A Passage from Hong Kong

Imagine the Empire State Building. Now imagine tipping it on its side, nudging it into the Hudson, and putting out to sea. That was the scale of thing I contemplated one day in late November, as I gaped at the immense navy hull of CMA CGM Christophe Colomb, one of the world’s largest container ships, which stretched above and out of sight on either side of me, on a quayside in Hong Kong. Nearly twelve hundred feet long, it’s bigger than an aircraft carrier and longer than the world’s largest cruise ships. On Christophe Colomb, all of that space goes to boxes. The ship has a capacity of 13,344TEUs—“twenty-foot equivalent units,” the size of a standard shipping container. These are stacked seven high above deck and another six to eight below. In cheerful shades of turquoise, maroon, navy, gold, and green, they look like a set of Legos designed for a young giant.

Trying to see where one even boards such a vessel, I noticed a steep aluminum gangway and went up its seventy-four steps, through two hatches, and into the eight-story “castle” that sits above the main deck and houses the ship’s living quarters, offices, and bridge. This was to be my home for nearly four weeks, as I took passage on Christophe Colomb from Hong Kong to Southampton, England, via the Suez Canal. (...)

In the 1960s, the shipping industry was transformed by the widespread adoption of the standardized shipping container. Developed by American trucking entrepreneur Malcom McLean, the container served as a one-size-fits-all package for goods. These twenty-foot boxes could be packed at the place of consignment (whether a factory, a warehouse, or a person’s front door), hitched up to a truck, driven to the quayside, lifted off the truck by a crane, and loaded directly into their designated places in a ship’s hold—thus eliminating expensive, time-consuming transfers from land transport to port warehouse, warehouse to ship hold. If 13,000 containers seem like a lot to load onto a ship, consider what it was like when every single item within those containers would have to be loaded individually; inventories of even modest-sized ships in the pre-container age ran into the hundreds of thousands of items. Now it can take less than a minute for a gantry crane to grab a container off the quayside, lift, swing, and drop it into place on a ship, then slide immediately back for another. (...)

When a container ship arrives in port today, it slides into a 24/7 operation superintended by logistics experts in distant offices. On board ship, the chief officer checks to make sure things go according to the computerized plan sent to him by the logistics office. As we watched the boxes pile on board Christophe Colomb in Hong Kong, I asked the chief officer if he had any idea what was in them. He shrugged, not even curious. All he knows—all anybody on board knows—is whether they need to be refrigerated, or whether they contain hazardous materials and need to be placed in a secure storage area. A port call lasts only six to twenty-four hours, and sailors rarely bother to get off the boat. The containers thus put up a wall between sea and land, making each side less accessible to the other.

By reducing the cost of transport, containerization accelerated a process of global economic integration whose earlier stages Conrad had witnessed. Today “shipping is so cheap,” writes the British journalist Rose George in Ninety Percent of Everything, “that it makes more financial sense for Scottish cod to be sent ten thousand miles to China to be filleted, then sent back to Scottish shops and restaurants, than to pay Scottish filleters.” Residents of the English port city Southampton were recently asked what percentage of goods they thought traveled by sea. All their answers, George says, “had the interrogative upswing of the unsure. ‘Thirty-five percent?’ ‘Not a lot?’ The answer is, nearly everything.” Ninety percent of everything, to be more accurate: most of the clothes you put on this morning; the coffee or tea you drank; your car, or at least parts of it, and some of the gas you put into it; your computer, television, phone, earphones—in short, the stuff of daily life.

by Maya Jasanoff, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Ocean/Corbis

Bill Gates: The Rolling Stone Interview

At 58, Bill Gates is not only the richest man in the world, with a fortune that now exceeds $76 billion, but he may also be the most optimistic. In his view, the world is a giant operating system that just needs to be debugged. Gates' driving idea – the idea that animates his life, that guides his philanthropy, that keeps him late in his sleek book-lined office overlooking Lake Washington, outside Seattle – is the hacker's notion that the code for these problems can be rewritten, that errors can be fixed, that huge systems – whether it's Windows 8, global poverty or climate change – can be improved if you have the right tools and the right skills. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the philanthropic organization with a $36 billion endowment that he runs with his wife, is like a giant startup whose target market is human civilization.

Personally, Gates has very little Master of the Universe swagger and, given the scale of his wealth, his possessions are modest: three houses, one plane, no yachts. He wears loafers and khakis and V-neck sweaters. He often needs a haircut. His glasses haven't changed much in 40 years. For fun, he attends bridge tournaments.

But if his social ambitions are modest, his intellectual scope is mind-boggling: climate, energy, agriculture, infectious diseases and education reform, to name a few. He has former nuclear physicists helping cook up nutritional cookies to feed the developing world. A polio SWAT team has already spent $1.5 billion (and is committed to another $1.8 billion through 2018) to eradicate the virus. He's engineering better toilets and funding research into condoms made of carbon nanotubes.

It's a long way from the early days of the digital revolution, when Gates was almost a caricature of a greedy monopolist hell-bent on installing Windows on every computer in the galaxy ("The trouble with Bill," Steve Jobs once told me, "is that he wants to take a nickel for himself out of every dollar that passes through his hands"). But when Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO in 2000, he found a way to transform his aggressive drive to conquer the desktop into an aggressive drive to conquer poverty and disease.

Now he's returning to Microsoft as a "technology adviser" to Satya Nadella, Microsoft's new CEO. "Satya has asked me to review the product plans and come in and help make some quick decisions and pick some new directions," Gates told me as we talked in his office on a rainy day a few weeks ago. He estimates­ that he'll devote a third of his time to Microsoft and two-thirds to his foundation and other work. But the Microsoft of today is nothing like the world-dominating behemoth of the Nineties. The company remained shackled to the desktop for too long, while competitors – namely, Apple and Google – moved on to phones and tablets. And instead of talking in visionary terms about the company's future, Gates talks of challenges­ that sound almost mundane for a man of his ambitions, like reinventing Windows and Office for the era of cloud computing. But in some ways, that's not unexpected: Unlike, say, Jobs, who returned to Apple with a religious zeal, Gates clearly has bigger things on his mind than figuring out how to make spreadsheets workable in the cloud.

When you started Microsoft, you had a crazy-sounding idea that someday there would be a computer on every desktop. Now, as you return to Microsoft 40 years later, we have computers not just on our desktops, but in our pockets – and everywhere else. What is the biggest surprise to you in the way this has all played out?

Well, it's pretty amazing to go from a world where computers were unheard of and very complex to where they're a tool of everyday life. That was the dream that I wanted to make come true, and in a large part it's unfolded as I'd expected. You can argue about advertising business models or which networking protocol would catch on or which screen sizes would be used for which things. There are less robots now than I would have guessed. Vision and speech have come a little later than I had guessed. But these are things that will probably emerge within five years, and certainly within 10 years.

If there's a deal that symbolizes where Silicon Valley is today, it's Facebook's $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp. What does that say about the economics of Silicon Valley right now?

It means that Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be the next Facebook. Mark has the credibility to say, "I'm going to spend $19 billion to buy something that has essentially no revenue model." I think his aggressiveness is wise – although the price is higher than I would have expected. It shows that user bases are extremely valuable. It's software; it can morph into a broad set of things – once you're set up communicating with somebody, you're not just going to do text. You're going to do photos, you're going to share documents, you're going to play games together.

Apparently, Google was looking at it.

Yeah, yeah. Microsoft would have been willing to buy it, too. . . . I don't know for $19 billion, but the company's extremely valuable.

You mentioned Mark Zuckerberg. When you look at what he's done, do you see some of yourself in him?

Oh, sure. We're both Harvard dropouts, we both had strong, stubborn views of what software could do. I give him more credit for shaping the user interface of his product. He's more of a product manager than I was. I'm more of a coder, down in the bowels and the architecture, than he is. But, you know, that's not that major of a difference. I start with architecture, and Mark starts with products, and Steve Jobs started with aesthetics.

by Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Roberto Parada

via:

via:

via:

A Toast Story

All the guy was doing was slicing inch-thick pieces of bread, putting them in a toaster, and spreading stuff on them. But what made me stare—blinking to attention in the middle of a workday morning as I waited in line at an unfamiliar café—was the way he did it. He had the solemn intensity of a Ping-Pong player who keeps his game very close to the table: knees slightly bent, wrist flicking the butter knife back and forth, eyes suggesting a kind of flow state.

The coffee shop, called the Red Door, was a spare little operation tucked into the corner of a chic industrial-style art gallery and event space (clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Evernote, Google) in downtown San Francisco. There were just three employees working behind the counter: one making coffee, one taking orders, and the soulful guy making toast. In front of him, laid out in a neat row, were a few long Pullman loaves—the boxy Wonder Bread shape, like a train car, but recognizably handmade and freshly baked. And on the brief menu, toast was a standalone item—at $3 per slice.

It took me just a few seconds to digest what this meant: that toast, like the cupcake and the dill pickle before it, had been elevated to the artisanal plane. So I ordered some. It was pretty good. It tasted just like toast, but better.

A couple of weeks later I was at a place called Acre Coffee in Petaluma, a smallish town about an hour north of San Francisco on Highway 101. Half of the shop’s food menu fell under the heading “Toast Bar.” Not long after that I was with my wife and daughter on Divisadero Street in San Francisco, and we went to The Mill, a big light-filled cafe and bakery with exposed rafters and polished concrete floors, like a rustic Apple Store. There, between the two iPads that served as cash registers, was a small chalkboard that listed the day’s toast menu. Everywhere the offerings were more or less the same: thick slices of good bread, square-shaped, topped with things like small-batch almond butter or apricot marmalade or sea salt.

Back at the Red Door one day, I asked the manager what was going on. Why all the toast? “Tip of the hipster spear,” he said.

I had two reactions to this: First, of course, I rolled my eyes. How silly; how twee; how perfectly San Francisco, this toast. And second, despite myself, I felt a little thrill of discovery. How many weeks would it be, I wondered, before artisanal toast made it to Brooklyn, or Chicago, or Los Angeles? How long before an article appears in Slate telling people all across America that they’re making toast all wrong? How long before the backlash sets in?

For whatever reason, I felt compelled to go looking for the origins of the fancy toast trend. How does such a thing get started? What determines how far it goes? I wanted to know. Maybe I thought it would help me understand the rise of all the seemingly trivial, evanescent things that start in San Francisco and then go supernova across the country—the kinds of products I am usually late to discover and slow to figure out. I’m not sure what kind of answer I expected to turn up. Certainly nothing too impressive or emotionally affecting. But what I found was more surprising and sublime than I could have possibly imagined.

by John Gravois, Pacific Standard |  Read more:

Image: Jeff Singer

A Kiss Is Just a Kiss, Unless It’s an Ad for a Clothing Company

The email Tatia Pilieva sent to 21 people Monday morning started off the way such notes usually do when someone wants to get a link on Facebook.

“Hey my dears,” Ms. Pilieva wrote. “I wanted to share our little film with you.”

The email’s recipients had starred in a video that Ms. Pilieva had recently directed on a shoestring budget for a small clothing company.

The three-and-a-half-minute video, shot in black and white, showed 10 pairs of strangers kissing for the first time.

“Here are the links,” she wrote. “Feel free to share as you wish.”

That wish was the Internet’s command. By Thursday afternoon, the video — titled “First Kiss” — was a bona fide viral sensation.

A YouTube link had about 42 million views. A Vimeo link had been watched an additional 1.5 million times. (By comparison, President Obama’s appearance on the popular online comedy show, “Between Two Ferns,” posted Tuesday morning, had about one-third the traffic.) For the designer, it wasn’t exactly supposed to work this way.

Melissa Coker, 35, the founder and creative director of the clothing company Wren, commissioned the video to showcase her clothing line’s fall collection for Style.com’s Video Fashion Week. Style.com had created the video series for brands that might lack the financial wherewithal to put on a runway show during Fashion Week.

The video’s outrageous popularity had the web abuzz all week, with some industry experts suggesting that it could force major designers to think more expansively about how to advertise future collections.

“She gets better attention here than an actual fashion show during Fashion Week,” said André Leon Talley, the artistic director at Zappos Couture, who used to be Ms. Coker’s boss at Vogue. “You can’t reach 40 million viewers in an 11- to 15-minute fashion runway presentation.” (...)

The label, which is based in Los Angeles, has four employees, including Ms. Coker. The budget for the video was about $1,300, with the money used for studio space, a video editor’s babysitting bill, lunch and “chocolate and some mints,” Ms. Pilieva said. The kissing strangers are friends of Ms. Coker and Ms. Pilieva’s. Many are musicians or models. All of them worked free.

The video begins with the 10 couples each facing off, some of them in awkward pas de deux. As the short film progresses, the couples kiss — a few of them passionately, some clumsily. But what was it that made it resonate with millions of drive-by clickers?

by John Koblin, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Tatia Pilieva

Jordi Alcaraz, Discussió entre astrònoms (IV), 2010
via:

via:

Thug Notes: Lolita

Owning the Net: How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware

Top-secret documents reveal that the National Security Agency is dramatically expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process.

The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.

The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.

In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites.

The implants being deployed were once reserved for a few hundred hard-to-reach targets, whose communications could not be monitored through traditional wiretaps. But the documents analyzed by The Intercept show how the NSA has aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives in the past decade by computerizing some processes previously handled by humans. The automated system – codenamed TURBINE – is designed to “allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.”  (...)

Earlier reports based on the Snowden files indicate that the NSA has already deployed between 85,000 and 100,000 of its implants against computers and networks across the world, with plans to keep on scaling up those numbers.

The intelligence community’s top-secret “Black Budget” for 2013, obtained by Snowden, lists TURBINE as part of a broader NSA surveillance initiative named “Owning the Net.”

The agency sought $67.6 million in taxpayer funding for its Owning the Net program last year. Some of the money was earmarked for TURBINE, expanding the system to encompass “a wider variety” of networks and “enabling greater automation of computer network exploitation.”  (...)

The NSA has a diverse arsenal of malware tools, each highly sophisticated and customizable for different purposes.

One implant, codenamed UNITEDRAKE, can be used with a variety of “plug-ins” that enable the agency to gain total control of an infected computer.

An implant plug-in named CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE, for example, is used to take over a targeted computer’s microphone and record conversations taking place near the device. Another, GUMFISH, can covertly take over a computer’s webcam and snap photographs. FOGGYBOTTOM records logs of Internet browsing histories and collects login details and passwords used to access websites and email accounts. GROK is used to log keystrokes. And SALVAGERABBIT exfiltrates data from removable flash drives that connect to an infected computer.

The implants can enable the NSA to circumvent privacy-enhancing encryption tools that are used to browse the Internet anonymously or scramble the contents of emails as they are being sent across networks. That’s because the NSA’s malware gives the agency unfettered access to a target’s computer before the user protects their communications with encryption.

by Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald, Intercept |  Read more:
Image: NSA

Celebrity Charity

News has emerged that Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation could be a mere vanity project. Have you ever? Can you even? (No, you can't. You either already tweeted or are just about to tweet, "I can't with this," about this.) We all can collectively gasp while secretly saying, "Yaaaaaas," in our heads regarding Gaga's latest endeavor in hot messery.

Showbiz 411's Roger Friedman published a breakdown of BTWF's 2012 tax report. The foundation's claimed $2.1 million in net assets (donations came in at $2.6 million). Here's where that money went according to Friedman:

$300,000 in strategic consulting
$62,836 on stage productions
$50,000 on social media
$50,000 on event coordination
$406,552 on legal
$150,000 on philanthropic consulting
$60,000 on research
$58,768 on publicity fees
$78,000 on travel
$72,000 on salaries
$808,661 on "other"
$5,000 on grants to organizations or individuals

While these numbers are damning (and what the fuck is "other?"), they shouldn't be terribly surprising given Born This Way Foundation's vague and broad mission statement that does not include "...and giving needy people money." The non-profit anti-bullying organization, per its mission statement, aims to:

...foster a more accepting society, where differences are embraced and individuality is celebrated. The Foundation is dedicated to creating a safe community that helps connect young people with the skills and opportunities they need to build a kinder, braver world.

We believe that everyone has the right to feel safe, to be empowered and to make a difference in the world. Together, we will move towards acceptance, bravery and love.

Its three pillars are: safety, skills, and opportunity. Can't really argue with those pillars.

In 2012, BTWF ran a poster campaign ("to inspire bravery"), sponsored the Born Brave Bus Tour ("The more kids that I can get to come and eat hamburgers and talk outside my shows ... I feel that it will start small, but over time will be very big," Gaga said to Reuters of the "drop-in center/roving tailgate party"), launched a youth advisory board, and worked with Office Depot on a line that included "empowerment gift cards," "Bravery Bracelets," and "Kindness Sticks" Post-It Notes. Sharpies were also involved, but this press release doesn't make clear how they were engineered to make people feel safe and accepted. I hope it involved making them more pungent, thus huffable.

by Rich Juzwiak, Gawker | Read more:
Image: Getty

 

Brenda Cablayan
via:

Jean Hélion (French, 1904–1987), Twin Figures, March 1938
via:

via:

Untitled by Harrison Wade (five-leavesleft) on Flickr.
via:

A Man Enough

This is the dynamic between my parents and me—a cool truce no one mentions, but exists as clearly as a wall. My father behaved as if he would never be old or weak and would always have the upper hand, the right answer. Now I want to know the truth about him, but to ask would be to force my parents to admit that I am a grownup and fully aware of his vulnerability.

I could ask so many questions now, before the door I have opened closes with this phone call, but I do not. Where did you think we would go when we grew up, if not into the world? Were we not doomed to fail you, to hear the sound of our adult selves and make our own choices? How did you believe you would never grow old or weak or be wrong? I wish I was brave enough to fight harder and insist on answers, or be braver still and be the one to forge a new relationship with my parents that is honest and open and adult. I could keep calling, every week, until my mother lets me in.

But I am not that brave.

by Anne Rieman, TMN |  Read more:

Image: F. Luis Mora, 1901

Real Estate

Inside The Barista Class

One of the most obscene things I learned as a barista was how eager people are to be liked. NYU sophomores, the ones with Jansport backpacks in full makeup at 9 a.m., stuttered their orders and shyly complimented me on my nose ring. I semi-patiently listened to innumerable Wikipedia-style monologues about the music I was playing from men in their twenties trying to render their business attire invisible with cultural know-how. I was given zines, mixtape-party fliers, home-recorded chillwave demos.

I said things like "How’s the app going?" and "Welcome to the neighborhood." I answered questions for new Greenpoint residents—of which there were more each year—about the best place to grab wine and tapas, get a shave and drink a beer at the same time. How myself and my co-workers became to be known as experts in such matters was largely beyond me, particularly since many of us shortly couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhood in which we served. More than anything else, though, I was asked what else I did.

"Oh you know," the t-shirt designer or gallery assistant with blunt bangs or unpaid Harper's intern would say on their way into the office. "When you aren’t making coffee." (...)

I was 17 when I got my first job, at the Starbucks in my hometown, a suburb about an hour south of Boston. I was trained in the store’s break room through a series of videos. The position’s first directive—conveyed by softly lit panoramas of women chatting over steaming lattes, men in tailored suits smiling gently in the direction of the espresso machine—was to maintain the brand’s identity as a "third place." The term, as appropriated by Starbucks, was actually originally coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe a particular kind of community space, one that facilitated civically minded social interaction. The "first place" is the home and the "second place" is the office, in Oldenburg’s conception, and the idea fit Starbucks’ self-styled business of "conversation and a sense of community" so well that the idea of the third place became their very foundation.

At that age, becoming a barista—as opposed to a waitress, or the girl serving popcorn at the multiplex—seemed like a good idea. In my budding process of cultural affiliation, I’d recognized the coffee shop as my spiritual home from an early age. This was 2006. Like I said, I was suburban. Something about a coffee shop felt intellectual.

There were only two coffee shops in my town, and they didn’t so much compete as complement each other, poised as they were on opposite sides of the economic spectrum. If you weren’t grabbing a large ice coffee, "extra-extra," (that’s extra cream, extra sugar) from the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street, you were exercising your right to, in the words of Tom Hanks’ character in the immortal You Got Mail, "get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self. Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino."

Though the appeal of such choice—and the corresponding price of such decision-making power—comes as no surprise to anyone, I will say that at least twice I gave empty Starbucks cups to high school girls so they could disguise their Mr. Coffee drip in 8 a.m. homeroom.

But actually working at Starbucks wasn’t cool by any stretch of the imagination. It was my first and only corporate job, with its corresponding dress code (khakis, collared shirts, no tattoos) and business practices standardized to a point well past common sense (the temperature, I was told, was controlled remotely, from an office at HQ in the Midwest).  (...)

I transferred stores twice, and though I wouldn’t recognize it until later, there was already something uniquely banal about my interactions with the customers at Starbucks. The robotic and infinitely scaleable details, our uniforms and employee numbers, the pre-calibrated automatic espresso machine, all contributed to a general sense of interchangeability. I had exhausting customers, but their demanding nature didn’t feel personal. I had no doubt the pudgy businessman would have told any woman where to put that whipped cream, or that the undergraduate with the fancy handbag, detailing last night’s party to a friend on the phone, was the kind of girl who would’ve shouted down any one of her servers for ostensibly placing a half-pump more white mocha in her beverage. If a customer was particularly bad we exercised one of the only powers we possessed and "decafed" them. To covertly rob a caffeine-addicted asshole of their morning jolt was truly one of the sweetest pleasures of baristahood, and one that my subsequent professions haven’t come close to replicating.

A few hours before close, a younger shift leader might travel the few blocks down Thayer Street to the liquor store. We’d drink Vodka and Red Bull out of our green-and-white venti cups and snigger behind the hulking safety of that massive, push-button espresso machine. As long as we didn’t get so drunk that we slurred the lines we’d been given—"Next guest please; Welcome to Starbucks, how may I help you?"—we were still doing our jobs.

by Molly Osberg, The Awl |  Read more:

Image: Matt Biddulph

Cressida Campbell, Interior with Red Ginger, 1998
via: