Main Street, USA

Recently, while on a road trip across America, I stayed in a hotel haunted by the ghost of the Nobel-Prize-winning-author Sinclair Lewis. This was in the small town of Sauk Centre, Minn., in a four-story, turn-of-the century brick building called the Palmer House. Lewis, who grew up in Sauk Centre, worked at the Palmer House during his teens behind the cigar counter. The hotel’s website boasts that Lewis’s ghost has since been spotted throwing glasses in the lobby bar.

If you know anything about Sinclair Lewis, it isn’t difficult to picture him as a cursed, complaining specter. He had, by all accounts, a very unhappy time in Sauk Centre. Born Harry Sinclair Lewis to a stern and taciturn physician who didn’t relate to Lewis’s bookish, sensitive nature (“You boys will always be able to make a living,” Lewis’s father once told his other two sons, “But poor Harry, there’s nothing he can do.”) Lewis was a shy, strange, and often ridiculed little boy. His kind of fast-talking hyper-intelligence didn’t go over well in that farmland setting. He was derided by peers and elders alike for being “old-fashioned” and “queer.” It didn’t help that he was awkwardly tall, with bright red hair and acne all over his face. In 1901, he tried unsuccessfully to run away—hoping, he said, to join the Spanish-American War. He was 13.

In 1920, Lewis finally got his revenge on his hometown with the publication of his novel Main Street. By then he was a Yale graduate, married, and living in the rapidly-growing city of Washington, DC. The plot of the novel concerns a spirited, socially-minded young woman from St. Paul named Carol Kennicott, who is forced to move to a small Minnesotan town after marrying the town’s physician. She finds the place stifling and soul-crushing, the people gossip-prone and petty. Critics lauded the novel as a satirical send-up of provincial small-town life, and the book’s enormous success launched Lewis’s literary career. The book became so famous, in fact, that “Main Street” entered the cultural lexicon as a metonym for small-town life—one used to this day, though its meaning has shifted. Originally, the term was used pejoratively, denoting a backward, ignorant, isolated way of life. It wasn’t until the ’40s and ’50s, with the rise of small-town depictions in film and television, that the term began to accrue fond, nostalgic connotations.

At the time of the book’s publication, the citizens of Sauk Centre, recognizing themselves as real-life models for the novel’s more insipid characters, were enraged. The Sauk Centre Herald waited six months before mentioning the bestselling book. But gradually the town came to embrace Lewis’s novel. By the 1950s, Sauk Centre’s real-life Main Street had been recast as a tourist attraction.

Lewis published over 23 books and is best known today for Babbitt—another satirical novel that coined a new American phrase—but outside of the English classroom, his work has been largely forgotten. Meanwhile, suburban sprawl has all but done in the idea of a small town with a bustling city center. And yet, Sauk Centre still stands today, its Main Street largely intact. (...)

The Sinclair Lewis Interpretative Center sits on the corner of Main and 12th, across the street from a Snap Fitness Center and a Dairy Queen. The squat little building is flat-topped and brutalist, more like a military bunker than a literary museum. A motion sensor sounded like an alarm as I entered the antechamber, where a bronzed bust of Sinclair Lewis’s scowling head was poised on a plinth.

That Friday morning, I was the museum’s only visitor. The guestbook hadn’t been signed in weeks.

“...[O]ut of this setting emerged a man of such independent spirit that he not only started a new era in literature—he forced Americans to take a new, more critical look at themselves,” read one of the museum’s exhibits. “Because of him, America will never be the same again.”

“I mean, his books just aren’t all that exciting to modern readers,” Andrea Kerfeld, the executive director of the Sauk Centre Chamber of Commerce, whose office shares the same building as the museum, told me a while later. She winced a little with guilt. “Frankly we’d do a lot better with a Brett Favre Museum, something like that. But it’s what we’ve got.”

by Matt Ray Robinson, TMN |  Read more:

Image Matt Ray Robinson

Night Fishing at Antibes, 1939 ~ Pablo Picasso
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The Library of Congress Wants to Destroy Your Old CDs (For Science)

If you've tried listening to any of your old CDs lately, if you even own them anymore, you may have noticed they won't play. That's what happened to mine, anyway.

CD players have long since given up on most of the burned mixes I made in college. (In some cases, this is for the best.) And while most of the studio-manufactured albums I bought still play, there's really no telling how much longer they will. My once-treasured CD collection—so carefully assembled over the course of about a decade beginning in 1994—isn't just aging; it's dying. And so is yours.

"All of the modern formats weren't really made to last a long period of time," said Fenella France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress. "They were really more developed for mass production.""If you want to really kill your discs, just leave them in your car over the summer."

France and her colleagues are trying to figure out how CDs age so that we can better understand how to save them. This is a tricky business, in large part because manufacturers have changed their processes over the years but won't say how. And so: we know a CD's basic composition—there's a plastic polycarbonate layer, a metal reflective layer with all the data in it, and then the coating on top—but it's impossible to tell just from looking at a disc how it will age. (...)

There are all kinds of forces that accelerate CD aging in real time. Eventually, many discs show signs of edge rot, which happens as oxygen seeps through a disc's layers. Some CDs begin a deterioration process called bronzing, which is corrosion that worsens with exposure to various pollutants. The lasers in devices used to burn or even play a CD can also affect its longevity.

Then there's the wear and tear that's more in line with what you'd probably expect to happen over time—like scratches and exposure to extreme temperatures. ("If you want to really kill your discs, just leave them in your car over the summer. That's a really great way to destroy them," France says.)

But it turns out that plenty of people don't know how to care for CDs properly in the first place. For instance, the best way to hold a CD is to pinch the hole in the middle, and the top surface of the CD—the side that faces up when it's playing—is more delicate than the bottom. Again, France: "People are generally more concerned about the scratches on the bottom, but actually you can get quite a lot more damage when you get scratches on the top layer because it goes through and impacts the metal reflective layer. So quite often you find people are really careful not to put their hands underneath, but holding it in the middle is better."

It's also better not to muck up the top of your CDs with labels—the adhesive creates chemical reactions that quickly eat up data—or even permanent markers. "The moment you start to write on that top layer, you're setting yourself up for degradation," France said.

by Adrienne LaFrance, Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Adrienne LaFrance

Lawyer Responds to Porn Star's Threatened Lawsuit

[ed. Classic.]

Millionaire playboy and Instagram celebrity Dan Bilzerian is best known of late for chucking a 90-pound porn star, Janice Griffith, off his mansion roof during a shoot for Hustler, and missing the pool. Griffith threatened to sue, and now Bilzerian's lawyer has purportedly writtenthe snarkiest response Bilzerian's money could buy.

via: Gawker and TFM

Banksy, Girl with blue bird
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Pat Metheny Group

Iselin Steiro in State of Emergency for Vogue Italia, September 2006. Shot by Steven Meisel
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[ed. For the mathematically challenged. Like me.]
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Inside the Strange New World of DIY Brain Stimulation

When Brent Williams got to RadioShack that day in the spring of 2012, he knew exactly what he was looking for: a variable resistor, a current regulator, a circuit board, and a 9-volt battery. The total came to around $20. Williams is tall and balding, with wire-rim glasses that make him look like an engineer, which he is. He directs a center on technology in education at Kennesaw State University and is the kind of guy who spends his free time chatting up people on his ham radio or trying to glimpse a passing comet with his telescope. But this project was different.

When he got home, he took his supplies into his office. He heated up his soldering iron, hoping his wife wouldn’t see what he was up to. He fished a few wires out of his desk and built a simple circuit. Using alligator clips, he connected the circuit to two kitchen sponges soaked in saline and strapped them to his head with a sweatband. He positioned one sponge just above his right eyebrow and the other up high on the left side of his forehead. Then he snapped the battery into place, turned a small dial, and sent an electric current into his brain.

It’s been nearly two years since Williams cobbled together his first device, and he has been electrifying his brain two to three times a week ever since. Often he does it for about 25 minutes in the evening while reading on the couch. Sometimes it’s while he’s doing laundry or other chores. It’s become just another part of his routine, like brushing his teeth.

Williams got the idea from a news story about how Air Force researchers were studying whether brain stimulation could cut pilot training time. The military is not alone in thinking that brain zapping may improve mental function. In recent years, the method—technically known as transcranial direct current stimulation—has caught the interest of academic researchers. British neuroscientists have claimed it can make people better at learning math. A team at Harvard has found promise for depression and chronic pain. Others are looking into using it to treat tinnitus and eating disorders and to speed up stroke recovery. Hundreds of papers have been published, and clinical trials are under way.

Though these are still early days for the research—many of the studies are small and the effects modest—it has inspired largely enthusiastic media coverage (“the electric thinking cap that makes you cleverer … and happier!” one British newspaper gushed) and spawned a community of DIY brain zappers.

Williams is one of its leaders. The treatments have made a huge difference in his life, he says. He retains more information from the tedious journal articles he has to read for work, and he feels more creative. On his blog, SpeakWisdom, he posts technically detailed reviews of stimulation devices and cheerfully gives advice to anyone considering trying it for the first time. He’s got lots of company. A subreddit devoted to the practice has nearly 4,000 subscribers who actively follow the scientific research and share tips on where to place the electrodes on your head if, say, you’re depressed, too impulsive, or just want to amp up your creativity.

Williams is spreading the brain-zapping idea closer to home too. He has built brain stimulators for his wife (he couldn’t keep the secret very long) and several friends and acquaintances. All in all, he has persuaded at least a dozen people to give it a try. One says she’s gone off antidepressants for the first time in 20 years. Another says brain stimulation is helping him get his ADD under control. Several ambitious middle-­aged professionals say the devices have boosted their memory and focus.

Entrepreneurs are starting to get in on the action. A company called foc.us has already planted a flag with a commercial brain-stimulation headset released last year. It’s marketed as a gadget for videogamers looking to improve their skills, thus skirting the need for FDA approval. The first batch of 3,000 sold out in just a few months. So did the second.

With easy access to the research, the equipment, and each other, self-experimenters aren’t consulting their doctors or waiting for scientific consensus. They’re zapping first and asking questions as they go.

by Greg Miller, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Gregory Miller

The Biggest Filer of Copyright Lawsuits? X-Art.com

In 2006, Colette Pelissier was selling houses in Southern California, and her boyfriend, Brigham Field, was working as a photographer of nude models. Colette wanted to leave the real-estate business, so she convinced her boyfriend to start making adult films. “I had this idea, when the real-estate market was cooling—you know, maybe we could make beautiful erotic movies,” she said.

By 2009, they had started shooting adult films in places like Madrid and Prague, and launched a Web site, X-art.com. The site promises erotica featuring “gorgeous fashion models” from “the USA, Europe, South America and Beyond.” For forty dollars a month, subscribers have unlimited access to a growing collection of short films. The site attracted a few hundred subscribers in its first year, then a couple thousand the next; it became profitable by 2010. The couple married in 2011; Pelissier changed her last name to Pelissier Field. That year, she noticed a change at X-art.com: the number of subscribers—the site had about fifty thousand by then—had stopped growing. The Fields hired an outside company to investigate whether people were watching their films without paying. They concluded that, each month, three hundred thousand people were watching pirated versions of their movies—including eighty thousand in the U.S. “We felt like we had to do something,” she said. “I don’t want to wake up in five years and have everything be free.”

Adult-film companies are not the only ones that face piracy made possible by Internet file-sharing, and the Fields weren’t the first to consider legal action. In 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America started suing thousands of people suspected of illegally sharing music, stopping only after piracy declined and legitimate sales rose. In a lawsuit in 2011, the production company Voltage Pictures accused about twenty-five thousand defendants of stealing its movie “The Hurt Locker”; after announcing that it had reached a series of settlements with accused thieves, it dropped the vast majority of cases.

A handful of adult-film companies had also filed copyright-infringement lawsuits against suspected online thieves, and the Fields decided to try it themselves. To identify thieves, the Fields hired outside computer investigators who tracked I.P. addresses where their movies were being illicitly shared via BitTorrent, a file-sharing program. (Using BitTorrent is different from visiting a video-streaming site like YouTube. A BitTorrent user not only downloads a movie but his or her computer automatically uploads a tiny piece of that movie for other file sharers—a process that makes BitTorrent users who view pirated movies liable for copyright infringement.) In February, 2012, the Fields filed their first suits against suspected pirates.

By 2013, subscriptions had declined to below fifty thousand. The Fields ramped up their annual production budget to around two million dollars, hoping to lure more subscribers with fresher material. They started to post new films on X-art.com nearly every day. Their investment in high-quality production paid off when “Farewell”—a narrative-driven film about two lovers on the run in the California desert —attracted a glowing review: Adam Baidawi wrote in British GQ that year that “the mom-and-pop American start-up has grown into a global production team,” making “perhaps the world’s most sophisticated cinema erotica.” In 2013, the Fields purchased a sixteen-million-dollar coastal mansion in Malibu. Having found a niche in the crowded world of online pornography, X-art.com still had tens of thousands of fans shelling out money for its movies. Quietly, the Fields were also making some extra money in another way: by becoming the biggest filer of copyright-infringement lawsuits in the nation. In the past year, their company Malibu Media LLC has filed more than thirteen hundred copyright-infringement lawsuits—more of these cases than anyone else, accounting for a third of all U.S. copyright litigation during that time, according to the federal-litigation database Pacer—against people that they accuse of stealing their films on the Internet.

Today, they average more than three suits a day, and defendants have included elderly women, a former lieutenant governor, and countless others. “Please be advised that I am ninety years old and have no idea how to download anything,” one defendant wrote in a letter, filed in a Florida court. Nearly every case settles on confidential terms, according to a review of dozens of court records. Malibu Media’s attorney, Keith Lipscomb, said that most defendants settle by paying between about two thousand and thirty thousand dollars. The income earned by all the suits represents less than five per cent of Malibu Media’s profits, Lipscomb said.

by Gabe Friedman, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: X-Art

The Rise of the Voluntariat

[ed. In the community I live in which skews toward older retired people, there's no shortage of volunteers for just about anything. Great right? But, the economic impact of that just dawned on me the other day when I stopped by the local hospital to check on something. While I was there I got in a conversation with a volunteer at the information desk and asked how many other people like him were currently working there (this is just a small-to-medium sized hospital). 123. One hundred and twenty three - doing all kinds of jobs, like landscaping, admitting, patient accounts, gift shop clerking, etc.  Jobs that normally might have been filled by people being paid actual wages. Like this article, my first thoughts drifted toward internships and how similar the situation seemed to be, with corporations increasingly relying on a workforce of willing unpaid labor. At least at the hospital they're given a free lunch.]

Coursera’s GTC offers the clearest instance yet of an emerging labor force in digital capitalism, which I suggest we call the voluntariat.

The voluntariat performs skilled work that might still command a wage without compensation, allegedly for the sake of the public good, regardless of the fact that it also contributes directly and unambiguously to the profitability of a corporation. Like the proletariat, then, the voluntariat permits the extraction of surplus value through its labor.

But unlike the proletariat’s labor, the voluntariat’s has become untethered from wages. The voluntariat’s labor is every bit as alienable as the proletariat’s — Coursera’s Translator Contract leaves no doubt about that — but it must be experienced by the voluntariat as a spontaneous, non-alienated gift.

And the voluntariat is not, like the proletariat, the instrument of its own dispossession. Rather, its contribution of uncompensated work accelerates deskilling and undermines the livelihood of those who do not have the luxury of working for free — in this case, professional translators who cannot afford to give away their labor.

In recent years, companies have made enormous use of two major strategies for extracting economic value without compensating those who originate it: unpaid internships and social media. Coursera’s invention of a translation voluntariat synthesizes some of the most effective aspects of both of these strategies for the empowerment of capital and pauperization of labor.

Unpaid internships have allowed companies to command an-ever expanding labor force at no cost, but the potential of unpaid internships to devalue work further and further up the skill ladder has intrinsic limits. The very institutional existence of internships, after all, entails the (usually false) promise of essential skills acquisition that will lead to future paid work. In other words, unpaid internships will always require there to continue to be paid positions somewhere in an organization, because employers lure candidates into them in large part by dangling before them the possibility of eventual promotion to one of those positions.

The GTC presents no similar difficulties for the capitalist: it solicits the voluntariat’s labor with the sole assurance that that labor constitutes its own reward. The “Do What You Love” mantra central to unpaid internships plays a role here, but the illusion of a career-building apprenticeship that persists as the justification of internships has been removed. For the moment, Coursera is still offering salaries to some workers (mostly engineers), but there is no reason in principle why all the “careers” the company currently advertises could not be reimagined as “global communities” of volunteers.

by Geoff Shullenberger, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: via:

Thelma Houston

[ed. Thelma kicks ass.]

Paranoia at the Disco

Rostislav Kostal
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Love Me Tinder

That fall, his relationship of two and a half years finally ended, and Eli found himself single again. He was 27 years old, losing the vestigial greenness of his youth. He wanted to have sex with some women, and he wanted some stories to tell. He updated his dating profiles. He compiled his photos. He experimented with taglines. He downloaded all the apps. He knew the downsides—the perfidy of the deceptive head shot, the seductress with the intellect of a fence post—but he played anyway. He joined every free dating service demographically available to him.

Around the same time, somewhere across town, a woman named Katherine1 shut down her OkCupid account. She had approached Internet dating assertively, had checked the box that read “Short-term dating” and the one that read “Casual sex.” Then a casual encounter had turned menacing, and Katherine decided she no longer wanted to pursue sex with total strangers. But she had a problem: She liked the adventure, she had the usual human need for other humans, and she needed the convenience of meeting people online. Katherine was 37, newly single, with family obligations and a full-time job. Most of her friends were married. She needed something new.

When Katherine and Eli downloaded Tinder in October 2013, they joined millions of Americans interested in trying the fastest-growing mobile dating service in the country. Tinder does not give out statistics about the number of its users, but the app has grown from being the plaything of a few hundred Los Angeles party kids to a multinational phenomenon in less than a year. Unlike the robot yentas of yore (Match.com, OkCupid, eHarmony), which out-competed one another with claims of compatibility algorithms and secret love formulas, the only promise Tinder makes is to show you the other users in your immediate vicinity. Depending on your feelings for these people, you swipe them to the left (meaning “no thanks”) or to the right (“yes, please”). Two people who swipe each other to the right will “match.” Your matches accrue in a folder, and often that's the end of the story. Other times you start texting. The swiping phase is as lulling in its eye-glazing repetition as a casino slot machine, the chatting phase ideal for idle, noncommittal flirting. In terms of popularity, Tinder is a massive and undeniable success. Whether it works depends on your idea of “working.”

For Katherine, still wary from her bad encounter, Tinder offered another advantage. It uses your pre-existing Facebook network and shows which friends, if any, you have in common with the person in the photo. On October 16, Eli appeared on her phone. He was cute. He could tell a joke. (His tagline made her laugh.) They had one friend in common, and they both liked Louis C.K. (“Who doesn't like Louis C.K.?” Eli says later. “Oh, you also like the most popular comedian in America?”) She swiped him to the right. Eli, who says he would hook up with anybody who isn't morbidly obese or in the middle of a self-destructive drug relapse, swipes everyone to the right. A match!

He messaged first. “Sixty-nine miles away??” he asked.

“I'm at a wedding in New Jersey,” she replied.

So, Eli said to himself, she's lonely at a wedding in New Jersey.

Eli: “So why you on Tinder?”

Katherine: “To date. You?”

Eli said it was an “esteem” thing. It had taught him that “women find me more attractive than I think.” Unfortunately for Katherine, he told her he didn't have a lot of time to date. He worked two jobs. They wanted different things. It therefore read as mock bravado when Eli wrote, “But you ever just want to fuck please please holler at me cool???” He added his number.

Katherine waited an hour to respond. Then: “Ha.” And then, one minute later, “I will.” And: “I kinda do.”

Eli: “Please please do. ;)”

Katherine liked that he was younger. He was funny. He did not, like one guy, start the conversation with “Don't you want to touch my abs?” He said “please.” Eli liked that Katherine was older. Katherine wrote: “You can't be psycho or I will tell [name of mutual friend].” He sympathized with that, too.

The parameters were clear. They arranged to meet.
···
I first signed up for Tinder in May but found it skewed too young. (I'm 32.) When I looked again in mid-October, everything had changed. I swiped through people I knew from college, people I might've recognized from the train. I saw it had gone global when a friend in England posted a Tinder-inspired poem on her Facebook page (“and here are we, He and Me, our flat-screen selves rendered 3D”). I started to check it regularly. The more I used it, the more I considered how much it would have helped me at other times in my life—to make friends in grad school, to meet people after moving to a new city. It seemed possible that one need never be isolated again.

In December, I flew out to Los Angeles, where Tinder is based, to visit the company's offices and meet two of its founders, Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, both 27. (The third is Jonathan Badeen, the engineer who built the app.) Rad is the chief executive officer; Mateen is chief marketing officer. They are also best friends, share a resemblance to David Schwimmer, and have been known to show up for work in the same outfit. I was staying only a mile from Tinder's offices in West Hollywood, and within forty-eight hours both founders showed up on my Tinder feed. Other memorable appearances on my feed in Los Angeles included a guy holding a koala bear, a guy and his Yorkshire terrier, in matching sweaters, and a pipe-smoking dandy with a Rasputin beard, horn-rimmed glasses, and a gold ring the exact shape and size of a cicada.

Rad and Mateen are local boys. They both grew up in Beverly Hills, although they attended different private schools. They first encountered each other at 14, when Sean made a play for Justin's girlfriend. (“We met because we both liked the same girl—but the girl was my girlfriend,” says Justin.) They reconnected at USC, and then both started independent companies. Justin's was a “social network for celebrities.” Sean's was Adly, a platform that allows companies to advertise via celebrities' social networks. He sold the majority of his stake in 2012. “I didn't want to be in the ad business,” he says. He also didn't want to make things for computers. “Computers are going extinct,” he says. “Computers are just work devices.” For people his age, the primary way to interface with the technical world was through a mobile device.

Rad and Mateen have shared business ideas with each other for years, and every idea begins with a problem. The key to solving the problem that interested Tinder: “I noticed that no matter who you are, you feel more comfortable approaching somebody if you know they want you to approach them,” says Sean. They had both experienced the frustration of sending smoke signals through social media. “There are people that want to get to know you who don't know you, so they're resorting to Facebook,” explains Justin. When those advances or friendings or followings are unwanted, they say, the overtures can seem a little “creepy.” (Consider, for example, the long-standing mystery of the Facebook “poke.”) Sean was interested in the idea of the “double opt-in”—some establishment of mutual interest that precedes interaction.

And so Tinder entered a fossilizing industry. Most of the big players (including Match.com, Plenty of Fish, OkCupid, eHarmony, Manhunt, JDate, and Christian Mingle) established themselves before billions of humans carried miniature satellite-connected data processors in their pockets, before most people felt comfortable using their real names to seek companionship online, and before a billion people joined Facebook—before Facebook even existed. Tinder's major advantages come from exploiting each of these recent developments. The company also managed to accrue, in less than a year of existence, the only truly important asset of any dating site: millions and millions of users.

by Emily Witt, GQ |  Read more:

Image:uncredited

The Last King of the American Middlebrow

The set of “Jeopardy!” was given a shiny makeover last year, in preparation for the quiz show’s fiftieth birthday. The new look features that familiar, top-heavy, bubble-letter logo and a gorgeously tacky sunset backdrop that provides an odd companion to the sexless blue-and-white board. In fluorescent spirit, though, the set is unchanged since the 1980s, much like the program itself.

Contestants come and go. Here’s our returning champion. He’s from Maryland, she’s from Chicago. Some, like this year’s star, Arthur Chu, even briefly become big deals. But it is Alex Trebek who has remained the centerpiece. His extended tenure as America’s senior-most faculty member has made Americans forget that he’s playing a part; a few years ago, Trebek was voted the eighth-most-trusted person in the United States, sandwiched between Bill and Melinda Gates. “He’s like a Ward Cleaver figure,” says Ken Jennings, the most successful “Jeopardy!” contestant ever. “But for the past thirty years.” This month, in fact, the host will mark three decades as the face and voice of “Jeopardy!”; like the show’s theme music, he is almost post-iconic, such a known entity that he’s just there.

He might not be there for much longer, though. “Jeopardy!” continues to draw around 25 million viewers per week, making it second among syndicated game shows (behind only “Wheel of Fortune,” which “Jeopardy!” fans dismiss as little better than a televised jumble puzzle). But Trebek has hinted that he will retire when his contract runs out in 2016. Already he has outlasted Jay Leno and now David Letterman as one of the final one-man TV brands from the time before DVRs. Audience shares and attention spans, however, aren’t the only things that have changed during his run. In the Internet era, knowing a little about a lot provides diminished cachet: You don’t have to retain facts when they can just be Googled. These days there’s a throwback charm to the whole “Jeopardy!” enterprise and the appeal, in Trebek’s late-career performances, of a simple job well done. (...)

Trebek has built his career on an air of erudition. But offscreen he is equally invested in a second persona, one that colleagues say has emerged more in recent years. This other Trebek is “much less of a ‘Masterpiece Theater’ guy,” is how a staffer puts it. “He’s more of a getting-his-hands-dirty guy.”

So even as Trebek might casually draw the solar system during conversation—because of course that’s a thing the host of “Jeopardy!” would do—he also takes pride in noting that he was almost kicked out of boarding school as a boy. He sometimes brags about his breakfast of Snickers and Diet Pepsi and likes to talk about the rec-league hockey games he suited up for with Dave Coulier (the “Full House” star who was not John Stamos, Bob Saget, or an Olsen twin). He has had two heart attacks but sums up his current exercise regimen as “I drink.” Yes, Trebek can describe for you the 1928 Mouton that he once tasted. But, he is quick to joke: “I’m not a true wine connoisseur. I’m just a drinker.”

Fact, according to Trebek: His favorite place in Los Angeles these days is Home Depot. He and his second wife, Jean, whom Trebek married in 1990 when she was 26 and he was a 49-year-old divorcé, live in a nice house in the Valley, and he spends a great deal of time thinking about maintenance and improvements (which he accomplishes with the help of “Manuel and Miguel”). Trebek says that when he gets up in the middle of the night—he has terrible insomnia—he will lie awake for hours plotting how to fix the sliver of light peeking through his window, and all the other home-repair projects he wants to tackle next.

by Noreen Malone, TNR |  Read more:

Image: Ian Allen

Massive Attack

The Snowden Saga Begins

[ed. Wow. Want to know what a true patriot looks like these days? (hint: not some phony tea bagger dressed up in guns and slogans)]

Make no mistake: it’s been the year of Edward Snowden. Not since Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War has a trove of documents revealing the inner workings and thinking of the U.S. government so changed the conversation. In Ellsberg’s case, that conversation was transformed only in the United States. Snowden has changed it worldwide. From six-year-olds to Angela Merkel, who hasn’t been thinking about the staggering ambitions of the National Security Agency, about its urge to create the first global security state in history and so step beyond even the most fervid dreams of the totalitarian regimes of the last century? And who hasn’t been struck by how close the agency has actually come to sweeping up the communications of the whole planet? Technologically speaking, what Snowden revealed to the world -- thanks to journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras -- was a remarkable accomplishment, as well as a nightmare directly out of some dystopian novel.

From exploiting backdoors into the Internet’s critical infrastructure and close relationships with the planet's largest tech companies to performing economic espionage and sending spy avatars into video games, the NSA has been relentless in its search for complete global omniscience, even if that is by no means the same thing as omnipotence. It now has the ability to be a hidden part of just about any conversation just about anywhere. Of course, we don’t yet know the half of it, since no Edward Snowden has yet stepped forward from the inner precincts of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, or other such outfits in the "U.S. intelligence community." Still, what we do know should take our collective breath away. And we know it all thanks to one young man, hounded across the planet by the U.S. government in an “international manhunt.”

As an NSA contractor, Snowden found himself inside the blanket of secrecy that has fallen across our national security state since 9/11 and there he absorbed an emerging principle on which this country was never founded: that “they” know what’s best for us, and that, in true Orwellian fashion, our ignorance is our strength. Increasingly, this has become Washington's twenty-first-century mantra, which is not to be challenged. Hence, the extremity of the outrage, as well as the threats and fantasies of harm, expressed by those in power (or their recently retired channelers) toward Snowden.

One brave young man with his head firmly fastened on his shoulders found himself trapped in Moscow and yet never lost his balance, his good sense, or his focus. As Jonathan Schell wrote in September 2013, “What happened to Snowden in Moscow diagramed the new global reality. He wanted to leave Russia, but the State Department, in an act of highly dubious legality, stripped him of his passport, leaving him -- for purposes of travel, at least -- stateless. Suddenly, he was welcome nowhere in the great wide world, which shrank down to a single point: the transit lounge at Sheremetyevo [Airport]. Then, having by its own action trapped him in Russia, the administration mocked and reviled him for remaining in an authoritarian country. Only in unfree countries was Edward Snowden welcome. What we are pleased to call the ‘free world’ had become a giant prison for a hero of freedom.”

And of course, there was also a determined journalist, who proved capable of keeping his focus on what mattered while under fierce attack, who never took his eyes off the prize. I’m talking, of course, about Glenn Greenwald. Without him (and the Guardian, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post), “they” would be observing us, 24/7, but we would not be observing them. This small group has shaken the world.

This is publication day for Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Security State, about his last near-year swept away by the Snowden affair. It’s been under wraps until now for obvious reasons. Today, TomDispatch is proud, thanks to the kindness of Greenwald’s publisher, Metropolitan Books, to be releasing an adapted, much shortened version of its first chapter on how this odyssey of our American moment began. (...)

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On December 1, 2012, I received my first communication from Edward Snowden, although I had no idea at the time that it was from him.

The contact came in the form of an email from someone calling himself Cincinnatus, a reference to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who, in the fifth century BC, was appointed dictator of Rome to defend the city against attack. He is most remembered for what he did after vanquishing Rome’s enemies: he immediately and voluntarily gave up political power and returned to farming life. Hailed as a “model of civic virtue,” Cincinnatus has become a symbol of the use of political power in the public interest and the worth of limiting or even relinquishing individual power for the greater good.

Glenn Greenwald, TomDispatch |  Read more:
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Duilio Barnabè (1914-1961) Still Life with Fruit and Oranges
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Videophony

[ed. I read this story today (Anti-Surveillance Mask Lets You Pass as Someone Else) and it reminded me of this memorable passage from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.]

l) It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn't been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they'd been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They'd never noticed it before, the delusion — it's like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation — utilizing a hand- held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (62) or 36 little pinholes — let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided. During a traditional call, e.g., as you let's say performed a close tactile blemish- scan of your chin, you were in no way oppressed by the thought that your phonemate was perhaps also devoting a good percentage of her attention to a close tactile blemish-scan. It was an illusion and the illusion was aural and aurally supported: the phone-line's other end's voice was dense, tightly compressed, and vectored right into your ear, enabling you to imagine that the voice's owner's attention was similarly compressed and focused . . . even though your own attention was not, was the thing. This bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time.

Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener's expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those callers who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking rude, absentminded, or childishly self- absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril-explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.

Even worse, of course, was the traumatic expulsion-from-Eden feeling of looking up from tracing your thumb's outline on the Reminder Pad or adjusting the old Unit's angle of repose in your shorts and actually seeing your videophonic interfacee idly strip a shoelace of its gumlet as she talked to you, and suddenly realizing your whole infantile fantasy of commanding your partner's attention while you yourself got to fugue-doodle and make little genital-adjustments was deluded and insupportable and that you were actually commanding not one bit more attention than you were paying, here. The whole attention business was monstrously stressful, video callers found.

(2) And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn't. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair- checks in the foyer mirror before answering the door.

But the real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way callers' faces looked on their TP screen, during calls. Not their callers' faces, but their own, when they saw them on video. It was a three-button affair:, after all, to use the TP's cartridge-card's Video-Record option to record both pulses in a two-way visual call and play the call back and see how your face had actually looked to the other person during the call. This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn't just 'Anchorman's Bloat,' that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs' high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. In an early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage's appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71 % of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 1960.

The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry's psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking; and in fact it was those entrepreneurs who gravitated toward the production of high-definition videophonic imaging and then outright masks who got in and out of the short-lived videophonic era with their shirts plus solid additional nets.

Mask-wise, the initial option of High-Definition Photographic Imaging — i.e. taking the most flattering elements of a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone-consumer and — thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered by the cosmetics and law-enforcement industries — combining them into a wildly attractive high-def broadcastable composite of a face wearing an earnest, slightly overintense expression of complete attention — was quickly supplanted by the more inexpensive and byte-economical option of (using the exact same cosmetic-and-FBI software) actually casting the enhanced facial image in a form-fitting polybutylene-resin mask, and consumers soon found that the high up-front cost of a permanent wearable mask was more than worth it, considering the stress- and VFD-reduction benefits, and the convenient Velcro straps for the back of the mask and caller's head cost peanuts; and for a couple fiscal quarters phone/cable companies were able to rally VPD-afflicted consumers' confidence by working out a horizontally integrated deal where free composite-and-masking services came with a videophone hookup. The high-def masks, when not in use, simply hung on a small hook on the side of a TP's phone- console, admittedly looking maybe a bit surreal and discomfiting when detached and hanging there empty and wrinkled, and sometimes there were potentially awkward mistaken-identity snafus involving multi-user family or company phones and the hurried selection and attachment of the wrong mask taken from some long row of empty hanging masks — but all in all the masks seemed initially like a viable industry response to the vanity,-stress,-and-Nixonian-facial-image problem.

(2 and maybe also 3) But combine the natural entrepreneurial instinct to satisfy all sufficiently high consumer demand, on the one hand, with what appears to be an almost equally natural distortion in the way persons tend to see themselves, and it becomes possible to account historically for the speed with which the whole high-def-videophonic-mask thing spiralled totally out of control. Not only is it weirdly hard to evaluate what you yourself look like, like whether you're good-looking or not — e.g. try looking in the mirror and determining where you stand in the attractiveness-hierarchy with anything like the objective ease you can determine whether just about anyone else you know is good-looking or not — but it turned out that consumers' instinctively skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they themselves were in person. High-def mask-entrepreneurs ready and willing to supply not just verisimilitude but aesthetic enhancement — stronger chins, smaller eye-bags, air-brushed scars and wrinkles — soon pushed the original mimetic-mask-entrepreneurs right out of the market. In a gradually unsubtlizing progression, within a couple more sales-quarters most consumers were now using masks so undeniably better-looking on videophones than their real faces were in person, transmitting to one another such horrendously skewed and enhanced masked images of themselves, that enormous psychosocial stress began to result, large numbers of phone-users suddenly reluctant to leave home and interface personally with people who, they feared, were now habituated to seeing their far-better-looking masked selves on the phone and would on seeing them in person suffer (so went the callers' phobia) the same illusion-shattering aesthetic disappointment that, e.g., certain women who always wear makeup give people the first time they ever see them without makeup.

by David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest via Kickstarter |  Read more:
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