Trigger Warnings: 'Empathetically Correct' is the New Politically Correct

[ed. Interesting. One source identifies an 'emerging problem' and all of a sudden it's a cultural catastrophe. "Trigger warnings" - the issue du jour. See here, here, here and here.]

When I was attending graduate school in the late 1980s and early 1990s, political correctness reigned supreme. Lassoing the powers of language, literature, and the law, the movement dubbed “PC” initially worked toward the good goal of greater inclusiveness for marginalized communities. Eventually, however, bloated by the riches of the ivory tower of academia and provoked by the excesses and exclusivity of the good-ol’-boy culture of Wall Street, political correctness morphed into a tyranny of speech codes, sensitivity training, andbook banning. Its reach lingers still, most recently exemplified in the decision by a state panel in Nevada not to name a cove after Mark Twain because of the author’s racist 19th-century views toward Native Americans.

But it seems political correctness is being replaced by a new trend—one that might be called “empathetic correctness.”

While political correctness seeks to cultivate sensitivity outwardly on behalf of those historically marginalized and oppressed groups, empathetic correctness focuses inwardly toward the protection of individual sensitivities. Now, instead of challenging the status quo by demanding texts that question the comfort of the Western canon, students are demanding the status quo by refusing to read texts that challenge their own personal comfort.

In the foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death, his iconoclastic jeremiad on entertainment culture, Neil Postman invokes George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In noting the contrast between their two dystopian visions of the future, Postman notes,

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

Orwell envisioned an external form of control that becomes internalized—essentially, political correctness. Huxley envisioned an internal form of control that becomes externalized—empathetic correctness. And Postman thinks Huxley’s was the more accurate prediction.

The most jaw-dropping display of empathetic correctness came in a recent New York Times article reporting on the number of campuses proposing that so-called “trigger warnings” be placed on syllabi in courses using texts or films containing material that might “trigger” discomfort for students. Themes seen as needing such warnings range from suicide, abuse, and rape to anti-Semitism, “misogynistic violence,” and “controlling relationships.” Astonishingly, some of the literary works advocates claim need warning labels for adult college students are often read by high school students, such as The Great Gatsby and The Merchant of Venice.

The purpose of these trigger warnings, according to one Rutgers student calling for them, is to permit students to either plan ahead for “tackling triggering massages” [sic] or to arrange “an alternate reading schedule with their professor.” The student, a sophomore and, surprisingly, an English major (once upon a time, English majors clamored for provocative books) advocates professors warning students as to which passages contain “triggering material” and which are “safer” so that students can read only portions of the book with which “they are fully comfortable.” He explains:

For many students, trigger traumas are daily, painful experiences … However, by creating trigger warnings for their students, professors can help to create a safe space for their students — one that fosters positive and compassionate intellectual discussion within the collegiate classroom.

He contends that “many of our students enter—and exit—our University with serious traumas, which can cause emotional or psychological distress within our own classrooms.” Thus, a similar proposal under consideration at the University of California, Santa Barbara, would allow students who might be traumatized by challenging material to miss classes containing such material without a grade penalty.How can empathy even be cultivated apart from a willingness to have our preconceptions and our very comfort challenged?

by Karen Swallow Prior, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Francisco Osorio/Flickr

Freeing the Gluten-Free

Gluten, a sticky protein found in wheat, barley, and other grains, is our most notorious food villain. It gets blamed for intestinal problems, cognitive and mood difficulties, joint pain, and depression. Last year, almost thirty per cent of Americans said, in a nationwide poll, that they wanted to reduce or eliminate the amount of gluten in their diet. Sales of gluten-free products totalled more than ten billion dollars in 2013, and are forecasted to rise another five billion in the next two years. Popular diet and nutrition books, like “Wheat Belly” and “Grain Brain,” argue that we should just give up eating gluten—and wheat—altogether.

For roughly one per cent of the population—about thirty million Americans—the advice may be sound. For these people, gluten causes the body’s immune system to attack various organs, an ailment known as celiac disease. Twenty years ago, many researchers were skeptical about celiac disease; most now agree that it is real and can be diagnosed through biopsies and blood tests. But scientists remain skeptical of claims made about non-celiac gluten sensitivity, or NCGS, which is purported to cause physical, emotional, or cognitive problems. A significant portion of gluten-free products (food, but also sunscreens, soaps, and even medicines) are sold to NCGS patients.

There are no tests for the condition, but, over the past five years, researchers, doctors (and a few celebrities) have proposed NCGS as an explanation for myriad health concerns, and it’s become an increasingly common diagnosis. Alessio Fasano, a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, estimates that as much as six per cent of the population, and perhaps more, has NCGS. By contrast, Peter Gibson, a gastroenterologist at Monash University, in Australia, thinks the number is less than half of one per cent.

A study Gibson published last summer suggests that, when it comes to gut distress, gluten is getting a bad rap. The study focussed on thirty-seven people who identified themselves as having both NCGS and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), an ailment characterized by a range of gut issues, including diarrhea or constipation, bloating, and stomach pain. The subjects all said that they felt better when they avoided gluten. To test whether the protein was really to blame, Gibson put them on one of three diets: gluten-free, low-gluten, and high-gluten. Each diet consisted of the same foods; the only difference was the amount of gluten.

All three regimens contained very little of another dietary problem child, the carbohydrate known as FODMAP (Fermentable, Oligo-, Di-, Mono-saccharides, and Polyols). Many humans have a hard time digesting FODMAPs, which are found in many foods—among them wheat, apples, artichokes, onions, milk, mushrooms, and mangoes. In recent years, some nutrition scientists have come to suspect that FODMAPs are a key culprit in IBS and other gut problems. RemovingFODMAPs from Gibson’s study diet ensured that gluten was the only variable. Each subject spent a week eating meals from each category, while undergoing tests and keeping a daily symptom diary. It turned out that gluten seemed to have no measurable harmful effects.

“We are convinced that gluten was not the cause of their gut issues,” Gibson said. He suspects that FODMAPs provoke far more intestinal distress than gluten; around seventy per cent of the IBS patients in his clinic who try a low-FODMAP diet see significant improvement. So why did the study’s participants (and, by extension, millions of other people) think that they had NCGS? It may be that people are right to insist that wheat makes them feel bad but wrong about which molecule is to blame: FODMAPs, not gluten, might trigger their intestinal turmoil.

by David Kohn, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Martin Parr/Magnum

On the Madness and Charm of Crushes

You are introduced to someone at a conference. They look nice and you have a brief chat about the theme of the keynote speaker. But already, partly because of the slope of their neck and a lilt in their accent, you have reached an overwhelming conclusion. Or, you sit down in the carriage – and there, diagonally opposite you – is someone you cannot stop looking at for the rest of a journey across miles of darkening countryside. You know nothing concrete about them. You are going only by what their appearance suggests. You note that they have slipped a finger into a book (The Food of the Middle East), that their nails are bitten raw, that they have a thin leather strap around their left wrist and that they are squinting a touch short-sightedly at the map above the door. And that is enough to convince you. Another day, coming out of the supermarket, amidst a throng of people, you catch sight of a face for no longer than eight seconds and yet here too, you feel the same overwhelming certainty – and, subsequently, a bittersweet sadness at their disappearance in the anonymous crowd.

Crushes: they happen to some people often and to almost everyone sometimes. Airports, trains, streets, conferences – the dynamics of modern life are forever throwing us into fleeting contact with strangers, from amongst whom we pick out a few examples who seem to us not merely interesting, but more powerfully, the solution to our lives. This phenomenon – the crush – goes to the heart of the modern understanding of love. It could seem like a small incident, essentially comic and occasionally farcical. It may look like a minor planet in the constellation of love, but it is in fact the underlying secret central sun around which our notions of the romantic revolve.

A crush represents in pure and perfect form the dynamics of romantic philosophy: the explosive interaction of limited knowledge, outward obstacles to further discovery – and boundless hope.

The crush reveals how willing we are to allow details to suggest a whole. We allow the arch of someone’s eyebrow to suggest a personality. We take the way a person puts more weight on their right leg as they stand listening to a colleague as an indication of a witty independence of mind. Or their way of lowering their head seems proof of a complex shyness and sensitivity. From a few cues only, you anticipate years of happiness, buoyed by profound mutual sympathy. They will fully grasp that you love your mother even though you don’t get on well with her; that you are hard-working, even though you appear to be distracted; that you are hurt rather than angry. The parts of your character that confuse and puzzle others will at last find a soothing, wise, complex soulmate.

by The Philosopher's Mail |  Read more:

Image: Mondadori/Getty

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As Publishers Fight Amazon, Books Vanish

[ed. See also: Amazon Tactics Confirm Its Critics' Worst Suspicions and Giants Behaving Badly.]

Amazon’s power over the publishing and bookselling industries is unrivaled in the modern era. Now it has started wielding its might in a more brazen way than ever before.

Seeking ever-higher payments from publishers to bolster its anemic bottom line, Amazon is holding books and authors hostage on two continents by delaying shipments and raising prices. The literary community is fearful and outraged — and practically begging for government intervention.

“How is this not extortion? You know, the thing that is illegal when the Mafia does it,” asked Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, echoing remarks being made across social media.

Amazon is, as usual, staying mum. “We talk when we have something to say,” Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive, said at the company’s annual meeting this week.

The battle is being waged largely over physical books. In the United States, Amazon has been discouraging customers from buying titles from Hachette, the fourth-largest publisher by market share. Late Thursday, it escalated the dispute by making it impossible to order Hachette titles being issued this summer and fall. It is using some of the same tactics against the Bonnier Media Group in Germany.

But the real prize is control of e-books, the future of publishing.

by David Streitfeld and Melissa Eddy, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Screenshot via Amazon

The Ball, Felix Vallotton
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Wayback Machine

[ed. Ever notice, the further you go back in a Tumblr archive the better it gets?]
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[ed. I think half my career was spent at one of these.]

Illustration from Mode-Maker Metal Business Furniture catalog. circa 1960
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You’re Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary

John McPhee — one the great American writers of nonfiction, almost peerless as a prose stylist — once wrote an essay for the New Yorker about his process called “Draft #4.” He explains that for him, draft #4 is the draft after the painstaking labor of creation is done, when all that’s left is to punch up the language, to replace shopworn words and phrases with stuff that sings.

The way you do it, he says, is “you draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity.” You go looking for le mot juste.

But where?

“Your destination is the dictionary,” he writes:

Suppose you sense an opportunity beyond the word “intention.” You read the dictionary’s thesaurian list of synonyms: “intention, intent, purpose, design, aim, end, object, objective, goal.” But the dictionary doesn’t let it go at that. It goes on to tell you the differences all the way down the line — how each listed word differs from all the others. Some dictionaries keep themselves trim by just listing synonyms and not going on to make distinctions. You want the first kind, in which you are not just getting a list of words; you are being told the differences in their hues, as if you were looking at the stripes in an awning, each of a subtly different green.

I do not have this first kind of dictionary. In fact I would have never thought to use a dictionary the way McPhee uses his, and the simple reason is that I’ve never had a dictionary worth using that way. If you were to look up the word “intention” in my dictionary here’s all you would see: “a thing intended; an aim or plan.” No, I don’t think I’ll be punching up my prose with that.

But somehow for McPhee, the dictionary — the dictionary! — was the fount of fine prose, the first place he’d go to filch a phrase, to steal fire from the gods. So for instance he’d have an idea of something he wanted to say:

I grew up in canoes on northern lakes. Thirty years later, I was trying to choose a word or words that would explain why anyone in a modern nation would choose to go a long distance by canoe. I was damned if I was going to call it a sport, but nothing else occurred.

And he’d go, Well, “sport” is kind of clunky, it’s kind of humdrum. Maybe I can do better. And he’d look up “sport,” and instead of the even more hopelessly banal “an activity involving physical exertion and skill” that I’d get out of my dictionary, he’d discover this lovely chip of prose: “2. A diversion of the field.” Thus he could write:

His professed criteria were to take it easy, see some wildlife, and travel light with his bark canoes — nothing more — and one could not help but lean his way… Travel by canoe is not a necessity, and will nevermore be the most efficient way to get from one region to another, or even from one lake to another — anywhere. A canoe trip has become simply a rite of oneness with certain terrain, a diversion of the field, an act performed not because it is necessary but because there is value in the act itself.

A book where you can enter “sport” and end up with “a diversion of the field” — this is in fact the opposite of what I’d known a dictionary to be. This is a book that transmutes plain words into language that’s finer and more vivid and sometimes more rare. No wonder McPhee wrote with it by his side. No wonder he looked up words he knew, versus words he didn’t, in a ratio of “at least ninety-nine to one.”

Unfortunately, he never comes out and says exactly which dictionary he’s getting all this juice out of. But I was desperate to find it. What was this secret book, this dictionary so rich and alive that one of my favorite writers was using it to make heroic improvements to his writing?

I did a little sleuthing. It wasn’t so hard with the examples McPhee gives, and Google. He says, for instance, that in three years of research for a book about Alaska he’d forgotten to look up the word Arctic. He said that his dictionary gave him this: “Pertaining to, or situated under, the northern constellation called the Bear.”

And that turned out to be enough to find it.

by James Somers, Jsomers.net Blog |  Read more:

Image: Telegraph

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“Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry”

There was a problem with the cookies.

When Jordan Metzner and Juan Dulanto launched Washio, it had already distinguished itself from other laundry and dry-cleaning services. There was no storefront, no rotating rack, no little pieces of paper to keep track of. Customers ordered their clothing picked up via the website or a mobile app, and it was returned to them not in a tangle of WE ❤ OUR CUSTOMERS hangers but in sleek black bags marked with the Washio logo, an understated silhouette of a shirt collar. The company called the drivers who completed these deliveries, usually in 24 hours’ time, “ninjas.” Still, the founders wanted to make sure their business stood out from the competition—that Washio established itself as the washing and dry-cleaning service by and for the ­convenience-loving, whimsy-embracing millennials of the New Tech Boom. “So we came up with the cookies,” says Metzner.

Inspired by Silicon Valley guru Paul Graham’s seminal essay to “do things that don’t scale,” they sourced cookies from bakeries in their three markets—snickerdoodles in San Francisco, frosted red velvet in L.A., classic chocolate chip in Washington, D.C.—which the ninja delivered, wrapped, along with the freshly laundered clothing. The gesture added another logistical wrinkle to an already complicated business, but it was worth it. “In the beginning, people loved it,” says Metzner. “Our social media went crazy, like, ‘Oh my God, Washio is the best!’ ”

That was in the beginning.

One Wednesday morning this spring, after staff at Washio had gathered for their daily “stand-up” meeting—a ritual suggested in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, a 2001 work-­processes manual that advocates keeping employees on their toes by having them give status updates literally on their feet—operations manager Sam Nadler broke some bad news. “Actually,” he said, “we’re starting to get a lot of requests for healthy treats instead of cookies.”

Ha, well, of course they were. Entitlement is a straight line pointing heavenward, and it should come as no surprise to Washio, where business is based on human beings’ ever-increasing desires, that their customers were upping the ante yet again.

Remember the scrub board? One imagines people were thrilled when that came along and they could stop beating garments on rocks, but then someone went ahead and invented the washing machine, and everyone had to have that, followed by the electric washing machine, and then the services came along where, if you had enough money, you could pay someone to wash your clothes for you, and eventually even this started to seem like a burden—all that picking up and dropping off—and the places offering delivery, well, you had to call them, and sometimes they had accents, and are we not living in the modern world? “We had this crazy idea,” says Metzner, “that someone should press a button on their phone and someone will come and pick up their laundry.”

So Washio made it thus. For a while, this was pleasing. But in the hubs and coastal cities of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and San Francisco—especially San Francisco—new innovations are dying from the day they are born, and laundry delivered with a fresh-baked cookie is no longer quite enough. There’s a term for this. It’s called the hedonic treadmill.

Fortunately, the employees of Washio are on their toes. “What if we did bananas?” Nadler suggested. Everyone laughed.

Metzner held up a small brown bag featuring a silhouette of a flower and a clean lowercase font. “I’ve been talking to the CEO of NatureBox,” he said. “It’s like a Birchbox for healthy treats. Every month they send you nuts and …”

“Banana chips?” said Brittany Barrett, whose job as Washio’s community manager includes cookie selection. Everyone laughed, again.

Metzner looked down at the bag. “Flax crostini,” he said. “I think it’s a much better value proposition than a cookie.” He looked at the bag again. “What is a flax crostini?”

We are living in a time of Great Change, and also a time of Not-So-Great Change. The tidal wave of innovation that has swept out from Silicon Valley, transforming the way we communicate, read, shop, and travel, has carried along with it an epic shit-ton of digital flotsam. Looking around at the newly minted billionaires behind the enjoyable but wholly unnecessary Facebook and WhatsApp, Uber and Nest, the brightest minds of a generation, the high test-scorers and mathematically inclined, have taken the knowledge acquired at our most august institutions and applied themselves to solving increasingly minor First World problems. The marketplace of ideas has become one long late-night infomercial. Want a blazer embedded with GPS technology? A Bluetooth-controlled necklace? A hair dryer big enough for your entire body? They can be yours! In the rush to disrupt everything we have ever known, not even the humble crostini has been spared.

by Jessica Pressler, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Michael Schmelling

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A Great Bookshelf Speaker

Pioneer has replaced our previous pick, the SP-BS41-LR, with the $130 SP-BS22-LR, and from the reviews they’re just as good, if not better. As such, they’re our new pick for inexpensive bookshelf speakers.

Why these? Well, you can check out the full rationale for the SP-BS41s here. The short version is that storied speaker designer Andrew Jones designed these inexpensive speakers. One of his other notable designs are the TAD Reference One’s which sell for slightly more money than the SP-BS22-LRs: $70,000.

There’s near-universal praise from the audio reviewers who have checked out the SP-BS22-LRs. Neil Gader, in his review for The Absolute Sound magazine, had this to say, “The BS22 has an honest tonal signature that doesn’t pander to the “let’s move ’em” sensibilities of big-box-store salesmen. It is remarkably free of sonic hype.” He continued, “However, the essence of the BS22’s performance is found in the quality of its midrange. Jones has fashioned a smooth, tonally ripe midband with just enough heft and weight behind vocal and instrumental images to provide reasonable dynamic and harmonic scale. The treble is surprisingly open, which lends overtones a fullness and dimensionality that are often lacking in blue-plate loudspeakers.” He concluded his review with, “The BS22 is simply one of the great buys out there, without reservation.”

CNET’s Steve Guttenberg, who reviewed both the old and the new models, said, “I’ve heard the complete system and the new models really do sound better, they sound clearer, make more bass, and can play louder than the original speaker line.” When comparing the small speakers to the 6-inch tall size common in this price range, Steve said, “If you care more about sound quality than getting the smallest possible speaker, consider something a bit larger, like the Jones designed SP-BS22-LR, the price is inline with the pint-size competition.” In a roundup of his Top 10 inexpensive speakers, Steve said of the BS22, “In its price class, nothing can touch this bookshelf speaker.”

by Geoff Morrison, Wirecutter |  Read more:

Image: Pioneer

The Trouble With IBM

In the summer of 2012, five American technology companies bid on a project for a demanding new client: the CIA. The spy agency was collecting so much information, its computers couldn’t keep up. To deal with the onslaught of data, the CIA wanted to build its own private cloud computing system—an internal version of the vast fleets of efficient, adaptable servers that run technically complex commercial services such as Netflix. For the agency, the power of the cloud was tantalizing. “It is nearly within our grasp to compute on all human-generated information,” the CIA’s chief technology officer, Ira “Gus” Hunt, told a gathering of industry leaders earlier that year, calling it “high noon in the Information Age.” For the bidders, more was at stake than a piece of the lucrative federal IT market. Whoever won the 10-year, $600 million contract could boast that its technology met the highest standards, with the tightest security, at the most competitive prices, at a time when customers of all kinds were beginning to spend more on data and analytics.

IBM was one of two finalists. The company would have been a logical, even obvious, choice. Big Blue had a decades-long history of contracting with the federal government, and many of the breakthroughs in distributed computing can be traced back to its labs. The cloud was a priority and a point of pride. In 2012, IBM’s new chief executive officer, Virginia Rometty, used her first speech to shareholders to describe big data as a “vast new natural resource” that would fuel the company’s growth for a decade.

On Feb. 14, 2013, the CIA awarded the contract to Amazon.com. The e-commerce company, a pioneer in offering cloud computing services to corporate customers from Nokia to Pfizer, had persuaded the spymasters that its public cloud could be replicated within the CIA’s walls. Amazon had been bleeding IBM for years—its rent-a-server-with-your-credit-card model was a direct threat to IBM’s IT outsourcing business—but this was different. Amazon beat IBM for a plum contract on something like its home turf, and it hadn’t done so simply by undercutting IBM on price. IBM learned that its bid was more than a third cheaper than Amazon’s and officially protested the CIA decision.

It would have been better to walk away. As the Government Accountability Office reviewed the award, documents showed the CIA’s opinion of IBM was tepid at best. The agency had “grave” concerns about the ability of IBM technology to scale up and down in response to usage spikes, and it rated the company’s technical demo as “marginal.” Overall, the CIA concluded, IBM was a high-risk choice. In a court filing, Amazon blasted the elder company as a “late entrant to the cloud computing market” with an “uncompetitive, materially deficient proposal.” A federal judge agreed, ruling in October that with the “overall inferiority of its proposal,” IBM “lacked any chance of winning” the contract. The corporate cliché of the 1970s and ’80s, that no one ever got fired for buying IBM, had never seemed less true. IBM withdrew its challenge.

No single deal encapsulates a 103-year-old company with a market capitalization of $185 billion. But the CIA butt kicking is a microcosm of larger problems IBM is having as it struggles to adapt to the cloud era, in which clients large and small rent technology cheaply over the Internet instead of buying costly fixed arrays. Under Rometty’s leadership, revenue has declined for eight consecutive quarters, a period when most of corporate America has flourished. In January, after a year in which IBM was the only company in the Dow Jones industrial average whose shares lost value, Rometty and her top executives turned down their annual bonuses, worth in her case as much as $8 million.

by Nick Summers, Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:

Image: 731; Photographs by Nigel Parry/CPI Syndication (Rometty); Mikehaywardcollection/Alamy (Cloud)

Max Ernst - The Blue Bird (L’Oiseau bleu), 1968
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Traditional Yuzen Fabric Dyeing
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Facebook Offers Privacy Checkup to All 1.28 Billion Users

[ed. FB and privacy - it's like a virus, you should probably do a scan every time you log on.]

Do you know who can see what you are posting on Facebook, including your photos, birthday and personal cellphone number?

Chances are that you don’t.

Responding to business pressures and longstanding concerns that its privacy settings are too complicated, Facebook announced on Thursday that it was giving a privacy checkup to every one of its 1.28 billion users.

The company, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., will also change how it treats new users by initially setting their posts to be seen only by friends. It will explain to them that adjusting the setting to “public” means that anyone on the Internet can see their photos and messages.

The change in default settings and the person-by-person review, which may shock users who suddenly realize how widely their personal information has been shared, is a sharp reversal for Facebook.

Facebook will change how it treats new users by initially setting their posts to be seen only by friends. It will explain to them that adjusting the setting to “public” means that anyone on the Internet can see their photos and messages.

“They have gotten enough privacy black eyes at this point that I tend to believe that they realized they have to take care of consumers a lot better,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit research and advocacy group. Ms. Dixon was briefed in advance about the latest changes.

For most of its 10-year history, Facebook has pushed — and sometimes forced — its users to share more information more publicly, drawing fire from customers, regulators and privacy advocates across the globe.

But for Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, more sensitivity to privacy might be good business.

Mr. Zuckerberg has seen privacy-friendly services like WhatsApp and Snapchat, and anonymous-sharing apps like Secret and Whisper, emerge as a competitive threat, particularly among younger users. That prompted him to strike a deal earlier this year to buy WhatsApp for as much as $19 billion.

“What we really want is to enable people to share what they want,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in an interview last month. “People read a lot of the stuff that we do as if we are trying to somehow get people to share more things, but all the core innovations are around giving people the tools they need to be comfortable.”

Facebook might also be acting to forestall any actions by regulators, who constantly scrutinize its privacy practices. European privacy officials are reviewing the company’s proposed acquisition of WhatsApp, which follows stricter privacy procedures than Facebook does. In the United States, the company is wrangling in a federal appeals court over how it uses the personal data of teenagers in advertising sent to their friends.

Even as Facebook takes steps to empower its users on privacy, it continues to introduce features that raise new issues. On Wednesday, it announced an optional service for mobile phones that eavesdrops on the sounds in a room to try to identify any music or television shows that might be playing. Facebook says it doesn’t store the information for long, but it is the first time the company has tried to listen in on its users’ lives.

by Vindu Goel, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

How the Internet Destroyed Tom Cruise

It was Jason Tugman's first day of work. Almost a decade later, he still remembers the screams.

A former circus fire-eater, he'd taken a job as a lighting technician for The Oprah Winfrey Show after burning off a chunk of his tongue. The pay was $32 an hour and he didn't want to screw it up. But as Tugman carefully hung black curtains in Studio B, directly behind the orange set where Oprah taped, those screams wouldn't stop. The crowd sounded as if it was going to tear the building down.

"I could just hear the audience going absolutely apeshit," Tugman says. "Just the absolute losing of minds." He glanced at a monitor that transmitted a silent, live feed. Tom Cruise was on a couch.

You've seen it, too. You can probably picture it in your head: Tom Cruise, dressed in head-to-toe black, looming over a cowering Oprah as he jumps up and down on the buttermilk-colored couch like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Cruise bouncing on that couch is one of the touchstones of the last decade, the punchline every time someone writes about his career.

There's just one catch: It never happened.

Like Humphrey Bogart saying, "Play it again, Sam," Tom Cruise jumping on a couch is one of our mass hallucinations. But there's a difference. Bogart's mythological Casablanca catchphrase got embedded in the culture before we could replay the video and fact-check. Thanks to the Internet, we have video at our fingertips. Yet rather than correct the record, the video perpetuated the delusion.

In May 2005, the same month that Cruise went on Oprah, the world of celebrity changed. Perez Hilton and the Huffington Post launched, with TMZ right behind them, and the rise of the gossip sites pressured the print tabloids to joining them in a 24-hour Internet frenzy. Camera phones finally outsold brick phones, turning civilians into paparazzi. YouTube was a week old, and for the first time a video could go viral overnight.

The Internet finally had the tools to feed us an endless buffet of fluff, chopping up real events to flashy — and sometimes false — moments that warped our cultural memory. The first star to stumble in front of the knives was the biggest actor in the world — and the one who'd tried the hardest not to trip.

by Amy Nicholson, LA Weekly | Read more:
Image: The Oprah Winfrey Show