Digital Cosmopolitans

The early 1980s weren’t especially kind to Paul Simon. He ushered in the second decade of his post–Simon & Garfunkel life with One Trick Pony, a forgettable companion album to a forgettable film starring his former musical partner, Art Garfunkel. When a 1981 reunion concert with Garfunkel brought 500,000 people to New York’s Central Park, and sold over two million albums in the United States, the two began touring together. But “creative differences” brought the arrangement to a premature end, and a planned Simon & Garfunkel album became a Simon solo release, Hearts and Bones, that was the lowest-charting of his career. With the breakup of his marriage to the actress Carrie Fisher, “I had a personal blow, a career setback and the combination of the two put me into a tailspin,” Simon told his biographer Marc Eliot.

During this dark period, Simon was mentoring a young Norwegian songwriter, Heidi Berg. Berg gave Simon a cassette of mbaqanga music featuring musicians from Soweto, then the most notorious blacks-only township in apartheid South Africa. While the identity of the album Simon heard is uncertain, it likely featured the Boyoyo Boys, a popular Sowetan band, and listening to the cassette in his car, Simon began writing new melody lines and lyrics on top of the sax, guitar, bass, and drums of their existing tracks.

“What I was consciously frustrated with was the system of sitting and writing a song and then going into the studio and trying to make a record of that song. And if I couldn’t find the right musicians or I couldn’t find the right way of making those tracks, then I had a good song and a kind of mediocre record,” Simon told Billboard magazine’s Timothy White. “I set out to make really good tracks, and then I thought, ‘I have enough songwriting technique that I can reverse this process and write the song after the tracks are made.’”

In the hopes of working this new way, Simon appealed to his record company, Warner Bros., to set up a recording session with the Boyoyo Boys. In 1985, that was far from an easy task. Since 1961, the British Musicians Union had maintained a cultural boycott of South Africa, managed by the UN Center against Apartheid. The boycott was designed to prevent musicians from performing at South African venues like Sun City, a hotel and casino located in the nominally independent bantustan of Bophuthatswana, an easy drive from Johannesburg and Pretoria. But the boycott covered all aspects of collaborations with South African musicians, and Simon was warned that he might face censure for working in South Africa.

When Simon turned to Warner Bros. for help, the company called Hilton Rosenthal. Then managing an independent record label in South Africa, Rosenthal had in the past worked with Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu, the two musicians who became the heart of Juluku, a racially integrated band that electrified traditional Zulu music and brought it to a global audience. Rosenthal’s label had partnered with Warner Bros. to distribute Juluku’s records in the United States, so Warner executives knew he could help Simon navigate a relationship with South African musicians.

As a white South African who’d recorded a highly political, racially integrated band in apartheid Johannesburg, Rosenthal was aware of some of the difficulties Simon might face in recording with Sowetan musicians. He assured Simon that they would find a way to work together and sent him a pile of twenty South African records, both mbaqanga acts and choral groups including Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Then he arranged a meeting with his friend and producer Koloi Lebona, who set up a meeting with the black musicians’ union, to discuss whether members should record with Simon. (...)

The sessions that Rosenthal and Lebona organized led to Graceland, one of the most celebrated albums of the 1980s. It won Grammy awards in 1986 and 1987, topped many critics’ charts and regularly features on “top 100 albums of all time” lists. It also made a great deal of money for Simon and the musicians he worked with, selling over sixteen million copies. South African songwriters share credits and royalties with Simon on half of the album’s tracks, and Simon paid session musicians three times the US pay scale for studio musicians. Many involved with the project, including Ladysmith Black Mambazo, drummer Isaac Mtshali, and guitarist Ray Phiri went on to successful international music careers.

At its best, Graceland sounds as if Simon is encountering forces too large for him to understand or control. He’s riding on top of them, offering free-form reflections on a world that’s vastly more complicated and colorful than the narrow places he and Art Garfunkel explored in their close harmonies. The days of miracle and wonder Simon conjures up in “The Boy in the Bubble” are an excellent metaphor for anyone confronting our strange, connected world.

Collaborations like Graceland don’t happen without the participation of two important types of people: xenophiles and bridge figures. Xenophiles, lovers of the unfamiliar, are people who find inspiration and creative energy in the vast diversity of the world. They move beyond an initial fascination with a cultural artifact to make lasting and meaningful connections with the people who produced the artifact. Xenophiles aren’t just samplers or bricoleurs who put scraps to new use; they take seriously both forks of Kwame Appiah’s definition of cosmopolitans: they recognize the value of other cultures, and they honor obligations to people outside their own tribe, particularly the people they are influenced and shaped by. Simon distinguishes himself from McLaren by engaging with South African musicians as people and by becoming an advocate and promoter of their music.

Unlike xenophiles, outsiders who seek inspiration from other cultures, bridge figures straddle the borders between cultures, figuratively keeping one foot in each world. Hilton Rosenthal was able to broker a working relationship between a white American songwriter and dozens of black South African musicians during some of the most violent and tense moments of the struggle against apartheid. As a bridge, Rosenthal was an interpreter between cultures and an individual both groups could trust and identify with, an internationally recognized record producer who was also a relentless promoter of South Africa’s cultural richness. Rosenthal, in turn, credits Koloi Lebona with building the key bridges between black musicians and the South African recording community. (...)

What happens when people encounter another culture for the first time? Will we find a bridge figure to help us navigate these encounters? How often do we embrace the unfamiliar as xenophiles, and how often do we recoil and “hunker down,” as Robert Putnam observes?

It’s a question as old as the Odyssey, where Odysseus’s encounters with people of other lands remind readers that his name, in Greek, means “he who causes pain or makes others angry.” For all the kindly Phaeacians who sail Odysseus back to Ithaca, there are Cyclopes who eat men and destroy ships. When we encounter new cultures, should we expect cooperation or conflict? The political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart consider this ancient question through the lens of media. In their book Cosmopolitan Communications, they look at what happens when people encounter different cultures through television, film, the Internet, and other media.

by Ethan Zuckerman, Salon | Read more:
Image: Paul Simon, Malcolm Gladwell (Credit: AP/Luiz Ribeiro/Hachette Book Group)

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Crazymeds

Crazymeds.us is an excellent and highly informative site which I will never recommend to my patients.

It’s excellent because it gives mostly accurate and readable descriptions of the costs and benefits of every psychiatric medication. It has a laser-like focus on what patients will actually want to know and was clearly written by someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of every treatment’s strengths and potential pitfalls.

This is important because the standard psychiatric response to someone who wants to know about a medication (when it’s not “shut up and trust me”) is to print out an information sheet from somewhere like drugs.com or webmd.com. These sites at worst just copy paste the FDA drug information sheet, and at best list off side effects in a rote and irrelevant way that only a robot could love. (...)

Everything crazymeds.us does is (...) Well-written, funny, mostly accurate (with the occasional mistake but no more than you’d expect from an individual effort), and precisely targeted to what patients really need to know.

And I still don’t recommend it to my patients, and probably never will. Why not?

Well, for one thing, it’s called crazymeds.us.

Most psychiatric patients have no problem with the word “crazy”. Either they don’t think of themselves as crazy, or they jokingly call themselves crazy and are happy to let other people in on the joke, or they self-identify as crazy as matter-of-factly as they’ll tell you the time of day, or they just don’t care.

But some psychiatric patients care about it a lot. Either they’re moderately neurotic people who are scared that if they accept psychiatric help with their mild depression it puts them in a category of “total lunatic” from which they will never escape, or they’re social justice types who are watching like hawks for any sign that their psychiatrist is a privileged ableist oppressor trying to use slurs to trivialize their concerns and victim-blame them for their problems.

I can usually tell which category a given person is in pretty quickly, but the chance of accidentally slipping up and recommending to someone from the second category a site called crazymeds.us is too horrible to contemplate.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: Crazymeds

After Normal

Last February, Zelda was born in the middle of a snow storm. Even though I had a C-section and Zelda was born a little early, we were happily shipped home just thirty six hours later. Mom (that’s me now, it turns out) was doing great and Zelda was a trooper.

In hindsight, I might have chosen to hang about in the hospital as long as my insurance would cover—which I think was about five days—but, in the haze and the happiness of a healthy birth, when the doctor says, “You’re doing great, up and walking all over the place! Would you be happier at home?” you don’t consider the nurses who pop in every hour to ask you if you want water or food, or to re-swaddle your baby because you have no idea how to do that yet. You don’t think about the fact that you push a button every time the baby cries because OF COURSE you don’t know what she wants; you don’t think about the fact that when she is feeding at your breast it’s very helpful to have a nurse peer over and say, “Yes, that’s right,” or, “No, honey, that’s your elbow she is sucking on.” You only think of returning home to some semblance of normalcy. No one tells you that normal is over; it’s gone, poof.

When we took a tour of our hospital about two months before Z was born, Josh and I saw a couple—yes, they walk you through a working hospital!—getting off the elevator. They looked maniacal, giggling as they rolled off the lift, dad with a little car seat in hand. And in that car seat was the tiniest thing, a slip of a babe. I don’t know if it was sleeping or just being a newborn, but we talked about it then: “They look like they’re stealing it!” They seemed so happy and full of possibility. Tears welled up in my eyes. They knew everyone was beaming at them, all the pregnant ladies in a row waiting to get on the elevator, to ride up to see where their own babies would be born. They didn’t know what awaited at “home.”

They set us free at about 5PM on a Thursday. We loaded her into her carseat in the hospital room, squishing little rolled up blankets around her because she was so small she needed the padding. We put her in the car and my brother-in-law drove us home, through the crazy Manhattan traffic to Brooklyn. We we were home. And alone.

by Laura June, The Awl |  Read more:

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Jamaica Flowers by Mariano Peccinetti Collage Art on Flickr.
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The Identity Crisis Under the Ink

Some weeks ago, during a bleary-eyed subway ride to work, I found myself staring at a young woman on the other side of the car. She wore business attire with a North Face jacket and flip-flops, and she had an infinity symbol tattooed along the outside of her left foot, only a portion of the loop had been left out to make room for the word Love. Next to her, a scruffy guy in t-shirt and jeans had ornate black and gray murals inked on each arm, one of which seemed to depict an alien fight scene, the other some sort of robot love story. To his left, squeezed in at the end of the bench, was a man thumbing his phone with quick, nervous jabs. When he turned his hand over, I saw the word Jasmine tattooed above his knuckles and a date printed beneath it.

Then there was me, a blank canvas, wondering if I was missing something. Each inked-up person on the train appeared to be in the same age group—Millennials, to use the much-maligned descriptor. Being of the same generation, presumably we all post to social media on a regular basis, through profiles and accounts that compel us to confront the question, Who are you? For some, that choice is liberating: It’s a chance to start from scratch. For others, the sheer volume of options can be paralyzing. In either case, modernity compels us to declare our identity with conviction, whether we’ve found it yet or not.

Growing up in a rapidly changing and challenging world, most young people have struggled at some point or another with figuring out who they might be. Tattoos, recent research suggests, don’t just express identity: They help define it. Modernity compels us to declare our identity with conviction, whether we’ve found it yet or not.

Although tattoos have been around for millennia, they’re more popular now than ever. In 1960, there were approximately 500 professional tattoo artists operating in the United States. By 1995, that number had risen to over 10,000. Nearly 20 years later, demand continues to surge, and by the latest estimates, roughly 20 percent of Americans have a tattoo. What’s more, 40 percent of the people in that group are Millennials, which some academics argue isn’t a coincidence.

“We’re living in this world that’s so fragmented and so chaotic,” says Anne Velliquette, a professor at the University of Arkansas who studies the relationship between consumer behavior and popular culture. Velliquette argues that we’re more able now than ever before to “recreate identities very easily,” both online and in real life.

In 1998, Velliquette and colleagues conducted an interview-based study that found people use tattoos as a way to cement aspects of their current selves. “We were hoping to look at the postmodern identity, and really what we found is that we were in this modern era where people did know who they were,” she said. “They had a sense of their core self.” Eight years later, the team revisited the idea. The second study, like the first, found that people used tattoos as a means to express their past and present selves. But the people interviewed in the second group also seemed to need proof that their identities existed at all. They relied on tattoos as a way to establish some understanding of who they actually were.

“We continue to be struck by rapid and unpredictable change,” study co-author Jeff Murray said at the time. “The result is a loss of personal anchors needed for identity. We found that tattoos provide this anchor. Their popularity reflects a need for stability, predictability, permanence.”

For people who study identity, this permanence is key. We define who we are by the elements that stick with us—people, stories, places, memories—and we measure ourselves in relation to them, patching the highlights together into what sociologists call a “personal myth.” These myths make sense of often-turbulent lives, integrating our “remembered past, perceived present, and anticipated future,” as Velliquette wrote in her 2006 report. Some people use institutions such as religion, work, and family to create this myth. Others use material objects like houses and cars to define it. But Millennials are something of a breed apart. Without access to many of the anchors their parents had to create their personal myths, that sense of stability and permanence is often harder to find.

People rarely get just one tattoo. About half of the inked-up population has between two and five, and 18 percent have six or more. In other words, tattoos aren’t just snapshots. They’re part of the ongoing narrative of the personal myth. Unlike material objects, part of what makes them so meaningful is the degree of sacrifice involved in the process. A tattoo’s acquisition “involves a painful ritual that may take hours,” Velliquette writes, and in fact “becomes a part of the object, since the experience adds meaning and becomes embodied in the tattoo.” And unlike trucks or apartments, which get manufactured en masse, “every tattoo is unique from the beginning.” People age with their tattoos and can chart the timeline of their personal myth from start to finish, just by running a finger over their skin.

by Chris Weller, The Atlantic |  Read more:

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It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s—AAAACK!

I’m dreaming of a drone Christmas. Tiny drones tucked into stockings. Bigger drones beneath the tree. A drone for Dad, another for Junior, a third for your cool tween niece.

Anecdotal reports suggest that drones are topping Christmas lists all over. Why are holiday shoppers so excited? 1) These newer-model aircraft are meant to be far easier to fly than their predecessors. 2) They have cameras, allowing for all manner of creative (or mischievous) projects. 3) Folks just seem to be jazzed ever since we started calling these things “drones.” (...)

One of the leading consumer drone brands is DJI, and its Phantom drones are hugely popular, so I tried one of these first. When the DJI Phantom 2 Vision+ Quadcopter arrived, I pulled it from its box, screwed on its propellers (as though I were assembling a very small piece of Ikea furniture), and folded open its one-page “Quick Start Guide.” The steps looked straightforward. Thinking I’d run a casual, preliminary experiment—maybe send the thing 10 feet in the air and then immediately land it—I walked to a softball field around the corner from Slate’s New York office. After switching on the remote control and the drone itself, I calibrated the drone’s compass as the guide instructed. All systems go. I fired up its four propellers.

Now, before I characterize what happened next, I’d like to issue a disclaimer: I am mostly not an idiot, but sometimes it is useful—in my guise as a tech columnist—when I act like one. Why? Because most of us act like idiots at one time or another. We are harried, and distracted, and it’s Christmas morning and our kid wants to fly her drone RIGHT NOW. So we glance at the Quick Start Guide and think, Hey, looks easy, and thusly we wade into a minor catastrophe.

Anyway, here’s what happened. The drone lifted off the ground and, despite all my efforts to control it, ascended to a height of 20 feet before veering straight into the chain-link fence at the edge of the field and wedging itself deeply therein. I had to climb up the fence to retrieve it. It was stuck good.

Perhaps a wiser person would have paused at this point. I did not. Undeterred, I again followed the steps in the Quick Start Guide—calibrating, starting the propellers, nudging the drone into the air with the joystick. The events that followed are seared into my brain like freeze frames from a car accident. The drone zoomed to a height of 50 feet or so, far above the top of that tall chain-link fence I’d been counting on to limit potential damage. The airborne monster did not respond to my frantic jiggling of the joystick, or to my plaintive cries of “Come back!” Instead it rose and rose—and then suddenly rocketed sidewise at alarming velocity. I watched in terror as it flew across a busy street and crashed into the third story of a tall building. It tumbled to the sidewalk with a clatter of broken, scattering plastic.

A very nice woman stood by the wreckage to safeguard it for me as I ran across the street to inspect the wounded drone. Its camera was sheared clean off. Its propellers had snapped. Its battery pack had flown loose and been badly dented. It was pure luck that nobody got hurt. I felt immensely guilty and unspeakably stupid. I genuinely hoped that no witnesses would report me to the cops.

“The most dangerous thing in that box is the Quick Start Guide,” says Peter Sachs, a drone advocate and the founder of the Drone Law Journal. “There should be no such thing. Your experience isn’t surprising—learning from just the Quick Start Guide is inevitably going to result in a crash.” Sachs says any new drone owner should be sure to study basic aeronautics and meteorology, and should initially operate only under the tutelage of an experienced drone pilot in a designated recreational airspace. I did none of that, and, yes, shame on me. At the same time, I’ve a strong hunch my desultory approach will be replicated again and again, in the days following Christmas, by excited drone newbies all over the country. People very rarely choose to study aeronautics when they can look at a Quick Start Guide. We are impatient. We do dumb stuff.

Which—given that these things weigh as much as a steam iron, soar through the skies at 30 mph, and have whirring propellers just hankering to slice through somebody’s cornea—suggests that maybe there ought to be some regulations out there to protect us from ourselves. Can you just fly a drone anywhere? Like, say, smack in the middle of a crowded city? Without any kind of permit?

by Seth Stevenson, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Robert Neubecker

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Bill Morrison. Just Ancient Loops. 2010. Performed by Maya Beiser at Bang On A Can Marathon, Winter Garden at the World Financial Center, 2012. Photograph © 2012 Thomas Steenland
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The Problem With Music

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke. And he does of course.

I. A & R Scouts

Every major label involved in the hunt for new bands now has on staff a high-profile point man, an "A & R" rep who can present a comfortable face to any prospective band. The initials stand for "Artist and Repertoire." because historically, the A & R staff would select artists to record music that they had also selected, out of an available pool of each. This is still the case, though not openly.

These guys are universally young [about the same age as the bands being wooed], and nowadays they always have some obvious underground rock credibility flag they can wave. Lyle Preslar, former guitarist for Minor Threat, is one of them. Terry Tolkin, former NY independent booking agent and assistant manager at Touch and Go is one of them. Al Smith, former soundman at CBGB is one of them. Mike Gitter, former editor of XXX fanzine and contributor to Rip, Kerrang and other lowbrow rags is one of them. Many of the annoying turds who used to staff college radio stations are in their ranks as well.

There are several reasons A & R scouts are always young. The explanation usually copped-to is that the scout will be "hip to the current musical "scene." A more important reason is that the bands will intuitively trust someone they think is a peer, and who speaks fondly of the same formative rock and roll experiences. The A & R person is the first person to make contact with the band, and as such is the first person to promise them the moon. Who better to promise them the moon than an idealistic young turk who expects to be calling the shots in a few years, and who has had no previous experience with a big record company. Hell, he's as naive as the band he's duping. When he tells them no one will interfere in their creative process, he probably even believes it.

When he sits down with the band for the first time, over a plate of angel hair pasta, he can tell them with all sincerity that when they sign with company X, they're really signing with him and he's on their side. Remember that great gig I saw you at in '85? Didn't we have a blast.

By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum. There is a pervasive caricature in popular culture of a portly, middle aged ex-hipster talking a mile-a-minute, using outdated jargon and calling everybody "baby." After meeting "their" A & R guy, the band will say to themselves and everyone else, "He's not like a record company guy at all! He's like one of us." And they will be right. That's one of the reasons he was hired.

These A & R guys are not allowed to write contracts. What they do is present the band with a letter of intent, or "deal memo," which loosely states some terms, and affirms that the band will sign with the label once a contract has been agreed on.

The spookiest thing about this harmless sounding little memo, is that it is, for all legal purposes, a binding document. That is, once the band signs it, they are under obligation to conclude a deal with the label. If the label presents them with a contract that the band don't want to sign, all the label has to do is wait. There are a hundred other bands willing to sign the exact same contract, so the label is in a position of strength.

These letters never have any terms of expiration, so the band remain bound by the deal memo until a contract is signed, no matter how long that takes. The band cannot sign to another laborer even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens. Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed.

One of my favorite bands was held hostage for the better part of two years by a slick young "He's not like a label guy at all," A & R rep, on the basis of such a deal memo. He had failed to come through on any of his promises [something he did with similar effect to another well-known band], and so the band wanted out. Another label expressed interest, but when the A & R man was asked to release the band, he said he would need money or points, or possibly both, before he would consider it.

The new label was afraid the price would be too dear, and they said no thanks. On the cusp of making their signature album, an excellent band, humiliated, broke up from the stress and the many months of inactivity.

by Steve Albini, Won't Anybody Listen |  Read more:

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The Long Thanatopsis

In 30 years, the assisted suicides of people won’t be met by the furor that followed the death of Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old woman with terminal brain cancer who ended her own life with a fatal dose of barbiturates on Nov. 1.

In 30 years, the media won’t bother with stories like Gillian Bennett, an 85-year-old Canadian woman who took her own life in August using alcohol and barbiturates because she had decided not to live any longer with dementia. Upon her death, a website, deadatnoon.com, went live with an essay justifying her choice and arguing for assisted suicide. In 30 years, an explanatory website will be as unnecessary as a newspaper story, because this form of dying will be just another one of the ways that we die.

This shift will be part of the lasting legacy of the 76 million baby boomers who make up about 25 percent of the American population and who will be aging and dying in the next 20 years. A century from now, the historians of the future will not credit them as much for their boisterous 1960s counterculture as for the gray twinkle and fade in the early 21st century that forever altered the way America dies.

For a middle-aged Gen X-er like me to play in the thanatopsis sandbox like this is bittersweet. (“Thanatopsis” is a meditation on death, from William Cullen Bryant’s 1817 poem.) Of course, it’s untoward to point to anyone’s death, no matter how inescapable it is. The main source of the bitterness, though, is acknowledging that the cultural hegemony of the baby boomers will always overshadow me. Better than I know the contours of my historical experience, I know theirs: born into postwar prosperity, the hedonism and idealism, its psychological aftermath, and the nostalgias (The Big Chill, A Prairie Home Companion). I envied their generational mindset, the self-identity of a group that was formed in the same historical crucible, so as a senior in college in 1989, I pitched an article on “my generation” to a national magazine. Very kindly but firmly the editor, a baby boomer, refused it on the grounds that generational forms of thinking were now outré, even as he admitted getting his start in journalism by publishing a “my generation” piece in 1974. This epitomizes to me how sorry a creature the Gen X-er could be: weaned on someone else’s cultural themes, always too late to the party. (Fortunately Richard Linklater and Douglas Coupland were more persistent than I was.)

All this is blunted by knowing that when (and, let’s be honest, if) I become an elderly Gen X-er, many of the sharp edges of old age will have been blasted smooth by the massive demographic cohort that has preceded me. That’s the sweet part of the bittersweetness.

by Michael Erard, TMN |  Read more:

Image: Colin Chillag, Grandma-Grandpa, 2012

Able-Bodied Until It Kills Us

My first white-collar job was “coordinator” at my college’s chapter of the Public Interest Research Group—yes, PIRG, mother ship of pie-eyed campus activists. It turned out to be manual labor after all. Nearly all the anticapitalist staff, board members, and volunteers had one or another malady, allergy, or disability that prevented them from fixing the ceiling, running the computer cables, moving the boxes, vacuuming, or cleaning anything. I remember one board member explaining to me how she couldn’t touch the ceiling tiles because she was allergic to fiberglass—it made her itch. Fiberglass makes everyone itch. But with that magic word, “allergy,” she was off the hook.

We endlessly criticized corporate agriculture at the PIRG, but I couldn’t talk about my gardening contracts with my coworkers because images of crawling around in sheep manure, worms, and caterpillars triggered their phobias. So did my stories about plumbing and any carpentry that involved a saw. When I mentioned that I had to drink from garden hoses, a colleague squealed, “Ew! That’s so gross!” She had a “hose phobia.” Allergies exempted this cadre of activists from physical labor. Phobias meant they would never have to hear about it.

As I scrambled up the rungs of the meritocracy, with my supererogatory privilege of four able limbs and all, I noticed ever-newer stylings in the lingo that heavily credentialed people devise to shirk routine labor. It wasn’t only allergies and phobias; it was ADD, ADHD, and PTSD, all of them rampant at my graduate school. There must have been at least six empathy-inducing acronyms for writing is hard, so I refresh my Facebook page all day instead. Meanwhile, every time I walked up the stairs to my new office and passed by the ZAPPY ELECTRIC sticker on the breaker box, I remembered a former lover of mine—an electrician who had rewired the building a few years back—coughing bitterly and complaining about the walls and floors being full of asbestos, which he’d been expected to inhale on a daily basis for eight months.

Installed there as a graduate student, I heard other students in the building complain, whenever workers came in to polish floors, fix radiators, or do electrical work, about the minor amount of dust that they themselves had to inhale—and how the lobby smelled of industrial cleaners. I interrupted one such conversation to say, “This building is full of asbestos; did you know? Just imagine how the guy drilling in the ceiling feels!” Every student in the lobby perked up. “They have us working in a building full of asbestos?!” Ew!

And now, with ten years of graduate school under my belt, it’s become my job to guess how to grade papers that come with special slips marked “dyslexia”; those slips mean, basically, that I’m not supposed to judge the writing on the basis of syntax, grammar, or coherence. Of course, the dyslexic papers are always diverse—some have syntactic mix-ups that are clearly symptomatic of the disorder, some do not, some appear simply to be bad papers written by someone who did not read the book, and some are as good as the best papers in the non-dyslexic category. The non-dyslexic category involves a similar spread—a certain proportion have the syntactic mishaps that are the classic signature of dyslexia, most do not, some are terribly bad, and some are great.

What divides students with the special slip from everyone else is not always or only dyslexia. Some students work the system—i.e., have parents who bestow on them a sense of entitlement and access to expensive special health services that it doesn’t even occur to ordinary people to ask for. Disability then turns into class power misrecognized. The rebranding of social and cultural capital via a class-encoded discourse of health allows the privileged student to get ahead with even less merit than before. After all, it is only when pain is the exception rather than the rule that it is noticed; only those who can imagine escaping their pain bother to complain about it, and only those who know the system can have the strength to manipulate it.

by June Thunderstorm, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Nolan Pellitier

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‘Fahrenheit 451,’ Read by Tim Robbins

One ordinary evening in the not too distant past, I discovered I had exhausted all the offerings of the futuristic entertainment devices designed to help me tolerate the present. There was nothing that interested me on my high-definition television, neither on my 700 channels of cable nor on my 300 hours of recorded DVR programming, and no one to amuse me on my telephone that is also a camera or on my electronic tablet that is also a web browser. So I roused the desktop computer that is also my audio library from its digital slumber, inserted a shiny disc into its silver frame, and listened as a Hollywood movie star read “Fahrenheit 451” to me.

I hope that Ray Bradbury, in whatever alternate dimension he now occupies, will overlook the transgression and forgive readers like me who have regarded “Fahrenheit 451” as perhaps his finest novel while being such poor stewards of its legacy.

Since its publication in 1953, “Fahrenheit 451” has handily retained its place in the canon of dystopian fiction: more approachable than “1984,” not nearly as baroque as “A Clockwork Orange.” (All three made for equally flamboyant motion pictures.) Its longstanding presence on adolescent reading lists makes it no less worthy of adult attention, and in an era when accessibility to books is still regularly denied — whether by jittery school boards or petulant online retailers — its relevance can hardly be disputed.

But like the somnambulant suburbanites who wander the pages of “Fahrenheit 451,” misremembering their own lives and established history like the hazy contents of dreams, we seem to have forgotten what gives the novel its enduring, prophetic power. It is indeed a story about a world where books are outlawed and burned, but it is also a tale about the value of intellect, the importance of information and the singular, irreplaceable experience of reading books as books — as physical, palpable and precious objects.

It’s not hard to guess why Tim Robbins, the outspoken liberal activist and Academy Award-winning star of films like “Mystic River,” “The Player” and “The Shawshank Redemption,” agreed to serve as the narrator for this project, produced by Audible Studios (owned by Amazon, another despotic state that will someday surely inspire its own great novel about a dehumanized future).

The actor certainly does not phone in his assignment, even if, in this modern age, it may be possible to do the recording work entirely by phone. Robbins has both a gruffness and a gentleness in his voice, and these qualities especially suit his portrayal of the “Fahrenheit 451” protagonist, Guy Montag, a so-called fireman in a future society, whose job is not to put out blazes but to set them in homes and locations suspected of harboring books, and who has become increasingly conflicted about his profession, wondering why it is necessary.

by Dave Itzkoff, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Bauman Rare Books