Tuesday, March 11, 2014
As Long As They Both Shall Live
Two days from now and 10,000 feet above the Southern California desert, Rex Pemberton will don a wingsuit, leap from a plane, and race toward the earth trailing orange smoke from canisters strapped to his ankles while Melissa Pemberton, one of the world’s best aerobatics pilots, paints a white smoky corkscrew around her husband—two minutes of barnstorming showmanship for thousands of gaping spectators spread out below them.
But first, a moment of marital tension. A screw has worked itself loose, a tiny screw, stainless steel, five millimeters long, one of four securing a sheet of aircraft aluminum across the front left side of the engine. Rex notices the hole, a flaw in his wife’s exquisite plane, as they push it out of the hangar at Pine Mountain Lake Airport, a few hundred yards from their home in the hills outside Yosemite National Park. He taps his finger against the loose corner, and he worries. Engine vibrations have started a hairline crack in the metal. Melissa says she’ll have her mechanics replace the screw at an airport that’s a 15-minute flight away. But he retrieves a screwdriver and tiny screw from the hangar while she watches him, slightly exasperated.
In their garage, Rex often works on his powered paraglider, with its 30-horsepower engine that propels him over these valleys, forests, and mountain lakes at 40 miles per hour. But the $350,000 plane, a sparkling metallic blue Zivko Edge 540, with black flames edged in pink, has much smaller tolerances. “Rex, this isn’t your paraglider,” she says, her soft voice calm but her words coming faster now, betraying her annoyance. “I need you to listen to me when we’re talking about my plane.”
But he’s not really listening. He knows that if the piece breaks on her brief flight, there’s a chance she won’t be able to adjust the prop and may not be able to land. And he knows the odds. In his five years with Melissa, she has lost four close friends and six acquaintances. This season has been a particularly bad one on the air-show circuit. Five performers have died from crashes already, some of them in front of huge crowds, the worst when a modified P-51 Mustang slammed into the audience at the Reno Air Races in September, killing the pilot and eight spectators and injuring 69. Aerobatics are unforgiving. The forces exerted on Melissa’s plane can bend even the thick bolts that hold the engine in place, and a moment of disorientation, a major gust of wind, or a slight overcorrection at the controls can be fatal.
Rex can’t change any of that, but here at least he has the illusion of control. “Just let me see,” he insists, and spins the screw into the engine. “See? It’s the same screw. The exact same screw.”
Melissa relents and climbs into her plane. The prop turns, stutters, and catches, and the engine settles into a deep, throaty rumble. She revs the throttle and roars down the runway, and Rex watches his wife climb into the morning sky.
Every marriage has its unspoken rules, an understanding of needs and desires, and the Pembertons’ is no different, though the stakes are slightly higher.
“I would never tell her to stop because of any fear that she’ll have an accident,” says Rex, 28. “We need to keep each other in check and make sure we’re doing these risky things in the safest way possible but not tell the other to stop, because those are our core values.”
Melissa, 27, agrees. Her husband has made more than 1,300 skydives and 300 BASE jumps. At age 21, he became the youngest Australian to climb Everest, and he recently set his sights on Pakistan’s K2, an objective that had Melissa concerned, though for reasons that had little to do with the technical route to the summit. “It’s one thing to worry about a mountain, but I don’t want him to get kidnapped or blown up,” she says. Still, these are concerns, not ultimatums. “I would never tell him outright, ‘No,’ ” she says. “If he wants to do something, that’s up to him.” Because that’s where they found each other—riding the edge of excess—and why they fell in love in the first place.
by Brian Mockenhaupt, Outside | Read more:
Image: Cody Pickens
[ed. Repost: Thursday, March 01, 2012 ]
Holding Algorithms Accountable
Chase kicks off the panel with an observation he’s made over years of working in data science. “When you’re talking about algorithms used for decision making and predictive modeling, models you build, by definition, have to be imperfect.” He says these models aren’t trying to catch all these edge cases, but to capture the “general gist of the data you’re working with.” If you focus too much on edge cases, it leads to overfitting, which can reduce the value of the model as the whole.
“When you consider the models that people are using are imperfect and they’re becoming increasingly important,” Chase says. “Journalists have an important role in exposing those models and holding them accountable.”
Now, we meet the panelists: first up is Jeremy, who worked on a project for the Wall Street Journal on online pricing algorithms used by Staples and other online vendors. Next is Nicholas, who has been researching how algorithms might be discriminatory, what kind of mistakes they can make, etc — essentially, “algorithms as sources of power.” Frank, who teaches at the Maryland Law School, is interested in helping journalists understand the legal aspects of data and “how the law can be changed to allow more of this work [data journalism] to be done.”
Chase says maybe algorithms aren’t completely to blame. From a reporting perspective, there’s a split responsibility between the algorithm and the institution that chooses to trust the algorithm. He asks the panel: should we focus more on exposing the algorithmic layer or the institutional layer?
Frank brings up an example of S&P failing to update their data set promptly — most of the reporting was focused on the failure of the algorithm. Nicholas throws out a bunch of questions reporters should ask about algorithms. “How are they making mistakes? Who do those mistakes affect? Who are the stakeholders? How might algorithms be censoring or discriminatory?” This covers a wide swath of reporting, from the most abstract features of algorithms down to the nitty gritty.
“If you’re going to talk about responsibility — and it’s tricky — it’s all about the human level,” says Jeremy.
Nicholas adds a corollary to the correlation doesn’t equal causation argument. “Correlation doesn’t equal intent. Just because there’s a correlation, doesn’t mean a designer sat down and intended for that to happen.” He noted that the predictive models used by the Chicago Police could show a correlation with race, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect the intent of the analysts. He says journalists have to be careful in claiming there’s a specific intent to an observed algorithm. “Really understanding the design process behind algorithms can shed some light into their intents.” (...)
Chase draws an analogy between penetrating the black box of an algorithm and the black box of an institution. How do we navigate these things? Nicholas brings up the trade secret exemptions to FOIA law that ensures to opaqueness of the algorithms the government might use through third-parties. If these technologies are patented, there’s a chance that we can start to understand them, but “at its core, it’s very opaque.” Reporters can start to connect the dots, but “correlation is a weak form of connection.”
Jeremy says that the inability to explain an algorithm may be a story in itself. Frank agrees, bringing up a the example of company personality tests. There’s very little direct relationship between your answers and your productivity as an employee; they’re essentially matching large data sets of what the best employees in the past have said.
“When you consider the models that people are using are imperfect and they’re becoming increasingly important,” Chase says. “Journalists have an important role in exposing those models and holding them accountable.”
Now, we meet the panelists: first up is Jeremy, who worked on a project for the Wall Street Journal on online pricing algorithms used by Staples and other online vendors. Next is Nicholas, who has been researching how algorithms might be discriminatory, what kind of mistakes they can make, etc — essentially, “algorithms as sources of power.” Frank, who teaches at the Maryland Law School, is interested in helping journalists understand the legal aspects of data and “how the law can be changed to allow more of this work [data journalism] to be done.”
Chase says maybe algorithms aren’t completely to blame. From a reporting perspective, there’s a split responsibility between the algorithm and the institution that chooses to trust the algorithm. He asks the panel: should we focus more on exposing the algorithmic layer or the institutional layer?
Frank brings up an example of S&P failing to update their data set promptly — most of the reporting was focused on the failure of the algorithm. Nicholas throws out a bunch of questions reporters should ask about algorithms. “How are they making mistakes? Who do those mistakes affect? Who are the stakeholders? How might algorithms be censoring or discriminatory?” This covers a wide swath of reporting, from the most abstract features of algorithms down to the nitty gritty.
“If you’re going to talk about responsibility — and it’s tricky — it’s all about the human level,” says Jeremy.
Nicholas adds a corollary to the correlation doesn’t equal causation argument. “Correlation doesn’t equal intent. Just because there’s a correlation, doesn’t mean a designer sat down and intended for that to happen.” He noted that the predictive models used by the Chicago Police could show a correlation with race, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect the intent of the analysts. He says journalists have to be careful in claiming there’s a specific intent to an observed algorithm. “Really understanding the design process behind algorithms can shed some light into their intents.” (...)
Chase draws an analogy between penetrating the black box of an algorithm and the black box of an institution. How do we navigate these things? Nicholas brings up the trade secret exemptions to FOIA law that ensures to opaqueness of the algorithms the government might use through third-parties. If these technologies are patented, there’s a chance that we can start to understand them, but “at its core, it’s very opaque.” Reporters can start to connect the dots, but “correlation is a weak form of connection.”
Jeremy says that the inability to explain an algorithm may be a story in itself. Frank agrees, bringing up a the example of company personality tests. There’s very little direct relationship between your answers and your productivity as an employee; they’re essentially matching large data sets of what the best employees in the past have said.
by Stephen Suen, MIT Center for Civic Media | Read more:
Image via:
Ben Hogan Isn’t Walking Out of That Sand Trap
The old scrivener stood above the putting green as if ready to dive into a pool of sensory memory … Whoops. Sorry. We’re not doing that kind of golf writing. Dan Jenkins was at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth the other day. Here’s some stuff he might have sensed. Distant train brakes, screeching. Mantis-like transmission towers, dotting the horizon. A complete lack of non-golf vegetation, thanks to the Texas winter. As Jenkins once wrote, “The scrub oaks looked like twisted wrought iron, and everybody’s front yard had turned the color of a corn tortilla.”
Jenkins is an 84-year-old golf writer of antiromantic disposition. He has a helmet of white hair and a squint that suggests cheerful orneriness. He had begun the afternoon in the Colonial dining room, where the club had put his World Golf Hall of Fame blazer in a glass case.
“Which I wasn’t going to wear anyway,” Jenkins said.
Jenkins walked from the lunchroom to the terrace. He noted Colonial’s exercise room. “Which I’m against,” he said. Jenkins noted the new tennis center. “Tennis doesn’t deserve this,” he said. Then he came to the edge of the terrace, where he could look down onto the putting green.
Jenkins told of an encounter that happened at about this spot in 1949. Before he got famous writing for Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest, before he became the writer Palmer and Nicklaus confided in, Jenkins was a 20-year-old cub reporter at the Fort Worth Press. Down on the putting green, he spotted Ben Hogan — just the greatest golfer in the world. A golfer nine months removed from the car accident that nearly took his life. A golfer with a don’t-screw-with-me stare that could separate Fort Worth’s mounted cops from their horses.
Jenkins steeled his nerves, walked over, and introduced himself. A divine yellow light enveloped Jenkins and Hogan, as if they’d gotten lost in Jack Nicklaus’s hair … whoops. Sorry. We’re not doing that kind of golf writing.
Dan Jenkins didn’t allow that kind of writing. The miracle of Jenkins is that he became the best golf writer ever by disabusing the sport of its literary pretensions. It’s as if Hunter Thompson had become the dean of racing writers. In a new memoir, His Ownself, Jenkins sketches out what we might call his issue positions. For being funny. For picking on golfers who deserve it. Against magical realism. Against turning the Eisenhower Cabin into the Shrine at Compostela. Against Tiger Woods, famously. If Sports Illustrated of the ’60s and ’70s thickened the sportswriter’s thesaurus, Jenkins was the guy insisting his words be precise and potent and unflowery. (...)
Here’s what it was like to watch Dan Jenkins get sweet, delicious revenge. You might remember this. It had been bubbling. When Tiger Woods joined the PGA Tour, in 1996, it wasn’t enough to say he could be the greatest golfer ever. “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity … ” Earl Woods told Sports Illustrated. “He is the Chosen One. He’ll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations.”
Jenkins wasn’t walking into that sand trap. But Woods did pique his interest. Woods had scored a phone call with Ben Hogan before he died in 1997 and soaked up wisdom from the old master. Jenkins saw a potential golf-history nut. In the early 2000s, Golf Digest reached out to Woods’s agent to set up an off-the-record dinner. Like the ones he’d had with Palmer and Hogan.
The answer came back from the Woods camp: “We have nothing to gain.”
Jenkins spent the next decade in what the Brits would call the shadow government. He gave Woods credit for his wins. He once allowed that Woods was a better shotmaker than even Hogan. But he poked at the excesses of Tigermania. In Golf Digest, Jenkins wrote up an imaginary press conference in which Mark O’Meara, who’d barnacled himself to Woods, began his answers with, “Tiger and me were discussing it earlier … ”
In 2001, Jenkins told the magazine, “Only two things can stop Tiger — injury or a bad marriage.” To quote a Fort Worth overheard, he was both right.
In 2010, Woods compared his injury comeback to Hogan’s. “Hogan nearly died,” Jenkins remarked. “All Tiger did was damn near get syphilis.” It wasn’t that Jenkins thought Woods had become evil. That would turn Earl Woods’s hook into a slice. No, Jenkins’s revelation was simpler. “He is a hell of a talent,” Jenkins told me. “He just happens to be an asshole.” To hear Jenkins tell it, the subtle russet peddlers who had turned golf into a religion and given Augusta National cathedral status had also erroneously granted Tiger a soul.
In a column, Jenkins withdrew the dinner invitation. “Now it’s too late,” he wrote. “I’m busy.”
Jenkins is an 84-year-old golf writer of antiromantic disposition. He has a helmet of white hair and a squint that suggests cheerful orneriness. He had begun the afternoon in the Colonial dining room, where the club had put his World Golf Hall of Fame blazer in a glass case.“Which I wasn’t going to wear anyway,” Jenkins said.
Jenkins walked from the lunchroom to the terrace. He noted Colonial’s exercise room. “Which I’m against,” he said. Jenkins noted the new tennis center. “Tennis doesn’t deserve this,” he said. Then he came to the edge of the terrace, where he could look down onto the putting green.
Jenkins told of an encounter that happened at about this spot in 1949. Before he got famous writing for Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest, before he became the writer Palmer and Nicklaus confided in, Jenkins was a 20-year-old cub reporter at the Fort Worth Press. Down on the putting green, he spotted Ben Hogan — just the greatest golfer in the world. A golfer nine months removed from the car accident that nearly took his life. A golfer with a don’t-screw-with-me stare that could separate Fort Worth’s mounted cops from their horses.
Jenkins steeled his nerves, walked over, and introduced himself. A divine yellow light enveloped Jenkins and Hogan, as if they’d gotten lost in Jack Nicklaus’s hair … whoops. Sorry. We’re not doing that kind of golf writing.
Dan Jenkins didn’t allow that kind of writing. The miracle of Jenkins is that he became the best golf writer ever by disabusing the sport of its literary pretensions. It’s as if Hunter Thompson had become the dean of racing writers. In a new memoir, His Ownself, Jenkins sketches out what we might call his issue positions. For being funny. For picking on golfers who deserve it. Against magical realism. Against turning the Eisenhower Cabin into the Shrine at Compostela. Against Tiger Woods, famously. If Sports Illustrated of the ’60s and ’70s thickened the sportswriter’s thesaurus, Jenkins was the guy insisting his words be precise and potent and unflowery. (...)
Here’s what it was like to watch Dan Jenkins get sweet, delicious revenge. You might remember this. It had been bubbling. When Tiger Woods joined the PGA Tour, in 1996, it wasn’t enough to say he could be the greatest golfer ever. “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity … ” Earl Woods told Sports Illustrated. “He is the Chosen One. He’ll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations.”
Jenkins wasn’t walking into that sand trap. But Woods did pique his interest. Woods had scored a phone call with Ben Hogan before he died in 1997 and soaked up wisdom from the old master. Jenkins saw a potential golf-history nut. In the early 2000s, Golf Digest reached out to Woods’s agent to set up an off-the-record dinner. Like the ones he’d had with Palmer and Hogan.
The answer came back from the Woods camp: “We have nothing to gain.”
Jenkins spent the next decade in what the Brits would call the shadow government. He gave Woods credit for his wins. He once allowed that Woods was a better shotmaker than even Hogan. But he poked at the excesses of Tigermania. In Golf Digest, Jenkins wrote up an imaginary press conference in which Mark O’Meara, who’d barnacled himself to Woods, began his answers with, “Tiger and me were discussing it earlier … ”
In 2001, Jenkins told the magazine, “Only two things can stop Tiger — injury or a bad marriage.” To quote a Fort Worth overheard, he was both right.
In 2010, Woods compared his injury comeback to Hogan’s. “Hogan nearly died,” Jenkins remarked. “All Tiger did was damn near get syphilis.” It wasn’t that Jenkins thought Woods had become evil. That would turn Earl Woods’s hook into a slice. No, Jenkins’s revelation was simpler. “He is a hell of a talent,” Jenkins told me. “He just happens to be an asshole.” To hear Jenkins tell it, the subtle russet peddlers who had turned golf into a religion and given Augusta National cathedral status had also erroneously granted Tiger a soul.
In a column, Jenkins withdrew the dinner invitation. “Now it’s too late,” he wrote. “I’m busy.”
by Bryan Curtis, Grantland | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Why You Should Embrace Surveillance, Not Fight It
[ed. See also: Edward Snowden addresses SXSW conference.]
I once worked with Steven Spielberg on the development of Minority Report, derived from the short story by Philip K. Dick featuring a future society that uses surveillance to arrest criminals before they commit a crime. I have to admit I thought Dick’s idea of “pre-crime” to be unrealistic back then. I don’t anymore.Most likely, 50 years from now ubiquitous monitoring and surveillance will be the norm. The internet is a tracking machine. It is engineered to track. We will ceaselessly self-track and be tracked by the greater network, corporations, and governments. Everything that can be measured is already tracked, and all that was previously unmeasureable is becoming quantified, digitized, and trackable.
We’re expanding the data sphere to sci-fi levels and there’s no stopping it. Too many of the benefits we covet derive from it. So our central choice now is whether this surveillance is a secret, one-way panopticon — or a mutual, transparent kind of “coveillance” that involves watching the watchers. The first option is hell, the second redeemable.
We can see both scenarios beginning today. We have the trade-secret algorithms of Google and Facebook on one hand and the secret-obsessed NSA on the other. Networks require an immune system to remain healthy, and intense monitoring and occasional secrets are part of that hygiene to minimize the bad stuff. But in larger doses secrecy becomes toxic; more secrecy requires more secrets to manage and it sets up a debilitating auto-immune disease. This pathology is extremely difficult to stop, since by its own internal logic it must be stopped in secret.
The remedy for over-secrecy is to think in terms of coveillance, so that we make tracking and monitoring as symmetrical — and transparent — as possible. That way the monitoring can be regulated, mistakes appealed and corrected, specific boundaries set and enforced. A massively surveilled world is not a world I would design (or even desire), but massive surveillance is coming either way because that is the bias of digital technology and we might as well surveil well and civilly.
In this version of surveillance — a transparent coveillance where everyone sees each other — a sense of entitlement can emerge: Every person has a human right to access, and benefit from, the data about themselves. The commercial giants running the networks have to spread the economic benefits of tracing people’s behavior to the people themselves, simply to keep going. They will pay you to track yourself. Citizens film the cops, while the cops film the citizens. The business of monitoring (including those who monitor other monitors) will be a big business. The flow of money, too, is made more visible even as it gets more complex.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Equations As Art
When mathematicians describe equations as beautiful, they are not lying. Brain scans show that their minds respond to beautiful equations in the same way other people respond to great paintings or masterful music. The finding could bring neuroscientists closer to understanding the neural basis of beauty, a concept that is surprisingly hard to define.
In the study, researchers led by Semir Zeki of University College London asked 16 mathematicians to rate 60 equations on a scale ranging from "ugly" to "beautiful." Two weeks later, the mathematicians viewed the same equations and rated them again while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The scientists found that the more beautiful an equation was to the mathematician, the more activity his or her brain showed in an area called the A1 field of the medial orbitofrontal cortex. (...)
Mathematicians say they are unsurprised by the findings. "When I see a beautiful mathematical construction, or an unexpected and wonderfully intricate argument with precise logical interlocking pieces in a proof, I do feel the same way as when I see some art that amazes me," says mathematician Colin Adams of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. Daina Taimina, a mathematician at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., says beautiful math results "sound like a melody. For me equations are beautiful if they have elegant solution or lead to unexpected, surprising results."
Understanding just what beauty is, not to mention what makes a thing beautiful, is not easy. Beauty is not simply something pleasing that brings happiness. Sad things, after all, can be beautiful. "There is the experience of beauty in pain," Zeki says. Take Michelangelo's Pietà , a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the dead Jesus Christ in her arms. "It's not a joyful thing, but it's very beautiful." (...)
Zeki and his colleagues admit that beauty is not perfectly defined, but say their studies could lead toward a deeper understanding of the idea. "The question we address is what neural mechanisms allow us to experience beauty," Zeki says. "The central issue that emerges from this work for the future is, why is it that an equation is beautiful?"
The study found, for example, that the beauty of equations is not entirely subjective. Most of the mathematicians agreed on which equations were beautiful and which were ugly, with Euler's identity, 1+eiπ=0, consistently rated the most attractive equation in the lot. "Here are these three fundamental numbers, e, pi and i," Adams says, "all defined independently and all critically important in their own way, and suddenly you have this relationship between them encompassed in this equation that has a grand total of seven symbols in it? It is dumbfounding."
by Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American | Read more:
Image:Quinn Dombrowski/Wikimedia Commons
In the study, researchers led by Semir Zeki of University College London asked 16 mathematicians to rate 60 equations on a scale ranging from "ugly" to "beautiful." Two weeks later, the mathematicians viewed the same equations and rated them again while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The scientists found that the more beautiful an equation was to the mathematician, the more activity his or her brain showed in an area called the A1 field of the medial orbitofrontal cortex. (...)Mathematicians say they are unsurprised by the findings. "When I see a beautiful mathematical construction, or an unexpected and wonderfully intricate argument with precise logical interlocking pieces in a proof, I do feel the same way as when I see some art that amazes me," says mathematician Colin Adams of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. Daina Taimina, a mathematician at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., says beautiful math results "sound like a melody. For me equations are beautiful if they have elegant solution or lead to unexpected, surprising results."
Understanding just what beauty is, not to mention what makes a thing beautiful, is not easy. Beauty is not simply something pleasing that brings happiness. Sad things, after all, can be beautiful. "There is the experience of beauty in pain," Zeki says. Take Michelangelo's Pietà , a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the dead Jesus Christ in her arms. "It's not a joyful thing, but it's very beautiful." (...)
Zeki and his colleagues admit that beauty is not perfectly defined, but say their studies could lead toward a deeper understanding of the idea. "The question we address is what neural mechanisms allow us to experience beauty," Zeki says. "The central issue that emerges from this work for the future is, why is it that an equation is beautiful?"
The study found, for example, that the beauty of equations is not entirely subjective. Most of the mathematicians agreed on which equations were beautiful and which were ugly, with Euler's identity, 1+eiπ=0, consistently rated the most attractive equation in the lot. "Here are these three fundamental numbers, e, pi and i," Adams says, "all defined independently and all critically important in their own way, and suddenly you have this relationship between them encompassed in this equation that has a grand total of seven symbols in it? It is dumbfounding."
by Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American | Read more:
Image:Quinn Dombrowski/Wikimedia Commons
To Have and to Hold
The MacGuffin, in Alfred Hitchcock’s formulation, is “the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story” — the object of desire, the ball all eyes are kept on. The Maltese Falcon is a MacGuffin, as are the letters of transit in “Casablanca,” and a MacGuffin par excellence is all the more potent, dramatically, because its exact significance and innate value go unexplained. One thinks of the briefcase in “Pulp Fiction” as an iconic MacGuffin: What is in it? No one will ever know, but every viewer feels the power of the symbol.
One thinks also that, in real life, the briefcase — every briefcase and every satchel and knapsack and tote and much derided so-called murse — is itself a kind of MacGuffin. The exact details of the personal effects and professional necessities a man daily organizes in his bag don’t matter. What’s meaningful is the male bag itself, which, ever evolving, has developed into a fascinating index of masculinity.
I hope that I will not run afoul of the gender police in supposing that the typical man’s relationship with his bag is different in kind from a typical woman’s relationship with hers — more utilitarian, less personal and mystifying even in its mundanity. He operates according to a system of codes that are harder to read and quicker to change, and when his semiotic knapsack opens, a thousand questions spill out.
What can it mean that I have seen the editor of GQ on the street wearing a simple backpack labeled JanSport? Don’t get me wrong; he looked good. But if such a major arbiter of male fashion sees fit to wear a bag scarcely distinguishable from that shouldered by Johnny Sixth Grader or Average Joe Busboy, then we have ourselves a puzzle on (and in) our hands. The pinstriped senior partner porting a leather case back and forth to Larchmont, N.Y., the graphic designer toting a bourgeois revision of a prototypically blue-collar kit bag, the dude swinging a Louis Vuitton carryall to the gym — each is lugging around an awful lot of symbolic weight.
No bag in the history of male bags — a history that stretches back to the leather loculus (meaning “little place”) of the Roman soldier — has more cultural baggage than the briefcase. With its right-rectangular rectitude and immutable sense of authority, the iconic attaché case is as rigid as the values of the corporate culture of which it remains a symbol.
One thinks also that, in real life, the briefcase — every briefcase and every satchel and knapsack and tote and much derided so-called murse — is itself a kind of MacGuffin. The exact details of the personal effects and professional necessities a man daily organizes in his bag don’t matter. What’s meaningful is the male bag itself, which, ever evolving, has developed into a fascinating index of masculinity.I hope that I will not run afoul of the gender police in supposing that the typical man’s relationship with his bag is different in kind from a typical woman’s relationship with hers — more utilitarian, less personal and mystifying even in its mundanity. He operates according to a system of codes that are harder to read and quicker to change, and when his semiotic knapsack opens, a thousand questions spill out.
What can it mean that I have seen the editor of GQ on the street wearing a simple backpack labeled JanSport? Don’t get me wrong; he looked good. But if such a major arbiter of male fashion sees fit to wear a bag scarcely distinguishable from that shouldered by Johnny Sixth Grader or Average Joe Busboy, then we have ourselves a puzzle on (and in) our hands. The pinstriped senior partner porting a leather case back and forth to Larchmont, N.Y., the graphic designer toting a bourgeois revision of a prototypically blue-collar kit bag, the dude swinging a Louis Vuitton carryall to the gym — each is lugging around an awful lot of symbolic weight.
No bag in the history of male bags — a history that stretches back to the leather loculus (meaning “little place”) of the Roman soldier — has more cultural baggage than the briefcase. With its right-rectangular rectitude and immutable sense of authority, the iconic attaché case is as rigid as the values of the corporate culture of which it remains a symbol.
by Troy Patterson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: john Vink/Magnum Photos
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Aberdeen unveiled this statue today to mark the city’s first annual Kurt Cobain Day. It would have been the Aberdeen native’s 47th birthday.
Just more evidence why Kurt Cobain wanted to get the fuck out of Aberdeen.
Jesus wept.
We Won't Be Together Much Longer
by Alex Balk, The Awl
Image: Jeffrey Zeldman, via Flickr[ed. Public Service Announcement. Am I the only one who forgot it was Daylight Savings Time today? My bedside clock automatically changes (who knew?) and I actually manually reset it back to the wrong time.]
How Silence Became a Luxury Product
Unwanted noise is perhaps the most irksome form of sensory assault. A bothersome sight? Close your eyes or turn the other way—eyesores are, generally, immobile. An annoying taste? Spit it out. (Why was it in your mouth?) Sound, on the other hand, is ambient, elusive, enveloping. Even the softest drone can echo cacophonously if it worms itself into your head. Ulysses was not seduced by the sight of the sirens. Poe’s telltale heart does not torment with its smell. “Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption,” groused the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.”
Noise ranks as the number one gripe of restaurant-goers nationally according to a Zagat survey, and it is the complaint submitted to New York City’s 311 hotline with the greatest frequency. (From 2012 to 2013, noise-related calls to 311 increased 16 percent according to noise activist Arlene Bronzaft.) Even if these complaints are just cyclical resurgences of an age-old problem—the ancient Greek colony Sybaris mandated that certain noisy tradesmen (potters, tinsmiths) had to live outside the city walls; Elizabethan men couldn’t beat their wives past 10 p.m.—we seem to be dealing with it differently. From noise-canceling headphones to the popularity of silent retreats, there has never been quite so great a premium placed on silence. And not only do we value it in a general sense, we’re willing to pay for it. Silence has become the ultimate luxury. (...)
Why has silence become a commodity? To some extent it seems an outgrowth of a back-to-basics, purity-as-priority impulse. Food can’t get from the farm to the table fast enough; toxins must be avoided at all costs; the “disconnectionists” preach digital detox. Absence, in other forms, has become a commodity. How many products advertise their virtues by what they don’t include? BPA-free baby bottles, GMO-free tomatoes, and gluten-free oatmeal—never mind that it didn’t have gluten to begin with—are all available at your local supermarket.
by Chloe Schama, TNR | Read more:
by Chloe Schama, TNR | Read more:
Image: Image Source
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