Micro-Loft Living in America's Oldest Indoor Mall

[ed. Don't know about the "micro" part, but this doesn't sound like a bad idea - re-purposing defunct and/or under-utilized malls to help ease housing crises in some cities.]

Living in the mall is probably a teen dream. But it's also a reality in Providence, Rhode Island, where nearly 100 micro-lofts, many of them 225-square-foot studios, came online in a historic shopping mall last fall.

While the lofts at the Arcade are likely the first of their kind located inside a mall, small-scale living is a wider trend across the U.S., mostly in cities where finding inexpensive ways to provide housing for people is a serious problem. Places like New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and Chicago have reduced the square footage requirements for apartments in recent years, with some going as small as 220 square feet, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

At the Arcade, considered America's oldest indoor mall, owner-developer Evan Granoff made his vision for a thriving "live small/play big" micro-loft community a reality -- but not before the historic site survived a few bouts of economic hardship.

by Ilyce R. Glink, CBS News | Read more:
Image: Ben Jacobsen Arcade Providence

Diarmuid Kelley, I'm Backing Britain
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The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill

[ed. I've never understood the whole "negotiated medical billing" aspect of American medicine (and it's relationship to insurance coverage.). See also: After Surgery, Surprise $117,000 Medical Bill From Doctor He Didn’t Know.]

Deirdre Yapalater’s recent colonoscopy at a surgical center near her home here on Long Island went smoothly: she was whisked from pre-op to an operating room where a gastroenterologist, assisted by an anesthesiologist and a nurse, performed the routine cancer screening procedure in less than an hour. The test, which found nothing worrisome, racked up what is likely her most expensive medical bill of the year: $6,385.

That is fairly typical: in Keene, N.H., Matt Meyer’s colonoscopy was billed at $7,563.56. Maggie Christ of Chappaqua, N.Y., received $9,142.84 in bills for the procedure. In Durham, N.C., the charges for Curtiss Devereux came to $19,438, which included a polyp removal. While their insurers negotiated down the price, the final tab for each test was more than $3,500.

“Could that be right?” said Ms. Yapalater, stunned by charges on the statement on her dining room table. Although her insurer covered the procedure and she paid nothing, her health care costs still bite: Her premium payments jumped 10 percent last year, and rising co-payments and deductibles are straining the finances of her middle-class family, with its mission-style house in the suburbs and two S.U.V.’s parked outside. “You keep thinking it’s free,” she said. “We call it free, but of course it’s not.”

In many other developed countries, a basic colonoscopy costs just a few hundred dollars and certainly well under $1,000. That chasm in price helps explain why the United States is far and away the world leader in medical spending, even though numerous studies have concluded that Americans do not get better care.

Whether directly from their wallets or through insurance policies, Americans pay more for almost every interaction with the medical system. They are typically prescribed more expensive procedures and tests than people in other countries, no matter if those nations operate a private or national health system. A list of drug, scan and procedure prices compiled by the International Federation of Health Plans, a global network of health insurers, found that the United States came out the most costly in all 21 categories — and often by a huge margin.

Americans pay, on average, about four times as much for a hip replacement as patients in Switzerland or France and more than three times as much for a Caesarean section as those in New Zealand or Britain. The average price for Nasonex, a common nasal spray forallergies, is $108 in the United States compared with $21 in Spain. The costs of hospital stays here are about triple those in other developed countries, even though they last no longer, according to a recent report by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that studies health policy.

While the United States medical system is famous for drugs costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and heroic care at the end of life, it turns out that a more significant factor in the nation’s $2.7 trillion annual health care bill may not be the use of extraordinary services, but the high price tag of ordinary ones. “The U.S. just pays providers of health care much more for everything,” said Tom Sackville, chief executive of the health plans federation and a former British health minister.

Colonoscopies offer a compelling case study. They are the most expensive screening test that healthy Americans routinely undergo — and often cost more than childbirth or an appendectomy in most other developed countries. Their numbers have increased manyfold over the last 15 years, with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggesting that more than 10 million people get them each year, adding up to more than $10 billion in annual costs.

Largely an office procedure when widespread screening was first recommended, colonoscopies have moved into surgery centers — which were created as a step down from costly hospital care but are now often a lucrative step up from doctors’ examining rooms — where they are billed like a quasi operation. They are often prescribed and performed more frequently than medical guidelines recommend.

The high price paid for colonoscopies mostly results not from top-notch patient care, according to interviews with health care experts and economists, but from business plans seeking to maximize revenue; haggling between hospitals and insurers that have no relation to the actual costs of performing the procedure; and lobbying, marketing and turf battles among specialists that increase patient fees.

While several cheaper and less invasive tests to screen for colon cancer are recommended as equally effective by the federal government’s expert panel on preventive care — and are commonly used in other countries — colonoscopy has become the go-to procedure in the United States. “We’ve defaulted to by far the most expensive option, without much if any data to support it,” said Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

by Elisabeth Rosenthal, NY Times |  Read more
Image: Matthew Ryan Williams

Hokusai Katsushika
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Stress Fractures

When Robert Rubin stepped down as Treasury secretary in 1999, Timothy Geithner and other members of Rubin’s team collected their mentor’s wisdom in a framed document, “The Rubin Doctrine of International Finance.” Among its ten principles: “Borrowers must bear the consequences of the debts they incur—and creditors of the lending they provide”; and “never let your rhetoric commit you to something you cannot deliver.” Rubin appreciated the gift, but he recognized that his students’ education was incomplete. In his 2003 memoir, Rubin added “another important rule of mine that Tim and his colleagues neglected. . . . Reality is always more complex than concepts and models.” We may be fond of our analytic prowess, but we cannot count on the world to fit our designs and prejudices.

If Geithner hadn’t learned that lesson during Rubin’s tenure as Treasury secretary, he would not lack for opportunities to absorb it firsthand, the hard way. In the decade to come, as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and then Treasury secretary, Geithner would confront crises far greater than even Rubin had faced in the 1990s. In Stress Test, his new memoir, Geithner recounts these episodes and attempts to justify the actions that he took to avert disaster.

During Geithner’s tenure at the Treasury, another veteran financial regulator was getting a financial reeducation—this time from a distance. As chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, Alan Greenspan had fought the 1990s financial battles at Rubin’s side. In 1999, after navigating through financial storms in Latin America and Asia, Rubin, Greenspan, and Rubin’s deputy secretary, Larry Summers, appeared on the cover of Time under the headline THE COMMITTEE TO SAVE THE WORLD. But when the financial system melted down in 2007 and 2008, much of the public concluded that the “committee” had not saved the world but had, in fact, doomed it, by laying the regulatory and monetary groundwork for the crash.

Greenspan himself would come to question his well-known premises. Long a believer in markets’ power to regulate themselves, he now saw validity in modern behavioral economists’ (and twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes’s) belief that markets are driven not just by rational choices but also by inefficient instincts and counterproductive emotions. And last year, he, too, offered a new book to explain both the crisis behind us and the path ahead: The Map and the Territory.

Geithner and Greenspan disagree on many things, and their books point readers in very different directions. But they both present their stories as almost exclusively technocratic affairs, ill-suited to popular meddling. Indeed, their substantial disagreements should not overshadow their basic agreement on the nature of financial policy and the government that formulates and implements it. They share a fundamental belief that financial policy is developed best when it is insulated from politics and politicians. When it comes to making decisions in a financial crisis, the people and their elected representatives should just get out of the experts’ way. (...)

From this trial by fire, Geithner concluded that the basic source of financial catastrophe is cyclical mania: “a general overconfidence that a long stretch of calm and stability foreshadowed more calm and stability,” leading to increasingly aggressive risk taking, exacerbated by debt (or “leverage”). Geithner also settled upon a basic narrative mind-set, pitting pragmatic financial regulators against both benighted, pitchfork-wielding populists and doom-and-gloom prophets of “moral hazard.” Moral hazard is a theory of incentives: when the government rescues you from a problem of your own making, it may have the perverse effect of fostering expectations among others that the government will save them from similar straits. In banking, the government’s rescue of one troubled bank or fund may encourage others to take on still greater risks, confident that the government will step in if things go wrong.

“There’s no way to solve a financial crisis,” Geithner contends, “without creating some moral hazard, without protecting investors and institutions from some of the consequences of excessive risk taking.” And sometimes, this requires even rescuing particularly bad actors in service of the greater good because “trying to mete out punishment to perpetrators during a genuinely systemic crisis—by letting major firms fail or forcing senior creditors to accept haircuts—can pour gasoline on the fire.” The public may cry out for “Old Testament vengeance,” but “the truly moral thing to do during a raging financial inferno is to put it out. The goal should be to protect the innocent, even if some of the arsonists escape their full measure of justice.” (...)

As Geithner acknowledges in Stress Test, Walter Bagehot’s 1873 classic, Lombard Street—“the bible of central banking”—urges that to stop a run on the banks, the central bank should “lend freely, boldly,” to convince the public that banks are liquid. It also should take care to make those loans at “a penalty rate” in order to deter banks from continuing to borrow after the crisis passes. Geithner and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, working closely together to ease the crisis, chose to ignore Bagehot’s second point. “We decided to try something unusual right away,” Geithner explains, “to reduce the penalty rate that banks paid to borrow from the Fed’s discount window” in order to “reduce the stigma for banks who feared that using the window would signal distress.” This approach drew criticism from what Geithner describes as “a group of hawkish regional Fed presidents . . . whose main concerns were preserving the Fed’s inflation-fighting credibility and avoiding moral hazard.” Worse still, in Geithner’s opinion, these critics “frequently deployed populist arguments against our lender-of-last-resort initiatives.”

To say that such critics frustrated him would be an understatement. In a theme that dominates Stress Test, Geithner paints them as unserious ideologues—and himself, much in the manner of the man who would become his boss, President Obama, as a practical problem solver:

I don’t think I’m hawkish or dovish by nature. I’ve always been pretty pragmatic, suspicious of ideology in any form, and I took both halves of the Fed’s dual mandate [i.e., employment and steady prices] seriously. But I found the more hawkish obsessions with moral hazard and inflation during a credit crunch bizarre and frustrating.

To Geithner, his critics were not just economists wary of moral hazard. They were—to borrow a phrase he uses throughout his book—“moral hazard fundamentalists.”

by Adam White, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

In Praise of the Humble Knot

A variety of knots. Top row, from left: surgeon’s; stevedore; sheepshank; sheet bend. Middle row, from left: monkey’s fist; true lovers’; figure-eight; bowline; thief; reef. Bottom: carrick bend.

Knot enthusiasts like to say that civilization is held together by knots. It sounds like a wisecrack — but if you take a look around, you may begin to see the truth behind the quip. You could start by scrutinizing your shoes. They’re tied, undoubtedly, with the first knot that you ever learned, the famous shoelace knot, or bowknot, or as some knot experts prefer to call it, the double-slipped reef knot: a knot that combines a simple half-hitch with those two bunny-eared loops to create an ingenious little mechanism, taut enough to keep your feet snugly sheathed but with a built-in quick-release that can free them in an instant, with a single tug on a string. Glance in the mirror and you may find more knots: the one in your necktie, perhaps, or the one made by the elastic band that is wound around to hold your hair in place. Your hair itself might be plaited into a braid: another knot. (...)

Knots are an ancient technology. They predate the axe and the wheel, quite possibly the use of fire and maybe even man himself: Some scientists have speculated that the first knotters were animals, gorillas who tied simple “granny knots,” interlacing branches to construct nests. But in a century of digital tech and robotics, knots remain indispensable. On the deck of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, cables are bundled and tied down with a variation on the reef knot, used by mariners thousands of years ago to trim their sails, and the clove hitch, a knot that entered the historical record in the first writings of the Greek physician Heraklas.

In other words, knots are ubiquitous — so threaded, as it were, into the fabric of everyday life that they are easily overlooked, hidden in plain sight. In certain quarters, though, knots command center stage. One such place is a house that sits along a well-trafficked residential through street a couple of hundred yards from the River Orwell in the town of Ipswich, in Suffolk, southeast England. It is a modest two-story brick building of Edwardian vintage, distinguished from neighboring houses only by a telling detail: a forged iron door knocker in the shape of knotted rope. Use that door knocker and you will be greeted by Des Pawson, a vibrant 67-year-old man with large round eyeglasses, a white beard worthy of a biblical patriarch and hair that stretches down nearly to his shoulders. Pawson’s mane is partially concealed beneath a red Kangol cap. “I’m a socialist, of a sort,” Pawson says. “I want the rope makers, I want the riggers, I want the sailmakers to be recognized for their contributions. They are a huge part of the story of knots.”

Pawson is one of the world’s foremost knot experts, a co-founder of the International Guild of Knot Tyers, and a prolific author of knotting books. His home, which he shares with his wife, Liz, is a shrine to knots. In a sun-flooded library on the ground floor, there are pieces of rope and fish netting dangling from timber beams, dozens of nautical paintings and artifacts, and rows of old bottles of Stockholm tar, also known as pine tar, a substance used to weatherproof rope. The bookshelves that line all four walls are packed with what may be the world’s largest private collection of knot literature. (...)

If you exit Pawson’s library through the back door, you step into a verdant garden, where stone footpaths wend past apple and plum trees and rows of honeysuckle and rose bushes. Follow those paths, and you will find yourself facing three small wooden buildings — the main attractions of Pawson’s knot reliquary. There is a workshop where Pawson makes ropes, his stock-in-trade for the last quarter-century. Nearby there are two larger sheds. This is the Museum of Knots and Sailors’ Ropework. Pawson opened the place in 1996; in 2007, he was awarded an M.B.E. (Member of the Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth “for services to the rope industry.” Pawson’s museum, likely the only institution of its kind on earth, is open by appointment only. “You don’t just pop up out of the blue,” Pawson says. “You know, I’m not here for mum and the kids because it’s a wet day and they don’t know what to do.”

by Jody Rosen, NY Times/T Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Tobias Harvey

Hiroko Koshino
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What’s the Killer App for VR?

[ed. C'mon. Please. It's porn, just like it's always been since the dawn of the Internet.]

It’s a huge year for games, with tech giants dropping billions on Mojang, Twitch and Oculus VR.

But at Oculus Connect in Los Angeles, the company’s first developer conference, the consensus is that while virtual reality games will be fun, they probably won’t be the content that convinces average consumers to try VR. Instead, developers here say, the lure will be social and media experiences, and games will come later for most users.

The mainstream-crossover question is a salient one, as Oculus is expected today to lay out its roadmap for getting the Oculus Rift headset on consumers’ heads. As co-founder Palmer Luckey told conference attendees at a welcome reception, the company is counting on the developers in attendance to fill its app store.

“Without content, nobody would be interested in this whole virtual reality thing,” Luckey said.

Multiple developers at Oculus Connect pointed to the already-announced Samsung Gear VR, a mobile virtual reality headset developed with Oculus, as an indicator of the future.

“It’s the mobile experiences,” said Otherworld Interactive co-founder Robyn Gray. “You can download from the store, which you already do every day. It’s just like with mobile games, when people were like, ‘I’m not a gamer,’ and then you’re like, ‘Well what about Bejeweled? What about FarmVille?'”

Alchemy creative director Phil Harper agreed that mobile has already taught consumers how to spread a killer app around once it emerges.

“People already understand how to share an application,” he said. “Those moments where people gather around someone who has a Gear VR headset and someone says, ‘Look at this!’ It’s going to create those ‘you have to check this out’ moments, and the easier it is to get involved in those moments, the better.”

One of the most buzzed-about VR experiences at E3 this year was, in fact, not made for the most casual audience. It was a (I’m unanimously told) terrifying VR slice of the upcoming horror game Alien: Isolation, based on Ridley Scott’s classic 1979 film and developed by English studio The Creative Assembly; despite the hype around that experience, TCA programmer Sam Birley volunteered the first Oculus hit might be something completely different.

“I’m not really sure what the killer app is, yet,” Birley said. “I don’t think it necessarily has to be games. Social interaction is a massive draw to VR. Hypothetically, say they had some form of gaze tracking in the Rift. Being able to form eye contact in VR would be so powerful.”

by Eric Johnson, Recode |  Read more: 

Image: Shutterstock

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Native Advertising is Here to Stay

[ed. See also: The invasion of corporate news]

“There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers. You might think that the public would resent this trick, but there is no evidence to suggest that they do.”

That was David Ogilvy, the Mad Men-era advertising wizard, in Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1963.

When we look back on 2014 in the news business, we may think of it as the year that Ogilvy’s maxim went mainstream, accepted in the world’s top newsrooms.

In January, NYTimes.com ran its first piece of what’s come to be called native advertising. It had “The New York Times” blazed across the top of the page, and it had a lot of the visual DNA of a Times article — a headline about millennials in the workplace, about 700 words of copy, and even the honorific Mr. and Ms. of Times style.

But above that headline, in 12-point type, were the words “Paid for and posted by Dell.” The byline went to a freelance writer with a Dell logo next to her name; the typography looked different from what you’d see on a Gail Collins column. And at the bottom: “This page was produced by the Advertising Department of The New York Times in collaboration with Dell. The news and editorial staffs of The New York Times had no role in its preparation.” (...)

If you’re like many journalists, the last few paragraphs have made you feel a little unclean. The separation of editorial content and advertising was drilled into most of our heads at a young age — that first journalism school class, that first crusty night city editor. The credibility of the news, forever challenged, would seem to be deeply wounded if something that looks like an article is up for sale. (...)

Publishers also love native advertising because it plays to their strengths. Before the web, a newspaper could sell businesses on an amorphous idea of its “audience” and the idea that putting ads near stories would somehow, fuzzily, equal impact. And even today, most news organizations have only the broadest idea of what makes one online reader different from another.

But the kings of online advertising — Google, Facebook — are swimming in user data. Google knows what you’re searching for, what you’re emailing about, where you’re looking for directions — even what products you almost-but-not-quite bought online. Facebook knows who your friends are, where you went to school, whether you’re single, what brands you like. All that data means they can target ads at you far more effectively than a newspaper website that doesn’t know much more than the fact you’re interested in news about Kansas City. (...)

So native advertising — which is fundamentally about brands, both the news organization’s and the advertiser’s — is seen as a place where publishers can still have something to offer. For Dell, attaching its name and content to The New York Times is something that’s hard for a social network to match. For GE, sponsored content on sites like Quartz and The Economist attaches a vague innovation-friendly feeling to its brand. For the National Retail Federation, which has bought space for what sort of looks like an op-ed on Politico, native gives direct entrée to an audience of Hill staffers and political movers.

Why is it called “native” advertising anyway? It’s meant to embody the idea that, on any given environment, a piece of advertising will be more effective if it feels native to that platform. An ad on Twitter should look like a tweet. An ad on Facebook should look like a Facebook update. An ad on a Google search should look like a search result.

by Joshua Benton, NeimanLab |  Read more:

Image: Ogilvy & Mather

Ink Sessions

I was a hooker — an art hooker — for most of my career,’ says Roxx, a tattooist in San Francisco. ‘I’d listen to what people wanted and I would do their things.’ When she suggested her own ideas, many declined — only to return later to confess their regret.

Today, no one tells Roxx what to do. Her clients come for a consultation in which she explores who they are and what they want their tattoo to say about them. They tell her where they want the piece and which of her other tattoos appeals to them. She takes notes and shoots photos. Unlike most tattooists, she uses no reference materials or stencils. ‘I just need to feel their energy and ask: “What would suit you? Do you want it to be warrior-like? Badass? Pretty and feminine?”’ A design takes shape, she draws it on freehand, and the work begins. ‘It’s nothing spiritual or philosophical,’ she says. When I ask her what she would create for me based on a half-hour of conversation, she exclaims: ‘I was just doing it!’ And her prescription is perfect, though I haven’t come for a tattoo.

We are in 2Spirit Tattoo, her shop on Pearl Street, where she has made her name as one of the most sophisticated and original tattooists in the world, working in a style — called ‘blackwork’ — that few women practice. Her studio is a sprawling open space with natural light, white walls, wood floors, brushed aluminium ceiling lamps, and black leather tattoo tables arranged at each of her four employees’ workstations. One wall near the glass-front entrance is covered in framed photos of her clients showing off their art: precise, geometric, all-black designs that follow the musculature of the body or fan out in lacy arcs between shoulder blades; boldly etched dharma wheels rolling across chests; honeycombed netting nicked from the Filipino Kalinga tradition and tailored like clothing on chests and arms; and in one photo, a simple trio of liquid lines pouring down a woman’s back and flowing around her waist.

Roxx’s workstation occupies a back corner of the shop that can be partitioned off with sliding doors. She sits on the edge of her chair, elbows on her knees, talking with increasing animation as the late morning coffee kicks in. Soothing electronica fills the space, softening the buzz of machines wielded by two artists, Michael Bennett and Matt Matik, who chat amiably with their prone clients. Two years ago when I interviewed her for my book Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, Roxx called her shop ‘San Francisco hippie’, but that merely describes the comfort level; there is nothing hippie about the refined aesthetic of this studio, or her elegant tattoos.

Whether you follow tattooing or not, you’ve probably seen a spate of recent articles announcing that it’s no longer the exclusive province of bikers and gangbangers — though it long predates both groups, and never really belonged to either. It’s true, however, that in the new millennium tattooing has landed squarely in mainstream Western culture and burrowed deep into the middle class, where it’s flourishing. Since the 1970s, when the Japanese influence opened the way to all manner of innovation, the colours have become richer, the technique is stronger, the range of styles and subjects is broader, and more people are wearing better executed, more interesting tattoos. But one thing hasn’t changed: tattooing is still generally a matter of putting pictures on skin — something Roxx will have no part of.

She is against using the body — a 3D form, a sculptural form — as if it were paper or canvas. The reason: horses. Roxx (née Roxanne) has loved horses since she was a child growing up in England who dreamed of becoming an equine veterinarian. ‘My Granny taught me to draw them when I was two,’ she says, and she has been riding for nearly as long. ‘I spent most of my childhood with horses — grooming them, touching them, running my hands down their legs and feeling their anatomy, and that’s how I learnt to draw them,’ she explains. ‘That’s all I drew as a kid, and all I cared to draw.’

Her sketches led to her interest in tattooing, first in London as a teen and a punk in the 1980s, then in Edinburgh and Amsterdam. Early on, when she tried to get a formal apprenticeship in London, she says: ‘People looked at me like I had horns growing out of my head — because I was a woman.’ (She is also a mixed-race lesbian of Persian, Dutch and German descent, which surely didn’t help in what was then a hetero-centric, white-dominated tattoo culture.) She went to Amsterdam because the tattoo consciousness was more evolved there. ‘The people in Amsterdam were educated about tattoos as an art form rather than some old historical, nasty, dirty trade,’ she says. She initially worked in a street shop doing flash designs — stock images pulled from a sheet — for people who lined up 100 deep every morning, pumped to get inked.

‘That was like tattoo university,’ she says. The non-stop work honed her technique and boosted her confidence. But the trite imagery nearly drove her to quit tattooing for good. ‘I worked for three years doing dolphins and rainbows and fuckin’ lions’ heads day in and day out, and I was like: “This isn’t being an artist; this is bollocks”.’ (...)

Anatomy is one reason she insists on choosing designs for her clients. It’s not that Roxx doesn’t respect their wishes (‘I’m a people-pleaser’), it’s just that she knows better. ‘A lot of these people, even if they’re 2D artists, they have no idea how things work when it comes to the 3D form. We know what works on the body and what doesn’t. I think it’s changing now where people trust the artist to do their piece and they don’t want to get in the way of the artist’s process. It’s a really privileged, nice position to be in, but I’ve worked really hard to get there.’ And, she says: ‘I don’t want to spend any more of my life doing art that makes my soul disappear.’

Blackwork tattoo, as defined by Marisa Kakoulas in Black Tattoo Art 2 (2013), which features Roxx’s art, emerged in the late 1960s and became fashionable in the ’90s. ‘It is a contemporary tattooist’s interpretation of an art largely derived from Polynesian, Maori and Southeast Asian cultures — often blending together signature styles from different traditions,’ Kakoulas explains. In the 1980s, the iconic artist Leo Zulueta popularised blackwork by combining it with Old School imagery — hearts, flames, and skulls. He was the first to build his style on a bedrock of tribal elements.

‘The black graphic look has introduced an important option to modern tattooing,’ wrote the artist Ed Hardy in Art From the Heart (1991), ‘that of clarity, visibility, and an appreciation of abstract form for its own sake.’

Throughout most of the 20th century, Western tattooing was a closed system wedded to a static roster of folk forms that included anchors, hearts, pin-ups, skulls, devils, snakes, panthers, tigers, swallows, eagles, mermaids, Christs, crucifixes, ships, tombstones, horseshoes, and nautical stars. A wave of Japanese and Polynesian influences enriched it both formally and technically from the 1970s to the ’90s, and by the turn of the millennium a recombinant postmodernism had scrambled the lexicon, allowing for everything from Day of the Dead pin-ups to solid black Banksy reproductions. This is the era in which Roxx came of age as a tattooist. But it was the blackwork that grabbed her: its abstract motifs promised timeless designs, and its graphic simplicity allowed for customising it on the body.

‘I’ve never done anything authentic from another culture,’ says Roxx. ‘I went through years of tattooing Polynesian — Tahitian, Samoan — the Samoan pe’a [traditional tattoo] has influenced my entire career, [but] I warped it.’ Once she was fluent in these styles, she built and distilled her own image library informed by them. ‘It’s all down to lines and forms and curves now, and the simplicity of how you put them together. It’s back to graphic design.’ And it’s all stored in her head.

‘She’s like a conceptual artist,’ says Cats, her newest hire and mentee, a young British artist with a graduate degree in fine arts who has joined our conversation. ‘The process is entirely theoretical until it’s on the person’s body.’

by Margot Mifflin, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Roxx

The Last Ride

There is no honor in worshiping a monolith, not really, and so consequently there’s no recompense or sympathy when it is toppled. That is life for those that care about the Dallas Cowboys. To do this is to take a long position on the NFL’s answer to Bear Stearns; it is to run cheering in the wake of a diamond-encrusted boulder that has just rumbled through some humble village. It is football exceptionalism at its highest peak and, now, its lowest valley.

The epistemology behind this particular fealty varies. Sometimes it’s a birthright, or something other than high-volume idolatry; more often, it’s the front-running jewelry store caper one comes to associate with the ritziest franchises. But it all leads to a similarly tacky endgame, the same broken-down luxury liner sputtering into port. Every professional franchise conducts business, of course, but only one has stamped the entire country onto its crest, only one is commanded by an owner who so manages his multi-billion-dollar enterprise like his family’s personal backwater canteen. There is no quiet failure here: America’s Team burns loudly. It is, unmistakably, burning.

Truthfully, even writing all that above seems a touch grandiose; there is no need to aggrandize stupidity, especially on such a lavish scale. This is a bad football franchise and does the things bad franchises do. It doesn’t simply leave positions unaddressed; it willfully and ritualistically ignores them, slapping papier-mache over various craters because to do more would be to admit the need to do more. Instead, they make do, or mostly don’t, with thrift-store safeties and bargain-basement interior linemen.

The Cowboys cannot bear to merely blow mid-round draft picks, either; they waste scores of them, unearthing just two starters after the third round in their last eight drafts. Smart teams require one premium pick at most to fix a roster need; Dallas fumbles through fistfuls, only to see more problems crop up once the first one finally resolves itself; it’s a hopelessly idiotic game of Whac-A-Mole that requires feeding hundred dollar bills, one after another, into a slot built for quarters. Good organizations have roster depth; Dallas employs the likes of Jeff Heath, Nick Hayden and David Arkin, all of whom sound and mostly play like TV actors.

It is, unsurprisingly, very difficult to win this way, which is the exactly the sort of concern that owner-general manager-huckster savant Jerry Jones should bother with and yet somehow cannot be bothered by. Those are concerns for other, lesser teams, the small fry with some sort of fowl or jungle cat on their helmets instead of a bright, gleaming star, the one that was for so long the league’s foremost guiding light.

***

The Cowboys never won quite like anyone else, and they cannot and will not lose as other teams do. It must be bigger and louder and wholly unmerciful, less defeat than overdue penance for past sins. Among bloated American sports franchises, only the Yankees and Lakers can claim this sort of organizational overstatement. But while the former ages into decrepitude and the latter has rotted from the inside out, neither has sunk into an abyss this deep, not yet.

There is no corollary for a team so outsized and significant both in its sport’s history and broader identity winning just one playoff game over 18 seasons, let alone in a league defined by (among other things) its parity. This is made odder still by this fan base’s defiant—in general, and in defiance of nearly two decades of factual failure—insistence on puffing their chests and denying a very palpable descent.

It’s a bad look. Not every Cowboys fan is that way, of course, but enough are, and are so brazenly and grandiosely that way, that it’s pro forma to assume that all involved deserve this particular bit of ironic retribution. If you’re the Cowboys fan, you’re the asshole.

That, I should mention, is me. This is the team I grew up caring about. This is the team that has more recently earned me a bit of well-meaning condescension from a good friend, who happens to be a Browns fan. We have argued idly about which team is more depressing—more buffoonish or idiotically mismanaged or multiply and deservingly doomed. We both know that he will win this argument, if that’s the word. It’s not much of a contest, really; Jones’ autocratic imbecility is no match for the endless carousel of buffoons that comprise Cleveland’s brain trust, and not even the most beaten-down Cowboy supporter can grasp a championship drought that’s eligible for Social Security. Still, he understands the situation.

“The worst part about your liking the Cowboys,” he tells me, “is that you don’t get to enjoy the Cowboys.”

by Mike Piellucci, The Classical | Read more:
Image: Dmitry Samarov.

Panel Urges Overhauling Health Care at End of Life

[ed. See also: When Medicine is Futile]

The country’s system for handling end-of-life care is largely broken and should be overhauled at almost every level, a national panel concluded in a report released on Wednesday.

The 21-member nonpartisan committee, appointed by the Institute of Medicine, the independent research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, called for sweeping change.

“The bottom line is the health care system is poorly designed to meet the needs of patients near the end of life,” said David M. Walker, a Republican and a former United States comptroller general, who was a chairman of the panel. “The current system is geared towards doing more, more, more, and that system by definition is not necessarily consistent with what patients want, and is also more costly.”

Many of the report’s recommendations could be accomplished without legislation. For example, the panel urged insurers to reimburse health care providers for conversations with patients on advance care planning. Medicare, which covers 50 million Americans and whose members account for about 80 percent of deaths each year, is considering doing just that, prompted by a recent request from the American Medical Association. Some private insurers are already covering such conversations, and many more would if Medicare did.

But some recommendations — like changing the reimbursement structure so that Medicare would pay for home health services instead of emphasizing hospital care, and so that Medicaid would provide better coverage of long-term care for the frail elderly — would require congressional action.

“We know that there may be a need for new legislation to be introduced to accomplish that, and we recognize that that’s harder to accomplish in a politically charged environment,” said Dr. Philip A. Pizzo, a former dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine and the committee’s other chairman. (...)

It called for a “major reorientation and restructuring of Medicare, Medicaid and other health care delivery programs” and the elimination of “perverse financial incentives” that encourage expensive hospital procedures when growing numbers of very sick and very old patients want low-tech services like home health care and pain management.

And it said that medical schools and groups that accredit and regulate health providers should greatly increase training in palliative care and set standards so that more clinicians know how to compassionately and effectively treat patients who want to be made comfortable but avoid extensive medical procedures.

The 507-page report, “Dying in America,” said its recommendations would improve the quality of care and better satisfy more patients and families. It also said the changes would produce significant savings that would help make health care more affordable.

“If you meet their needs, treat their pain, treat their depression, get them some help in the house, your costs plummet,” said Dr. Diane E. Meier, a committee member and the director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care. Fewer patients would end up in emergency rooms getting expensive care they do not want, she said, adding, “It’s a rare example in health policy of doing well by doing good.”

by Pam Belluck, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Heather Ainsworth

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The Solution to ISIS Is the First Amendment

As the elite panic about ISIS — the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant — continues apace, it’s worth looking at how violations of the First Amendment have allowed this group to flourish, and just generally screw up US policy-making. The gist of the problem is that Americans have been lied to for years about our foreign policy, and these lies have now created binding policy constraints on our leaders which make it impossible to eliminate groups like ISIS.

Let’s start by understanding what ISIS actually is. First, ISIS is a brutal fascistic movement of radical Sunni militants, well-armed and well-trained, and bent on the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate throughout the Middle East. Second, it may also be and almost certainly was an arm of a wealthy Gulf state allied with the United States. This contradiction probably doesn’t surprise you, but if it does, that’s only because it cuts against a standard narrative of good guys and bad guys peddled by various foreign policy interests. The reality is that ally and enemy in post-colonial lands is often a meaningless term —it’s better to describe interests. A good if overly romanticized Hollywood illustration of this dynamic is the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, about the secret collaboration between Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan Israel and the CIA to undermine the Soviets in Afghanistan. This foreign policy apparatus is usually hidden in plain sight, known to most financial, political, military, and corporate elites but not told to the American public.

ISIS, like Al Qaeda, is an armed and trained military group. Guns and training cost money, and this money came from somewhere. There are two Gulf states that finance Sunni militants — Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Both states use financial power derived from oil to build armed terrorist groups which then accomplish aims that their states cannot pursue openly. This occasionally slips out into the open. German Development Minister Gerd Mueller recently blamed Qatar, for instance, for financing ISIS. Qatar itself swiftly denied the charges and claimed it only funds Jabhat al-Nusra. Al-Nusra is the other radical Al Qaeda offshoot militant group fighting in Syria.In other words, Qatar denied funding ISIS by saying it funds Al-Qaeda. It’s a sort of ‘we fund the bad guys who want to kill Americans but not the really bad guys who behead them on social media,’ a non-denial denial by geopolitical psychopaths. (...)

This is what happened after 9/11, a lack of an informed debate due to propaganda, media control, and a special kind of censorship. Our policy on ISIS is the price for such ignorance. Polling shows Americans want something done on ISIS, but they have no confidence that what is being done will work. This is a remarkably astute way to see the situation, because foreign policy since 9/11 has been a series of geopolitical duct tape and costly disasters. Despite the layers of gauze and grime pulled over our foreign policy viewfinder, the public itself is aware that whatever we’re doing ain’t working.

Until that happens, Americans will not be willing to pay any price for a foreign policy, and rightfully so. Fool me once, shame on you. And so forth.

Unwinding the classified state, and beginning the adult conversation put off for seventy years about the nature of American power, is the predicate for building a global order that can drain the swampy brutal corners of the world that allow groups like ISIS to grow and thrive. To make that unwinding happen, we need to start demanding the truth, not what ‘national security’ tells us we need to know. The Constitution does not mention the words ‘national security’, it says ‘common defense.’ And that means that Americans should be getting accurate information about what exactly we are defending.

by Matt Stoller, Medium |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Honolulu Is Building America's First Fully Driverless Transit System

Perfect weather and sandy beaches might spring to mind when a mainlander thinks of Honolulu. But this metro area of nearly 1 million people is far from paradise for those who get stuck in its notorious traffic, which competes with Los Angeles for the title of worst in the United States.

"Anybody who flies into Honolulu and drives into town—heading to Waikiki, for example—you are immediately struck by the H-1 freeway, seven lanes of traffic going in the same direction," says Dan Grabauskas, executive director and CEO of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation ­(HART). "And if you land at rush hour, it's a standstill. It surprises people when they come here, to see how much congestion we face."

HART is working on an alternative to that miserable commute: a 20-mile elevated rail line—a first for the islands—that will whisk passengers between downtown and outlying communities in a fraction of the time it currently takes to crawl through rush hour traffic. With the first trips planned for 2017, the $5.2 billion Honolulu Rail Transit Project is expected to reduce congestion by 18 percent, taking as many as 40,000 automobiles off the road and replacing them with a fleet of four-car trains that can accommodate up to 800 riders, with racks for both bicycles and surfboards.

But surfboard storage will not be the project's only unique feature; this will also be the first fully automated wide-scale urban transit system in the United States. Instead of human drivers, a centrally-located computer system will control stops, departures, and speed, and even open and close doors. Operation will be cheaper than for manually-driven rail, says Grabauskas, and he also expects it to be safer. "There are transit systems where driver error has caused collisions or other incidents," he says. "The driverless operation we have is going to be very safe." (...)

In Honolulu, which is starting from scratch, automation was perhaps the easiest thing about making the system a reality. The rail line was "decades in the making," says Jennifer Sabas, former chief of staff to Hawaii's Sen. Daniel Inouye, who secured $1.5 billion in federal funding for the rail line before his death in 2012. Sabas now serves as executive director of Move Oahu Forward, a business- and labor-backed non-profit organized to support the line in the face of opposition from residents and politicians who argued that the elevated tracks and stations would loom over the landscape, and that the system, which will be funded by a half-cent surcharge on the state's general excise tax in addition to the federal contribution, simply cost too much. "Since there was such an issue over whether to even build a train, the driverless aspect hasn't gotten much attention," says Sabas.

by Amy Crawford, CityLab |  Read more:

Image: HART

Yayoi Kusama, I Who Have Arrived In Heaven, New York, 2013
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The Scent of Green Papaya
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Essential Dance - OneTwoThree