Too Fast, Too Furious

For more than two centuries, time has been felt to be passing more and more quickly. Scholars tell us that since the twin revolutions of the 18th century — industrial and political — a general sense of time speeding up has been recorded with regularity in documents of all kinds. Political and technical progress somehow meant that people were always losing ground, unable to keep up, out of breath. Rousseau spoke in Émile of the encroaching tourbillon social irresistibly overtaking everything, and the enduring popularity of Walden no doubt owes something to its condemnation of the way we squander rather than savor our time. Marx’s bourgeoisie, of course, “cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the means of production,” and toward the end of the century, Nietzsche diagnosed the malady of the modern age in “the madly thoughtless shattering and dismantling of all foundations, their dissolution into a continual evolving that flows ceaselessly away, the tireless unspinning and historicizing of all there has ever been by modern man, the great cross-spider at the node of the cosmic web” — lines that come from the aptly titled Untimely Meditations. (...)

If one’s leisure time feels like work that one doesn’t have time for, work itself increasingly feels like work one doesn’t have time for. From the Amazon warehouses that track employees’ speed to the call centers that monitor times and keystrokes to the work that follows you home, a sense of speedup has obliterated, as in a lightning war, the time-saving promise of the technologies of the past. Entire industries disappear with uncanny speed: textiles gradually left New York over the course of forty years, starting in the 1950s, but American steel production, the world’s largest, fully collapsed within five years in the 1980s. Even the stock trading floor has been replaced by nanosecond-responsive computerized trading systems, with brokers seeking ever finer time-advantages over competitors, reflective in turn of a corporate world ever more concerned to deliver quick dividends to shareholders. These shareholders enjoy the spectacle of trigger-happy CEOs mowing down workers in mass layoffs. According to one estimate, the white-collar workers in these companies once switched jobs an average of four times over the course of their careers; now they can expect to switch more than a dozen times. These jobs are increasingly self-managed, with workers expected to approach their jobs with a “self-employed mind-set,” in the words of one management theorist. The loosening of the nine-to-five workday and the granting of more “flexibility” has resulted in workers feeling the need to give themselves wholly to their companies.

So the speedup is real. But why do we have it? “Capitalism” is the obvious and grating answer, and there’s no question that the need to increase not only productivity, but also circulation and distribution (what Marx saw as the need to cut down on “turnover time”), have driven ever faster cycles of accumulation. But acceleration at the heart of production doesn’t immediately explain acceleration in society, or the feeling that life itself has accelerated. The need to consume more, and consume better and faster — to be first in line for the bendy iPhone 6 — doesn’t give a human being a competitive advantage the way producing a phone without human beings, and delivering that phone all over the planet, does. And of course most of the cultural presuppositions that girded speedup, such as the “Protestant work ethic” and secularization, which led to emphasis on accumulating “this-worldly” achievements (rather than waiting for the “sacral time” after death), preceded the actual acceleration in production.

Nor does it follow that we should have less time as a result of the speedup of production. In fact, the problem may be that we have finally ended up with more free time — and yet don’t feel that we have more time. The centrality of this feeling to our age, and to the ages that preceded it, has received its most comprehensive treatment in the recent work of German theorist Hartmut Rosa and his concept of an “acceleration society.” For Rosa, the sense of speedup created by labor-saving is one of the major paradoxes of modernity, and one of the exemplary versions of this paradox is that “the dramatic rise in feelings of stress and lack of time” in our epoch has been “accompanied by an equally significant increase in free time.” For nearly every population group, even working women, the amount of time free from remunerated labor, obligatory household activities, and bodily self-care actually rose from the 1960s to the 1990s, with working women (who nonetheless continue to serve the much-despised “second shift”) gaining at least 3.7 hours a week. Though the gains have been unevenly distributed — with declining welfare payments for the poor and stagnant wages for working classes leading people to work several jobs — labor-saving technologies have mostly saved us time. But every surveyed group over that period feels we have lost it.

The key is that a society undergoing acceleration gets caught in a feedback loop it cannot escape, whereby acceleration in production, circulation, and distribution (in Rosa’s terms, “technical acceleration”) drives social change. The institutions of society no longer guarantee stable life paths. If in classical modernity people could imagine their lives in intergenerational terms — say, the same firm passing down through a bourgeois family — in late capitalism, turnover is so accelerated that it becomes hard to imagine one’s life course even within a few years, let alone a few generations. This in turn drives a sense of the acceleration of the “pace of life,” the psychological feeling of always being out of breath — which in turn drives the desire for more labor-saving technology, and technical change. There have been world-historical short-circuits in this loop — the 1930s, which spelled forced leisure for thousands, and the 1970s, when advances in technical change and the rate of profitability they promised seemed to meet a historic limit — but overall the pressure hasn’t slackened. For Rosa, modernity is defined by a continual sense of the present contracting—a feeling that what one is able to do within a given time frame is shrinking. The feeling comes about because the variety of social experiences available is ceaselessly proliferating: the number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large, and expands every day with implacable speed.

by Editors, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Speed

Millennials in Adulthood

Detached from Institutions, Networked with Friends

The Millennial generation is forging a distinctive path into adulthood. Now ranging in age from 18 to 331, they are relatively unattached to organized politics and religion, linked by social media, burdened by debt, distrustful of people, in no rush to marry— and optimistic about the future.

They are also America’s most racially diverse generation. In all of these dimensions, they are different from today’s older generations. And in many, they are also different from older adults back when they were the age Millennials are now.

Pew Research Center surveys show that half of Millennials (50%) now describe themselves as political independents and about three-in-ten (29%) say they are not affiliated with any religion. These are at or near the highest levels of political and religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the quarter-century that the Pew Research Center has been polling on these topics.

At the same time, however, Millennials stand out for voting heavily Democratic and for liberal views on many political and social issues, ranging from a belief in an activist government to support for same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization. (For more on these views, see Chapters 1 and 2.)

Millennials have also been keeping their distance from another core institution of society—marriage. Just 26% of this generation is married. When they were the age that Millennials are now, 36% of Generation X, 48% of Baby Boomers and 65% of the members of the Silent Generation were married. (See box on page 10 for demographic portraits of America’s four adult generations). Most unmarried Millennials (69%) say they would like to marry, but many, especially those with lower levels of income and education, lack what they deem to be a necessary prerequisite—a solid economic foundation.

Digital Natives

Adults of all ages have become less attached to political and religious institutions in the past decade, but Millennials are at the leading edge of this social phenomenon. They have also taken the lead in seizing on the new platforms of the digital era—the internet, mobile technology, social media—to construct personalized networks of friends, colleagues and affinity groups.

They are “digital natives”—the only generation for which these new technologies are not something they’ve had to adapt to. Not surprisingly, they are the most avid users. For example, 81% of Millennials are on Facebook, where their generation’s median friend count is 250, far higher than that of older age groups (these digital generation gaps have narrowed somewhat in recent years).

by Pew Research Center |  Read more:

Image: Pew Research Center

Teenage Wastelands

It took me seven years of marriage to figure out that my wife is a hardcore Pearl Jam fan. I knew she had some of their albums stashed in our iTunes library, but I didn’t realize she had all of them. I figured they were records from her youth, a band she no longer listened to, but I was wrong.

I heard Pearl Jam for the first time while I was in college in Southwest Virginia. A guy who was dating a woman I’d had a crush on played them for me at a party. He was a rich kid who belonged to a rich-kid fraternity and wore braided belts from J. Crew. ‘This band is going to be huuuuuge’ he told me, his forehead beaded with sweat. Cocaine may have been involved. The song was ‘Even Flow’ from Pearl Jam’s first album Ten. I liked my music raw and fast. Pearl Jam didn’t qualify. They were too ponderous. Too slow.

My wife Nuvia and I are ten years apart. She was just thirteen years old when she heard ‘Even Flow’ for the first time. She remembers it vividly. She was driving with her family in their Chevy van from Los Angeles to Tijuana to go to the family dentist where she would be fitted with a retainer. Then they’d drive on to Ensenada to visit her grandfather at his rancho in Valle de Guadalupe.

As the youngest, she got to sit in the passenger seat where she was in charge of the radio. While passing through San Diego she was able to pick up the local alternative station, 91X, which she felt was edgier than world-famous KROQ in LA. That’s when she heard ‘Even Flow’. They were driving through Camp Pendleton, the long undeveloped stretch of coast between San Onofre and Oceanside where the freeway runs alongside the Pacific Ocean, a place where you can imagine what California would be like without all the people in it, a place Eddie Vedder, who’d grown up in San Diego, knew well. The song, the swells, the van, the land – it all crystallized for her. While her friends were transitioning from Janet Jackson to New Kids on the Block, Nuvia decided that Pearl Jam was her favourite band.

When Pearl Jam released their new album Lightning Bolt last year, I surprised my wife with tickets to their show at Viejas Arena at San Diego State University.

It had been decades since I’d been to a concert in an arena and I wasn’t sure what to expect. To help get me up to speed on what Pearl Jam has been up to for the last twenty years, my wife went online, found the set list from a recent show in Hartford, Connecticut, and made a playlist on iTunes from her collection.

It was three hours long. (...)

At the kind of shows I like to go to, I’m usually one of the older people in the audience. This fact was driven home when I went to see Wavves in L.A. at the Echo on Sunset Boulevard a few weeks before the Pearl Jam concert. Wavves write bright, beachy pop punk songs with huge hooks and subversive lyrics that enamour teenagers and annoy parents. Naturally, it was an all-ages show, and as I made my way to the back of the line, I talked to Nuvia on my mobile phone, laughing about how young everyone looked. I was easily twice as old as the kids in line.

But then I did the math.

If I was fifteen when I went to see The Ramones thirty years ago, and if some of these kids were fifteen, and they most certainly were, I was now three times as old as they were.

If nostalgia is the sensation of one’s past and present unexpectedly connecting in a way that reinforces the notion that you are exactly where you need to be, what I was feeling was the complete opposite of that. This was not a pleasant connection. This was a gruesome collision, my memories scattered all over the place. I felt like a character in a science fiction movie under psychic attack – not from my future, but my past. These weren’t my people and this wasn’t my scene. I didn’t belong here. It wasn’t a matter of being cool enough – or was it? Was I that guy in the horror movie who refuses to get the message that it’s time to go? It would have been somewhat satisfying if the kids in the crowd judged me. If they looked at me and said to each other, Oh, shit, Dad is here, that would have been okay. But that wasn’t the case. These kids who bum-rushed the merch table for overpriced T-shirts before the show even started didn’t see me at all. I like to think it was because they were too busy looking at their phones, their faces lit up like cherubs, but I knew the truth: I was the ghost of their uncool future.

by Jim Ruland, Granta | Read more:
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Marcus Mariota - Hawaii Boy Makes Good

[ed. See also: Eight things you should know about Marcus Mariota.]

Marcus Mariota took a deep breath, shook his lowered head and pursed his lips. His eyes welled up. He had just won the Heisman Trophy, becoming the first Hawaii native and the first Oregon Duck to do so, and he was getting choked up as he delivered his acceptance speech at a theater in Midtown. He took a moment to address the children of Hawaii who are much the way he was.

“You should take this as motivation and dream big and strive for greatness,” he said.

He gulped.

“This is the toughest part,” he said, and took another breath. He thanked his parents and his brother and ended with a message in Samoan: Thank you very much.

Afterward, drawing on Hawaiian, he said, “Ohana means family — that’s it right there.” He added, wearing Hawaiian and Samoan leis around his neck: “In Hawaii, if one person is successful, the entire state is successful. To be a part of that, it’s so special. It’s hard to explain.”

Mariota, a redshirt junior from Honolulu, led Oregon to a 12-1 record, the Pacific-12 championship and the No. 2 seed in the College Football Playoff. He accounted for 53 total touchdowns against only two interceptions. He won more awards than he had shelf space for. The other two finalists, Wisconsin running back Melvin Gordon and Alabama wide receiver Amari Cooper, were worthy competition. Gordon ran for the fourth-highest yardage in a single season in N.C.A.A. history. Cooper was the first receiver invited to the Heisman ceremony since 2003. And they stood no chance.

In Hawaii, Mariota’s parents are constantly approached to talk about Marcus — at his brother Matt’s school, at the store, at the airport. Locals walk around Honolulu wearing Mariota’s No. 8 Oregon jerseys. They would gather to watch Oregon’s game.

“Everybody kind of adopted him as a son,” his mother said.

Passas uses Mariota as an example of a strong quarterback and a good person. He requires five things of his players. They have to show love for their mothers, make two people smile every day, do one random act of kindness, be a team player in all facets of life and say a prayer when they see an ambulance, a police car or a fire truck.

He tells them: If it worked for Marcus Mariota, it can work for you.

by Tim Rohan, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Everyone is Altered

Hollywood has always carefully guarded its vanity magic tricks. Diet pills, plastic surgery and Botox were Beverly Hills’ pretty little secrets before they were accepted as the norm. But the entertainment industry’s latest glamour miracle — a technique so effective that nearly every movie star has started using it — has stayed underground for more than a decade.

It’s called “beauty work.” It's a digital procedure of sorts, in which a handful of skilled artists use highly specialized software in the final stages of post-production to slim, de-age and enhance actors’ faces and bodies.

This is the version of on-screen stars that we, the audience, see. And if this comes as any surprise, it’s because the first rule of beauty work is: Don’t talk about beauty work.

Under strict non-disclosure agreements, Hollywood A-listers have been quietly slipping in and out of a few bland office buildings around town, many to sit in on days-long retouching sessions, directing the artists to make every frame suitable. At one such facility, young, fit up-and-comers disrobe for a handheld scanner that captures every pore and hair follicle, creating a template for future beauty work that, as a result, will appear all the more natural.

As Photoshop is to magazine photography, digital beauty has become to celebrities in motion: a potent blend of makeup, plastic surgery, muscle-sculpting, hair restoration, dental work and dermatology. Even the most flawless-in-real-life human specimens are going under the digital knife. Because they can. Because in this age of ultra-high definition, they have to.

In some cases, it's for pure vanity. In others it's because the film requires it: When a 24-year-old actress is tasked with playing a 17-year-old young-adult heroine, digital beauty becomes more like digital type-casting.

“Nobody looks like what you see on TV and in the movies. Everybody is altered,” says Claus Hansen, a beauty-work pioneer who plies his trade at Method Studios, one of the handful of shops in Los Angeles that specialize in video retouching.

After years of silence, Hansen agreed to speak with Mashable about his craft, saying he wants young people who idolize movie, TV and music stars to know that “what they see is smoke and mirrors.”

The path to Hansen’s openness, however, was long and littered with unanswered phone calls, stonewalling and refusals to comment for this story. Though a few insiders acknowledged it — “the stars/celebrities would be horrified” is a direct quote from one email rejection — nobody wanted to talk on the record.

But like all of Hollywood’s vanity magic tricks before it, the secret of digital beauty eventually sprung a leak.

The Clock Turners

Sitting at an outdoor table at Foxy’s Restaurant in Glendale on a blindingly bright spring day in 2012, an actor linked to a beloved movie character lamented over chopped salads and Diet Cokes that the years had all but deep-sixed a long-gestating sequel. But there was one last hope.

The actor, who agreed to speak only if he could remain anonymous, talked cautiously about a visit to Lola Visual Effects. Located in an unmarked office space above a clothing store in Santa Monica, the company was an otherwise garden-variety Hollywood VFX shop, but with a curious specialty: They’d figured out a way to turn back the clock.

The technique made its “out” debut when Lola aged Brad Pitt backwards for Benjamin Button in 2008. As it turned out, the most striking visual in David Fincher’s epic wasn’t Button the shriveled, elderly man-child. It came toward the end of the film, when Pitt emerged into the golden light of a dance studio as a naturally radiant, strapping 20-something — this, at a time when Pitt, in his mid-40s, was just beginning to age into his real-life role as the sexiest man alive.

Sometime after the Foxy’s waitress had collected the check, the actor said the technique had begun to spread throughout the film industry — you just didn’t know it, because they weren’t always using it to take 25 years off the onscreen talent. Instead, they were beginning to use it for subtle nip and tuck, the kind of stuff you’d never notice even if you were looking for it.

But it was expensive, and so hush-hush that it was reserved for the Pitt-level celebrities of the world. The only people who knew about digital beauty were those who practiced it, had it practiced on them, or were so high up the studio/agency food chain that they were agreeing not only pay for it, but to quietly hand the film’s finished scenes over for however long it took to get the work done, which was sometimes weeks. In the early goings, actors leveraged studios into paying for the work, but nowadays it's just a part of the budget.

“We were seeing hundreds of thousands spent on this, anywhere from $500 to $2,500 per shot — maybe more if there’s a lot going into the scenes,” a former top-level studio executive recently told Mashable, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.

“It would benefit both parties. You want your actor or actress to do the publicity for the movie, so you wanted to keep them happy.”

by Josh Dickey, Mashable |  Read more:

Image: Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection

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ASMR: Softer Than Softcore

Over the past five years, autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) has become the focal point of a robust community of online enthusiasts. In its protoplasmic early life on blogs and message boards, it was simply dubbed “the Unnamed Feeling”: a blissful sensation of tingling along the scalp and vertebral axis that results from a set of reliable interpersonal triggers, distinct to each participant, but often with a great deal of overlap: soft voices, kind words, a conceit of caregiving.

The group’s coalescence was spontaneous and stumbling, in a way that seems typical for Internet-based discovery. Frequenters of online comment threads began offering halting accounts of a supposedly private experience that, it turns out, was enthusiastically shared. They reported a history of such reactions trailing back to their early youth, recurrent and unexpected glimmers of joy in response to close conversation and casual touch. Awareness of the phenomenon has snowballed as this proclivity has been profiled by various media outlets, mostly in a tone of wondering confusion.

Since coming into knowledge of one another and giving themselves a name, self-styled “ASMR-tists” have put forward countless videos specifically designed to provoke this response. The content of these videos range from the silent handling of common objects like hair brushes or cotton swabs to prolonged whispered monologues to role-play scenarios of impressive audiovisual nuance. In the role-play videos, performers look straight at you for the better part of an hour, gesturing around the camera lens to suggest that you are there, an arm’s length away, being gently manipulated. Clips tend to recapitulate standard scenarios (haircuts and doctor’s visits among the most ubiquitous), but new variations emerge each month: Now you are being fitted for a suit; now you are booking a cruise; now you are surviving an apocalypse.

In explaining ASMR to those outside the community, its enthusiasts repeatedly distinguish the feeling as nonsexual, a completely innocuous satisfaction. When novices are exposed to these videos for the first time, however, they tend to react with not just confusion but embarrassment, a sense of transgression — the fresh young faces, breathy speech patterns, and tight camera angles seem to borrow from precedents set by more prurient media. These are pornographic borderlands, softer than softcore, the sweetness of the performance never quite matter of fact enough to settle the question of its potential indecency. (...)

The ASMR movement spans much more than just clinical role-play, though, and in fact seems to dovetail with other large categories of community-produced media, inscrutable at the surface but riveting for millions at a more visceral level. Consider the unboxing videos that Mireille Silcoff recently analyzed in the New York Times, in which retail items of almost any size or value are laid out before the camera and described aloud, at length, and in exquisite detail. Silcoff hypothesizes that such videos flip deep-seated emotional switches. Some of us are so conditioned to enjoy novelty and possession that virtual routines of real-life consumerism approximate its psychic rewards, just as others of us so yearn for interpersonal support that we respond to its whispered approximations. Whether these appetites are a function of starvation or gluttony is up for debate (and perhaps best addressed, as with pornography, on a case-by-case basis).

For many, watching these clips constitutes a kind of therapy. Sufferers of anxiety and insomnia seek these videos out to soothe their particular clinical afflictions while untold others, gleaning from the experience a feeling of enhanced well-being, are easing distress that’s less well defined, measurable only after it’s been shed. In accounting for the joys of unboxing videos, Silcoff invokes the idea of “neural massage,” a metaphor that recurs frequently in the ASMR community as well, not only as a performative conceit, in videos about being massaged, but also as a rhetorical figure for the relaxation provided by the pursuit as a whole. The implication of this trope is that our brains are rife with hidden knots, the release of which depends on triggers that can be pulled almost without our knowing, or understanding why. (...)

More and more, we turn to devices to help us explain the generalized tenderness of our flesh. However keenly we suffer, however cleanly that suffering fits into our common nosology, each of us is inevitably captivated by the elaborate workings of our own insides. Whether or not we strictly need this information, pleasure is built into the unveiling – the thrill of reflexive comprehension, another small truth made naked. Diagnosis as a synaptic connection doubles as an emotional one, renewing the intimacy of self-knowledge, and of being known.

ASMR and its relatives are not weighted with the baggage of conventional pornography, but the echoes in their energies are hard to ignore. One possibility is that these online performances represent a sort of virtual flirtation for the lonely set, some self-guided foreplay, offering in the comfort of one’s own home the same preludial thrill that hovers between two singles in a bar. Viewer comments on good-faith ASMR clips often winkingly remark on the performers’ physical beauty, for instance, betraying a frustrated desire for a more conventionally physical kind of caregiving.

Alternatively, these videos might be conceptualized as artifacts of a post-pornographic age, in which a culture oversaturated with blunt stimulation has inspired a search for intimacy’s origins and rudiments. If we extend evidence that long-term exposure to pornography is associated with structural changes in the brain, if we argue that the ubiquity of sex in the public eye is responsible for a slow and steady corruption of our dopaminergic pathways, ASMR may represent an exhausted attempt at reassembling the pieces of our fractured psyches. After the shock has worn away, after we’ve definitively had our fill, we come to recognize the urges behind our urges, some of which are startling in their humility.

by Nitin K. Ahuja, The New Inquiry |  Read more:

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Puff Daddy

If you're interested in cigars and want to buy and smoke them like you know what you're doing, here are 14 things to remember:

1. Does the cigar feel firm? Don't buy it. It's either packed too tightly or hasn't been stored properly and has dried out. A cigar with a firm draw will make you feel like you're trying to suck a milkshake through a drink stirrer. If it's dry, the wrapper will peel and unravel as it burns.

2. Good cigars are handmade and have three parts: long filler, a binder to hold the filler, and a different type of tobacco for the wrapper. Avoid cheap, machine-made, short-filler cigars.

3. Not all cigars are created equal. Mild, medium and full are the classifications. The full-bodied ones are the most flavorful, but they can make you feel woozy if you're not used to them.

4. Size isn't an indicator of strength, nor is the color of the tobacco leaves used as the wrapper. The lightest wrappers are double claro (light green) and claro (tan). The darkest wrappers are maduro (dark brown) and oscuro (black).

5. The bigger the ring size (circumference) of the cigar, the longer it takes to smoke. The size is measured in 64ths of an inch. So 50-ring cigars like a "Churchill" or "robusto" are 50/64ths of an inch in diameter. Extra-large cigars (larger than 50) are frowned upon as cartoonish.

6. Don't take a cigar and dip it into whatever you're drinking. All this does is taint the flavors of your cigar and your drink.

7. Cubans aren't the industry standard anymore. There are exceptional Cuban cigars—especially if they contain tobacco from the Vuelta Abajo region—but other tropical countries like the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Honduras make great cigars, too. And, unlike Cubans, they're legal to buy in the United States.

by Ron Kaspriske, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Sam Kaplan

“Corrupt, Toxic and Sociopathic”

Glenn Greenwald unloads on torture, CIA and Washington’s rotten soul.

It took years until the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report — which shows not only that the CIA’s torture regime was larger and more vicious than understood, but that the agency repeatedly lied about it to the White House and Congress — was finally released to the public. But it only took hours before President Obama was once again urging the nation to look forward, not back. “Rather than another reason to refight old arguments,” read a White House statement, “I hope that today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong — in the past.” When members of the media asked whether that meant the White House considered torture to be ineffective, as the report claims, an anonymous official said Obama would not “engage” in the ongoing “debate.” On the issues of rape, waterboarding and induced hypothermia, apparently, reasonable minds can differ.

Glenn Greenwald, the Intercept’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and longtime critic of the war on terror, disagrees. “There’s no debate,” he told Salon. “Everything that we did,” he continued, “in terms of how we treated detainees, has [long] been viewed as morally vile and inexcusable and criminal.” Greenwald has little doubt, however, that Washington will turn torture into yet another partisan squabble. It’s the go-to move, he says, when America’s political and media elite decide they’d rather look the other way. “That’s just the ritual Washington engages in,” Greenwald said. (...)

One thing I want to establish as much as we can is who was involved in the lead-up to this release, and what role they played. So why did it take so long for this to be released?

Well, first of all, there was a major war between the Senate [Intelligence] Committee and the CIA over access to the information [the committee] wanted. That took years.

Secondly, there was a huge conflict between the committee and the White House, which, on its own, tried to stifle and suppress all kinds of vital material. In fact, there were 9,000 documents that the CIA and the White House — together, as part of the executive branch — refused to give to the committee.

So much of it was just grappling over access to information (which is ironic, since this committee is supposed to exercise oversight of the CIA …)

Also, the material was complicated. There were raw reports from all over the world, and it can take a long time to sort through that and put together a comprehensive report. So, I don’t think it’s surprising that it took this long.

And did anything in the summary surprise you? Or was it more or less what you expected after covering this for so many years?

Honestly, there wasn’t really anything that surprised me in terms of the disclosures.

There’s obviously new details about some of the more brutal interrogations; there are details and lots of corroborating pieces of evidence about the extent to which the CIA just outright lied, publicly, and to Congress. Part of what surprised me was how overt and unflinching the report was about essentially accusing people like [former CIA head] Gen. Hayden of being pathological liars.

But the broad strokes of the program and what the CIA did have long been known — for years — and I think what was more important about Tuesday was the ritual of official Washington finally admitting it.

Yeah, what’s striking to me about the lying is just how clearly it shows that the CIA in many ways is operating outside the system of democratic accountability. It’d be wrong to say it’s like the CIA runs the country, since there’s a bunch of stuff they don’t really care about besides intelligence and so forth, but it certainly looks like they don’t really answer to anyone.

The CIA cares about a lot more than just intelligence. They care a lot about private contracts (because so many of their colleagues work at those very lucrative private contracting jobs where a lot of them hope to go when they leave the CIA); they care about militarism and the assertion of force in the world (they run the drone program); they do all kinds of military activities beyond just the gather of intelligence. But you’re obviously right that the CIA exists beyond democratic accountability — and has for decades.

If I had to identify one key point from Tuesday, the thing that bothered me most about the narrative: Yes, the CIA goes off on its own and does things that political officials don’t know about; and yes, they mislead and lie to the committees that oversee them; and they do all these horrible things, the details of which are sometimes unknown to the political branches — but that’s how Washington wants it.

They’ve always wanted it that way. That’s what the CIA does. The CIA does the dirty work of the political branches of Washington and when they get caught, publicly, the ritual is that official Washington pretends that it was just these rogue CIA officers doing this without anyone’s knowledge or approval. It’s exactly what happened in the Iran-Contra scandal, which was ordered at the highest levels of the White House by President Reagan … but when they got caught, they said: Oh, it was Oliver North and these rogue CIA officers who were doing this without our knowledge!

That’s just the ritual Washington engages in; the CIA is kind of like their wild pit bull that they purposely let off leash. They don’t want to see the mauling but they know that it’s happening, and pretend they don’t know. And when it gets reported, they pretend that they’re horrified.

by Elias Isquith, Salon | Read more:
Image: Silvia Izquierdo/AP

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America’s Toughest, Ugliest Warplane Is Going Back Into Battle

For more than 30 years, the A-10 Thunderbolt II—better known as the Warthog because it’s so ugly—has performed a crucial role: attacking hostile targets that threaten troops on the ground, a task called close air support. The plane, designed for the Cold War, is old. It’s slow. And it’s about as sophisticated as a hammer. But it is heavily armored and wickedly armed, making it a ruthlessly effective weapon. And that is why, despite ongoing efforts by Defense Department brass to kill it, the Warthog is headed back into battle to help in the fight against ISIS.

An undisclosed number of Warthogs, part of the “Blacksnakes” 163rd Expeditionary Fighter Squadron based at Fort Wayne, Indiana, have been deployed to Middle Eastern airbases to provide air cover to troops fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

That makes the A-10 something of a zombie—it refuses to die. The Air Force wants to scuttle the 238 A-10s still in service, a move that would save $3.7 billion over five years—and make way for more sophisticated planes like the new F-35 Lightning II. But given the crucial role it plays providing close air support, something particularly helpful against enemies in a place like Iraq, the A-10 has many staunch defenders, including Senator John McCain.

Close air support is a vital job that, when properly executed, can mean the difference between life and death for soldiers. It’s highly dangerous, because it requires flying at altitudes low enough to discern friend from foe, leaving the plane particularly vulnerable to ground-based anti-aircraft fire. The A-10, little more than a flying tank, is perfectly suited to the task and beloved by pilots and troops alike.

“It’s a game-changer,” Gen. John F. Campbell, the Army’s vice chief of staff, told The Washington Post earlier this year. “It’s ugly. It’s loud, but when it comes in and you hear that pffffff [of the cannon], it just makes a difference.” Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called it “the ugliest, most beautiful aircraft on the planet.”

What makes the plane’s continued relevance so impressive is the fact it was designed more than 40 years ago, and a new one hasn’t been built since 1984.

The Fairchild Republic A-10 was developed in the 1960s and 1970s, even as American helicopters were being shot down in Vietnam with frightening regularity. It was the first airplane designed specifically for close air support, with the goal of defending soldiers against artillery, tanks and other weapons.

It was basically designed to “take apart a Soviet tank,” says Jeffery S. Underwood, a historian at the United States Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. To that end, the A-10 typically is equipped with the AGM-65 Maverick air-to-surface missile and is capable of carrying many other armaments, including AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles.

But its primary weapon is a seven-barrel GAU-8 Avenger Gatling cannon. It measures 9 feet long and fires 30mm armor-piercing shells which are held in a drum not quite six feet in diameter. It can spit them out at a rate of 3,900 rounds per minute, and accounts for some 16 percent of the plane’s unladen weight. The gun is so large and so integral to the A-10, that the airplane is effectively built around it. In fact, when the gun is removed for maintenance, the tail of the plane must be supported to keep it from falling over.

But all that firepower is useless if the plane can be easily shot down. “Close air support means you’re close to people,” says Underwood. That means you’re flying low, too — often just a few hundred feet up. Easy prey for anyone with bad intentions. The cockpit sits in what amounts to a 1,200-pound titanium tub, specifically designed to withstand fire from 23mm anti-aircraft shells at close range. The A-10 can take a ton of abuse, and continue flying if it’s lost an engine, a tail or even half of a wing.

by Jordan Golson, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Greg L. Davis
h/t Scott

Two Futures Can Explain Time's Mysterious Past

Physicists have a problem with time.

Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Einstein’s special and general relativity or quantum mechanics, all the equations that best describe our universe work perfectly if time flows forward or backward.

Of course the world we experience is entirely different. The universe is expanding, not contracting. Stars emit light rather than absorb it, and radioactive atoms decay rather than reassemble. Omelets don’t transform back to unbroken eggs and cigarettes never coalesce from smoke and ashes. We remember the past, not the future, and we grow old and decrepit, not young and rejuvenated. For us, time has a clear and irreversible direction. It flies forward like a missile, equations be damned.

For more than a century, the standard explanation for “time’s arrow,” as the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington first called it in 1927, has been that it is an emergent property of thermodynamics, as first laid out in the work of the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. In this view what we perceive as the arrow of time is really just the inexorable rearrangement of highly ordered states into random, useless configurations, a product of the universal tendency for all things to settle toward equilibrium with one another.

Informally speaking, the crux of this idea is that “things fall apart,” but more formally, it is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which Boltzmann helped devise. The law states that in any closed system (like the universe itself), entropy—disorder—can only increase. Increasing entropy is a cosmic certainty because there are always a great many more disordered states than orderly ones for any given system, similar to how there are many more ways to scatter papers across a desk than to stack them neatly in a single pile.

The thermodynamic arrow of time suggests our observable universe began in an exceptionally special state of high order and low entropy, like a pristine cosmic egg materializing at the beginning of time to be broken and scrambled for all eternity. From Boltzmann’s era onward, scientists allergic to the notion of such an immaculate conception have been grappling with this conundrum.

Boltzmann, believing the universe to be eternal in accordance with Newton’s laws, thought that eternity could explain a low-entropy origin for time’s arrow. Given enough time—endless time, in fact—anything that can happen will happen, including the emergence of a large region of very low entropy as a statistical fluctuation from an ageless, high-entropy universe in a state of near-equilibrium. Boltzmann mused that we might live in such an improbable region, with an arrow of time set by the region’s long, slow entropic slide back into equilibrium. (...)

Many of the modern explanations for a low-entropy arrow of time involve a theory called inflation—the idea that a strange burst of antigravity ballooned the primordial universe to an astronomically larger size, smoothing it out into what corresponds to a very low-entropy state from which subsequent cosmic structures could emerge. But explaining inflation itself seems to require even more fine-tuning. One of the problems is that once begun, inflation tends to continue unstoppably. This “eternal inflation” would spawn infinitudes of baby universes about which predictions and observations are, at best, elusive. Whether this is an undesirable bug or a wonderful feature of the theory is a matter of fierce debate; for the time being it seems that inflation’s extreme flexibility and explanatory power are both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

For all these reasons, some scientists seeking a low-entropy origin for time’s arrow find explanations relying on inflation slightly unsatisfying. “There are many researchers now trying to show in some natural way why it’s reasonable to expect the initial entropy of the universe to be very low,” says David Albert, a philosopher and physicist at Columbia University. “There are even some who think that the entropy being low at the beginning of the universe should just be added as a new law of physics.”

That latter idea is tantamount to despairing cosmologists simply throwing in the towel. Fortunately, there may be another way.

Tentative new work from Julian Barbour of the University of Oxford, Tim Koslowski of the University of New Brunswick and Flavio Mercati of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics suggests that perhaps the arrow of time doesn’t really require a fine-tuned, low-entropy initial state at all but is instead the inevitable product of the fundamental laws of physics. Barbour and his colleagues argue that it is gravity, rather than thermodynamics, that draws the bowstring to let time’s arrow fly. Their findings were published in October in Physical Review Letters.

The team’s conclusions come from studying an exceedingly simple proxy for our universe, a computer simulation of 1,000 pointlike particles interacting under the influence of Newtonian gravity. They investigated the dynamic behavior of the system using a measure of its "complexity," which corresponds to the ratio of the distance between the system’s closest pair of particles and the distance between the most widely separated particle pair. The system’s complexity is at its lowest when all the particles come together in a densely packed cloud, a state of minimum size and maximum uniformity roughly analogous to the big bang. The team’s analysis showed that essentially every configuration of particles, regardless of their number and scale, would evolve into this low-complexity state. Thus, the sheer force of gravity sets the stage for the system’s expansion and the origin of time’s arrow, all without any delicate fine-tuning to first establish a low-entropy initial condition.

From that low-complexity state, the system of particles then expands outward in bothtemporal directions, creating two distinct, symmetric and opposite arrows of time. Along each of the two temporal paths, gravity then pulls the particles into larger, more ordered and complex structures—the model’s equivalent of galaxy clusters, stars and planetary systems. From there, the standard thermodynamic passage of time can manifest and unfold on each of the two divergent paths. In other words, the model has one past but two futures. As hinted by the time-indifferent laws of physics, time’s arrow may in a sense move in two directions, although any observer can only see and experience one. “It is the nature of gravity to pull the universe out of its primordial chaos and create structure, order and complexity,” Mercati says. “All the solutions break into two epochs, which go on forever in the two time directions, divided by this central state which has very characteristic properties.”

Although the model is crude, and does not incorporate either quantum mechanics or general relativity, its potential implications are vast. If it holds true for our actual universe, then the big bang could no longer be considered a cosmic beginning but rather only a phase in an effectively timeless and eternal universe. More prosaically, a two-branched arrow of time would lead to curious incongruities for observers on opposite sides. “This two-futures situation would exhibit a single, chaotic past in both directions, meaning that there would be essentially two universes, one on either side of this central state,” Barbour says. “If they were complicated enough, both sides could sustain observers who would perceive time going in opposite directions. Any intelligent beings there would define their arrow of time as moving away from this central state. They would think we now live in their deepest past.”

by Lee Billings, Scientific American |  Read more:

Image: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch

John William Godward, A Congenial Task (Detail) 1915.
via:

Three-Point Lighting

Three-point lighting is a standard method used in visual media such as theatre, video, film, still photography and computer-generated imagery.  By using three separate positions, the photographer can illuminate the shot's subject (such as a person) however desired, while also controlling (or eliminating entirely) the shading and shadows produced by direct lighting.

The key light, as the name suggests, shines directly upon the subject and serves as its principal illuminator; more than anything else, the strength, color and angle of the key determines the shot's overall lighting design.

In indoor shots, the key is commonly a specialized lamp, or a camera's flash. In outdoor daytime shots, the Sun often serves as the key light. In this case, of course, the photographer cannot set the light in the exact position he or she wants, so instead arranges it to best capture the sunlight, perhaps after waiting for the sun to position itself just right.

The fill light also shines on the subject, but from a side angle relative to the key and is often placed at a lower position than the key (about at the level of the subject's face). It balances the key by illuminating shaded surfaces, and lessening or eliminating chiaroscuro effects, such as the shadow cast by a person's nose upon the rest of the face. It is usually softer and less bright than the key light (up to half), and more to a flood. Not using a fill at all can result in stark contrasts (due to shadows) across the subject's surface, depending upon the key light's harshness. Sometimes, as in low-key lighting, this is a deliberate effect, but shots intended to look more natural and less stylistic require a fill.

In some situations a photographer can use a reflector (such as a piece of white cardstock mounted off-camera, or even a white-painted wall) as a fill light instead of an actual lamp. Reflecting and redirecting the key light's rays back upon the subject from a different angle can cause a softer, subtler effect than using another lamp.

The back light (a.k.a. the rim, hair, or shoulder light) shines on the subject from behind, often (but not necessarily) to one side or the other. It gives the subject a rim of light, serving to separate the subject from the background and highlighting contours.

Back light or rim light is different from a kick in that a kick (or kicker) contributes to a portion of the shading on the visible surface of the subject, while a rim light only creates a thin outline around the subject without necessarily hitting the front (visible) surface of the subject at all.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: James Jeffrey