitting your own throat. I did not take any of this advice. The very nature of advice makes me avoid it.

Alan Goldberg, a Philadelphia-based psychologist who plays guitar in the rock 'n' roll band we recently disinterred after 43 years of well-advised inactivity, puts it this way: "When somebody says, 'You should do something,' the subtext is: 'You're an idiot for not already doing it.' Nobody takes advice under those conditions."

Many people would rather be thought of as an idiot than do something they don't want to do. If someone suggests getting a high-paying job with Morgan Stanley when what you really want to do is to organize a peasant's revolt in the Yucatán, their advice, though judicious, is useless. Success on anyone's terms other than your own is failure.

The U.S. is addicted to advice. Americans honestly believe that someone out there knows how to fix all our problems. Maybe Oprah. Maybe Dr. Phil. Maybe Barack Obama. Maybe Ayn Rand. Newspapers, magazines and television are filled with advice about health, finances, raising children, dieting. Don't smoke. Don't text on I-95. Don't allow your teenage son Vlad to disappear into his bedroom for the next decade. Exercise 30 minutes a day. Never buy stocks from men wearing ostrich-skin shoes.

Why, then, are so many of us miserable, bankrupt, overweight chain smokers with horrible, illiterate kids? The advice was out there.

A major part of the Internet's appeal is the immediate availability of useful advice on virtually any topic. (Well, that and the free porn.) If people have the right information in their hands, the Web's early evangelists proclaimed, they will make the right decisions. Things haven't worked out the way they hoped. People still smoke. People still text while driving. People still vote Republican.

by Joe Queenan, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Actually, wi-fi or no wi-fi, that's really the question.]

Maxime Ballesteros
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Diary of a 24-Hour Dive Bar

It’s 10 a.m., and Spider is sweeping cigarette butts from the floor with all the finesse of a waiter cleaning up crumbs between courses at Le Veau d’Or. A scruffy, waiflike man who bears a startling resemblances to the broom with which he’s sweeping, Spider hollers through the empty bar, spittle flying in the morning light, “They just throw ‘em on the floor—don’t care a thing for ‘ol Spider! No damn respect.”

The mid-morning sun is cracking through the front window of Brothers III, where I’m anchored at the bar spinning one of the perfectly clean ashtrays with my index finger. In a world so saturated with craft cocktails and drowning in mixologists, the dive bar has become, perhaps, the last true rara avis. While I’ve spent many a long, rowdy night at Brothers III, I wondered: what does a dive bar like this look like when the sun’s rising? What does it look like at high noon? With those questions, my journey to capture the 24-hour life cycle of a bar began in earnest.

Located in New Orleans on a stretch of Magazine Street between a recently-opened juice cleanse bar and the future home of a hoity-toity taco shack, Brothers III is a living, breathing relic. The diminutive building—which is the color of a French’s mustard bottle and decorated year-round with multi-colored Christmas lights—is cavernous, with sunken ceilings that can be easily reached by those with average wingspans.

In its 47 years of existence, Brothers III has become the Swiss Army Knife of bars, providing all the tools one might need to survive a night. Would you like to spend some alone time thumbing through a battered Tom Clancy novel? A small, dusty library is positioned by the bar entrance. Looking to hustle a game of pool for some quick cash? Saunter to the back and rack up the balls. Someone giving you trouble? J.L.—a silver-bearded, self-proclaimed “enforcer”—will toss them out before a brawl ensues. (...)

Brothers III is a place where things come in curious numbers. There are two jukeboxes, three video poker machines and, most peculiar of all: four cash registers. For over 40 years, Johnny has given each of the four bartenders his own cash register to ensure no one competes for tips. Lined up in a row on the bar, they are covered with knitted tea cozy-style covers when not in use.

“You can’t be a C+ student in math and bartend here,” says Charlie, the evening bartender who could easily win a Mike Ditka lookalike contest. “Otherwise, it ain’t coming out of anyone else’s pocket.”

The bar is bustling now as the clock strikes 9:00 p.m., with younger couples and gaggles of girls making their way in for cheap after-dinner drinks. A man in penny loafers and athletic socks perches at the bar swirling a brandy. The regulars, huddled together around Charlie, are loudly referring to themselves as “The Think Tank” and discussing the merits of the short-lived 1980s late-night program, The Alan Thicke Show.

I feel a second wind.

The pool table is finally being used by three 20-something boys—regulars who come every Friday night and are well liked enough to have their own designated red Solo cups. Their affection for Brothers III is palpable, as they tell tales of packed Mardi Gras nights, Sunday morning bacon and egg breakfasts cooked by Charlie, and the time a guy stuck his hand in a crock pot full of hot dogs.

“He just scalded the hell out of himself,” says Adam, slightly balding and the clear leader of the pack. “The hot dogs all fell to the ground. No one was really concerned about him, they just picked up the hot dogs and put them on some buns. That’s how we kind of do it around here.”

As if on cue, a woman behind us falls over backwards out of her stool, landing with a thud. No one bats an eye.

by Sarah Baird, Punch |  Read more:

Image: Sarah Baird

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Walter Becker

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The Next Pandemic Could be Downloaded from the Internet

Last October, scientists in California sequenced the DNA for the “type H” botulinum toxin. One gram of this toxin would be sufficient to kill half a billion people, making it the deadliest substance yet discovered – with no antidote. The DNA sequence was not placed on public databases, marking the first time genetic code has been withheld from the public over security concerns.

As biological discoveries accelerate, we may need to censor even more genetic data. The line between digital data and our physical world is not as clear cut as it once was, with the advent of 3D printing technologies and DNA synthesisers. Many people are familiar with the first printed gun, cited heavily by the media as a dangerous development. But many would probably be surprised to learn that analogous technology is used to print pathogens. For example, the polio virus was successfully recreated in 2002, and the 1918 flu virus was resurrected by a DNA synthesiser in 2005.

Pandora’s box 2.0

The machines that make this resurrection possible serve many legitimate research purposes. Instead of painstakingly manipulating DNA in a local lab, scientists can get made-to-order sequences from a variety of DNA synthesis companies from around the world. Alternatively, if they have some extra cash and desk space, they could get one of the machines right here on Ebay. Access to such a machine gives scientists a critical edge in many areas of genomics research.

But the increasing accessibility to this technology raises concerns about the “dual-use” nature of it as an unprecedented weapon. President Obama was worried enough to commission a report on the safety of synthetic biology, while volunteers have created software to detect malicious DNA sequences before an unsuspecting company prints them out.

by Andrew Snyder-Beattie, The Conversation |  Read more:

Image: Abode of Chaos

‘Aid in Dying’ Movement Takes Hold in Some States

[ed. I'm convinced this is a cultural/legal/moral challenge we absolutely have to overcome.]  

Helping the terminally ill end their lives, condemned for decades as immoral, is gaining traction. Banned everywhere but Oregon until 2008, it is now legal in five states. Its advocates, who have learned to shun the term “assisted suicide,” believe that as baby boomers watch frail parents suffer, support for what they call the “aid in dying” movement will grow further.

In January, a district court in New Mexico authorized doctors to provide lethal prescriptions and declared a constitutional right for “a competent, terminally ill patient to choose aid in dying.” Last May, the Vermont Legislature passed a law permitting it, joining Montana, Oregon and Washington. This spring, advocates are strongly promoting “death with dignity” bills in Connecticut and other states.

Public support for assisted dying has grown in the past half-century but depends in part on terminology. In a Gallup Poll conducted in May, for example, 70 percent of respondents agreed that when patients and their families wanted it, doctors should be allowed to “end the patient’s life by some painless means.” In 1948, that share was 37 percent, and it rose steadily for four decades but has remained roughly stable since the mid-1990s.

Yet in the same 2013 poll, only 51 percent supported allowing doctors to help a dying patient “commit suicide.”

About 3,000 patients a year, from every state, contact the advocacy group Compassion & Choices for advice on legal ways to reduce end-of-life suffering and perhaps hasten their deaths.

Giving a fading patient the opportunity for a peaceful and dignified death is not suicide, the group says, which it defines as an act by people with severe depression or other mental problems.

But overt assistance to bring on death, by whatever name, remains illegal in most of the country. And so for Robert Mitton of Denver, 58 and with a failing heart, the news from New Mexico last month was bittersweet.

“I am facing my imminent death,” he said, asking why people in Montana and New Mexico “are able to die with dignity and I am not.”

“This should be a basic human right.”

by Erik Eckholm, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Matthew Staver

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Humans of New York

"I wanted to be in the FBI, but then I found out that first you have to be a police officer for four years. And I don’t think I want to do that."
"Why not?"
"I’m literally five feet tall. If I tried to arrest someone, they’d think they were being pranked."

"I told her that if she wanted to start over, to meet where we first kissed. She was supposed to be here 15 minutes ago."

"You want to hear what just happened to me? I was in the subway station, and this man came walking by me. He seemed really angry and was talking gibberish and screaming about how he was going to kill anyone who talked to him. So I thought: ‘That guy’s crazy, I’m gonna keep away from him.’ Then two minutes later, another young man walked by and collapsed right in front of me, and started having a seizure. I bent down to help him, and you know what happened? The crazy guy bent down and said: ‘He’s having a seizure! Turn him on his side!’

I thought: ‘Wait a second! Weren’t you just crazy?’”

From the Series: Humans of New York

Jake Shimabukuro

[ed. Back in the day, 143 used to mean (code for) I love you.]

Moon at White Sands by snowpeak on Flickr.
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Over the Top

[ed. I wonder where everybody parked?]

Every sports market deserves one. None of them will do it like Seattle did Wednesday.

So cold that seals shivered. So warm that cops cried. So compelling that Pete Carroll, king of the run-on sentence, was nearly at a loss.

“There’s not enough words to describe the emotion, the exchange,” he said. But true to his mantra, “always compete,” he tried.

“The consistency of the intensity of the fans along the route was amazing,” he said, talking to reporters after a final ceremony on the home field. “The frustrating part was not being able to touch everyone and feel the gratitude we have . . . I can’t imagine one better than than that (celebration) — that was over the top.”

Over the top. Police estimated 700,000, Seahawks owner Paul Allen said nearly a million. But measurement was not about quantity. It was about quality. From babies to oldies, happiness raged.

“The thing that struck me was the little kids,” Carroll said. “Some were screaming and hollering, some were a little intimidated. But they had this moment, and will remember this connection with their parents.”

People who witnessed as youngsters a similar Seattle parade in 1979 will tell you where they stood, which Sonics they saw, how the air smelled and how they met their spouse that day. For a new generation, the same things happened Wednesday.

The sensory richness when thousands share a common delight at the same moment is not to be forgotten. In 2064, a guy will tell a story to his grandkids about how when he was a little boy, Brandon Mebane smiled at him. Another will describe how his cheeks felt when Marshawn Lynch hit them with Skittles. A woman will giggle telling about the time she and Richard Sherman made eye contact, and he winked at the little girl.

They all will remember, man, was it cold. Some lasted hours in it, a living, pulsing REI catalog flowing through downtown. It just enhanced the adventure.

The processional was late, slow and a shocker for players and fans alike. Neither was quite ready for the other. Some fans came from Alaska, others from Canada, Montana, Idaho, Oregon. There was the guy who walked from Bellevue over the I-90 bridge. Some slept in tents on Fourth Avenue concrete.

The crowd was a lot like the Seahawks roster — from many places. Only WR Jermaine Kearse is homegrown, from Tacoma’s Lakes High School and the University of Washington. Can we have a 253 amen for the brother who broke five tackles on the way to a Super Bowl touchdown?

The Seahawks have the biggest geographic monopoly in the NFL, which helped cause every single downtown hotel room to be sold Tuesday night. Lots of people in the region, in the soon-to-be-immortal words of Lynch, are all ’bout that action.

That’s why what the Seahawks have done has value beyond a sports trophy. Seattle is drawing thousands of technology workers from around the country and the world. Did you hear that Microsoft’s new CEO is from India?

There are so many new people here who came for the jobs and have only minimal social connections. Seahawks success provides a universal touchstone for people who need to talk about something besides the next app — even if they don’t exactly know that’s why they care about Golden Tate’s yards after catch.

Same with the Sounders. The international appeal of soccer directly connects to the thousands of tech workers whose ethnic heritages reserve a prominent place for futbol. Think about it: The Seahawks and Sounders lead their sports in ravenous consumption by home fans. It’s not the coffee.

But that explains only a part of Wednesday’s roaring conflagration of passion. The biggest part is the long-timers here who have endured 35 years of drift between heartbreak and squat.

by Art Thiel, SportspressNW |  Read more:

Image: Seahawks.com

Coby Whitmore, “The Eternal Blossom” S.E. Post, 1961
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Does a More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex?

[ed. Lots of relationship advice these days. See also: Romance at Arm's Length.]

Not long ago, I was at a dinner party with several couples in their 40s, all married except for my boyfriend and me. The mood was jovial until, over dessert, one guest made an offhand joke about Internet porn.

His wife took issue, and during a tense back-and-forth between them, the rest of us sensed that we were about to learn way too much about their personal lives. Fortunately, another husband deftly maneuvered to a safe topic for middle-aged parents (kids and screen time!), and after a lively discussion about iPads, we made our excuses to leave.

In the car, I turned to my boyfriend and said, “I bet there won’t be any sex happening in their bedroom tonight.”

He smiled and shook his head. He predicted that the hosts would be the least likely to have sex that night.

I thought he was kidding. This couple were my “model marrieds,” true equals who share the housework and child care, communicate openly and prioritize each other’s careers. The best friends of happy-couple cliché. Earlier in the evening, I watched them work together in the kitchen, cheerfully cooking and cleaning: She bringing out the hors d’oeuvres, and he chopping and dicing. When their 6-year-old woke up with a nightmare, they wordlessly agreed that he would be the one to soothe her. It was the kind of marriage many people wish for.

“Exactly,” my boyfriend said. “Least likely.”

Marriage is hardly known for being an aphrodisiac, of course, but my boyfriend was referring to a particularly modern state of marital affairs. Today, according to census data, in 64 percent of U.S. marriages with children under 18, both husband and wife work. There’s more gender-fluidity when it comes to who brings in the money, who does the laundry and dishes, who drives the car pool and braids the kids’ hair, even who owns the home. A vast majority of adults under 30 in this country say that this is a good thing, according to a Pew Research Center survey: They aspire to what’s known in the social sciences as an egalitarian marriage, meaning that both spouses work and take care of the house and that the relationship is built on equal power, shared interests and friendship. But the very qualities that lead to greater emotional satisfaction in peer marriages, as one sociologist calls them, may be having an unexpectedly negative impact on these couples’ sex lives.

A study called “Egalitarianism, Housework and Sexual Frequency in Marriage,” which appeared in The American Sociological Review last year, surprised many, precisely because it went against the logical assumption that as marriages improve by becoming more equal, the sex in these marriages will improve, too. Instead, it found that when men did certain kinds of chores around the house, couples had less sex. Specifically, if men did all of what the researchers characterized as feminine chores like folding laundry, cooking or vacuuming — the kinds of things many women say they want their husbands to do — then couples had sex 1.5 fewer times per month than those with husbands who did what were considered masculine chores, like taking out the trash or fixing the car. It wasn’t just the frequency that was affected, either — at least for the wives. The more traditional the division of labor, meaning the greater the husband’s share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones, the greater his wife’s reported sexual satisfaction.

by Lori Gottlieb, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Craig Cutler

Mel Karch
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In the sense that the part represents the whole I am interested in society at large. . . The most consistent conclusion I have drawn in my travels is that no one really knows what’s going on –it is apathy and self-­‐preservation, which define the sociopolitical aspects of the cities and their societies. Subjectivity becomes a comforting trap. It obsessively focuses on the self as a standard for an exterior reality, which exists only in the mind. Psychology is reality for many people. I try to show this. It may not, in fact, be the actual psychology of the subject that I portray, but it is played out in the image and the projection of that psychology into the surrounding space. The street does not induce people to shed their self-­awareness. They seem to withdraw into themselves. They become less aware of their surroundings, seemingly lost within themselves. Their image is the outward facing front belied by the inwardly gazing eyes.

New York, 1994 by Philip-Lorca diCorcia
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Stop Beating a Dead Fox

There ain’t no sanity clause,” Chico Marx told Groucho. There is also no Santa Claus. And there was no sanity in the Santa fracas that became an embarrassing liberal-media fixation just before Christmas. For those who missed it, what happened was this: A Fox News anchor, Megyn Kelly, came upon a tongue-in-cheek blog post at Slate in which a black writer, Aisha Harris, proposed that Santa be recast as a penguin for the sake of racial inclusiveness. After tossing this scrap of red meat to her all-white panel of prime-time guests, Kelly reassured any “kids watching” (this was nearing 10 p.m.) that “Santa just is white.” (For good measure, she added, “Jesus was a white man, too.”) Soon and sure enough, Kelly’s sound bites were being masticated in op-ed pieces, online, and especially on cable, where a passing wisecrack best left to the satirical stylings of Stewart and Colbert became a call to arms. At CNN, one anchor brought on Santas of four races to debunk Kelly. BuzzFeed reported that MSNBC ­programs hopped on the story fourteen times in a single week.

Of course what Kelly said was dumb. But the reaction was even dumber. Every year, Fox News whips up some phantom “war on Christmas” plotted by what the network’s blowhard-in-chief Bill O’Reilly calls “secular progressives.” This seasonal stunt has long been old news, yet many in the liberal media still can’t resist the bait. You had to feel for the NBC News White House correspondent Kristen Welker, who was drafted into filing a Kelly-Santa story on the Today show for no ­discernible reason other than that she is not white.

When this supposed “national firestorm” (as Al Sharpton inflated it on his MSNBC show) finally died down, only two things had been accomplished beyond the waste of everyone’s time. Liberals had played right into Fox’s stereotype of them—as killjoy p.c. police. And Fox News could once again brag about its power to set an agenda for its adversaries even as it also played the woebegone ­victim. “Because they can’t defeat us on the media battlefield, the far left seeks to demonize Fox News as a right-wing propaganda machine and a racist enterprise,” said O’Reilly when sermonizing about the episode on his show. “That’s why Miss Megyn got headlines about a Santa Claus remark that was totally harmless.” Fox News is a right-wing propaganda machine and at times (if not this one) a racist enterprise (witness, among other examples, its fruitless effort to drum up a “New Black Panther Party” scandal over some 95 segments in the summer of 2010). But O’Reilly was half-right. Kelly’s inane remark was harmless and unworthy of headlines. Without the left’s overreaction, there wouldn’t have been any pseudo “national firestorm.”

Still, O’Reilly’s summation was predicated on an erroneous underlying assumption that few bother to question: In truth, Fox News has been defeated on the media battlefield—and on the political battlefield as well. Even the 73-year-old wizard of Fox, Roger Ailes, now in full Lear-raging-on-the-heath mode as ­portrayed in my colleague Gabriel ­Sherman’s definitive new biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room, seems to sense the waning of his power. The only people who seem not to know or accept Fox’s decline, besides its own audience, are ­liberals, including Barack Obama, whose White House mounted a short-lived, pointless freeze-out of Fox News in 2009, and who convinced himself that the network has shaved five points off his approval rating.

Ailes would like the president and everyone else to keep believing he has that clout. But these days Fox News is the loudest voice in the room only in the sense that a bawling baby is the loudest voice in the room. In being so easily bullied by Fox’s childish provocations, the left gives the network the attention on which it thrives and hands it power that it otherwise has lost. As the post-Obama era approaches, the energy spent combating Ailes might be better devoted to real political battles against more powerful adversaries—not to mention questioning the ideological slant of legitimate news operations like, say, 60 Minutes, which has recently given airtime to a fraudulent account of the murders at Benghazi and to a credulous puff piece on the NSA’s domestic surveillance.

The most interesting news about Fox News is that for some years now it has been damaging the right far more than the left. As a pair of political analysts wrote at Reuters last year, “When the mainstream media reigned supreme, between 1952 and 1988, Republicans won seven out of the ten presidential elections,” but since 1992, when “conservative media began to flourish” (first with Rush Limbaugh’s ascendancy, then with Fox), Democrats have won the popular vote five out of six times. You’d think they’d be well advised to leave Fox News to its own devices so that it can continue to shoot its own party in the foot.

by Frank Rich, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Getty