Monday, November 3, 2014
Desperate Measures: An Interview with David Gordon
David Gordon’s fiction doesn’t fall comfortably into one category. Depending on what you’re reading and who you’re talking to, he might be a mystery writer, a postmodernist, a satirist, or a hybrid. His new collection, White Tiger on Snow Mountain, runs an impressive gamut. Its cast is large and varied—there are gunmen, grad students, investigators, vampires, struggling writers, Internet sex trolls, and men named David Gordon. (One of these stories, “Man-Boob Summer,” first appeared in The Paris Review’s Fall 2012 issue.) Gordon’s sentences are crisp and often jarring. His plots unspool in strange, sometimes disturbing ways. There’s little to be gained in trying to situate yourself according to generic conventions; better just to enjoy the disorientation and to trust that you’re in the hands of an earnest storyteller.
White Tiger on Snow Mountain is your first story collection. Did you approach the stories differently than you would a novel?
In conceptual terms, I do think there’s a difference, at least for me. A story usually comes into my mind like a three-dimensional object—something I can see and feel and rotate. I’m often completely wrong about what the object is, but it’s still there. Whereas a novel is more like a set of directions for a road trip to California, with a planned stop in, say, Colorado and a visit to the Grand Canyon. The truth is I have no idea what’s going to happen along the way or whether I’ll even get there, but I have this general sense of direction and an end I hope to reach.
Now that the stories are completed and assembled, are you surprised at any of the themes or images that crop up?
I wrote these stories over a period of years, so some of the thematic echoes that people point out seem fairly straightforward for somebody who’s been writing for a long time—you deal with certain recurring ideas and problems. But then there are very specific echoes that I wasn’t aware of, and those are really interesting to me. My protagonists eat a lot of Chinese food and go to a lot of cafés. People tend to have cats in my stories, and the women have long fingers. I have no idea where this stuff comes from. I have no lost love with long fingers. I guess these things just leak out of my subconscious. (...)
Struggling and failed writers seem to be a mainstay in your work. You’ve had quite a bit of success with your own writing, so I wonder, without involving any shrinks—why that particular fixation?
It’s been a very long haul. I’m one of those weird people who knew in the second grade that this is what I wanted to do with my life and really set about doing it. At least in my own mind, I was trying to be a poet and to write serious fiction at the age of seven. I was probably sending things to The Paris Review when I was a teenager. But I really didn’t start publishing until four or five years ago. It felt like a long, epic journey to where I wanted to be as a writer. So in a strange way, I think I tend to write about people who are somehow living in this twilight where they’re not really part of mainstream society. They might be comp-lit professors or artists or drug dealers, but they tend to be on the fringes. That’s just where I found myself trapped for twenty-some-odd years. If I meet somebody now and they say they’ve heard my name or read my work, I assume they must have me mixed up with someone else. It takes a long time to undo that underdog mentality.
You’ve managed to straddle the line between mystery and literary fiction, and in this collection you look to other genres as well.
I think that horror and sci-fi in particular are great generators of imagery, and genre produces great characters. To find figures in Western culture as lasting and powerful as Dracula and Sherlock Holmes, you have to go to the Bible or Greek myths or Shakespeare. But as my work matures, it’s really more about the forms of genre storytelling—the way these stories shape and generate and vivify narrative. I’m trying to express something very personal through these classic forms, to use them as a poet uses a sonnet form.
Image: Michael SharkeyIn conceptual terms, I do think there’s a difference, at least for me. A story usually comes into my mind like a three-dimensional object—something I can see and feel and rotate. I’m often completely wrong about what the object is, but it’s still there. Whereas a novel is more like a set of directions for a road trip to California, with a planned stop in, say, Colorado and a visit to the Grand Canyon. The truth is I have no idea what’s going to happen along the way or whether I’ll even get there, but I have this general sense of direction and an end I hope to reach.Now that the stories are completed and assembled, are you surprised at any of the themes or images that crop up?
I wrote these stories over a period of years, so some of the thematic echoes that people point out seem fairly straightforward for somebody who’s been writing for a long time—you deal with certain recurring ideas and problems. But then there are very specific echoes that I wasn’t aware of, and those are really interesting to me. My protagonists eat a lot of Chinese food and go to a lot of cafés. People tend to have cats in my stories, and the women have long fingers. I have no idea where this stuff comes from. I have no lost love with long fingers. I guess these things just leak out of my subconscious. (...)
Struggling and failed writers seem to be a mainstay in your work. You’ve had quite a bit of success with your own writing, so I wonder, without involving any shrinks—why that particular fixation?
It’s been a very long haul. I’m one of those weird people who knew in the second grade that this is what I wanted to do with my life and really set about doing it. At least in my own mind, I was trying to be a poet and to write serious fiction at the age of seven. I was probably sending things to The Paris Review when I was a teenager. But I really didn’t start publishing until four or five years ago. It felt like a long, epic journey to where I wanted to be as a writer. So in a strange way, I think I tend to write about people who are somehow living in this twilight where they’re not really part of mainstream society. They might be comp-lit professors or artists or drug dealers, but they tend to be on the fringes. That’s just where I found myself trapped for twenty-some-odd years. If I meet somebody now and they say they’ve heard my name or read my work, I assume they must have me mixed up with someone else. It takes a long time to undo that underdog mentality.
You’ve managed to straddle the line between mystery and literary fiction, and in this collection you look to other genres as well.
I think that horror and sci-fi in particular are great generators of imagery, and genre produces great characters. To find figures in Western culture as lasting and powerful as Dracula and Sherlock Holmes, you have to go to the Bible or Greek myths or Shakespeare. But as my work matures, it’s really more about the forms of genre storytelling—the way these stories shape and generate and vivify narrative. I’m trying to express something very personal through these classic forms, to use them as a poet uses a sonnet form.
by Dwyer Murphy, Paris Review | Read more:
Sunday, November 2, 2014
Eat Spinach, Not Kale
[ed. I couldn't agree more. I usually eat spinach salads with chopped bok choy (for crunchiness and a bit of peppery flavor) and sliced red tomatoes. A little mixture of chinese mustard and soy sauce for dressing.]
Kale is a perfectly fine ingredient, but its bitterness and toughness have become indicators of quality to a certain segment of Americans, rather than characteristics to be overcome through cooking. And that’s led to its usage as a trendy ingredient in weird new places. But: Dishes do not usually become better or even more interesting when a trendy ingredient or process is foisted onto them. They almost always become worse. For example: the classic spinach, bacon, and egg salad, familiar to anyone who’s ever been to a steakhouse. This is a classic for a reason. The flavors and textures work beautifully, each individual ingredient holding its own. Replace the spinach with kale, and everything’s thrown off. Typically, the hot vinaigrette slightly wilts the spinach, adding a new flavor and texture, but kale is much tougher and won’t even notice that a hot vinaigrette has been added. Kale’s raw flavor, unchanged by the dressing, will thus overwhelm the egg and bacon.
That’s not to say that kale is a bad ingredient; it just needs to be used thoughtfully. Kale is in the brassica family, like collards, so it’s related to cabbage, broccoli, and brussels sprouts. It’s not related to spinach, which is in the beet family. The greens in the beet family, which also include chard, are more delicate and tender than the brassica greens; they cook much more quickly and can be eaten raw, without the rigamarole of massage (and I’d argue that no matter how thorough the massage, raw kale never attains an appropriately tender texture). The stems of beet-family greens are also edible and delicious, even the tougher chard stems (which take well to roasting and pickling).
Spinach comes in a few different forms. Probably the most common on grocery store shelves is bagged baby spinach. Never buy this. (Never buy any bagged green, now that I think about it. They go bad within a day of being opened, and are typically several times more expensive than the non-bagged kind.) If you can get real spinach from the farmers market, the kind with the little pink caps on the roots still attached, do that, but totally usable tasty spinach is also available year-round in grocery stores. It should come in a bundle, and in probably two types: one is very dark green and has curled edges around the leaves; this is called savoy spinach. The other is slightly lighter and has flat leaves, like a larger version of baby spinach. I tend to prefer savoy if I’m cooking it for awhile, and flat-leaf if I’m eating it raw, or doing a real quick cook.
by Dan Nosowitz, The Awl | Read more:
Image: David Wagoner
Berlin Now
When the German writer Peter Schneider published “The Wall Jumper,” his celebrated elliptical novella about the divided Berlin of the Cold War, in 1982, the city’s central importance to the 20th century was unquestioned. First the kaiser and then the Führer had touched off world wars from Germany’s capital. And when the world was split between Soviet and American blocs, Berlin could rightly claim to be the front line. The concrete barrier zigzagging through its streets stood as the tangible symbol of that division.
President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 Berlin speech is best remembered for the phrase “Ich bin ein Berliner,” but before his indelible German declaration he said more broadly, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.” Caring about what happened in Berlin meant caring about what happened everywhere, lending added significance to works like “The Wall Jumper” or the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire.”
Now, 25 years after the fall of the wall, the city is once again the object of intense fascination — not because of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s influence over European fiscal policies but because bohemian young people are moving to the city from every part of the globe and clubbing all night. It’s Berlin as Ibiza or Cancun, but with bad weather.
In “Berlin Now,” Schneider seeks to explain why the city became “the capital of creative people from around the world today,” attracting artists, D.J.s and software developers from Tokyo, Tel Aviv and all points in between. He also tackles the interconnected question of how, once Berlin “burst out of the shackles of reinforced concrete, barbed wire and iron bars . . . the severed veins and limbs of the divided city fused back together.” (...)
Schneider identifies “the weirdness, perpetual incompleteness and outlandishness of Berlin,” not as a failing but as an attraction. A jewel of a city like Dubrovnik or Venice feels like a closed circuit, a finished book. “Imperfection, incompleteness — not to say ugliness — afford a sense of freedom that compact beauty never can,” he writes.
For centuries Berlin has had something of a chip on its shoulder. It lacks the ancient ruins of Rome or the sophisticated beauty of Paris. It is landlocked and flat, with a climate that can be frigid, gray and unpleasant up to eight months out of the year. “Imagine Geneva, lost in a desert,” Balzac wrote in 1843, “and you have an idea of Berlin.”
President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 Berlin speech is best remembered for the phrase “Ich bin ein Berliner,” but before his indelible German declaration he said more broadly, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.” Caring about what happened in Berlin meant caring about what happened everywhere, lending added significance to works like “The Wall Jumper” or the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire.”Now, 25 years after the fall of the wall, the city is once again the object of intense fascination — not because of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s influence over European fiscal policies but because bohemian young people are moving to the city from every part of the globe and clubbing all night. It’s Berlin as Ibiza or Cancun, but with bad weather.
In “Berlin Now,” Schneider seeks to explain why the city became “the capital of creative people from around the world today,” attracting artists, D.J.s and software developers from Tokyo, Tel Aviv and all points in between. He also tackles the interconnected question of how, once Berlin “burst out of the shackles of reinforced concrete, barbed wire and iron bars . . . the severed veins and limbs of the divided city fused back together.” (...)
Schneider identifies “the weirdness, perpetual incompleteness and outlandishness of Berlin,” not as a failing but as an attraction. A jewel of a city like Dubrovnik or Venice feels like a closed circuit, a finished book. “Imperfection, incompleteness — not to say ugliness — afford a sense of freedom that compact beauty never can,” he writes.
For centuries Berlin has had something of a chip on its shoulder. It lacks the ancient ruins of Rome or the sophisticated beauty of Paris. It is landlocked and flat, with a climate that can be frigid, gray and unpleasant up to eight months out of the year. “Imagine Geneva, lost in a desert,” Balzac wrote in 1843, “and you have an idea of Berlin.”
by Nicholas Kulish, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via:
This Weekend, College Is for Everyone
When Diane LaPointe went off to Wesleyan University in 1975, her parents dropped her off freshman year and didn’t return until graduation. “I put my stuff in storage and took the bus home during breaks,” she said.
Now that her daughter, Megan, is a sophomore at Wesleyan, Ms. LaPointe keeps in much closer contact. She is regularly invited to Megan’s dance recitals, receives a weekly email from the school about happenings, and last month attended Family Weekend, a three-day festival featuring office hours with the dean, astrology walks, seminars (“Parenting Through the Job Search”) and boomer empowerment sessions (“The End of Back Pain”).“I know I’m not supposed to be a helicopter parent,” Ms. LaPointe said. “I’ve made a concerted effort not to call her, not to email her, not to text her.” But when she learned about Family Weekend, she leapt. “Because it’s a sanctioned event, you don’t feel like you’re intruding,” she said.
Few idylls are more entrenched in the mythology of American childhood than the ritual of going off to college. The teenager stuffs belongings into milk crates, kisses a sniffling mom and dad on the cheek, waves goodbye to the younger siblings and the dog, and strides off into the future.
Nearly everything about this image has become outdated. First, colleges are employing elaborate farewell ceremonies, strict deadlines, even “parent bouncers” to get traumatized parents to actually leave campus after dropping off their children. Second, technological umbilical cords like texting and FaceTime allow parents and students to confer on everything from class selection to birth control. And third, just weeks after the start of school, parents, younger siblings, even the pet are invited to return to campus.
Once sleepy, overlooked occasions for a few nearby parents, Family Weekends have become hyper-organized, multiday extravaganzas with lectures from Nobel laureates, Olympic-style sports events, Hollywood entertainers, even parades. They’re also occasions for big recruiting, big fund-raising and, inevitably, big stress.
Anyone with vague memories of a slightly awkward parental visit during college would be stunned by the ornate architecture of the modern-day experience. Boston University lists 59 events, including a mind reader, a primer on social media (“#wasteoftime OR #valueforconsumers”) and dozens of lectures on everything from surviving finals to “Monsters and the American Psyche.”
The University of Texas at Austin has 95 events, including bingo night, ghost tours, six different times for family bowling and a photo booth. Pomona College offers “Coffee at the Queer Resource Center”; Reed College a “Nuclear Reactor Tour.” And a remarkable number of schools bring in big-ticket entertainers: Seth Meyers (George Washington), Kathy Griffin (Hofstra) and Jay Leno (Connecticut).
Why such a fuss? Anna Thomas, the director of parent and family programs at Vanderbilt University, said parents today crave a higher level of engagement. “They really want to be part of their student’s experience,” she said. More than 4,300 people attended Vanderbilt Family Weekend this year, up 50 percent from a decade ago.
by Bruce Feiler, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Charlie Mahoney
Shift The Darkness Around, It Won't Help Any
by Alex Balk, The Awl
Image: via
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Smuggling Snowden's Secrets
Late on the evening of January 11, 2013, someone sent me an interesting email. It was encrypted, and sent from the sort of anonymous email service that smart people use when they want to hide their identity. Sitting at the kitchen table in the small cottage where I lived in Berkeley with my wife and two cats, I decrypted it.
The anonymous emailer wanted to know if I could help him communicate securely with Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who had repeatedly cast a critical eye on American foreign policy.
From: anon108@■■■■■■■■■I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just been contacted by Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who was then preparing a momentous leak of government data.
To: Micah Lee
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2013
Micah,
I’m a friend. I need to get information securely to Laura Poitras and her alone, but I can’t find an email/gpg key for her.
Can you help?
A month earlier, Snowden had anonymously emailed Glenn Greenwald, a Guardian journalist and chronicler of war-on-terror excesses, but Greenwald didn’t use encryption and didn’t have the time to get up to speed, so Snowden moved on. As is now well known, Snowden decided to contact Poitras because she used encryption. But he didn’t have her encryption key, as is necessary to send someone encrypted email, and the key wasn’t posted on the web. Snowden, extraordinarily knowledgeable about how internet traffic is monitored, didn’t want to send her an unencrypted email, even if just to ask for her key. So he needed to find someone he thought he could trust who both had her key and used encrypted email.
That was me.
And as it turned out, several months later I was drawn more deeply into the whole thing, when Snowden got back in touch and asked me to work with him to launch an online anti-surveillance petition.
Until now, I haven’t written about my modest role in the Snowden leak, but with the release of Poitras’ documentary on him, “Citizenfour,” I feel comfortable connecting the dots. I think it’s helpful to show how privacy technologists can work with sources and journalists to make it possible for leaks to happen in a secure way. Securing those types of interactions is part of my job now that I work with Greenwald and Poitras at The Intercept, but there are common techniques and general principles from my interactions with Snowden that could serve as lessons to people outside this organization.
When I got that first email, I was working as a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and as the chief technology officer of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. My encryption key was posted at both sites, so Snowden was able to find it easily, and the key was digitally signed by people who were well-known in the privacy world (pioneering blogger Cory Doctorow and free software champion Richard Stallman, for instance); this meant those people had digitally vouched, in a way that was incredibly difficult to forge, that the key really belonged to me and not to, say, some NSA trickster. In other words, Snowden didn’t need to worry about the key being a fake. Poitras was a founding board member of the FPF, so he assumed I would have her key, and he was right.
It wasn’t uncommon for me to receive the type of email Snowden sent — strangers send me encrypted emails all the time, requesting help. Some of those emails are from people who appear to have personal issues to work out, but the inquiry from Snowden, emailing under a pseudonym, struck me as serious. I quickly forwarded it in an encrypted email to Poitras. The encryption technology we used — the standard among email users concerned with privacy — is known by two acronyms: GPG, for GNU Privacy Guard, or PGP, for Pretty Good Privacy.
From: Micah LeeLike me, Poitras was accustomed to receiving anonymous inquiries, and she recognized that this one was credible. A few hours later, she sent me a reply.
To: Laura Poitras
Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2013
Hey Laura,
This person just send me this GPG encrypted email. Do you want to respond? If you want to, and you need any help with using crypto, I’m happy to help.
From: Laura PoitrasThe frustrating and ironic thing about GPG is that even experts make mistakes with it. Even, as it turns out, Edward Snowden.
To: Micah Lee
Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2013
Hey Micah,
Thanks for asking. Sure, you can tell this person I can be reached with GPG at: laurapoitras@gmail.com
I’ll reply with my public key.
I’m also on jabber/OTR at:
l.p.@jabber.org
I hope all is good with you!
Laura
I now had Poitras’ permission to send Snowden her encryption key, but in his first email to me, Snowden had forgotten to attach his key, which meant I could not encrypt my response. I had to send him an unencrypted email asking for his key first. His oversight was of no security consequence—it didn’t compromise his identity in any way—but it goes to show how an encryption system that requires users to take specific and frequent actions almost guarantees mistakes will be made, even by the best users.
After receiving Snowden’s key, I sent him an encrypted email with Poitras’ key. This enabled him to send his first encrypted email to Poitras, in which he called himself Citizenfour. But I wasn’t out of the identity-confirmation picture yet.
Snowden and Poitras quickly set up a more secure channel for communication. Poitras created an anonymous email account, doing so with the Tor Browser that masks your identity on the web, and she created a new GPG key, just for communicating with Citizenfour. This was advisable because, if she were under surveillance by the NSA or any other intelligence agency, they might have compromised her known accounts, and she would prefer for there to be no trace of her true name in the correspondence with this secrecy-seeking stranger.
But the internet is a hall of mirrors.
Should Journalism Worry About Content Marketing?
[ed. See also: Newsrooms struggle with free-content strategy]
At a glance, the Daily Growl could be any morning news meeting held in the “win the internet through pet videos” bureau of a lavishly funded media startup. Rows of eager young people stand behind their monitors—“TMZ-style,” managing editor Lisa Keller told me—as Keller solicits memes and news pegs to supplement the content already scheduled on the team’s editorial calendar. Monitors are tuned to Twitter feeds and Photoshop works in progress. Any of the team’s 10 “community managers” and eight designers might produce as many as 10 postings a day. Those numbers don’t include the constant interaction with fans and followers and strangers that is also a big part of the job. The office is light-filled and, despite the heavy productivity expectations, seemingly free of stress. I’m struck by this, having been in so many newsrooms in which there’s a palpable sense that the media industry, to say nothing of the country and the human race, is at the abyss.
The Daily Growl is the morning ritual of Nestlé Purina PetCare’s content marketing team. Neither the Daily Growl nor its counterpart, the Weekly Meow, are really news meetings. But the Purina operation is, in some ways, closer to a newsroom than journalists would care to admit. As its name, The Feed, suggests, the team produces timely information and entertainment and pushes it out to an audience on social platforms. It’s focused on speed, accountable for accuracy, and perpetually aware of the needs of its readers. The most obvious difference between The Feed’s work and that of an actual newsroom is that the team is explicitly aligned with the interests of the world’s second-largest pet food company. Then again, boundaries between editorial and advertising in journalism newsrooms aren’t what they used to be. Editors at Time Inc. now report to managers on the business side, and a series of recently leaked emails suggests that executives at Vice expect to know in advance about stories that mention advertisers or other corporate brands. That The Feed’s work is overtly coming from a brand is arguably a win for transparency.
The Feed devotes itself to customer service, with the ultimate goal of making money. Signs posted throughout the team’s office remind members of this: “Engage,” “Impact Business Now,” “Convert,” “Results.” How different are these reminders of the realities of capitalism from the various measures of popularity (total traffic, new readers, etc.) prominently displayed in newsrooms? Are the lists a reminder that reporters should be giving readers what they want, or just rankings of the writers whose stories have been most successfully monetized that day, not unlike the sales-leader board in a firm hawking timeshares?
Another thing The Feed’s work on behalf of Purina has in common with the work of journalists on behalf of their own (often corporate) owners: People are reading it.
The employees of The Feed are practitioners of a shape-shifting genre that has taken over billions of dollars of corporate marketing budgets globally in the last decade. Content marketing is so broad that it eludes definition even by its most ardent practitioners, but the term includes essentially any form of content (a Facebook post, a celebrity Q&A, a feature-length documentary) created by or on behalf of a brand with the hope that it will attract an audience on its own merits—as opposed to traditional advertising, which has the far smaller ambition of gaining notice from a captive audience before the ad break ends, or the page gets flipped, and the real content begins.
Most content marketing bypasses traditional media entirely, and as such it threatens to further erode journalism’s dwindling advertising revenue. (...)
As journalism newsrooms have diminished in strength and ambition over the last decade, “brand newsrooms,” a term that’s now used casually within the marketing and PR industry, are booming—and have been for some time. As Sam Slaughter, the vice president of content at Contently, a software platform with a network of freelance writers available to both marketers and journalism publishers, notes, Red Bull was covering the action-sports industry when “BuzzFeed was just a twinkle in Jonah Peretti’s eye.” American Express has a publication devoted to small-business owners, and General Electric covers its own scientists and hopes to never send another press release to an inattentive newspaper reporter. Chevron runs a community news site for Richmond, CA, where it is the town’s largest employer. Coca-Cola now reportedly spends more money creating its own content than it does on television advertising.
Nestlé, Purina’s parent and the world’s largest food company, creates more than 1,500 pieces of content each day company-wide, and its brands have accumulated more than 250 million Facebook fans.
Advertisers and journalists have always been partners, and that partnership has always contained an inherent tension. Content marketing has the potential to turn that tension into an existential threat. Journalists like to think of themselves as protectors of the public interest, intermediaries who police both fact and rhetoric. The very premise of the profession is that it’s dangerous to have words pass straight from the mouths of CEOs or politicians to the public’s ear. This intermediary function is at the core of journalism’s identity and, though it wasn’t always thought of this way, the core of its business model. But each successful piece of content marketing is, in effect, a statement that a journalist wasn’t wanted or needed. Each time a consumer clicks on a piece of content marketing, or shares it with a friend, it’s confirmation that they’re very comfortable being out there in the information landscape on their own.
At a glance, the Daily Growl could be any morning news meeting held in the “win the internet through pet videos” bureau of a lavishly funded media startup. Rows of eager young people stand behind their monitors—“TMZ-style,” managing editor Lisa Keller told me—as Keller solicits memes and news pegs to supplement the content already scheduled on the team’s editorial calendar. Monitors are tuned to Twitter feeds and Photoshop works in progress. Any of the team’s 10 “community managers” and eight designers might produce as many as 10 postings a day. Those numbers don’t include the constant interaction with fans and followers and strangers that is also a big part of the job. The office is light-filled and, despite the heavy productivity expectations, seemingly free of stress. I’m struck by this, having been in so many newsrooms in which there’s a palpable sense that the media industry, to say nothing of the country and the human race, is at the abyss.The Daily Growl is the morning ritual of Nestlé Purina PetCare’s content marketing team. Neither the Daily Growl nor its counterpart, the Weekly Meow, are really news meetings. But the Purina operation is, in some ways, closer to a newsroom than journalists would care to admit. As its name, The Feed, suggests, the team produces timely information and entertainment and pushes it out to an audience on social platforms. It’s focused on speed, accountable for accuracy, and perpetually aware of the needs of its readers. The most obvious difference between The Feed’s work and that of an actual newsroom is that the team is explicitly aligned with the interests of the world’s second-largest pet food company. Then again, boundaries between editorial and advertising in journalism newsrooms aren’t what they used to be. Editors at Time Inc. now report to managers on the business side, and a series of recently leaked emails suggests that executives at Vice expect to know in advance about stories that mention advertisers or other corporate brands. That The Feed’s work is overtly coming from a brand is arguably a win for transparency.
The Feed devotes itself to customer service, with the ultimate goal of making money. Signs posted throughout the team’s office remind members of this: “Engage,” “Impact Business Now,” “Convert,” “Results.” How different are these reminders of the realities of capitalism from the various measures of popularity (total traffic, new readers, etc.) prominently displayed in newsrooms? Are the lists a reminder that reporters should be giving readers what they want, or just rankings of the writers whose stories have been most successfully monetized that day, not unlike the sales-leader board in a firm hawking timeshares?
Another thing The Feed’s work on behalf of Purina has in common with the work of journalists on behalf of their own (often corporate) owners: People are reading it.
The employees of The Feed are practitioners of a shape-shifting genre that has taken over billions of dollars of corporate marketing budgets globally in the last decade. Content marketing is so broad that it eludes definition even by its most ardent practitioners, but the term includes essentially any form of content (a Facebook post, a celebrity Q&A, a feature-length documentary) created by or on behalf of a brand with the hope that it will attract an audience on its own merits—as opposed to traditional advertising, which has the far smaller ambition of gaining notice from a captive audience before the ad break ends, or the page gets flipped, and the real content begins.
Most content marketing bypasses traditional media entirely, and as such it threatens to further erode journalism’s dwindling advertising revenue. (...)
As journalism newsrooms have diminished in strength and ambition over the last decade, “brand newsrooms,” a term that’s now used casually within the marketing and PR industry, are booming—and have been for some time. As Sam Slaughter, the vice president of content at Contently, a software platform with a network of freelance writers available to both marketers and journalism publishers, notes, Red Bull was covering the action-sports industry when “BuzzFeed was just a twinkle in Jonah Peretti’s eye.” American Express has a publication devoted to small-business owners, and General Electric covers its own scientists and hopes to never send another press release to an inattentive newspaper reporter. Chevron runs a community news site for Richmond, CA, where it is the town’s largest employer. Coca-Cola now reportedly spends more money creating its own content than it does on television advertising.
Nestlé, Purina’s parent and the world’s largest food company, creates more than 1,500 pieces of content each day company-wide, and its brands have accumulated more than 250 million Facebook fans.
Advertisers and journalists have always been partners, and that partnership has always contained an inherent tension. Content marketing has the potential to turn that tension into an existential threat. Journalists like to think of themselves as protectors of the public interest, intermediaries who police both fact and rhetoric. The very premise of the profession is that it’s dangerous to have words pass straight from the mouths of CEOs or politicians to the public’s ear. This intermediary function is at the core of journalism’s identity and, though it wasn’t always thought of this way, the core of its business model. But each successful piece of content marketing is, in effect, a statement that a journalist wasn’t wanted or needed. Each time a consumer clicks on a piece of content marketing, or shares it with a friend, it’s confirmation that they’re very comfortable being out there in the information landscape on their own.
by Michael Meyer, CJR | Read more:
Image: Noma Bar
Friday, October 31, 2014
On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning
[ed. Repost. Given the recent controversy over street harassment that has the whole internet aflame, perhaps it's time for a more poignant perspective.]
One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.
Tell you the truth, she’s not that good-looking. She doesn’t stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn’t young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a “girl,” properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She’s the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there’s a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.
Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl - one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you’re drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of course. Sometimes in a restaurant I’ll catch myself staring at the girl at the next table to mine because I like the shape of her nose.
But no one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived type. Much as I like noses, I can’t recall the shape of hers - or even if she had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great beauty. It’s weird.
“Yesterday on the street I passed the 100% girl,” I tell someone.
“Yeah?” he says. “Good-looking?”
“Not really.”
“Your favorite type, then?”
“I don’t know. I can’t seem to remember anything about her - the shape of her eyes or the size of her breasts.”
“Strange.”
“Yeah. Strange.”
“So anyhow,” he says, already bored, “what did you do? Talk to her? Follow her?”
“Nah. Just passed her on the street.”
She’s walking east to west, and I west to east. It’s a really nice April morning.
Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about myself, and - what I’d really like to do - explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock built when peace filled the world.
After talking, we’d have lunch somewhere, maybe see a Woody Allen movie, stop by a hotel bar for cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed.
Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.
Now the distance between us has narrowed to fifteen yards.
How can I approach her? What should I say?
“Good morning, miss. Do you think you could spare half an hour for a little conversation?”
Ridiculous. I’d sound like an insurance salesman.
“Pardon me, but would you happen to know if there is an all-night cleaners in the neighborhood?”
No, this is just as ridiculous. I’m not carrying any laundry, for one thing. Who’s going to buy a line like that?
Maybe the simple truth would do. “Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me.”
No, she wouldn’t believe it. Or even if she did, she might not want to talk to me. Sorry, she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you, but you’re not the 100% boy for me. It could happen. And if I found myself in that situation, I’d probably go to pieces. I’d never recover from the shock. I’m thirty-two, and that’s what growing older is all about.
We pass in front of a flower shop. A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The asphalt is damp, and I catch the scent of roses. I can’t bring myself to speak to her. She wears a white sweater, and in her right hand she holds a crisp white envelope lacking only a stamp. So: She’s written somebody a letter, maybe spent the whole night writing, to judge from the sleepy look in her eyes. The envelope could contain every secret she’s ever had.
I take a few more strides and turn: She’s lost in the crowd.
Now, of course, I know exactly what I should have said to her. It would have been a long speech, though, far too long for me to have delivered it properly. The ideas I come up with are never very practical.
Oh, well. It would have started “Once upon a time” and ended “A sad story, don’t you think?”
by Haruki Murakami, YMFY | Read more:
Image via:: City Block, Geoffrey Johnson. Represented at the Hubert Gallery here
My Week With a Flip Phone
“Oh, is that an iPhone 6?” someone asks. Two-thirds of the dinner party turns to look at the girl who’s just taken her phone out to check a message. “Can I hold it?” someone else asks. “Does it really bend when you sit?” “Man, that’s huge.” “How’s the camera? I hear it’s the best camera.”
The girl passes it around with a shrug and offers a few low-key Luddite excuses for her embrace of new and exciting technology. “I didn’t even want one, really,” she says. “My other screen was just so cracked. So I thought, If I have to get a new phone, why not?”
Another woman turns to me. “I’m just, like, so not into technology,” she says, just loudly enough. “I still have an iPhone 4! And I don’t even load music on it.” I ask her what she does on long walks or the subway.
“I just look at the world. I mean, God, can’t people just do that anymore?”
I’m at a gathering of people I don’t really know, many of whom have septum rings and stick-and-poke tats, so I wasn’t exactly expecting to be the coolest person at the jamboree. Normally, I would just shut up at this point and fume at the insufferable nature of people who claim they don’t need music on the subway. But tonight, I have an ace in my pocket.
So, as if I’m just casually checking an incoming message, as one does, I pull out my brand-new phone — a Samsung flip phone. A flip phone.
Lately the flip has been discussed as a sort of “status phone” among cool people, like pretentious technophobes and Anna Wintour, so I’m wondering if my newly acquired flip phone will provide me entry to this club. With a satisfying fwaaap! and a flick of the wrist — like I’m opening a switchblade — I pop that faux Luddite’s over-inflated bubble. There’s a moment of silence as I pretend to text away — slowly, precisely, laboriously. For I am on a flip phone, and I revel in my slow text messaging, much as a slow-food early adopter would revel in raising her own chickens.
“Whoa,” says Zoe, a particularly cool redhead who was seconds ago blowing cigarette smoke in my face as if I were invisible, “is that a flip phone? Rad.”
Does the hipness of the flip represent a rebellion against mindless iPhone addicts? A fear of the hackable Cloud? A desire to return to simpler, more social times? As a smartphone addict who literally sleeps with my iPhone clutched in my hand (it’s an alarm clock!), the idea of something that allows me to communicate but can free me from the attention-prison of a smartphone is enticing. And I’m not alone. A Pew study revealed that 9 percent of American adults don’t use smartphones, including 15 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 13 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds. So a few weeks ago, after reading this Medium essay heralding the flip phone as the phone of cool girls, I decided to give smartphoneless life a shot.
The girl passes it around with a shrug and offers a few low-key Luddite excuses for her embrace of new and exciting technology. “I didn’t even want one, really,” she says. “My other screen was just so cracked. So I thought, If I have to get a new phone, why not?”
Another woman turns to me. “I’m just, like, so not into technology,” she says, just loudly enough. “I still have an iPhone 4! And I don’t even load music on it.” I ask her what she does on long walks or the subway.“I just look at the world. I mean, God, can’t people just do that anymore?”
I’m at a gathering of people I don’t really know, many of whom have septum rings and stick-and-poke tats, so I wasn’t exactly expecting to be the coolest person at the jamboree. Normally, I would just shut up at this point and fume at the insufferable nature of people who claim they don’t need music on the subway. But tonight, I have an ace in my pocket.
So, as if I’m just casually checking an incoming message, as one does, I pull out my brand-new phone — a Samsung flip phone. A flip phone.
Lately the flip has been discussed as a sort of “status phone” among cool people, like pretentious technophobes and Anna Wintour, so I’m wondering if my newly acquired flip phone will provide me entry to this club. With a satisfying fwaaap! and a flick of the wrist — like I’m opening a switchblade — I pop that faux Luddite’s over-inflated bubble. There’s a moment of silence as I pretend to text away — slowly, precisely, laboriously. For I am on a flip phone, and I revel in my slow text messaging, much as a slow-food early adopter would revel in raising her own chickens.
“Whoa,” says Zoe, a particularly cool redhead who was seconds ago blowing cigarette smoke in my face as if I were invisible, “is that a flip phone? Rad.”
Does the hipness of the flip represent a rebellion against mindless iPhone addicts? A fear of the hackable Cloud? A desire to return to simpler, more social times? As a smartphone addict who literally sleeps with my iPhone clutched in my hand (it’s an alarm clock!), the idea of something that allows me to communicate but can free me from the attention-prison of a smartphone is enticing. And I’m not alone. A Pew study revealed that 9 percent of American adults don’t use smartphones, including 15 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 13 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds. So a few weeks ago, after reading this Medium essay heralding the flip phone as the phone of cool girls, I decided to give smartphoneless life a shot.
by Allison P. Davis, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Myths And Misconceptions Of Our Wearable Future
Wearables as a second brain. The Internet of Self and Things. One trillion sensors….
There’s no doubt that a sensor-laden world is the buzz of the town. The next Big Thing. In fact, there is so much buzz that many consumers probably dismiss it as hype. Yet, in spite of all this hype, as a 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley’s semiconductor and sensor industry, this is about as exciting a space I’ve ever been in.
The reality is of course more nuanced. Yes it’s true that the market is growing extremely fast and there will be many winners — but there will be even more losers in the space. Sensors are getting amazingly accurate, but wearable products continue to be clunky and provide a poor user experience. In fact, studies have found that 40 percent of consumers who buy and try a wearable fitness tracker leave it sitting on their bedside after a month or two.There’s clearly a lot of work to be done.
Unfortunately, PR hype and science-fiction-fueled ideas, have pushed consumer expectations to an all-time high, and have raised the bar for just about any company (look at Apple, for example). Meanwhile, vaporware that takes advantage of this enthusiasm, mixed with crowdfunding campaigns, are a real danger and risk affecting the industry’s credibility if companies do not deliver. At this point, it is critical to separate over-promised functionality from a reality that is still, by any measure, incredibly exciting.
In this article, we’ll review myths and misconceptions that are prevalent around hardware and that may mislead consumers.
by Hamid Farzaneh, TechCrunch | Read more:
Image:Bryce Durbin
Major Cyber Attack Expected by 2025
A major cyber attack will happen between now and 2025 and it will be large enough to cause “significant loss of life or property losses/damage/theft at the levels of tens of billions of dollars,” according to more than 60 percent of technology experts interviewed by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. (...)
A key concern for many of the experts Pew interviewed is infrastructure, where very real cyber vulnerabilities do exist and are growing. Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the National Security Agency and a partner at Washington, D.C.-based law firm Steptoe & Johnson told Pew, “Cyberwar just plain makes sense. Attacking the power grid or other industrial control systems is asymmetrical and deniable and devilishly effective. Plus, it gets easier every year. We used to worry about Russia and China taking down our infrastructure. Now we have to worry about Iran and Syria and North Korea. Next up: Hezbollah and Anonymous.”
Jeremy Epstein, a senior computer scientist working with the National Science Foundation as program director for Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, said, “Damages in the billions will occur to manufacturing and/or utilities but because it ramps up slowly, it will be accepted as just another cost (probably passed on to taxpayers through government rebuilding subsidies and/or environmental damage), and there will be little motivation for the private sector to defend itself.”Today, cities around the world use supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems to manage water, sewage, electricity, and even traffic lights. Last October, researchers Chris Sistrunk and Adam Crain found that these systems suffer from 25 different security vulnerabilities. And it’s not unusual for them to have the same security passwords that came direct from the manufacturer. As writers Indu B. Singh and Joseph N. Pelton pointed out in The Futurist magazine, the failure to take even the most basic security precautions leaves these systems open to remote hacking.
Its one reason why many security watchers were hopeful that the Obama administration’s Cybersecurity Framework, released earlier this year, would force companies that preside over infrastructure components to take these precautions, but many in the technology community were disappointed that the guidelines did not include hard mandates for major operators to fix potential security flaws. (...)
But SCADA vulnerabilities look quaint compared to the exploitable security gaps that will persist across the Internet of Things as more infrastructure components are linked together. “Current threats include economic transactions, power grid, and air traffic control. This will expand to include others such as self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, and building infrastructure,” said Mark Nall, a program manager for NASA
Other experts told Pew that military contractors, facing declining business for missiles and tanks, have purposefully overblown the threats posed by cyber attacks to scare up an enemy for the nation to arm against.
“…This concern seems exaggerated by the political and commercial interests that benefit from us directing massive resources to those who offer themselves as our protectors. It is also exaggerated by the media because it is a dramatic story,” said Joseph Guardin, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. “It is clear our leaders are powerless to rein in the military-industrial-intelligence complex, whose interests are served by having us fearful of cyber attacks. Obviously there will be some theft and perhaps someone can exaggerate it to claim tens of billions in losses, but I don’t expect anything dramatic and certainly don’t want to live in fear of it.” (...)Still others, such as lead researcher for GigaOM Research Stowe Boyd, said that the growing cyber capabilities of states like China almost promise bigger cyber attacks of growing international importance.
“A bellicose China might ‘cyber invade’ the military capabilities of Japan and South Korea as part of the conflict around the China sea, leading to the need to reconfigure their electronics, at huge cost. Israel and the United States have already created the Stuxnet computer worm to damage Iran’s nuclear refinement centrifuges, for example. Imagine a world dependent on robotic farm vehicles, delivery drones, and AI-managed transport, and how one country might opt to disrupt the spring harvest as a means to damage a neighboring opponent,” Boyd said.
by Patrick Tucker, Defense One | Read more:
Image: via:
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
You Don't Wanna Talk?
[ed. THE viral video of the moment (maybe the year). The comments section on YouTube is just as disturbing. See also: here and here.]
by Bethonie Butler, Washington Post | Read more:
Video: Rob Bliss Creative
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)