Heart Attack Grill

[ed. I'll admit, I'd never heard of the Heart Attack Grill until yesterday when a friend who visits Las Vegas regularly mentioned it. Truth in Advertising!]

On a recent trip to Las Vegas, I stopped by the Heart Attack Grill.

The restaurant has been in the news recently after its owner "Doctor Jon" Basso gave a bizarre interview on Bloomberg TV where he said his restaurant kills its customers. He even carried the (alleged) cremated remains of a customer with him.

And while it's a macabre gimmick, it's not entirely inaccurate. Heart Attack Grill is crazy unhealthy: The restaurant's signature dish is its 9,982-calorie Quadruple Bypass Burger, which weighs a staggering 3 pounds. Customers can order burgers with up to eight patties, all topped with chili, tomato, cheese, onion, and bacon (for an extra fee).

Inside, the restaurant has an ironic medical theme with nurse waitresses and hospital-themed decor. Even the customers have to wear hospital gowns, and anyone more than 350 pounds eats for free.

by Megan Willett, Business Insider |  Read more:

Image: Megan Willett

Bikes vs. Cars: The Deadly War Nobody's Winning

Concussion or no concussion, Steve Hill wants a new bike. Pronto.

“To be honest with you, I feel like I should have it already,” he says to the woman he’s facing, Megan Hottman, a 35-year-old personal-injury lawyer who’s taking notes on a laptop inside her Golden, Colorado, office. From where I sit, just to the right of Hill*—who is 38 and trim—he looks pretty good, considering that he suffered a concussion and whiplash in a car collision just one week ago. But as I watch him, I have to wonder if he should have even driven himself to this meeting. As a longtime rider, I’ve endured similar injuries: I once went to the ER with a concussion after a crash, and I felt the effects for weeks. Hill has already told Hottman that he’s been experiencing dizzy spells.
*Because of ongoing litigation, the name of Hottman’s client has been changed.

Talking a beat too slowly, Hill describes a big ride he’s supposed to do eight days from now. It’s a Colorado event that took place last summer and covered more than 100 miles and over 13,000 feet of vertical gain—a major undertaking.

Hottman nods. She’s a dedicated rider herself, so she knows all about the hunger to get back on the road. But Hill is in no shape for a day like that, and he’s naive to think that a lawyer can serve up a new high-end bike anytime soon.

“Almost every client sitting in that chair has some event coming up,” Hottman says diplomatically. “These accidents only seem to happen when you have something on the burner.”

Hill’s crash occurred in Boulder, 20 miles north of Golden. Pedaling his $10,000 dream machine on a pleasant summer afternoon, Hill was traveling north on two-lane Cherryvale Road as he approached South Boulder Road. He had the green light as he entered the intersection, at about 25 miles per hour.

Just then, a car turned left in front of him. Hill was far enough away to avoid a crash, but a second car abruptly turned left, too, and he couldn’t dodge it. The vehicle’s right front corner hit his left foot, shearing the pedal cleat off his cycling shoe. The car bulled into the seat tube of Hill’s frame, which snapped. He went flying, helmet first.

“I had very little road rash,” he says. “But I hit my head.”

“Yowzers,” says Hottman, a long, lean, and outgoing ex–professional road racer who now runs her own 50-member cycling team—called TheCyclist-Lawyer.com—and still manages to ride 6,000 miles a year. “Super, super violent!”

Hill again brings up the long ride he wants to do. “Do you think we’d be able to settle in a timely manner?” he asks.

With that, Hottman lifts her hands off the keyboard and peers up from the screen. Cyclists who consider hiring Hottman don’t always know about her out-of-office activities, which include a lot of educational work. She teaches bike-handling skills to beginners. She gives lectures to cops about relevant laws. She’s the coauthor of a forthcoming reference book that’s aimed at every attorney and judge in her field. Hottman has dissected cycling athletically, legally, and ethically, and she’s concluded that, while she dearly loves her two-wheeled brothers and sisters, riders don’t always display sound judgment.

“I’m not pro-cyclist all the time,” Hottman told me when we first spoke months earlier. “I get frustrated when I see riders behaving badly.” (...)

In her office, in the courtroom, in the news, on the Web, and on city streets and country roads, Megan Hottman encounters various species of the same genus: riders who are sure they’ve been wronged and simultaneously believe that cyclists are always right.

Often as not, they have been wronged, but Hottman consistently quotes a statistic that many riders don’t know or choose to ignore: roughly 47 percent of all bike-car mishaps happen because riders are at fault. That figure is debatable—there’s no national database, and Hottman’s use of it derives from small-sample studies, media accounts, and her own experience working on cases over the years. Still, there’s no doubt that riders often behave recklessly on roads and highways. Ask any driver who’s seen them blow through red lights or come screaming the wrong direction down one-way streets.

A particularly sour moment for cycling’s image occurred last September in New York City’s Central Park, when Jill Tarlov, a 58-year-old mother of two, stepped off a curb and into the path of 31-year-old Harlem cyclist Jason Marshall, who was swerving around other pedestrians and reportedly in an aerodynamic tuck when he hit her. Three days later, Tarlov, the wife of a CBS senior vice president, died from severe head trauma. Marshall, who told reporters that the collision was “unavoidable,” hasn’t been charged with a crime.

In San Francisco in March of 2012, cyclist Chris Bucchere killed an elderly pedestrian in the city’s Castro district, hitting him after running multiple stop signs. According to a report on the mishap in the San Francisco Chronicle, three other pedestrians had been mowed down in the Bay Area in the past year. Bucchere ultimately pleaded guilty to felony vehicular manslaughter.

We all know that motorists can be reckless and myopic as well, and statistically they may be at fault in car-bike accidents nearly half the time. When drivers screw up or drive too aggressively—or with outright malice—the consequences are usually dire for bicyclists because of the harsh realities of physics. Cars are massive metal beasts; bikes are not. When collisions happen, bikes and their riders get the worst of it, regardless of who’s at fault.

by Andrew Tilin, Outside | Read more:
Image: John Haynes

1933, Japan, 人を笑はせる小話集 / Hito o warawaseru kobanashishū
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Nap Like a Pro

Growing up, sleep was considered paramount in my family home. My siblings and I didn’t have many house rules – bedtimes were flexible, we had free reign over microwaved TV dinners (this was the 1980s), and video games. But one thing was always crystal clear: we couldn’t disturb an adult, or another kid, who was taking a nap.

As I got older, I was in for a rude awakening. Apparently, society looks down upon napping in the adult working world. But evidence is growing that napping can produce cognitive benefits from increased alertness to improved motor skills, perception and memory consolidation. So how do you get the best from a brief bit of shuteye? (...)

In a study published in 2008, the University of California’s Sara Mednick – author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life – and her colleagues compared the benefits of 200mg of caffeine (about the amount in a cup of coffee) with a 60 to 90 minute daytime nap on various memory tasks. They found that a nap generally improved memory performance, while caffeine either didn’t affect – or worsened – performance. The researchers suggest that caffeine blocks consolidation of new material into long-term memory by increasing levels of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine in the hippocampus (the same neurotransmitter that naturally decreases during slow wave sleep).

The promised benefits of sleep have even persuaded a few firms to allow their employees to nap at work. Earlier this year, software companyHubSpot designed a napping room in its Massachusetts office that features a hammock and dim lighting. Employees are free to book the space without limitations.

According to HubSpot’s Alison Elworthy, the policy is a huge success, especially helpful for new parents who are making up for disrupted sleep at night, or employees recovering from jetlag. “People are really excited to use it and haven’t abused the policy at all,” she says.

Other firms have had less success. Earlier this year, BBC Capital reported that napping policies led to slacking off and procrastination at some companies, and a 30% drop in productivity at one Toronto-based tech start-up.

Even so, Mednick claims that about 40% of the population are habitual nappers – meaning they feel the need for, and benefit from, a regular afternoon snooze. So if you’re a natural napper (and I am), what is the most effective way to nap?

The best way to nap

According to researchers, the most natural time to take a nap, based on our circadian rhythms, is in the afternoon sometime between 2 and 4pm. Mednick even designed a napping wheel that pinpoints the ideal time to snooze, when a nap would contain a good balanced of slow wave and REM sleep. This balance typically occurs six to eight hours after waking. (...)

But the best way to nap also depends on what kind of effects you’re looking for. In a 2009 study, Mednick and her colleagues compared the effects of REM sleep, non-REM sleep, and quiet rest (while awake) on creative problem-solving. On the morning of the test, students were given a task in which they had to come up with a word that is associated with three apparently unrelated words – for instance ‘falling’, ‘actor’ and ‘dust’ can all be associated with the word ‘star’. Early in the afternoon, the students either took an REM nap, a non-REM nap or spent time resting while awake. When they returned in the evening to repeat versions of the morning’s test, the students who had taken the REM naps performed the best. In other words, it seems that REM can enhance creative problem solving.

“So if you’re looking for a restorative nap, you should sleep later in the day when you have an increased amount of slow wave sleep,” says Mednick, “And if you’re looking for a nap that might aid your creativity, you should sleep earlier in the day when you experience more REM.” (...)

But getting REM sleep also means having to sleep for longer – about 60-90 minutes – because it is the last stage of the sleep cycle. Short naps can have benefits too, though.

by Tiffanie Wen, BBC | Read more:
Image: Thinkstock

The Internet’s Hidden Science Factory

In a small apartment in a small town in northeastern Mississippi, Sarah Marshall sits at her computer, clicking bubbles for an online survey, as her 1-year-old son plays nearby. She hasn’t done this exact survey before, but the questions are familiar, and she works fast. That’s because Marshall is what you might call a professional survey-taker. In the past five years, she has completed roughly 20,000 academic surveys. This is her 21st so far this week. And it’s only Tuesday.

Marshall is a worker for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online job forum where “requesters” post jobs, and an army of crowdsourced workers complete them, earning fantastically small fees for each task. The work has been called microlabor, and the jobs, known as Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, range wildly. Some are tedious: transcribing interviews or cropping photos. Some are funny: prank calling someone’s buddy (that’s worth $1) or writing the title to a pornographic movie based on a collection of dirty screen grabs (6 cents). And others are downright bizarre. One task, for example, asked workers to strap live fish to their chests and upload the photos. That paid $5 — a lot by Mechanical Turk standards.

Mostly, Marshall is a sort of cyber guinea pig, providing a steady stream of data to academic research. This places her squarely inside a growing culture of super-savvy, highly experienced study participants.

As she works, she hears a rustling noise. “Grayson, are you in my garbage can?”

In the kitchen, the trash can’s on its side. Her son has liberated an empty box of cinnamon rolls and dumped the remaining contents on the floor. She goes to him, scoops him up and carries him back to the living room, where he circles the carpet, chattering happily as she resumes typing.

“I’m never going to be absolutely undistracted, ever,” Marshall says, and smiles.

Her employers don’t know that Marshall works while negotiating her toddler’s milk bottles and giving him hugs. They don’t know that she has seen studies similar to theirs maybe hundreds, possibly thousands, of times.

Since its founding in 2005, Mechanical Turk has become an increasingly popular way for university researchers to recruit subjects for online experiments. It’s cheap, easy to use, and the responses, powered by the forum’s 500,000 or so workers, flood in fast.

These factors are such a draw for researchers that, in certain academic fields, crowdsourced workers are outpacing psychology students — the traditional go-to study subjects. And the studies are a huge draw for many workers, who tend to participate again and again and again.

These aren’t obscure studies that Turkers are feeding. They span dozens of fields of research, including social, cognitive and clinical psychology, economics, political science and medicine. They teach us about human behavior. They deal in subjects like energy conservation, adolescent alcohol use, managing money and developing effective teaching methods.

“Most of what’s happening in these studies involves trying to understand human behavior,” said Yale University’s David Rand. “Understanding bias and prejudice, and how you make financial decisions, and how you make decisions generally that involve taking risks, that kind of thing. And there are often very clear policy implications.”

As the use of online crowdsourcing in research continues to grow, some are asking the question: How reliable are the data that these modern-day research subjects generate?

by Jenny Marder, PBS Newshour |  Read more:

Image: Edel Rodriguez

Moonwalking

How to Do Everything on YouTube

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Charles Addams - New Yorker / February 16, 1981
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How We Write About Love

A few months ago, I read several articles touting the health benefits of writing in a deeply personal way. Studies had shown that writing introspectively on a regular basis can lead to lowered blood pressure, improved liver function and even the accelerated healing of postoperative wounds. The study’s subjects had been told to write for short periods each day about turbulent emotional experiences.

I bet a lot of them wrote about love. As the editor of this column, I have spent much of the last decade reading stories of people’s turbulent emotional experiences. They all involved love in one way or another.

Which isn’t so surprising. Who hasn’t been stirred up by love? But these writers had spun their experiences into stories and sent them here, where more than 99 percent must be turned away.

Although the would-be contributors may be happy to learn of the surprising health benefits of their writing, I think they hoped for a more glamorous reward than improved liver function.

Lately I have been thinking about those tens of thousands of passed-over stories and all the questions and lessons about love they represent. When taken together, what does all this writing reveal about us, or about love? Here’s what I have found.

First, and most basic: How we write about love depends on how old we are.

The young overwhelmingly write with a mixture of anxiety and hope. Their stories ask: What is it going to be for me?

Those in midlife are more often driven to their keyboards by feelings of malaise and disillusionment. Their stories ask: Is this really what it is for me?

And older people almost always write from a place of appreciation, regardless of how difficult things may be. Their message: All things considered, I feel pretty lucky.

In writing about love, the story of how we met looms large because a lot of us believe, validly or not, that a good meeting story bodes well for the relationship.

What do we consider to be a good meeting story? When it involves chance more than effort. You get bonus points if the chance encounter suggests compatibility, like mistakenly wheeling off with each other’s shopping carts at Whole Foods because your items had so much overlap, you got the carts mixed up.

“I get those beets all the time!” “You like Erewhon Supergrains, too?”

Pretty soon it’s time to get a room.

It seems the harder we work at finding love, the more prone we are to second-guessing the results. High-volume online daters worry about this, along with those who routinely attend singles events.

The fear is we may force things or compromise after pushing so hard for so long. We may admire hard work in most endeavors, but we admire laziness when it comes to finding love. (If you manage to stay together over the long haul, however, it will be because of effort, not chance.)

When some people write about love, they can’t find the right words to capture the intensity of their feelings, so they rely on stock terms that are best avoided. These include (but are not limited to): amazing, gorgeous, devastating, crushed, smitten, soul mate and electrifying.

Popular phrases include: “meet cute,” “heart pounded,” “heart melted,” “I’ll always remember,” “I’ll never forget” and “Reader, I married him.” Then there is everyone’s favorite stock word regardless of subject: literally. As in, “our date was literally electrifying.”

Women and men may feel love similarly, but they write about it differently.

A lot of men’s stories seem tinged by regret and nostalgia. They wish previous relationships hadn’t ended or romantic opportunities hadn’t slipped away. They lament not having been more emotionally open with lovers, wives, parents and children.

Women are more inclined to write with restlessness. They want to figure love out. Many keep mental lists of their expectations, detailing the characteristics of their hoped-for partner with alarming specificity and then evaluating how a new romantic interest does or doesn’t match that type.

They write something like, “I always pictured myself with someone taller, a guy with cropped brown hair and wire-rim glasses who wears khakis or jeans, the kind of person who would bring me tea in bed and read the Sunday paper with me on the couch.”

Men almost never describe the characteristics of their ideal partner in this way. Even if they have a specific picture in mind, few will put that vision to paper. I wonder if they’re embarrassed to.

by Daniel Jones, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Brian Rea

To a Friend, On His Divorce

You were 7 and I was 6 when we met near the jungle gym. After becoming bandmates in high school and enjoying a brief twinkle of local stardom, we became men and did man things, one of which was each finding someone we loved enough to marry. I have proof that both of us were happy then. The photos from our weddings show us laughing, smiling, greeting friends and relatives, eating cake, smoking cigars and dancing.

It was impossible to imagine, in the face of all that merriment, that one day our respective unions would begin to crack, the crack would become a fissure and the fissure would become a total collapse. Everyone reads the grim divorce statistics. Our mothers and fathers had marriages that failed. But that wouldn’t happen to us. We were bright, we were young and most of all, we were sure of our brides.

There was no one else in the world for me back then but my love. We were partners, friends, lovers, and when life was full of death, job loss, car wrecks and money struggles, we stuck together. Sometimes I’d watch her while she slept and think, “I don’t know what I would do if I had to live without you.” We made a pact that we’d both die together, in our sleep, at the same time, arms folded across chests, so neither of us would have to face the world without the other.

I saw it coming before she did. The money ran low; then it ran out; then every month was a struggle. Both of us knuckled down and worked harder. We also both sought and found therapy, but neither of us had therapists who were geniuses, and nothing really changed. What I choose to focus on now is the memory of when things were wonderful, and they were wonderful for a good 12 years.

So now you tell me you are going to a mediator to work out the details of your divorce, and I feel what it must have been like for you when I told you my seemingly unshakable marriage to a wonderful woman — who is still wonderful — was over. Now I have an idea what all our mutual friends went through watching us fall apart. “Oh, man — can’t you work it out?” The answer is, No, you can’t — no one else lives with your spouse, and no one else has any idea how often you fight, stew or go to bed lonely. Both you and I hung in there until it was spoiled milk, and there isn’t a thing you can do with spoiled milk except dump it down the drain.

Now I’m going to tell you what your life will be like when you pack your stuff and move out of the house. For me, that came in 2012.

At first it will be a huge relief. You’ll have no idea until it actually happens what it’s like to live a life with no one to argue with, and brother, it is sweet. You’ll wonder why you didn’t do this before — just go away by yourself for a while, get back in touch with your essence. You’ll forget that you didn’t do it because you didn’t even have money to buy a banana, forget a man-cave — and you also, like me, took your marriage vows seriously. For now, though, sweet relief.

But soon, there by yourself, the fact that a good part of your life is over and you’re just scraping by will greet you every day; that despite your obvious skills and smarts and ambition, you failed to make your 20s and 30s and 40s into some kind of mighty empire. You’ll discover the world isn’t necessarily rushing to greet older divorced men. You’ll see other guys around your new town, guys who have either divorced or never married, and they in turn will recognize you, noting that you have no one next to you as you shop, get your car fixed, play gigs with your band or visit coffee shops.

These guys have semi-old faces and bodies, and you’ll soon realize with a great shock that you have a semi-old face and body, too. You won’t be in any kind of emotional shape to meet a woman to share your breakfast and your bed right away, either — single available women who don’t have serious emotional problems or substance issues aren’t looking for recently divorced dudes. But even if you had a sweet car, a swank crib and some spending cash, it’d still be rough going. Here’s why.

by Josh Max, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tim Lahan

The Future of the Web Is 100 Years Old

“There is no ‘top’ to the World-Wide Web,” declared a 1992 foundational document from the World Wide Web Consortium—meaning that there is no central server or organizational authority to determine what does or does not get published. It is, like Borges’ famous Library of Babel, theoretically infinite, stitched together with hyperlinks rather than top-down, Dewey Decimal-style categories.1 It is also famously open—built atop a set of publicly available industry standards.

While these features have connected untold millions and created new forms of social organization, they also come at a cost. Material seems to vanish almost as quickly as it is created, disappearing amid broken links or into the constant flow of the social media “stream.” It can be hard to distinguish fact from falsehood. Corporations have stepped into this confusion, organizing our browsing and data in decidedly closed, non-transparent ways. Did it really have to turn out this way?

The web has played such a powerful role in shaping our world that it can sometimes seem like a fait accompli—the inevitable result of progress and enlightened thinking. A deeper look into the historical record, though, reveals a different story: The web in its current state was by no means inevitable. Not only were there competing visions for how a global knowledge network might work, divided along cultural and philosophical lines, but some of those discarded hypotheses are coming back into focus as researchers start to envision the possibilities of a more structured, less volatile web.

By the late 19th century, the modern information age had already begun. The industrialization of the printing press, coupled with the introduction of cheap rag paper, had dramatically altered the economics of publishing. Much of Europe and North America was awash in data. Daily newspapers, cheap magazines, and mass-market novels all emerged during this period, along with a flurry of institutional reports, memos, and all kinds of other printed ephemera.

Meanwhile, new communications technologies like the telegraph and telephone were cropping up. Tram and railway lines were proliferating. An increasingly internationalized postal service sped the flow of data around the globe. By 1900, a global information network had already started to take shape.

The industrial information explosion triggered waves of concern about how to manage all that data. Accomplished librarians like Melvil Dewey (of Decimal System fame), Sir Anthony Panizzi of the British Library, and Charles Cutter of the Boston Athenaeum all began devising new systems to cope with the complexity of their burgeoning collections. In the fast-growing corporate world, company archivists started to develop complex filing systems to accommodate the sudden deluge of typewritten documents.

Among these efforts, one stood out. In 1893, a young Belgian lawyer named Paul Otlet wrote an essay expressing his concern over the rapid proliferation of books, pamphlets, and periodicals. The problem, he argued, should be “alarming to those who are concerned about quality rather than quantity,” and he worried about how anyone would ever make sense of it all. An ardent bibliophile with an entrepreneurial streak, he began working on a solution with his partner, a fellow lawyer named Henri La Fontaine (who would later go on to join the Belgian Senate and win the Nobel Peace Prize): a “Universal Bibliography” (Repertoire bibliographique universel) that would catalog all the world’s published information and make it freely accessible.

The project won Otlet and La Fontaine a Grand Prize at the Paris World Expo of 1900, and attracted funding from the Belgian government. It would eventually encompass more than 16 million entries ranging from books and periodicals to newspapers, photographs, posters, and audio and video recordings, all painstakingly recorded on individual index cards. Otlet even established an international network of associations and a vast museum called the World Palace (Palais Mondial) or Mundaneum, which at one point occupied more than 100 rooms in a government building.

Otlet’s Mundaneum presented an alternative vision to today’s (nominally) flat and open web by relying on a high degree of bibliographical control. He envisioned a group of trained indexers managing the flow of information in and out of the system, making sure that every incoming piece of data would be properly categorized and synthesized into a coherent body of knowledge. To this end, he and La Fontaine developed a sophisticated cataloging system that they dubbed the Universal Decimal Classification. Using the Dewey Decimal System as its starting point, it started with a few top-level domains (like Philosophy, Social Sciences, and The Arts), which could then be further divided into a theoretically infinite number of sub-topics. This in itself was nothing new, but Otlet introduced an important new twist: a set of so-called “auxiliary tables” that allowed indexers to connect one topic to another by using a combination of numeric codes and familiar marks like the equal sign, plus sign, colon, and quotation marks. So, for example, the code 339.5 (410/44) denoted “Trade relations between the United Kingdom and France,” while 311:[622+669](485) meant “Statistics of mining and metallurgy in Sweden.”

Otlet hoped that this new system would allow for a grand unification of human knowledge, and entirely new forms of information. But neither he nor his Mundaneum survived the ravages of World War II. After invading Brussels, the Nazis destroyed much of his life’s work, removing more than 70 tons worth of material and repurposing the World Palace site for an exhibition of Third Reich art. Otlet died in 1944, and has remained largely forgotten ever since. (...)

All of these proposals were, first and foremost, managed systems, closely curated collections of knowledge that would have required a high degree of systematic control. And for the most part, they were situated squarely in the public sector, with little role for private enterprise. They emerged in an era of industrialization, when many writers saw great hope in the possibilities of scientific management to improve the human condition; and in a time of war, when many thinkers hoped that a more orderly system would serve as a bulwark against the possibility of international conflict.

In other words, the dream of organizing the world’s information stemmed not from an authoritarian impulse, but from a deeply utopian one. In the United States, though, a very different kind of utopia was being imagined.

by Alex Wright, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Pete Ryan

[ed. Quite a sunrise over Honolulu this morning. Photo: markk]

How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

As she made the long journey from New York to South Africa, to visit family during the holidays in 2013, Justine Sacco, 30 years old and the senior director of corporate communications at IAC, began tweeting acerbic little jokes about the indignities of travel. There was one about a fellow passenger on the flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport:

“ ‘Weird German Dude: You’re in First Class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant.’ — Inner monologue as I inhale BO. Thank God for pharmaceuticals.”

Then, during her layover at Heathrow:

“Chilly — cucumber sandwiches — bad teeth. Back in London!”

And on Dec. 20, before the final leg of her trip to Cape Town:

“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

She chuckled to herself as she pressed send on this last one, then wandered around Heathrow’s international terminal for half an hour, sporadically checking her phone. No one replied, which didn’t surprise her. She had only 170 Twitter followers.

Sacco boarded the plane. It was an 11-hour flight, so she slept. When the plane landed in Cape Town and was taxiing on the runway, she turned on her phone. Right away, she got a text from someone she hadn’t spoken to since high school: “I’m so sorry to see what’s happening.” Sacco looked at it, baffled.

Then another text: “You need to call me immediately.” It was from her best friend, Hannah. Then her phone exploded with more texts and alerts. And then it rang. It was Hannah. “You’re the No. 1 worldwide trend on Twitter right now,” she said.

Sacco’s Twitter feed had become a horror show. “In light of @Justine-Sacco disgusting racist tweet, I’m donating to @care today” and “How did @JustineSacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!” and “I’m an IAC employee and I don’t want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever.” And then one from her employer, IAC, the corporate owner of The Daily Beast, OKCupid and Vimeo: “This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight.” The anger soon turned to excitement: “All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail” and “Oh man, @JustineSacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands” and “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.”

The furor over Sacco’s tweet had become not just an ideological crusade against her perceived bigotry but also a form of idle entertainment. Her complete ignorance of her predicament for those 11 hours lent the episode both dramatic irony and a pleasing narrative arc.(...)

By the time Sacco had touched down, tens of thousands of angry tweets had been sent in response to her joke. Hannah, meanwhile, frantically deleted her friend’s tweet and her account — Sacco didn’t want to look — but it was far too late. “Sorry @JustineSacco,” wrote one Twitter user, “your tweet lives on forever.”

In the early days of Twitter, I was a keen shamer. When newspaper columnists made racist or homophobic statements, I joined the pile-on. Sometimes I led it. The journalist A. A. Gill once wrote a column about shooting a baboon on safari in Tanzania: “I’m told they can be tricky to shoot. They run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out.” Gill did the deed because he “wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.”

I was among the first people to alert social media. (This was because Gill always gave my television documentaries bad reviews, so I tended to keep a vigilant eye on things he could be got for.) Within minutes, it was everywhere. Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received, one stuck out: “Were you a bully at school?”

Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized. As time passed, though, I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive. I also began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment. It almost felt as if shamings were now happening for their own sake, as if they were following a script.

Eventually I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media. Whenever possible, I have met them in person, to truly grasp the emotional toll at the other end of our screens. The people I met were mostly unemployed, fired for their transgressions, and they seemed broken somehow — deeply confused and traumatized.

by Jon Ronson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Andrew B. Myers. Prop stylist: Sonia Rentsch

Anselm Kiefer (German, b. 1945), Geheimnis der Farne [Mystery of ferns], 2006
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Scorched Earth, 2200AD

I stare out the window from my tiny flat on the 300th floor, hermetically sealed in a soaring, climate-controlled high-rise, honeycombed with hundreds of dwellings just like mine, and survey the breathtaking vistas from my lofty perch more than half a mile above ground: the craftsman cottages with their well-tended lawns, the emerald green golf courses, the sun-washed aquamarine swimming pools and the multimillion-dollar mansions that hug the sweeping sands from Malibu to Palos Verdes. These images evoke feelings of deep nostalgia for a Los Angeles that doesn’t exist anymore, back in the halcyon days before my great-grandparents were born, when procreation wasn’t strictly regulated and billions of people roamed freely on Earth.

There are only about 500 million of us left, after the convulsive transformations caused by climate change severely diminished the planet’s carrying capacity, which is the maximum population size that the environment can sustain. Most of us now live in what the British scientist James Lovelock has called ‘lifeboats’ at the far reaches of the northern hemisphere, in places that were once Canada, China, Russia and the Scandinavian countries, shoehorned into cities created virtually overnight to accommodate the millions of desperate refugees where the climate remains marginally tolerable.

What I ‘see’ outside my window is an illusion, a soothing virtual imitation of a world that once was, summoned by impulses from my brain. Yet the harsh reality is unsettling. As far as the eye can see, what’s left of civilised society is sheathed in glass – the ribbons of highways ferrying the bullet trains that encircle megacities where millions cram into skyscrapers hundreds of stories high; the vast tracts of greenhouses covering chemically enhanced farms where fruits and vegetables are grown and livestock graze; and even the crowded subterranean villages artificially lit to mimic the experience of walking outside on a sunny, spring day. (...)

It seems like hubris to think we can somehow save ourselves through Lovelockian lifeboats strung across the landscape, given the extent of the damage some experts believe we will wreak. Climate models predict temperatures could rise by four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) or more by the end of this century, a level that Kevin Anderson of the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research described as ‘incompatible with any reasonable characterisation of an organised, equitable and civilised global community’.

‘We will see temperatures higher than any known during human civilisation – temperatures that we are simply not adapted to,’ says Heidi Cullen, chief scientist for the NPO Climate Central in Princeton, and author of The Weather of the Future (2010). ‘With each passing year, our “new normal” is being locked in with the full impacts arriving towards the latter part of this century,’ she says. ‘It’s hard for us to imagine that large parts of the planet would be unlivable outdoors.’

An increase of seven degrees Fahrenheit would see mass migrations from some of the most humid places on Earth – the Amazon, parts of India, northern Australia. Rising sea levels of four feet or more and ferocious storms would flood coastal cities from Tokyo to Mumbai, and submerge low-lying areas such as Bangladesh and Florida, displacing millions. Earth’s most populated areas, that belt of land extending from central China and most of Europe, Africa, Australia, the US and Latin America, would be parched by this century’s end, drying up surface water and killing crops that hundreds of millions depend upon for survival. Nearly half the world’s population, almost 4 billon people, could be enduring severe water scarcity and starvation, numerous studies suggest.

Scorching heat waves and cataclysmic fires will spark food riots, famine and mass migrations of millions. An explosion in insects will trigger widespread outbreaks of typhus, cholera, yellow fever, dengue, malaria and a host of long-dormant or even novel pathogens, unleashing epidemics reminiscent of the Black Death which killed as many as 200 million people in the 14th century. Once-teeming metropolises would become watery ghost towns: Picture Manhattan, Tokyo, São Paulo underwater, sparsely populated colonies of hardy survivors who eke out vampire-like subterranean existences, emerging only at night when the temperatures dip into the low triple digits.

Worse yet, temperatures won’t conveniently stabilise at just seven degrees of warming – Earth’s climate won’t reach a new equilibrium for hundreds of years because of all the heat trapping carbon dioxide that’s already been dumped into the environment. ‘We have only felt a fraction of the climate change from the gases already in the atmosphere,’ said James Hansen, a leading climatologist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, recently. ‘Still more is in the pipeline because the climate system has enormous inertia and doesn’t change that quickly.’ The planet will continue to heat up, triggering feedback loops of runaway climate change, until we can kiss most of civilisation goodbye.

by Linda Marsa, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Ed Freeman/Getty

Free Fall

It was close. With the full activation of the dark rhetorical skills he has honed over the past five years, Tiger Woods nearly changed the narrative of his ongoing saga again last week at Torrey Pines, despite what has been happening before our eyes.

It started Wednesday when, in explaining the alarming chunks and skulls and even shanks, Woods went back to old reliable: swing-change jargon. He spoke of “release patterns,” the search for “a consistent bottom,” and being “caught right dead in between” the teaching of deposed coach Sean Foley and new consultant Chris Como. All grounded in an audacious mantra, given the surreal and totally unprecedented nature of the shots in questions: “I’ve been through it before.” Really?

The next day, after withdrawing on his 12th hole of the Farmers Insurance Open because of tightness in his back—his third WD in his last eight events—Woods used a hasty parking-lot press conference to invoke his other favorite fallback topic: injury. The ensuing pedantry regarding activated and deactivated glutes will probably have a longer shelf life than LeBron James’ “I’m taking my talents to South Beach.”

Then on Saturday, Notah Begay III shared on Golf Channel that he had exchanged texts with Woods, reporting that his friend did not consider his latest problems “a major concern.”

Thus did a 14-time major winner, still the most powerful man in golf, attempt to use his influence to deflect attention from what he doesn’t want others, and probably himself, to believe: that his game is on a cliff’s edge, teetering more toward retirement than resurgence.

Woods’ stubborn ability to stay unceasingly on message and concede nothing has long made him a difficult subject to present with any depth, and never more so than now. When he deems the topic positive, he gives little information. When he deems it negative, he gives none. It’s understandable for a relentlessly scrutinized athlete who wants to minimize the noise, but in the process, he basically dares journalists to call him a liar. Very few have gone there.

Woods’ PGA Tour peers are unwittingly in on the obfuscation. First, circling the wagons is part of the player code. Second, they know if they don’t, the man they least need as an enemy will be displeased. A parade of public euphemisms, led by Fred Couples’ dismissive “he’s fine,” ensues. Meanwhile, every close observer is wondering the same thing.

Is Tiger Woods done?

Even that question carries the caveat, of course, that professional golfers, who have the most ability to come back because of the nature of golf and the many years one can play, get the benefit of the doubt. The greater the champion, the greater the benefit.

But here’s the thing. At Torrey, as it had been at the Waste Management Phoenix Open the previous week and at the Hero World Challenge in December, what transpired was simply too graphic not to trust our eyes. The emperor has no clothes.

Sure, pros fall into chipping slumps, which are getting more prevalent and prolonged as agronomy allows fairway lies to get ever tighter. But it’s extremely rare for a touring pro to hit shots as badly as often as Woods has, the cumulative effect more alarming than the most wildly sprayed drives of Seve Ballesteros, Ian Baker-Finch and David Duval combined.

Plenty of evidence defined the state of affairs at Torrey. Couples, not even in the event, took the unusual step of dropping in to watch and, seemingly, casually interact with Woods for his nine-hole Wednesday practice round, an emotionally intelligent elder in crisis-intervention mode. Fellow players gathered around a more sociable Woods on the practice tee, kibitzing easily until a horrifying Woods skull or shank left them speechless and facially frozen. They also saw Woods, on the crowded practice putting green, drop three balls to try some short shots, only to pick them up after a third went speeding past its target.

Come Thursday’s first round, there were the low murmurs from Woods’ stunned gallery, and the awkward body language of playing partners Rickie Fowler and Billy Horschel, who like Jordan Spieth and Patrick Reed at Phoenix, were forced at short range to witness an icon slowly stripped of his aura. On Woods’ first hole, when he bellied an otherwise simple chip, Nick Faldo waited a beat before intoning on Golf Channel, “That’s quite frightening.”

So what is really going on here?

Well, I have a theory, admittedly speculative and uncomfortable for many, who would rather—almost as much as Woods—not go there. But it’s based on the relevant history of a historic figure, the only thing that seems proportional in scale to what has ensued: The scandal that changed Woods’ life after Thanksgiving of 2009.

by Jamie Diaz, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Getty

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Destination Whatever: Touring the Cruise Industry of the Caribbean

With open, smiling mouths and wide, fixated eyes, a group of racially diverse “wholesome” families is featured against the new slogan of Royal Caribbean: “Our ships are designed to WOW.” Notable here is the emphasis on the ships’ design, rather than on any particular destination. As ships become more extreme in size, scale, and amenities, the travel experience is designed to make the floating vacation a familiar and comfortable one. The process of interiorizing hundreds of atmospheres into one floating mega-container has much to do with design, engineering, and management—but mostly economics.

And the effects of the current generation of cruise tourism in the Caribbean are only beginning to unfold. Adrenaline Beach, Barefoot Beach Club, Dragon’s Plaza. Entering Columbus Cove, Freedom of the Seas sails into Royal Caribbean’s Buccaneer’s Bay. The bay is flanked by recreational attractions including the world’s longest zip line, Dragon’s Breath, and the Dragon’s Tail Coaster atop Santa Maria Mountain. The only landmark is the 19th-century citadel sitting above the horizon—3,000 feet above sea level. The fortress is named for Henri Christophe Laferrière, a key leader of the first black slave rebellion that lead Haiti to independence from the French in 1804.

The boat, Royal Caribbean’s flagship, docks on the northwestern coast of Hispaniola Island, a territory called Labadee®—a registered trademark. Royal Caribbean leased the peninsula from the Haitian government on a 99-year contract. According to Royal Caribbean’s Port Explorer & Shopping Guide, the leased land is “strengthening the cooperative effort between the government of Haiti and RCCL® […] and has been solidified by extensive on-site development through the company’s investment of tens of millions of dollars.” Testifying to the economic humanitarianism of the deal, the guide mentions that “it is a clear vote of confidence in the people, nation, and future of the country as our guests continue to have the exclusive opportunity to enjoy a relaxing fun-filled day in the clear blue waters of Haiti’s northern coast. The sailors who joined Christopher Columbus and first came ashore here centuries ago obviously knew a good thing when they saw it.”

Since the 1980s, RCCL® has held exclusive rights to docking at the once small fishing village and coastal town of Labadie, named for the first French settler in the late 17th century. Anglicized, Labadee® “was specifically designed and built to provide guests with a variety of opportunities to have fun in the sun.” As the guide claims, Royal Caribbean “is honored and proud to be a pioneering partner with a people and country which has such a rich heritage and the tremendous potential to become one of the Caribbean’s premier tour destinations.”

These private destinations—compounds really—have become the new ports of call for big cruise ships. Today, nearly 10 private islands are owned by eight major cruise operators in the Caribbean. By buying or leasing islands, or anchoring at unregulated, deserted stretches of beach, cruise operators can reduce the number of days in official ports and divert the expenditures of travelers to locations under control of the industry. Piers, once perceived as extensions of land that connected ship to destination, have today become extensions of ships. Usually fenced or cordoned off, these extensions are fictional territory: they guide travelers away from local neighborhoods and people, toward areas owned and scripted by cruise companies. They are programmed to deliver isolated, worry-free experiences, supplementing those offered by the ship itself—pristine water, white sand, Caribbean beaches. Off-site excursions are limited to day-trips to tourist-friendly destinations—a colonial city or pre-Hispanic archaeological ruin.

Bigger Boats, Bigger Piers

As ships grow, they become destinations in themselves, ultimately devaluing the role of land-based destinations. From the already impressive 961-foot, 2,200-passenger Queen Elizabeth in the late 1960s, the size and scale of cruising vessels has nearly tripled to a whopping 6,300 passengers (Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas). The increase in size of cruise ships, in width as much as in height, enables considerable spatial and programmatic complexity—streets, entertainment spaces, dining rooms, bars, pools, stores, water parks—with nonstop events that keep passengers entertained, day and night. Ships are designed as small, floating cities. Like an urban theme park, the ships include a multiplicity of landscape decks, terraces, surfing pools, and running paths that consume all available space on the ship’s roof deck.

Although the layout of vessels is organized around a double-loaded corridor down the middle—the “main street,” which provides each room with exterior views and direct access to amenities—it is the central kitchen that forms ships’ cores and ensures their functionality. Precisely engineered and impeccably designed, ship kitchens provide food tailored to a wide range of dining experiences, from luxurious, romantic dinners to basic midday snacks. Upwards of 15,000 meals can be served in one day, delivered through 30 different menus. Onboard infrastructure is vital: desalination plants for drinking water, crushing and compacting systems for recyclables, dehydrators and incinerators for food waste, with leftover ash disposed of offshore.

by Martin Delgado, Zuzanna Koltowska, Félix Madrazo & Sofia Saavedra, Harvard Design |  Read more:

Image: Carlos Weeber

The Future of an Illusion

Has there ever been a medical specialty as beleaguered as psychiatry? Since the profession’s founding in 1844, the doctors of the soul have had to contend with suspicions that they do not know what mental illness is, what type their patients might have, or what they should do about it—in other words, that they are doctors who do not practice real medicine. Some of the worry comes from the psychiatrists themselves, such as Pliny Earle, who in 1886 complained that “in the present state of our knowledge, no classification of insanity can be erected upon a pathological basis.” In 1917, psychiatrist Thomas Salmon lamented that the classification of diseases was still “chaotic”—a “condition of affairs [that] discredits the science of psychiatry and reflects unfavorably upon our association,” and that left the profession unable to meet “the scientific demands of the present day.” In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association voted to declare that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness, a determination that, however just, couldn’t possibly be construed as scientific. And for the six years leading up to the 2013 release of the fifth edition of its diagnostic manual, the DSM-5, the APA debated loudly and in public such questions as whether Asperger’s disorder were a distinct mental illness and if people still upset two weeks after the death of a loved one could be diagnosed with major depression. (The official conclusions, respectively: no and yes.)

To the diagnostic chaos was added the spectacle of treatments. Psychiatrists superintended horrifyingly squalid asylums; used insulin and electricity to send patients into comas and convulsions; inoculated them with tuberculin and malaria in the hope that fever would cook the mental illness out of them; jammed ice picks into their brains to sever their frontal lobes; placed them in orgone boxes to bathe in the orgasmic energy of the universe; psychoanalyzed them interminably; primal-screamed them and rebirthed them and nursed their inner children; and subjected them to medications of unknown mechanism and unanticipated side effects, most recently the antidepressant drugs that we love to hate and hate to love and that, either way, are a daily staple for 11 percent of adults in America.

It’s not just diagnostic uncertainty or therapeutic disasters that cast suspicion on the profession. It’s also the bred-in-the-bone American conviction that no one should tell us who we are. For that is what psychiatrists (and the rest of us in the mental-health professions) do, no matter whether we want to or not. To say you know what mental health and illness are is to say you know how life should go, and what we should do when it goes otherwise. You’d better know what to do when you’ve made a grievous error in those weighty matters, or at the very least, how to ask for forgiveness. And you’d better hope that, apologies offered, you can give the public a reason to believe that at long last you know what you are doing.

This is the unenviable task that Jeffrey Lieberman, past president of the APA, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University’s medical school, chief of psychiatry at its hospital, and director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, has taken on in his book Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry. “Psychiatry has earned its stigma,” he writes at the outset, and its practitioners must “own up to our long history of mistakes.” Otherwise it will remain “the black sheep of the medical family, scorned by physicians and patients alike.”

In Lieberman’s history, most of the profession’s travails can be traced to the mischief caused by one man: the Viennese neurologist who, on arriving for his first (and only) visit to America, said, “They don’t realize that we are bringing them the plague.” That at any rate is what, according to legend, Sigmund Freud said to Carl Jung as their ship pulled into New York harbor in 1909. Lieberman agrees wholeheartedly that Freud unleashed a plague. The pathogen was not, Lieberman says, the self-doubt and pessimism for which Freud is justly famous, but his autocratic approach to his patients and his insistence that his disciples remain in lockstep. Worst of all, says Lieberman, Freud “blurred the boundary between mental illness and mental health” by maintaining that conflict among the various agencies of the mind, set off by early childhood experience, was unavoidable.

In the early twentieth century, according to Lieberman, the members of the APA weren’t interested in Freud. American psychoanalysts, however, were interested in the APA. The analysts’ campaign for recognition eventually succeeded. Lieberman argues that this was largely because psychoanalysis offered psychiatrists “a way out of the asylum” and into cushy private practices ministering to the well-heeled “worried well.” Having convinced doctors (and patients) that we were all at least a little neurotic, Freud had opened the way to travesties like the pathologizing of homosexuality and endless and ineffective stays on the analytical couch.

by Gary Greenberg, Bookforum |  Read more:

Image: Sigmund Freud's office photo: uncredited