PJ Harvey

Anthony Bourdain Has Become the Future of Cable News, and He Couldn't Care Less

"Ready to eat well?" asks Anthony Bourdain.

The chef turned TV star is leading the way toward a pair of narrow seats at the New York outpost of a Michelin-rated Tokyo yakitori joint called Tori Shin, a tightly packed establishment that's Bourdain's kind of place: little-known, deeply authentic, and a bit unusual. "We might as well be in Tokyo," he says. "They do everything right here."

A meal out with Bourdain typically involves three things. There will be engaging conversation, possibly touching on such subjects as the essays of Michel de Montaigne, 1920s surrealist films, and mixed-martial-arts combat. There will be booze, although perhaps in more modest quantities than his reputation suggests. And there will be food--some strange, all carefully prepared, and a certain amount involving animal innards that seem better suited to ninth-grade biology class than the dinner table.

Bourdain, 58, is a foodie explorer who has spent years trekking around the planet while fearlessly tucking into all manner of exotic fare, from months-old rotten shark meat in Iceland to a still-beating cobra heart in Vietnam. "He's the Indiana Jones of the food world," says his close friend Eric Ripert, chef and co-owner of New York institution Le Bernardin. "He is the smart guy who knows food and is going to take us with him on an adventure."

Bourdain's hour-long CNN food and travel show, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, which kicked off its fourth season on September 28 (new episodes air Sundays at 9 p.m. EST), is unlike anything else on TV. Forget about four-star hotels or luxury spa treatments: Bourdain is on a mission to illuminate underappreciated and misunderstood cultures, whether it's Myanmar or Detroit. He regularly takes viewers to the sorts of places--Libya, Gaza, Congo--that most Americans know only from grim headlines about political strife and body counts. Bourdain does all of this with vivid narrative reporting, stunning visuals, palpable empathy, and a relentlessly open mind. The show has so far been nominated for 11 Emmys and has won three (most recently for Best Informational Series or Special). This year it was also awarded a prestigious Peabody.

As with Bourdain's previous programs, A Cook's Tour and the long-running No Reservations, the premise is simple: he goes somewhere interesting and hangs out with the locals. "We show up and say, 'What's to eat? What makes you happy?'" Bourdain says. "You're going to get very Technicolor, very deep, very complicated answers to those questions. I'm not a Middle East expert. I'm not an Africa expert. I'm not a foreign-policy wonk. But I see aspects of these countries that regular journalists don't. If we have a role, it's to put a face on people who you might not otherwise have seen or cared about."

Parts Unknown is the flagship of Bourdain's somewhat accidental empire. He also presides over two other current TV programs: the PBS docuseries The Mind of a Chef (which he both narrates and executive produces) and the Esquire Network travel show The Getaway. He's a mentor on ABC's reality competition The Taste (season 3 premieres in January), and he oversees an Ecco/HarperCollins imprint that has released four books since it kicked off in May 2013. He has written six food books of his own--including his 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential--and several crime novels. Recently, and much to his surprise, he's even become a new face of CNN, which is currently being overhauled by former NBCUniversal president and CEO Jeff Zucker. His show could lead an industry-wide shift toward a more documentary-focused cable-news landscape.

For Bourdain, it has been a long evolution: from heroin-addicted chef to punk-rock-foodie author to global citizen on a mission to simply understand a bit about our world. It's a testament to Bourdain's work ethic and creative drive that after 14 years on television, he's still pushing to get better, go deeper, seek out complexity, avoid the obvious and conventional. At a time when he could simply coast, Bourdain seems as energized as ever. (...)

That quest for excellence is a big part of what's kept Bourdain excited about making a show with the same basic format for the past 14 years. He can be intense, but he constantly pushes the crew to reach toward the new. "We literally sit down and try to figure out, 'What's the most fucked-up thing we can do?' " he says, taking a swig from his industrial-size cup of light-and-sweet deli coffee. " 'What haven't we done that we can try?' " (...)

Not all of these experiments pay off, and Bourdain is okay with that. The point is to resist the predictable, especially when it comes to TV's ingrained conventions. "The only thing that makes me upset and, really, a dick is if something is fucking plodding and reasonable," he says, spitting out that last word with palpable revulsion. "It starts with an establishing shot, I go someplace, I meet somebody, I sit down, I eat, and I come to a conclusion: That kind of conventional thinking really upsets me. I would much rather see some incomprehensible, over-the-top, fucked-up thing, because at least you're trying to do something awesome."

by Rob Brunner, Fast Company |  Read more:

Image: CNN

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Polaroid Goes After GoPro With a $99 Action Camera

What better way to conjure the 1980s, Taylor Swift probably thought, than by using a Polaroid picture of herself as an album cover. Inside the album are 13 more vintage-esque photos. You could say that Polaroid is having its moment. Again.

This time around the brand is resonating with a generation whose parents experienced the first boom in analog instant photography. And now the company is trying to sustain that interest with the Cube, an adorably tiny HD action-video camera priced at $99 for kids who can’t afford a GoPro, which can cost two to four times as much.

“GoPro has done an incredible job building a new category in the digital imaging space,” says Polaroid Chief Executive Officer Scott Hardy. “But when we look at that market, we think it can be much bigger by not just targeting the professional and amateur and aspirational thrill-seekers but going after more of the lifestyle segments.” The Cube, which goes on sale today, is geared toward people who are more likely to strap a camera to the handlebars of their fixed-wheel bike than to swim with sharks. (...)

Beyond the physical allusions, Brunner says he wanted to make the camera as fun and easy to use as the original Polaroid point-and-shoots. The Cube has a single button on top—press once to take a still image, twice for video. A door in the back, unscrewed with a coin, reveals the memory card, a micro USB port for charging the device and for downloading video, and a switch for choosing between 720p or 1080p resolution. The resolution is on par with that of a GoPro, which also offers an intermediate option of 960p.

As one would expect with a camera that’s half the price, the Cube includes fewer features. There’s no photo blast or remote control, while the cheapest GoPro offers both. But what it sacrifices in terms of features, the Cube makes up for in convenience. A magnet on the bottom attaches to metal surfaces without the need for another accessory (although there are plenty of those, including helmet, bike, suction, and tripod mounts).

Plus, the Cube is cute.

by Belinda Lanks, Businessweek |  Read more:

Image: Polaroid

Pimping Climate Action

[ed. See also: Naomi Klein's One Way or Another Everything Changes]

I’ve never been to a protest march that advertised in the New York City subway. That spent $220,000 on posters inviting Wall Street bankers to join a march to save the planet, according to one source. That claims you can change world history in an afternoon after walking the dog and eating brunch. Welcome to the “People’s Climate March,” which took place yesterday in New York City. It was timed to take place before world leaders hold a Climate Summit at the United Nations tomorrow. (...)

Environmental activist Anne Petermann and writer Quincy Saul describe how the People’s Climate March has no demands, no targets, and no enemy. Organizers admitted encouraging bankers to march was like saying Blackwater mercenaries should join an antiwar protest. There is no unity other than money. One veteran activist who was involved in Occupy Wall Street said it was made known there was plenty of money to hire her and others. There is no sense of history: decades of climate-justice activism are being erased by the sensationalist phrase “biggest climate change demonstration ever.” Investigative reporter Cory Morningstar has connected the dots between the organizing groups, 350.org and Avaaz, the global online activist outfit modeled on MoveOn.org, and institutions like the World Bank and Clinton Global Initiative. Morningstar claims the secret of Avaaz’s success is its “expertise in behavioral change.”

That is what I find most troubling. Having worked on Madison Avenue for nearly a decade, I can smell a P.R. and marketing campaign a mile away. That seems to be how the People’s Climate March was organized. According to inside sources a push early on for a Seattle-style event—organizing thousands of people to nonviolently shut down the area around the United Nations—was thwarted by paid staff with the organizing groups. One participant in the organizing meetings said, “In the beginning people were saying, ‘This is our Seattle.” But the paid staff got the politics-free Climate March. Another source said, “You wouldn’t see Avaaz promoting an Occupy-style action. The strategic decision was made to have a big march and get as many mainstream groups on board as possible.”

Nothing wrong with that. Not every tactic should be based on Occupy. But in an email about climate change that Avaaz sent out last December, which apparently raked in millions of dollars, it wrote, “It’s time for powerful, direct, non-violent action, to capture imagination, convey moral urgency, and inspire people to act. Think Occupy.” Think Occupy? Without the politics? What is happening exactly?

It seems that Avaaz found a lucrative revenue stream by warning about climate catastrophe that can only be solved with a donate button. This isn’t really a surprise. Avaaz has pioneered clickbait activism. It gets people to sign petitions about dramatic but ultimately minor issues. The operating method of Avaaz, which was established in 2007, is to create “actions” like these that generate emails for its fundraising operation. Avaaz’s business model to create products (the actions), that help it increase market share (emails), and ultimately, revenue. The actions that get the most attention are ones with the most petition signers, media coverage, and ability to generate that revenue. Social justice is turned into a product that enhances the liberal do-goodery. Avaaz profits off using internet activism and philanthropy as a release valve for people who desire genuine change, but lack the tools for building it directly. Now, it has set its sights on the climate justice movement.

To convince people to donate, it says we need Occupy-style actions. That lets people direct their desire for social change into a click of their mouses. When the moment came for assembling such a protest, though, Avaaz and 350.org blocked it. When it finally did get organized in the form of Flood Wall Street, they pushed it out of sight. If you go to the People’s Climate March website, you won’t find any mention of the Flood Wall Street action, which I fully support, but fear is being organized with too little time and resources. Nor have I seen it in an Avaaz email, nor has anyone else I’ve talked to. Bill McKibben of 350.org began promoting it this week, but that may be because there is discontent in the activist ranks about the march, which includes a number of Occupy Wall Street activists. One inside source said, “It’s a branding decision not to promote the Flood Wall Street action. These are not radical organizations.”

Branding. That’s how the climate crisis is going to be solved. We are in an era of postmodern social movements. The image is said to come first, not the ideology, and it is the branding that shapes the reality. The P.R. and marketing determines the tactics, the messaging, the organizing, and the strategy. When I asked an insider what the metrics for success would be, the insider told me that it would be measured by media coverage and long-term polling about public opinion. I was dumbfounded. Those are the exact same tools we would use in huge marketing campaigns. First we would estimate and tally media “impressions” across all digital, print, outdoor, and so on. Then a few months down the road we would conduct surveys to see if we changed the consumer’s opinion of the brand, their favorability, the qualities they associated with it, the likelihood they would try. Avaaz is doing the same thing.

That is how we should read Avaaz’s branding about changing world history. The more dramatic the language, the better the response. It’s like the supermarket. The bags and boxes don’t say, “Not bad,” or “kinda tasty.” They say “the cheesiest,” “the most delicious,” “an avalanche of flavor,” “utterly irresistible.” That’s why climate change polls so well for Avaaz. You see the same overblown rhetoric being used for the People’s Climate March: It’s the “biggest ever.” There is “unprecedented collaboration” with more than 1,400 “partner” groups in New York City. Everything comes down to this one day with the “future on the line and the whole world watching, we’ll take a stand to bend the course of history.”

by Arun Gupta, Souciant | Read more:
Image: Mat McDermott

"It's strange. I felt less lonely when I didn't know you."
       ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
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Joel Meyerowitz, St. Louis, 1977
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Larry Ellison Bought an Island in Hawaii. Now What?

Henry Jolicoeur is a retired French Canadian hypnotherapist and a glass-products importer who enjoys making very low-budget documentary films. In the summer of 2012, Jolicoeur read that Larry Ellison, a founder of the Silicon Valley giant Oracle and the fifth-richest man in the world, had bought 97 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai — not a 97 percent stake in some kind of company, but 97 percent of the physical place. Jolicoeur was curious, so he booked a flight and packed his camera.

Jolicoeur knew a little about Lanai, having lived in Hawaii in the ’90s. It is among the smallest and least trafficked of Hawaiian islands — a quiet, spectacular place where Cook Island pine trees vault up everywhere, like spires or giant peacock feathers — and can feel like a charming wormhole to an earlier era. There is only one town, Lanai City, where virtually all of the island’s 3,200 residents live. Ellison now owned a third of all their houses and apartments; the island’s two Four Seasons-run hotels; the central commons at the heart of Lanai City, called Dole Park, and all the buildings around it; the town swimming pool; the community center; the theater; a grocery store; two golf courses; a wastewater treatment plant; the water company; and a cemetery. In a single sweeping real estate deal, reported to cost $300 million, he had acquired 87,000 of the island’s 90,000 acres. And he would subsequently buy an airline that connects Lanai to Honolulu as well. On all of Lanai, I heard of only a handful of businesses — the gas station, the rental-car company, two banks, a credit union and a cafe called Coffee Works — that are neither owned by Ellison nor pay him rent. (...)

Ninety seven percent of Lanai may be a lot of Lanai, but it’s a tiny part of Ellison’s overall empire. Ellison, who stepped down as C.E.O. of Oracle on Sept. 18, is estimated to be worth $46 billion. He made an estimated $78.4 million last year, or about $38,000 an hour. He owns a tremendous amount of stuff — cars, boats, real estate, Japanese antiquities, the BPN Paribas Open tennis tournament, an America’s Cup sailing team, one of Bono’s guitars — and has a reputation for intensity and excess. Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that when Ellison has played basketball on the courts on his yachts, he has positioned “someone in a powerboat following the yacht to retrieve balls that go overboard.” One biographer called him “a modern-day Genghis Khan.”

At a public meeting on Lanai last year, an Ellison representative explained that his boss wasn’t drawn to the island by the potential for profits but by the potential for a great accomplishment — the satisfaction one day of having made the place work. For Ellison, it seemed, Lanai was less like an investment than like a classic car, up on blocks in the middle of the Pacific, that he had become obsessed with restoring. He wants to transform it into a premier tourist destination and what he has called “the first economically viable, 100 percent green community”: an innovative, self-sufficient dreamscape of renewable energy, electric cars and sustainable agriculture.

Ellison has explained that Lanai feels to him like “this really cool 21st-century engineering project” — and so far, his approach, which seems steeped in the ethos of Silicon Valley, has boiled down to rooting out the many inefficiencies of daily life on Lanai and replacing them with a single, elegantly designed system. It’s the sort of sweeping challenge that engineering types get giddy over: a full-scale model. Of course, there are actual people living inside Ellison’s engineering project — a community being hit by an unimaginable wave of wealth. But unlike all the more familiar versions of that story, Lanai isn’t being remade by some vague socioeconomic energy you can only gesture at with words like “techies” or “hipsters” or “Wall Street” but by one guy, whose name everyone knows, in a room somewhere, whiteboarding out the whole project.

Jolicoeur seemed to understand the precariousness that power imbalance created: the staggering responsibility, the incomprehensible control. At one point, standing on a beach, he announces theatrically to the camera, “The Bible says, ‘Where there is no vision, people perish.’ ” Eventually he visits the island’s animal-rescue center, where a young employee explains that because there are no natural predators on Lanai, the feral-cat population just explodes. Right now, she tells him, the shelter is housing 380 cats.

From behind the camera, Jolicoeur hollers: “So basically, these are 380 cats of Mr. Ellison’s?”

“They’re his cats!” the woman says, laughing and laughing. (...)

Like a lot of omnipotent forces, Ellison has remained mostly invisible. He has visited Lanai many times — locals told me they can tell he’s on the island when they see his yacht hitched in the harbor — but he seems determined to keep a formal distance from the community, shielding himself behind the executive team of Pulama Lanai, the management company he set up to oversee the island’s transformation. Although Pulama holds frequent public meetings on Lanai, Ellison has declined to attend any or to address residents directly. Several residents told me that they’d resorted to reading biographies of Ellison to learn more about the man — books that have somewhat disquieting titles like “Everyone Else Must Fail” and “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison,” the punch line being: “God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison.”

Ellison’s vision for the island was first delivered, by proxy, early last year, at a meeting of the island’s Community Plan Advisory Committee. These meetings were part of a county-government process to update the island’s comprehensive planning document, which dictates everything from zoning and land use to cultural preservation. Butch Gima, a Lanai native and social worker who was chairman of the committee, told me that Ellison’s takeover put them in a tricky position. On one hand, it allowed for greater ambition. (“A new world has opened up,” one member told the committee.) But it also felt strange to chart a course for an island that someone else had taken control of. Even the committee’s economic research and growth projections might now be obsolete, depending on what Ellison wanted to do. And so they invited Pulama’s new chief operating officer, Kurt Matsumoto, to brief them.

Matsumoto was hired to oversee operations on Lanai a couple of months earlier. He had a background in running large resorts, but he was also a “Lanai Boy,” as people kept putting it to me — he grew up on the island. “He doesn’t come off as being real slick,” Gima told me. (As kids, Gima and Matsumoto were in Boy Scouts together.) His appointment was encouraging; the relationship between the island and its new owner had been brought down to a more human scale.

Matsumoto appeared before the committee in mid-January — a middle-management Moses coming down the mountain with an important PowerPoint. He prefaced his presentation by explaining that Ellison didn’t have any firm plans yet, only “intentions.” Then he put up his first slide.

That night, and in other meetings, Matsumoto unveiled a startlingly ambitious vision for the island. He explained that Ellison aimed to build a third resort, this time on the uninhabited southwestern coast, as well as a complex of private estates — maybe 50 of them, each five or more acres. Ellison intended to expand Lanai’s airport, adding a bigger runway to accommodate direct flights from the mainland for the first time. The limiting factor on Lanai has always been water, but Ellison would build a state-of-the-art desalination plant to produce more fresh water. Ellison would expand Lanai City; build an “energy park,” where electricity produced with solar panels or photosynthesizing algae would be fed into a new smart grid; and bring commercial agriculture back to the island, in fields outfitted with sensors to control fertilization and irrigation, so that Lanai could begin to feed itself and even export products, rather than depend on weekly food barges from Oahu. Eventually Matsumoto would tell The Wall Street Journal that Ellison hoped to see the island’s population double to about 6,000. Elsewhere, there was talk of organic wineries and flower farms and an innovative aquaponics-and-hydroponics operation that would raise fish and fruits and vegetables in a sustainable symphony of positive feedback loops. Better health care. A bowling alley. An institute for the study of sustainability. A 22-acre film studio. A top-flight, residential tennis academy for competitive youth.

Matsumoto’s tone at that first meeting was low-key, humble and inclusive. He used words like “respect” and “empower,” “sharing” and “investing.” Then, eventually, he hit his last slide: “Mahalo” — Hawaiian for “Thank you” — and was done.

“It was hard to formulate any thought-out questions,” Gima recalled about the presentation. “I think people just went, ‘Whoa.’ ”

by Jon Mooallem, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Mark Peterson and Greta Pratt for The New York Times

Portland Will Still Be Cool, but Anchorage May Be the Place to Be

Alaskans, stay in Alaska. People in the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, sit tight.

Scientists trying to predict the consequences of climate change say that they see few havens from the storms, floods and droughts that are sure to intensify over the coming decades. But some regions, they add, will fare much better than others.

Forget most of California and the Southwest (drought, wildfires). Ditto for much of the East Coast and Southeast (heat waves, hurricanes, rising sea levels). Washington, D.C., for example, may well be a flood zone by 2100, according to an estimate released last week.

Instead, consider Anchorage. Or even, perhaps, Detroit. (...)

Under any model of climate change, scientists say, most of the country will look and feel drastically different in 2050, 2100 and beyond, even as cities and states try to adapt and plan ahead. The northern Great Plains states may well be pleasant (if muggy) for future generations, as may many neighboring states. Although few people today are moving long distances to strategize for climate change, some are at least pondering the question of where they would go.

“The answer is the Pacific Northwest, and probably especially west of the Cascades,” said Ben Strauss, vice president for climate impacts and director of the program on sea level rise at Climate Central, a research collaboration of scientists and journalists. “Actually, the strip of coastal land running from Canada down to the Bay Area is probably the best,” he added. “You see a lot less extreme heat; it’s the one place in the West where there’s no real expectation of major water stress, and while sea level will rise there as everywhere, the land rises steeply out of the ocean, so it’s a relatively small factor.”

by Jennifer A. Kingson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Burton/Getty Images; Joe Raedle/Getty Images; The' N. Pham/The Virginian-Pilot, via Associated Press; Elaine Thompson/Associated Press

The Solace of Oblivion

On October 31, 2006, an eighteen-year-old woman named Nikki Catsouras slammed her father’s sports car into the side of a concrete toll booth in Orange County, California. Catsouras was decapitated in the accident. The California Highway Patrol, following standard protocol, secured the scene and took photographs. The manner of death was so horrific that the local coroner did not allow Nikki’s parents to identify her body.

“About two weeks after the accident, I got a call from my brother-in-law,” Christos Catsouras, Nikki’s father, told me. “He said he had heard from a neighbor that the photos from the crash were circulating on the Internet. We asked the C.H.P., and they said they would look into it.” In short order, two employees admitted that they had shared the photographs. As summarized in a later court filing, the employees had “e-mailed nine gruesome death images to their friends and family members on Halloween—for pure shock value. Once received, the photographs were forwarded to others, and thus spread across the Internet like a malignant firestorm, popping up on thousands of Web sites.”

Already bereft of his eldest daughter, Catsouras told his three other girls that they couldn’t look at the Internet. “But, other than that, people told me there was nothing I could do,” he recalled. “They said, ‘Don’t worry. It’ll blow over.’ ” Nevertheless, Catsouras embarked on a modern legal quest: to remove information from the Internet. In recent years, many people have made the same kind of effort, from actors who don’t want their private photographs in broad circulation to ex-convicts who don’t want their long-ago legal troubles to prevent them from finding jobs. Despite the varied circumstances, all these people want something that does not exist in the United States: the right to be forgotten.

The situation is different in Europe, thanks to a court case that was decided earlier this year. In 1998, a Spanish newspaper called La Vanguardia published two small notices stating that certain property owned by a lawyer named Mario Costeja González was going to be auctioned to pay off his debts. Costeja cleared up the financial difficulties, but the newspaper records continued to surface whenever anyone Googled his name. In 2010, Costeja went to Spanish authorities to demand that the newspaper remove the items from its Web site and that Google remove the links from searches for his name. The Spanish Data Protection Agency, which is the local representative of a Continent-wide network of computer-privacy regulators, denied the claim against La Vanguardia but granted the claim against Google. This spring, the European Court of Justice, which operates as a kind of Supreme Court for the twenty-eight members of the European Union, affirmed the Spanish agency’s decisions. La Vanguardia could leave the Costeja items up on its Web site, but Google was prohibited from linking to them on any searches relating to Costeja’s name. The Court went on to say, in a broadly worded directive, that all individuals in the countries within its jurisdiction had the right to prohibit Google from linking to items that were “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed.”

The consequences of the Court’s decision are just beginning to be understood. Google has fielded about a hundred and twenty thousand requests for deletions and granted roughly half of them. Other search engines that provide service in Europe, like Microsoft’s Bing, have set up similar systems. Public reaction to the decision, especially in the United States and Great Britain, has been largely critical. An editorial in the New York Times declared that it “could undermine press freedoms and freedom of speech.” The risk, according to the Times and others, is that aggrieved individuals could use the decision to hide or suppress information of public importance, including links about elected officials. A recent report by a committee of the House of Lords called the decision “misguided in principle and unworkable in practice.”

Jules Polonetsky, the executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a think tank in Washington, was more vocal. “The decision will go down in history as one of the most significant mistakes that Court has ever made,” he said. “It gives very little value to free expression. If a particular Web site is doing something illegal, that should be stopped, and Google shouldn’t link to it. But for the Court to outsource to Google complicated case-specific decisions about whether to publish or suppress something is wrong. Requiring Google to be a court of philosopher kings shows a real lack of understanding about how this will play out in reality.”

At the same time, the Court’s decision spoke to an anxiety felt keenly on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, the right to privacy trumps freedom of speech; the reverse is true in the United States. “Europeans think of the right to privacy as a fundamental human right, in the way that we think of freedom of expression or the right to counsel,” Jennifer Granick, the director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, said recently. “When it comes to privacy, the United States’ approach has been to provide protection for certain categories of information that are deemed sensitive and then impose some obligation not to disclose unless certain conditions are met.” Congress has passed laws prohibiting the disclosure of medical information (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), educational records (the Buckley Amendment), and video-store rentals (a law passed in response to revelations about Robert Bork’s rentals when he was nominated to the Supreme Court). Any of these protections can be overridden with the consent of the individual or as part of law-enforcement investigations. (...)

Google doesn’t publish its own material, but the Court decision recognized that the results of a Google search often matter more than the information on any individual Web site. The private sector made this discovery several years ago. Michael Fertik, the founder of Reputation.com, also supports the existence of a right to be forgotten that is enforceable against Google. “This is not about free speech; it’s about privacy and dignity,” he told me. “For the first time, dignity will get the same treatment in law as copyright and trademark do in America. If Sony or Disney wants fifty thousand videos removed from YouTube, Google removes them with no questions asked. If your daughter is caught kissing someone on a cell-phone home video, you have no option of getting it down. That’s wrong. The priorities are backward.” (...)

“There is an inevitable conflict between two distinct social values”—privacy and free speech, Schrage said. “The question is how do societies value those competing rights. Technology didn’t create the tension but just revealed it in a dramatic way.”

by Jeffrey Toobin, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Javier Jaen

Alibaba is All of These Companies Rolled Into One

[ed. The initial public offering happened last Friday and generated $25 billion in revenue. See also: After Alibaba's I.P.O: The Big Picture]

Alibaba’s initial public offering is likely to be the biggest the world has ever seen. The scale of the thing has led many to compare the huge Chinese company to familiar internet giants in the West, such as Amazon. But the company isn’t just the “Amazon of China”—it’s also the Dropbox, PayPal, Uber, Hulu, and more. Though Google has its fingers in a similarly high volume of pies, its enterprises, unlike Alibaba’s, are exclusively digital.

Alibaba’s distinct businesses resemble more than a dozen major Western companies, by our count—a phenomenon we’ve sketched out in the graphic below. In the text that follows, we unravel some of that complexity—and explain how Alibaba has expanded on its way to a historic IPO.

Following the ambitious vision of founder and chairman Jack Ma, Alibaba has been on an investment bender, snatching up stakes in everything from mobile platforms to brick-and-mortar shopping malls, wealth-management products, and cloud services. This strategy might look scattershot. But Alibaba—a bit like Amazon, the Western company to which it’s most often compared—has demonstrated a knack for dominating whatever sector it enters and for anticipating what consumers want before they know they want it.

by Nikhil Sonnad, Gwynn Guilford and Lily Kuo, Quartz |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

via: account deactivated

‘Poor People Don’t Plan Long-Term. We’ll Just Get Our Hearts Broken’

In the autumn of 2013 I was in my first term of school in a decade. I had two jobs; my husband, Tom, was working full-time; and we were raising our two small girls. It was the first time in years that we felt like maybe things were looking like they’d be OK for a while.

After a gruelling shift at work, I was unwinding online when I saw a question from someone on a forum I frequented: Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive? I thought I could at least explain what I’d seen and how I’d reacted to the pressures of being poor. I wrote my answer to the question, hit post, and didn’t think more about it for at least a few days. This is what it said:

Why I make terrible decisions, or, poverty thoughts

There’s no way to structure this coherently. They are random observations that might help explain the mental processes. But often, I think that we look at the academic problems of poverty and have no idea of the why. We know the what and the how, and we can see systemic problems, but it’s rare to have a poor person actually explain it on their own behalf. So this is me doing that, sort of.

Rest is a luxury for the rich. I get up at 6am, go to school (I have a full course load, but I only have to go to two in-person classes), then work, then I get the kids, then pick up my husband, then have half an hour to change and go to Job 2. I get home from that at around 12.30am, then I have the rest of my classes and work to tend to. I’m in bed by 3am. This isn’t every day, I have two days off a week from each of my obligations. I use that time to clean the house and soothe Mr Martini [her partner], see the kids for longer than an hour and catch up on schoolwork.

Those nights I’m in bed by midnight, but if I go to bed too early I won’t be able to stay up the other nights because I’ll fuck my pattern up, and I drive an hour home from Job 2 so I can’t afford to be sleepy. I never get a day off from work unless I am fairly sick. It doesn’t leave you much room to think about what you are doing, only to attend to the next thing and the next. Planning isn’t in the mix.

When I was pregnant the first time, I was living in a weekly motel for some time. I had a mini-fridge with no freezer and a microwave. I was on WIC [government-funded nutritional aid for women, infants and children]. I ate peanut butter from the jar and frozen burritos because they were 12 for $2. Had I had a stove, I couldn’t have made beef burritos that cheaply. And I needed the meat, I was pregnant. I might not have had any prenatal care, but I am intelligent enough to eat protein and iron while knocked up.

I know how to cook. I had to take Home Ec to graduate from high school. Most people on my level didn’t. Broccoli is intimidating. You have to have a working stove, and pots, and spices, and you’ll have to do the dishes no matter how tired you are or they’ll attract bugs. It is a huge new skill for a lot of people. That’s not great, but it’s true. If you fuck it up, you could make your family sick.

We have learned not to try too hard to be middle class. It never works out well and always makes you feel worse for having tried and failed yet again. Better not to try. It makes more sense to get food that you know will be palatable and cheap and that keeps well. Junk food is a pleasure that we are allowed to have; why would we give that up?

We have very few of them. (...)

Convenience food is just that. And we are not allowed many conveniences. Especially since the Patriot Act [aimed at strengthening domestic security in the war against terrorism] was passed, it’s hard to get a bank account. But without one, you spend a lot of time figuring out where to cash a cheque and get money orders to pay bills. Most motels now have a no-credit-card-no-room policy. I wandered around San Francisco for five hours in the rain once with nearly a thousand dollars on me and could not rent a room even if I gave them a $500 cash deposit and surrendered my cellphone to the desk to hold as surety.

Nobody gives enough thought to depression. You have to understand that we know that we will never not feel tired. We will never feel hopeful. We will never get a vacation.

Ever. We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor. It doesn’t give us much reason to improve ourselves. We don’t apply for jobs because we know we can’t afford to look nice enough to hold them. I would make a super legal secretary but I’ve been turned down more than once because I “don’t fit the image of the firm”, which is a nice way of saying “gtfo, pov”. I am good enough to cook the food, hidden away in the kitchen, but my boss won’t make me a server because I don’t “fit the corporate image”. I am not beautiful. I have missing teeth and skin that looks like it will when you live on B12 and coffee and nicotine and no sleep. Beauty is a thing you get when you can afford it, and that’s how you get the job that you need in order to be beautiful. There isn’t much point trying.

Cooking attracts roaches. Nobody realises that. I’ve spent hours impaling roach bodies and leaving them out on toothpick spikes to discourage others from entering. It doesn’t work, but is amusing.

“Free” only exists for rich people. It’s great that there’s a bowl of condoms at my school, but most poor people will never set foot on a college campus. We don’t belong there. There’s a clinic? Great! There’s still a copay [cost levied by health insurance companies]. We’re not going. Besides, all they’ll tell you at the clinic is you need to see a specialist, which, seriously? Might as well be located on Mars for how accessible it is. “Low cost” and “sliding scale” sound like “money you have to spend” to me, and they can’t help you anyway.

I smoke. It’s expensive. It’s also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It’s a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and I feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed. It is not a good decision, but it is the only one that I have access to. It is the only thing I have found that keeps me from collapsing or exploding.

I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don’t pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It’s not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isn’t that I blow five bucks at Wendy’s. It’s that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to.

There’s a certain pull to live what bits of life you can while there’s money in your pocket, because no matter how responsible you are you will be broke in three days anyway. When you never have enough money it ceases to have meaning. I imagine having a lot of it is the same thing.

Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain. It’s why you see people with four different babydaddies instead of one. You grab a bit of connection wherever you can to survive. You have no idea how strong the pull to feel worthwhile is. It’s more basic than food. You go to these people who make you feel lovely for an hour that one time, and that’s all you get. You’re probably not compatible with them for anything long term, but right this minute they can make you feel powerful and valuable. It does not matter what will happen in a month. Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don’t plan long term because if we do we’ll just get our hearts broken. It’s best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it.

I am not asking for sympathy. I am just trying to explain, on a human level, how it is that people make what look from the outside like awful decisions. This is what our lives are like, and here are our defence mechanisms, and here is why we think differently. It’s certainly self-defeating, but it’s safer. That’s all. I hope it helps make sense of it.

by Linda Tirado, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Scott Suchman

Landon Nordeman, Marseille, France, 2011.
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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