[ed. The Amiga 1000, my first computer. As Byte magazine said, "the first multimedia computer... so far ahead of its time that almost nobody—including Commodore's marketing department—could fully articulate what it was all about" .]
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1,000 True Fans

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist’s works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

To raise your sales out of the flatline of the long tail you need to connect with your True Fans directly. Another way to state this is, you need to convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans.

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day’s wages per year in support of what you do. That “one-day-wage” is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let’s peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.

The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support. You also benefit from the direct feedback and love.

The technologies of connection and small-time manufacturing make this circle possible. Blogs and RSS feeds trickle out news, and upcoming appearances or new works. Web sites host galleries of your past work, archives of biographical information, and catalogs of paraphernalia. Diskmakers, Blurb, rapid prototyping shops, Myspace, Facebook, and the entire digital domain all conspire to make duplication and dissemination in small quantities fast, cheap and easy. You don’t need a million fans to justify producing something new. A mere one thousand is sufficient.

This small circle of diehard fans, which can provide you with a living, is surrounded by concentric circles of Lesser Fans. These folks will not purchase everything you do, and may not seek out direct contact, but they will buy much of what you produce. The processes you develop to feed your True Fans will also nurture Lesser Fans. As you acquire new True Fans, you can also add many more Lesser Fans. If you keep going, you may indeed end up with millions of fans and reach a hit. I don’t know of any creator who is not interested in having a million fans.

But the point of this strategy is to say that you don’t need a hit to survive. You don’t need to aim for the short head of best-sellerdom to escape the long tail. There is a place in the middle, that is not very far away from the tail, where you can at least make a living. That mid-way haven is called 1,000 True Fans. It is an alternate destination for an artist to aim for.

by Kevin Kelly, The Technium |  Read more:

Image: CBBC News

First Class Seats on the Internet

The Federal Communications Commission, America's telcoms regulator, has formulated a plan to allow internet service providers (ISPs) to charge companies for the right to "premium" access to its customers. This is the worst internet policy news imaginable. It should strike terror into the heart of anyone who cares about fairness, politics, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, fair trade, entrepreneurship, or innovation. The FCC now stands as the world's foremost symbol for "regulatory capture," and its chairman – a former cable executive lobbyist – is the poster child for an unhealthy relationship between industry and its regulators. 

What's at stake is "network neutrality," which is the simple principle that your ISP should give you the bits you ask for, as quickly as it can, and not deliberately slow down the data you're looking for.

(There are valid arguments to be made about network management techniques that try to slow down some customers' connections in order to ensure that other customers get their fair share of the internet, but anyone who brings up those arguments in this context is just trying to sow confusion by changing the subject. Whatever network management is, it's not an ISP discriminatorily slowing down Netflix streams and delivering its own, competing streams with less jitter and delay because Netflix hasn't paid protection money this month.)

The ISPs say they only want to get paid for the use of their service, but the problem is, they're already getting paid. You pay your internet bill every month. Netflix, Google, Yahoo, the Guardian and Boing Boing all pay their internet bills every month. The ISPs aren't seeking to get paid, they're seeking to get paid twice: once by you, and a second time because you are now their hostage and the companies you want to do business with have to get through them to get to you.

There's a useful analogy to the phone company that I've written about here before: you pay for your phone service every month. The pizza place on the corner also pays for its phone service every month. When you want to order a pizza from Joe's Corner Pizzeria, you call their number. If their phone isn't engaged, it rings and you get to place your order. If they get more orders than they can handle on one line, they buy a second line, a third, even 10 lines to take their orders. Provided one of those lines is free, your call goes through to someone when you ring.

But what if your phone company decided that the way to bring in higher profits was to go around to all the pizza places and shake them down for "premium" access to "their" customers? If Joe's Corner Pizzeria turned them down, your call to Joe's might get a busy signal, even if there were plenty of free lines at Joe's place. Meanwhile, an order to the monied, tasteless sultan of global cardboard pizza-ite, that is, the company who has plenty of money for "premium" access – is easy to reach, because your phone company has promised them that every call will be put through.

The thing is, Joe's is paying for its lines. You're paying for your line. The phone company exists solely to connect people to the numbers they dial. But because there are "natural monopolies" in phone service (because there are only so many mobile frequencies and underground cable space), they can abuse their position to extort additional payments from the services you want to talk to. And the more popular a service is, the better it is, the more the ISP stands to profit from this racket. (...)

If you think of a business idea that's better than any that have come before – if you're ready to do to Google what Google did to Altavista; if you're ready to do to the iPod what the iPod did to the Walkman; if you're ready to do to Netflix what Netflix did to cable TV – you have to start out with a bribery warchest that beats out the firms that clawed their way to the top back when there was a fairer playing-field.

by Cory Doctrow, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Nacho Doce/Reuters/Corbis

The Ford Show is Riveting, but Soon We’ll Stop Believing It

From: The producer

To: The writers

Re: The Rob Ford Show

When you pitched me a show about a rogue mayor from Toronto, I thought you were nuts. Toronto? What ever happens in Toronto? As my man Bill Clinton said, the show smashes every stereotype about Canadians. But I was wrong. The Rob Ford Show is a crazy success – like, Game of Thrones crazy. The whole world is watching. Jimmy Kimmel is obsessed. Your creation Rob Ford is the most compelling TV character since Tony Soprano, only funnier.

You had me hooked right from the start. I howled when you had him call the cops on the comedienne in the breast plate. I had fits when he was caught reading behind the wheel and giving the finger to that mom from his van. I died when he tackled that lady councillor in the council chamber. Boom! I could watch that in slo-mo a million times.

Last season, when you showed me the crack scripts, I thought you were going too far. A mayor of Toronto smoking crack? In a crack house, with crackheads? I was wrong again. It was good to go dark. Dark is big box office these days. Except that Rob Ford makes Breaking Bad look like The Care Bears. Walter White has nothing on your Rob.

The mystery packages in the gas station? The partying at city hall? The sketchy friends like “Sandro” and “Princess.” Princess! Ha! Courtney Love kills it in that role.

The show keeps getting weirder. “Enough to eat at home”? Those stiffs at broadcast standards weren’t happy about that one, believe me. And who dreamed up the episode where Rob rants about the police chief at the (adore the name) Steak Queen? In Jamaican! Whatever you guys are smoking back there, smoke some more – and bill me.

by Marcus Gee, Globe and Mail | Read more:
Image: Randy Holmes

Ed Van der Elsken
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The Adjunct Revolt

Mary-Faith Cerasoli has been reduced to “sleeping in her car, showering at college athletic centers and applying for food stamps,” The New York Times recently reported. Is she unemployed? No, in fact, she is a college professor— but an adjunct one, meaning she is hired on a short-term contract with no possibility of tenure.

A spate of research about the contingent academic workforce indicates that Cerasoli’s circumstances are not exceptional. This month, a report by the American Association of University Professors showed that adjuncts now constitute 76.4 percent of U.S. faculty across all institutional types, from liberal-arts colleges to research universities to community colleges. A study released by the U.S. House of Representatives in January reveals that the majority of these adjuncts live below the poverty line.

Over spring break, Cerasoli publicly protested her working conditions on the steps of New York Department of Education wearing a vest emblazoned with the words “Homeless Prof” on it. Her efforts dovetail with a national labor movement in which thousands of adjuncts are fighting for change within the higher-education system. In the short-term, adjuncts are demanding a living wage, but they are also proposing long-term solutions to structural problems ailing universities. Many argue that the dependence on contingent labor is part of a larger pattern of corporatizing the university, which they believe is harming not just professors and students, but society more broadly. (...)

How did it come to this? Jeffrey Selingo, author of College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What it Means for Students, argues that the shift towards contingent labor occurred because university administrators began to focus on enhancing the student experience outside—rather than inside—the classroom. “We moved away from a faculty-centric university to one focused on serving students,” he told me. “To attract students, universities need amenities to keep up in an arms race with other institutions,” he says. Instead of being an institution of public good, the university began to look more and more like a business in which the student was the customer.

Selingo points out that university administration costs have ballooned over the last two decades, as universities hired non-faculty staff to run the growing list of campus amenities. Given these skyrocketing expenses, administrators felt pressure to cut costs. “As professors started to retire, administrators realized that if they did not hire tenure-track professors, they could have more flexibility with their workforce,” explains Selingo. At the same time, graduate schools were churning out large numbers of Ph.D.s willing to teach single courses for a few thousand dollars, so hiring adjuncts seemed like a simple solution.

Maisto argues that in the midst of these changes administrators lost sight of the university’s mission. “This adjunct crisis did not happen because of some grand, nefarious plot,” she told me. “It has to do with the reactive character of university leadership who got caught up in short-term thinking rather than intentional, long-term strategic planning.” Yet, Maisto and other activists believe that it is not too late to change the system.

by Elizabeth Segran, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Jamie Long

Whitewood Under Siege

There are approximately two billion wooden shipping pallets in the United States. They are in the holds of tractor-trailers, transporting Honey Nut Cheerios and oysters and penicillin and just about any other product you can think of: sweaters, copper wire, lab mice, and so on. They are piled up behind supermarkets, out back, near the loading dock. They are at construction sites, on sidewalks, in the trash, in your neighbor’s basement. They are stacked in warehouses and coursing their way through the bowels of factories.

The magic of these pallets is the magic of abstraction. Take any object you like, pile it onto a pallet, and it becomes, simply, a “unit load”—standardized, cubical, and ideally suited to being scooped up by the tines of a forklift. This allows your Cheerios and your oysters to be whisked through the supply chain with great efficiency; the gains are so impressive, in fact, that many experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century. Studies have estimated that pallets consume 12 to 15 percent of all lumber produced in the US, more than any other industry except home construction.

Some pallets also carry an aesthetic charge. It’s mostly about geometry: parallel lines and negative space, slats and air. There is also the appeal of the raw, unpainted wood, the cheapest stuff you can buy from a lumber mill—“bark and better,” it’s called. These facts have not escaped the notice of artists, architects, designers, or DIY enthusiasts. In 2003, the conceptual artist Stuart Keeler presented stacks of pallets in a gallery show, calling them “the elegant serving-platters of industry”; more recently, Thomas Hirschhorn featured a giant pallet construction as part of his Gramsci Monument. Etsy currently features dozens of items made from pallets, from window planters and chaise lounges to more idiosyncratic artifacts, such as a decorative teal crucifix mounted on a pallet. If shipping containers had their cultural moment a decade ago, pallets are having theirs now.

Since World War II, most of America’s pallet needs have been met by several thousand small and mid-sized businesses. These form the nucleus of not just an industry, but a sprawling, anarchic ecosystem—a world, really, complete with its own customs, language, and legends, with a political class, with its own media. This world is known as “whitewood.” There are approximately forty thousand citizens of whitewood, ranging from pallet pickers (who salvage pallets from the trash) to pallet recyclers (who repair broken pallets and make them whole) to pallet manufacturers, pallet consultants, pallet academics, pallet thieves, and pallet association presidents. Whitewood includes people who crisscross the country selling pallet repair machinery, preaching the gospel of tools such as the Rogers Un-Nailer.

Not all pallets belong to the world of whitewood. The most important other category—and whitewood’s chief antagonist—is the blue pallet. These blues are not just a different color; they are also built differently, and play by different rules, and for the past twenty-five years, the conflict between blue and white has been the central theme in the political economy of American pallets. The person most identified with this conflict is a soft-spoken, middle-aged man from Kansas named Bob Moore. Currently embroiled in a legal battle over a pallet deal gone bad, Moore is a singular figure in the industry and a magnet for controversy. When not in federal court, he can sometimes be found piloting a Mooney Acclaim Type S turboprop airplane, which he prefers, when possible, to flying commercial. The Mooney is a good place to concentrate, one imagines. And it is important to concentrate when plotting the future of pallets.

by Jacob Hodes, Cabinet |  Read more:

Image: Laszlo Bilki

Eric Fischl
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N. Anderson
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Growing-Ups

One of the most common insults to today’s emerging adults is that they’re lazy. According to this view, young people are ‘slackers’ who avoid work whenever possible, preferring to sponge off their parents for as long as they can get away with it. One of the reasons they avoid real work is that have an inflated sense of entitlement. They expect work to be fun, and if it’s not fun, they refuse to do it.

It’s true that emerging adults have high hopes for work, and even, yes, a sense of being entitled to enjoy their work. Ian, a 22-year-old who was interviewed for my 2004 book, chose to go into journalism, even though he knew that: ‘If I’m a journalist making $20,000 a year, my dad [a wealthy physician] makes vastly more than that.’ More important than the money was finding a job that he could love. ‘If I enjoy thoroughly doing what I’m doing in life, then I would be better off than my dad.’ Emerging adults enter the workplace seeking what I call identity-based work, meaning a job that will be a source of self-fulfillment and make the most of their talents and interests. They want a job that they will look forward to doing when they get up each morning.

You might think that this is not a realistic expectation for work, and you are right. But keep in mind it was their parents’ generation, the Baby Boomers, who invented the idea that work should be fun. No one had ever thought so before. Baby Boomers rejected the traditional assumption that work was a dreary but unavoidable part of the human condition. They declared that they didn’t want to spend their lives simply slaving away – and their children grew up in this new world, assuming that work should be meaningful and self-fulfilling. Now that those children are emerging adults, their Baby Boomer parents and employers grumble at their presumptuousness.

So, yes, emerging adults today have high and often unrealistic expectations for work, but lazy? That’s laughably false. While they look for their elusive dream job, they don’t simply sit around and play video games and update their Facebook page all day. The great majority of them spend most of their twenties in a series of unglamorous, low-paying jobs as they search for something better. The average American holds ten different jobs between the ages of 18 and 29, and most of them are the kinds of jobs that promise little respect and less money. Have you noticed who is waiting on your table at the restaurant, working the counter at the retail store, stocking the shelves at the supermarket? Most of them are emerging adults. Many of them are working and attending school at the same time, trying to make ends meet while they strive to move up the ladder. It’s unfair to tar the many hard-working emerging adults with a stereotype that is true for only a small percentage of them.

Is striving for identity-based work only for the middle class and the wealthy, who have the advantages in American society? Yes and no. The aspiration stretches across social classes: in the national Clark poll, 79 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds agreed that: ‘It is more important for me to enjoy my job than to make a lot of money,’ and there were no differences across social class backgrounds (represented by mother’s education). However, the reality is quite different from the aspiration. Young Americans from lower social class backgrounds are far less likely than those from higher social backgrounds to obtain a college education and, without a college degree, jobs of any kind are scarce in the modern information-based economy. The current US unemployment rate is twice as high for those with only a high-school degree or less than it is for those with a four-year college degree. In the national Clark poll, emerging adults from lower social class backgrounds were far more likely than their more advantaged peers to agree that ‘I have not been able to find enough financial support to get the education I need.’ That’s not their fault. It is the fault of their society which short-sightedly fails to fund education and training adequately, and thereby squanders the potential and aspirations of the young.

Another widespread slur against emerging adults is that they are selfish. Some American researchers – most notoriously Jean Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University and a well-known writer and speaker – claim that young people today have grown more ‘narcissistic’ compared with their equivalents 30 or 40 years ago. This claim is based mainly on surveys of college students that show increased levels of self-esteem. Today’s students are more likely than in the past to agree with statements such as: ‘I am an important person.’

With this stereotype, too, there is a grain of truth that has been vastly overblown. It’s probably true that most emerging adults today grow up with a higher level of self-esteem than in previous generations. Their Baby Boomer parents have been telling them from the cradle onward: ‘You’re special!’ ‘You can be whatever you want to be!’ ‘Dream big dreams!’ and the like. Popular culture has reinforced these messages, in movies, television shows and songs. Well, they actually believed it. In the national Clark poll, nearly all 18- to 29-year-olds (89 per cent) agreed with the statement: ‘I am confident that eventually I will get what I want out of life.’

But – and this is the key point – that doesn’t mean they’re selfish. It certainly doesn’t mean they are a generation of narcissists. It simply means that they are highly confident in their abilities to make a good life for themselves, whatever obstacles they might face. Would we prefer that they cringed before the challenges of adulthood? I have come to see their high self-esteem and confidence as good psychological armour for entering a tough adult world. Most people get knocked down more than once in the course of their 20s, by love, by work, by any number of dream bubbles that are popped by rude reality. High self-esteem is what allows them to get up again and continue moving forward. For example, Nicole, 25, grew up in poverty as the oldest of four children in a household with a mentally disabled mother and no father. Her goals for her life have been repeatedly delayed or driven off track by her family responsibilities. Nevertheless, she is pursuing a college degree and is determined to reach her ultimate goal of getting a PhD. Her self-belief is what has enabled her to overcome a chaotic childhood full of disadvantages. ‘It’s like, the more you come at me, the stronger I’m going to be,’ she told me when I interviewed her for my 2004 book.

by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Thomas Peter/Reuters

Leo Kottke

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Goodbye Net Neutrality - Life in the Fast Lane

The principle that all Internet content should be treated equally as it flows through cables and pipes to consumers looks all but dead.

The Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday that it would propose new rules that allow companies like Disney, Google or Netflix to pay Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon for special, faster lanes to send video and other content to their customers.

The proposed changes would affect what is known as net neutrality — the idea that no providers of legal Internet content should face discrimination in providing offerings to consumers, and that users should have equal access to see any legal content they choose.

The proposal comes three months after a federal appeals court struck down, for the second time, agency rules intended to guarantee a free and open Internet.

Tom Wheeler, the F.C.C. chairman, defended the agency’s plans late Wednesday, saying speculation that the F.C.C. was “gutting the open Internet rule” is “flat out wrong.” Rather, he said, the new rules will provide for net neutrality along the lines of the appeals court’s decision.

Still, the regulations could radically reshape how Internet content is delivered to consumers. For example, if a gaming company cannot afford the fast track to players, customers could lose interest and its product could fail.

The rules are also likely to eventually raise prices as the likes of Disney and Netflix pass on to customers whatever they pay for the speedier lanes, which are the digital equivalent of an uncongested car pool lane on a busy freeway.

Consumer groups immediately attacked the proposal, saying that not only would costs rise, but also that big, rich companies with the money to pay large fees to Internet service providers would be favored over small start-ups with innovative business models — stifling the birth of the next Facebook or Twitter.

“If it goes forward, this capitulation will represent Washington at its worst,” said Todd O’Boyle, program director of Common Cause’s Media and Democracy Reform Initiative. “Americans were promised, and deserve, an Internet that is free of toll roads, fast lanes and censorship — corporate or governmental.”

If the new rules deliver anything less, he added, “that would be a betrayal.”

by Edward Wyatt, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times

Hubert Wolfs (Belgian, 1899-1937), Composition with fish, 1926.
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The Possibility of Self-Sacrifice

Normally, death is present in our lives as an ending-yet-to-arrive. For most of us, Simone Weil writes, “Death appears as a limit set in advance on the future.” We make plans, pursue goals, navigate relationships—all under the condition of death. We lead our lives under the condition of death; our actions are shaped by it as a surface is shaped by its boundaries.

However, as we approach this boundary, when our end is present, we are nothing but terror. All pursuits disintegrate, and our self-understanding collapses. At once we are expelled from the sphere of meaning. We are nothing more than this body. This body and its last breath. It is not simply that we cannot survive our own death; we cannot bear the sight of it. We do not want to die. Not now.

And yet the possibility of self-sacrifice suggests that this terror can be overcome, that death can be meaningful. One recent example is that of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire in December 2010 and whose death put in motion the massive uprising known as the Arab Spring. But there are many less noted acts of self-sacrifice. In different places and moments in time, in different languages and cultures, soldiers, activists, lovers, friends, and parents exhibit a willingness to die that demands our attention.

Such acts, so difficult to comprehend, may seem at first sight unworthy of serious consideration. But rushing to this conclusion would be a mistake. It is not only that by dismissing acts of self-sacrifice as unintelligible we disavow a prevalent and influential human phenomenon. Understanding these acts may also shed light on the way we value things more generally. Indeed, we will see that even if most of us will never actually take such extreme measures, the possibility of self-sacrifice is part of living a meaningful life.

Consider, then, three famous individuals whose deaths are often seen as examples of self-sacrifice. As we consider their deaths, we will come to realize that only one of them found meaning in her own life and that, surprisingly, of the three it is only her death that may properly be called an act of self-sacrifice.

Three Sights of Death
First: a seventy-year-old man. His beard elongates his stocky face. He has an exceptionally broad and flattened nose. Its nostrils flare with each breath, as if each drawing of air originates in a new, voluntary decision to inhale. We watch him in the early hours of dawn, sitting quietly in his prison cell. The skin on his forehead is wrinkled and soft and covered with dried sweat. He has not bathed during these days of waiting, of which this day is second to last.

The old man’s eyes are fixed on the spot where his friend and disciple had just stood. Only a moment ago his friend spoke hopefully, pleading with the old man to flee this jail, to come with him, to save himself. Perhaps the old man is considering the state of mind his friend must be in now: walking back, his mission unfulfilled, unable to understand why his wish that life prevail was shattered by the wisest of men.

Crito has left, and Socrates, who thrived most amongst the crowds, is now alone­ in his cell, having turned down his last chance of survival. On the day after tomorrow he will drink a cup of poisoned hemlock and expire in accordance with the decision of the Athenian court. The sun rises in the sky outside and daylight fills the dank, dusty cell. Socrates breathes calmly, his nostrils flare and contract. It is summer, 399 BCE.

Socrates could not acknowledge that his death would be a terrible loss.

Second: two months short of his forty-sixth birthday, a man in uniform steps from a balcony into an office that is not his own. The office belongs to the commandant of the Japan Self-Defense Force, who is tied and held at sword-point near the wall. “I don’t even think they heard me,” the man says, as he undoes the last button of his uniform jacket.

A moment ago, standing on the balcony, he had called upon the 800 soldiers of the 32nd Regiment to rise against Japan’s liberal-democratic constitution in the name of the country’s history and tradition: “Will you abide a world in which the spirit is dead and there is only a reverence for life?” he asked. The soldiers jeered and hissed, “Let the commandant go!” “Come down off there!” He was not able to finish his speech and decided to move forward with his plan. He motioned to his soldier, Morita, and together they called out, “Long live his imperial Majesty! Long live his imperial Majesty! Long live his imperial Majesty!”

Having failed to inspire a coup d’état, the man sits on the floor of the commandant’s office, and Morita takes his place behind him and slightly to his left, a sword raised above his head. The man grasps a short sword with both hands and points it to his stomach. His strong eyebrows sharpen, but his face is still imprinted with vulnerability. He was a tender, sickly child, and though his features have hardened over the years, though he is now the commander of his own army, the Shield Society, the fragile essence of his face has remained: his right eye slightly larger than his left and higher on his face.

The next moment, the man will disembowel himself. He will then be decapitated by Morita, with the help of another soldier, Furu-Koga, who will, in turn, decapitate Morita and thereby complete the seppuku ritual and the effort of the Shield Society to revive “the spirit of Japan.” This will be the end of one of Japan’s most celebrated and prolific authors, Yukio Mishima, in Tokyo, November 25, 1970.

Third: a forty-year-old woman in the midst of a great crowd of people huddled around the Epsom Downs Racecourse, south of London. Her thin lips are pressed together, her eyes, normally weary and doubtful, are filled with intent. She stands close to the barrier that separates the masses from the racetrack and watches the horses’ hooves thump the ground.

The socialites, the gamblers, the peddlers, the riff-raff, the jockeys, King George V and his wife Queen Mary—all are present and following the race. None entertains a shred of doubt that the Derby will run its course. Emily Wilding Davison, a militant suffragette, resists this overwhelming certainty. She stands still, around her the incessant movement of things and events, the habitual pattern of human and animal affairs. She clasps the metal bar and takes a deep breath. She slips under the railing, the suffragettes’ flag on her body, and runs to the king’s horse, which has appeared around the bend. Days later she will die of her injuries. It is June 4, 1913—Derby Day.

Socrates, Yukio Mishima, and Emily Wilding Davison. Perhaps the only thing they have in common is their public embrace of death. All three had sufficient time and leisure to consider their options, to choose their ending, and all saw death as their final, life-affirming action.

by Oded Na’aman, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Dexter Dalwood
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How BP's Gulf Settlement Became Its Target

The oil rig fire and the nearly unstoppable fountain of oil that followed at the Macondo Prospect on April 20, 2010, was the largest marine oil spill in the nation’s history. The oil poured into the gulf for 87 days, fouling an estimated 68,000 square miles of waters and almost 500 miles of coastline from Louisiana to Florida.

With complex ripple effects and lingering uncertainty about the health of the gulf, the economic impact remains nearly impossible to quantify. But BP, exceeding its obligations under the federal Oil Pollution Act to compensate victims, set up a multibillion-dollar program and turned to Kenneth R. Feinberg, an expert in administering complicated programs like the Sept. 11 victims compensation fund, to run it. (...)

But in meeting halls and boardrooms along the gulf, Mr. Feinberg’s compensation program was criticized as being confusing and unpredictable.

“I can’t tell you how many times we did our financials,” said Michael Hinojosa, the owner of Midship Marine, a boat building company in Harvey. “They always asked for more documentation. They kept asking for more and more, and we kept giving it to them.”

With anger and criticism mounting, BP and a committee of plaintiffs’ lawyers began to work out, over nearly 150 negotiating sessions, a broad settlement that could help the company limit the scope of any coming litigation. Negotiators envisioned a program very different from Mr. Feinberg’s. The new claims process was intended to be accessible, and the explicitly stated goal was to help claimants get the largest amount for which they qualified.

Both sides agreed on a claims administrator: Patrick Juneau, a laid-back Louisiana lawyer and a veteran administrator of major settlement funds, including the one resulting from lawsuits over the painkilling drug Vioxx.

A central element of the agreement, however, would prove to be a time bomb. Instead of having claims calculators contend with different kinds of arguable evidence to prove that damage was linked to the spill, the negotiators came up with a formula that relied solely on financial data for proof of harm. If a business was in a certain region and could prove that its income dropped and rose again in a specific pattern during 2010, that would be enough to establish a claim.

To David A. Logan, the dean of the law school at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, this was a creative way to avoid endless minitrials. “The whole idea is to make this proceed without laborious technical findings on causation,” he said.

The deal covered a broad array of businesses in the gulf states, stretching all the way to the Tennessee state line. It offered those claiming damages the potential of maximizing compensation. For BP, it promised to sharply reduce the number of litigants it would face.

The agreement was unusual in another critical way: There was no limit on the overall payout. Aside from a fund for the seafood industry capped at $2.3 billion, BP had agreed not to turn off the spigot as long as there were legitimate claims to pay.

Elizabeth Cabraser, a member of the group of lawyers representing damage claimants, described the deal, which runs to more than a thousand pages including exhibits, as “the most detailed, highly defined settlement agreement that I’ve ever seen.”

“It was a model,” she said. “Up until the day it wasn’t.” (...)

Lawyers all along the Gulf Coast tell the same story: of taking a casual look at the agreement, reading it with increasing disbelief and then immediately encouraging their partners to read it, too. Accountants were hired, chambers of commerce were contacted, and clients — doctors, nonprofit organizations, just about any type of enterprise — were urged to gather financial documents. Law firms, also eligible for claims under the deal, began to look at their own account books.

One lawyer in Tampa, Fla., sent out a mass mailing, later highlighted in court filings by BP, saying that “the craziest thing about the settlement is that you can be compensated for losses that are UNRELATED to the spill.”

by Campbell Robertson and John Schwarz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: U.S. Coast Guard, via Reuters

Damon Albarn

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