Gabriel García Márquez, Conjurer of Literary Magic, Dies at 87

[ed. See also: The Art of Fiction No.69.]

Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.

Cristóbal Pera, his former editor at Random House, confirmed the death. Mr. García Márquez learned he had lymphatic cancer in 1999, and a brother said in 2012 that he had developed senile dementia.

Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers — Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them — who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience.

“Each new work of his is received by expectant critics and readers as an event of world importance,” the Swedish Academy of Letters said in awarding him the Nobel.

Mr. García Márquez was a master of the literary genre known as magical realism, in which the miraculous and the real converge. In his novels and stories, storms rage for years, flowers drift from the skies, tyrants survive for centuries, priests levitate and corpses fail to decompose. And, more plausibly, lovers rekindle their passion after a half-century apart.

Magical realism, he said, sprang from Latin America’s history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence. In accepting his Nobel, Mr. García Márquez said: “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination. For our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

Like many Latin American intellectuals and artists, Mr. García Márquez felt impelled to speak out on the political issues of his day. He viewed the world from a left-wing perspective, bitterly opposing Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the right-wing Chilean dictator, and unswervingly supporting Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Castro became such a close friend that Mr. García Márquez showed him drafts of his unpublished books.

No draft had more impact than the one for “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Mr. García Márquez’s editor began reading it at home one rainy day, and as he read page after page by this unknown Colombian author, his excitement grew. Soon he called the Argentine novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez and summoned him urgently to the home.

Mr. Eloy Martinez remembered entering the foyer with wet shoes and encountering pages strewn across the floor by the editor in his eagerness to read through the work. They were the first pages of a book that in 1967 would vault Mr. García Márquez onto the world stage. He later authorized an English translation, by Gregory Rabassa. In Spanish or English, readers were tantalized from its opening sentences:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” would sell tens of millions of copies. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since ‘Don Quixote.’ ” The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”

Mr. García Márquez was rattled by the praise. He grew to hate “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he said in interviews, because he feared his subsequent work would not measure up to it in readers’ eyes. He need not have worried. Almost all his 15 other novels and short-story collections were lionized by critics and devoured by readers.

by Jonathan Kandell, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ulf Andersen, AP

Douglas and Stephanie Mallis Kahn
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The Postcapital Economy

Consider John Maynard Keynes’s coalmine experiment. On the theory that having people employed for no purpose at all can help to stimulate economic activity during times of demand collapse or output shock, he proposed having a government fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them in coal mines, and encouraging private enterprise to compete to dig them back up again. The process would employ many more people in jobs, albeit pointless ones, and thereby spread wealth around. Keynes argued it would naturally be more sensible to have these people employed in building houses or something else more useful. But the economic effect would be the same.

In many ways, what White is arguing is that China is actually running the greatest Keynesian coal-mine thought experiment of all time, building and producing not for the sake of what was produced but rather to take advantage of a global capital surplus. This gave China the opportunity to empower its citizens on the condition that underwriting the capital could woo it in the first place through this massive social experiment. It did so, of course, by means of foreign-exchange manipulation—an important precursor to the quantitative easing (QE) used by the U.S. Federal Reserve postcrisis—that ensured that every dollar invested in China would offer a better payoff than a dollar invested at home. It could guarantee this because not only would there always be a superior Chinese bid for the capital in question but it would be coming from the government directly.

It is only because the government is putting up the bid rather than private enterprise—which in emerging markets is thought of as risky and suffering from corruption and other principal-agent problems—that the capital suddenly becomes free-flowing to the country in question. If it wasn’t the government providing the bid, it would be seen as too risky to invest. But since the government can print money ad infinitum, and this is what Chinese currency manipulation really consists of (buying dollars with newly printed yuan), that bid remains competitive for as long as the Chinese government wants it to be.

The Western version of QE sees the Federal Reserve printing money in order to absorb underperforming assets and U.S. Treasury bonds into its coffers in a way that effectively underwrites their performance no matter what and squeezes the market at the same time. The Chinese FX manipulation version of QE saw the government printing money in order to absorb abundant dollars out of the global system, in a way that effectively kept the dollar overvalued no matter what. This meant investors could be sure that their dollar denominated investments in China would always result in real returns.

The reason the Chinese government felt comfortable underwriting bids for foreign investment, meanwhile, is probably because its socialistic disposition allowed it to see what the West couldn’t: namely, that in the West, capital was no longer scarce enough to justify a truly competitive bid for it and all China had to do was provide some sort of guarantee in order to benefit from it.

At the end of the day, the much discussed “savings glut” is just another way of saying capital surplus. For years nobody really understood what was fueling it, but more recently Larry Summers speculated that it was the first clear symptom of “secular stagnation,” a trend that arguably started in the early 1980s. In a secular-stagnated economy, we end up with a capital rather than labor bias, which sees rents and returns flow to owners of capital in favor of labor, to the detriment of the wider economy.

Unless that surplus could be redistributed to new pockets of demand, all roads consequently lead to a demand collapse, because eventually all wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of technology and capital owners rather than in labor’s hands. This creates a vicious demand circle that impoverishes the economy overall.

For China to benefit from that capital surplus, all it needed to do was draw the capital over and keep it there, creating a self-enforcing capital scarcity—or savings glut—for the world. With its socialistically minded economy that didn’t mind investing capital for public purposes regardless of return, China prevented that capital from returning to the West. This is important, because if the capital was allowed to flow back to the West, it would have less of a distributive wealth effect than it would in China, where it would make more people feel more rich. In the West, it would more than likely end up concentrating in the hands of capital owners, who would be ever keener to employ robots than human beings. (...)

As White argues, this is why it’s wrong to assume that China is pursuing capitalism as we know it. Its real aim is to create a hybrid model of public investment and very aggressive market-based competition with the hope of creating consumer surpluses rather than economic rents. This would distribute wealth more widely than if it was passed exclusively to rent seekers alone.

Capital is allocated consequently not on the basis of whether the asset created can provide a return but whether it serves a greater social purpose. The Chinese government will consequently fund contractors to develop public infrastructure and other massive social projects, as well as backstop private enterprise that has potentially overinvested in private developments. Even if the projects don’t yield a monetary return, they improve the social infrastructure, Chinese mobility, and the general standard of life. By contrast, in the United States, the lack of guaranteed returns has created a major underinvestment problem in public infrastructure, which is now falling apart or becoming ever more dangerous as a result.

by Izabella Kaminska, TNI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Irony is Ruining Our Culture

[ed. The prevalence of irony may also be an expression of generalized helplessness/hopelessness, which, I guess, is at least a positive in that it implies an awareness and perhaps yearning for something more authentic. It's better than what comes after: cynicism (followed by resignation and/or despair).]

Percy Shelley famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” For Shelley, great art had the potential to make a new world through the depth of its vision and the properties of its creation. Today, Shelley would be laughed out of the room. Lazy cynicism has replaced thoughtful conviction as the mark of an educated worldview. Indeed, cynicism saturates popular culture, and it has afflicted contemporary art by way of postmodernism and irony. Perhaps no recent figure dealt with this problem more explicitly than David Foster Wallace. One of his central artistic projects remains a vital question for artists today: How does art progress from irony and cynicism to something sincere and redeeming?

Twenty years ago, Wallace wrote about the impact of television on U.S. fiction. He focused on the effects of irony as it transferred from one medium to the other. In the 1960s, writers like Thomas Pynchon had successfully used irony and pop reference to reveal the dark side of war and American culture. Irony laid waste to corruption and hypocrisy. In the aftermath of the ’60s, as Wallace saw it, television adopted a self-deprecating, ironic attitude to make viewers feel smarter than the naïve public, and to flatter them into continued watching. Fiction responded by simply absorbing pop culture to “help create a mood of irony and irreverence, to make us uneasy and so ‘comment’ on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and most important, these days, to be just plain realistic.” But what if irony leads to a sinkhole of relativism and disavowal? (...)

Recently, the Onion spoofed an ad campaign in which Applebee’s encouraged hipsters to visit their restaurants “ironically” and middle-aged adults to make fun of hipsters. The parody describes four “with it” young folks “seriously” eating their dinner at Applebee’s while ridiculing the food, service and atmosphere. Behind them sit three sad, middle-aged adults mocking the hipsters, sarcastically saying “because I know who the latest bands are I am too cool to eat a cheeseburger without making fun of it.” Neither group is genuinely happy about their meal or station in life. The Onion’s satire points out that irony and formality have become the same thing. At one time, irony served to reveal hypocrisies, but now it simply acknowledges one’s cultural compliance and familiarity with pop trends. The art of irony has lost its vision and its edge. The rebellious posture of the past has been annexed by the very commercialism it sought to defy.

by Matt Ashby and Brendan Carroll, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Hachette Book Group

How Legalized Pot Would Change America

When Washington State needed advice on how to set up a market for legal marijuana, they called UCLA professor Mark Kleiman. Here, Kleiman discusses the future of legalized pot with Ezra Klein.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mark Kleiman: Continued prohibition is probably the worst thing we could do about cannabis right now. Alcohol style legalization, which is where we're headed, is probably the second worse. If we had a national debate now we might settle on a temperate cannabis policy. That would get us the benefits of legalization without an upsurge in heavy use and use by juveniles.

Without a national solution – a national framework for safe cannabis policy – we're going to wind up going down the road we went down with alcohol. We'll have commercial sale, low taxes, loose regulation. That's a bad place to be for alcohol. It's not as bad a place to be for cannabis, but it's the worse place we could be.

Ezra Klein: Why is it a dumb idea to regulate Cannabis in the states?

Mark: A lot of the things you might want to do as a state government you can't do while it remains federally illegal. Each state is hostage to all the other states. If Washington wanted to have tight restrictions and high taxes and Oregon wanted to have loose restrictions and low taxes, guess what happens? Lots of Oregon pot floods Washington.

We'll get a race to the bottom. With tobacco, now New York State and particularly New York City have very high tobacco taxes. But something like a third of all the cigarettes sold in New York City are smuggled. Not from Leningrad, but from Virginia. It's really hard to stop that stuff.

An ounce of cannabis on the illicit market or in the medical stores now costs around $300. A pack of cigarettes can easily weigh just about one ounce. New York City and state are trying to collect $8.00 on a pack of cigarettes and substantially failing. So now try to collect $300.00 on an ounce of cannabis.

I think burning plant leaves and flowers and breathing the smoke is going to be completely out of fashion in ten years along with burning tobacco leaves.

I think we're going to go entirely e-cigarette for both markets. One of the consequences is that's much easier to smuggle because concentrate is much more compact than herbal cannabis. Collecting state level taxes on this may be really hard if there's any substantial state gradients. It's a little weird to be giving state licenses to commit federal felonies. It will be nice to have a legally sane system. (...)

Ezra: Why do you think cannabis concentrate is going to become so dominant in ten years? I'm curious about that.

Mark: A number of reasons. Most people don't like to cough.

Ezra: We should say concentrate is when you've essentially extracted the active ingredient.

Mark: There are a number of different technologies for taking cannabis flowers and leave sand extracting from them the active agents. Not just the THC but the 90 other chemicals that are in there. Then it's put in a variety of forms. There's a liquid form that can go into something like an e-cigarette. There's also a solid, sort of waxy form that can go into a different kind of vaporizer.

In any case you've got some device that applies external heat to the concentrate and you breathe the vapor as opposed to the current technology which is you burn the plant matrix in order to vaporize the active agent and breath the smoke. Well, come on guys, breathing smoke's not a good idea and it's no fun. I think people, particularly people who only use it occasionally, will pay extra not to cough. The more advanced vaporization devices will actually deliver a measured puff which a joint really can't or a pipe really can't.

If you had a measured puff of a tested concentrate you could actually know how many milligrams you're getting to your brain. You could actually control your cannabis use in a halfway reasonable way as much as you can control your drinking experience by having some number of drinks. If you have three drinks, you know what that does to you. You can't really know that with cannabis now. The product is too different. The smoking behaviors is too different. It's not really reproducible. I think concentrates will take care of that.

by Ezra Klein, Vox |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Cummins / Getty Images

Portland: Don't Pee in the Pool

Portland officials said Wednesday they are flushing away millions of gallons of treated water for the second time in less than three years because someone urinated into a city reservoir.

In June 2011, the city drained a 7.5m-gallon reservoir at Mount Tabor in southeast Portland. This time, 38m gallons from a different reservoir at the same location will be discarded after a 19-year-old was videotaped in the act.

"The basic commandment of the Water Bureau is to provide clean, cold and constant water to its customers," bureau administrator David Shaff said Wednesday. "And the premise behind that is we don't have pee in it."

The open reservoirs hold water that has already been treated and goes directly into mains for distribution to customers.

The urine poses little risk – animals routinely deposit waste without creating a public health crisis – but Shaff said he doesn't want to serve water that was deliberately tainted.

"There is at least a perceived difference from my perspective," Shaff said. "I could be wrong on that, but the reality is our customers don't anticipate drinking water that's been contaminated by some yahoo who decided to pee into a reservoir."

by AP/The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. A good fishing day.]
Image source: markk

Goldfish Street (金魚街) or Mongkok Goldfish Market, Hongkong

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Messaging Wars

In the history of human communication, the Facebook post is a highly unnatural way to interact with friends and acquaintances. It’s akin to standing before a room filled with every single person you know and delivering a presentation about your personal life. You really don’t want all of those people listening, since a lot of them won’t care and a few of them you’d rather not tell. Sure, Facebook’s privacy controls let you target posts in principle, but in practice it’s a lot of work, especially when you’re trying to share something quickly.

This overly public nature is a big reason why Facebook, long stereotyped as a teenage obsession, today has a self-admitted problem with young people. Namely: They are leaving. By one estimate, some 11 million fewer high school and college kids in the US use Facebook today than did three years ago. Increasingly, kids don’t want to be on a network where their parents can so easily monitor their communi­cations. The generation that has grown up with social media is also wary of its permanence—that picture you post today may come back to haunt you when you’re ready to find a job. Even the site’s central design, a timeline that literally begins with your birth, emphasizes the notion that Facebook is forever.

This approach, as popular and powerful as it turned out to be, has created an opportunity for the mobile-messaging apps. They all foster a more natural feeling of conversation taking place between ad hoc groups of friends. Even better, to participate you don’t have to set up yet another social network. Instead, you just capitalize on the one that’s already in your pocket: your phone’s address book. With all of them, you download the app and, based on matches in your phone book, get automatically connected with any of your contacts who are also on the new service. After that, it’s astonishingly fast and easy to send texts, photos, and more, just as you would with SMS. (...)

But with 450 million people, WhatsApp’s plate is already looking pretty full. Yet Livingston is probably correct in his belief that Facebook can’t win the messaging wars, even with the infusion of WhatsApp’s user base. That’s because the messaging wars might never be won by anyone.

Why? For the same reasons that companies like WhatsApp and Kik have been able to grow so fast in the first place. Mobile apps are easy to download and launch with a single finger tap; the phone’s contact list is always available to get you up and running with at least a few good friends. On mobile devices, the self-reinforcing network effect might not be as important as it has been on the web. A recent study of 15- to 25-year-olds in the UK showed that 25 percent of them were using multiple messaging apps.

“The winner-take-all dynamic is obliterated on mobile,” argues Benedict Evans, an analyst and investor with Andreessen Horowitz. It’s not just that these apps can access our address books, reducing the frictional barriers to joining. The mobile experience makes it trivial to pick different apps for different uses with the mere tap of a thumb. And this shift, in turn, accelerates the process of building com­panies around such apps. “You don’t have to raise $50 million,” Evans says. “You don’t have to have 500 employees. You can have 20 to 40 guys who have never raised any money from venture capitalists reach 500 million users.”

by Mat Honan, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Ben Wiseman

Siobhan Mcbride
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A Better Way to Pick Your Doctor

Last week, the federal government made plans to release a massive database capable of providing patients with much more information about their doctors.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the government agency that runs Medicare, plans to post on its website detailed information about how many visits and procedures individual health professionals billed the program for in 2012, and how much they were paid.

This new trove of data, which covers 880,000 health professionals, adds to a growing body of information available to patients who don’t want to leave picking a doctor to chance. But to put that information to good use, consumers need to be aware of what is available, what’s missing and how to interpret it.

So, what’s out there?

As it stands, patients can go to websites such as Yelp or Healthgrades to read reviews of their doctors submitted by other patients. They can go to the websites of state medical boards to find out whether a doctor has faced disciplinary action. If they’re really adventurous, they can seek out lawsuit filings.

At its website, ProPublica maintains a database on which patients can check whether their doctors have received payments or gifts from any of more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies. Another ProPublica database allows patients to look at which medications a doctor has prescribed to patients in Medicare’s prescription drug program. The data enables patients to compare doctors with their peers, seeing if they have unusual practices or conflicts of interest.

This fall, under a little-debated part of the Affordable Care Act, the federal government will release data on personal, promotional, and research payments to doctors from all pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Armed with this information, patients will be able to at least ask whether their doctors have prescribed a drug because it is the best one for their patients—or because of a financial relationship. (...)

These new tools all have limits. They won’t tell you whether one doctor’s patients are sicker than another’s and need different therapies. They won’t tell you about a doctor’s bedside manner or willingness to return a phone call at 3 a.m. They won’t tell you about a doctor’s surgical skill.

It’s also far from certain whether patients will embrace the tools. Currently, an array of information is available about hospitals and nursing homes, but it’s unclear that it has made much of a difference in where patients seek care. Some people would simply prefer to make decisions the old-fashioned way, relying on community networks rather than data.

Still, our experience in making data available suggests lots of people are eager to use this information to drive health care choices. Millions have visited our Prescriber Checkup and Dollars for Docs news applications.

by Charles Ornstein, Pacific Standard | Read more:Image: Yevhen Vitte/Shutterstock

How a Watch is Made

German watchmaking company NOMOS Glashütte offers a look at what goes into the assembly of one of their watches in this fascinating short film that follows one of their watchmakers.
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Brett Amory
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Here's What Happens If You Don't Do Your Taxes

You, yes you, can do your taxes this year. Many of you are done, most of you haven't started, and a few of you are freaking out. Some of you are thinking: what if I just don't file? What will happen if I don't pay? What if I didn't file last year or the year before that? What will they do to me and will I be in prison with Wesley Snipes?

I have some answers to those questions! You should note that I am not a tax professional, that this is definitely not professional advice and that every situation is unique. Also you should be doing your taxes right now probably, not reading the Internet. But here's some experience, offered person-to-person, that is not professional counsel.

It is better to do a cruddy job and file than to not file.
When I say "cruddy job," I don't mean "making wild guesstimations" or being dishonest. I mean: If you can't nail some stuff down, forget about it and move on. For instance: Do you not have receipts for some expenses? Big deal: cut them out and forget about it. (These small expense-deductions don't generally have too much effect on your tax burden anyway.) Err on the side of "hurting" yourself and just plow through it. It's just not worth making yourself crazy over fifteen bucks!

You can fix your return!
It is easy to amend a return. It's also easy for the IRS to amend your return: "You do not need to file an amended return due to math errors. The IRS will automatically make that correction." Intense, right?

It is better to file and not pay than to not file and not pay.
What happened, you spend all your money? That's okay, pal! Do your taxes, send 'em in, if you have absolutely no money. You will incur not-totally-crazy penalties over time due to not paying, and they will want to talk to you about when you can pay. (Yup, it's always the broke people that have to pay more in this world.) That's not ideal, sure! But it's a lot more ideal than not having filed.

Okay, but should I be scared of the IRS?
The IRS only wants to hear from you. The answer, surprisingly, is a very firm "no"! Not at all! The IRS has some of the nicest, most understanding people I have ever spoken with in my life. True fact.

There's a lot of TV- and movie-propagated terror about the IRS. (As well, the whole idea of the government and money is anxiety-producing on its own, sure.) And the truth is… well, they kind of used to be a little mean? But that's actually ancient history. The people at the IRS are some of the funnest people ever! I have had long hilarious conversations with them on the phone. (For real, there are some hilarious ladies down in Atlanta.) IRS employees are like most civil servants; they deal with confused, freaked out and sometimes very dingbatty people (not you, friend!) every day—the kind of people who do not follow directions, particularly. So if you are not a jerk, they will be delighted to speak to you, at length. They will sometimes be like, "Girl, how did you get into this trouble?" and you'll be like "Oh, haha, I'm a mess! Mistakes happen!" and they'll be like, "I hear you! I get it!" Do not be afraid. What they want is to hear from you.

Should I be scared of my state tax department?
Actually… well, maybe just a little. The same rules apply as above—they do want to hear from you!—but, for instance, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance seems to be a little cranky. They want their money, they want it now, and if you don't give it to them, they will take it. I'm sure there are some wonderful, caring people working in all of America's fine state tax departments!

What happens if you don't file?
Have I mentioned that the IRS only wants to hear from you?

by Choire Sicha, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Mat Honan

Goat

[ed. Full World Music album here.]

The Truth About Google X

Astro Teller is sharing a story about something bad. Or maybe it's something good. At Google X, it's sometimes hard to know the difference.

Teller is the scientist who directs day-to-day work at the search ­giant's intensely private innovation lab, which is devoted to finding unusual solutions to huge global problems. He isn't the president or chairman of X, however; his actual title, as his etched-glass business card proclaims, is Captain of Moonshots--"moonshots" being his catchall description for audacious innovations that have a slim chance of succeeding but might revolutionize the world if they do. It is evening in Mountain View, California, dinnertime in a noisy restaurant, and Teller is recounting over the din how earlier in the day he had to give some unwelcome news to his bosses, Google cofounder Sergey Brin and CFO Patrick Pichette. "It was a complicated meeting," says Teller, 43, sighing a bit. "I was telling them that one of our groups was having a hard time, that we needed to course-correct, and that it was going to cost some money. Not a trivial amount." Teller's financial team was worried; so was he. But Pichette listened to the problem and essentially said, "Thanks for telling me as soon as you knew. We'll make it work."

At first, it seems Teller's point is that the tolerance for setbacks at Google X is uncharacteristically high--a situation helped along by his bosses' zeal for the work being done there and by his parent company's extraordinary, almost ungodly, profitability. But this is actually just part of the story. There happens to be a slack line--a low tightrope--slung between trees outside the Google X offices. After the meeting, the three men walked outside, took off their shoes, and gave the line a go for 20 minutes. Pichette is quite good at walking back and forth; Brin slightly less so; Teller not at all. But they all took turns balancing on the rope, falling frequently, and getting back on. The slack line is groin-high. "It looked like a fail video from YouTube," Teller says. And that's really his message here. "When these guys are willing to fall, groan, and get up--and they're in their socks?" He leans back and pauses, as if to say: This is the essence of Google X. When the leadership can fail in full view, "then it gives everyone permission to be more like that."

Failure is not precisely the goal at Google X. But in many respects it is the means. By the time Teller and I speak, I have spent most of the day inside his lab, which no journalist has previously been allowed to explore. Throughout the morning and afternoon I visited a variety of work spaces and talked at length with members of the Google X Rapid Evaluation Team, or "Rapid Eval," as they're known, about how they vet ideas and test out the most promising ones, primarily by doing everything humanly and technologically possible to make them fall apart. Rapid Eval is the start of the innovative process at X; it is a method that emphasizes rejecting ideas much more than affirming them. That is why it seemed to me that X--which is what those who work there usually call it--sometimes resembled a cult of failure. As Rich DeVaul, the head of Rapid Eval, says: "Why put off failing until tomorrow or next week if you can fail now?" Over dinner, Teller tells me he sometimes gives a hug to people who admit mistakes or defeat in group meetings.

X does not employ your typical Silicon Valley types. Google already has a large lab division, Google Research, that is devoted mainly to computer science and Internet technologies. The distinction is sometimes framed this way: Google Research is mostly bits; Google X is mostly atoms. In other words, X is tasked with making actual objects that interact with the physical world, which to a certain extent gives logical coherence to the four main projects that have so far emerged from X: driverless cars, Google Glass, high-­altitude Wi-Fi balloons, and glucose-monitoring contact lenses. Mostly, X seeks out people who want to build stuff, and who won't get easily daunted. Inside the lab, now more than 250 ­employees strong, I met an idiosyncratic troupe of former park rangers, sculptors, philosophers, and machinists; one X scientist has won two Academy Awards for special effects. Teller himself has written a novel, worked in finance, and earned a PhD in artificial intelligence. One recent hire spent five years of his evenings and weekends building a helicopter in his garage. It actually works, and he flew it regularly, which seems insane to me. But his technology skills alone did not get him the job. The helicopter did. "The classic definition of an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing," says DeVaul. "And people like that can be extremely useful in a very focused way. But these are really not X people. What we want, in a sense, are people who know less and less about more and more."

If there's a master plan behind X, it's that a frictional arrangement of ragtag intellects is the best hope for creating products that can solve the world's most intractable issues. Yet Google X, as Teller describes it, is an experiment in itself--an effort to reconfigure the process by which a corporate lab functions, in this case by taking incredible risks across a wide variety of technological domains, and by not hesitating to stray far from its parent company's business. We don't yet know if this will prove to be genius or folly. There's actually no historical model, no ­precedent, for what these people are doing.

But in some ways that makes sense.

by Jon Gertner, Fast Company |  Read more:

Image: llustration by Owen Gildersleeve, Photo by Sam Hofman

Font War: Inside the Design World's $20 Million Divorce

Gotham is one hell of a typeface. Its Os are round, its capital letters sturdy and square, and it has the simplicity of a geometric sans without feeling clinical. The inspiration for Gotham is the lettering on signs at the Port Authority, manly works using “the type of letter that an engineer would make,” according to Tobias Frere-Jones, who is widely credited with designing the font for GQ magazine in 2000. Critics have praised Gotham as blue collar, nostalgic yet “exquisitely contemporary,” and “simply self evident.”

It’s also ubiquitous. Gotham has appeared on Netflix envelopes, Coca-Cola cans, and in the Saturday Night Live logo. It was on display at the Museum of Modern Art from 2011 to 2012 and continues to be part of the museum’s permanent collection. It also helped elect a president: In 2008, Barack Obama’s team chose Gotham as the official typeface of the campaign and used it to spell out the word HOPE on its iconic posters.

Among those who draw letters for a living, Gotham is most notable for being the crowning achievement of two of the leaders of their tribe, Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler. The two men seemed to be on parallel paths since the summer of 1970, when they were both born in New York. Hoefler and Frere-Jones were already prominent designers when they began operating as Hoefler&Frere-Jones in 1999, having decided to join forces instead of continuing their race to be type design’s top boy wonder. Each would serve as an editor for the other, and they would combine their efforts to promote the work they did together.

Colleagues still struggle to explain what a big deal this was at the time. Debbie Millman, president emeritus of AIGA, the major trade organization for graphic designers, begins by comparing them to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, then stops. “They were famous before they got together, so that’s how they’re not like the Beatles. It’s more like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young,” she says, before pausing again. “You know what—I’ll tell you what they were like. They were like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.”

For 15 years, Frere-Jones and Hoefler seemed charmed. They made typefaces that rendered the stock charts in the Wall Street Journal readable and helped Martha Stewart sell cookbooks. They created an alphabet for the New York Jets, based on the team’s logo. And they saw their lettering chiseled into stone as part of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. Last year, the duo won the AIGA Medal, the profession’s highest award. It seemed to be one of those rare situations whereby two successful soloists had combined to make an even better supergroup. Hoefler was asked if there were any troubles in their working relationship for a video produced for the AIGA in 2013. “We do have a longstanding disagreement over the height of the lower case t,” he said. “That is the only point of contention.”

Not quite. In January, Frere-Jones filed a lawsuit against Hoefler, saying that their company was not actually a partnership, but a long con in which Hoefler had tricked him into signing over the rights to all of his work, cheating Frere-Jones out of his half of the business. “In the most profound treachery and sustained exploitation of friendship, trust and confidence, Hoefler accepted all the benefits provided by Frere-Jones while repeatedly promising Frere-Jones that he would give him the agreed equity, only to refuse to do so when finally demanded,” the complaint charges. Frere-Jones is asking a court to grant him $20 million. Hoefler won’t comment on the suit directly, but the day after it was filed a lawyer for the company issued a brief statement disputing the claims, which, it said, “are false and without legal merit.” (About Gotham’s creation, Hoefler writes in an email: “No one is disputing Tobias’s role in those projects, or my own, for that matter. [Our] typefaces have had a lot of other contributors, as well — everything we do here is a team effort.”) According to the company statement, Frere-Jones was not Hoefler’s partner but a “longtime employee.”

by Joshua Brustein, Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:

Image: Kathy Willens/AP