Does Living Alone Drive You Mad?

These are, statistically, boom times for middle-aged people who are living alone. Their numbers have nearly doubled since 1999, rising from 13 percent to 21 percent of the 55-to-64-year-old population. Singletons in general tend to dwell in large cities: Manhattan and Washington households are half-solo-occupant (by contrast, Idaho and Utah households are less than one-fifth so).

And there are, in fact, those who’d say this is healthy. In his 2012 book Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, sociologist Eric Klinenberg led the rallying cry. In Klinenberg’s formulation, the freedom to live alone is one of the triumphs of wealthier societies, and loneliness is but a memory thanks to, among other things, social media. The studies of UCLA genomics researcher Steven Cole, however, yielded somewhat-conflicting results. Cole did an analysis of gene activity in people with varying loneliness levels as measured by a survey. He controlled for factors like age, weight, and the use of prescription drugs. The result? Chronic loneliness (social isolation, that is, as opposed to mere stress or depression) correlates to actual changes in gene expression. Genes for bad things like inflammation get overexpressed, while genes for good things like antibodies are stifled. This could make a person more prone to infection, heart disease, and even cancer. The study also found the size of one’s social network matters less than the strength of one’s ties. Never mind all that liking on Facebook; medically speaking, a few close friends is better than many casual acquaintances.

In the end, is stability limiting — does it quash our vibrating uniqueness — or is it, in fact, stabilizing? In our youths, many of us suspected that being tied down to a partner and family might constrain us. But after 40, even that landscape starts to shift. Many singletons turn inward and start longing for the things so many of us longed to be free of in our 20s. One bachelor friend of mine decided at 46 that, after too many Trader Joe’s single-serve Indian meals (plus those all-too-handy microwaveable burritos, Kettle Chips, and chocolate-covered espresso beans), he had suddenly become too fat to appear in public — not even for a home-cooked dinner with three single (very friendly, and not too anorexic themselves) women. Another bachelor, another ex of mine in fact, became obsessed, as many do in L.A., with traffic patterns. When I invited him to a play — by James Joyce, his favorite author — he declared proudly and obstinately: “I won’t cross the 405 after 4 p.m.!,” practically waving a cane. Speaking of ­traffic, I admit that I couldn’t get out in the evenings at all by this point without my partner. He loves to drive — so that’s my personal Uber; he’ll flag the toothpaste spots on my collar (why so many? It’s because I vigorously brush my teeth without putting on my glasses); and if there is the sort of obligatory vaguely work-related L.A. party where you are “greeted” in the lobby by a wide-eyed intern crossing you off on a clipboard and the only real “mixing” offered is snatching both veggie bruschetta and Thai meat skewers off passing trays, at least we have each other to talk to before driving home and roundly complaining.

But what does that mean for all those people who don’t have that person to complain to? Or who, after nights spent apart, don’t have someone to come home to, to reassure them that, no, that wasn’t rude to say, and no, they didn’t really mean that, and no, you weren’t so drunk (or perhaps were, more than you realized)? All those people who spent all those years coming home only to their own thoughts. The more time I spend thinking about living alone, the more I kept coming back to that endless vacuum of mental space.

For writers who are mothers, like me, our customary complaint has always been that we never had time to ourselves. More recently, I’ve started suspecting that the belief that if we are alone with our thoughts, brilliant things will occur (a novel! An opera! A screenplay!) may be a myth. In fact, the opposite may be true — that, left solely to its own devices, one’s mind tends to go into endless fretting circles. There are the emails sent that drew no answer — do they not like you? Did you offend them? Did you ask too much? (And now we have social-media anxiety — if enough people don’t like our Instagrams right away, we might quickly take them down.) Let alone the stress over one’s impossible-to-fulfill ambition. And then there is the mole that you watch anxiously, day after day. (I am currently in a slightly alarmed relationship with a back molar that has me flossing four times a day.) One does retirement-account and property-tax sums in one’s head over and over again. To a certain extent, these are the worry beads of life, and a calming partner (if you have that sort of partner) can simply say, “There, there.” Or, “That’s enough for today — let’s shake up a cocktail, light up a bowl, and watch TV.”

And if you don’t, never mind socializing, even keeping our lonely caves relatively civilized can start to become challenging, though few will be quite as bizarre as legendary outsider artist Henry Darger. A solitary custodian who lived alone in a small apartment, in Chicago, Darger left behind not just a 15,145-page tome detailing wars between massive armies of girls (with penises) but also, less dramatically if no less tellingly, a ten-year daily weather journal. Think about that: a ten-year daily weather journal.

Sandra Tsing Loh, The Cut | Read more:
Image: The Big Lebowski’

The Two Chords You Need to Join the Ukulele Boom

[ed. My personal favorite (super easy) uke song: Eddie Vedder's Longing to Belong.]

Someone inform Zooey Deschanel on an olde tyme phone: the ukulele has gone mainstream. Yes, the instrument that was once a hipster essential alongside thick-rimmed glasses and craft beer is currently enjoying a massive sales boost. Amazon reports that, between 2013 and 2014, sales of the ukulele have increased by 1,200%.

But is the rise down to the so-called “Mumford effect” – or should we blame recent four-string abuser Meghan Trainor instead? “It’s replacing the recorder in schools now,” says Will Grove-White, member of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain and author of Get Plucky with the Ukulele. “It’s an easy way for kids to get into music. Unlike the recorder, you don’t need a lot of technique to get a tune out of it quickly. And ukuleles are also cheap: a good one costs less than £30.”

OK, we’ve got our diminutive friend in our hands, we have banished all memory of Tiny Tim tiptoeing through his tulips and we’re trying hard to channel Joaquin Phoenix in Her instead. So where do we begin?

“The easiest place to start is with some one-chord songs such as Bob Marley’s Get Up Stand Up,” says Grove-White. That’s just a C minor chord for the whole thing. Or you could try Chain of Fools by Aretha Franklin. It’s just a C 7th chord.”

Great. But now we’re getting pins and needles in our fingers and we have to admit that our Aretha impression isn’t quite what it used to be. Is there anything we can try that makes us look more like, say, Ryan Gosling in Blue Valentine?

by Priya Elan, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Sam Jones

For Pete's Sake

[ed. I'm still in shock. On the upside, Duck Soup readers won't have to wade through crazy sports posts for a while.]

We’ll never understand it. I can explain some of the logic behind Seattle’s now infamous second-and-goal play call. I can show you why Russell Wilson threw the pass. I can point out why it might not have been quite as awful a decision as it seemed immediately afterward, when we judge such choices almost entirely based on their outcomes. I’ll even get to how Bill Belichick nearly screwed up the situation before being bailed out by his team’s fifth cornerback. I’ll do all that. You will probably never understand why the Seahawks just didn’t hand the ball to Marshawn Lynch in that situation and worry about trying anything else later. Truthfully, neither will I.

I don’t think passing the ball was the right decision, but let me try to put together a case in which it might be a justifiable choice. After the game, Pete Carroll suggested that the Seahawks didn’t want to leave the Patriots any time for a last-ditch drive after Seattle’s seemingly inevitable touchdown. Granted, Carroll suggested his team was “… playing for third and fourth down,” which seems a little bizarre given that the Super Bowl was on the line, but I’m willing to give his ability to formulate coherent words 30 minutes after that play happened the benefit of the doubt, given that I was watching the game at home and could barely form meaningful sentences at what I had seen.

by Bill Barnwell, Grantland |  Read more:

Image: Mike Ehrmann/Getty

Beginners

Drinking gin and talking about love
(This is a draft of Carver’s story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” without Gordon Lish’s edits.)

My friend Herb McGinnis, a cardiologist, was talking. The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. It was Saturday afternoon. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Herb and I and his second wife, Teresa—Terri, we called her—and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque, but we were all from somewhere else. There was an ice bucket on the table. The gin and the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. Herb thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. When he was young he’d spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He’d left the Church at the same time, but he said he still looked back to those years in the seminary as the most important in his life.

Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Herb loved her so much he tried to kill her. Herb laughed after she said this. He made a face. Terri looked at him. Then she said, “He beat me up one night, the last night we lived together. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles, all the while saying, ‘I love you, don’t you see? I love you, you bitch.’ He went on dragging me around the living room, my head knocking on things.” She looked around the table at us and then looked at her hands on her glass. “What do you do with love like that?” she said. She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair that hung down her back. She liked necklaces made of turquoise, and long pendant earrings. She was fifteen years younger than Herb, had suffered periods of anorexia, and during the late sixties, before she’d gone to nursing school, had been a dropout, a “street person,” as she put it. Herb sometimes called her, affectionately, his hippie.

“My God, don’t be silly. That’s not love, and you know it,” Herb said. “I don’t know what you’d call it—madness is what I’d call it—but it’s sure as hell not love.”

“Say what you want to, but I know he loved me,” Terri said. “I know he did. It may sound crazy to you, but it’s true just the same. People are different, Herb. Sure, sometimes he may have acted crazy. O.K. But he loved me. In his own way, maybe, but he loved me. There was love there, Herb. Don’t deny me that.”

Herb let out breath. He held his glass and turned to Laura and me. “He threatened to kill me, too.” He finished his drink and reached for the gin bottle. “Terri’s a romantic. Terri’s of the ‘Kick-me-so-I’ll-know-you-love-me’ school. Terri, hon, don’t look that way.” He reached across the table and touched her cheek with his fingers. He grinned at her.

“Now he wants to make up,” Terri said. “After he tries to dump on me.” She wasn’t smiling.

“Make up what?” Herb said. “What is there to make up? I know what I know, and that’s all.”

“What would you call it then?” Terri said. “How’d we get started on this subject anyway?” She raised her glass and drank. “Herb always has love on his mind,” she said. “Don’t you, honey?” She smiled now, and I thought that was the last of it.

“I just wouldn’t call Carl’s behavior love, that’s all I’m saying, honey,” Herb said. “What about you guys?” he said to Laura and me. “Does that sound like love to you?”

by Raymond Carver, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Jessica Hines

What’s the Dam Problem

Why it's so hard to design a fish ladder that works

The salmon look stressed. Behind the algae-streaked windows at Seattle’s Hiram Chittenden fish ladder they’re bumping heads, flipping in the current, and pointing their narrow jaws upstream.

To get to this point, they’ve already swum through the Straits of Juan de Fuca and the Puget Sound, and jumped through the first 17 steps of the ladder, which looks like a skinny set of concrete bleachers. Most fish passes aren’t as visible at the Seattle one, which has an observation deck where you can peer into the steps, but the way the fish have to work around a manmade barrier in the river is common. From here, the fish will keep following the current upstream to spawn in the stream where they were born. Anadramous fish are imprinted, Twilight style, in the rivers where they hatched, so depending on where they came from, they’ll still have several more dams to navigate.

There are more than 80,000 dams in the U.S. and nearly all of them have some kind of fish pass. They range from multi-step ladders like the Seattle one to elevators that suck the fish upstream to nature-like diversion canals. Some of them have been in place since the colonists started farming, and in 1890 the state of Washington passed a law that all dams, “wherever food fish are wont to ascend,” needed to include a fishway. The rest of the country eventually followed suit. Now, any new hydropower dam needs to get its fish ladder design cleared by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. But there aren’t a ton of new dams going in, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that just because a ladder exists it doesn’t mean that fish are going to figure out how to use it, or want to. (...)

All fish migrate to a degree, but dams have the biggest disrupting force on anadramous fish, like salmon or shad, which spawn in rivers but spend most of their lives in the ocean, and catadramous ones, like eel, which live in freshwater, but swim out into the ocean to do it.

There are other factors, like overfishing and climate change, which also hurt declining fish populations, but dams are the most obvious, and because of that, environmental engineers, dam operators, and fish biologists have been trying, with limited success, to design ways for fish to get past them.

In the middle of last century, dams were seen as the answer to a wide range of issues, from water supply to energy security. JFK boosted dam building in his campaign speeches. From the 1920s to the ‘70s, the Army Corps of Engineers built tens of thousands of dams, ones like the Columbia River’s Grand Coulee, which has cut off more access to fish habitat than any other structure in the world. That boom in dam building took a toll. “Many fishways were originally designed for adult salmon over 50 years ago, but we’ve recently found that they don’t work well for other species,” says USGS fish biologist Alexander Haro.

He’s trying to find ways to make them more appealing. At the Conte Anadramous Fish Branch, in Massachusetts, Haro sends fish through a respirometer to see how much energy they exert when they’re stressed, and through what he calls a “sprint swimming flume,” to see how fast they can swim and for how long. “It’s kind of like a high-speed treadmill for fish,” he says. He’ll use that data to try to design fishways that actually work.

The biggest issue, according to Jim Taurek, a NOAA restoration ecologist, is that different fish swim very differently. Some, like salmon, can jump high and sprint, while others — sturgeon for instance — mosey upstream. Alewife freak out in confined spaces and shad don’t like air bubbles.

Because of that, there are almost as many ways to design a passage as there are fish trying to swim through it. “In general, the lower the slope of a fishway, the easier fish can ascend, but that also means the fishway needs to be longer, and many fish will not stay in a fishway structure for very long,” Haro says. It’s possible to have a theoretically perfectly designed ladder that keeps fish stranded on the bottom, because they don’t like its style.

In addition to figuring out the size and shape of the structure you also need to design an appealing entrance, and to make sure the river flow points the fish in the right direction. Salmon can’t use an elevator if they can’t find the door. “Building fish ladders, even thought it’s engineering, it’s also art,” Waldman says.

Then you have to engineer the other side, for downstream fish migration. That’s simpler from a design perspective — the hardest part is teasing the fish out of the main current and into the fish pass — but it can be complicated from the financial side. Running water around the dam is the simplest solution, but utilities make their money on river flows, so they’re hesitant to spill a single drop.

by Heather Hansman, Medium | Read more:
Image: French Lake Dam fish ladder, Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, Oklahoma. Flickr/lsmith2010

How Hair Braiding Explains What's Gone Wrong With America's Economy

Isis Brantley has been arrested, jailed and a plaintiff in a federal civil rights case. But she’s not a whistleblower or a political dissident.

She teaches how to braid hair.

For almost 20 years, Isis has fought Texas over her right to braid hair and to pass on her knowledge to others. Her struggle recently culminated in a major federal court decision earlier this month, which shined a spotlight onoccupational licensing. Today, millions of Americans, like Isis, have to seek permission from the government—or fight back—before they can do their jobs.

Isis has been braiding since 1979 and has taught others in the art of natural hair care since 1984. Like many African braiders, Isis doesn’t use chemicals, dyes or coloring agents when she braids, twists or weaves hair. As she put it, her personal philosophy is “healing through hair.”

But in 1997, seven uniformed and undercover officers handcuffed Isis in front of her customers and dragged her out of her salon in Dallas. She had previously been found guilty and convicted for the surreal offense of braiding hair without a cosmetology license.

After a decade of fighting for reform, in 2007, Texas acquiesced and created a separate, 35-hour hair-braiding certificate. The state “grandfathered” Isis in, and honored her as the first natural-hair-care expert in the state. Finally, Isis could legally braid hair for a living.

Unfortunately, that reform didn’t apply to teaching hair braiding. In Texas, braiding schools were regulated as barber colleges. So despite her decades of experience, Isis would have had to spend about $25,000 to comply and transform her natural hair salon into a barber college. Those changes were needed so that her teaching would satisfy the 35-hours of training students need to obtain a license in braiding.

Thanks to the growth in occupational licensing, Isis is not alone. Licensure was once imposed only on professionals like doctors and lawyers. In the early 1950s, less than five percent of Americans needed a license to work from the government. Recent estimates put that number as high as 30 percent, as reported in a new study conducted for the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project by Morris Kleiner, a professor at the University of Minnesota. Moreover, according to a wide-ranging 2012 report on licensing by the Institute for Justice, occupational licenses affect many low-income or low-skilled occupations, which in turn have a greater proportion of African-American and Hispanic workers.

Occupational licensing is typically defended as a way to protect consumers and ensure quality practitioners. But many licensing requirements are just downright baffling. In Isis’ case, Texas wanted her braiding school, the Institute for Ancestral Braiding, to have a minimum of 2,000 square feet of floor space (more than twice the size of her current facility); install at least 10 barber chairs, (even though braiders don’t cut hair); and have at least five sinks, despite the fact that “the state makes it illegal for hair braiders to provide services that require a sink.” The regulations were so strict, Texas couldn’t name a single school that taught only the natural hair-braiding curriculum and complied with the state’s barber regulations.

by Nick Sibilla, Forbes | Read more:
Image:uncredited

Bending Jaws

[ed. Big surf along Hawaii's northern shores this winter.]

via: Surfer Magazine

Marshawn and Gronk

[ed. The hopes and dreams of entire cities, millions of people, rest with these guys. Not Conan, the other two guys.]

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids

A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son's confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless.

Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 35 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.

The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

Praising children's innate abilities, as Jonathan's parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on “process” (consisting of personal effort and effective strategies) rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.

The Opportunity of Defeat

I first began to investigate the underpinnings of human motivation—and how people persevere after setbacks—as a psychology graduate student at Yale University in the 1960s. Animal experiments by psychologists Martin Seligman, Steven Maier and Richard Solomon, all then at the University of Pennsylvania, had shown that after repeated failures, most animals conclude that a situation is hopeless and beyond their control. After such an experience, the researchers found, an animal often remains passive even when it can effect change—a state they called learned helplessness.

People can learn to be helpless, too, but not everyone reacts to setbacks this way. I wondered: Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people's beliefs about why they had failed.

by Carol S. Dweck, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Jim Cummins/Getty

Gordon Parks, Louis Armstrong, Los Angeles, California, 1969.
via:

Go Ahead, Angela, Make My Day

It was in Greece that the infernal euro crisis began just over five years ago. So it is classically fitting that Greece should now be where the denouement may be played out—thanks to the big election win on January 25th for the far-left populist Syriza party led by Alexis Tsipras (see article). By demanding a big cut in Greece’s debt and promising a public-spending spree, Mr Tsipras has thrown down the greatest challenge so far to Europe’s single currency—and thus to Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, who has set the austere path for the continent.

The stakes are high. Although everybody, including Mr Tsipras, insists they want Greece to stay in the euro, there is now a clear threat of Grexit. In 2011-12 Mrs Merkel wavered, but then decided to support the Greeks to keep them in the single currency. She did not want Germany to be blamed for another European disaster, and both northern creditors and southern debtors were nervous about the consequences of a chaotic Greek exit for Europe’s banks and their economies.

This time the odds have changed. Grexit would look more like the Greeks’ fault, Europe’s economy is stronger and 80% of Greece’s debt is in the hands of other governments or official bodies. Above all the politics are different. The Finns and the Dutch, like the Germans, want Greece to stick to promises it made when they twice bailed it out. And in southern Europe centrist governments fear that a successful Greek blackmail would push voters towards their own populist opposition parties, like Spain’s Podemos (see article).

A good answer to a bad question

It could all get very messy. But there are broadly three possible outcomes: the good, the disastrous, and a compromise to kick the can down the road. The history of the euro has always been to defer the pain, but now the battle is about politics not economics—and compromise may be much harder.

Tantalisingly, there is a good solution to be grabbed for both Greece and Europe. Mr Tsipras has got two big things right, and one completely wrong. He is right that Europe’s austerity has been excessive. Mrs Merkel’s policies have been throttling the continent’s economy and have ushered in deflation. The belated launch of quantitative easing (QE) by the European Central Bank admits as much. Mr Tsipras is also right that Greece’s debt, which has risen from 109% to a colossal 175% of GDP over the past six years despite tax rises and spending cuts, is unpayable. Greece should be put into a forgiveness programme just like a bankrupt African country. But Mr Tsipras is wrong to abandon reform at home. His plans to rehire 12,000 public-sector workers, abandon privatisation and introduce a big rise in the minimum wage would all undo Greece’s hard-won gains in competitiveness.

Hence this newspaper’s solution: get Mr Tsipras to junk his crazy socialism and to stick to structural reforms in exchange for debt forgiveness—either by pushing the maturity of Greek debt out even further or, better still, by reducing its face value. Mr Tspiras could vent his leftist urges by breaking up Greece’s cosy protected oligopolies and tackling corruption. The combination of macroeconomic easing with microeconomic structural reform might even provide a model for other countries, like Italy and even France.

A very logical dream—until you wake up and remember that Mr Tsipras probably is a crazy leftwinger and Mrs Merkel can barely accept the existing plans for QE. Hence the second, disastrous outcome: Grexit. Optimists are right that it would now be less painful than in 2012, but it would still hurt.

by Editors, The Economist |  Read more:

Image: Bridgeman

Farnese Gallery. Annibale Carracci. Mercury and Paris, (detail). Frescoe. 1597-1603/4. Rome
via:

Hey, Newcomers—Welcome to the Only City in the Country that Isn't Ridiculous and Horrible!

Hey! Are you new here? Welcome. Have a seat. Don't sit there, it's wet, sit there. Would you like anything? We don't have that. Would you like something else? Would you like some weed? We have plenty of weed.

One more question: Who are you again?

Just to make things clear, it's not like the rest of us aren't happy you're here. We're happy you're here. Ish. Happy-ish. We're not super happy about what's happening to our rents, but we're happy that we're a bigger city than Boston now, because of you. (Fuck Boston.) We're happy to be going to the Super Bowl. (Once again: Fuck Boston.) We're happy you chose Seattle over all the other places you could have chosen, but it's not exactly like we're surprised, because all of us chose Seattle, too. Seattle is better than other places. FACT. We're also happy you're here because everyone currently living here who's single was just going, 'God, we could really use some new people to choose from.' The dating pool was getting gnarly. Please have sex with as many of us as you can.

Now, as to your questions. "Oooh, the Seattle Freeze—what do you do about the Seattle Freeze!?" Please stop asking this question. Kindly click here and stop asking us this question.

As for, "Oooh, I don't know how to find restaurants on my own! Tell me food secrets only locals know!" That's a reasonable request. Pro tip: Angela Garbes, who is hilarious, writes about eating out in the city every damn week in The Stranger, and all the damn time on Slog, our blog (slog.thestranger.com), and she's gone ahead and written down some foodie secrets only locals know here. Read it, memorize it, and then keep everything you learn secret from the next wave of newcomers. (...)

For those of you who just want to bitch and moan about how California is better than Seattle, or how New York City is better than Seattle, or how Vienna is better than Seattle, or how Spokane is better than Seattle, we have you covered, there, too. (Spoiler alert: Not even the person from Spokane thinks Spokane is better than Seattle.)

A whole bunch of newcomers to the city are living in micro-housing, aka apartments the size of closets, because Seattle is more lenient on developers building apartments the size of closets than any other city in the country, which we're quite proud of, because density is good, and people ought to be able to live in whatever shapes they damn well want to. But what is it like to live in one of those closets? Heidi Groover went and found out.

The other kind of newcomer to the city is living in a brand-new luxury building with a rooftop fire pit and boozy building-wide parties—and 9 times out of 10, this kind of newcomer works for Amazon or Microsoft. Brendan Kiley ascends to that world right here.

by Staff, The Stranger |  Read more:
Image: Malcolm Smith

New to Town: A Special Issue of The Stranger
First Impressions of Seattle by Someone from California
Eight Easy Steps to Help You Break Through the Dreaded "Seattle Freeze"
First Impressions of Seattle by Someone from Vienna
First Impressions of Seattle by Someone from New York
The Mysteries of Seattle's New-to-Town Tech Workers
First Impressions of Seattle by Someone from Spokane
A User's Guide to Seattle's Tourist Attractions (Which All New Residents Are Required to Visit at Least Once)
Hundreds of Newcomers in Seattle Are Refugees from Iraq
Living in a Micro-Apartment Is "Like Living in a Closet"
Okay, New Starbucks Palace on Pike Street, What the Hell Are You?

Ann Greene Kelly, Untitled, 2013. Brick, shoe sole, wire, Quickcrete, found stone. 8x6x7”. Photo: Lance Brewer. Courtesy the artist.
via:

Lars Andersen: A New Level of Archery

[ed. THE viral video of the moment. Awesome.]

The Instant Ramen Power Rankings

After interviewing Hans Lienesch, the Ramen Rater, I wondered: how does the instant ramen in my neighborhood rate? What’s best? There are countless brands of instant noodles made and distributed around the world. How hard or punishing would it be to taste one’s way through a stack of them to figure out what’s worth keeping in the cupboard?

And, after 17 packages of ramen, I couldn’t eat anymore. My feet were swollen like they’d been on a transcontinental flight. It had to stop somewhere.

If we can rank our pro football teams, I thought, we can do it to our food. Why not take the sports analogy even further, I asked myself through sodium-induced mania at 1:30 in the morning, and for a while, I was convinced I’d created a highly scientific and totally foolproof metric to measure instant noodle quality. The equation looked something like this:

rSCORE = (R_taste*1.1)〖+R〗_value+V_misc-((N_a-2000))/500

〖 R〗_value=(.69-Price)/1.1

V_misc= (E_prep+A_ttract+F_ind+S_num)/6

I eventually realized that what I had done didn’t make much sense at all; I’ll chalk it up to hallucinations due to consuming one million percent of my daily salt intake. In the end, I just assigned a 1-10 score and plotted the brands on a scatter chart based on taste and price.

MyKuali Penang White Curry

Like Hans Lienesch, The Ramen Rater, said in my interview with him, there’s just nothing like this on the market right now. The creamy, sinus-clearing broth actually tastes like it took more than three minutes to prepare. It includes a sachet of non-dairy creamer (!), and it is the one instant noodle you might be able to pass off in an actual restaurant. The only issue is that it’s difficult to find—I had to get it on eBay, where I paid about $2.75 per package.

Taste (out of 10): 9.5

Acecook Super Big Ramen Tonkotsu

I loved this ramen—the broth was deeply rich and creamy, like having a nice hot pig smoothie. The ramen block was also exceptional, with thicker-than-average noodles. This product also had, by a lot, the most insane amount of sodium: 3,080 mg, which is 128% of your daily allowance. Your rings won’t fit your hands after eating this, but your palate will thank you.

Taste: 9

by Lucas Peterson, Lucky Peach |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Black Mirror

One of the most disturbing moments in the British TV series “Black Mirror” is what appears to be a passionate love scene. The episode takes place in a version of the future where most people have had small devices, called “grains,” surgically implanted in their heads that can record and replay their memories on demand. As the encounter progresses, it is revealed that the couple are actually having dull and mechanical sex, their eyes grayed out as they both tune into their grains to watch memories of their previous trysts, from an earlier, steamier time in their relationship.

Each episode of “Black Mirror” — named for the way our screens look while powered down — paints a different nightmarescape of a future gone technologically awry. In one episode, for example, a woman uses a mail-order kit to create a golem of her deceased boyfriend using his social-media profiles. Another follows an obnoxious cartoon character as he becomes a powerful political figure after performing a series of public stunts. Still another imagines a post-peak-oil future, wherein people generate energy and currency by pedaling on stationary bikes, and the only escape from the drudgery is reality-show fame. The show feels like required viewing for our always connected, device-augmented lives. (...)

That the show probably owes its American stature to social media is perfectly appropriate, because the series fixates on our codependent and contradictory relationship with technology and media. We love being able to share our inner monologues and the minutia of our lives with one another, until, that is, it all goes horribly wrong in ways previously unimaginable. Or even if it doesn’t, we still find ourselves annoyed, jealous, infuriated and even depressed by the behavior of others (and occasionally ourselves) online. And yet we keep logging on. (...)

In America, we treat the release of each new Apple product with the reverence usually reserved for pop icons. The sly ingenuity of “Black Mirror” is that it nails down our love for the same devices we blame for our psychological torment. Brooker understands that even as we swear off tweeting and promise to stop Googling our exes, our phones are still the last things we see before falling asleep and the first things we reach for when we awaken.

To that end, the gadgets in “Black Mirror,” including the creepy memory-recording devices, look sleek enough to want, which is perhaps the show’s cleverest trick. It is impossible to watch the show and not idly fantasize about having access to some of the services and systems they use, even as you see them used in horrifying ways. (You might not feel this way about, say, “The Terminator.”) Most television shows and movies can’t even correctly portray the standard interfaces that we use to browse the Web, send a text message or make a voice call, let alone design them in a desirable way.

by Jenna Wortham, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tom Gauld

Piotr Rosiński. Przejście (Passage)
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Hamlet and Ophelia, Andrej Dugin
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Basic Bitch

[ed. See also: Columbusing, and overanalyzing the term Basic]

Over the past year, we have arrived at an odd cultural and lexicographical moment: To dress “normal” is the height of chic, yet to call someone “basic” is the chicest put-down, one that shows no signs of disappearing. This is despite the increasing obviousness, with ever-more widespread usage, that basic isn’t an especially new or insightful insult. It’s just about the oldest one in the book.

Basic, according to the BuzzFeed quizzes and CollegeHumor videos that wrested the term from the hip-hop world and brought it into the realm of white-girl-on-white-girl insults, means someone who owns things like Uggs and North Face and leggings. She likes yogurt and fears carbs (there is an exception for brunch), and loves her friends, unless and until she secretly hates them. She finds peplum flattering and long (or at least shoulder-grazing) hair reliably attractive. She exercises in various non-bulk-building ways, some of which have inspired her to purchase special socks for the experience. She bought the Us Weekly with Lauren Conrad’s wedding on the cover. She Pins. She runs her gel-manicured hands up and down the spine of female-centric popular culture of the last 15 years, and is satisfied with what she feels. She doesn’t, apparently, long for more.

The basic bitch — as she’s sometimes called because it’s funnier when things alliterate, and because you’re considered a poor sport if you don’t find it funny — is almost always a she. In more sophisticated renderings,her particularities vary by region and even neighborhood, but she is almost always portrayed as utterly besotted with Starbucks’s Pumpkin Spice Latte. It is the setup to nearly every now-familiar punch line about a basic bitch, her love for the autumnal mass-market beverage. Pumpkin Spice Lattes are “mall.” They reveal a girlish interest in seasonal changes and an unsophisticated penchant for sweet. They are sidewalk chalkboards announcing their existence in polka-dot bubble letters. They are from the mid-aughts. They are easy targets.

Basic rolls beautifully off the tongue. It’s a useful insult. Like trashy or gauche, it derives its power from the knowledge that if you can recognize someone or something as basic, you probably, yourself, aren’t it. It also feels restrained, somehow. You don’t quite have to stoop to calling someone a slut or a halfwit or anything truly cruel. It’s not as implicating as calling someone tacky — the basic woman is so evidently nonthreatening she doesn’t even deserve such a raised pulse. Basic-tagging is coolly lazy. It conveys a graduate seminar’s worth of semiotics in five letters. “So basic,” you think, scrolling through your Facebook feed. “She’s basic,” you offer to a friend, commenting on her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. It was a word we’d been looking for.

by Noreen Malone, The Cut |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia