Helsinki Wants to Make Car Ownership Obsolete

The Finnish capital has announced plans to transform its existing public transport network into a comprehensive, point-to-point "mobility on demand" system by 2025 – one that, in theory, would be so good nobody would have any reason to own a car.

Helsinki aims to transcend conventional public transport by allowing people to purchase mobility in real time, straight from their smartphones. The hope is to furnish riders with an array of options so cheap, flexible and well-coordinated that it becomes competitive with private car ownership not merely on cost, but on convenience and ease of use.

Subscribers would specify an origin and a destination, and perhaps a few preferences. The app would then function as both journey planner and universal payment platform, knitting everything from driverless cars and nimble little buses to shared bikes and ferries into a single, supple mesh of mobility. Imagine the popular transit planner Citymapper fused to a cycle hire service and a taxi app such as Hailo or Uber, with only one payment required, and the whole thing run as a public utility, and you begin to understand the scale of ambition here.

That the city is serious about making good on these intentions is bolstered by the Helsinki Regional Transport Authority's rollout last year of a strikingly innovative minibus service called Kutsuplus. Kutsuplus lets riders specify their own desired pick-up points and destinations via smartphone; these requests are aggregated, and the app calculates an optimal route that most closely satisfies all of them.

All of this seems cannily calculated to serve the mobility needs of a generation that is comprehensively networked, acutely aware of motoring's ecological footprint, and – if opinion surveys are to be trusted – not particularly interested in the joys of private car ownership to begin with. Kutsuplus comes very close to delivering the best of both worlds: the convenient point-to-point freedom that a car affords, yet without the onerous environmental and financial costs of ownership (or even a Zipcar membership).

by Adam Greenfield, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Hemis/Alamy

Victoria Kwasinski, Relativity (2007)
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What Have We Done?

The Anthropocene is perceived as a new geological era, succeeding the Holocene, a discrete age in which human beings have affected the world. Some scientists suggest it dates from the beginning of agriculture and human management of the land; some from the inception of the Industrial Revolution, which began to pump exponentially greater quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. And some source it to the middle of the last century: the dawn of a new nuclear age and the start of the 'Great Acceleration', which has witnessed an exponential increase in the exploitation of resources and extinction of species. Indeed, in her recent book, The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert notes that the legacy of our own species's brief reign on the planet will be a stratum the thickness of a cigarette paper.

The Anthropocene has become a fashionable term. Earlier this year I spoke at a conference in Sydney, 'Encountering the Anthropocene', which drew together scientists, historians, writers, artists and filmmakers - a motley crew whose disparity underlined the all-encompassing appeal of the new term. Such studies of the Anthropocene offer a neat blurring of the distinctions that have grown up between the arts and sciences - a schism that is mirrored in our disastrous separation from the natural world.

Gaia Vince is not only well named but also well placed to write about this subject. As a former news editor at Nature, she has contributed to a prestigious magazine which, since its first publication in 1869, has documented the changing patterns of the natural world and, perhaps more importantly, the impact of humans on that world. Vince's ambitious and provocative book aims to take snapshots of hot spots of Anthropocene action: from Nepal to the Maldives, from Peru to Kenya. She arranges her chapters by geographical feature - 'Atmosphere', 'Mountains', 'Rivers', 'Oceans' - prefacing each with deft, if gloomy summaries of the ecological state-of-play in these areas, before launching into on-the-ground reports. Hers is a journalistic account, in magazine style, as she talks to geo-engineers, conservationists and activists: the people dealing with the direct effects of climate change and other global-scale depredations. Like other recent books in the field - George Monbiot's Feral and Callum Roberts's Ocean of Life - Adventures in the Anthropocene lays out the bad news baldly, in order to jerk us out of our complacency. Bare, brutal statistics show how we have turned the planet into a 'super organism', tailored to sustain our expanding, exploiting species.

Some 40 per cent of the earth's ice-free land mass is now intensively farmed to produce food. Only 12 per cent of its rivers run freely to the seas. Nearly one billion people go hungry every day; 1.5 billion are overweight or obese. Each year, more than 300,000 sea birds die on fishing lines and 100 million sharks are killed. Every square kilometre of sea contains 18,500 pieces of floating plastic. Only 1 per cent of the world's urban population are breathing air clean enough to meet EU standards according to a 2007 report by the World Bank (the Chinese government, fearing social unrest, redacted it on publication).

These are the facts we hear every day, yet we seem inured to their impact. In the wake of last February's storms, I took a train ride across Suffolk and into Essex. The land around the tracks was flooded, it was an almost apocalyptic scene, yet my fellow passengers barely gave the inundation - and the devastation that it represented to both the wildlife and the human managers of the land - a second glance. It felt like a glimpse of the future: a drastically changed world, greeted with a weary shrug of the shoulders.

by Philip Hoare, Literary Review | Read more:
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uncredited (ed. Basquiat?)

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Why Young Men Are Giving Up Porn in 2014

For most men, our earliest memories of porn are a source of amusing nostalgia. The Penthouse found under your dad’s bed. Freeze-framing Basic Instinct to get a better peek between Sharon Stone’s legs. Staying up late to watch Eurotrash with the sound down.

For me, now a 29-year-old, it was my friends at school circulating a floppy disc containing images of Geri from the Spice Girls’ early glamour modelling days, downloaded via the painfully slow 56k dial modems we’d just begun to acquire. My generation were on the very cusp of the internet age, when access was still restricted to a shared family computer and PornHub, RedTube and the rest were still just a twinkle in some Californian entrepreneurs’ eyes.

But here’s the thing about the generation of 10-13 year old boys who came just after me – those born after, say, 1992 – and all 10-13 year old boys since: any one of them can see more naked women on their phone in 10 minutes than most grown men in history saw in their entire lifetimes. They can also, of course, see women performing acts most men in history would never have dreamt up, let alone witnessed. And unsurprisingly, in overwhelming numbers, this is precisely what they choose do. The government, slowly waking up to the issue, issued a cross-party report in 2012 that revealed one in three boys of this age had viewed explicit material online, with four out of five becoming regular uses by the time they were 16.

One reaction to this is a sort of generational jealousy, like looking at PlayStations and iPads and ruefully remembering you had to make do with a Commodore 64. But increasing numbers of men who have reached their early twenties having grown up on this diet of unlimited porn are reporting some draw backs, including a decreased interest in “real” sex, an inability to ejaculate during it and – worst of all for most – erectile dysfunction. At the same time, the young women they’re sleeping with are reporting their own problems, chiefly unrealistic expectations for things like anal sex, facials and general “porn star” behaviour: pressure to look and perform in ways they’re often not comfortable with.

None of these fears about pornography are new. The difference is that they’re not being voiced by a Mary Whitehouse figure or the Church. They’re coming from young men themselves. From us.

On 16 May 2012, a video of a Ted Talk called “The Great Porn Experiment” was placed on YouTube, and has been watched two-and-half-million times since. In it, a retired physiology teacher called Gary Wilson claims: “The widespread use of internet porn is one of the fastest moving global experiments every conducted.”

His argument is that we don’t know what happens to young men when they can watch an unlimited amount of pornography – both in terms of volume and variety – before they’ve had any kind of real-life sexual experience, because it has no precedent in history. Only now are the “guinea pigs” of the internet era reaching the age where they can tell us.

by Sam Parker, Esquire |  Read more:

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Which Matters More, Talent or Practice?

Scientists have long argued over the relative contributions of practice and native talent to the development of elite performance. This debate swings back and forth every century, it seems, but a paper in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science illustrates where the discussion now stands and hints — more tantalizingly, for people who just want to do their best — at where the research will go next.

The value-of-practice debate has reached a stalemate. In a landmark 1993 study of musicians, a research team led by K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist now at Florida State University, found that practice time explained almost all the difference (about 80 percent) between elite performers and committed amateurs. The finding rippled quickly through the popular culture, perhaps most visibly as the apparent inspiration for the “10,000-hour rule” in Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling “Outliers” — a rough average of the amount of practice time required for expert performance. (...)

The new paper, the most comprehensive review of relevant research to date, comes to a different conclusion. Compiling results from 88 studies across a wide range of skills, it estimates that practice time explains about 20 percent to 25 percent of the difference in performance in music, sports and games like chess. In academics, the number is much lower — 4 percent — in part because it’s hard to assess the effect of previous knowledge, the authors wrote.

“We found that, yes, practice is important, and of course it’s absolutely necessary to achieve expertise,” said Zach Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University and a co-author of the paper, with Brooke Macnamara, now at Case Western Reserve University, and Frederick Oswald of Rice University. “But it’s not as important as many people have been saying” compared to inborn gifts.

One of those people, Dr. Ericsson, had by last week already written his critique of the new review. He points out that the paper uses a definition of practice that includes a variety of related activities, including playing music or sports for fun or playing in a group.

But his own studies focused on what he calls deliberate practice: one-on-one lessons in which an instructor pushes a student continually, gives immediate feedback and focuses on weak spots.

“If you throw all these kinds of practice into one big soup, of course you are going to reduce the effect of deliberate practice,” he said in a telephone interview.

Dr. Hambrick said that using Dr. Ericsson’s definition of practice would not change the results much, if at all, and partisans on both sides have staked out positions. Like most branches of the nature-nurture debate, this one has produced multiple camps, whose estimates of the effects of practice vary by as much as 50 percentage points. (...)

Yet the range of findings and level of disagreement are themselves hints that there are likely to be factors involved in building expertise that are neither genetic nor related to the amount of practice time.

One is the age at which a person picks up a violin, or a basketball, or a language. People who grow up in bilingual households fully integrate both languages at the same time that language-specialized areas in their brains are developing. The same may be true of many other skills — there may exist a critical window of learning in childhood that primes the brain to pick up skills quickly later on.

Other factors are much easier to control. For instance, scientists have shown that performance itself — that is, testing oneself, from memory — is a particularly strong form of practice. One of the studies that the new review paper includes found that chess masters with similar abilities varied widely in the amount of hours they reported practicing, from 3,000 to more than 25,000.

“We may find when looking more closely that playing in tournaments, under pressure, is an important factor,” Dr. Hambrick said.

The content of isolated practice is another. In dozens of experiments, scientists have shown that mixing related skills in a single practice session — new material and old, scales and improvisation, crawl and backstroke — seems to sharpen each skill more quickly than if practiced repeatedly on its own. Varying the place and timing of practice can help as well, for certain skills, studies suggest.

“The question is: What is the optimal kind of practice in the area you wish to achieve expertise?” Dr. Ericsson said. “These are things we are now beginning to study, in areas like medical training.”

by Benedict Carey, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Devin Yalkin for The New York Times

Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing

You hear a lot nowadays about the magic of big data. Getting hold of the right numbers can increase revenue, improve decision-making, or help you find a mate—or so the thinking goes. In 2009, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a crowd of education researchers: “I am a deep believer in the power of data to drive our decisions. Data gives us the roadmap to reform. It tells us where we are, where we need to go, and who is most at risk.”

This is a story about what happened when I tried to use big data to help repair my local public schools. I failed. And the reasons why I failed have everything to do with why the American system of standardized testing will never succeed.

A few years ago, I started having trouble helping my son with his first-grade homework. I’m a data-journalism professor at Temple University, and when my son asked me for help on a worksheet one day, I ran into an epistemological dilemma. My own general knowledge (and the Internet) told me there were many possible “correct” answers. However, only one of these answers would get him full credit on the assignment.

“I need to write down natural resources,” he told me.

“Air, water, oil, gas, coal,” I replied.

“I already put down air and water,” he said. “Oil and gas and coal aren’t natural resources.”

“Of course they are,” I said. “They’re non-renewable natural resources, but they’re still natural resources.”

“But they weren’t on the list the teacher gave in class.”

I knew my son would start taking standardized tests in third grade. If the first-grade homework was this confusing, I was really worried about how he—or any kid—was supposed to figure out the tests. I had been spending time with civic hackers, the kind of people who build software and crunch government data for fun, and I decided to see if I could come up with a beat-the-test strategy derived from a popular SAT prep course I used to teach.

In essence, I tried to game the third-grade Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA), the standardized test for my state. Along with a team of professional developers, I designed artificial-intelligence software to crunch the available data. I talked to teachers. I talked to students. I visited schools and sat through School Reform Commission meetings.

After six months of this, I discovered that the test can be gamed. Not by using a beat-the-test strategy, but by a shockingly low-tech strategy: reading the textbook that contains the answers.

Philadelphia is the eighth-largest school district in the country, and its public students are overwhelmingly poor: 79 percent of them are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The high-school graduation rate is only 64 percent and fewer than half of students managed to score proficient or above on the 2013 PSSA.

When a problem exists in Philadelphia schools, it generally exists in other large urban schools across the nation. One of those problems—shared by districts in New York, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and other major cities—is that many schools don’t have enough money to buy books. The School District of Philadelphia recently tweeted a photo of Mayor Michael Nutter handing out 200,000 donated books to K-3 students. Unfortunately, introducing children to classic works of literature won’t raise their abysmal test scores.

This is because standardized tests are not based on general knowledge. As I learned in the course of my investigation, they are based on specific knowledge contained in specific sets of books: the textbooks created by the test makers.

All of this has to do with the economics of testing. Across the nation, standardized tests come from one of three companies: CTB McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, or Pearson. These corporations write the tests, grade the tests, and publish the books that students use to prepare for the tests. Houghton Mifflin has a 38 percent market share, according to its press materials. In 2013, the company brought in $1.38 billion in revenue.Pearson came under fire last year for using a passage on a standardized test that was taken verbatim from a Pearson textbook.

Pennsylvania currently has a multi-million-dollar contract with a company called Data Recognition Corporation (DRC) to grade the PSSAs. DRC works with McGraw-Hill as part of a consortium that has a $186 million federal contract to write and grade standardized tests for the rest of the country. McGraw-Hill, meanwhile, also writes the books and curricula schools buy to prepare students for the tests. Everyday Math, the branded curriculum used by most Philadelphia public schools in grades K­–5, is published by McGraw Hill.

Put simply, any teacher who wants his or her students to pass the tests has to give out books from the Big Three publishers.

by Meredith Broussard, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Matt Stanley

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How We End Up Marrying the Wrong People

Anyone we could marry would, of course, be a little wrong for us. It is wise to be appropriately pessimistic here. Perfection is not on the cards. Unhappiness is a constant. Nevertheless, one encounters some couples of such primal, grinding mismatch, such deep-seated incompatibility, that one has to conclude that something else is at play beyond the normal disappointments and tensions of every long-term relationship: some people simply shouldn’t be together.

How do the errors happen? With appalling ease and regularity. Given that marrying the wrong person is about the single easiest and also costliest mistake any of us can make (and one which places an enormous burden on the state, employers and the next generation), it is extraordinary, and almost criminal, that the issue of marrying intelligently is not more systematically addressed at a national and personal level, as road safety or smoking are.

It’s all the sadder because in truth, the reasons why people make the wrong choices are easy to lay out and unsurprising in their structure. They tend to fall into some of the following basic categories.

One: We don’t understand ourselves

When first looking out for a partner, the requirements we come up with are coloured by a beautiful non-specific sentimental vagueness: we’ll say we really want to find someone who is ‘kind’ or ‘fun to be with’, ‘attractive’ or ‘up for adventure…’

It isn’t that such desires are wrong, they are just not remotely precise enough in their understanding of what we in particular are going to require in order to stand a chance of being happy – or, more accurately, not consistently miserable.

All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses. They have to grasp where these have come from, what they make them do – and most importantly, what sort of people either provoke or assuage them. A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet), it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities.

The very idea that we might not be too difficult as people should set off alarm bells in any prospective partner. The question is just where the problems will lie: perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us, or we can only relax when we are working, or we’re a bit tricky around intimacy after sex, or we’ve never been so good at explaining what’s going on when we’re worried. It’s these sort of issues that – over decades – create catastrophes and that we therefore need to know about way ahead of time, in order to look out for people who are optimally designed to withstand them. A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: ‘And how are you mad?’

The problem is that knowledge of our own neuroses is not at all easy to come by. It can take years and situations we have had no experience of. Prior to marriage, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner – and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably don’t care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures. On our own, when we’re furious, we don’t shout, as there’s no one there to listen – and therefore we overlook the true, worrying strength of our capacity for fury. Or we work all the time without grasping, because there’s no one calling us to come for dinner, how we manically use work to gain a sense of control over life – and how we might cause hell if anyone tried to stop us. At night, all we’re aware of is how sweet it would be to cuddle with someone, but we have no opportunity to face up to the intimacy-avoiding side of us that would start to make us cold and strange if ever it felt we were too deeply committed to someone. One of the greatest privileges of being on one’s own is the flattering illusion that one is, in truth, really quite an easy person to live with.

With such a poor level of understanding of our characters, no wonder we aren’t in any position to know who we should be looking out for.

Two: We don’t understand other people

This problem is compounded because other people are stuck at the same low level of self-knowledge as we are. However well-meaning they might be, they too are in no position to grasp, let alone inform us, of what is wrong with them.

Naturally, we make a stab at trying to know them. We go and visit their families, perhaps the place they first went to school. We look at photos, we meet their friends. All this contributes to a sense we’ve done our homework. But it’s like a novice pilot assuming they can fly after sending a paper plane successfully around the room.

In a wiser society, prospective partners would put each other through detailed psychological questionnaires and send themselves off to be assessed at length by teams of psychologists. By 2100, this will no longer sound like a joke. The mystery will be why it took humanity so long to get to this point.

We need to know the intimate functioning of the psyche of the person we’re planning to marry. We need to know their attitudes to, or stance on, authority, humiliation, introspection, sexual intimacy, projeby ction, money, children, aging, fidelity and a hundred things besides. This knowledge won’t be available via a standard chat.

In the absence of all this, we are led – in large part – by what they look like. There seems to be so much information to be gleaned from their eyes, nose, shape of forehead, distribution of freckles, smiles… But this is about as wise as thinking that a photograph of the outside of a power station can tell us everything we need to know about nuclear fission.

We ‘project’ a range of perfections into the beloved on the basis of only a little evidence. In elaborating a whole personality from a few small – but hugely evocative – details, we are doing for the inner character of a person what our eyes naturally do with the sketch of a face.

by The Philosopher's Mail |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Restaurant Watches Old Surveillance to Improve Service

A busy NYC restaurant kept getting bad reviews for slow service, so they hired a firm to investigate. When they compared footage from 2004 to footage from 2014, they made some pretty startling discoveries. So shocking, in fact, that they ranted about it on Craigslist!

Here's the transcription:

We are a popular restaurant for both locals and tourists alike. Having been in business for many years, we noticed that although the number of customers we serve on a daily basis is almost the same today as it was 10 years ago, the service just seems super slow even though we added more staff and cut back on the menu items...

One of the most common complaints on review sites against us and many restaurants in the area is that the service was slow and/or they needed to wait a bit long for a table.

We decided to hire a firm to help us solve this mystery, and naturally the first thing they blamed it on was that the employees need more training and that maybe the kitchen staff is just not up to the task of serving that many customers.

Like most restaurants in NYC we have a surveillance system, and unlike today where it's a digital system, 10 years ago we still used special high capacity tapes to record all activity. At any given time we had 4 special Sony systems recording multiple cameras. We would store the footage for 90 days just in case we needed it for something.

The firm we hired suggested we locate some of the older tapes and analyze how the staff behaved 10 years ago versus how they behave now. We went down to our storage room but we couldn't find any tapes at all.

We did find the recording devices, and luckily for us, each device has 1 tape in it that we simply never removed when we upgraded to the new digital system!

The date stamp on the old footage was Thursday July 1, 2004. The restaurant was very busy that day. We loaded up the footage on a large monitor, and next to it on a separate monitor loaded up the footage of Thursday July 3 2014, with roughly the same amount of customers as ten years before.

I will quickly outline the findings. We carefully looked at over 45 transactions in order to determine the data below:

by Maia McCann, Distractify |  Read more:

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Turning ‘Likes’ Into a Career

[ed. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.]

On a Monday evening in late June, Darren Lachtman surveyed the sun-dappled patio of Southern Pacific Brewing, a bar and restaurant in a cavernous warehouse in San Francisco’s Mission District. Beer in hand, he nodded toward Robby Ayala, a comedian and employee of Niche, the social media management agency Mr. Lachtman, 32, founded with a partner last July. Mr. Ayala was one of more than a dozen Niche members invited to the company-sponsored happy hour.

“He got like, 40,000 likes and shares on his last post,” Mr. Lachtman said. (That post featured Mr. Ayala, an affable 23-year old with a kind of frat-boy charm, pouring hot coffee on his bare hand.) “The dog is down there with his 50,000 followers,” Mr. Lachtman went on, gesturing at Biggie Griffon, a pouty Brussels Griffon who sat underneath a pizza-and-cheeseburger-strewn picnic table.

Known online as Biggie Smalls the Notorious D.O.G., Biggie has actually garnered more than 75,000 followers across Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr with punny posts involving rap lyrics and improbable photos. He is paid in turn to promote brands like BarkBox, a subscription service for dog accessories, on his social media feeds, with Niche brokering the deals.

In an era of new economies, this may be one of the most curious: the network that has sprung up to help the follower-laden stars of Instagram, Vine, Pinterest and other social media services make money by connecting them with brands wanting to advertise to their audiences. People like Mr. Lachtman and his co-founder, Rob Fishman, run what may be seen as a parallel universe to Hollywood, one in which shares and likes matter more than box-office sales and paparazzi shots. Here, authenticity — a word that comes up often in this arena — trumps a Photoshop-perfect facade or publicist-approved message.

Some of these agents want to groom their clients (or creators, as they’re often called) into marquee names who can resonate beyond a smartphone screen. (Though it’s worth noting that some already have a bigger following than “traditional” celebrities: Nash Grier, Instagram’s answer to the archetypical teenage idol, has more than 5.9 million followers on the social network; Oprah Winfrey has about half that.)

“We want to cultivate these stars, and if they graduate to being the next Jimmy Fallon, great,” said Gary Vaynerchuk, a founder of the New York-based GrapeStory, an agency that represents a coterie of Vine comedians in addition to other social media personalities. “But when they’re just trying to get $10,000 or $20,000 out of a brand, which is life-changing for these kids, we know how to get it done.”

“You come work with GrapeStory,” he added, “you’re guaranteed to make five and six figures per year.”

While the metrics of the businesses may be different — Niche, for example, charges brands for the use of their services instead of talent — these agencies share much of the bravado of their Hollywood counterparts. (...)

That worth can be significant. Niche’s so-called branded marketing deals can pay upward of five figures a post — enough that one of Biggie’s owners, Lindsey Louie, quit her job with Google to work full time on Biggie’s feeds and work as the company’s community manager. Niche also enables creators to track their performances across social networks (what post got like after like on Instagram but flopped on Facebook, for example) and allows brands to see which creators work best for them.

“We’ll do stuff like discount codes,” Mr. Lachtman explained on a Wednesday afternoon in Niche’s San Francisco office. This time, Biggie was out of the crate and padding across the conference room table, paws sometimes landing on Mr. Lachtman’s MacBook. “Biggie gets a custom code; let’s see how many BarkBoxes he sells versus other dogs.”

“The dog demographic on these social platforms is huge,” he added, scanning Biggie’s statistics on his screen. Mr. Lachtman recounted an April Fool’s Day campaign Niche did with American Eagle called American Beagle. “We flew a bunch of dogs to their headquarters in Pittsburgh,” he said. “I think we had five dogs that each had 400,000 followers. It’s a crazy audience. It works really well.”

by Sheila Marikar, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Preston Gannaway for The New York Times

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Kevin Sloan, Optimists Reef
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Epicurus and Happiness

The Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus was born in 341 BC, on the island of Samos, a few miles off the coast of modern Turkey. He had an unusually long beard, wrote over three hundred books and was one of the most famous philosophers of his age.

What made him famous was his skilful and relentless focus on one particular subject: happiness. Previously, philosophers had wanted to know how to be good; Epicurus insisted he wanted to focus on how to be happy.

Few philosophers had ever made such a frank, down-to-earth admission of their interests before. It shocked many, especially when they heard that Epicurus had started a School for Happiness. The idea of what was going on inside was both entirely shocking and deeply titillating. A few disgruntled Epicureans made some damaging leaks about what was going on in the school. Timocrates said that Epicurus had to vomit twice a day because he spent all his time on a sofa being fed luxurious meats and fish by a team of slaves. And Diotimus the Stoic published fifty lewd letters which he said had been written by Epicurus to some young students when he’d been drunk and sexually obsessed. It’s because of such gossip that we still sometimes now use the adjective ‘Epicurean’ to describe luxury and decadence.

But such associations are unfounded. The truth about Epicurus is far less sensational – but far more interesting. The Greek philosopher really was focused on happiness and pleasure, but he had no interest in expensive meals or orgies. He owned only two cloaks and lived on bread, olives and – as a treat – the occasional slice of cheese. Instead, having patiently studied happiness for many years, Epicurus came to a set of remarkable and revolutionary conclusions about what we actually need to be happy, conclusions wholly at odds with the assumptions of his age – and of our own.

Epicurus proposed that we typically make three mistakes when thinking about happiness.

1. We think we need romantic relationships

Then, as now, people were obsessed with love. But Epicurus observed that happiness and love (let alone marriage) almost never go together. There is too much jealousy, misunderstanding and bitterness. Sex is always complicated and rarely in harmony with affection. It would be best, Epicurus concluded, never to put too much faith in relationships. By contrast, he noted how rewarding most friendships are: here we are polite, we look for agreement, we don’t scold or berate and we aren’t possessive. But the problem is we don’t see our friends enough. We let work and family take precedence. We can’t find the time. They live too far away.

2. We think we need lots of money

Then, as now, people were obsessed by their careers, motivated by a desire for money and applause. But Epicurus emphasised the difficulties of employment: the jealousy, the backbiting and frustrated ambitions.

What makes work really satisfying, Epicurus believed, is when we’re able to work either alone or in very small groups and when it feels meaningful, when we sense that we’re helping others in some way or making things that improve the world. It isn’t really cash or prestige we want, it’s a sense of fulfilment through our labour.

3. We put too much faith in luxury

We dream of luxury: a beautiful home, elegant rooms and pleasant views. We imagine trips to idyllic locations, where we can rest and let others look after us…

But Epicurus disagreed with our longings. Behind the fantasy of luxury, what he believed we really want is calm. Yet calm won’t possibly arise simply through changing the view or owning a delightful building.

Calm is an internal quality that is the result of analysis: it comes when we sift through our worries and correctly understand them. We therefore need ample time to read, to write, and most of all, to benefit from the regular support of a good listener: a sympathetic, kind, clever person who in Epicurus’s time would have been a philosopher, and whom we would now call a therapist.

With his analysis of happiness in hand, Epicurus made three important innovations:

by Alain de Botton, School of Life |  Read more:

Image:uncredited

Scavengers

[ed. I can't stress enough, if you want to get a good sense of what North Korean life is like (and all its horrors), read The Ophan Master's Son (Pulitzer Prize winner) by the author of this piece.]

I was in Pyongyang’s Department Store Number One when I saw a bottle of rice wine emblazoned with the bust of famed Japanese pro wrestler Rikidōzan, Koreanized as ‘Ryokdosan’. The bottle was styled after a Grecian urn, with Ryokdosan’s image framed, halo-like, in a golden championship belt. Pearlescent and adorned, the bottle was a rare object of beauty for sale in North Korea. For a week, my minders had been steering me daily into shopping opportunities at various gifts shops and department stores. And I was ready to pay. I was dying to buy something, anything that would help my wife and children understand the profound surrealism and warped reality I’d experienced on my research trip to North Korea.

But there was nothing to buy. The stores were filled with cheap Chinese goods, grey-market medicines and out-of-date foreign snacks and candies. North Korea produced only durable goods like Vinalon overcoats, shovel handles and work boots. I might have actually bought a Vinalon blazer or a North Korean skillet. But the regime didn’t offer these at their tourist shops. I couldn’t even buy a painting or a ceramic bowl made in North Korea. Arts and crafts there are required to glorify the regime, yet it’s forbidden for a foreigner to possess images of the Dear Leaders, DPRK flags or nationalist iconography like the Chollima (a mythical winged horse that symbolizes the rapid advancement of the society), a double rainbow over Mount Paektu (the ‘official’ setting of Kim Jong-il’s illustrious birth) or some Taepodong missiles blazing upward. Hence the selection of a Beijing dollar store.

My main minder, Ga-yoon, was bright and funny and sophisticated – she had a graduate degree from Kim Il-sung University in handling American tourists – but she seemed baffled that I wasn’t salivating at all these goods for sale. She strolled with me down aisles of knock-off iPods, no-name tennis rackets and imitation handbags before showing me the object of her desire: a box fan moulded in China from pink plastic. Ga-yoon stared longingly at it, imagining perhaps the cool breeze it would bring to her Pyongyang apartment. She simply couldn’t believe that I wasn’t snapping up that fan, stowing it in my overhead luggage bin and lovingly unveiling it back in America. She couldn’t quite figure me out. Why had I purchased only postcards? The only real interest I’d shown in shopping was when I was taken to a store that had a selection of North Korean taxidermy. I was holding my arms wide to measure the two-metre wingspan of a mounted vulture, wondering if I could get it home and how a stuffed North Korean scavenger would look over our mantle in San Francisco, when I caught Ga-yoon studying me like I was an alien.

Then I found the bottle of rice wine beaming the image of Rikidōzan.

I pulled it from the shelf and asked Ga-yoon about the wrestler it depicted.

‘That’s Ryokdosan, a famous Korean,’ she said, her tone suddenly serious. ‘He went to Japan, and after beating all the Japanese fighters, he wanted to return home to Korea a champion. The Japanese were angry so they kidnapped him and murdered him.’

Her assistant minder Dong-man was new at the job. He sported
a starched white shirt, a straight black tie and a prominent Kim Il-sung pin.

‘The Japanese were jealous and ashamed that a Korean was better,’ Dong-man added. ‘When Ryokdosan tried to return home to the glorious socialism of North Korea, the cowards stabbed him to death.’

‘The Japanese murdered him?’ I asked. ‘How? Where?’

My minders shook their heads. They didn’t know the details.

A young saleswoman jumped in with her limited English.

‘Japan steal,’ she added, her eyes wide. ‘Japan kill.’

I studied the portrait of Ryokdosan on the bottle, a North Korean hero so powerful that Japan couldn’t let him live, a North Korean so loyal that Japan had no choice but to steal him and kill him.

I purchased the bottle of rice wine, thus elevating myself somewhat in Ga-yoon’s esteem. But the day was a disaster for her: part of her job was to entice hard currency from me, and I ended up spending only eleven American dollars in Pyongyang’s most elite shopping establishment.

One thing I had acquired in North Korea was a stomach bug. Knowing that I couldn’t drink the bottle of rice wine and that
I couldn’t bring it on the plane, I poured it down the sink in my room on the thirty-second floor of the Yanggakdo Hotel.

The hotel is on an island in the Taedong River. Pyongyangites are forbidden from setting foot on the island, and tourists are barred by guards from leaving. Assuming that tourists can’t get into trouble in this moated lodging, the minders go home for the night, and the guests are left to their own devices. What guests there were. At the height of the tourist season, there were only enough visitors in Pyongyang to fill the sixth and thirty-second floors – two lit bands in a dark monolith straddled by a rain-swollen river.

Trapped and sick and a little stir-crazy, I went to the hotel’s forty-ninth floor, where there was a bar and an unused revolving restaurant that didn’t revolve. Here, I found a carpet of AstroTurf, a fish tank full of algae and a lone, drunken Japanese businessman. There was also a spectacular view of the DPRK’s darkened emptiness.

by Adam Johnson, Granta |  Read more:

Image: Adam Johnson

The Limits of Favela Chic

Buses and cars stream from the affluent coastal neighborhoods of Salvador, Brazil’s third largest city, to Shopping Iguatemi, one of the biggest and newest malls in town. Crawling through traffic, we pass through an area my friends call “Americatown”: a Sam’s Club, two-story Burger King, Hiper Bom Preço (a Walmart-owned megastore) and a pizza joint all situated near the junction of three major crosstown highways. Just a kilometer or so further down, I enter the mall to buy a $50 plastic smartphone at Lojas Americanas (literally, “American Stores”), which is basically Target. The customer service is quick and polite. There is no haggling over the sale. I brandish my Wells Fargo debit card with few worries.

This is not really the commonly held vision of life in northeastern Brazil—it is neither the sleepy, tropical paradise nor the chaotic and dangerous mega-city. But this economic landscape is already and increasingly the norm. The number of shopping malls in Brazil doubled between 2008 and 2013.

As Brazilian cities upgrade and modernize—mostly in preparation for upcoming mega-events such as the Olympics and FIFA World Cup—it’s worth asking what they’re aspiring toward. Development efforts are in full swing and economic growth is generally positive, driven by a newly sprouted and rapidly growing middle class, eager to consume. Yet relatively basic issues of housing, transportation, schools, etc., remain unresolved and perpetually confused. (...)

Though Brazilian architecture and urban design has always been strongly influenced by modernism, it is in fact, and in image, chaotic. Spaghetti-strung streets, unregulated development and commerce of every type spring up wherever the opportunity presents itself. While the scale of the formal design may not be human, that has little to do with how people actually use the city. Ultimately, Brazilian cities are not known for the monuments of Le Corbusier, CIAM or even Oscar Niemeyer. They’re known for the favelas—squatter settlements and shantytowns, swaths of informal neighborhoods that occupy every unused space, often illegally, and often as the only option for the very poor. And that image, like the reality of the Brazilian city, has its own logic.

This logic has been increasingly valued by planners and designers in the developed world. As the Brazilian urban and economic landscape begins to model itself on the North, American and European planners talk of creating places that look more like the South. Favela chic, beyond just being fashionable, is viewed by some as an innovative system for future development: self-generating communities that are lively, walkable and mixed-use. The favela is seen as an open studio for architectural and planning practices in the West that seek to both improve and learn from the informal city. Everyday urbanism, studies of informality and ecological approaches extol the virtues of the piecemeal, inherently participatory appropriations of urban spaces. These borrowed styles are possibly a necessity for ideals of sustainability to be realized in Seattle and other places. Changing urban sensibilities and definitions of “quality of life” underlie the genuinely psychological appeal of favela chic. The attraction to these “minor architectures,” as Jill Stoner of Berkeley puts it, is clearly aesthetic and perhaps also personal. In Shantytown, Aira notes: “Those dollhouse-like constructions had their charm, precisely because of their fragility and their thrown-together look. . . . They simplified things enormously. For someone wearied or overwhelmed by the complexities of middle-class life, they could seem to offer a solution.”

At the same time, favela chic is also correctly criticized for its tendency to aestheticize poverty.

by Lisa Sturdivant, Arcade |  Read more:

Image: Lisa Sturdivant

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Seven Reasons Not to Write Novels and Only One Reason to Write Them

I can think of seven reasons not to write novels:

First: There are too many novels and too many people writing them. Not only do those already written continue to exist and demand to be eternally read, but thousands more entirely new novels keep appearing in publishers’ catalogs and in bookshops around the world; then there are the many thousands rejected by publishers that never reach the bookshops, but which nonetheless exist. It is, then, a commonplace activity, one that is, in theory, within the grasp of anyone who learned to write at school, and for which no higher education or special training is required.

Second: And precisely because anyone, whatever his or her profession, can write a novel, it is an activity that lacks merit and mystery. Poets, philosophers, and dramatists do it; so do sociologists, linguists, publishers, and journalists; politicians, singers, TV presenters, and football coaches; engineers, school teachers, civil servants, and movie actors; critics, aristocrats, priests, and housewives; psychiatrists, university professors, soldiers, and goatherds. It would seem, though, that for all its lack of merit and mystery, there is still something strangely alluring about the novel—or is it simply a desirable ornament? But what is so desirable about something that lies within the reach of all professions, regardless of their previous training, prestige, or earning power? What is it about the novel?

Third: Writing a novel certainly won’t make you rich: indeed, only one in every hundred novels published—and that’s an optimistic percentage—earns a decent amount of money. The money earned is unlikely to change a writer’s life and it certainly won’t be enough to retire on. What’s more, it can take months or even years of work to write an average-length novel that some people then might want to read. Investing all that time in a task that has only a one percent chance of making any money is absurd, especially bearing in mind that these days no one—not even aristocrats and housewives—has that amount of time to spare. The Marquis de Sade and Jane Austen did, but their modern-day equivalents do not; and worse still, not even the aristocrats and housewives who don’t write but do read have time enough to read what their writing colleagues write.

Fourth: The novel is no guarantee of fame, or only a very minor fame, which could be acquired by far speedier and less laborious means. As everyone knows, the only real fame comes from television, where novelists are becoming an increasingly rare sight, unless the writer in question is there not because of the interest or excellence of his novels, but in his role as fool or clown, along with other clowns from various fields, whether artistic or not. The novels written by that truly famous novelist-turned-TV-celebrity will merely provide the tedious and soon-forgotten pretext for his popularity, which will depend less on the quality of his future works, which no one really cares about anyway, and far more on his ability to wield a walking stick, wear stylish scarves or Hawaiian shirts or hideous waistcoats, and explain how he communicates with his unorthodox God or how easily and authentically one can live among the Moors (this always goes down well in Spain). Besides, it would be nonsense to struggle to write a novel purely in order to become famous (for even if you write in the most pedestrian of styles, that, too, takes time) when nowadays one doesn’t need to do anything very much to become famous. Marriage to or an affair with a suitably prominent person and the subsequent slipstream of marital and extramarital goings-on are a far more efficient way of going about it. Or you could simply commit some indecent act or outrage, although nothing, of course, that involves a long prison sentence.

by Javier Marías, Three Penny Review | Read more:
Image: Grammarly