Saturday, December 20, 2014
The Orphan Master's Son
[ed. So, North Korea is in the news again, shrouded in mystery. If you've ever wondered what life might really be like there, pick up The Orphan Master's Son, it comes as close to anything I've ever read that answers that question (and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction). Here's one review of the book: "I haven’t liked a new novel this much in years, and I want to share the simple pleasure of reading the book. But I also think it’s an instructive lesson in how to paint a fictional world against a background of fact: The secret is research. Johnson spent six years working on “The Orphan Master’s Son,” reading everything he could about North Korea, ingesting the oral histories of defectors and eventually visiting the country. He had to investigate the actual place with enough care that he could begin to invent his own version. It’s this process of re-imagination that makes the fictional locale so real and gives the novel an impact you could never achieve with a thousand newspaper stories."]
North Korea, the Stalinist “hermit kingdom” and one of the world’s most backward and isolated countries, is also a realm where fiction making — state-sponsored storytelling, that is — reigns supreme. At least, that’s how Adam Johnson depicts the dictatorial Communist state in his harrowing and deeply affecting new novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” which recounts the picaresque adventures of its title character, Jun Do, a soldier turned kidnapper turned surveillance officer, who tries to stay alive as he stumbles his way through the government bureaucracy.Set in the recent past, when the country’s eccentric strongman Kim Jong-il (who died in December) still ruled with an iron whim, the novel conjures an Orwellian world in which the government’s myths about the country — its success, its benevolence, its virtues in taking on the evils perpetrated by the United States, South Korea and Japan — are not only tirelessly drilled into the citizenry through propaganda broadcasts but have also become an overarching narrative framing everyone’s lives. As Jun Do learns, people’s identities are subordinate to the roles the state expects them to fulfill, and even words or acts that inadvertently cast doubt on the greatness and goodness of the government can lead to death or prison or torture.
“Where we are from,” says one character, “stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.” (...)
In both “Emporium” (set largely in America) and “The Orphan Master’s Son” there is a heightened apprehension of the precariousness of life, the randomness of fate, the difficulty of emotional connection. Because the hardships of real life in North Korea, described by defectors, can be Kafkaesque in their surreal horror, it’s harder to tell in these pages where Mr. Johnson’s penchant for exaggeration leaves off. (...)
The North Korean prisons here seem designed to erase identity and all that makes one human. “In Prison 33, little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be,” Mr. Johnson writes. “Next went your past, and suddenly it was inconceivable that your head had ever touched a pillow, that you’d once used a spoon or a toilet, that your mouth had once known flavors and your eyes had beheld colors beyond gray and brown and the shade of black that blood took on.”
As for Mr. Johnson’s hero, Jun Do, he goes from being an instrument of the state — kidnapping an assortment of people on official orders and eavesdropping on foreign radio transmissions — to becoming one of its victims. Along the way he commits terrible acts that will haunt the rest of his days, and yet he doggedly clings to the goal of survival.
And then, unexpectedly, he meets and falls in love with Sun Moon, the country’s most famous actress, “the only person who could take away the pain he’d suffered.” His love for her will alter the trajectory of his story and give him the chance to commit a selfless act — inspired, weirdly, by the movie “Casablanca” — that might redeem his life.
In recounting Jun Do’s peregrinations, Mr. Johnson does an agile job of combining fablelike elements with vivid emotional details to create a story that has both the boldness of a cartoon and the nuance of a deeply felt portrait. He captures the grotesque horrors that Jun Do is involved in, or witness to, even as he gives us a visceral sense of the world that his characters inhabit. It’s a world in which anyone may be an informer, and suspicion poisons relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives. Here, even love is considered a liability, an emotion that gives the government leverage over would-be defectors: one more thing it can take away.
by Michiko Kakutani, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Korean News Service
You’re 16. You’re a Pedophile. You Don’t Want to Hurt Anyone. What Do You Do Now?
We have a few go-to archetypes when it comes to pedophilia: There is the playground lurker, the chat-room predator, and the monstrous (often religious) authority figure. These men are usually middle-aged, unrepentant serial abusers who are caught only after remaining undetected for years. But what about the preceding decades? When do these urges first begin to manifest?
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a pedophile as an individual who “over a period of at least six months” has “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children.” This person also has to have “acted on these sexual urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty,” and be “at least age 16 years and at least five years older than the child or children” involved.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that most pedophiles first notice an attraction toward children when they themselves are between 11 and 16, mirroring that of any other sexual awakening. It can be a confusing time for any of us, but imagine realizing that you’re attracted to little kids. How do these young men and women negotiate that with no viable role models or support network? There is no It Gets Better for pedophiles. Are they all fated to end up as child molesters? Or is it possible for them to live a life without hurting children at all?
I spoke with experts and asked around online. I came across a site for self-described pedophiles who acknowledged their attraction and wanted help dealing with it. But the men I met were in their 50s and 60s, and I’d hoped to speak with someone younger, someone still coming to terms with what he was learning about himself. I asked them if they knew anyone like that, and a few weeks later I received an email.
“My name is Adam,” it read. “I’m 18 and non-exclusively attracted to boys and girls of all ages (particularly very young ones). I am the leader of a support group for non-offending pedophiles around my age… I would be very happy to talk with you.” (...)
There is currently no mechanism for treating someone who has pedophilic urges and hasn’t acted on them. A major roadblock is the existence of mandatory reporting laws, which dictate that people in certain professions must report suspicion of child abuse and neglect to Child Protective Services. (The individuals required to make a report varies from state to state; it can include all citizens but is usually restricted to those whose work puts them in regular contact with children, such as teachers, police, and psychologists.)
Mandated reporting revolutionized the way child abuse is handled in the U.S. and has brought many incidents to light, but it can be problematic for young men like Adam who haven’t abused children. The civil and criminal liabilities facing those who fail to report someone who goes on to molest a kid, combined with the fact that it need only be based on suspicion and not probable cause, means a report could be triggered when well-intentioned individuals reach out for help. The overwhelming number of minor-attracted men I spoke with said this was too much of a deterrent. Which also makes it harder to learn more about them.
There is a lot we still don’t know about pedophilia—one researcher described our scientific understanding of it as a series of “pretty big black holes.” We don’t know, for example, how someone comes by an attraction for prepubescent children in the first place. The research we do have, and this is derived from very small sample sizes, suggests that those attracted to kids tend to be shorter, left-handed, and have a lower IQ than the broader population. Another study found that being knocked unconscious before the age of 13 might be a factor. This may sound like quackery, but it points toward biological causation. In other words, it’s likely that pedophiles are born this way.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a pedophile as an individual who “over a period of at least six months” has “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children.” This person also has to have “acted on these sexual urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty,” and be “at least age 16 years and at least five years older than the child or children” involved.Anecdotal evidence suggests that most pedophiles first notice an attraction toward children when they themselves are between 11 and 16, mirroring that of any other sexual awakening. It can be a confusing time for any of us, but imagine realizing that you’re attracted to little kids. How do these young men and women negotiate that with no viable role models or support network? There is no It Gets Better for pedophiles. Are they all fated to end up as child molesters? Or is it possible for them to live a life without hurting children at all?
I spoke with experts and asked around online. I came across a site for self-described pedophiles who acknowledged their attraction and wanted help dealing with it. But the men I met were in their 50s and 60s, and I’d hoped to speak with someone younger, someone still coming to terms with what he was learning about himself. I asked them if they knew anyone like that, and a few weeks later I received an email.
“My name is Adam,” it read. “I’m 18 and non-exclusively attracted to boys and girls of all ages (particularly very young ones). I am the leader of a support group for non-offending pedophiles around my age… I would be very happy to talk with you.” (...)
There is currently no mechanism for treating someone who has pedophilic urges and hasn’t acted on them. A major roadblock is the existence of mandatory reporting laws, which dictate that people in certain professions must report suspicion of child abuse and neglect to Child Protective Services. (The individuals required to make a report varies from state to state; it can include all citizens but is usually restricted to those whose work puts them in regular contact with children, such as teachers, police, and psychologists.)
Mandated reporting revolutionized the way child abuse is handled in the U.S. and has brought many incidents to light, but it can be problematic for young men like Adam who haven’t abused children. The civil and criminal liabilities facing those who fail to report someone who goes on to molest a kid, combined with the fact that it need only be based on suspicion and not probable cause, means a report could be triggered when well-intentioned individuals reach out for help. The overwhelming number of minor-attracted men I spoke with said this was too much of a deterrent. Which also makes it harder to learn more about them.
There is a lot we still don’t know about pedophilia—one researcher described our scientific understanding of it as a series of “pretty big black holes.” We don’t know, for example, how someone comes by an attraction for prepubescent children in the first place. The research we do have, and this is derived from very small sample sizes, suggests that those attracted to kids tend to be shorter, left-handed, and have a lower IQ than the broader population. Another study found that being knocked unconscious before the age of 13 might be a factor. This may sound like quackery, but it points toward biological causation. In other words, it’s likely that pedophiles are born this way.
by Luke Malone, Matter | Read more:
Image: Simon Prades
Hiding and Seeking: Vivian Maier
[ed. See also: here and here.]
Sitting on the ground, the homeless man curls himself into an elegant spiral: knees raised, arms wrapped, head lowered so that nothing shows but the round top of his cloth cap. His light-colored suit and hat are dirty, but he wears good shoes, and there is a ring on his hand. Huddled on the sidewalk, he turns himself into his own protective shell; he draws himself inward, hiding, yet makes a shape that arrests the eye.
Still pictures are more secretive than moving pictures. The power of great photographs comes from the tension between what they reveal and what they withhold. Cut off from time before and after, they have the excitement of mysteries forever on the verge of being solved. A young black man dressed in white rides a dark horse bareback under the shadow of the El: the picture lingers in the mind like a cryptic poem. The street is empty, the horse walks calmly, and the boy sits on its back with easy grace.
Documentary films about photographers are caught between images that flow and images that freeze; talking heads unpack the significance of iconic images seen all too fleetingly. Still photography turns a fugitive glimpse into a permanent record that can be studied for any length of time. A beautiful woman with dark-rimmed eyes, seen from the window of a passing bus, becomes a monument as enduring as the marble front of the Public Library rising behind her. Film returns these images to the tyranny of time, giving them context at the price of their independence.
Finding Vivian Maier investigates the case of a provokingly secretive woman who took thousands of photographs but kept them locked away, never showing or selling them during her lifetime. The documentary features interviews with people who knew Maier, including those who employed her as a nanny or who as children were her charges. They construct a fascinating, contradictory, unsettling verbal portrait of the artist, complicating rather than simplifying our understanding of her. It seems she was conscious of being a puzzle, even gleefully so: one speaker quotes Maier calling herself “the mystery woman.”
Vivian Maier was a strange, difficult person, and those who knew her have spent a lot of time trying to understand her. But when people in the film say, “Why was a nanny taking all these photographs?” or “What’s the use of taking it if no one sees it?” they reveal less about Maier than about common assumptions of what art is for, and who artists are. Maier’s photographs, to which she devoted herself rigorously but for which she never sought recognition, illustrate the paradox of someone who wanted to stay hidden yet obsessively documented her existence, a solitary outsider who could form profound, fleeting connections with strangers. One interviewee speculates that Maier would have been upset at having her privacy violated by the documentary’s delving. But the film’s fascination with its subject, at once intrusive and compassionate, feels very much like Maier’s own eye, stalking people in the street, yet seeming not to expose them so much as to grant them the flattery of rapt attention.
by Imogen Sara Smith, Threepenny Review | Read more:
Image: Vivian Maier
Sitting on the ground, the homeless man curls himself into an elegant spiral: knees raised, arms wrapped, head lowered so that nothing shows but the round top of his cloth cap. His light-colored suit and hat are dirty, but he wears good shoes, and there is a ring on his hand. Huddled on the sidewalk, he turns himself into his own protective shell; he draws himself inward, hiding, yet makes a shape that arrests the eye.Still pictures are more secretive than moving pictures. The power of great photographs comes from the tension between what they reveal and what they withhold. Cut off from time before and after, they have the excitement of mysteries forever on the verge of being solved. A young black man dressed in white rides a dark horse bareback under the shadow of the El: the picture lingers in the mind like a cryptic poem. The street is empty, the horse walks calmly, and the boy sits on its back with easy grace.
Documentary films about photographers are caught between images that flow and images that freeze; talking heads unpack the significance of iconic images seen all too fleetingly. Still photography turns a fugitive glimpse into a permanent record that can be studied for any length of time. A beautiful woman with dark-rimmed eyes, seen from the window of a passing bus, becomes a monument as enduring as the marble front of the Public Library rising behind her. Film returns these images to the tyranny of time, giving them context at the price of their independence.
Finding Vivian Maier investigates the case of a provokingly secretive woman who took thousands of photographs but kept them locked away, never showing or selling them during her lifetime. The documentary features interviews with people who knew Maier, including those who employed her as a nanny or who as children were her charges. They construct a fascinating, contradictory, unsettling verbal portrait of the artist, complicating rather than simplifying our understanding of her. It seems she was conscious of being a puzzle, even gleefully so: one speaker quotes Maier calling herself “the mystery woman.”
Vivian Maier was a strange, difficult person, and those who knew her have spent a lot of time trying to understand her. But when people in the film say, “Why was a nanny taking all these photographs?” or “What’s the use of taking it if no one sees it?” they reveal less about Maier than about common assumptions of what art is for, and who artists are. Maier’s photographs, to which she devoted herself rigorously but for which she never sought recognition, illustrate the paradox of someone who wanted to stay hidden yet obsessively documented her existence, a solitary outsider who could form profound, fleeting connections with strangers. One interviewee speculates that Maier would have been upset at having her privacy violated by the documentary’s delving. But the film’s fascination with its subject, at once intrusive and compassionate, feels very much like Maier’s own eye, stalking people in the street, yet seeming not to expose them so much as to grant them the flattery of rapt attention.
by Imogen Sara Smith, Threepenny Review | Read more:
Image: Vivian Maier
Can Couples Therapy Make Me Less of an Emotional Cavewoman?
In previous columns, I have written, in lengthy and pathetic detail, about the traumatic breakup I went through at the end of July. In addition to publishing multiple essays about the perils of heartbreak, I’ve also been privately campaigning to get my ex back: shameless, 2,000-word emails listing all the ways I’m prepared to change; sappy, “you complete me”-esque text messages; I even showed up at her apartment crying in a silk slip one evening, like a crazy woman from a Marcello Mastroianni movie. My ex rebuffed all my efforts with the same response: Though she still loved me, she just didn’t feel safe in our relationship. (The result, apparently, of my recurring pressures to open our relationship throughout our two years together—my bad?) By November, after four months of trying to negotiate with her, I was beginning to give up hope. But then I got an email: “I’m willing to try to work things out, under one condition: We have to begin couples therapy.”
I’ll start by saying that I realize this whole situation is embarrassing. Couples therapy just seems like one of those things other people do. Specifically, other people in their 50s, with two kids and a house, for whom separating would dismantle their entire lives. Lessa and I, on the other hand, began dating only two years ago, and we are in our 20s. The only property we’ve ever shared were the communal toothbrushes at our respective apartments. Many would argue that needing to see a therapist at this stage is a sign that we should just break up. I also understand that, by dragging ourselves back into a messy relationship we just spent months trying to get over, we risk suffering heartbreak all over again. But I’m lovesick and desperate, and therefore can’t be held accountable for my decisions.
I’ve always been kind of skeptical of therapy. I grew up in a conservative, traditional Italian Catholic family. Where I come from, when you’re sad, you get smacked in the face and told to cheer up. I can’t remember anyone in my family talking openly about their feelings—we barely talked at all, unless it concerned Jesus or sports. Needing to see a therapist was viewed as a sign of weakness. And although there were a couple of times during depressive periods of my life when I considered seeing a psychologist, I always ultimately decided against it, deeming it too self-indulgent. Of course, there are situations when therapy seems appropriate—after a serious loss or trauma, for example. But am I really going to pay a stranger thousands of dollars to listen to me whine about the stresses of my blogger life? Tragic. (...)
Our first session was six weeks ago. Somewhat worryingly, on the day of, my primary concern was what to wear. I wanted to make a good impression on the therapist by looking pretty, but also virtuous—ya know, “the good guy” in the relationship—and so I chose a white, crew-neck wool dress with gold buttons that I felt made me look particularly angelic. The therapist wasn’t exactly what I expected. Having been a fan of HBO’s In Treatment, the stock image of a therapist in my mind is of a dark and handsome, pensive, Gabriel Byrne–type with whom patients always feel a muted sexual tension. Our therapist (I’ll call her Kate), however, was a 60-something woman in white jeans and trendy, knee-high leather boots, smiling enthusiastically in her shabby-chic Upper East Side office. Peppy and progressive, she’s like the cool mom you always wished you had.
As a first step, both Lessa and I were asked to explain why we were in couples therapy. Surprisingly, Kate did not think “Because she made me do it” was either a funny or a valid response. Lessa, on the other hand, has been in therapy since she was young (typical Jew), and is well-versed in this sort of thing. She explained that we have pretty serious trust and jealousy issues, many of which are left over from our year in a poorly managed open relationship. And the fact that we both cheated once didn’t help. Also, Lessa seems to think I have an “anger problem” (I prefer to think of myself as “passionate”), and that I need to learn to communicate my feelings rather than be an emotional cavewoman (my parents’ fault).
Jealousy sucks. It’s stressful and unattractive, and once it gets hold of you, it can be hard to control. Talking about your feelings is difficult enough, but the sensitive subjects of trust and jealousy are two of the hardest to broach. Usually, when I feel upset or insecure in a relationship, my default reaction is to retaliate in order to make the other person feel as bad as I do. It’s just way easier to be a bitch than it is to admit, “It makes me feel insecure when you talk to your ex.” Retribution is more appealing than fixing the problem, because the latter usually entails making yourself vulnerable. And thanks to my ego, I’ve never been very comfortable with vulnerability. Lessa’s reaction to a problem, meanwhile, has always been to run away—hence her eventual decision to break up. Before we split, we were having the same stupid fight over and over again. Eventually, I’d go into vengeful bitch mode, and she’d walk out. Nothing ever got solved.
I’ll start by saying that I realize this whole situation is embarrassing. Couples therapy just seems like one of those things other people do. Specifically, other people in their 50s, with two kids and a house, for whom separating would dismantle their entire lives. Lessa and I, on the other hand, began dating only two years ago, and we are in our 20s. The only property we’ve ever shared were the communal toothbrushes at our respective apartments. Many would argue that needing to see a therapist at this stage is a sign that we should just break up. I also understand that, by dragging ourselves back into a messy relationship we just spent months trying to get over, we risk suffering heartbreak all over again. But I’m lovesick and desperate, and therefore can’t be held accountable for my decisions.I’ve always been kind of skeptical of therapy. I grew up in a conservative, traditional Italian Catholic family. Where I come from, when you’re sad, you get smacked in the face and told to cheer up. I can’t remember anyone in my family talking openly about their feelings—we barely talked at all, unless it concerned Jesus or sports. Needing to see a therapist was viewed as a sign of weakness. And although there were a couple of times during depressive periods of my life when I considered seeing a psychologist, I always ultimately decided against it, deeming it too self-indulgent. Of course, there are situations when therapy seems appropriate—after a serious loss or trauma, for example. But am I really going to pay a stranger thousands of dollars to listen to me whine about the stresses of my blogger life? Tragic. (...)
Our first session was six weeks ago. Somewhat worryingly, on the day of, my primary concern was what to wear. I wanted to make a good impression on the therapist by looking pretty, but also virtuous—ya know, “the good guy” in the relationship—and so I chose a white, crew-neck wool dress with gold buttons that I felt made me look particularly angelic. The therapist wasn’t exactly what I expected. Having been a fan of HBO’s In Treatment, the stock image of a therapist in my mind is of a dark and handsome, pensive, Gabriel Byrne–type with whom patients always feel a muted sexual tension. Our therapist (I’ll call her Kate), however, was a 60-something woman in white jeans and trendy, knee-high leather boots, smiling enthusiastically in her shabby-chic Upper East Side office. Peppy and progressive, she’s like the cool mom you always wished you had.
As a first step, both Lessa and I were asked to explain why we were in couples therapy. Surprisingly, Kate did not think “Because she made me do it” was either a funny or a valid response. Lessa, on the other hand, has been in therapy since she was young (typical Jew), and is well-versed in this sort of thing. She explained that we have pretty serious trust and jealousy issues, many of which are left over from our year in a poorly managed open relationship. And the fact that we both cheated once didn’t help. Also, Lessa seems to think I have an “anger problem” (I prefer to think of myself as “passionate”), and that I need to learn to communicate my feelings rather than be an emotional cavewoman (my parents’ fault).
Jealousy sucks. It’s stressful and unattractive, and once it gets hold of you, it can be hard to control. Talking about your feelings is difficult enough, but the sensitive subjects of trust and jealousy are two of the hardest to broach. Usually, when I feel upset or insecure in a relationship, my default reaction is to retaliate in order to make the other person feel as bad as I do. It’s just way easier to be a bitch than it is to admit, “It makes me feel insecure when you talk to your ex.” Retribution is more appealing than fixing the problem, because the latter usually entails making yourself vulnerable. And thanks to my ego, I’ve never been very comfortable with vulnerability. Lessa’s reaction to a problem, meanwhile, has always been to run away—hence her eventual decision to break up. Before we split, we were having the same stupid fight over and over again. Eventually, I’d go into vengeful bitch mode, and she’d walk out. Nothing ever got solved.
by Karley Sciortino, Vogue | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Friday, December 19, 2014
What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs
Eric Jackson was sitting in his hotel room on Sea Island, Ga., watching his kids splash around in the pool, when he clicked “publish” on his latest blog post for Forbes.com. Jackson, an influential hedge-fund manager, had become fixated on Yahoo and the efforts of its chief executive, Marissa Mayer, to turn around the enormous yet floundering Internet company. It was July 21, 2014, almost exactly two years to the day since Mayer took over, arriving at Yahoo’s headquarters to an unfurled purple carpet and Shepard Fairey-style “HOPE” posters bearing her face. During those 24 months, Mayer eliminated dozens of products and rebooted others. She acquired 41 start-ups and even hired Katie Couric. But just one week earlier, Mayer announced the company’s lowest quarterly earnings in a decade. Jackson argued in his post that Yahoo no longer made sense as an independent entity. Instead, it might be a nice takeover target for one of the tech industry’s Big Four: Apple, Facebook, Amazon or Google.
Jackson’s conclusion wasn’t based simply on a discouraging quarter. It was a result of an eye-opening calculation he had performed — what’s known on Wall Street as a sum-of-the-parts valuation. Yahoo had a market value of $33 billion at the time, but that figure owed largely to its stake in Alibaba, the Chinese Internet conglomerate. According to Jackson’s valuation, Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba was worth roughly $37 billion. But if you subtracted that position, the entirety of Yahoo’s core business, all its web products and content sites, actually had a market valuation of negative $4 billion. A conquering company could theoretically buy Yahoo, sell off its Asian assets and absorb its business units free. This sort of sale would make a lot of money for Yahoo’s shareholders, Jackson wrote, even if it meant gutting the company and losing Mayer as C.E.O. after only two years.
A day after his post, Jackson received an unusual email. A major Yahoo shareholder had written to explain that he and many other investors, along with numerous employees and advertisers, had themselves become extremely frustrated with Mayer. Her turnaround plan, he said, had failed. The start-ups she acquired (most notably the social blogging platform Tumblr, which Yahoo bought for $1.1 billion in 2013) had failed to revive the company’s flat revenues of roughly $5 billion per year. Nor had Mayer succeeded, despite her track record overseeing Google’s search engine, in turning any of Yahoo’s many products into an industry leader. There were also a number of embarrassing management setbacks. The best outcome for Yahoo, the shareholder said, might be to sell the company. (...)
Dynamic and wildly profitable Internet companies like Facebook and Google may get most of the attention, but Silicon Valley is littered with firms that just get by doing roughly the same thing year after year — has-beens like Ask.com, a search engine that no longer innovates but happily takes in $400 million in annual revenue, turning a profit in the process. Mayer, who is 39, was hired to keep Yahoo from suffering this sort of fate. She believed it could again become a top-tier tech firm that enjoyed enormous growth and competed for top talent. And two years in, Mayer, who has a tendency to compare herself with Steve Jobs, wasn’t about to abandon her turnaround plan. On the afternoon of Oct. 21, she entered a web TV studio on Yahoo’s garrisonlike campus to present the company’s latest quarterly results. But the presentation effectively became a response to Starboard’s campaign. Even though Yahoo’s revenue had decreased in five of the past six quarters, Mayer attested that she had “great confidence in the strength of our business.”
Mayer’s resolve was consistent with other remarks she had made at the time, in both public and private. She highlighted various signs of promise. Yahoo’s mobile revenues, while still small, had doubled from the previous year. Display advertising revenue was down 6 percent, but the number of ads sold had actually increased by 24 percent. Yahoo was engaging more mobile users than ever before. Mayer didn’t bother talking about a potential AOL takeover. Her goal was nothing less than to return her company to the level of the Big Four. “We believe deeply in the future potential of Yahoo,” she said into the camera, “and the transformation we are pursuing to bring an iconic company back to greatness.”
Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to make money on the Internet. There are e-commerce companies and marketplaces — think Amazon, eBay and Uber — that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms. Hardware companies, like Apple or Fitbit, profit from gadgets. For everyone else, though, it more or less comes down to advertising. Social-media companies, like Facebook or Twitter, may make cool products that connect their users, but they earn revenue by selling ads against the content those users create. Innovative media companies, like Vox or Hulu, make money in much the same way, except that they’re selling ads against content created by professionals. Google, which has basically devoured the search business, still makes a vast majority of its fortune by selling ads against our queries.
Yahoo essentially invented the online-advertising business. In 1994, two graduate students at Stanford, Jerry Yang and David Filo, dreamed up a way to help early users navigate the web. They picked URLs that they each liked — beginning with around 100 links, including one for Nerf toys and one dedicated to armadillos — and listed them on a page called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” Within a year, their guide had to be divided into 19 categories (art, business, etc.) and was generating one million clicks a day. In 1995, the year Yahoo started selling ads, a former company executive estimated that the entire market was about $20 million. By 1997, Yahoo’s ad revenues alone were $70.4 million. The next year, they were $203 million.
To keep up with the growth, Yahoo quickly expanded beyond its directory to create a multitude of ad-supported products. The company aimed to be all things to all web users, and for most of a decade, it was a wildly successful strategy. In 1997, Yahoo added chat rooms, classified ads and an email service. In 1998, it introduced sports, games, movies, real estate, a calendar, file sharing, auctions, shopping and an address book. Even during the crash of the Internet bubble, a profusion of more traditional advertisers began to migrate from print to digital. The search business, in particular, was growing enormously. In 2002, Yahoo’s first full year monetizing search results with attendant ads, its revenues reached $953 million. In 2003, they eclipsed $1.6 billion. In 2004, they grew again to $3.5 billion. At its peak, Yahoo’s market capitalization reached $128 billion. It was $20 billion larger than Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s holding company.
But this growth obscured a looming problem. While Yahoo was busy enlarging its portfolio, a new generation of start-ups was focusing on perfecting one single product. Soon enough, Yahoo was losing out to eBay in auctions, Google in search and Craigslist in classifieds. Then Facebook came along, replacing Yahoo as the home page for millions of people. The advertising dollars soon followed, and Yahoo’s revenue flattened. Between 2007 and 2012, the company churned through four C.E.O.s. The last of them, Scott Thompson, resigned in disgrace after five months when a large activist shareholder, Dan Loeb, published an open letter accusing him of fabricating a computer-science degree. After Thompson’s resignation, in May 2012, Yahoo was worth less than $20 billion on the public markets.
Jackson’s conclusion wasn’t based simply on a discouraging quarter. It was a result of an eye-opening calculation he had performed — what’s known on Wall Street as a sum-of-the-parts valuation. Yahoo had a market value of $33 billion at the time, but that figure owed largely to its stake in Alibaba, the Chinese Internet conglomerate. According to Jackson’s valuation, Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba was worth roughly $37 billion. But if you subtracted that position, the entirety of Yahoo’s core business, all its web products and content sites, actually had a market valuation of negative $4 billion. A conquering company could theoretically buy Yahoo, sell off its Asian assets and absorb its business units free. This sort of sale would make a lot of money for Yahoo’s shareholders, Jackson wrote, even if it meant gutting the company and losing Mayer as C.E.O. after only two years.A day after his post, Jackson received an unusual email. A major Yahoo shareholder had written to explain that he and many other investors, along with numerous employees and advertisers, had themselves become extremely frustrated with Mayer. Her turnaround plan, he said, had failed. The start-ups she acquired (most notably the social blogging platform Tumblr, which Yahoo bought for $1.1 billion in 2013) had failed to revive the company’s flat revenues of roughly $5 billion per year. Nor had Mayer succeeded, despite her track record overseeing Google’s search engine, in turning any of Yahoo’s many products into an industry leader. There were also a number of embarrassing management setbacks. The best outcome for Yahoo, the shareholder said, might be to sell the company. (...)
Dynamic and wildly profitable Internet companies like Facebook and Google may get most of the attention, but Silicon Valley is littered with firms that just get by doing roughly the same thing year after year — has-beens like Ask.com, a search engine that no longer innovates but happily takes in $400 million in annual revenue, turning a profit in the process. Mayer, who is 39, was hired to keep Yahoo from suffering this sort of fate. She believed it could again become a top-tier tech firm that enjoyed enormous growth and competed for top talent. And two years in, Mayer, who has a tendency to compare herself with Steve Jobs, wasn’t about to abandon her turnaround plan. On the afternoon of Oct. 21, she entered a web TV studio on Yahoo’s garrisonlike campus to present the company’s latest quarterly results. But the presentation effectively became a response to Starboard’s campaign. Even though Yahoo’s revenue had decreased in five of the past six quarters, Mayer attested that she had “great confidence in the strength of our business.”
Mayer’s resolve was consistent with other remarks she had made at the time, in both public and private. She highlighted various signs of promise. Yahoo’s mobile revenues, while still small, had doubled from the previous year. Display advertising revenue was down 6 percent, but the number of ads sold had actually increased by 24 percent. Yahoo was engaging more mobile users than ever before. Mayer didn’t bother talking about a potential AOL takeover. Her goal was nothing less than to return her company to the level of the Big Four. “We believe deeply in the future potential of Yahoo,” she said into the camera, “and the transformation we are pursuing to bring an iconic company back to greatness.”
Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to make money on the Internet. There are e-commerce companies and marketplaces — think Amazon, eBay and Uber — that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms. Hardware companies, like Apple or Fitbit, profit from gadgets. For everyone else, though, it more or less comes down to advertising. Social-media companies, like Facebook or Twitter, may make cool products that connect their users, but they earn revenue by selling ads against the content those users create. Innovative media companies, like Vox or Hulu, make money in much the same way, except that they’re selling ads against content created by professionals. Google, which has basically devoured the search business, still makes a vast majority of its fortune by selling ads against our queries.
Yahoo essentially invented the online-advertising business. In 1994, two graduate students at Stanford, Jerry Yang and David Filo, dreamed up a way to help early users navigate the web. They picked URLs that they each liked — beginning with around 100 links, including one for Nerf toys and one dedicated to armadillos — and listed them on a page called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” Within a year, their guide had to be divided into 19 categories (art, business, etc.) and was generating one million clicks a day. In 1995, the year Yahoo started selling ads, a former company executive estimated that the entire market was about $20 million. By 1997, Yahoo’s ad revenues alone were $70.4 million. The next year, they were $203 million.
To keep up with the growth, Yahoo quickly expanded beyond its directory to create a multitude of ad-supported products. The company aimed to be all things to all web users, and for most of a decade, it was a wildly successful strategy. In 1997, Yahoo added chat rooms, classified ads and an email service. In 1998, it introduced sports, games, movies, real estate, a calendar, file sharing, auctions, shopping and an address book. Even during the crash of the Internet bubble, a profusion of more traditional advertisers began to migrate from print to digital. The search business, in particular, was growing enormously. In 2002, Yahoo’s first full year monetizing search results with attendant ads, its revenues reached $953 million. In 2003, they eclipsed $1.6 billion. In 2004, they grew again to $3.5 billion. At its peak, Yahoo’s market capitalization reached $128 billion. It was $20 billion larger than Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s holding company.
But this growth obscured a looming problem. While Yahoo was busy enlarging its portfolio, a new generation of start-ups was focusing on perfecting one single product. Soon enough, Yahoo was losing out to eBay in auctions, Google in search and Craigslist in classifieds. Then Facebook came along, replacing Yahoo as the home page for millions of people. The advertising dollars soon followed, and Yahoo’s revenue flattened. Between 2007 and 2012, the company churned through four C.E.O.s. The last of them, Scott Thompson, resigned in disgrace after five months when a large activist shareholder, Dan Loeb, published an open letter accusing him of fabricating a computer-science degree. After Thompson’s resignation, in May 2012, Yahoo was worth less than $20 billion on the public markets.
by Nicholas Carlson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Matt Dorfman. Photographs by Getty Images
Open Bay Lets You Run Your Own Copy of The Pirate Bay
Legendary file-sharing site The Pirate Bay may have finally been forced offline, but that doesn’t mean that the less-than-legal file-sharing scene has slowed down—the shady BitTorrent hydra has many more heads to take The Pirate Bay’s place. In fact, if the folks at torrent site Isohunt have their way, there will very soon be many, many more heads: the site has released an open sourced "copy" of The Pirate Bay called "Open Bay" that anyone with access to a Web server can install and run.
The Open Bay project maintainers have set up a GitHub repository for the Open Bay application and written instructions covering how to get your very own Open Bay site up and running—complete with example configuration files. To make it work, you need at minimum a Web server running Apache or Nginx and PHP (either with mod_php or PHP-FPM or whatever other PHP method you prefer); since we’ve got one of those in our closet, we decided to take a crack at installing the application to see how it works.
What Open Bay is not
I was hoping that Open Bay would be a full-featured Bittorrent site wherein I could both search for and also add torrents; I’d planned on setting everything up and then offering out a complete set of Linux ISO torrent links to prove that it worked. However, it’s important to be clear at the outset that Open Bay’s primary purpose is to be a copy of The Pirate Bay.
The key word here is "copy," because to really make Open Bay work for you, you either need to use Isohunt’s remote torrent database—which makes Open Bay really just a self-hosted front end rather than a full featured torrent site—or you need to download an almost 900MB torrent database dump (which comes as a 441MB gzipped CSV file with about 8 million torrents and their associated magnet link hashes, sourced from The Pirate Bay as well as other torrent sites). The intent is that you first set up the Open Bay application, then either point it at Isohunt’s database or dump the CSV file into your own MySQL database. Once you’ve brought these two halves together, the resultant whole is a torrent search site with about 8 million working torrents you can search through and download.
What you can’t do is list your own torrents—at least, not without directly adding them to the MySQL database. This definitely helps keep the Open Bay application simpler both from a development perspective and also for would-be Open Bay administrators to install and configure, but it also limits the application’s usefulness. For right now, it’s really good for only one thing: running a static sort-of copy of The Pirate Bay.
I was hoping that Open Bay would be a full-featured Bittorrent site wherein I could both search for and also add torrents; I’d planned on setting everything up and then offering out a complete set of Linux ISO torrent links to prove that it worked. However, it’s important to be clear at the outset that Open Bay’s primary purpose is to be a copy of The Pirate Bay.
The key word here is "copy," because to really make Open Bay work for you, you either need to use Isohunt’s remote torrent database—which makes Open Bay really just a self-hosted front end rather than a full featured torrent site—or you need to download an almost 900MB torrent database dump (which comes as a 441MB gzipped CSV file with about 8 million torrents and their associated magnet link hashes, sourced from The Pirate Bay as well as other torrent sites). The intent is that you first set up the Open Bay application, then either point it at Isohunt’s database or dump the CSV file into your own MySQL database. Once you’ve brought these two halves together, the resultant whole is a torrent search site with about 8 million working torrents you can search through and download.
What you can’t do is list your own torrents—at least, not without directly adding them to the MySQL database. This definitely helps keep the Open Bay application simpler both from a development perspective and also for would-be Open Bay administrators to install and configure, but it also limits the application’s usefulness. For right now, it’s really good for only one thing: running a static sort-of copy of The Pirate Bay.
Forging ahead anyway
But, what the heck, it’s Friday, so we set it up anyway—though without importing the large database dump needed to really fill out its functionality.
by Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: uncredited
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Richard Sherman for President
[ed. Hilarious. Richard Sherman does seem to have a knack for getting into the heads of his opponents (I love the Harbaugh impression). See also: Thug Life, an excellent documentary about his upbringing in Compton, Calif. and the skills he brings to the game.]
Hackers Are Winning the Media War
[ed. See also: Hackers are going after the internet's very structure.]
The hackers are winning.
Something has shifted. This year, they didn't only steal credit cards numbers. They clear-cut through retailers records and broke into highly sophisticated systems. They stole celebrity photos that paparazzo only dream about. And now, we have something new, again: a widescale breach and control of a media narrative aimed at destroying a major company based in the United States.
For years, hacks were mostly about committing robbery -- slipping in and out unnoticed, with maybe a dropped calling card as a small-scale brag. Now Sony has canceled the Christmas Day release of "The Interview" -- the movie that apparently spurred the hacks into Sony Pictures Entertainment in the first place.
The tactics are similar to the renegade, total information freedom approach popularized by groups such as Wikileaks or Anonymous. Those leaks and attacks -- some serious, some just online vandalism -- were aimed specifically at getting publicity, but you can at least understand the pursuit of a higher motivation. When you take down the CIA Web site just "for the lulz," it may be goofy, but at least you're making a splash to prove a point.
But Sony is hardly the National Security Agency or a national government. These broad leaks aren't for a cause -- they're aimed at undermining the character of a company by exposing how it conducts its normal business. It's like "The Jungle," but for movies. And the threat of a violent, physical attack put Sony in the toughest position imaginable -- between losing a war of principles or putting lives in danger. Sony was set to lose either way.
The hacks of Home Depot, celebrity iCloud accounts and Sony were likely the work of different people. But taken together, they show a growing cockiness, ambition and media savvy within the hacker world.
And that's truly troubling, on a couple of levels.
by Hayley Tsukayama, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Frederic J. Brown
The hackers are winning.Something has shifted. This year, they didn't only steal credit cards numbers. They clear-cut through retailers records and broke into highly sophisticated systems. They stole celebrity photos that paparazzo only dream about. And now, we have something new, again: a widescale breach and control of a media narrative aimed at destroying a major company based in the United States.
For years, hacks were mostly about committing robbery -- slipping in and out unnoticed, with maybe a dropped calling card as a small-scale brag. Now Sony has canceled the Christmas Day release of "The Interview" -- the movie that apparently spurred the hacks into Sony Pictures Entertainment in the first place.
The tactics are similar to the renegade, total information freedom approach popularized by groups such as Wikileaks or Anonymous. Those leaks and attacks -- some serious, some just online vandalism -- were aimed specifically at getting publicity, but you can at least understand the pursuit of a higher motivation. When you take down the CIA Web site just "for the lulz," it may be goofy, but at least you're making a splash to prove a point.
But Sony is hardly the National Security Agency or a national government. These broad leaks aren't for a cause -- they're aimed at undermining the character of a company by exposing how it conducts its normal business. It's like "The Jungle," but for movies. And the threat of a violent, physical attack put Sony in the toughest position imaginable -- between losing a war of principles or putting lives in danger. Sony was set to lose either way.
The hacks of Home Depot, celebrity iCloud accounts and Sony were likely the work of different people. But taken together, they show a growing cockiness, ambition and media savvy within the hacker world.
And that's truly troubling, on a couple of levels.
by Hayley Tsukayama, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Frederic J. Brown
Thursday, December 18, 2014
When Castro Heard The News
It was around 1:30 in the afternoon, Cuban time. We were having lunch in the living room of the modest summer residence which Fidel Castro owns on magnificent Varadero Beach, 120 kilometers from Havana. For at least the tenth time, I was questioning the Cuban leader on details of the negotiations with Russia before the missile installations last year. The telephone rang, a secretary in guerilla garb announced that Mr. Dorticós, President of the Cuban Republic, had an urgent communication for the Prime Minister. Fidel picked up the phone and I heard him say: "Como? Un atentado?" ('What's that? An attempted assassination?") He then turned to us to say that Kennedy had just been struck down in Dallas. Then he went back to the telephone and exclaimed in a loud voice "Herido? Muy gravemente?" ("Wounded? Very seriously?")
He came back, sat down, and repeated three times the words: "Es una mala noticia." ("This is bad news.") He remained silent for a moment, awaiting another call with further news. He remarked while we waited that there was an alarmingly sizable lunatic fringe in American society and that this deed could equally well have been the work of a madman or of a terrorist. Perhaps a Vietnamese? Or a member of the Ku Klux Klan? The second call came through: It was hoped they would be able to announce that the United States President was still alive, that there was hope of saving him. Fidel Castro's immediate reaction was: "If they can, he is already re-elected." He pronounced these words with satisfaction.
This sentence was a sequel to a conversation we had held on a previous evening and which had turned into an all-night session. To be precise, it lasted from 10 in the evening until 4 in the morning. A good part of the talk revolved about the impressions I recounted to him of an interview which President Kennedy granted me this last October 24, and about Fidel Castro's reactions to these impressions. During this nocturnal discussion, Castro had delivered himself of a relentless indictment of U.S. policy, adding that in the recent past WAshington had had ample opportunity to normalize its relations with Cuba, but that instead it had tolerated a CIA program of training, equipping and organizing a counter-revolution. He has told me that he wasn't in the least fearful of his life, since danger was his natural mileu, and if he were to become a victim of the United States this would simply enhance his radius of influence in Latin America as well as throughout the socialist world. He was speaking, he said, from the viewpoint of the interests of peace in both the American continents. To achieve this goal, a leader would have to arise in the United States capable of understanding the explosive realities of Latin America and of meeting them halfway. Then, suddenly, he has taken a less hostile tak: "Kennedy could still be this man. He still had the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas. He would then be an even greater President than Lincoln. I know, for example, that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with. I have gotten this impression from all my conversations with Khrushchev. Other leaders have assured me that to attain this goal, we must first await his re-election. Personally, I consider him responsible for everything, but I will say this: he has come to understand many things over the past few months; and then too, in the last analysis, I'm convinced that anyone else would be worse." Then Fidel had added with a broad and boyish grin: "If you see him again, you can tell him that I'm willing to declare Goldwater my friend if that will guarantee Kennedy's re-election!"
This conversation was held on November 19th.
Now it was nearly 2 o'clock and we got up from the table and settled ourselves in front of a radio. Commandant Vallero, his physician, aide-de-camp, and intimate friend, was easily able to get the broadcasts from the NBC network in Miami. As the news came in, Vallero would translate it for Fidel: Kennedy wounded in the head; pursuit of the assassin; murder of a policeman; finally the fatal announcement: President Kennedy is dead. Then Fidel stood up and said to me: "Everything is changed. Everything is going to change. The United States occupies such a position in world affairs that the death of a President of that country affects millions of people in every corner of the globe. The cold war, relations with Russia, Latin America, Cuba, the Negro question...all will have to be rethought. I'll tell you one thing: At least Kennedy was an enemy to whom we had become accustomed. This is a serious matter, an extremely serious matter." (...)
We arrived at the granja de pueblo, where the farmers welcomed Fidel. At that very moment, a speaker announced over the radio that it was now known that the assassin is a "pro-Castro Marxist." One commentator followed another; the remarks became increasingly emotional, increasingly aggressive. Fidel then excused himself: "We shall have to give up the visit to the farm." We went on toward Matanzas from where he could telephone President Dorticós. On the way he had questions: "Who is Lyndon Johnson? What is his reputation? What were his relations with Kennedy? With Khrushchev? What was his position at the time of the attempted invasion of Cuba?" Finally and most important of all: "What authority does he exercise over the C.I.A.?" Then abruptly he looked at his watch, saw that it would be half an hour before we reached Matanzas and, practically on the spot, he dropped off to sleep.
He came back, sat down, and repeated three times the words: "Es una mala noticia." ("This is bad news.") He remained silent for a moment, awaiting another call with further news. He remarked while we waited that there was an alarmingly sizable lunatic fringe in American society and that this deed could equally well have been the work of a madman or of a terrorist. Perhaps a Vietnamese? Or a member of the Ku Klux Klan? The second call came through: It was hoped they would be able to announce that the United States President was still alive, that there was hope of saving him. Fidel Castro's immediate reaction was: "If they can, he is already re-elected." He pronounced these words with satisfaction.This sentence was a sequel to a conversation we had held on a previous evening and which had turned into an all-night session. To be precise, it lasted from 10 in the evening until 4 in the morning. A good part of the talk revolved about the impressions I recounted to him of an interview which President Kennedy granted me this last October 24, and about Fidel Castro's reactions to these impressions. During this nocturnal discussion, Castro had delivered himself of a relentless indictment of U.S. policy, adding that in the recent past WAshington had had ample opportunity to normalize its relations with Cuba, but that instead it had tolerated a CIA program of training, equipping and organizing a counter-revolution. He has told me that he wasn't in the least fearful of his life, since danger was his natural mileu, and if he were to become a victim of the United States this would simply enhance his radius of influence in Latin America as well as throughout the socialist world. He was speaking, he said, from the viewpoint of the interests of peace in both the American continents. To achieve this goal, a leader would have to arise in the United States capable of understanding the explosive realities of Latin America and of meeting them halfway. Then, suddenly, he has taken a less hostile tak: "Kennedy could still be this man. He still had the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas. He would then be an even greater President than Lincoln. I know, for example, that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with. I have gotten this impression from all my conversations with Khrushchev. Other leaders have assured me that to attain this goal, we must first await his re-election. Personally, I consider him responsible for everything, but I will say this: he has come to understand many things over the past few months; and then too, in the last analysis, I'm convinced that anyone else would be worse." Then Fidel had added with a broad and boyish grin: "If you see him again, you can tell him that I'm willing to declare Goldwater my friend if that will guarantee Kennedy's re-election!"
This conversation was held on November 19th.
Now it was nearly 2 o'clock and we got up from the table and settled ourselves in front of a radio. Commandant Vallero, his physician, aide-de-camp, and intimate friend, was easily able to get the broadcasts from the NBC network in Miami. As the news came in, Vallero would translate it for Fidel: Kennedy wounded in the head; pursuit of the assassin; murder of a policeman; finally the fatal announcement: President Kennedy is dead. Then Fidel stood up and said to me: "Everything is changed. Everything is going to change. The United States occupies such a position in world affairs that the death of a President of that country affects millions of people in every corner of the globe. The cold war, relations with Russia, Latin America, Cuba, the Negro question...all will have to be rethought. I'll tell you one thing: At least Kennedy was an enemy to whom we had become accustomed. This is a serious matter, an extremely serious matter." (...)
We arrived at the granja de pueblo, where the farmers welcomed Fidel. At that very moment, a speaker announced over the radio that it was now known that the assassin is a "pro-Castro Marxist." One commentator followed another; the remarks became increasingly emotional, increasingly aggressive. Fidel then excused himself: "We shall have to give up the visit to the farm." We went on toward Matanzas from where he could telephone President Dorticós. On the way he had questions: "Who is Lyndon Johnson? What is his reputation? What were his relations with Kennedy? With Khrushchev? What was his position at the time of the attempted invasion of Cuba?" Finally and most important of all: "What authority does he exercise over the C.I.A.?" Then abruptly he looked at his watch, saw that it would be half an hour before we reached Matanzas and, practically on the spot, he dropped off to sleep.
by Jean Daniels, TNR | Read more:
Image: Alan Oxley/Getty
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
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