Inside the Buzz-Fueled Media Startups Battling for Your Attention

Over the past couple of decades, this war for eyeballs has been fought across an ever-expanding territory. With the advent of the modern web, online publications and blogs competed to dominate your laptop screen. But with the rise of mobile, the battleground has become infinite. No matter where you are or what you’re doing—eating, drinking, watching a movie—the news has access to you. Stories roll in on push notifications and social media streams in a nonstop look-at-me barrage, all of them lighting up the same small screen. There is only one true channel now, and it’s probably in your pocket (or hand) at this very moment.

What’s more, everyone has access to it. Everyone can program it. The media has been so completely flattened and democratized that your little sister can use the same distribution methods as the world’s most powerful publishers. She has instant access to you—potentially to everyone—and she doesn’t need to invest in broadcast towers or a printing press, satellites or coaxial cable. Neither does anyone else. That little vibration in your pocket could mean that we are bombing Iraq again or that a massive typhoon is headed for the Gulf of Thailand or that your father has tagged a photo of you on Facebook. (Nice Boy Scouts uniform.) Even Hearst never had to compete with corgi videos.

But the thing is, the media isn’t just competing with your little sister—it’s co-opting her, using her as a vector to spread its content. She is the new delivery mechanism. We don’t learn about the world from The New York Times, we learn about it from the Times stories that our family and friends share or that show up as push notifications four minutes before one from The Guardian does. Thirty percent of American adults get news from Facebook, according to the Pew Research Center, and more than half of Americans got news from a smartphone within the past week, according to the American Press Institute. And these metrics are just going up, up, up. The question for news publishers is no longer how to draw an audience to their sites, it’s how to implant themselves into their audience’s lives.

These dynamics have unleashed a new breed of media company that is racing to master these cutting-edge distribution systems. Much as Hearst, Henry Luce, and Ted Turner figured out how to amass huge audiences using newspapers, magazines, and television, the latest would-be kingpins are learning what kinds of stories resonate with readers on phones and Facebook. Instead of hiring newsies to scream at you in the streets, they are enlisting social media experts to scream at you on Twitter. Instead of investing in satellite trucks or paying for prime placement at the corner newsstand, they are reverse-engineering Facebook’s algorithm to ensure their stories dominate your News Feed. (...)

The vibe at BuzzFeed headquarters in lower Manhattan is young and antiseptic. Everything looks too brand-new. The walls are white. Great Big Screens are mounted everywhere. Where the data team sits they show charts and numbers. And at each of the editors’ desks, dashboards display the ebb and flow of its stories’ popularity on BuzzFeed itself as well as across social media. And those numbers are moving relentlessly, inevitably, always and forever up.

BuzzFeed is best known for its lists and quizzes— many of which are gauche little trifles designed to shock, like “29 Things Everyone With a Vagina Definitely Should Know”—or those too-cute compilations of cat pictures and corgi GIFs. But over the years it has muscled into other genres: breaking and investigative news, service-oriented lifestyle stories, long-form narrative, and video. It’s growing like a well-fed toddler, building out bureaus both domestically and internationally, and has launched a motion picture studio in Los Angeles. It’s also creating a new division, BFF, that will make content that lives only in the apps where kids are, like Vine and Snapchat and Imgur. Noted VC firm Andreessen Horowitz just invested $50 million in the company, giving it a reported valuation of $850 million, which it is using to extend its reach even farther. The much larger New York Times Company is worth $1.9 billion. But with profits declining, the Times is slashing its workforce yet again, while BuzzFeed is hiring. Dear God, yes, it’s hiring!

“BuzzFeed News has the potential to become the leading news source for a generation of readers who will never subscribe to a print newspaper or watch a cable news show,” explains the company’s CEO, Jonah Peretti. It’s not hard to see BuzzFeed as the next great media empire, something like Time Warner was in its prime, publishing news, entertainment, and even games. But unlike Time Warner, its growth doesn’t come from lavish ad campaigns or newsstand placement but from social media. Its stories—be they quizzes, listicles, or investigative news—are engineered to come to you. They exist as free-floating agents, cruising along as links in social media streams and finding readers via shares and retweets and email forwards and pins. To do that effectively, BuzzFeed’s staff has to understand why people share things. They have to understand what makes a story go viral and then try to apply that understanding to all sorts of media.

by Mat Honan, Wired |  Read more:

Image: National Venture Capital Associastion, First Look Meida, Circa, Atavist 

Why Life Is Absurd

A Consideration of Time, Space, Relativity, Meaning and Absurdity (Yep, All of It)

I. Relativity

DZIGAN: Professor Einstein said, “In the world, there is time. And just as there is time, there is another thing: space. Space and time, time and space. And these two things,” he said, “are relative.”

Do you know what “relative” means?

SHUMACHER: Sigh. Nu? The point? Continue.

DZIGAN: There is no person these days who doesn’t know what “relative” means. I will explain it to you with an analogy and soon you will also know. Relativity is like this: If you have seven hairs on your head, it’s very few but if you have seven hairs in your milk, it’s very many.

II. Absurdity

In the 1870s, Leo Tolstoy became depressed about life’s futility. He had it all but so what? In “My Confession,” he wrote: “Sooner or later there will come diseases and death (they had come already) to my dear ones and to me, and there would be nothing left but stench and worms. All my affairs, no matter what they might be, would sooner or later be forgotten, and I myself should not exist. So why should I worry about these things?”

Life’s brevity bothered Tolstoy so much that he resolved to adopt religious faith to connect to the infinite afterlife, even though he considered religious belief “irrational” and “monstrous.” Was Tolstoy right? Is life so short as to make a mockery of people and their purposes and to render human life absurd?

In a famous 1971 paper, “The Absurd,” Thomas Nagel argues that life’s absurdity has nothing to do with its length. If a short life is absurd, he says, a longer life would be even more absurd: “Our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead any minute. But of course none of these evident facts can be what makes life absurd, if it is absurd. For suppose we lived forever; would not a life that is absurd if it lasts 70 years be infinitely absurd if it lasted through eternity?”

This line of reasoning has a nice ring to it but whether lengthening an absurd thing will relieve it of its absurdity depends on why the thing is absurd and how much you lengthen it. A longer life might be less absurd even if an infinite life would not be. A short poem that is absurd because it is written in gibberish would be even more absurd if it prattled on for longer. But, say I decided to wear a skirt so short it could be mistaken for a belt. On my way to teach my class, a colleague intercepts me:

“Your skirt,” she says, “is absurd.”

“Absurd? Why?” I ask.

“Because it is so short!” she replies.

“If a short skirt is absurd, a longer skirt would be even more absurd,” I retort.

Now who’s being absurd? The skirt is absurd because it is so short. A longer skirt would be less absurd. Why? Because it does not suffer from the feature that makes the short skirt absurd, namely, a ridiculously short length. The same goes for a one-hour hunger strike. The point of a hunger strike is to show that one feels so strongly about something that one is willing to suffer a lack of nourishment for a long time in order to make a point. If you only “starve” for an hour, you have not made your point. Your one-hour hunger strike is absurd because it is too short. If you lengthened it to one month or one year, you might be taken more seriously. If life is absurd because it’s short, it might be less absurd if it were suitably longer.

Absurdity occurs when things are so ill-fitting or ill-suited to their purpose or situation as to be ridiculous, like wearing a clown costume to a (non-circus) job interview or demanding that your dog tell you what time it is. Is the lifespan of a relatively healthy and well-preserved human, say somewhere between 75 and 85, so short as to render it absurd, ill-suited to reasonable human purposes?

by Rivka Weinberg, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Leif Parsons

Why is There a Worm in Bottles of Tequila?

Dear Cecil:

The other night I was talking with a friend who worked at a bar in Arizona where most of the hicks got shots of tequila. As they got drunker they would ask to have "the worm" (bleagh) along with their shot. My questions are: What kind of worm is that thing? Does drinking/eating the worm make you drunker? And how did the worm end up in the tequila?

— Beth L. Grover, via the Internet

Cecil replies:

You probably think this is some ancient Mexican tradition, right? Not unless your idea of ancient is 1950. We even know who invented the practice. Various reasons are given for it, but I say it all boils down to: Let's see if we can get the gringos to eat worms.

First let's get a few things straight. There's no worm in tequila, or at least there isn't supposed to be. Purists (hah!) say the worm belongs only in a related product, mescal. Strictly speaking, mescal is a generic term meaning any distillate of the many species of agave (or maguey) plant, tequila included. Today, however, mescal is popularly understood to mean a product bottled in the region around the city of Oaxaca. For years this stuff was basically home-brewed firewater consumed by the locals, but in 1950, Mexico City entrepreneur Jacobo Lozano Paez hit on the idea of putting a worm in each bottle as a marketing gimmick. Stroke of genius, eh? I don't get it either, but that's what separates us from the visionaries.

The critter in question is the agave worm, which is actually a butterfly larva. The worms bore into the agave plant's pineapplelike heart, and quite a few get cooked up in the brew used to make mescal. Far from being grossed out, Jacobo concluded that the worm was an essential component of the liquor's flavor and color. He may also have figured, Hey, mescal is about as palatable as paint remover, and the only people who are going to drink this stuff are macho lunatics, so why not take it to the max? In fairness, the worms were also said to have aphrodisiac properties, and worms and bugs are sometimes consumed in Mexico as a delicacy. (Supposedly this dates back to the Aztecs.) At any rate, the ploy worked and the worm in the bottle is now a firmly established tradition.

by Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope |  Read more:

Image: via:

John Henry Wise

[ed. Marcus Mariota isn't the first Hawaiian football player to gain fame with a big "O" on his jersey, or to be associated with a Heisman. That would be John Henry Wise.

Oberlin was the first school coached by the legendary John W. Heisman. He coached the teams in 1892 and '94, the second and fourth seasons that football was a varsity sport at the college. The faculty had not approved football as a sport prior to 1891, but it agreed to hire Heisman as head coach for the '92 season because he was recommended by Walter Camp. Heisman was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania where he starred as an end in football. In those days football was quite popular in the East and was just beginning to take root in the Midwest. The hiring of Heisman enabled Oberlin to become one of the leading team's in the Midwest. In 1892 the "O" Men, as they were called at the time, were led by Heisman to their first undefeated season with a perfect 7-0-0 record beating their opponents by an average score of 37-4 which included two wins over Ohio State and one over Michigan. To this day, the Wolverines still claim they won the contest but all agree that both sides played the game as it should have been played (without any slugging.) Because Heisman enrolled in post graduate courses in art, he was permitted to play football for Oberlin as he participated in the late stages of some games near the end of the season. Heisman became known as the leading pioneer in developing the game of football into what it is today with formation shifts, centering the ball, and forward passing. His contribution to Oberlin was in proving that an intelligent coach was an integral part of the sport. The Heisman name is more famous today than back in 1892, being synonymous with the award for most outstanding player in college football. As a result, Oberlin named their athletics booster club after Heisman, in an attempt encourage support for all of Oberlin's athletic programs.

Controversial game vs. Michigan

On a cold Saturday afternoon in November 1892, Oberlin's team took the field in Ann Arbor against a heavily favored Michigan squad which had trounced them handily the year before. Notable among the Oberlin visitors was their new player-coach John Heisman, who had been hired away from the University of Pennsylvania by the Oberlin Athletic Association (a student-run enterprise in those days) and who brought an undefeated team with him to Ann Arbor. The team's fastest running back was Charles Savage, who a few years later would become Oberlin's director of athletics and, like Heisman, a nationally prominent figure. Oberlin's best lineman was theology student John Henry Wise, half-German, half-Hawaiian, who after graduation returned to his island home and joined the 1895 Counter-Revolution aimed at toppling the Republic of Hawaii and restoring Queen Liliuokalani and the monarchy. He was sent to prison for three years charged with treason. Oberlin's team trainer, "nurse to the wounded," was pre-med student Clarence Hemingway, who would go on to practice medicine in Oak Park, Illinois, and pass on his love of hunting in Michigan to his son, future novelist Ernest Hemingway.

The game in Ann Arbor was close all the way. At halftime Michigan led 22-18. The team captains agreed on a shortened second half, to end at 4:50 p.m. so Oberlin could catch the last train home. With less than two minutes remaining, Michigan drove to the 5-yard line before Oberlin stopped them and took over on downs. Then halfback Savage entered the mists of Oberlin athletic legend by dodging through the line and sprinting 90 yards to the Michigan 5, where Michigan's star player, George Jewett, caught him from behind.

Two plays later Oberlin made its final touchdown. Score: Oberlin 24, Michigan 22, with less than a minute to go. As Michigan launched its last drive, the referee (an Oberlin sub) announced that 4:50 p.m. had arrived, time had expired, and the Oberlin squad trotted off the field to catch the train. Next the umpire (a Michigan man) ruled that four minutes remained on the game clock, owing to timeouts that Oberlin's timekeeper had not recorded. Michigan then walked the ball over the goal line for an uncontested touchdown and was declared the winner, 26 to 24. By that time the Oberlinians were headed home clutching their own victory, 24 to 22. Officially, each school recognizes a win for themselves in the respective archives.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. I'll be taking a short break. Enjoy the archives.]

Franco Matticchio
via:

The Shape of a Listener

You could not say a word and still be thought a great conversationalist, so long as your interlocutor ends up doing the kind of talking they like to do. That’s what it means to be good at conversation. It’s not about saying interesting things or absorbing what someone else says. It’s about extruding the right kind of talk.

The picture I have in mind is of a pasta maker. I imagine someone turning a little hand crank, working a glob of dough into clean hollow tubes of macaroni or waves of lasagna. That’s what conversation is like. Conversation is like making pasta the old-fashioned way, except that in conversation what you’re working into form is someone else’s ideas.

At the heart of the process, you, the listener, are just like a pasta machine—a machine so obnoxiously simple that you hesitate to call it one. Because all it is is a shape. (...)

I shine—I come into my own—under certain configurations of these knobs, and shrivel under others. For instance I enjoy riffs of sarcastic banter and quoting movies, but I tire quickly of pun-upmanship. I like to explain. I lean heavily on a stock of nerdy analogies and feel crippled when I can’t use them. I don’t know how to keep small talk going. I range from being very charismatic to having something like a stammer. I like it when the gossip knob is turned up high. I can’t riff about football or how many gigabytes a phone has. I prefer my talk to be salted with curse words. I don’t like talk that sounds like it’s coming out of an English classroom. I rarely argue. I don’t do well when I’m trying to impress.

Different speakers draw different kinds of talk out of me. Michael, fluent in most of my intellectual interests, is great for helping me feel out ideas. Rob gets me spilling insecurities. I have a friend, Carey, who leaves me thinking I’m inarticulate and wrong. With Nikhil I talk slow and philosophical. I get Seinfeldian with Matt. I spout bullshit with Sanders. There is a guy at work who encourages me to improv. An old roommate, Andy, always had me explaining things I didn’t understand well enough to explain. Drew gets my polemical side going. I’m made to feel young when I talk to my older brothers, and wise when I talk to my older friends. I’m at my most charming in the company of my good friends’ girlfriends.

Which is all to say that I configure myself in light of who I’m talking to—so much so that you could say they configure me.

Some talkers are no doubt more configurable than others, in the sense that they change themselves, chameleon-like, depending on whoever they’re talking to, while others are “just themselves” no matter what. But I’d bet most people are more pliable than they’d say. How easy it is to tell when a friend of yours picks up their phone that they’re talking to their girlfriend? Their employer? A mutual friend? Their parents?

What’s happening, I think, is some combination of “mirroring”—that phenomenon where I’ll unconsciously mimic your posture, tone, level of intimacy, style of humor, and so on—and this thing where before each of my remarks I’ll think about you and what I know about you and what I think I can say and then I’ll triage your likely responses, and my responses to your responses, and so on, and make my conversational moves in light of this projected snap-analysis of where I think our talk might take us.

It sounds effortful and conscious but of course it’s not. Having a sense of where you are in a conversation, of what’s apt and in play, is the bedrock social skill. It happens automatically. To be socially well-adjusted is to adjust well, to be highly responsive to the microdynamics of talk.

by James Sommers, jsommers.net |  Read more:

Selene and Endymion, Ubaldo Gandolfi
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Pernil: Let the Oven Do All the Work

If you buy a big pork shoulder and take your time, as you should, the classic Puerto Rican pork roast called pernil can take you nearly all day. The last time I roasted a large one it was in the oven for seven hours.

Yet there are times I feel almost guilty about this dish because the process is beyond easy and incredibly impressive, it feeds as many people as a medium-size ham, and the flavor is unbelievable.

When I first learned how to make a classic pernil, about 30 years ago, the only seasonings I used were oregano, garlic and vinegar.

But I’ve taken some liberties by adding a little cumin and some chilies; the onion is my addition, too. After all, pork is less flavorful than it used to be.

I believe that a slightly wetter coating and some water in the bottom of the pan keeps the meat moist during the long, slow roasting period.

The idea is this: Make a purée of the onion, garlic — you can use much more than the four cloves I recommend here — oregano, cumin and mild chili powder, like ancho. You can add a little cayenne or chipotle powder, but not too much.

Rub the paste all over the pork shoulder, and then roast it in a slow oven at about 300 degrees until it’s super-tender and brown.

When it’s done, the pork should be just about falling off the bone and a thing of beauty, crisp and dark. If the outside needs a little more browning, just jack the heat up a bit for 10 or 15 minutes.

Let it rest a bit, serve and try not to feel too guilty.

Pernil Recipe Here

by Mark Bittman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Evan Sung

Our New Politics of Torture

New York Review contributor Mark Danner has been writing about the use of torture by the US government since the first years after September 11. Following the release this month of the Senate’s report on the CIA torture program, Hugh Eakin spoke to Danner about some of the most startling findings of the investigation and what it reveals about the continued political debate surrounding the program.

Hugh Eakin: Nearly six years ago, you published the secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross documenting the CIA’s torture of more than a dozen “high value” detainees. And now we have the Senate’s extensive investigation of the torture program itself. What are some of the most revealing findings of the Senate report?

Mark Danner: There is a lot in the executive summary that we already knew but that is now told in appalling detail that we hadn’t seen before. The relentlessness, day in day out, of these techniques; the totality of their effect when taken together—walling, close-confinement, water-dousing, waterboarding, the newly revealed “rectal rehydration,” and various other disgusting and depraved things—is recounted in numbing, revolting detail. The effect can only be conveyed by a full reading, through page after awful page of this five-hundred-page document, which is after all less than 10 percent of the report itself.

What I think is strictly speaking new is, first, how amateurish the torture program was. It was really amateur hour, beginning with the techniques themselves, which were devised and run by a couple of retired Air Force psychologists who were hired by the CIA and put in charge though they had never conducted an interrogation before. They had no expertise in terrorism or counterterrorism, had never interrogated al-Qaeda members or anyone else for that matter. When it came to actually working with detained terrorists and suspected terrorists they were essentially without any relevant experience. Eventually, the CIA paid them more than $80 million.

The second revelation is the degree to which the CIA claimed great results, and did so mendaciously. Sometimes the attacks they said they had prevented were not serious in the first place. Sometimes the information that actually might have led to averting attacks came not from the enhanced interrogation techniques but from other traditional forms of interrogation or other information entirely. But what the report methodically demonstrates is that the claims about having obtained essential, life-saving intelligence thanks to these techniques that had been repeated for years and years and years are simply not true. And the case is devastating.

This was a central question the Senate investigation was looking at, wasn’t it? The issue of whether actual intelligence was gained from torture. In essence, “Was it worth it?”

From the beginning the CIA had claimed that these techniques were absolutely essential to saving the lives of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people. Those claims have been made by many people and it is another revelation of the report that we see CIA people, notably the lawyers, raising these claims before the program even existed. The lawyers seemed to be thinking, “This is the only way we’re going to get away with this.” There is a quote in the report that people would look more kindly on torture—that is the word used—if it was used to stop imminent attacks. This was the so-called “necessity defense,” which, as the CIA lawyers put it, could be invoked to protect from prosecution “US officials who tortured to obtain information that saved many lives.” This idea was there right from the inception of the program.

So the CIA is already using the word “torture” in the earliest documents the Senate committee looked at?

This is before the program even began, in the weeks after September 11, when CIA lawyers and other officials are talking about using “torture.” And they use the word.

And there aren’t any detainees at this point.

There really aren’t. This is near the beginning of the Afghanistan campaign, and they didn’t have anyone, certainly not anyone considered “high value.”

Do we get any closer in the report to an original decision by the Bush administration or the CIA to use torture? (...)

The White House, including the offices of the president and the vice-president, and the National Security Council—these three vital areas of decision-making still have not been examined. And there’s a reason for that. The Republicans refused to sign on to the Senate investigation unless these areas were put beyond the committee’s ken. The original vote by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to pursue the CIA investigation in 2009 was 14-1, and they got the Republicans on board by agreeing not to look at the executive. As it was, most of the Republicans jumped ship and abandoned the report anyway. Now, in their own 167-page summary of their “minority views,” they attack the report for “faulty analysis, serious inaccuracies, and misrepresentations of fact” and argue that the program was essential to gaining vital intelligence that saved many lives. But they present no convincing evidence. (...)

So the CIA is already talking about torture before they have a suspect in mind, and then when they do finally have a suspect, a few months later, and this is Abu Zubaydah, this radical course seems to be projected onto him.

Abu Zubaydah is the key case. He was captured in March 2002 in Pakistan. He was immediately interrogated by two experienced FBI interrogators using traditional “rapport-building” techniques and he did yield up a good deal of information. He had been badly wounded and had to be hospitalized, but he was compliant and cooperative in the view of the FBI interrogators. The information he gave during those initial weeks of talking to the FBI is the very information that is cited by the CIA to bolster their claim that they got information through torture from Abu Zubaydah. These are the key pieces of intelligence he gave up—that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (aka “Mukhtar”) was the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, and the identity of Jose Padilla, the so-called aspiring dirty bomber—to the FBI in the spring of 2002.

The FBI interrogators were fluent Arabic speakers and deeply knowledgeable about al-Qaeda. And they got Abu Zubaydah to talk through traditional interrogation methods?

These were the standard FBI protocols—excluding torture—that had long been used, but the FBI interrogator Ali Soufan was not only experienced with al-Qaeda, he was by many accounts the best interrogator in the government. He had interrogated al-Qaeda suspects in the USS Cole bombing.

Abu Zubaydah had been captured by the CIA. How was it that the FBI interrogated him first?

It’s interesting. He was the CIA’s prisoner. He was taken to a black site in Thailand run by the CIA. Initially, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center didn’t send anyone to interrogate him because, according to Soufan, they didn’t believe it was Abu Zubaydah. So there was this initial delay, which allowed the FBI to start on the job of the interrogation. And only when the CIA realized it was really Abu Zubaydah did they start to send their own people. And these are the military psychologists Mitchell and Jessen, who actually came personally, and actually conducted that interrogation and were eventually paid $81 million for their efforts. There was this period that they overlapped with the FBI, and Ali Soufan, who recognized them as rank amateurs, objected strenuously. The FBI eventually pulled out of the interrogation entirely. And this is another reason the program was such a disaster. Because of it you have the people in the government who know the most about interrogating al-Qaeda members not even taking part.

And when the decision to start using torture is made, the Bush administration is on some level directly involved in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah?

Right after they got Abu Zubaydah, Bush talked about him publicly, at a fundraiser in Greenwich, Connecticut. And already in Newsweek, in April 2002, there was an article about whether Abu Zubaydah was cooperating or not. And though they are all blind quotes you can pretty much pick out which are from the CIA and which from the FBI. There’s this amazing bureaucratic tug of war going on in the press. Here’s this guy at this black site in Thailand, and meanwhile, both bureaucracies are fighting it out about whether he should be tortured in Newsweek. It still is astonishing. He’s there, in the hospital, and officials from the two agencies are being quoted, the FBI saying they’re getting a lot from the prisoner and the CIA saying they’re not getting anything.

But what is fascinating is what seems to have led the CIA to resort to this improvised, amateurish program—this physical abuse put together by two psychologists who had no idea what they were doing. It was the utterly mistaken conviction that Abu Zubaydah was withholding information about attacks that would have killed thousands of people. So here we come back to the same theme of actionable intelligence, needing to use these techniques to find out about plots that would threaten thousands of people. So we are back to the raison d’être of the program itself.

It sounds like a tautology. They have to torture Abu Zubaydah so that he will reveal a “ticking time bomb,” and they need that revelation to justify the use of torture. And the use of torture is based on the fact that he hasn’t revealed any such plot.

All came from the conviction that Abu Zubaydah has knowledge of plots to kill thousands of people, and that conviction stems from an absolutely mistaken idea of who Abu Zubaydah is. The CIA officers are convinced that Abu Zubaydah is the third or fourth man in al-Qaeda, which he is not; they are convinced he is this very important guy that would have this information most vital information on current planning. But he’s not. He’s not even a member of al-Qaeda. In fact, he was something like a travel agent for al-Qaeda, which meant of course he had a lot of useful information. But because the CIA was convinced that he was at the pinnacle of the organization, they thought that even though he seemed to be cooperating with these FBI interrogators, he was actively withholding what they really needed: information about an impending “threat.”

Eventually, as I’ve described in The New York Review, he was put under forced sleep deprivation for 180 hours and waterboarded eighty-three times. It’s extraordinary that the last two times—the eighty-second and eighty-third waterboardings—were imposed at the direct orders of officials at CIA headquarters, over the strenuous objections of the interrogators who were performing them. The interrogators judged Abu Zubaydah was completely compliant: he just had nothing to give up.

It’s an epistemological paradox: How do you prove what you don’t know? And from this open question comes this anxiety-ridden conviction that he must know, he must know, he must know. So even though the interrogators are saying he’s compliant, he’s telling us everything he knows—even though the waterboarding is nearly killing him, rendering him “completely non-responsive,” as the report says—officials at headquarters was saying he has to be waterboarded again, and again, because he still hadn’t given up information about the attacks they were convinced had to be coming. They kept pushing from the other side of the world for more suffering and more torture.

And finally, grudgingly, after the eighty-second and eighty-third waterboardings, they came to the conclusion that Abu Zubaydah didn’t have that information. So when they judged the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah a “success,” what that really meant was that the use of those techniques, in this brutal, appalling extended fashion, had let them prove, to their satisfaction, that he didn’t know what they had been convinced that he did know. It had nothing to do with him giving more information as he was waterboarded. The use of these techniques let them alleviate their own anxiety. And their anxiety was based on complete misinformation. Complete ignorance about who this man actually was.

by Mark Danner interviewed by Hugh Eakin, NY Reveiw of Books |  Read more:

Image: DigitalGlobe/ScapeWare3d/Getty Images

A Farewell to Hemnes: Ernest Hemmingway Assembles an IKEA Daybed Frame with Three Drawers

In the morning there was more rain and the river ran gray with mud. The camions were mired and the caissons would need two days of good weather before we could use them again.

Spazinni had been out very early and caught three lovely trout. He layered them in his rucksack with damp rushes from the river.

“No more fish today, capitano,” Spazinni said. “The gods have made the river angry. Today we go to IKEA.”

“Yes, capitano?” Renzo said. I knew he was sick of sharing a closet with Father Dunasetta and had his eye on the Kvikne wardrobe. We both understood that the Kvikne was not fine and true, that it was mainly particleboard with a fiberboard back, but I said nothing of this. We would go to IKEA.

“Spazinni,” I said, “gas up the barattare.”

At IKEA we behaved foolishly. With the Swedish meatballs we drank too freely of wine and were asked to leave by the commissario. This embarrassed Father Dunsa, who had come along at the last moment. Then Spazinni and I shamed Renzo for favoring the Kvikne until he upgraded to the Hurdal, which is mostly solid pine.

Later in the afternoon an altercation broke out in the kitchenwares. When it was over the priest had lost a tooth and was more apologetic than before. I helped Renzo load the Hurdal into the truck and went to smooth things with the manager. Perhaps I myself would purchase a piece of furniture, she said.

I told her it would please me to take the Hemnes daybed frame with three drawers.

- - -

The morning brought more rain. We drank coffee in the cocina. I watched two crows work the gray stubble in a field.

“Today, Rollo,” I said to Spazinni, “the Hemnes."

“Aye, capitano?” he said. “Depend on me as your second.”

In my quarters I stepped into the coveralls. It was important to maintain a line, true and pure, not to allow the coveralls to bulge or pucker. My glance fell on the Hemnes instructions and I saw the little man in the drawings maintaining just such a line.

The Hemnes had come in two flat boxes. They were heavy and smooth and cool. When we opened them there was a gentle off-gassing of Melamine.

“Rollo,” I said, “there are to be 27 of these.” I pointed beneath the little man on the instructions to what looked like a small set screw, numbered 116894. “And 22 of these.” This too looked like a small set screw but with the number 108462. “And 16 of these.” An even smaller screw, numbered 109049.

In the beginning the work went well, although Spazinni was still drunk from the night before. We made steady progress with the Hemnes. Its frame was held together by wooden dowels that Spazinni handed me with brutal, uncertain fingers.

“Bear up, Rollo,” I said, “or these Swedes will get the better of you.”

“No, capitano,” he said. “It is only this weather and that I remain a little potted.”

In the early afternoon there was cheese and beer in brown bottles that the priest had bought to soothe his embarrassment.

“I envy you,” he said to me. “You are a builder. You see results of your efforts.”

“I am a drinker of beer,” I told him. “I am no builder.”

It was not necessary to return to the room, to look again at the Hemnes, but I took two bottles and went back.

by Jeff Steinbrink, McSweeny's |  Read more:

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Walter Padgett (b.1945), Cemetary at Numazu (2006)
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Penelope Austin

[ed. See also: A Place To Call Home]

Why The Mona Lisa Stands Out

[ed. See also: The Art World's Patron Satan]

In 1993 a psychologist, James Cutting, visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to see Renoir’s picture of Parisians at play, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, considered one of the greatest works of impressionism. Instead, he found himself magnetically drawn to a painting in the next room: an enchanting, mysterious view of snow on Parisian rooftops. He had never seen it before, nor heard of its creator, Gustave Caillebotte.

That was what got him thinking.

Have you ever fallen for a novel and been amazed not to find it on lists of great books? Or walked around a sculpture renowned as a classic, struggling to see what the fuss is about? If so, you’ve probably pondered the question Cutting asked himself that day: how does a work of art come to be considered great? (...)

The process described by Cutting evokes a principle that the sociologist Duncan Watts calls “cumulative advantage”: once a thing becomes popular, it will tend to become more popular still. A few years ago, Watts, who is employed by Microsoft to study the dynamics of social networks, had a similar experience to Cutting in another Paris museum. After queuing to see the “Mona Lisa” in its climate-controlled bulletproof box at the Louvre, he came away puzzled: why was it considered so superior to the three other Leonardos in the previous chamber, to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention?

When Watts looked into the history of “the greatest painting of all time”, he discovered that, for most of its life, the “Mona Lisa” languished in relative obscurity. In the 1850s, Leonardo da Vinci was considered no match for giants of Renaissance art like Titian and Raphael, whose works were worth almost ten times as much as the “Mona Lisa”. It was only in the 20th century that Leonardo’s portrait of his patron’s wife rocketed to the number-one spot. What propelled it there wasn’t a scholarly re-evaluation, but a burglary.

In 1911 a maintenance worker at the Louvre walked out of the museum with the “Mona Lisa” hidden under his smock. Parisians were aghast at the theft of a painting to which, until then, they had paid little attention. When the museum reopened, people queued to see the gap where the “Mona Lisa” had once hung in a way they had never done for the painting itself. The police were stumped. At one point, a terrified Pablo Picasso was called in for questioning. But the “Mona Lisa” wasn’t recovered until two years later when the thief, an Italian carpenter called Vincenzo Peruggia, was caught trying to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

The French public was electrified. The Italians hailed Peruggia as a patriot who wanted to return the painting home. Newspapers around the world repro­duced it, making it the first work of art to achieve global fame. From then on, the “Mona Lisa” came to represent Western culture itself. In 1919, when Marcel Duchamp wanted to perform a symbolic defacing of high art, he put a goatee on the “Mona Lisa”, which only reinforced its status in the popular mind as the epitome of great art (or as the critic Kenneth Clark later put it, “the supreme example of perfection”). Throughout the 20th century, musicians, advertisers and film-makers used the painting’s fame for their own purposes, while the painting, in Watts’s words, “used them back”. Peruggia failed to repatriate the “Mona Lisa”, but he succeeded in making it an icon.

Although many have tried, it does seem improbable that the painting’s unique status can be attributed entirely to the quality of its brushstrokes. It has been said that the subject’s eyes follow the viewer around the room. But as the painting’s biographer, Donald Sassoon, drily notes, “In reality the effect can be obtained from any portrait.” Duncan Watts proposes that the “Mona Lisa” is merely an extreme example of a general rule. Paintings, poems and pop songs are buoyed or sunk by random events or preferences that turn into waves of influence, rippling down the generations.

by Ian Leslie, Intelligent Life | Read more:
Image: Eyevine

Pete Souza
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Toxic Detox Myths

Whether it’s cucumbers splashing into water or models sitting smugly next to a pile of vegetables, it’s tough not to be sucked in by the detox industry. The idea that you can wash away your calorific sins is the perfect antidote to our fast-food lifestyles and alcohol-lubricated social lives. But before you dust off that juicer or take the first tentative steps towards a colonic irrigation clinic, there’s something you should know: detoxing – the idea that you can flush your system of impurities and leave your organs squeaky clean and raring to go – is a scam. It’s a pseudo-medical concept designed to sell you things.

“Let’s be clear,” says Edzard Ernst, emeritus professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University, “there are two types of detox: one is respectable and the other isn’t.” The respectable one, he says, is the medical treatment of people with life-threatening drug addictions. “The other is the word being hijacked by entrepreneurs, quacks and charlatans to sell a bogus treatment that allegedly detoxifies your body of toxins you’re supposed to have accumulated.”

If toxins did build up in a way your body couldn’t excrete, he says, you’d likely be dead or in need of serious medical intervention. “The healthy body has kidneys, a liver, skin, even lungs that are detoxifying as we speak,” he says. “There is no known way – certainly not through detox treatments – to make something that works perfectly well in a healthy body work better.”

Much of the sales patter revolves around “toxins”: poisonous substances that you ingest or inhale. But it’s not clear exactly what these toxins are. If they were named they could be measured before and after treatment to test effectiveness. Yet, much like floaters in your eye, try to focus on these toxins and they scamper from view. In 2009, a network of scientists assembled by the UK charity Sense about Science contacted the manufacturers of 15 products sold in pharmacies and supermarkets that claimed to detoxify. The products ranged from dietary supplements to smoothies and shampoos. When the scientists asked for evidence behind the claims, not one of the manufacturers could define what they meant by detoxification, let alone name the toxins.

Yet, inexplicably, the shelves of health food stores are still packed with products bearing the word “detox” – it’s the marketing equivalent of drawing go-faster stripes on your car. You can buy detoxifying tablets, tinctures, tea bags, face masks, bath salts, hair brushes, shampoos, body gels and even hair straighteners. Yoga, luxury retreats, and massages will also all erroneously promise to detoxify. You can go on a seven-day detox diet and you’ll probably lose weight, but that’s nothing to do with toxins, it’s because you would have starved yourself for a week.

Then there’s colonic irrigation. Its proponents will tell you that mischievous plaques of impacted poo can lurk in your colon for months or years and pump disease-causing toxins back into your system. Pay them a small fee, though, and they’ll insert a hose up your bottom and wash them all away. Unfortunately for them – and possibly fortunately for you – no doctor has ever seen one of these mythical plaques, and many warn against having the procedure done, saying that it can perforate your bowel.

Other tactics are more insidious. Some colon-cleansing tablets contain a polymerising agent that turns your faeces into something like a plastic, so that when a massive rubbery poo snake slithers into your toilet you can stare back at it and feel vindicated in your purchase. Detoxing foot pads turn brown overnight with what manufacturers claim is toxic sludge drawn from your body. This sludge is nothing of the sort – a substance in the pads turns brown when it mixes with water from your sweat.

“It’s a scandal,” fumes Ernst. “It’s criminal exploitation of the gullible man on the street and it sort of keys into something that we all would love to have – a simple remedy that frees us of our sins, so to speak. It’s nice to think that it could exist but unfortunately it doesn’t.”

by Dara Mohammadi, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images

13 Notes on the College Football Playoff

[ed. Go Ducks! Man, what a wipeout. Something of a trend across the SEC. Safe to say the new college football playoffs have been a great success so far.]

1. Florida State completely collapsed. You know what they say about pressure: it bursts pipes or creates diamonds. Or sometimes, when Oregon is running you to the limit of your football credit, it takes your diamonds, flushes them down the world's biggest pipes, and then stuffs you into the great sucking drain of history.

That is what happened when Florida State lost, 59-20, New Year's Day. It feels like a kind of duty to note, out of sportsmanship, just how monumental a thing ended in the Rose Bowl. The Seminoles had won 29 in a row, won two ACC titles and one national title, and garnered a Heisman Trophy for Jameis Winston. That all happened, and nothing can ever take that away from Florida State. Look, it's in a book and in the records and everything.

2. But that -- is that how you want it to end? The suspicions all along for the Seminoles this year were that they were skating along in a weak conference, aided and abetted by the longest string of fortuitous bounces and tips ever, and bailed out in key situations by the holy triumverate of Jameis, Nick O'Leary, and Rashad Greene. And it should have been so easy to call their bluff, and yet no one could, not Louisville, not Notre Dame, not Florida, not even Miami playing at home.

3. They were going to steal a title, and you were going to haaaaaaate how they did it.

4. Even at the half, you thought it was going to happen. FSU only trailed, 18-13, and was in prime position to do the dastardly thing it'd done all year long. The Seminoles were going to steal the train. They were going to run into the sunset with your horses and your children, and then Dalvin Cook fumbled, and Oregon scored. But there, at 25-13, right there, that's when Florida State would do that thing, and throw a few passes and get this back to a one-score game, and that's what they did, but then another Cook fumble.

5. Then Jameis Winston scrambled his way into his personal disaster meme.

Winston could try to do that a thousand times and fail to duplicate it. It is a piece of failure so perfect it is its own achievement. It is a spastic piece of randomness unlike any other in the entire scope of human history. And all joking aside, this is when you knew the game was over at 45-20: not because of the score, but because no one recovers from a line in the script like this.

by Spencer Hall, SBNation | Read more:
Image: Harry How/Getty Images and Giphy

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How to Write

I teach a Popular Criticism class to MFA students. I don’t actually have an MFA, but I am a professional, full-time writer who has been in this business for almost two decades, and I’ve written for a wide range of impressive print and online publications, the names of which you will hear and think, “Oh fuck, she’s the real deal.” Because I am the real deal. I tell my students that a lot, like when they interrupt me or roll their eyes at something I say because they’re young and only listen when old hippies are digressing about Gilles Deleuze’s notions of high capitalism’s infantilizing commodifications or some such horse shit.

Anyway, since Friday is our last class, and since I’m one of the only writers my students know who earns actual legal tender from her writing—instead of say, free copies of Ploughshares—they’re all dying to know how I do it. In fact, one of my students just sent me an email to that effect: “For the last class, I was wondering if you could give us a breakdown of your day-to-day schedule. How do you juggle all of your contracted assignments with your freelance stuff and everything else you do?”

Now, I’m not going to lie. It’s annoying, to have to take time out of my incredibly busy writing schedule in order to spell it all out for young people, just because they spend most of their daylight hours being urged by hoary old theorists in threadbare sweaters to write experimental fiction that will never sell. But I care deeply about the young—all of them, the world’s young—so of course I am humbled and honored to share the trade secrets embedded in my rigorous daily work schedule. Here we go:

Today, I woke up at 4 a.m. because one of my dogs was making a strange gulping sound. I sat for several minutes listening closely, wide awake, wondering if she wasn’t developing esophageal cancer or some other gruesome ailment that the pricey animal specialty hospital might guilt me into actually treating. I imagined sitting in the posh chill of their giant waiting room, the pricey coffee and tea machine humming away next to me, filling out forms instructing them to never crack my 10-year-old dog’s chest and do emergency open heart surgery if she starts coding. “Option 1: LET MY DOG DIE.” That’s one I had to check off and sign, over and over again, when my other, eight-year-old dog had an unexplained fever and it cost me $6000 to save her. The vet’s eyes would dart over my forms and the corners of her mouth would pinch slightly, and then she’d treat me like someone who might just yank the IV out of her dog’s leg and twist her neck at any minute, the Jack Bauer of budget-minded dog owners.


Anyway, right about now you’re starting to understand why the morning hours are so potent for a working writer: The mind spills over with expansive concepts and sweeping images that just cry out to be tapped in another scintillating essay or think piece.

Rather than get up and spoil my inspired revelry, though, I know to let these thoughts swirl and churn until they take a more coherent shape. My mind soon shifts to tallying up the costs of college for my stepson, who for some nutty reason applied to a wide range of insanely expensive private colleges on the East Coast. After I marvel over that sum for a while, I try adding together his costs with the costs of sending my two young daughters to college in ten years. Then I think about how we should probably try to pay off our credit cards and our home equity loan first, and THEN focus on coming up with this mammoth amount for college, and then of course we’ll be retiring right after that but we’ll still have 15 years left on our massive mortgage. “We’re never going to retire,” I think. “We’re going to have to keep working forever and ever and ever. And we can’t turn on the AC this summer. And we have to stop going out to our favorite Mexican restaurant every other week and drinking margaritas, which are an inexcusably expensive indulgence.” Old people problems, LOL.

Then I think about margaritas for a while. I think about how there should really be a breakfast margarita. Breakfast ‘Rita. Breakarita. Sunrise ‘Rita. Maybe with Chia seeds. I think about how I worked at Applebee’s when I was my stepson’s age. And he’s never even had a job. Ever! I think about how weird that is, that he’s never had a job, but he’s applying to colleges that cost $250k, all told. YOLO, I guess.

Then I think about how my black Applebee’s polo shirt always smelled like nachos because I didn’t wash it often enough. See how I was thinking about a smell? That’s how you know I’m a real artist and not some fucking hack who writes light verse for The New Yorker. Artists can conjure a stinky odor using only their raw powers of imagination and long-term memory. That’s also how you know it’s time to write.

by Heather Havrilesky, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Ed Yourdon