Thursday, March 12, 2015
Opportunity Gap
[ed. See also: Richer and Poorer.]
The event is billed as a lecture on a new book of social science. But the speaker visiting Cambridge’s Lesley University this Monday night sounds like a political candidate on the hustings. Robert D. Putnam — Harvard political scientist, trumpeter of community revival, consultant to the last four presidents — is on campus to sound an alarm. "What I want to talk to you about," he tells some 40 students and academics, is "the most important domestic challenge facing our country today. I want to talk about a growing gap between rich kids and poor kids."
Two decades ago, Putnam shot to fame with "Bowling Alone," an essay-turned-best-selling-book that amassed reams of data to chart the collapse of American community. His research popularized a concept known as "social capital." The framework, used in fields like sociology and economics, refers to social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trust they create. "He’s one of the most important social scientists of our time," says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, because of his ability to blend scientific rigor with popular appeal.
But tonight Putnam sets the science aside, at least to start. He opens his Cambridge talk with a story. It’s about two young women, Miriam and Mary Sue. Their families, he says, both originally came from the same small Ohio town. Miriam, who had well-educated parents, went off to an ultra-elite East Coast university. Mary Sue, the daughter of high-school graduates who never held a steady job, ended up on a harrowing path of abuse, distrust, and isolation.
Removing a sheet of paper from a folder — the notes from an interview that one of his researchers conducted with Mary Sue — Putnam reads off the particulars. Mary Sue’s parents split up when she was 5. Her mother turned to stripping, leaving Mary Sue alone and hungry for days. Her only friend until she went to school was a mouse who lived in her apartment. Caught selling pot at 16, she spent time in juvenile detention, flunked out of high school, and got a diploma online. Mary Sue wistfully recalls the stillborn baby she had at 13. She now dates an older man with two infants born to two different mothers.
"To Mary Sue," Putnam says, "this feels like the best she can hope for."
He pauses. "Honestly, it’s hard for me to tell the story."
Miriam is Putnam’s own granddaughter. Mary Sue (a pseudonym) is almost exactly the same age. And the backdrop to this tale is the professor’s hometown of Port Clinton, once an egalitarian community where people looked after all kids, regardless of their backgrounds. In Putnam’s telling, Port Clinton now symbolizes the class disparities that have swept the country in recent decades — a "split-screen American nightmare" where the high-school lot contains one kid’s BMW parked beside the jalopy in which a homeless classmate lives.
"In Port Clinton now, nobody thinks of Mary Sue as one of ‘our kids,’" Putnam says. "They think she’s somebody else’s kid — let them worry about her."
At 74, the professor is embarking on a campaign with one basic goal: getting educated Americans to worry about the deteriorating lives of kids like Mary Sue. It kicks into high gear this week with the publication of his new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon & Schuster). The basic argument: To do well in life, kids need family stability, good schools, supportive neighbors, and parental investment of time and money. All of those advantages are increasingly available to the Miriams of the world and not to the Mary Sues, a disparity that Putnam calls "the opportunity gap.
Ever since the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged in 2011, much public discussion has focused on the unequal distribution of income in today’s America. Traditionally, though, that kind of inequality hasn’t greatly concerned Americans, Putnam writes. What they have worried about is a related, though distinct, issue: equality of opportunity and social mobility. Across the political spectrum, Putnam writes, Americans historically paid lots of attention to the prospects for the next generation: "whether young people from different backgrounds are, in fact, getting onto the ladder at about the same place and, given equal merit and energy, are equally likely to scale it."
The event is billed as a lecture on a new book of social science. But the speaker visiting Cambridge’s Lesley University this Monday night sounds like a political candidate on the hustings. Robert D. Putnam — Harvard political scientist, trumpeter of community revival, consultant to the last four presidents — is on campus to sound an alarm. "What I want to talk to you about," he tells some 40 students and academics, is "the most important domestic challenge facing our country today. I want to talk about a growing gap between rich kids and poor kids."
Two decades ago, Putnam shot to fame with "Bowling Alone," an essay-turned-best-selling-book that amassed reams of data to chart the collapse of American community. His research popularized a concept known as "social capital." The framework, used in fields like sociology and economics, refers to social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trust they create. "He’s one of the most important social scientists of our time," says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, because of his ability to blend scientific rigor with popular appeal.
But tonight Putnam sets the science aside, at least to start. He opens his Cambridge talk with a story. It’s about two young women, Miriam and Mary Sue. Their families, he says, both originally came from the same small Ohio town. Miriam, who had well-educated parents, went off to an ultra-elite East Coast university. Mary Sue, the daughter of high-school graduates who never held a steady job, ended up on a harrowing path of abuse, distrust, and isolation.Removing a sheet of paper from a folder — the notes from an interview that one of his researchers conducted with Mary Sue — Putnam reads off the particulars. Mary Sue’s parents split up when she was 5. Her mother turned to stripping, leaving Mary Sue alone and hungry for days. Her only friend until she went to school was a mouse who lived in her apartment. Caught selling pot at 16, she spent time in juvenile detention, flunked out of high school, and got a diploma online. Mary Sue wistfully recalls the stillborn baby she had at 13. She now dates an older man with two infants born to two different mothers.
"To Mary Sue," Putnam says, "this feels like the best she can hope for."
He pauses. "Honestly, it’s hard for me to tell the story."
Miriam is Putnam’s own granddaughter. Mary Sue (a pseudonym) is almost exactly the same age. And the backdrop to this tale is the professor’s hometown of Port Clinton, once an egalitarian community where people looked after all kids, regardless of their backgrounds. In Putnam’s telling, Port Clinton now symbolizes the class disparities that have swept the country in recent decades — a "split-screen American nightmare" where the high-school lot contains one kid’s BMW parked beside the jalopy in which a homeless classmate lives.
"In Port Clinton now, nobody thinks of Mary Sue as one of ‘our kids,’" Putnam says. "They think she’s somebody else’s kid — let them worry about her."
At 74, the professor is embarking on a campaign with one basic goal: getting educated Americans to worry about the deteriorating lives of kids like Mary Sue. It kicks into high gear this week with the publication of his new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon & Schuster). The basic argument: To do well in life, kids need family stability, good schools, supportive neighbors, and parental investment of time and money. All of those advantages are increasingly available to the Miriams of the world and not to the Mary Sues, a disparity that Putnam calls "the opportunity gap.
Ever since the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged in 2011, much public discussion has focused on the unequal distribution of income in today’s America. Traditionally, though, that kind of inequality hasn’t greatly concerned Americans, Putnam writes. What they have worried about is a related, though distinct, issue: equality of opportunity and social mobility. Across the political spectrum, Putnam writes, Americans historically paid lots of attention to the prospects for the next generation: "whether young people from different backgrounds are, in fact, getting onto the ladder at about the same place and, given equal merit and energy, are equally likely to scale it."
by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education | Read more:
Image: Bryce Vickmark
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Ultrasound Therapies Target Brain Cancers and Alzheimer’s Disease
From imaging babies to blasting apart kidney stones, ultrasound has proved to be a versatile tool for physicians. Now, several research teams aim to unleash the technology on some of the most feared brain diseases.
The blood-brain barrier, a tightly packed layer of cells that lines the brain's blood vessels, protects it from infections, toxins, and other threats but makes the organ frustratingly hard to treat. A strategy that combines ultrasound with microscopic blood-borne bubbles can briefly open the barrier, in theory giving drugs or the immune system access to the brain. In the clinic and the lab, that promise is being evaluated.
This month, in one of the first clinical tests, Todd Mainprize, a neurosurgeon at the University of Toronto in Canada, hopes to use ultrasound to deliver a dose of chemotherapy to a malignant brain tumor. And in some of the most dramatic evidence of the technique's potential, a research team reports this week in Science Translational Medicine that they used it to rid mice of abnormal brain clumps similar to those in Alzheimer's disease, restoring lost memory and cognitive functions. If such findings can be translated from mice to humans, “it will revolutionize the way we treat brain disease,” says biophysicist Kullervo Hynynen of the Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, who originated the ultrasound method. (...)
Safely and temporarily opening the blood-brain barrier is a long-sought goal in medicine. About a decade ago, Hynynen began exploring a strategy combining ultrasound and microbubbles. The premise is that ultrasound causes such bubbles to expand and contract, jostling the cells forming the blood-brain barrier and making it slightly leaky.
That could help cancer physicians such as Mainprize deliver chemotherapy drugs into the brain. Hynynen also hypothesized that the brief leakage would rev up the brain's inflammatory response against β amyloid—the toxic protein that clumps outside neurons in Alzheimer's and may be responsible for killing them. Disposing of such debris is normally the role of the microglia, a type of brain cell. But previous studies have shown that when β amyloid forms clumps in the brain, it “seems to overwhelm microglia,” Bacskai says. Exposing the cells to anti bodies that leak in when the blood-brain barrier is breached could spur them to “wake up and do their jobs,” he says. Some antibodies in blood may also bind directly to the β-amyloid protein and flag the clumps for destruction. (...)
The blood-brain barrier, a tightly packed layer of cells that lines the brain's blood vessels, protects it from infections, toxins, and other threats but makes the organ frustratingly hard to treat. A strategy that combines ultrasound with microscopic blood-borne bubbles can briefly open the barrier, in theory giving drugs or the immune system access to the brain. In the clinic and the lab, that promise is being evaluated.
This month, in one of the first clinical tests, Todd Mainprize, a neurosurgeon at the University of Toronto in Canada, hopes to use ultrasound to deliver a dose of chemotherapy to a malignant brain tumor. And in some of the most dramatic evidence of the technique's potential, a research team reports this week in Science Translational Medicine that they used it to rid mice of abnormal brain clumps similar to those in Alzheimer's disease, restoring lost memory and cognitive functions. If such findings can be translated from mice to humans, “it will revolutionize the way we treat brain disease,” says biophysicist Kullervo Hynynen of the Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, who originated the ultrasound method. (...)Safely and temporarily opening the blood-brain barrier is a long-sought goal in medicine. About a decade ago, Hynynen began exploring a strategy combining ultrasound and microbubbles. The premise is that ultrasound causes such bubbles to expand and contract, jostling the cells forming the blood-brain barrier and making it slightly leaky.
That could help cancer physicians such as Mainprize deliver chemotherapy drugs into the brain. Hynynen also hypothesized that the brief leakage would rev up the brain's inflammatory response against β amyloid—the toxic protein that clumps outside neurons in Alzheimer's and may be responsible for killing them. Disposing of such debris is normally the role of the microglia, a type of brain cell. But previous studies have shown that when β amyloid forms clumps in the brain, it “seems to overwhelm microglia,” Bacskai says. Exposing the cells to anti bodies that leak in when the blood-brain barrier is breached could spur them to “wake up and do their jobs,” he says. Some antibodies in blood may also bind directly to the β-amyloid protein and flag the clumps for destruction. (...)
This week, neuroscientist Jürgen Götz of the Queensland Brain Institute in St. Lucia, Australia, and his Ph.D. student Gerhard Leinenga report that they have built on Hynynen and Aubert's protocol, using a different mouse model of Alzheimer's. After injecting these animals with a solution of microscopic bubbles, they scanned an ultrasound beam in a zigzag pattern across each animal's entire skull, rather than focusing on discrete areas as others have done. After six to eight weekly treatments, the team tested the rodents on three different memory tasks. Alzheimer's mice in the control group, which received microbubble injections but no stimulation, showed no improvement. Mice whose blood-brain barriers had been made permeable, in contrast, saw “full restoration of memory in all three tasks,” Götz says.
by Emily Underwood, Science | Read more:
Image: Emmanuel Thevenot/Lab of Isabelle Aubert/ Sunnybrook Research Institute
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Barack and Me
I couldn’t sleep for shit.
Friday night had turned into Saturday morning, and I was staring at the ceiling in a hotel room in Washington, D.C., only blocks from the White House, recovering from my third hot shower of the night. The fever that had developed from an 11-hour Amtrak trip down the East Coast a day earlier hadn’t left my body, and the only way I knew how to deal with the chills was to take hot showers and hope for the best.
But that wasn’t the real reason for my insomnia and this body-zapping panic: I would be speaking to the president of the United States of America in 10 hours. On Air Force One. Before his speech in Selma, Alabama, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the march that took place on what became known as Bloody Sunday.
On Monday, I had received an email from the White House offering “a potential opportunity with President Obama in the very near future.” The opportunity was to be a part of a roundtable of five journalists who would have 30 minutes to talk with the president.
As the week progressed, however, the stakes grew. With the date inching closer, the details became clearer. On Friday, the final email:
Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, just a sunrise away from that one question, I still wasn’t sure what I was going to ask. I had written one question down, but I wasn’t convinced it was the question. And I was running out of time.
All I could think about was why I was here. Or, more accurately, what brought me here. I knew what I’d wanted to ask for years. I just didn’t know if, when the time came, I’d actually ask it.
I've been chasing Barack Obama for more than a decade. I watched his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention while deep in the throes of college application essays. It was a speech that I needed to hear, a speech that felt as if it were specifically for me. Before I knew it, I was working on Capitol Hill in 2007 as a college intern for Senator Ted Kennedy, where I would occasionally catch a glimpse of the then-Senator Obama traveling on the underground monorail from the Senate to the Capitol floor. I reveled in the excitement when he announced his presidency that February. I volunteered for that campaign in 2008 in New Hampshire, taking to the streets of New England with a megaphone following his victory, and hoping to one day be a part of his actual staff. In 2011, looking for a way out of graduate school, I applied for a job as a blogger in his reelection campaign — and I almost got that job, before then not getting that job.
My current job — the second attempt to drop out of graduate school — is a result of not getting a job with the Obama campaign. Living in New York is a result of not getting a job with the Obama administration. And my slow crawl away from politics and toward writing is a direct result of chasing — and never quite catching — the world that surrounds President Obama. The chase has felt never-ending. But in a way, I owe everything to the chase.
The chase was on my mind as I rode in a car to Joint Base Andrews on Saturday morning. It’s what I thought about on the shuttle to Air Force One with the four other journalists, Charles Blow from the New York Times, Zerlina Maxwell from Essence, White House correspondent April Ryan from the American Urban Radio Networks, and DeWayne Wickham, a USA Today columnist and dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism & Communication. And that chase is what I thought of when we arrived at Andrews and stood before Air Force One. (...)
Air Force One is a plane on PEDs. It rumbles with such force that we were told attempting to record the roundtable on our personal devices would be a challenge, and that the stenographer would have a transcript of proceedings ready for us later that day. In terms of size, it appeared to have swallowed two double-aisled commercial airliners. But it’s still a plane. It has wheels, it has wings, it takes off, and it goes into the air.
There were stairs everywhere, and so many rooms. And many of these rooms had doors. The floor plan felt like a labyrinth of narrow walkways, leading to beige area after beige area. Both times I left my part of the cabin by myself, I got lost. And even though I was never lost for more than 10 seconds, I immediately felt that let-go-of-your-mom’s-hand-at–Six Flags lost, scared that I was either going to get in trouble or never find my way back.
Every now and then, during a break in conversation, I’d retreat to my notebook and stare at my question. I’d written a second one focused on Selma, but it wasn’t right. It was a cop-out question. A question anyone could have asked. So I knew what I had to do. I needed to change a word here, move a sentence there, make it more concise, but I knew it was absolutely the type of question I was asked here to put forward.
Friday night had turned into Saturday morning, and I was staring at the ceiling in a hotel room in Washington, D.C., only blocks from the White House, recovering from my third hot shower of the night. The fever that had developed from an 11-hour Amtrak trip down the East Coast a day earlier hadn’t left my body, and the only way I knew how to deal with the chills was to take hot showers and hope for the best.
But that wasn’t the real reason for my insomnia and this body-zapping panic: I would be speaking to the president of the United States of America in 10 hours. On Air Force One. Before his speech in Selma, Alabama, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the march that took place on what became known as Bloody Sunday.On Monday, I had received an email from the White House offering “a potential opportunity with President Obama in the very near future.” The opportunity was to be a part of a roundtable of five journalists who would have 30 minutes to talk with the president.
As the week progressed, however, the stakes grew. With the date inching closer, the details became clearer. On Friday, the final email:
Following brief remarks at the top of the roundtable, the President will take a question from each participant.As in one question. Zero room for error. My editor’s response was as blunt as it was true: “Better make it count.”
Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, just a sunrise away from that one question, I still wasn’t sure what I was going to ask. I had written one question down, but I wasn’t convinced it was the question. And I was running out of time.
All I could think about was why I was here. Or, more accurately, what brought me here. I knew what I’d wanted to ask for years. I just didn’t know if, when the time came, I’d actually ask it.
I've been chasing Barack Obama for more than a decade. I watched his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention while deep in the throes of college application essays. It was a speech that I needed to hear, a speech that felt as if it were specifically for me. Before I knew it, I was working on Capitol Hill in 2007 as a college intern for Senator Ted Kennedy, where I would occasionally catch a glimpse of the then-Senator Obama traveling on the underground monorail from the Senate to the Capitol floor. I reveled in the excitement when he announced his presidency that February. I volunteered for that campaign in 2008 in New Hampshire, taking to the streets of New England with a megaphone following his victory, and hoping to one day be a part of his actual staff. In 2011, looking for a way out of graduate school, I applied for a job as a blogger in his reelection campaign — and I almost got that job, before then not getting that job.
My current job — the second attempt to drop out of graduate school — is a result of not getting a job with the Obama campaign. Living in New York is a result of not getting a job with the Obama administration. And my slow crawl away from politics and toward writing is a direct result of chasing — and never quite catching — the world that surrounds President Obama. The chase has felt never-ending. But in a way, I owe everything to the chase.
The chase was on my mind as I rode in a car to Joint Base Andrews on Saturday morning. It’s what I thought about on the shuttle to Air Force One with the four other journalists, Charles Blow from the New York Times, Zerlina Maxwell from Essence, White House correspondent April Ryan from the American Urban Radio Networks, and DeWayne Wickham, a USA Today columnist and dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism & Communication. And that chase is what I thought of when we arrived at Andrews and stood before Air Force One. (...)
Air Force One is a plane on PEDs. It rumbles with such force that we were told attempting to record the roundtable on our personal devices would be a challenge, and that the stenographer would have a transcript of proceedings ready for us later that day. In terms of size, it appeared to have swallowed two double-aisled commercial airliners. But it’s still a plane. It has wheels, it has wings, it takes off, and it goes into the air.
There were stairs everywhere, and so many rooms. And many of these rooms had doors. The floor plan felt like a labyrinth of narrow walkways, leading to beige area after beige area. Both times I left my part of the cabin by myself, I got lost. And even though I was never lost for more than 10 seconds, I immediately felt that let-go-of-your-mom’s-hand-at–Six Flags lost, scared that I was either going to get in trouble or never find my way back.
Every now and then, during a break in conversation, I’d retreat to my notebook and stare at my question. I’d written a second one focused on Selma, but it wasn’t right. It was a cop-out question. A question anyone could have asked. So I knew what I had to do. I needed to change a word here, move a sentence there, make it more concise, but I knew it was absolutely the type of question I was asked here to put forward.
by Rembert Browne, Grantland | Read more:
Image: Rembert Browne
The NFL Trade Wheel
[ed. If any of this makes sense to you, back away from the TV, take a deep breath, have a sobering look at yourself and ask... how do I find my way back to the light.]
Using the Draft Pick Value Calculator generated by Chase Stuart at Football Perspective, we can estimate the difference in value between the two draft picks. We also have to guess where New Orleans’s draft pick will land, since compensatory picks have yet to be handed out, but it should come within one or two slots of the 110th overall pick. Using those figures, the balance of what the Seahawks sent amounts to the equivalent of the 65th pick in the draft — the first pick of the third round. That certainly sounds a lot less dramatic than dealing a first-round pick for a fourth-rounder.It’s not the first time the Seahawks have used their first-round pick in a move to acquire a weapon for Russell Wilson, which is one of the many reasons this deal is so fascinating. Seattle sent a first-round pick to Minnesota two years ago (along with a seventh-round pick in that draft and a third-round pick in 2014) to acquire Percy Harvin in a deal that proved to be a rare misstep for general manager John Schneider, with Harvin missing virtually all of his first season in Seattle with injuries, before being dealt away to the Jets for what ended up being a sixth-round pick. (...)
The part that doesn’t click for me is Seattle adding salary while still owing Wilson and Bobby Wagner new deals. While the Seahawks took cash off their cap in the Harvin deal, they still owe $7.2 million in dead money for Harvin in 2015. The recent contract extension for Lynch gave him $12 million guaranteed, all of which gets paid this season; he has base salaries of $9 million and $7 million in 2016 and 2017, respectively, but the Seahawks could cut him and save $4 million in 2016 or $4.5 million in 2017.
Graham is not cheap for Seattle, even with the Saints eating his $12 million signing bonus. The Seahawks will owe him $8 million in 2015, $9 million in 2016, and $10 million in 2017, assuming they keep the $5 million roster bonus Graham is due Thursday without converting it to a signing bonus. Converting the bonus would free up more cap space in 2015, but would cost the Seahawks if they decided down the line they wanted to move on, so it doesn’t seem like a logical move.
None of the 2016 or 2017 money is guaranteed or would result in dead cap if the Seahawks decide to move on, so this can be anything from a one-year rental to a three-year deal. Given that the Seahawks will likely sign Wilson and Wagner to new deals during the 2015 season, the base salaries owed Graham will be difficult to swallow in the years to come. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see the Seahawks forced to choose between Graham and Lynch in 2016, and if Graham wins, Seattle will likely offer him an extension to free up cap space in 2017.
The megadeals to come are also likely why the Seahawks moved on from Unger. A Pro Bowl–caliber center who has struggled to stay healthy in recent seasons, the 28-year-old Unger was just about due for a new deal. He was entering the third year of a four-year, $26 million extension that has relatively docile cap hits of $4.5 million in both 2015 and 2016. After that, a healthy Unger would have likely expected to see his cap hit double, pointing to the Alex Mack deal as a comparable contract. Seattle couldn’t afford to give Unger that much money, and in trading him now, it was able to get a serious asset who upgraded them at a more meaningful position.
For the Saints, this is a serious repudiation of their all-in philosophy from a year ago and the quality of the team Sean Payton and Mickey Loomis thought they had built. I wrote about their cap woes in December, and while I pointed out the accounting method that would enable them to overcome their $27 million nightmare and get underneath the hard cap, there wasn’t going to be much space to reshape their franchise.
New Orleans had already cut Curtis Lofton and Pierre Thomas this offseason, but to make serious changes to its roster in the years to come, it was going to have to carve one or two of the top salaries off the books. One of those players, apparently, was Graham. While the Saints get $19 million in cap relief over 2016 and 2017, they don’t actually save any money in 2015. With the dead money on his deal, Graham’s cap hold actually rises from $8 million to $9 million. The Saints then add the $4.5 million on Unger’s deal to their 2015 cap, and they’ll also owe an extra $750,000 or so for the salary difference between the draft picks they just traded.
After battling so hard to get underneath the cap of $143 million, New Orleans is already nearly $3 million over the cap. Loomis suggested after the trade that he made the deal to improve New Orleans’s defense, which certainly makes it strange that he traded Graham for a center and not a defensive player.
by Bill Barnwell, Grantland | Read more:
Image: Chris Graythen, Getty
The Revolution Will Probably Wear Mom Jeans
America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.
—Warren G. Harding, “A Return to Normalcy,” May 14, 1920
—Warren G. Harding, “A Return to Normalcy,” May 14, 1920
Not long ago, a curious fashion trend swept through New York City’s hipster preserves, from Bushwick to the Lower East Side. Once, well-heeled twentysomethings had roamed these streets in plaid button-downs and floral playsuits. Now, the reign of the aspiring lumberjacks and their mawkish mates was coming to an end. Windbreakers, baseball caps, and polar fleece appeared among the flannel. Cargo shorts and khakis were verboten no longer. Denim went from dark-rinse to light. Sandals were worn, and sometimes with socks. It was a blast of carefully modulated blandness—one that delighted some fashion types, appalled others, and ignited the critical passions of lifestyle journalists everywhere.
They called it Normcore. Across our Fashion Nation, style sections turned out lengthy pieces exploring this exotic lurch into the quotidian, and trend watchers plumbed every possible meaning in the cool kids’ new fondness for dressing like middle-aged suburbanites. Were hipsters sacrificing their coolness in a brave act of self-renunciation? Was this an object lesson in the futility of ritually chasing down, and then repudiating, the coolness of the passing moment? Or were middle-aged dorks themselves mysteriously cool all of a sudden? Was Normcore just an elaborate prank designed to prove that style writers can be fooled into believing almost anything is trendy?
By March 2014, Vogue had declared Normcore totally over, but even that lofty fiat couldn’t put a stop to it. Gap adopted the slogan “dress normal” for its fall ad campaign, and the donnish Oxford English Dictionary nominated “normcore” for 2014’s word of the year. A full twelve months after Vogue tried to extinguish it, Normcore continues to convulse opinion, a half-life long enough (in fashion-time, anyway) to place it among the decade’s most enduring trends.
More than that, elaborate prank or no, Normcore is a remarkably efficient summary of hipster posturing at its most baroque. Never has a trend so perfectly crystallized the endless, empty layers of fashion-based rebellion. And never has a trend shown itself to be so openly contemptuous of the working class. Like many a fad before it, Normcore thrives on appropriation. But where privileged hipsters once looked to underground subcultures—bikers, punks, Teddy Boys—as they pursued their downwardly mobile personal liberation, they now latch onto the faceless working majority: the Walmart shoppers, the suburban moms and dads.
Even if it began as something of a self-referential fashion joke, the media’s infatuation with all things Normcore says a lot. Not least, it highlights our abiding social need for a sanitized counterculture, for a youthful rebellion that can be readily dismissed, for the comfort of neoliberal melancholy, for what Warren G. Harding—the unheralded John the Baptist of the Normcore Gospel—famously called “a return to normalcy.”
The Revolt of the Mass Indie Überelite
The adventure began in 2013, and picked up steam early last year with Fiona Duncan’s “Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion,” a blowout exploration of the anti-individualist Normcore creed for New York magazine. Duncan remembered feeling the first tremors of the revolution:
Part of the problem derives from the hipster’s ubiquity. For the past several years, hipsterism has been an idée fixe in the popular press—coy cultural shorthand in the overlapping worlds of fashion, music, art, and literature for a kind of rebellion that doesn’t quite come off on its own steam. Forward-thinking middle-class youngsters used to strike fear in the hearts of the squares by flouting social norms—at least nominally, until they grew up and settled into their own appointed professional, middle-class destinies. Now, however, the hipster is a benign and well-worn figure of fun: a lumpenbourgeois urbanite perpetually in search of ways to display her difference from the masses.
They called it Normcore. Across our Fashion Nation, style sections turned out lengthy pieces exploring this exotic lurch into the quotidian, and trend watchers plumbed every possible meaning in the cool kids’ new fondness for dressing like middle-aged suburbanites. Were hipsters sacrificing their coolness in a brave act of self-renunciation? Was this an object lesson in the futility of ritually chasing down, and then repudiating, the coolness of the passing moment? Or were middle-aged dorks themselves mysteriously cool all of a sudden? Was Normcore just an elaborate prank designed to prove that style writers can be fooled into believing almost anything is trendy?By March 2014, Vogue had declared Normcore totally over, but even that lofty fiat couldn’t put a stop to it. Gap adopted the slogan “dress normal” for its fall ad campaign, and the donnish Oxford English Dictionary nominated “normcore” for 2014’s word of the year. A full twelve months after Vogue tried to extinguish it, Normcore continues to convulse opinion, a half-life long enough (in fashion-time, anyway) to place it among the decade’s most enduring trends.
More than that, elaborate prank or no, Normcore is a remarkably efficient summary of hipster posturing at its most baroque. Never has a trend so perfectly crystallized the endless, empty layers of fashion-based rebellion. And never has a trend shown itself to be so openly contemptuous of the working class. Like many a fad before it, Normcore thrives on appropriation. But where privileged hipsters once looked to underground subcultures—bikers, punks, Teddy Boys—as they pursued their downwardly mobile personal liberation, they now latch onto the faceless working majority: the Walmart shoppers, the suburban moms and dads.
Even if it began as something of a self-referential fashion joke, the media’s infatuation with all things Normcore says a lot. Not least, it highlights our abiding social need for a sanitized counterculture, for a youthful rebellion that can be readily dismissed, for the comfort of neoliberal melancholy, for what Warren G. Harding—the unheralded John the Baptist of the Normcore Gospel—famously called “a return to normalcy.”
The Revolt of the Mass Indie Überelite
The adventure began in 2013, and picked up steam early last year with Fiona Duncan’s “Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion,” a blowout exploration of the anti-individualist Normcore creed for New York magazine. Duncan remembered feeling the first tremors of the revolution:
Sometime last summer I realized that, from behind, I could no longer tell if my fellow Soho pedestrians were art kids or middle-aged, middle-American tourists. Clad in stonewash jeans, fleece, and comfortable sneakers, both types looked like they might’ve just stepped off an R-train after shopping in Times Square. When I texted my friend Brad (an artist whose summer uniform consisted of Adidas barefoot trainers, mesh shorts and plain cotton tees) for his take on the latest urban camouflage, I got an immediate reply: “lol normcore.”Brad, however eloquent and charming, did not coin the term himself. He got it from K-HOLE, a group of trend forecasters. To judge by K-HOLE’s name alone—a slang term for the woozy aftereffects of the animal tranquilizer and recreational drug ketamine—the group was more than happy to claim Normcore as its own licensed playground. As company principals patiently explained to the New York Times, their appropriation of the name of a toxic drug hangover was itself a sly commentary on the cultural logic of the corporate world’s frenetic cooptation of young people’s edgy habits. At a London art gallery in October 2013, in a paper titled “Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom,” team K-HOLE proposed the Twitter hashtag #Normcore as a rejoinder to such cooptation:
If the rule is Think Different, being seen as normal is the scariest thing. (It means being returned to your boring suburban roots, being turned back into a pumpkin, exposed as unexceptional.) Which paradoxically makes normalcy ripe for the Mass Indie überelites to adopt as their own, confirming their status by showing how disposable the trappings of uniqueness are.Jargon aside, the report had a point: lately “Mass Indie überelites”—a group more commonly known as hipsters—have been finding it increasingly difficult to express their individuality, the very thing that confers hipster cred.
Part of the problem derives from the hipster’s ubiquity. For the past several years, hipsterism has been an idée fixe in the popular press—coy cultural shorthand in the overlapping worlds of fashion, music, art, and literature for a kind of rebellion that doesn’t quite come off on its own steam. Forward-thinking middle-class youngsters used to strike fear in the hearts of the squares by flouting social norms—at least nominally, until they grew up and settled into their own appointed professional, middle-class destinies. Now, however, the hipster is a benign and well-worn figure of fun: a lumpenbourgeois urbanite perpetually in search of ways to display her difference from the masses.
by Eugenia Williamson, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Hollie Chastain
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
People Who Could Really Break The Internet
Among the many security failures of the past few months there has been one notable success. The Internet proved that it was robust enough to withstand Papermag.com’s Break the Internet edition. It’s nice to know that while North Korea can take down Sony, and Lizard Squad can put major gaming sites out of business on Christmas Day, the Internet itself can handle any amount of undraped celebrity derrière. That episode set me to thinking, though. If Kim Kardashian and her photoshopped posterior can’t break the Internet, than who could?
The first place you might consider attacking would be the DNS root name servers. These control the very top level of DNS, and without them no server on the Internet would have a name. There are a limited number of them, and they are controlled by a committee, the DNS Root Server System Advisory Committee otherwise known as the Secret Masters of the Internet. However, the servers themselves are run on heavily protected highly redundant hardware, and are geographically distributed. They also run different software, so a single vulnerability could not be used to take down all the root servers. They are such an obvious place to attack that they are too well defended to be a good target.
The Internet can route around damage. That is a strength when dealing with minor damage or attacks but a problem when a major component is damaged. The network traffic that gets rerouted causes bottlenecks and slowdowns elsewhere in the network. Once you hit the dreaded Reload Threshold, when web pages are loading slowly enough that people start hitting the reload button and sending multiple requests for the same page, then large sections of the net would grind to a halt. This happened on July 18th, 2001 when a train accident in a tunnel in Baltimore severed an Internet backbone cable. That afternoon users all over the US had problems accessing web sites in other parts of the US, apparently randomly. A simple brute force DDoS attack against one or two key points in the Internet would be enough to make the rest unusable. Personally I would probably go after MAE-West in San Jose, partly because almost all the traffic to and from Silicon Valley goes through there but mostly because it has a cool name.
To make a serious dent in the bandwidth of one or more Internet Exchange Points you would need total bandwidth in the Terabits/second range, an order of magnitude larger than the Spamhaus attack. Who has access to that sort of bandwidth and the expertise to point it all at one place?
My first thought was Netflix. During prime viewing hours Netflix streaming videos account for about a third of all the bandwidth used in the US, and probably more when a new season of House of Cards comes out. In order to serve their fifty million plus viewers, Netflix probably uses between ten and twenty Terabits/second which is more than enough to take down several Internet Exchange Points. However, they don’t control all of the bandwidth directly. Much of it is either leased from content distribution networks (CDN) such as Limelight and Level 3, or sent from caching devices that are colocated in major ISPs. While Netflix could temporarily disable the Internet, pretty soon the CDNs and ISPs would pull the plug on their equipment, and things would be back to normal.
Next up in the bandwidth stakes is Google, whose YouTube video streaming takes up about half as much bandwidth as Netflix. That’s certainly enough to do serious damage, but there is a limited range of IP addresses from which the attack could originate. So, this attack could be blocked, though with significant collateral damage. Actually, if Google were just to take down Google Search, Gmail, Google Voice, Google Drive, and YouTube, the Internet would be broken for many people. On the bright side, nobody would miss Google+. Luckily large corporations have checks and balances built in to prevent this sort of corporate suicide.
I mentioned the CDNs earlier, and certainly the large ones likeLimelight, Level 3, Amazon AWS, and Akamai have enough bandwidth to be a significant threat. I would be especially concerned about Akamai, as they have a wide geographical distribution of their servers. Anyone surfing the Internet regularly downloads files from Akamai many times a day without noticing it. However, while these companies could do temporary damage in the long run they could simply be disconnected from the rest of the Internet. Things would be painful if they were offline for any period, though, as the content they are currently delivering would be unavailable. Once again, I don’t think corporate suicide is very likely.
For an attack on the Internet to be successful and sustained, it would have to come from many different sources. So the question is, who could get control of enough devices to take down not just a large corporation or a small country, but the entire Internet? Clearly any of the large software vendors that push out updates to millions of devices on a regular basis could do this: Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Oracle, etc. Let’s hope they all have good enough quality assurance to prevent a rogue programmer from inserting a backdoor and enabling the launch of the Mother of All DDoS Attacks.
Are there any individuals or small groups that could launch a supermassive DDoS attack without having to go through large corporate QA? I came up with three good examples, and there are probably quite a few more out there.
The first place you might consider attacking would be the DNS root name servers. These control the very top level of DNS, and without them no server on the Internet would have a name. There are a limited number of them, and they are controlled by a committee, the DNS Root Server System Advisory Committee otherwise known as the Secret Masters of the Internet. However, the servers themselves are run on heavily protected highly redundant hardware, and are geographically distributed. They also run different software, so a single vulnerability could not be used to take down all the root servers. They are such an obvious place to attack that they are too well defended to be a good target.The Internet can route around damage. That is a strength when dealing with minor damage or attacks but a problem when a major component is damaged. The network traffic that gets rerouted causes bottlenecks and slowdowns elsewhere in the network. Once you hit the dreaded Reload Threshold, when web pages are loading slowly enough that people start hitting the reload button and sending multiple requests for the same page, then large sections of the net would grind to a halt. This happened on July 18th, 2001 when a train accident in a tunnel in Baltimore severed an Internet backbone cable. That afternoon users all over the US had problems accessing web sites in other parts of the US, apparently randomly. A simple brute force DDoS attack against one or two key points in the Internet would be enough to make the rest unusable. Personally I would probably go after MAE-West in San Jose, partly because almost all the traffic to and from Silicon Valley goes through there but mostly because it has a cool name.
To make a serious dent in the bandwidth of one or more Internet Exchange Points you would need total bandwidth in the Terabits/second range, an order of magnitude larger than the Spamhaus attack. Who has access to that sort of bandwidth and the expertise to point it all at one place?
My first thought was Netflix. During prime viewing hours Netflix streaming videos account for about a third of all the bandwidth used in the US, and probably more when a new season of House of Cards comes out. In order to serve their fifty million plus viewers, Netflix probably uses between ten and twenty Terabits/second which is more than enough to take down several Internet Exchange Points. However, they don’t control all of the bandwidth directly. Much of it is either leased from content distribution networks (CDN) such as Limelight and Level 3, or sent from caching devices that are colocated in major ISPs. While Netflix could temporarily disable the Internet, pretty soon the CDNs and ISPs would pull the plug on their equipment, and things would be back to normal.
Next up in the bandwidth stakes is Google, whose YouTube video streaming takes up about half as much bandwidth as Netflix. That’s certainly enough to do serious damage, but there is a limited range of IP addresses from which the attack could originate. So, this attack could be blocked, though with significant collateral damage. Actually, if Google were just to take down Google Search, Gmail, Google Voice, Google Drive, and YouTube, the Internet would be broken for many people. On the bright side, nobody would miss Google+. Luckily large corporations have checks and balances built in to prevent this sort of corporate suicide.
I mentioned the CDNs earlier, and certainly the large ones likeLimelight, Level 3, Amazon AWS, and Akamai have enough bandwidth to be a significant threat. I would be especially concerned about Akamai, as they have a wide geographical distribution of their servers. Anyone surfing the Internet regularly downloads files from Akamai many times a day without noticing it. However, while these companies could do temporary damage in the long run they could simply be disconnected from the rest of the Internet. Things would be painful if they were offline for any period, though, as the content they are currently delivering would be unavailable. Once again, I don’t think corporate suicide is very likely.
For an attack on the Internet to be successful and sustained, it would have to come from many different sources. So the question is, who could get control of enough devices to take down not just a large corporation or a small country, but the entire Internet? Clearly any of the large software vendors that push out updates to millions of devices on a regular basis could do this: Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Oracle, etc. Let’s hope they all have good enough quality assurance to prevent a rogue programmer from inserting a backdoor and enabling the launch of the Mother of All DDoS Attacks.
Are there any individuals or small groups that could launch a supermassive DDoS attack without having to go through large corporate QA? I came up with three good examples, and there are probably quite a few more out there.
by Andrew Conway, Cloudmark Security Blog | Read more:
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