Sex is Sex, But Money is Money

His son didn’t get into Dartmouth and that makes him sad, because he loves his son and he knows how much pressure the boy puts on himself. I understand.

His wife won’t let him have his late-night bowls of mint chocolate chip ice cream anymore and she nags him about the Sunday afternoons he spends watching golf on television. I frown.

His doctor says he needs more vitamin D, and maybe he should consider anti-depressants, too, but he’s sure if he could just find something meaningful to do with his life, he would feel better. I make a little tsk-ing noise, widen my eyes. I am close to crying.

I tell him he’s sweet for caring about his son so much. I tell him if I were with him, I would let him eat all the ice cream he wanted, and Sunday afternoons would be set aside for watching golf, because why shouldn’t people do what makes them happy? Then I tell him I don’t know about vitamin D and anti-depressants (that’s the truest thing I’ll say all week), but he seems very healthy and, as I say this, I gently touch his thigh and dip my head a little and look at him so my eyes are half hidden — I’ve practiced in the mirror. I smile without showing my teeth — I’ve practiced that, too — and wait for him to reach for me. But he’s not ready for that; he wants to tell me about how he hit a triple for his softball team last weekend, how it was “magical,” how he wishes he could feel that good all the time.

I’ve had men like him before, and they’re sweet, but they can be tricky, too. I don’t know what a triple is, and I have no idea what it has to do with magic, but I do know we’ve been talking for 15 minutes. I know it’s important that he feel like we have all day, that we have forever. Time can’t exist for us. But I know exactly how much time we do have. I kick off my shoes (simple, beige $600 Louboutins that I got on sale for $250) that I wore specially for him because he told me he’s “not a fancy guy.” (If he were fancy, I’d wear my black Louboutins.)

He’s still talking about triples and magic and meaning. We have 35 minutes. It’s plenty of time, but I don’t want to take any unnecessary risks. My job is all about minimizing risk. I move closer, tell him I have an idea that would make him feel good. I tell him it would make me feel good, too. I tell him I’ve been thinking about it since he texted me two days ago. I gently claw his thigh with my fresh, red (any other color, you’re taking a risk) manicure. I moisten my lips, flash just a little tooth. He’s shy, but he’s a man. He stops talking.

The tricky part of my job is over. Now it’s time for sex. (...)

Clients knew me as Angelina or Anna. Angelina was “sweet, intelligent, fun and playful… a devoted pleasure seeker who takes enjoying life very seriously indeed.”

Anna was more shy, a “European companion who adores luxury travel… often passionate, sometimes hilarious but rarely forgettable.”

Angelina cost $800 an hour, $4,000 for the night; Anna ran $900 and $5,000. According to rankings in The Erotic Review (TER), the Yelp of the commercial sex world, each rated in the top 1 percent of all escorts.

But there are lots of young, pretty girls in my business. What got me to the top — and what kept me there — was my work ethic and attention to detail. I was successful because I learned some hard, valuable lessons about making it in the sex-for-money business.

Here are some of them:

by Svetlana Z, Medium | Read more:
Image:Pascal Perich

Songs of Emptiness

[ed. Highlighting one of the links in this essay: Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.]

As with all advertisements, there are a few deceptions at the heart of Apple’s commercial for U2’s newly released Songs of Innocence. The most immediate is that it ends with the tagline “free on iTunes now.”

Given that the album was delivered — without permission — into the digital libraries of over five hundred million iTunes users, implying any kind of choice in the matter seems at the very least misleading. A better version of the ad might read “yours whether you like it or not.”

The move to upload Songs of Innocence without the consent of hundreds of millions of music fans has been so strongly criticized that within days Apple posted a standalone webpage with instructions on how to permanently delete the album. Meanwhile, lead-singer Bono has been lashing out at critics as “haters,” calling the Internet commentary “enough to put you off democracy.” It’s a rather odd rebuttal, which is to say nothing of the rather unsettling implications such a marketing strategy brings with it in a post-Snowden world.

A much more subtle deception is embedded in the ad’s content, which features old footage of live performances from the Ramones, the Clash, and Patti Smith. But what about U2? They are relegated to empty blue-violet avatars, singing and performing the album’s lead single while images of Patti, Joey and Johnny, Joe and Mick are projected onto them.

It’s surely intended as an homage of sorts, an attempt to paint the band as following in the footsteps of punk rock’s greatest. But the resulting imagery only underlines the Washington Post’s Chris Richards’description of the iTunes scheme: “rock-and-roll as dystopian junk mail.” This is the artist as a hollow vessel, a blank commodity for the sake of another commodity, ready-made for the transmission of whatever concept is deemed worthy at the time.

To be sure, Bono has viewed himself in such a way for some time now. He has famously spent the past twenty-five years glad-handing Clintonian economists and former World Bank honchos, heads of state, bigoted congressmen, and outright war criminals. He has penned asinine columns for the New York Times touting the benefits of the free market that make Thomas Friedman look positively eloquent. And then there’s his charitable work: providing money for AIDS research in Africa by teaming up with some of the very same Western companies that have profited so highly from the ongoing pillage of the continent.

Bono’s mission isn’t simply to provide capitalism with a human face. Whether he acknowledges it or not, it’s an attempt at constructing a full-spectrum artistic cocoon for Margaret Thatcher’s notorious dictum “There Is No Alternative.” Songs of Innocence — both its ham-handed aesthetics and its crass economics — fits right in.

by Alexander Billet, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: Phil Romans / Flickr

[ed. The old home town... nice weather, but a little chilly.]
photo: markk

Civil Forfeiture

[ed. I knew it was bad, but not this bad. See also: Stop and Seize.]

Pejac, Ants 
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This Is What Happens to Your Bike After It’s Stolen

To the prepared thief, every bike rack is a buffet. You think a cable lock will keep your beloved wheels in your life. The thief knows a simple pair of aviation snips cuts through that cable like butter. You’re convinced a locker-style combination lock will outsmart a crook. He pops it in seconds with a shim—just slides it in between the body of the lock and its fishhook tip, and your bike is his. (A good bandit can make a shim in about five minutes with nothing more than a beer can and a pair of scissors.) U-locks? Routinely opened with a Bic pen jammed into the keyhole. Even with that rare unbreakable lock, a bike is no safer than its anchor; outside Guthrie Hall at the University of Washington sits a metal rack that bike thieves have sawed straight through.

The components, meanwhile—the lights, seats, handlebars, derailleurs, and brakes that turn a frame into a ridable bike—can go for hundreds of dollars each on the black market. With no serial numbers, these parts, unlike frames, are untraceable. “As long as you’ve got the proper tools,” Justin, a University Avenue fixture who has swapped stories with more than one bike thief and asked that his last name be withheld, explained, “you can just walk up to a bike and be like, ‘I want those rims, I want those handlebars, I want that seat.’ ” A buffet.

Not that your bike is safe indoors. Whitney Rosa, a customer service manager at a medical firm and self-described “avid bike commuter,” thought the locked communal storage room of the Capitol Hill condo building where she rented an apartment was secure until her $8,300 Seven Mudhoney disappeared on December 31, 2011.

Her ride, with its custom titanium frame painted like a pair of blue and brown argyle socks, became one of 824 reported stolen bikes in Seattle that year, according to city data (by 2013 the number rose to an annual 1,121, three per day on average). Had police given it to her straight, Rosa would have learned that only 1 percent of stolen bikes make it back to their owners. And thieves rarely get caught in the act. Someone leaning over a bike to unlock it looks pretty much the same to passersby as someone leaning over a bike to hack or cut its lock. And as Rosa now realized, inside storage isn’t necessarily better.

“The garages are such a soft target, and they’re typically [easy] to get into and chock-full of stuff you can steal,” says Bryan Hance, who runs the online antitheft database bikeindex.org. “One idiot with [the right tools] can get in and get a lot of valuables really fast, really quietly.”

Still, Rosa filed a police report and waited for the cops to solve the caper. And waited. It would be nine months before she received word of her bike’s fate. When she did, it wouldn’t be from the Seattle police. (...)

Justin, our University Ave source—twentysomething, buzzed reddish hair, a valiant attempt at a goatee—recalls once finding an apparently abandoned bike stashed behind a bush in the U District. After waiting for an hour to see if its owner would return—“I boarded around a little bit, smoked some weed”—he said to himself, “Fuck it.” He grabbed the bike and started rolling downhill. Before he’d gone more than a few blocks, a guy on the sidewalk waved at him to pull over. “And this guy’s like, ‘Hey, you wanna sell that bike? How much you want for it?’ And I’m like, ‘Twenty bucks and like a bag of weed right now.’ ” The buyer counteroffered $10 and a gram of marijuana. “Deal.”

“It’s all drugs,” says Hance of bikeindex.org. “Bikes become a sort of currency. You can rip off a bike and trade it for a $50 bag of drugs pretty easily, and then that guy turns around and trades it to another guy, and so on.” One UW police report describes the arrest of a man busted for selling stolen bicycles via Craigslist. A search of his sedan revealed clothes, toiletries, cellphones, and tools for stealing bikes. An utterly spartan existence—save the meth pipe in the glove box.

by Casey Jaywork, Seattle Met |  Read more:

Image: Todd McLellan

The Power of Grace

[ed. Gilead is one of my favorite books. See also: 'Lila': an exquisite novel of spiritual redemption and love.]

Marilynne Robinson tracks the movements of grace as if it were a wild animal, appearing for fleeting intervals and then disappearing past the range of vision, emerging again where we least expect to find it. Her novels are interested in what makes grace necessary at all—shame and its afterlife, loss and its residue, the limits and betrayals of intimacy.

In Lila, her brilliant and deeply affecting new novel, even her description of sunlight in a St. Louis bordello holds a kind of heartbreak: “When a house is shut up like that in the middle of a summer day the light that comes in through any crack is as sharp as a blade.” The notion that light might hurt—that illumination doesn’t always arrive as salvation, or that salvation might ache before it heals—echoes the novel’s articulation of a more personal kind of pain. “That was loneliness. When you’re scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it’s kindly meant.”

Except it does make a difference, or it can. Witness a woman who has just been baptized by the man who will become her husband: “That was what made her cry. Just the touch of his hand.” Lila explores what that crying expresses—joy and scalding at once. In these pages, Robinson resists the notion of love as an easy antidote to a lifetime of suffering or solitude, suggesting that intimacy can’t intrude on loneliness without some measure of pain.

The novel, Robinson’s fourth, returns to the small-town world and church-steeped characters of its predecessors Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). Both of these novels examine the lifelong friendship between two Iowa preachers and the entwining of their families. Lila tells the story of the second wife of one of those ministers, John Ames, offering a portrait of a woman whose brutal, itinerant past makes it difficult for her to accept domesticity and love when they come. (...)

The premise of Lila is just that: a marriage catches husband and wife by surprise—both of them stunned not merely that they would love each other but that they would love anyone, that life still holds this for them. Ames, long entrenched in his identity as an aging widower, finds himself unexpectedly drawn to Lila—a much younger woman who appears in his small town of Gilead after years adrift, fending for herself. “I don’t trust nobody,” she tells him. To which he replies, aptly enough, “No wonder you’re tired.” (...)

Lila takes as its core concern what might have constituted, in another narrative, a happy ending: two lonely souls who never expected happiness somehow finding it. But Robinson’s quest is to illuminate how fraught this happiness is, shadowed by fears of its dissolution and the perverse urge to hasten that dissolution before it arrives unbidden.

by Leslie Jamison, Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Clay Rodery

George Adams, Don Pullen, John Scofield, Dannie Richmond

Christopher Morris
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Borondo, Les Trois Ages

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Stop and Seize

[ed. See also: The Washington Post Regains Its Place at the Table.]

After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government called on police to become the eyes and ears of homeland security on America’s highways.

Local officers, county deputies and state troopers were encouraged to act more aggressively in searching for suspicious people, drugs and other contraband. The departments of Homeland Security and Justice spent millions on police training.

The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found. Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back.

Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms that teach the techniques of “highway interdiction” to departments across the country.

One of those firms created a private intelligence network known as Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System that enabled police nationwide to share detailed reports about American motorists — criminals and the innocent alike — including their Social Security numbers, addresses and identifying tattoos, as well as hunches about which drivers to stop.

Many of the reports have been funneled to federal agencies and fusion centers as part of the government’s burgeoning law enforcement intelligence systems — despite warnings from state and federal authorities that the information could violate privacy and constitutional protections.

A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.

“All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine,” Deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Ill., wrote in a self-published book under a pseudonym. Hain is a marketing specialist for Desert Snow, a leading interdiction training firm based in Guthrie, Okla., whose founders also created Black Asphalt.

Hain’s book calls for “turning our police forces into present-day Robin Hoods.”

Cash seizures can be made under state or federal civil law. One of the primary ways police departments are able to seize money and share in the proceeds at the federal level is through a long-standing Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program known as Equitable Sharing. Asset forfeiture is an extraordinarily powerful law enforcement tool that allows the government to take cash and property without pressing criminal charges and then requires the owners to prove their possessions were legally acquired.

The practice has been controversial since its inception at the height of the drug war more than three decades ago, and its abuses have been the subject of journalistic exposés and congressional hearings. But unexplored until now is the role of the federal government and the private police trainers in encouraging officers to target cash on the nation’s highways since 9/11.

“Those laws were meant to take a guy out for selling $1 million in cocaine or who was trying to launder large amounts of money,” said Mark Overton, the police chief in Bal Harbour, Fla., who once oversaw a federal drug task force in South Florida. “It was never meant for a street cop to take a few thousand dollars from a driver by the side of the road.”

To examine the scope of asset forfeiture since the terror attacks, The Post analyzed a database of hundreds of thousands of seizure records at the Justice Department, reviewed hundreds of federal court cases, obtained internal records from training firms and interviewed scores of police officers, prosecutors and motorists.

by Michael Sallah, Robert O’Harrow Jr., Steven Rich, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: InRoadsBook, YouTube

Drones and Everything After

Drones are a different kind of new technology from what we’re used to. The communications breakthroughs of the past two decades have multiplied the connections within society, but drones offer something else: the conquest of physical space, the extension of society’s compass, the ability to be anywhere and see anything. This physical presence can be creepy when seen from the ground, in ways that echo the imaginings of science fiction. “Flying,” says Illah Nourbakhsh, who ran the robotics program at NASA’s Ames facility, “creates this dynamic where people are no longer on top.” And yet to the drone pilot, maneuvering through the air, it is liberating. (...)

Lost in the concern that the drone is an authoritarian instrument is the possibility that it might simultaneously be a democratizing tool, enlarging not just the capacities of the state but also the reach of the individual—the private drone operator, the boy in Cupertino—whose view is profoundly altered and whose abilities are enhanced. “The idea I’m trying to work out to simplify this whole thing—surveillance, drones, robots—has to do with superhero ethics,” says Patrick Lin, a technology ethicist at California Polytechnic State University. “It’s about what humans do when they have superpowers. What happens then?” (...)

It wasn’t too long ago that to operate an unmanned aircraft meant standing in the middle of a field with a radio controller in your hand and toggling the vehicle through the sky—back and forth, up and down—as if tied to it by a tether. That this now seems ancient is thanks in part to the smartphone revolution, which made many of the components needed for autonomous flight (computer processors, GPS, tiny cameras, and sensors) far smaller, smarter, and cheaper. Within the past five years, these technologies have helped to produce affordable drones that can fly on their own, stabilizing themselves when the winds shift, heading for a point specified on GPS. We are deep enough into the entrepreneurial era that everyone can see a gold rush coming; hobbyists in the obscure world of radio control trade stories about cold-call emails from investors or government agents. “I have these buddies who would drop off into darpa-land for a few years, and you’d never hear from them,” a Texan tinkerer named Gene Robinson says. “And then suddenly they reappear with a Ferrari, and they say, ‘I can’t tell you exactly what I’ve been working on. But it worked.’ ” (...)

The privilege of seeing this way, and this much—it exists simply because he has a drone. Should it? Clarifying where drones are allowed to fly and under what circumstances has proved challenging. There are no consistent laws about whether police need a warrant to fly a drone over your property, searching for drugs or evidence. (A few state legislatures have passed laws requiring police to secure warrants, others have decided that cops do not need to, and most have set no guidelines at all.) It is even less clear how private operators, hobbyists, or governments should operate. The airspace above 500 feet is reserved for planes and other aircraft, but below that line the rules are “irregular and inconsistent,” says Troy Rule, a law professor at Arizona State—there is little clarity, for instance, about whether a property owner can prevent her teenage neighbor from flying a drone over her house. Congress has asked the Federal Aviation Administration to regulate the commercial use of drones by next September, but an agency audit has signaled it will likely miss its deadline. One mark of exactly how conflicted the government is about drones is that Robinson is at once a frequent collaborator with state agencies and a recipient of cease-and-desist letters from the FAA. (...)

There is a four minute shot that opens Pretty Sweet, a short skateboarding film from 2012 co-directed by Spike Jonze, shot entirely from a drone. The lens starts tight on a skateboarder’s face—a gnarly and meaty face, the kind an Italian butcher might grab, cure, and slice. Then the camera begins to move, past him and across the street, tracking four new skaters as they jump out of a pickup truck and scale a fence, then following one skater razoring down a flight of stairs, then soaring past them and down to a bug’s-eye view, another skater leaping, a girl tumbling, each figure quickly exchanged for the next but the movement continuous, as if the camera were working in cursive, until it lifts higher and disappears into a cloud of confetti. Money shot. “Even now I watch that and I get chills,” says Randy Slavin, a commercial director who recently founded the first drone film festival. “There is literally no other way to get that shot. You can put a camera literally anywhere in three-dimensional space. You can design any shot.”

by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Spike Jonze

I'll be taking a short break (or not, depending on my wi-fi situation). Enjoy the archives.

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How to Move to Paris

So, you’ve decided to move from the United States to Paris, France.

Perhaps like myself you made this decision more or less on a whim with no real planning going into it before the decision was made, or perhaps you took a longer, more reasonable approach to the problem. Either way, you now have a series of things to do before you board that airplane.

Now, I should preface this by saying that I’m not a lawyer and I’m not a travel agency. I did find it useful, however, when I was planning my move to read through the notes of other people who had done roughly the same thing. There are only a handful of them on the internet (here are some) and if you’re seriously considering doing this, read them all in addition to this. Your mileage is certain to vary.

What is amazing about this process is that most of it is dictated by government agencies, and yet nearly every step of the process is insanely vague. Therefore, I feel that sharing what we experienced could be hugely helpful to someone else trying to accomplish the same thing. Reading through the consulate docs are one thing, hearing the story of what real people went through is a bit different. Again, this is not a how-to, this is a how-we-did-done.

The Visa Process

Well, first things first, getting a French visa. In order to live in France for longer than the normal 3 months a tourist visa gets you, one has to get a long stay visa of some kind. There are several different types of long stay visas you can get, though most are super specific — being a student or an au pair, or marrying a French person. The one that seemed to fit us best was the “D” visa or long stay “visitor” visa. This is actually a little confusing to everyone involved, because I’m going to be working from home essentially, but not for a French company and not doing business in France.

The “D” visa essentially asks you to prove that you can live in France without ever being in danger of getting a job at a French company. I believe it’s normally for people who sort of want to long-vacation in France or semi-retire there, but working for a strange company that lets you work from anywhere fortunately and also occasionally frustratingly blurs the lines. Countries don’t really know what to do with people like me. However, this is the best option I could find that fit me.

Now then, there are 14 steps to the visa application process.

by Scott Chacon, Medium |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence

Not long after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, in which Ayatollah Ruhollah Kho­meini became supreme leader, a US official was heard to exclaim: “Who ever took religion seriously?” The official was baffled at the interruption of what he assumed was an overwhelmingly powerful historical trend. Pretty well everyone at the time took it for granted that religion was on the way out, not only as a matter of personal belief, but even more as a deciding factor in politics. Secularisation was advancing everywhere, and with increasing scientific knowledge and growing prosperity it was poised to become a universal human condition. True, there were some countries that remained stubbornly religious – including, ironically, the United States. But these were exceptions. Religion was an atavistic way of thinking which was gradually but inexorably losing its power. In universities, grandiose theories of secularisation were taught as established fact, while politicians dismissed ideas they didn’t like as “mere theology”. The unimportance of religion was part of conventional wisdom, an unthinking assumption of those who liked to see themselves as thinking people.

Today no one could ask why religion should be taken seriously. Those who used to dismiss religion are terrified by the in­tensity of its revival. Karen Armstrong, who cites the US official, describes the current state of opinion: “In the west the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident.” She goes on:

As one who speaks on religion, I constantly hear how cruel and aggressive it has been, a view that, eerily, is expressed in the same way almost every time: “Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history.” I have heard this sentence recited like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics. It is an odd remark. Obviously the two world wars were not fought on account of religion . . . Experts in political violence or terrorism insist that people commit atrocities for a complex range of reasons. Yet so indelible is the aggressive image of religious faith in our secular consciousness that we routinely load the violent sins of the 20th century on to the back of “religion” and drive it out into the political wilderness.

The idea that religion is fading away has been replaced in conventional wisdom by the notion that religion lies behind most of the world’s conflicts. Many among the present crop of atheists hold both ideas at the same time. They will fulminate against religion, declaring that it is responsible for much of the violence of the present time, then a moment later tell you with equally dogmatic fervour that religion is in rapid decline. Of course it’s a mistake to expect logic from rationalists. More than anything else, the evangelical atheism of recent years is a symptom of moral panic. Worldwide secularisation, which was believed to be an integral part of the process of becoming modern, shows no signs of happening. Quite the contrary: in much of the world, religion is in the ascendant. For many people the result is a condition of acute cognitive dissonance. (...)

Armstrong performs an invaluable service by showing that religion is not the uniquely violent force demonised by secular thinkers. Yet neither is religion intrinsically peaceful – a benign spiritual quest compromised and perverted by its involvement with power. The potential for violence exists in faith-based movements of all kinds, secular as well as religious. Evangelical atheists splutter with fury when reminded that a war on religion was an integral part of some of the 20th century’s worst regimes. How can anyone accuse a movement devoted to reason and free inquiry of being implicated in totalitarian oppression? It is a feeble-minded and thoroughly silly response, reminiscent of that of witless believers who ask how a religion of love could possibly be held to account for the horrors of the Inquisition.

Conventional distinctions between religious and secular belief pass over the role that belief itself plays in our lives. “We are meaning-seeking creatures,” Karen Armstrong writes wisely, “and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives.” We are unlike our animal kin in another way. Only human beings kill and die for the sake of beliefs about themselves and the nature of the world. Looking for sense in their lives, they attack others who find meaning in beliefs different from their own. The violence of faith cannot be exorcised by demonising religion. It goes with being human.

by John Gray, New Statesman |  Read more:

Image: Samuel de Champlain (1574-1635)

The Birth of the Time-Motion Human

In a darkened room, a woman lies watched by an infra-red camera as she sleeps. It monitors her breathing, her movements, the flicker of her eyelids. Some hours later it stings her with a painful electric shock. She wakes, tumbles out of bed and into the restroom, whereupon a chip installed in her toothbrush tracks her arm movements. She’s photographed, silently, every thirty seconds. As she sets off in the morning her location is logged and data is streamed on the steps she takes. Her pulse and calorie count are recorded and sent to unseen observers. She has a dog at her side. The dog’s data is logged as well.

Such a tableau would be the envy of any futuristic dictatorship. In fact, the devices outlined above are all available on the consumer market now, for voluntary use. The impetus towards tracking our lives with smartphones, apps and stats represents a massive growth area into which companies like Jawbone, MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper, Runtastic, MapMyRun, Foodzy, GymPact, and Fitocracy are flooding. Alongside the Nike+ Fuelband, there’s the popular Fitbit Flex, a wristband that counts the steps you take by day and the number of times you stir in your sleep. There are smart cups to track what you drink and wristbands programmed to give you electric shocks for not achieving your goals. There’s even a “Fitbit for your vagina” in the form of the KGoal Smart Kegel Trainer—a Kickstarter project designed to track kegels, exercises for women’s pelvic floor muscles to improve childbirth and continence, and for helping them to achieve a better “clench strength” via Bluetooth.

With all this biofeedback now available on our phones, the act of walking, living and breathing can—at least to the “datasexuals” who embrace it—be an ongoing project with limitless potential for improvement. But might such potential also lead to a kind of “Taylorism within”? Applying scientific management to twentieth century business created a workforce optimized for maximum efficiency. Likewise, life-tracking is encouraging us to internalize this dream by optimizing ourselves. Rather than a tool for liberation, we’re using the tech, in other words, to tune our lives for maximum “productivity.”

Perhaps none of this should seem surprising for a consumer society that drives on anxiety. If bad breath had to be invented as a disease mouthwash would help to cure a century ago, now the Quantified Self movement suggests we must live in permanent beta, to aim not just at maintaining ourselves but to become “better than well.” And so, Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done and websites like Lifehacker help to turn our lives into a series of sanctioned tasks and goals, where one must carry a “Surprise Journal” to find areas for self-improvement in one’s life, and sleep comes in the form of “power” naps. There’s the Lumo Back, a gizmo that monitors the tricky process of sitting in a chair, while the Narrative wearable camera snaps your life twice a minute. Time management lessons are now available for kids, while the iPotty seems to give toddlers the message that they shouldn’t take their eyes off a screen even when satisfying the most basic of human needs.

Silicon Valley, naturally, is more than happy to export the mantra of ongoing product optimization to our bodies: life-hacking fanatics talk of “upgrades” and “body hacks,” with often obsessive results. In a Financial Times article that marked a mainstream recognition of the movement, Tim Ferriss–author of The 4-Hour Body–claimed that he could teach people how to lose weight without exercising, work on two hours’ sleep, and have a fifteen-minute orgasm, while bio-hacker Dave Asprey was adamant that he’s made himself twenty years younger and forty IQ points smarter through life-tracking and smart pills (“I’ve rewired my brain,” he said). All of this task management can become a considerable task in itself, leading to the piling up of Catch 22 ironies—like the fact that developers are now working on smartphone apps to solve the problem of people spending too much time on their smartphones.

by Dale Lately, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Robert Nelson

What if Aliens are Delicious?

Hengki Koentjoro, Red Raw - Tsukiji fish market - Tokyo - 2014.
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Octopus intelligence is well documented: they have been known to open jars, guard their unhatched eggs for months or even years, and demonstrate personalities. Most famously, they can blast a cloud of ink to throw off predators, but even more impressive is the masterfully complex camouflage employed by several members of Cephalopoda (a class that also includes squid and cuttlefish). Their curious behaviors are also culturally familiar. Ringo Starr traces the origins of his song “Octopus’s Garden” to an anecdote that a sea captain once told him in Sardinia, about the habit octopuses have of adorning their homes with rocks and detritus. During the 2010 FIFA World Cup, soccer fans across the world became enamored of Paul the Octopus (also known as Pulpo Paul), who correctly “predicted” the outcomes of all seven of Germany’s matches by choosing a box that, in addition to containing food, had the flag of the winning country on it. The chef José Andrés pledged to take octopus off his menus if Paul’s prediction about the semifinal between Spain and Germany came true. It did, and some Germans responded by calling for his arms. (Paul died that October, of apparently natural causes.)

Are Paul’s kind too smart to be eaten? The cephalopod—a spelling-bee favorite, from the Greek kephalē, for “head,” and pous or pod, for “foot,” by way of modern Latin—has been around for hundreds of millions of years. Evolutionarily speaking, it is far more distant from humans than the animals we tend to have moral quandaries about consuming. In characterizing the octopus, the CUNY biology professor Peter Godfrey-Smith has used language very similar to that of Lerner’s narrator: “It’s probably the closest we’ll get to meeting an intelligent alien.” With their ovoid, head-like mantles, octopuses even look the part. They have relatively large brains, three hearts, and a decentralized nervous system that confers incredible motor dexterity—and they can squeeze through any opening larger than their beaks. They’ve been observed to “walk” on the ocean floor and even dry land. They have remained inscrutable in part by being notoriously difficult lab animals. There are stories of them unplugging drains, disconnecting wires, and resisting the maze challenge. They are known to possess around five hundred million neurons—which is not such an impressive number when compared with the eighty-six billion in the human brain, but is notable for the fact that more than half of them are located in the animal’s arms. I like to think of an octopus as a blobby, eight-fingered hand, but with a mind of its own and the uncanny ability to change color, size, shape, and texture. And then I’m suddenly not so keen on the idea of eating it.

by Sylvia Killinsworth, New Yorker | Read more: Why Not Eat Octopus?