Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Freeze Your Butt Off
The first time that I heard about cryotherapy, it was in conversation with a friend. "It’s that thing that all the models are doing where you freeze yourself," was her exact description. No other details provided. I immediately started to picture creepy chambers full of floating bodies. Don't they do that to dead people they're planning on bringing back once the science is solid enough? I had to know more.
As it turns out, cryotherapy is a whole lot less science fiction than my imagination made it out to be. Doctors have used it for years in physical therapy, and major athletes from Usain Bolt to Cristiano Ronaldo swear it improves performance and reduces injury recovery time.
On a basic level, cryotherapy is a process in which you subject the body to extreme cold for a short period of time in order to reduce inflammation. This makes it an excellent treatment for muscle soreness and joint swelling. Rather fortuitiously, according to practitioners, this also means that the treatment can boost metabolism, stimulate collagen production, increase endorphins, reduce cellulite, and improve energy. Whether or not I had any swollen joints at that moment, the rest of the side effects (or side perks, really) were all things I wanted. So, I found KryoLife, an NYC-based company offering whole-body cryotherapy treatments, and booked the next available appointment.
Walking into the office a few days later, I was greeted by KryoLife founders Joanna Fryben and Eduardo Bohorquez-Barona. They discreetly asked me if I would mind waiting a few minutes because Yoko Ono (!!!) was just finishing a treatment. Off to a great start.
When my turn came, and I shed my clothes and donned socks, a pair of wooden-soled clogs and some ultra-thick mittens. "Make sure to dry off any sweat," Joanna called into my dressing room. “You want to avoid frostbite!” Naturally that caused me to panic and I immediately broke out into a nervous sweat.
As it turns out, cryotherapy is a whole lot less science fiction than my imagination made it out to be. Doctors have used it for years in physical therapy, and major athletes from Usain Bolt to Cristiano Ronaldo swear it improves performance and reduces injury recovery time.On a basic level, cryotherapy is a process in which you subject the body to extreme cold for a short period of time in order to reduce inflammation. This makes it an excellent treatment for muscle soreness and joint swelling. Rather fortuitiously, according to practitioners, this also means that the treatment can boost metabolism, stimulate collagen production, increase endorphins, reduce cellulite, and improve energy. Whether or not I had any swollen joints at that moment, the rest of the side effects (or side perks, really) were all things I wanted. So, I found KryoLife, an NYC-based company offering whole-body cryotherapy treatments, and booked the next available appointment.
Walking into the office a few days later, I was greeted by KryoLife founders Joanna Fryben and Eduardo Bohorquez-Barona. They discreetly asked me if I would mind waiting a few minutes because Yoko Ono (!!!) was just finishing a treatment. Off to a great start.
When my turn came, and I shed my clothes and donned socks, a pair of wooden-soled clogs and some ultra-thick mittens. "Make sure to dry off any sweat," Joanna called into my dressing room. “You want to avoid frostbite!” Naturally that caused me to panic and I immediately broke out into a nervous sweat.
by Victoria Lewis, Into The Gloss | Read more:
Image: Victoria Lewis
The Data Sublime
How did we come to believe the phone knows best? When cultural and economic historians look back on the early 21st century, they will be faced with the riddle of how, in little more than a decade, vast populations came to accept so much quantification and surveillance with so little overt coercion or economic reward. The consequences of this, from the Edward Snowden revelations to the transformation of urban governance, are plain, yet the cultural and psychic preconditions remain something of a mystery. What is going on when people hand over their thoughts, selves, sentiments, and bodies to a data grid that is incomprehensible to them?
The liberal philosophical tradition explains this sort of surrender in terms of conscious and deliberate trade-offs. Our autonomy is a piece of personal property that we can exchange for various guarantees. We accept various personal “costs” for certain political or economic “benefits.” For Thomas Hobbes, relinquishing the personal use of force and granting the state a monopoly on violence is a prerequisite to any legal rights at all: “Freedom” is traded for “security.” In more utilitarian traditions, autonomy is traded for some form of economic benefit, be it pleasure, money, or satisfaction. What both accounts share is the presumption that no set of power relations could persist if individuals could not reasonably consent to it.
Does that fit with the quantified, mass-surveilled society? It works fine as a post-hoc justification: “Yes,” the liberal will argue, “people sacrifice some autonomy, some privacy — but they only do so because they value convenience, efficiency, pleasure, or security even more highly.” This suggests, as per rational-choice theory, that social media and smart technologies, like the Google Now “dashboard” that constantly feeds the user information on fastest travel routes and relevant weather information in real time, are simply driving cost savings into everyday life, cutting out time-consuming processes and delivering outcomes more efficiently, much as e-government contractors once promised to do for the state. Dating apps, such as Tinder, pride themselves on allowing people to connect to those who are nearest and most desirable and to block out everyone else.
Leaving aside the unattractiveness of this as a vision of friendship, romance, or society, there are several other problems with it. First, it’s not clear that a utilitarian explanation works even on its own limited terms to justify our surrender to technology. It does not help people do what they want: Today, people hunt desperately for ways of escaping the grid of interactivity, precisely so as to get stuff done. Apps such as Freedom (which blocks all internet connectivity from a laptop) and Anti-Social (which blocks social media specifically) are sold as productivity-enhancing. The rise of “mindfulness,” “digital detox,” and sleep gurus in the contemporary business world testifies to this. Preserving human capital in full working order is something that now involves carefully managed forms of rest and meditation, away from the flickering of data.
Second, the assumption that if individuals do something uncoerced, then it was because it was worth doing rests on a tightly circular argument that assumes that the autonomous, calculating self precedes and transcends whatever social situation it finds itself in. Such a strong theory of the self is scarcely tenable in the context for which it was invented, namely, the market. The mere existence of advertising demonstrates that few businesses are prepared to rely on mathematical forces of supply and demand to determine how many of their goods are consumed. Outside the market realm, its descriptive power falls to pieces entirely, especially given “smart” environments designed to pre-empt decision-making.
The theory of the rational-calculating self has been under quiet but persistent attack within the field of economics since the 1970s, resulting in the development of behavioral economics and neuroeconomics. Rather than postulate that humans never make mistakes about what is in their best interest, these new fields use laboratory experiments, field experiments, and brain scanners to investigate exactly how good humans are at pursuing their self-interest (as economists define it, anyway). They have become a small industry for producing explanations of why we really behave as we do and what our brains are really doing behind our backs.
From a cultural perspective, behavioral economics and neuroeconomics are less interesting for their truth value (which, after all, would have surprised few behavioral psychologists of the past century) but their public and political reception. The fields have been met with predictable gripes from libertarians, who argue that the critique of individual rationality is an implicit sanction for the nanny state to act on our behalf. Nonetheless, celebrity behaviorists such as Robert Cialdini and Richard Thaler have found an enthusiastic audience, not only among marketers, managers, and policymakers who are professionally tasked with altering behavior, but also the nonfiction-reading public, tapping into a far more pervasive fascination with biological selfhood and a hunger for social explanations that relieve individuals of responsibility for their actions.
The establishment of a Behavioural Insights Team within the British government in 2010 (and since privatized) is a case in point of this surprising new appetite for nonliberal or postliberal theories of individual decision making. Set against the prosaic nature of the team’s actual achievements, which have mainly involved slightly faster processing of tax and paperwork, the level of intrigue that surrounds it, and the political uses of behaviorism in general, seems disproportionate. The unit attracted some state-phobic critiques, but these have been far outnumbered by a half-mystical, half-technocratic media fascination with the idea of policymakers manipulating individual decisions. This poses the question of whether behavior change from above is attractive not in spite of its alleged paternalism but because of it.
Likewise, the notorious Facebook experiment on “emotional contagion” was understandably controversial. But would it be implausible to suggest that people were also enchanted by it? Was there not also a mystical seduction at work, precisely because it suggested some higher power, invisible to the naked eye? We assume, rationally, that the presence of such a power is dangerous. But it is no contradiction to suggest that it might also be comforting or mesmerizing. To feel part of some grand technocratic plan, even one that is never made public, has the allure of immersing the self in a collective, in a manner that had seemed to have been left on the political scrapheap of the 20th century.
The liberal philosophical tradition explains this sort of surrender in terms of conscious and deliberate trade-offs. Our autonomy is a piece of personal property that we can exchange for various guarantees. We accept various personal “costs” for certain political or economic “benefits.” For Thomas Hobbes, relinquishing the personal use of force and granting the state a monopoly on violence is a prerequisite to any legal rights at all: “Freedom” is traded for “security.” In more utilitarian traditions, autonomy is traded for some form of economic benefit, be it pleasure, money, or satisfaction. What both accounts share is the presumption that no set of power relations could persist if individuals could not reasonably consent to it.Does that fit with the quantified, mass-surveilled society? It works fine as a post-hoc justification: “Yes,” the liberal will argue, “people sacrifice some autonomy, some privacy — but they only do so because they value convenience, efficiency, pleasure, or security even more highly.” This suggests, as per rational-choice theory, that social media and smart technologies, like the Google Now “dashboard” that constantly feeds the user information on fastest travel routes and relevant weather information in real time, are simply driving cost savings into everyday life, cutting out time-consuming processes and delivering outcomes more efficiently, much as e-government contractors once promised to do for the state. Dating apps, such as Tinder, pride themselves on allowing people to connect to those who are nearest and most desirable and to block out everyone else.
Leaving aside the unattractiveness of this as a vision of friendship, romance, or society, there are several other problems with it. First, it’s not clear that a utilitarian explanation works even on its own limited terms to justify our surrender to technology. It does not help people do what they want: Today, people hunt desperately for ways of escaping the grid of interactivity, precisely so as to get stuff done. Apps such as Freedom (which blocks all internet connectivity from a laptop) and Anti-Social (which blocks social media specifically) are sold as productivity-enhancing. The rise of “mindfulness,” “digital detox,” and sleep gurus in the contemporary business world testifies to this. Preserving human capital in full working order is something that now involves carefully managed forms of rest and meditation, away from the flickering of data.
Second, the assumption that if individuals do something uncoerced, then it was because it was worth doing rests on a tightly circular argument that assumes that the autonomous, calculating self precedes and transcends whatever social situation it finds itself in. Such a strong theory of the self is scarcely tenable in the context for which it was invented, namely, the market. The mere existence of advertising demonstrates that few businesses are prepared to rely on mathematical forces of supply and demand to determine how many of their goods are consumed. Outside the market realm, its descriptive power falls to pieces entirely, especially given “smart” environments designed to pre-empt decision-making.
The theory of the rational-calculating self has been under quiet but persistent attack within the field of economics since the 1970s, resulting in the development of behavioral economics and neuroeconomics. Rather than postulate that humans never make mistakes about what is in their best interest, these new fields use laboratory experiments, field experiments, and brain scanners to investigate exactly how good humans are at pursuing their self-interest (as economists define it, anyway). They have become a small industry for producing explanations of why we really behave as we do and what our brains are really doing behind our backs.
From a cultural perspective, behavioral economics and neuroeconomics are less interesting for their truth value (which, after all, would have surprised few behavioral psychologists of the past century) but their public and political reception. The fields have been met with predictable gripes from libertarians, who argue that the critique of individual rationality is an implicit sanction for the nanny state to act on our behalf. Nonetheless, celebrity behaviorists such as Robert Cialdini and Richard Thaler have found an enthusiastic audience, not only among marketers, managers, and policymakers who are professionally tasked with altering behavior, but also the nonfiction-reading public, tapping into a far more pervasive fascination with biological selfhood and a hunger for social explanations that relieve individuals of responsibility for their actions.
The establishment of a Behavioural Insights Team within the British government in 2010 (and since privatized) is a case in point of this surprising new appetite for nonliberal or postliberal theories of individual decision making. Set against the prosaic nature of the team’s actual achievements, which have mainly involved slightly faster processing of tax and paperwork, the level of intrigue that surrounds it, and the political uses of behaviorism in general, seems disproportionate. The unit attracted some state-phobic critiques, but these have been far outnumbered by a half-mystical, half-technocratic media fascination with the idea of policymakers manipulating individual decisions. This poses the question of whether behavior change from above is attractive not in spite of its alleged paternalism but because of it.
Likewise, the notorious Facebook experiment on “emotional contagion” was understandably controversial. But would it be implausible to suggest that people were also enchanted by it? Was there not also a mystical seduction at work, precisely because it suggested some higher power, invisible to the naked eye? We assume, rationally, that the presence of such a power is dangerous. But it is no contradiction to suggest that it might also be comforting or mesmerizing. To feel part of some grand technocratic plan, even one that is never made public, has the allure of immersing the self in a collective, in a manner that had seemed to have been left on the political scrapheap of the 20th century.
by William Davies, TNI | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Mega-Project: Nicaragua’s Massive New Canal
Just north of Punta Gorda, the view of Nicaragua’s Miskito coast is much as Christopher Columbus would have seen it when he first sailed these waters more than five centuries ago. On the land, there is little sign of habitation among the forested cliff tops and pellucid bays. At sea, the only traffic is a small boat and a pod of half a dozen dolphins.
Our launch, however, is a 21st-century beast that leaps and crashes through the swells with bone-jarring, teeth-rattling thuds as we speed past this nature reserve and indigenous territory that is set to become the stage for a great many more noisy, polluting intrusions by the modern world.
If the dreams of Nicaraguan officials and Chinese businessmen are realised, this remote idyll will be transformed over the next five years into a hub of global trade – the easternmost point of a new canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific for supertankers and bulk carriers that are too big for the Panama canal.
In an era of breathtaking, earth-changing engineering projects, this has been billed as the biggest of them all. Three times as long and almost twice as deep as its rival in Panama, Nicaragua’s channel will require the removal of more than 4.5bn cubic metres of earth – enough to bury the entire island of Manhattan up to the 21st floor of the Empire State Building. It will also swamp the economy, society and environment of one of Latin America’s poorest and most sparsely populated countries. Senior officials compare the scale of change to that brought by the arrival of the first colonisers.
“It’s like when the Spanish came here, they brought a new culture. The same is coming with the canal,” said Manuel Coronel Kautz, the garrulous head of the canal authority. “It is very difficult to see what will happen later – just as it was difficult for the indigenous people to imagine what would happen when they saw the first [European] boats.”
For the native Americans, of course, that first glimpse of Spanish caravels was the beginning of an apocalypse. Columbus’s ships were soon followed by waves ofconquistadores whose feuding, disease and hunger for gold and slaves led to the annihilation of many indigenous populations.
The Nicaraguan government, by contrast, hopes the canal can finally achieve the Sandinista dream of eradicating poverty. In return for a concession to the Chinese company HKND, it hopes for billions of dollars of investment, tens of thousands of jobs and, eventually, a stable source of national income.
First, however, the project has to be built. Since the days of the first Spanish colonisers, there have been more than 70 proposals to construct a route across this stretch of the Central American isthmus. Blueprints have been sketched out by British, US and French engineers. Almost all have remained on the drawing board.
But this time work is already under way. The groundbreaking ceremony took place on 22 December. Over the next five years, engineers will build a 30-metre-deep, 178-mile, fenced waterway which, if finished (and there must always be doubts for a project of this size and cost), will change the lives of millions and the wildlife of a continent.
by Jonathan Watts, The Guardian | Read more:
Images: Fitzcorraldo and The Guardian
Monday, January 19, 2015
Seahawks 28, Packers 22
Watching the Packers at the end of that game was like every nightmare in which you arrive to class five minutes late, find out there’s a pop quiz, realize you haven’t put on pants, and discover the floor beneath you actually isn’t there, and you’re falling. Except in this case, they happen all at once. And they’re real, not dreams. And Marshawn Lynch is the monster at the end of your real life.
by Grantland Staff | Read more: here and here
Image: Tom Pennington/Getty
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Tardigrades (also known as waterbears or moss piglets) are water-dwelling, segmented micro-animals, with eight legs.
via:
Japan’s Island Problem
[ed. See also: The Shape of Japan to Come.]
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Mr. Hasegawa, a fisherman. “I don’t think that the bombing of Hiroshima was a good thing.” Staring at the furious grey channel where the Pacific Ocean meets the Sea of Okhotsk off Hokkaido in northern Japan on a cold, clear day last March, he spoke like a trauma victim reliving the past: “But if the Americans had dropped the atomic bomb a month earlier, those islands out there would still be Japan’s.”
Were I unaware of the chronology of the summer of 1945 and had we been anywhere else, such a comment would make the engaging 64-year-old seem insensitive or odd. Yet on the horizon three miles in the distance were the snow-covered banks of one of Russia’s Kuril Islands, known to the Japanese who lived there until 1945 as Suishojima of the Habomai group. Mr. Hasegawa’s father was among the 17,291 Japanese who called it and several other nearby islands home. Admiral Yamamoto gathered his fleet there in 1941 to attack Pearl Harbor, and the region was once one of the three richest fishing grounds in the world, replete with salmon, herring, and cod.
In August 1945 wartime Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s cataclysmic losses following America’s nuclear decimation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, its firebombing of most other cities, and its devastation of Okinawa island in the East China Sea. Equally important, Russia had disavowed its neutrality pact with Japan, and Soviet troops were advancing into Japanese-controlled Manchuria, northern Korea, and a number of islands around Hokkaido. As the emperor told his defeated subjects with staggering understatement, “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
What parts of its massive empire Japan would forfeit were then unknown. In the coming years, an area that once resembled an enormous octopus spanning North China and the southern Pacific near Australia would be reduced to the seahorse-shaped nation that we are now familiar with. But this reality has yet to be accepted fully in Japan, especially among people like Mr. Hasegawa, whose lives were upended by history. They were left to imagine any number of alternate realities.
On September 2, 1945, Hirohito’s representatives signed surrender papers to American officers aboard the USS Missouri. At the same moment, Soviet soldiers overwhelmed the islands that the Japanese continue to call the Northern Territories (yet which are known internationally as the southern part of Russia’s Kuril Island chain). At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Franklin Roosevelt promised these islands to Joseph Stalin in exchange for his troops’ entry into the war on the side of Allies. Within three days of the soldiers’ arrival on the southern Kurils, the Russians began to deport most of the Japanese to Hokkaido, although some were also taken to POW camps in Siberia. 20,000 Russians live on these islands today, and that, to paraphrase Vladimir Putin’s current mood, would appear to be that. Except, of course, for the evicted islanders and their descendants.
The peace treaty that ended war between Japan and the Allied Powers was signed in San Francisco in September 1951 and came into effect the following April. It dismantled Japan’s vast empire, returning the country largely to the shape it was in 1869, the year that Hokkaido became part of it. Whatever detractors say today, at the time Emperor Hirohito was pleased. On April 26, 1952, General Matthew Ridgway sent a telegram from Tokyo to the treaty’s chief architect in Washington, John Foster Dulles: “His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, on his own initiative, graciously called upon me this morning and personally expressed his gratitude … [for] making it possible for Japan to regain her sovereignty next Monday.” (...)
The internationally accepted map of Japan today dates from this moment in the early 1950s. The American negotiators involved in its creation excluded specific mention of the islands at the heart of each of Japan’s territorial disputes with Russia, China and Taiwan, and Korea. President Harry Truman’s special representative to the treaty process, John Foster Dulles, kept abundant correspondence, and his records along with those of other diplomats make clear that the final map would not fully commit to naming who owned what—for reasons ranging from real and perceived threats of Communist takeover of the entire area, including Japan, to a desire to cement the need for American power in the region. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was displeased with this gamble, especially in terms of the islands Japan contests with Russia. On January 17, 1952, Senator Tom Connally wrote to Dulles that the formula was “vague and contained the germ of future conflicting claims.”
Over sixty years later, that germ has developed and spread: in addition to the conflict with Russia, there is the perilous standoff in the East China Sea over several steep crags known to the Japanese as the Senkaku and to the Chinese and Taiwanese as the Diaoyutai, and the caustic on-again, off-again slugfest with Korea over some rocks in the sea that the Japanese call Takeshima and the Koreans, Dokdo. (...)
In 2012 Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami criticized all sides in the dispute for getting people “drunk” on nationalism’s “cheap liquor.” At the time, the Japanese government had just upped the ante by purchasing the islands for $26 million from the family that had held them privately for decades. The already tense situation erupted into widespread anti-Japanese protests and boycotts throughout China, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in trade loss, and leading to Japanese, Chinese, and American warships patrolling the area. Following months of frigid relations, China declared an “Air Defense Identification Zone” in the skies above the islands in November 2013, matching what Japan had maintained for decades but generating new outrage because Beijing dictated its position unilaterally and issued unusually expansive demands. (...)
In 1945 the United States captured these islands in the Battle for Okinawa—known locally as the “Typhoon of Steel”—and then governed them together with the rest of Okinawa, its pilots using them for target practice. When Washington agreed to Okinawa’s sovereign reversion to Japan in 1972, it postponed decisions over who would have control over these rocks, recognizing Japan’s so-called administrative rights but not sovereignty. This remains the U.S. position today, regardless of Tokyo’s hard lobbying and Beijing’s bellicosity.
Oil and natural gas deposits near these islands were discovered in 1968, leading some to say that the fight is simply a resource struggle. Yet as recently as 2008, Japanese and Chinese companies established joint development guidelines. This draws attention to an additional dynamic at play that involves lingering historical animosities, distinct from the new laws of the sea but drawing dividing lines just as powerfully. (...)
The United States did not create these various island disputes, but as the victor in 1945, it drew expedient boundaries to contain a history of conflict, and those boundaries are showing their limits. History matters, of course. Yet the propensity to treat it like a backdrop to the present, rather than learning from it, has helped transform Northeast Asia’s legacies into contemporary tinderboxes.
by Alexis Dudden, Dissent | Read more:
Image: Al Jazeera English
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Mr. Hasegawa, a fisherman. “I don’t think that the bombing of Hiroshima was a good thing.” Staring at the furious grey channel where the Pacific Ocean meets the Sea of Okhotsk off Hokkaido in northern Japan on a cold, clear day last March, he spoke like a trauma victim reliving the past: “But if the Americans had dropped the atomic bomb a month earlier, those islands out there would still be Japan’s.”
Were I unaware of the chronology of the summer of 1945 and had we been anywhere else, such a comment would make the engaging 64-year-old seem insensitive or odd. Yet on the horizon three miles in the distance were the snow-covered banks of one of Russia’s Kuril Islands, known to the Japanese who lived there until 1945 as Suishojima of the Habomai group. Mr. Hasegawa’s father was among the 17,291 Japanese who called it and several other nearby islands home. Admiral Yamamoto gathered his fleet there in 1941 to attack Pearl Harbor, and the region was once one of the three richest fishing grounds in the world, replete with salmon, herring, and cod.In August 1945 wartime Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s cataclysmic losses following America’s nuclear decimation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, its firebombing of most other cities, and its devastation of Okinawa island in the East China Sea. Equally important, Russia had disavowed its neutrality pact with Japan, and Soviet troops were advancing into Japanese-controlled Manchuria, northern Korea, and a number of islands around Hokkaido. As the emperor told his defeated subjects with staggering understatement, “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
What parts of its massive empire Japan would forfeit were then unknown. In the coming years, an area that once resembled an enormous octopus spanning North China and the southern Pacific near Australia would be reduced to the seahorse-shaped nation that we are now familiar with. But this reality has yet to be accepted fully in Japan, especially among people like Mr. Hasegawa, whose lives were upended by history. They were left to imagine any number of alternate realities.
On September 2, 1945, Hirohito’s representatives signed surrender papers to American officers aboard the USS Missouri. At the same moment, Soviet soldiers overwhelmed the islands that the Japanese continue to call the Northern Territories (yet which are known internationally as the southern part of Russia’s Kuril Island chain). At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Franklin Roosevelt promised these islands to Joseph Stalin in exchange for his troops’ entry into the war on the side of Allies. Within three days of the soldiers’ arrival on the southern Kurils, the Russians began to deport most of the Japanese to Hokkaido, although some were also taken to POW camps in Siberia. 20,000 Russians live on these islands today, and that, to paraphrase Vladimir Putin’s current mood, would appear to be that. Except, of course, for the evicted islanders and their descendants.
The peace treaty that ended war between Japan and the Allied Powers was signed in San Francisco in September 1951 and came into effect the following April. It dismantled Japan’s vast empire, returning the country largely to the shape it was in 1869, the year that Hokkaido became part of it. Whatever detractors say today, at the time Emperor Hirohito was pleased. On April 26, 1952, General Matthew Ridgway sent a telegram from Tokyo to the treaty’s chief architect in Washington, John Foster Dulles: “His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, on his own initiative, graciously called upon me this morning and personally expressed his gratitude … [for] making it possible for Japan to regain her sovereignty next Monday.” (...)
The internationally accepted map of Japan today dates from this moment in the early 1950s. The American negotiators involved in its creation excluded specific mention of the islands at the heart of each of Japan’s territorial disputes with Russia, China and Taiwan, and Korea. President Harry Truman’s special representative to the treaty process, John Foster Dulles, kept abundant correspondence, and his records along with those of other diplomats make clear that the final map would not fully commit to naming who owned what—for reasons ranging from real and perceived threats of Communist takeover of the entire area, including Japan, to a desire to cement the need for American power in the region. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was displeased with this gamble, especially in terms of the islands Japan contests with Russia. On January 17, 1952, Senator Tom Connally wrote to Dulles that the formula was “vague and contained the germ of future conflicting claims.”
Over sixty years later, that germ has developed and spread: in addition to the conflict with Russia, there is the perilous standoff in the East China Sea over several steep crags known to the Japanese as the Senkaku and to the Chinese and Taiwanese as the Diaoyutai, and the caustic on-again, off-again slugfest with Korea over some rocks in the sea that the Japanese call Takeshima and the Koreans, Dokdo. (...)
In 2012 Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami criticized all sides in the dispute for getting people “drunk” on nationalism’s “cheap liquor.” At the time, the Japanese government had just upped the ante by purchasing the islands for $26 million from the family that had held them privately for decades. The already tense situation erupted into widespread anti-Japanese protests and boycotts throughout China, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in trade loss, and leading to Japanese, Chinese, and American warships patrolling the area. Following months of frigid relations, China declared an “Air Defense Identification Zone” in the skies above the islands in November 2013, matching what Japan had maintained for decades but generating new outrage because Beijing dictated its position unilaterally and issued unusually expansive demands. (...)
In 1945 the United States captured these islands in the Battle for Okinawa—known locally as the “Typhoon of Steel”—and then governed them together with the rest of Okinawa, its pilots using them for target practice. When Washington agreed to Okinawa’s sovereign reversion to Japan in 1972, it postponed decisions over who would have control over these rocks, recognizing Japan’s so-called administrative rights but not sovereignty. This remains the U.S. position today, regardless of Tokyo’s hard lobbying and Beijing’s bellicosity.
Oil and natural gas deposits near these islands were discovered in 1968, leading some to say that the fight is simply a resource struggle. Yet as recently as 2008, Japanese and Chinese companies established joint development guidelines. This draws attention to an additional dynamic at play that involves lingering historical animosities, distinct from the new laws of the sea but drawing dividing lines just as powerfully. (...)
The United States did not create these various island disputes, but as the victor in 1945, it drew expedient boundaries to contain a history of conflict, and those boundaries are showing their limits. History matters, of course. Yet the propensity to treat it like a backdrop to the present, rather than learning from it, has helped transform Northeast Asia’s legacies into contemporary tinderboxes.
by Alexis Dudden, Dissent | Read more:
Image: Al Jazeera English
Is Emirates the World's Best Airline?
The black SUV, included in the $10,000 round-trip Emirates Business Class ticket, picks me up at 8 a.m. for flight 204, departing JFK airport for Dubai at 11:20 a.m. It’s a quick ride to the airport, where an Emirates baggage handler waits at the curb. In less than five minutes, my bags are checked, boarding pass issued. When the flight is called, I walk from the Business Class Lounge, one of the airline’s 30 lounges worldwide, passing a wall-sized Emirates ad that reads “Boredom Is Grounded Indefinitely,” and step straight into the upper deck of the Airbus A380, the world’s biggest jetliner, tall as an eight-story building.
I sink into the flatbed seat, which, compared with those of other international industry leaders, including Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines, is state-of-the-art, as is the 1,600-channel in-seat entertainment system. There’s a small minibar of soft drinks and snacks, but who wants to fetch their own drinks in business and first class? The allure of Emirates goes beyond its hardware into what aviation writer Gary Leff tells me is the “halo effect of some of the over-the-top things they do.” He calls the in-your-face features the “Emirates bling”: the two enormous spa showers in first class; the 14 first-class suites, each with a vanity table, closet, 23-inch TV screen and electronic doors that seal shut for total seclusion; the young fleet, which includes 50 A380s (already more than any other airline, with 90 more on order).
The plane lifts off in a quiet purr—with 550-plus tons and 500 passengers—and soon a caravan of flight attendants, fluent in a dozen languages, is rolling down the aisles, a parade of smiles and service.
“You’re able to park things that are difficult in your life,” a woman’s voice assures me from the noise-canceling headset. “Untether yourself from your schedule.... Let all that go.”
It’s time to head to the lounge. It’s big and circular, with a horseshoe-shaped stand-up bar in the center, created in the cross-aisle for which Emirates forfeited a number of business-class seats. In ads the lounge is shown bubbling with bon vivants: bearded hunks just back from jungles as wild as their souls; unattached beauties with come-hither-into-my-sliding-door-domain smiles; cosmopolitans, captains of industry and other celebrants conversing in the new disco of the skies. When I burst in at about noon, the bar is being staged, a theater set being erected by nine flight attendants assembling bottles, glasses and snacks. Soon Champagne corks are popping and fellow passengers arrive.
Do not run, I tell myself. These people aren’t angling to steal your overhead space or cut in front of you at the bathroom. These are your friends. (...)
The age of Emirates accelerated in 2008 with the introduction of its Airbus A380 flights. Since the double-decker, wide-bodied, four-engine jetliner was introduced in the early 2000s, airline executives and owners, both public and private, had dreamed of how to best maximize its mammoth space. “People were fantasizing about gyms on board and casinos, bowling alleys and swimming pools,” says Sarrabezolles. “None of that really happened with any other airlines.”
Emirates capitalized on the A380’s space with revolutionary bling. To spread the word, the airline launched highly publicized inaugural flights from several cities and held special events from New York to Los Angeles, where there was a gala dinner at the Kodak Theater. Ricky Martin performed, Hilary Swank spoke and Wolfgang Puck catered. There were advertisements in glossy international magazines, on billboards and drive-time radio. The strategy worked: CEO-level executives, American celebrities, politicians, ultra-high-net-worth individuals, the rich, royal and famous were soon reveling in the new way to fly, using Dubai as a hub to connect to the world.
“This airline is amazing,” Paris Hilton tweeted in June 2009 from her Emirates first-class suite. The tweet was estimated by one publicist to be worth $1.5 million in public relations, with $3 million more in free advertising if the message spread in the media, which of course it did. “For the first time, you could travel commercially better than you could privately in anything like a Gulfstream, which was in no way as luxurious as flying on Emirates in the first-class cabin,” says event planner Colin Cowie, who has flown 12 million miles across nearly a hundred countries and became allegiant to Emirates while producing the grand opening of the Atlantis, The Palm resort in Dubai in 2008. “To walk onto the A380 in 2008, to have a bathroom the size of an average Manhattan bathroom, your own attendant, a seven-minute shower, every amenity known to man, full-size bath towels is pretty amazing. You cannot do better on a commercial flight. It was a big game changer.”
Midway through the Dubai-London flight, the Middle Easterners in first class would change their attire to suit their destination. “You’d take off from the Middle East, and everyone would be covered in white robes or black abayas,” says Cowie. “You’d land in London ,and everyone would be in bespoke suits, high heels, tight jeans, fabulous fitted tops. It would be the exact opposite going back.”
Dr. Michael Apa, a leading New York–based cosmetic dentist, heard about Emirates at a dinner party at furrier Dennis Basso’s home in Manhattan. “I was sitting next to Ivanka Trump,” he says. “She said, ‘I just got back from Dubai, and Emirates is so great.’ But I didn’t really understand, because I didn’t think I would be going to Dubai anytime soon.” Then in 2006, members of the royal family became Apa’s patients in New York. In 2008 they flew him to visit on Emirates, which the royal family flies when they are not flying privately. “I’m sitting on that plane and I’m thinking, Wow!” says Apa, who now has an outpost of his practice in Dubai and flies Emirates often.
In the first-class cabin, Apa’s fellow passengers have included Virgin Airlines founder Richard Branson, sportscaster Bryant Gumbel, CNN anchor Richard Quest and rapper Busta Rhymes. But Emirates is as much about who you don’t see as much as who you do. “You are sleeping privately, while on other airlines you are sleeping with everyone else,” says Cowie.
Still, first and business class cannot sustain an airline. Emirates had to communicate its message to the masses. But outside of its stellar equipment and service, it did not yet know what its message was. By 2010, spurred by the explosive growth of tourism in Dubai, the airline was expanding at warp speed, ordering $13 billion in new aircraft.
“Emirates was growing probably as fast as Google,” says Scott Goodson, founder of the StrawberryFrog advertising agency in New York. “And the reason for that was the center of the world was changing. The old center of the world was Europe. Before, if you were flying from Asia to the States or Latin America, you had to fly through London or Frankfurt. But with the new 777s and the A380, the center of the world shifted to Dubai. If you worked at Facebook in California, you could fly from L.A. to Dubai, and it’s a quick hop to Mumbai. The airline realized they needed an idea that could rally both existing employees and new employees. Additionally, they needed help to make this Dubai-based airline not only relevant but admired by the world.”
I sink into the flatbed seat, which, compared with those of other international industry leaders, including Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines, is state-of-the-art, as is the 1,600-channel in-seat entertainment system. There’s a small minibar of soft drinks and snacks, but who wants to fetch their own drinks in business and first class? The allure of Emirates goes beyond its hardware into what aviation writer Gary Leff tells me is the “halo effect of some of the over-the-top things they do.” He calls the in-your-face features the “Emirates bling”: the two enormous spa showers in first class; the 14 first-class suites, each with a vanity table, closet, 23-inch TV screen and electronic doors that seal shut for total seclusion; the young fleet, which includes 50 A380s (already more than any other airline, with 90 more on order).The plane lifts off in a quiet purr—with 550-plus tons and 500 passengers—and soon a caravan of flight attendants, fluent in a dozen languages, is rolling down the aisles, a parade of smiles and service.
“You’re able to park things that are difficult in your life,” a woman’s voice assures me from the noise-canceling headset. “Untether yourself from your schedule.... Let all that go.”
It’s time to head to the lounge. It’s big and circular, with a horseshoe-shaped stand-up bar in the center, created in the cross-aisle for which Emirates forfeited a number of business-class seats. In ads the lounge is shown bubbling with bon vivants: bearded hunks just back from jungles as wild as their souls; unattached beauties with come-hither-into-my-sliding-door-domain smiles; cosmopolitans, captains of industry and other celebrants conversing in the new disco of the skies. When I burst in at about noon, the bar is being staged, a theater set being erected by nine flight attendants assembling bottles, glasses and snacks. Soon Champagne corks are popping and fellow passengers arrive.
Do not run, I tell myself. These people aren’t angling to steal your overhead space or cut in front of you at the bathroom. These are your friends. (...)
The age of Emirates accelerated in 2008 with the introduction of its Airbus A380 flights. Since the double-decker, wide-bodied, four-engine jetliner was introduced in the early 2000s, airline executives and owners, both public and private, had dreamed of how to best maximize its mammoth space. “People were fantasizing about gyms on board and casinos, bowling alleys and swimming pools,” says Sarrabezolles. “None of that really happened with any other airlines.”
Emirates capitalized on the A380’s space with revolutionary bling. To spread the word, the airline launched highly publicized inaugural flights from several cities and held special events from New York to Los Angeles, where there was a gala dinner at the Kodak Theater. Ricky Martin performed, Hilary Swank spoke and Wolfgang Puck catered. There were advertisements in glossy international magazines, on billboards and drive-time radio. The strategy worked: CEO-level executives, American celebrities, politicians, ultra-high-net-worth individuals, the rich, royal and famous were soon reveling in the new way to fly, using Dubai as a hub to connect to the world.
“This airline is amazing,” Paris Hilton tweeted in June 2009 from her Emirates first-class suite. The tweet was estimated by one publicist to be worth $1.5 million in public relations, with $3 million more in free advertising if the message spread in the media, which of course it did. “For the first time, you could travel commercially better than you could privately in anything like a Gulfstream, which was in no way as luxurious as flying on Emirates in the first-class cabin,” says event planner Colin Cowie, who has flown 12 million miles across nearly a hundred countries and became allegiant to Emirates while producing the grand opening of the Atlantis, The Palm resort in Dubai in 2008. “To walk onto the A380 in 2008, to have a bathroom the size of an average Manhattan bathroom, your own attendant, a seven-minute shower, every amenity known to man, full-size bath towels is pretty amazing. You cannot do better on a commercial flight. It was a big game changer.”
Midway through the Dubai-London flight, the Middle Easterners in first class would change their attire to suit their destination. “You’d take off from the Middle East, and everyone would be covered in white robes or black abayas,” says Cowie. “You’d land in London ,and everyone would be in bespoke suits, high heels, tight jeans, fabulous fitted tops. It would be the exact opposite going back.”
Dr. Michael Apa, a leading New York–based cosmetic dentist, heard about Emirates at a dinner party at furrier Dennis Basso’s home in Manhattan. “I was sitting next to Ivanka Trump,” he says. “She said, ‘I just got back from Dubai, and Emirates is so great.’ But I didn’t really understand, because I didn’t think I would be going to Dubai anytime soon.” Then in 2006, members of the royal family became Apa’s patients in New York. In 2008 they flew him to visit on Emirates, which the royal family flies when they are not flying privately. “I’m sitting on that plane and I’m thinking, Wow!” says Apa, who now has an outpost of his practice in Dubai and flies Emirates often.
In the first-class cabin, Apa’s fellow passengers have included Virgin Airlines founder Richard Branson, sportscaster Bryant Gumbel, CNN anchor Richard Quest and rapper Busta Rhymes. But Emirates is as much about who you don’t see as much as who you do. “You are sleeping privately, while on other airlines you are sleeping with everyone else,” says Cowie.
Still, first and business class cannot sustain an airline. Emirates had to communicate its message to the masses. But outside of its stellar equipment and service, it did not yet know what its message was. By 2010, spurred by the explosive growth of tourism in Dubai, the airline was expanding at warp speed, ordering $13 billion in new aircraft.
“Emirates was growing probably as fast as Google,” says Scott Goodson, founder of the StrawberryFrog advertising agency in New York. “And the reason for that was the center of the world was changing. The old center of the world was Europe. Before, if you were flying from Asia to the States or Latin America, you had to fly through London or Frankfurt. But with the new 777s and the A380, the center of the world shifted to Dubai. If you worked at Facebook in California, you could fly from L.A. to Dubai, and it’s a quick hop to Mumbai. The airline realized they needed an idea that could rally both existing employees and new employees. Additionally, they needed help to make this Dubai-based airline not only relevant but admired by the world.”
by Mark Seal, Departures | Read more:
Image: Alexander Gronsky
The Jet Set Life - For Now
Brad knows what kind of plane Lagerfeld travels on because he has flown on it often. As the most senior and prominent member of a group of male models often referred to as Karl’s Boys, Brad not only works for Chanel and Fendi, the fashion houses where Lagerfeld is the head designer, but also accompanies him on yearly vacations to St. Tropez and work trips and to parties worldwide. He has been photographed with Lagerfeld so often that gossip blogs have mistakenly identified him as the designer’s boyfriend, but their relationship is not romantic. Lagerfeld refers to Brad and the other models that travel with him as his family, albeit a self-selected, genetically ideal one. “I hate ugly people,” Lagerfeld told me. “Very depressing.”
If models were show dogs, Brad would be a golden retriever. He has a strong jaw, hazel eyes and thick blond hair that seems perpetually windswept. The scruff on his face is shaped carefully, deliberately, to draw attention to his cheekbones. Unlike other beautiful people whose appeal lies in a distinctive facial quirk, Brad’s features are perfectly proportioned, with no apparent flaws or peculiarities. When he models, he looks like a Roman statue. “His best bit is the curve of his thigh,” Lagerfeld once said.
At the airport, Hudson snapped photos on an iPhone while his father modeled for him. An hour went by. The man in the suit reappeared and said there would be “a special cake” for “Mr. Hudson” on the plane. Brad asked if there might be special wine for him. “Might as well, right?” he said, and grinned.
Around 2:30, Lagerfeld appeared at the top of the stairs leading to the airport lounge. He was dressed in the manner that has made him the most recognizable designer in the world: a white shirt with a high Edwardian collar, fingerless leather gloves, a strict black blazer and sunglasses. A diamond cat brooch was pinned to his tie, and his tight black pants were covered in a microprint of his own likeness, which ran up and down the leg and, from far away, looked like a thick pinstripe.
“Hello!” Lagerfeld said. He glanced at the field of small planes and frowned. “And where is ours? Is it that one?” Brad pointed to the larger jet parked just out of view. “Ah, the big one,” Lagerfeld said. “Good.”
Lagerfeld was expected that evening in Dubai, where he would show Chanel’s 2015 resort collection in two days. Typically Brad would model in the show, but in Dubai, only Hudson, who is Lagerfeld’s godson, would walk the runway. (He has been appearing in Chanel shows since he was 2.) Lagerfeld was accompanied on the trip, as he is most places, by his 39-year-old bodyguard, Sébastien Jondeau, a part-time boxer with a sinewy build and an intense stare. (A few days later, he nearly body-checked Brad when he held a cup of coffee a little too close to Lagerfeld’s white blazer).
Lagerfeld led the way to the plane. Inside, a wineglass of Diet Coke awaited him at his seat. At the back of the aircraft was a single bed made up with crisp white linens.
“But where am I going to sleep?” Hudson asked.
“You sleep on your seat, darling,” Lagerfeld replied in his heavy German accent. “I have to arrive fresh, you don’t have to. Don’t be selfish.”
Lagerfeld rummaged in one of his many shopping bags and fished out a matching light blue Givenchy tank top and shirt with their tags still attached. “For Dubai,” he said, handing them to Brad. For the plane ride, Brad wore jeans and a blazer by Dior and white Nike high-top sneakers. A rose-gold Rolex glimmered on one wrist, and on the other he wore a diamond bracelet by Chrome Hearts, Lagerfeld’s favorite jewelry brand. “Karl is really generous,” Brad told me. “He likes his friends to look chic.”
After lunch — caviar and salmon tartare for Lagerfeld; caviar, foie gras and scallops for Brad; couscous and vegetables for Hudson — Lagerfeld fell asleep not in his bed, but upright in his seat, Dracula-like. He was still wearing his sunglasses, and the stiff collar of his shirt seemed to dig in uncomfortably at his neck. Brad took out a notebook and jotted down the trip’s mileage. He keeps a log of the cumulative distance he has traveled as a model, currently at 2.4 million miles. Back in St. Louis, where Brad is from, his mother, Barb, keeps track by pinning red flags on a large world map in her basement. The plane climbed into the sky and reached a quiet lull. “See, I told you,” Brad said. “Up here, there’s almost no turbulence.”
Brad likes to say that male modeling is to the women’s business as the W.N.B.A. is to the N.B.A. While Gisele Bündchen’s yearly income is estimated at around $47 million, men of Brad’s standing earn $200,000 to $500,000. A male model, however, can gain an advantage, and ensure career longevity, by forging relationships with influential designers and photographers.
Most of today’s top men have longstanding associations with certain labels. But in a way, Brad is unlike other models, because Lagerfeld isn’t like other designers. Lagerfeld has been at Chanel’s helm since 1983 and still designs 17 collections a year for Chanel, Fendi and his namesake line, an unprecedented feat of creative stamina. He is also a photographer who shoots campaigns for his labels as well as for other brands, like Audi. Brad has become the beneficiary of Lagerfeld’s productivity, appearing on his runways and in his ads. That Brad continues to work well into his 30s is due in no small part to having Lagerfeld as his champion. “If I never met Karl, there’s no way I’d still be modeling,” he said.
by Irina Aleksander, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brad Kroenig
Friday, January 16, 2015
Answering for America
[ed. See also: Patriot Act Idea Rises in France, and Is Ridiculed]
Americans who live abroad -- more than six million of us worldwide (not counting those who work for the U.S. government) -- often face hard questions about our country from people we live among. Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to explain everything that baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the United States. Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase. Which means that we Americans abroad are regularly asked to account for the behavior of our rebranded “homeland,” now conspicuously in decline and increasingly out of step with the rest of the world.
In my long nomadic life, I’ve had the good fortune to live, work, or travel in all but a handful of countries on this planet. I’ve been to both poles and a great many places in between, and nosy as I am, I’ve talked with people all along the way. I still remember a time when to be an American was to be envied. The country where I grew up after World War II seemed to be respected and admired around the world for way too many reasons to go into here.
That’s changed, of course. Even after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I still met people -- in the Middle East, no less -- willing to withhold judgment on the U.S. Many thought that the Supreme Court’s installation of George W. Bush as president was a blunder American voters would correct in the election of 2004. His return to office truly spelled the end of America as the world had known it. Bush had started a war, opposed by the entire world, because he wanted to and he could. A majority of Americans supported him. And that was when all the uncomfortable questions really began.
In the early fall of 2014, I traveled from my home in Oslo, Norway, through much of Eastern and Central Europe. Everywhere I went in those two months, moments after locals realized I was an American the questions started and, polite as they usually were, most of them had a single underlying theme: Have Americans gone over the edge? Are you crazy? Please explain.
Then recently, I traveled back to the “homeland.” It struck me there that most Americans have no idea just how strange we now seem to much of the world. In my experience, foreign observers are far better informed about us than the average American is about them. This is partly because the “news” in the American media is so parochial and so limited in its views both of how we act and how other countries think -- even countries with which we were recently, are currently, or threaten soon to be at war. America’s belligerence alone, not to mention its financial acrobatics, compels the rest of the world to keep close track of us. Who knows, after all, what conflict the Americans may drag you into next, as target or reluctant ally?
So wherever we expatriates settle on the planet, we find someone who wants to talk about the latest American events, large and small: another country bombed in the name of our “national security,” another peaceful protest march attacked by our increasingly militarized police, another diatribe against “big government” by yet another wannabe candidate who hopes to head that very government in Washington. Such news leaves foreign audiences puzzled and full of trepidation.
Question Time
Take the questions stumping Europeans in the Obama years (which 1.6 million Americans residing in Europe regularly find thrown our way). At the absolute top of the list: “Why would anyone oppose national health care?” European and other industrialized countries have had some form of national health care since the 1930s or 1940s, Germany since 1880. Some versions, as in France and Great Britain, have devolved into two-tier public and private systems. Yet even the privileged who pay for a faster track would not begrudge their fellow citizens government-funded comprehensive health care. That so many Americans do strikes Europeans as baffling, if not frankly brutal.
Americans who live abroad -- more than six million of us worldwide (not counting those who work for the U.S. government) -- often face hard questions about our country from people we live among. Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to explain everything that baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the United States. Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase. Which means that we Americans abroad are regularly asked to account for the behavior of our rebranded “homeland,” now conspicuously in decline and increasingly out of step with the rest of the world.
In my long nomadic life, I’ve had the good fortune to live, work, or travel in all but a handful of countries on this planet. I’ve been to both poles and a great many places in between, and nosy as I am, I’ve talked with people all along the way. I still remember a time when to be an American was to be envied. The country where I grew up after World War II seemed to be respected and admired around the world for way too many reasons to go into here.That’s changed, of course. Even after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I still met people -- in the Middle East, no less -- willing to withhold judgment on the U.S. Many thought that the Supreme Court’s installation of George W. Bush as president was a blunder American voters would correct in the election of 2004. His return to office truly spelled the end of America as the world had known it. Bush had started a war, opposed by the entire world, because he wanted to and he could. A majority of Americans supported him. And that was when all the uncomfortable questions really began.
In the early fall of 2014, I traveled from my home in Oslo, Norway, through much of Eastern and Central Europe. Everywhere I went in those two months, moments after locals realized I was an American the questions started and, polite as they usually were, most of them had a single underlying theme: Have Americans gone over the edge? Are you crazy? Please explain.
Then recently, I traveled back to the “homeland.” It struck me there that most Americans have no idea just how strange we now seem to much of the world. In my experience, foreign observers are far better informed about us than the average American is about them. This is partly because the “news” in the American media is so parochial and so limited in its views both of how we act and how other countries think -- even countries with which we were recently, are currently, or threaten soon to be at war. America’s belligerence alone, not to mention its financial acrobatics, compels the rest of the world to keep close track of us. Who knows, after all, what conflict the Americans may drag you into next, as target or reluctant ally?
So wherever we expatriates settle on the planet, we find someone who wants to talk about the latest American events, large and small: another country bombed in the name of our “national security,” another peaceful protest march attacked by our increasingly militarized police, another diatribe against “big government” by yet another wannabe candidate who hopes to head that very government in Washington. Such news leaves foreign audiences puzzled and full of trepidation.
Question Time
Take the questions stumping Europeans in the Obama years (which 1.6 million Americans residing in Europe regularly find thrown our way). At the absolute top of the list: “Why would anyone oppose national health care?” European and other industrialized countries have had some form of national health care since the 1930s or 1940s, Germany since 1880. Some versions, as in France and Great Britain, have devolved into two-tier public and private systems. Yet even the privileged who pay for a faster track would not begrudge their fellow citizens government-funded comprehensive health care. That so many Americans do strikes Europeans as baffling, if not frankly brutal.
Thursday, January 15, 2015
I Was an Amazon Chew Toy
I moved to Seattle five years ago, after being laid off from my job in New York at one of those startups where employees rally around the VC-fueled dream until they’re dumped via email arnd locked out of the office. A job at a larger, more established company like Amazon sounded good. Solid. For my second round of job interviews, I had been called in for meetings at the department’s temporary office in the Columbia Center tower. In a city where executives wear faded jeans and backpacks to work, the Columbia Center is Seattle’s lone totem to conspicuous consumption: seventy-six floors that hover over downtown’s more modest skyscrapers by a good two to three hundred feet, and are wrapped in reflective black glass.
Amazon prides itself on a rigorous hiring process. For a low-level merchandising job in Amazon’s books department, after passing two phone screens that included a logic puzzle—“How many floors are there in the Columbia Center? No, don’t look it up! Pretend there is no Internet”—I was called in for five back-to-back interviews that lasted from morning through lunch. During a break between interviews, the human resources recruiter, Ashley Jones1, came in to tell me more about the company’s benefits. There is something about the fastidious personal grooming of HR recruiters that makes one feel dumpy; gazing at me behind thick, mascara-coated eyelashes that boasted immaculate lash separation, she talked 401Ks and stock options while I stared longingly at her frizz-less locks. “And when we move to our new offices, you can bring your dog to work,” she said.
We live in such a dog-adoring culture that it’s hard to admit when you aren’t totally enamored of them. What you are supposed to feel—what you must always feel—is love. And dog owners are blessed with the extraordinary ability to call bullshit; they can sniff out your limp pats, your half-hearted game of catch. Soon the question comes: “Oh, you don’t like dogs?”
Translation:
1. How can you not like dogs?
2. How can you not like my dog?
3. When a dying baby’s in the street, do you kick it ‘til it fits in the gutter?
No one starts out this way. There’s a time when all kids want a pet, around the time when spreading boogers on the furniture is still okay. My older sister and I worked our way through a small menagerie of pets—hamsters, parakeets, and fish—though everything seemed to perish or run from our feeble, incapable hands. The grass in our backyard grew high, enriched by the nutrients of our decaying mistakes.
But when I was around nine, I was traumatized by my cousins’ unneutered dog, Max. When I visited them in Florida, he ignored the rest of the family, ran over to me, and humped my leg like he hadn’t had sex in years. No one would admit it that perhaps Max picked me because I looked most like a dog. My hair was black just like Max’s coat, and, crouched on the floor screaming, I was just about the same height as a German Shepherd. My cousin Susan always let it go on for a bit too long; I have never understood why people call out the names of their dogs when dogs only respond ten percent of the time, and like humans, never when they are having sex.
“Max! Max! (Ha, ha.) Oh Max, get off her!”
Hump. Hump.
“Bad dog. (Hee hee.) So bad!”
Hump. Hump. Hump.
“Max, what am I going to do with you?”
Humphumphumphumphumphumphump.
After two hours or just ten seconds—what did it matter, when a dog was humping the crap out of you?—she would amble the three long yards across the room to yank Max away, and I would crawl out from under the blanket, the only shield between me and Max’s terrifying dog penis. For years after, Susan would keep me up to date on how my sexual assailant was doing. “When are you coming back?” my cousin asked. “Max misses you.”
My job started in July, and we were supposed to move to Amazon’s new campus the following May. The new campus would unite most of the company into one luxurious mega-compound, the Amazonian equivalent of the Googleplex. I hoped to forget about the new buildings and their dog-filled corridors, but the move was always hovering in the distance, its little puppy paws scratching around the doorway of my mind, dying to be let out so it could take a massive dump. I started to dread my morning hike to work even more than usual. As the date grew closer, you could hear murmurings of excitement around the office and impassioned debates about pet supplies. Kayla, who sat to my left, wanted to discuss her dog’s latest issue. “He keeps peeing on the front yard. It’s so annoying. The neighbors keep complaining about our yard. So now I’m feeding him these pills that won’t kill the grass,” she said.
“There are pills for that?” I asked. I pictured a dog collapsing from acute renal failure in a flower patch. The dog would be fucked, but the begonias, immaculate. “How does that work?”
In November, I felt encouraged by an email sent out by our department head, Scott Reynolds. “Can each of you reply back to me if a) you have allergies to dogs and to what degree, e.g., can’t be on the same floor or just can’t pet them, or b) are afraid or don’t like dogs.”
“Can’t be on the same floor” indicated there might be dog-free floors, which made sense: A multibillion-dollar corporation that had built out space in their complex for nap rooms, outdoor decks, and organic vending machines had surely carved out a few dog-free floors for those of us who wanted to work in a yip-free environment. I speedily typed back my response. “I’m allergic to dog hair—can’t be around furniture or whatever for very long that dogs have been on.” I am far more allergic to cats than dogs, but an allergy is an allergy.
“So if someone had a dog in their office or at their desk,” he wrote back, “would that create problems?”
by Corina Zappia, The Awl | Read more:
Image: wablair
We live in such a dog-adoring culture that it’s hard to admit when you aren’t totally enamored of them. What you are supposed to feel—what you must always feel—is love. And dog owners are blessed with the extraordinary ability to call bullshit; they can sniff out your limp pats, your half-hearted game of catch. Soon the question comes: “Oh, you don’t like dogs?”
Translation:
1. How can you not like dogs?
2. How can you not like my dog?
3. When a dying baby’s in the street, do you kick it ‘til it fits in the gutter?
No one starts out this way. There’s a time when all kids want a pet, around the time when spreading boogers on the furniture is still okay. My older sister and I worked our way through a small menagerie of pets—hamsters, parakeets, and fish—though everything seemed to perish or run from our feeble, incapable hands. The grass in our backyard grew high, enriched by the nutrients of our decaying mistakes.
But when I was around nine, I was traumatized by my cousins’ unneutered dog, Max. When I visited them in Florida, he ignored the rest of the family, ran over to me, and humped my leg like he hadn’t had sex in years. No one would admit it that perhaps Max picked me because I looked most like a dog. My hair was black just like Max’s coat, and, crouched on the floor screaming, I was just about the same height as a German Shepherd. My cousin Susan always let it go on for a bit too long; I have never understood why people call out the names of their dogs when dogs only respond ten percent of the time, and like humans, never when they are having sex.
“Max! Max! (Ha, ha.) Oh Max, get off her!”
Hump. Hump.
“Bad dog. (Hee hee.) So bad!”
Hump. Hump. Hump.
“Max, what am I going to do with you?”
Humphumphumphumphumphumphump.
After two hours or just ten seconds—what did it matter, when a dog was humping the crap out of you?—she would amble the three long yards across the room to yank Max away, and I would crawl out from under the blanket, the only shield between me and Max’s terrifying dog penis. For years after, Susan would keep me up to date on how my sexual assailant was doing. “When are you coming back?” my cousin asked. “Max misses you.”
My job started in July, and we were supposed to move to Amazon’s new campus the following May. The new campus would unite most of the company into one luxurious mega-compound, the Amazonian equivalent of the Googleplex. I hoped to forget about the new buildings and their dog-filled corridors, but the move was always hovering in the distance, its little puppy paws scratching around the doorway of my mind, dying to be let out so it could take a massive dump. I started to dread my morning hike to work even more than usual. As the date grew closer, you could hear murmurings of excitement around the office and impassioned debates about pet supplies. Kayla, who sat to my left, wanted to discuss her dog’s latest issue. “He keeps peeing on the front yard. It’s so annoying. The neighbors keep complaining about our yard. So now I’m feeding him these pills that won’t kill the grass,” she said.
“There are pills for that?” I asked. I pictured a dog collapsing from acute renal failure in a flower patch. The dog would be fucked, but the begonias, immaculate. “How does that work?”
In November, I felt encouraged by an email sent out by our department head, Scott Reynolds. “Can each of you reply back to me if a) you have allergies to dogs and to what degree, e.g., can’t be on the same floor or just can’t pet them, or b) are afraid or don’t like dogs.”
“Can’t be on the same floor” indicated there might be dog-free floors, which made sense: A multibillion-dollar corporation that had built out space in their complex for nap rooms, outdoor decks, and organic vending machines had surely carved out a few dog-free floors for those of us who wanted to work in a yip-free environment. I speedily typed back my response. “I’m allergic to dog hair—can’t be around furniture or whatever for very long that dogs have been on.” I am far more allergic to cats than dogs, but an allergy is an allergy.
“So if someone had a dog in their office or at their desk,” he wrote back, “would that create problems?”
by Corina Zappia, The Awl | Read more:
Image: wablair
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