Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6

#6 E——— on “How and Why I Have Come to be Totally Devoted to S——— and Have Made Her the Linchpin and Plinth of My Entire Emotional Existence”

And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and raped and very nearly killed.

Q.

Let me explain. I’m aware of how it might sound, believe me. I can explain. In bed together, in response to some sort of prompt or association, she related an anecdote about hitchhiking and once being picked up by what turned out to be a psychotic serial sex offender who drove her to a secluded area and raped her and would almost surely have murdered her had she not been able to think effectively on her feet under enormous fear and stress. Irregardless of whatever I might have thought of the quality and substance of the thinking that enabled her to induce him to let her live.

Q.

Neither would I. Who would, now, in an era when every—when psychotic serial killers have their own trading cards? I’m concerned in today’s climate to steer clear of any suggestion of anyone quote asking for it, let’s not even go there, but yet rest assured it gives one pause about the capacities of judgment involved, or at the very least in the naïveté—

Q.

Only that it was perhaps marginally less unbelievable in the context of her type, in that this was what one might call a quote Granola Cruncher, or post-Hippie, New Ager, what have you, in college where one is often first exposed to social taxonomies we called them Granola Crunchers or simply Crunchers, terms comprising the prototypical sandals, unrefined fibers, daffy arcana, emotional incontinence, flamboyantly long hair, extreme liberality on social issues, financial support from parents they revile, bare feet, obscure import religions, indifferent hygiene, a gooey and somewhat canned vocabulary, the whole predictable peace-and-love post-Hippie diction that im—

Q.

A large outdoor concert-slash-performance-art community festival thing in a park downtown where—it was a pickup, plain and simple. I will not try to represent it as anything nicer than that, or more fated. And I’m going to admit at the risk of appearing mercenary that her prototypical Cruncher morphology was evident at first sight, from clear on the other side of the bandstand, and dictated the terms of the approach and the tactics of the pickup itself and made the whole thing almost criminally easy. Half the women there—it is a less uncommon typology among young educated girls out here than one might think. You don’t want to know what kind of festival or why the three of us were there, trust me. I’ll just bite the political bullet and confess that I classified her as a strictly one-night objective, and that my interest in her was almost entirely due to the fact that she was extraordinarily pretty. Sexually attractive, sexy. She had a phenomenal body, even under the poncho. It was her body that attracted me. Her face was a bit strange. Not homely but eccentric. Tad’s assessment was that she looked like a really sexy duck. Nevertheless nolo to the charge that I spotted her on her blanket at the concert and sauntered carnivorously over with an overtly one-night objective. And, having had some prior dealings with the Cruncher genus prior to this, that the one-night proviso was due mostly to the grim unimaginability of having to talk with a New Age brigadier for more than one night. Whether or not you approve I think we can assume you understand.

Q.

That essential at-center-life-is-just-a-cute-pet-bunny fluffiness about them that makes it exceedingly hard to take them seriously or to end up not feeling as if you’re exploiting them in some way.

Q.

Fluffiness or daffiness or intellectual flaccidity or a somehow smug-seeming naïveté. Choose whichever offends you least. And yes and don’t worry I’m aware of how all this sounds and can well imagine the judgments you’re forming from the way I’m characterizing what drew me to her but if I’m to really explain this to you as requested then I have no choice but to be brutally candid rather than observing the pseudosensitive niceties of euphemism about the way a reasonably experienced, educated man is going to view an extraordinarily good-looking girl whose life philosophy is fluffy and unconsidered and when one comes right down to it kind of contemptible. I’m going to pay you the compliment of not pretending to worry whether you understand what I’m referring to about the difficulty of not feeling impatience and even contempt—the blithe hypocrisy, the blatant self-contradiction—the way you know from the outset that there will be the requisite enthusiasms for the rain forest and spotted owl, creative meditation, feel-good psychology, macrobiosis, rabid distrust of what they consider authority without evidently once stopping to consider the rigid authoritarianism implicit in the rigid uniformity of their own quote unquote nonconformist uniform, vocabulary, attitudes. As someone who worked himself through both college and two years now of postgraduate school I have to confess to an almost blanket—these rich kids in torn jeans whose way of protesting apartheid is to boycott South African pot. Silverglade called them the Inward Bound. The smug naïveté, the condescension in the quote compassion they feel for those quote unquote trapped or imprisoned in orthodox American lifestyle choices. So on and so forth. The fact that the Inward Bound never consider that it’s the probity and thrift of the re— to occur to them that they themselves have themselves become the distillate of everything about the culture they deride and define themselves as opposing, the narcissism, the materialism and complacency and unexamined conformity—or the irony that the blithe teleology of this quote impending New Age is exactly the same cultural permission slip that Manifest Destiny was, or the Reich or the dialectic of the proletariat or the Cultural Revolution—all the same. And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same.

Q.

You would be surprised.

Q.

All right and the near-contempt here specifically in the way you can glide casually over and bend down next to her blanket to initiate conversation and idly play with the blanket’s fringe and create the sense of affinity and connection that will allow you to pick her up and somehow almost resent that it’s so goddamn easy to make the conversation flow toward a sense of connection, how exploitative you feel when it is so easy to get this type to regard you as a kindred soul—you almost know what’s going to be said next without her having even to open her pretty mouth. Tad said that she was like some kind of smooth blank perfect piece of pseudo-art you want to buy so you can take it home and sm—

Q.

No, not at all, because I am trying to explain that the typology here dictated a tactic of what appeared to be a blend of embarrassed confession and brutal candor. The moment enough of a mood of conversational intimacy had been established to make a quote confession seem even remotely plausible I deployed a sensitive-slash-pained expression and quote confessed that I’d in fact not just been passing her blanket and even though we didn’t know each other had felt a mysterious but overwhelming urge just to lean down and say hi but no something about her that made it unimaginable to deploy anything less than total honesty forced me to confess that I had in fact deliberately approached her blanket and initiated conversation because I had seen her from across the bandstand and had felt some mysterious but overwhelmingly sensual energy seeming to emanate from her very being and had been helplessly drawn to it and had leaned down and introduced myself and started a conversation with her because I wanted to connect and make mutually nurturing and exquisite love with her, and had been ashamed of admitting this natural desire and so had fibbed at first in explaining my approach, though now some mysterious gentleness and generosity of soul I could intuit about her was allowing me to feel safe enough to confess that I had, formerly, fibbed. Note the rhetorically specific blend of childish diction like Hi and fib with flaccid abstractions like nurture and energy. This is the lingua franca of the Inward Bound. I actually truly did like her, I found, as an individual—she had an amused expression during the whole conversation that made it hard not to smile in return, and an involuntary need to smile is one of the best feelings available, no? A refill? It’s refill time, yes? No?

Q.

And that prior experience has taught that the female Granola Cruncher tends to define herself in opposition to what she sees as the essentially unconsidered and hypocrisy-bound attitudes of quote mainstream women and is thus essentially unoffendable, rejects the whole concept of propriety and offense, and views so-called honesty of even the most brutal or repellent sort as evidence of sincerity and respect, getting quote real, id est the impression that you respect her personhood too much to ply her with implausible fictions and leave very basic energies and desires uncommunicated. Not to mention, to make your indignation and distaste complete, I’m sure, the fact that extremely, off-the-charts pretty women of almost every type have, from my experience, tend all to have a uniform obsession with the idea of respect, and will do almost anything anywhere for any fellow who affords her a sufficient sense of being deeply and profoundly respected. I doubt I need to point out that this is nothing but a particular female variant of the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings. I can tell by your expression what you think of brutal candor. The fact is that she had a body that my body found sexually attractive and wanted to have intercourse with and it was not really any more noble or complicated than that. And she did indeed turn out to be straight out of Central Granola-Cruncher Casting, I should stress. She had some kind of monomaniacal hatred for the American timber industry, and professed membership in one of these apostrophe-heavy near-Eastern religions that I would defy anyone to pronounce correctly, and believed strongly in the superior value of vitamins and minerals in colloidal suspension rather than tablet form, et cetera, and then, when one thing had been led stolidly by me to another and there she was in my apartment and we had done what I had wanted to do with her and had exchanged the standard horizontal compliments and assurances, she was going on about her imported denomination’s views vis-à-vis energy fields and souls and connections between souls via what she kept calling quote focus, and using the, well, the quote L-word itself several times without irony or even any evident awareness that the word has through tactical overdeployment become compromised and requires invisible quotes around it now at the very least, and I suppose I should tell you that I was planning right from the outset to give her the special false number when we exchanged numbers in the morning, which all but a very small and cynical minority always want to. I.e. exchange numbers. A fellow in Tad’s torts study group’s great-uncle or grandparents or something have a vacation home just outside town and are never there, with a phone but no machine or service, so when someone you’ve given the special number calls the special number it simply rings and rings, so for a few days it’s usually not evident to the girl that what you’ve given her isn’t your true number but for a few days allows her to imagine that you’ve just been extremely busy and scarce and that this is also perhaps why you haven’t called her either. Which obviates the chance of hurt feelings and is therefore, I submit, good, though I can well im—

Q.

The sort of glorious girl whose kiss tastes of liquor when she’s had no liquor to drink. Cassis, berries, gumdrops, all steamy and soft. Quote unquote.

by David Foster Wallace, The Paris Review |  Read more:
Image: Wikipedia

The Myth of American Meritocracy

Just before the Labor Day weekend, a front page New York Times story broke the news of the largest cheating scandal in Harvard University history, in which nearly half the students taking a Government course on the role of Congress had plagiarized or otherwise illegally collaborated on their final exam. Each year, Harvard admits just 1600 freshmen while almost 125 Harvard students now face possible suspension over this single incident. A Harvard dean described the situation as “unprecedented.”

But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America’s most prestigious academic institution? In the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together with their professional schools. The rise of a Henry Ford, from farm boy mechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtually impossible today, as even America’s most successful college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often turn out to be extremely well-connected former Harvard students. Indeed, the early success of Facebook was largely due to the powerful imprimatur it enjoyed from its exclusive availability first only at Harvard and later restricted to just the Ivy League.

During this period, we have witnessed a huge national decline in well-paid middle class jobs in the manufacturing sector and other sources of employment for those lacking college degrees, with median American wages having been stagnant or declining for the last forty years. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top, with America’s richest 1 percent now possessing nearly as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent. This situation, sometimes described as a “winner take all society,” leaves families desperate to maximize the chances that their children will reach the winners’ circle, rather than risk failure and poverty or even merely a spot in the rapidly deteriorating middle class. And the best single means of becoming such an economic winner is to gain admission to a top university, which provides an easy ticket to the wealth of Wall Street or similar venues, whose leading firms increasingly restrict their hiring to graduates of the Ivy League or a tiny handful of other top colleges. On the other side, finance remains the favored employment choice for Harvard, Yale or Princeton students after the diplomas are handed out.

The Battle for Elite College Admissions

As a direct consequence, the war over college admissions has become astonishingly fierce, with many middle- or upper-middle class families investing quantities of time and money that would have seemed unimaginable a generation or more ago, leading to an all-against-all arms race that immiserates the student and exhausts the parents. The absurd parental efforts of an Amy Chua, as recounted in her 2010 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, were simply a much more extreme version of widespread behavior among her peer-group, which is why her story resonated so deeply among our educated elites. Over the last thirty years, America’s test-prep companies have grown from almost nothing into a $5 billion annual industry, allowing the affluent to provide an admissions edge to their less able children. Similarly, the enormous annual tuition of $35,000 charged by elite private schools such as Dalton or Exeter is less for a superior high school education than for the hope of a greatly increased chance to enter the Ivy League. Many New York City parents even go to enormous efforts to enroll their children in the best possible pre-Kindergarten program, seeking early placement on the educational conveyer belt which eventually leads to Harvard. Others cut corners in a more direct fashion, as revealed in the huge SAT cheating rings recently uncovered in affluent New York suburbs, in which students were paid thousands of dollars to take SAT exams for their wealthier but dimmer classmates.

But given such massive social and economic value now concentrated in a Harvard or Yale degree, the tiny handful of elite admissions gatekeepers enjoy enormous, almost unprecedented power to shape the leadership of our society by allocating their supply of thick envelopes. Even billionaires, media barons, and U.S. Senators may weigh their words and actions more carefully as their children approach college age. And if such power is used to select our future elites in a corrupt manner, perhaps the inevitable result is the selection of corrupt elites, with terrible consequences for America. Thus, the huge Harvard cheating scandal, and perhaps also the endless series of financial, business, and political scandals which have rocked our country over the last decade or more, even while our national economy has stagnated.

Just a few years ago Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden published The Price of Admission, a devastating account of the corrupt admissions practices at so many of our leading universities, in which every sort of non-academic or financial factor plays a role in privileging the privileged and thereby squeezing out those high-ability, hard-working students who lack any special hook. In one particularly egregious case, a wealthy New Jersey real estate developer, later sent to Federal prison on political corruption charges, paid Harvard $2.5 million to help ensure admission of his completely under-qualified son.When we consider that Harvard’s existing endowment was then at $15 billion and earning almost $7 million each day in investment earnings, we see that a culture of financial corruption has developed an absurd illogic of its own, in which senior Harvard administrators sell their university’s honor for just a few hours worth of its regular annual income, the equivalent of a Harvard instructor raising a grade for a hundred dollars in cash.

by Ron Unz, The American Conservative |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Key & Peele: Obama, The College Years

[ed. Thanks, Patrick.]

The Wife Bonus

[ed. See also: Poor Little Rich Women]

Women are notoriously bad at asking for bonuses. Which is why I did my homework and created – as BusinessInsider.com suggested – “a master plan”. I waited “the appropriate amount of time” (in my case, five years), made sure the big boss was in a good mood and took him out to lunch (“somewhere intimate, where there will be no interruptions”). I eschewed any usage of the word “need” (stinking, as it does, of desperation) in my pitch – which was “backed up with reports, charts and documentation of my positive performance” – and I tried to “remain respectful” as he stared slack-jawed back at me, before throwing his head back and roaring with laughter.

Asking my own husband for a bonus simply for being his wife was never going to be anything less than preposterous. Yet according to an author of the forthcoming memoir, Primates of Park Avenue, this is what a glittering tribe of crispy-haired Upper East Side Manhattan wives do every year – depending, of course, on how well they have managed the domestic budget, socialised, upheld a variety-filled performance in the bedroom… and succeeded in getting the kids into a ‘Big Ten’ school.

Wednesday Martin, a social researcher who has been immersing herself in the lives of “Park Lane Primates” for over a decade, explains how the “wife bonus”, as she has called it, works in practice.

“It might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done, but her own performance — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn, these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting.”

So far, so laughable. Only Martin’s book isn’t a pastiche, but a serious, anthropomorphic study.

And it’s all true. I’ve lived on the Upper East Side – I know. I’ve watched this brittle brigade tirelessly work through their exhaustive body admin schedules and three Flywheel classes a day – not to mention the intensive labour that comes with being what Martin calls “the Glam SAHMs”, glamorous stay-at-home-moms. The mothers run their home lives as domestic CEOs, outsourcing and managing the nanny, the housekeeper, sleep trainer, thumb-sucking guru and child etiquette expert on her hands-free has become their full-time job.

“These women are anxious and hypervigilant about being perfect wives and mothers,” Martin tells me. “Whereas middle-class mothers are more likely to be working and come from a common-sense tradition when it comes to parenting, the more educated and privileged mothers tend to work from a script called ‘intensive motherhood’. While their husbands make millions, the privileged women who I met tend to give away the skills they honed in graduate school and their professions — organising galas, editing newsletters, running the library and bake sales — free of charge. It is also an act of extravagance, a brag: ‘I used to work. I can, but I don’t need to.’”

But under this arrangement, women are still dependent on their men. Add in the real stressers of intensive motherhood – exhaustively enriching their children’s lives by virtually every measure – and Martin believes it all combines to make these women feel frustrated, anxious, on edge…” And angry? “Yes,” she laughs, “very, very angry.”

by Celia Walden, The Telegraph |  Read more:

Image: Stepford Wives

All Purpose Recipe

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From Mega-Machines to Mega-Algorithms

In the middle of last century, the historian Lewis Mumford coined the term mega-machine to describe organizations in which humans function like cogs—such as the bureaucracies that rapidly developed and spread during the Industrial Revolution. In his 1964 essay “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Mumford argues that the mega-machine represented a structure of power in which authority was not embodied in the visible, corporeal figure of the sovereign but rather was congruent with an abstract system that ordered, administered, and directed its organic components. “At the very moment Western nations threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled uniformed army.” With their managerial hierarchies, divisions of labor, and intricate methods of accounting, mega-machines excel at controlling large social systems and coordinating collective actions for the purpose of achieving a goal. Like bureaucracies they are essentially technologies that process information and communicate commands.

While they are composed of humans, mega-machines are fundamentally antihuman, in both their means and ends. “Under the pretext of saving labour,” Mumford writes, “the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.” There’s a reason he used the Kremlin, the Pentagon, and General Motors as examples of mega-machines. From their vantage point, the human-cogs have little knowledge of how their actions are incorporated into the functioning of the whole system, let alone choice in the matter. They are treated like automatons or “servomechanisms” who can be kept on a need-to-know basis while work is squeezed out of them.

Now, in the time of networked computing, “smart” technologies, and digital platforms, the image of society as mega-machine is being supplanted by the mega-algorithm—with people acting not merely as cogs but as information nodes, inputs, and outputs incorporated into a calculus of control simply by existing on the network. To accommodate the mega-algorithm, people are atomized by digital technologies and blown apart into streams of data; they are given a unique identity and all their actions—every piece of content generated, every action capable of being tracked—is fed into processors.

Whereas the mega-machine operated by violent means—forcibly divorcing the human-cogs of identity and absorbing their productive and creative energies through wage or slave labor—the mega-algorithm doubles back and promises you reunification with this alienated self through “authentic” (or “creative” or “social”) work completed on your own time. We are sold a desirable narrative about the wealth of networks, decentralized production, cognitive surplus, collaborative consumption, social engagement, and instant convenience. The techno-utopic discourses of emancipation and community that surround the technologies and sociopolitics that make up the mega-algorithm serve as an effective ideological veil, which shrouds the practices of exploitation and control. Don’t think of yourself as an overworked, underpaid laborer trying to hustle for a paycheck. No, you’re actually an entrepreneurial individual, building your personal brand and finding (or making) your niche in the marketplace.

We have escaped the violence of the mega-machine, so the story goes. But the mega-machine and mega-algorithm have more in common than many commentators believe. They are not the same, but nor are they separate; both exist in the same familial lineage, like father and son. As Astra Taylor writes in The People’s Platform, “Many of the problems that plagued our media system before the Internet was widely adopted have carried over into the digital domain—consolidation, centralization, and commercialism—and will continue to shape it.” With both the mega-algorithm and the mega-machine, humans are subsumed into a feedback-driven, information-processing system to which they are at once essential and incidental. The system can’t run without people serving as cogs or nodes, yet in each case, the judgment of those serving the system is rendered superfluous. With the mega-algorithm, functions once assigned to people are assigned to code that becomes one (or many) steps removed from its programmers. The very question of where agency ultimately resides becomes fuzzy, since it is unevenly distributed across different people and times.

The mega-algorithm is powered by a particular idea of how technology fits into political economy: Algorithms serve to hide or obscure the actual human labor involved in business operations. This contributes to a large-scale reshaping of the economics of labor. That is, paying people for the goods and services they produce stops being part of the way business is done and finding jobs that come with security, longevity, and a paycheck becomes more difficult.

Unlike with the mega-machine, it’s not always clear when we’ve been assimilated as a human-node in the mega-algorithm. The systems—like social networks we use to connect with various platforms while hundreds of trackers hoover every piece of (meta)data that can be brokered for the purpose of rating and targeting us—are so interrelated that it appears there’s no escape. It functions rhizomatically: like the roots and shoots of a persistent, massive set of plants, it seems to pop up everywhere. And it is extremely flexible, able to derive value from people in ways that are not obviously exploitative or controlling.

This flexibility, this ability to reconfigure and appropriate additional parts of life extends the mega-algorithm’s power further than that of the mega-machine. The technologies of the mega-algorithm disguise human labor by hiding it in plain sight. Every action has the potential to be labor, if it can be processed in the right way. Even the sanctity of our home is not safe from intrusion. As design critic Justin McGuirk argues in an essay on the “smart home,” “the proliferation of smart, connected products will turn the home into a prime data collection node. It is estimated that there will be 50 billion wi-fi-connected devices by 2020, and all of them will collect data that is transmitted to and stored by their manufacturers. In short, the home is becoming a data factory.” This shift makes complete sense in light of the operational logic of the mega-algorithm. Excluding the home from data harvest and monetization would be a foolishly inefficient waste of exploitable labor.

by Janathan Sadowski, TNI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Amy

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Things Fall Apart

When Nike Honcho Phil Knight commissions his swoosh-stripe Mount Rushmore somewhere in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, the Air Max 95 will be one of the shoes that will be carved into the Precambrian granite outcropping. The Air Max 95 isn’t the best Nike runner ever made, it’s arguably (sorry Air Jordan junkies) the best Nike shoe ever made, an object burrowed deeply into the popular culture. Collectors flocked to it, kickstarting what would become a $75 billion global industry fueled by hype beasts, sneakerheads, and enough aspirational consumers to fill the Mariana Trench several times over. Since it’s 1995 debut, the Air Max 95 has remained a perennial bestseller. Nike churns out several new versions every year. The number of colorways is staggering: over 150 and counting. Such ubiquity has done nothing to diminish the shoe’s cachet. It continues to be been worn by artists, actors, pop stars, criminals and, yes, even actual athletes.

Nagomo Oji knew he was stepping into history when he laced up a pair of Air Max 95s last month in Saitama City, Japan, a commuter sprawl 10 miles north of central Tokyo. What made Oji’s shoes so special was their pedigree. Anybody can walk into Foot Locker and buy a pair of Air Maxes for 160 bucks. Oji’s shoes were something quite different. To use the sneakerhead vernacular, they were “DS” (dead stock), a discontinued model that’s new, unworn, and unboxed. Even better, they were “OG. Not “original gangster,” just “original.” In other words, these vintage kicks were highly collectable, a pristine example of the very first Air Maxes that dropped two decades ago.

But something insidious has been happening to those shoes, and every other pair like them, over the years. They’ve been crumbling away to nothing as they sit tucked in boxes or hidden in closets. The materials used to make them degrade over time, causing the shoes to fall apart, rendering them worthless.

Untouched specimens like Oji’s are as rare as Siamese hermaphrodites and can fetch over $2,000. But Oji had no interest in selling his Air Max 95s. For him, the shoebox was a time capsule that conjured fleeting images of lost youth and harkened to a forgotten period when collecting kicks was a hobby, not an investment. Besides, how could you put a price on old-school details like midsole “BWs” (big windows) that contained the encapsulated nitrogen bubbles, or the PSI specs stamped on the sole from toe to heel (“20, 25, 5,”), like an Enigma code?

Much had happened since Oji purchased these Nike runners. He no longer defined himself by the shoes he wore. Vanity had been undermined by adulthood and responsibilities. He was a grown man now, a father of 2-year-old twins. As he appraised his newly shod feet, a smile creased his lips. It might not be possible to relive the past, he thought. But this was the closest thing to it.

As soon as he planted his feet, Oji sensed something was terribly wrong. The midsoles flattened, and his footing became strangely unstable. He didn’t realize it at the time, but the polyurethane (PU), that squishy, shock-absorbing material sandwiched between the upper and the outer sole, was more than ten years past its projected lifespan.

After just one step, the hardened PU foam fractured and collapsed, like arid soil crumbling beneath the boots of a Dust Bowl Okie. Oji looked down in disbelief. With the inner soles completely detached from the uppers, his feet were actually touching the ground. His beloved Air Maxes had just morphed into Fred Flintstone shoes.

by Rene Chun, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Nagomo Oji

Family Raised $187M For Cancer, Spent It On Themselves

[ed. And they got away with it. So how is this a deterrent to anyone, exactly?]

A Tennessee man and his family used much of the $187 million it collected for cancer patients to buy themselves cars, gym memberships and take luxury cruise vacations, pay for college tuition and employ family members with six-figure salaries, federal officials alleged Tuesday in one of the largest charity fraud cases ever, involving all 50 states.

The joint action by the Federal Trade Commission and the states says James T. Reynolds Sr., his ex-wife and son raised the money through their various charities: The Cancer Fund of America in Knoxville, Tennessee, and its affiliated Cancer Support Services; The Breast Cancer Society in Mesa, Arizona; and the Children's Cancer Fund of America in Powell, Tennessee. (...)

Anyone who donated money to these groups shouldn't expect a refund anytime soon. While litigation against Reynolds Sr. and the Cancer Fund of America is ongoing, the settlement agreements with Reynolds' son, ex-wife and a long-time associate of the family - Kyle Effler - notes that much of the money has already been spent. The agreement bans the three from fundraising and shuttered their organizations.

"The money is mostly gone," said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection. Rich declined to say whether a separate criminal investigation might be underway, noting only that the regulatory agency doesn't have that authority. (...)

The settlement agreement imposed hefty judgments based on the amount of money donated to the charities between 2008 and 2012. But because of Perkins' "inability to pay," her $30 million judgment would be suspended entirely. The $65.5 million judgment against Reynolds II would be suspended after he pays $75,000.

Effler, former president of Cancer Support Services, faced a $41 million judgment that would be forgiven after paying $60,000.

Officials on Tuesday said that any money recouped under the settlements would go to state authorities, which will have the ability to distribute the money to legitimate charities. Officials cited complexities of the case to explain why the charities were allowed to continue operating even after media outlets flagged them as potentially fraudulent.

"I hope it serves as a strong warning for anyone trying to exploit the kindness and generosity of others," Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said of the investigation.

by Anne Flaherty, AP | Read more:
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$400 Yoga Pants Are Just the Beginning

[ed. Why, indeed.]

Feeding off the rise of workout gear that can be worn in or out of the gym, activewear labels have become status symbols, much like any other pricey designer clothes. Premium yoga pants, made popular amongst the masses by Lululemon, can run anywhere from $80 to $200. A horde of brands battle each other in this segment as upstarts such as Outdoor Voices, Michi, and Vie Active jostle with superpowers Nike, Under Armour, and Adidas.

Yet there's little available for women searching the racks for even more expensive, higher-end performance wear. Fear not, luxury shoppers. It won't remain like this for long.

Quietly, a smattering of new true luxury activewear labels have appeared, each with the hope that affluent shoppers are willing to shell out $300, $400, or more on a pair of pliable pants. Think about it this way: If you're a luxury shopper who buys $1,500 designer dresses, pays $250 a month for an Equinox gym membership, and totes around a $4,000 Chanel bag, why would you spend a mere $100 on the leggings that you wear to the gym, on errands, and on the weekend?

by Kim Bhasin, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Claire Pepper via Charli Cohen

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The Tao of Poo: We're Doing It All Wrong

In my large Italian family, I grew up with the subject of poo, bottoms and constipation readily – and far too frequently – discussed at the dinner table. I’d be about to raise a raviolo to my mouth, only to hear how someone’s piles had popped, just that morning.

This doesn’t mean I’m anal (sorry) about the subject. It’s fascinating away from the lunch table. Late last year, I read that we are pooing all wrong: we should be squatting, not sitting, on a toilet bowl. Then a book called Charming Bowels by Giulia Enders caused something of a storm in its native Germany and I got fully immersed in the subject.

Enders is studying in Frankfurt for her medical doctorate in microbiology. She is utterly, charmingly obsessed with the gut, gut bacteria and poo. She writes and talks about her subject matter with such child-like enthusiasm, it’s infectious. And, yes, we have been pooing all wrong. Enders tells me about various studies that show that we do it more efficiently if we squat. This is because the closure mechanism of the gut is not designed to “open the hatch completely” when we’re sitting down or standing up: it’s like a kinked hose. Squatting is far more natural and puts less pressure on our bottoms. She says: “1.2 billion people around the world who squat have almost no incidence of diverticulosis and fewer problems with piles. We in the west, on the other hand, squeeze our gut tissue until it comes out of our bottoms.” Lovely.

But not to worry. Although you can climb on your toilet seat and squat (“It might be fun!”), we can iron out the kink by sitting with our feet on a little stool and leaning forward. The book even has a helpful drawing by Enders’ sister.

Then there are the sphincters. One of them we probably all know about – the one we open consciously – but there is also another, inner one, which is operated unconsciously. This ani internus sends a sample into the chamber between the inner and outer sphincter for the sensor cells to analyse and decide if it’s “safe” to fart or poo: “Yes, you’re at home. No, you’re in the office.” If it’s not safe, the sensors send it back in. But, if the inner sphincter is ignored enough times – say, because we are too shy to go to the loo for fear of being overheard – it sulks and can switch off. That’s one of the reasons constipation can occur.

Enders loves her inner sphincter. “Learning about those two sphincters really changed my perspective on life,” she says. “Those inner nerves don’t care for other people; they have no eyes or ears. Finally, something that only thinks of me! So, now I can go to the toilet anywhere. I worship that muscle!”

But the gut – and Enders’ book – is about far more than poo (although there is plenty there, about consistency, frequency, buoyancy, colour and laxatives, to keep the most forensic of scatologists happy). Enders’ big thing is bacteria.

by Annalisa Barbieri, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Sciepro/Science Photo Library/Corbis

Dr. Eelgood

Personally, I can’t think of a sea creature more horrific than the eel. It has all the negative qualities of a fish (might touch you while swimming, incapable of feeling love), plus all the negative qualities of a snake (has no limbs at all yet somehow manages to move around)—plus, in some cases, all the negative qualities of a poorly-grounded home appliance. In fact, if I were choosing something to encounter in open water, I’d rank only one fish lower than an eel: an eel that’s been marinating in cocaine. Unfortunately for me, a team of Italian scientists has been exposing European eels to low doses of cocaine to monitor the effect of the drug.

by Jess Zimmerman, Hakai Magazine | Read more:
Image: Jelger Herder/Buiten-beeld/Minden Pictures/Corbis

Octopus Chandelier by Daniel Hopper
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The Hole in the Rooftop Solar-Panel Craze

Most people buy rooftop solar panels because they think it will save them money or make them green, or both. But the truth is that rooftop solar shouldn’t be saving them money (though it often does), and it almost certainly isn’t green. In fact, the rooftop-solar craze is wasting billions of dollars a year that could be spent on greener initiatives. It also is hindering the growth of much more cost-effective renewable sources of power.

According to a recent Energy Department-backed study at North Carolina State University, installing a fully financed, average-size rooftop solar system will reduce energy costs for 93% of the single-family households in the 50 largest American cities today. That’s why people have been rushing out to buy rooftop solar panels, particularly in sunny states like Arizona, California and New Mexico.

The primary reason these small solar systems are cost-effective, however, is that they’re heavily subsidized. Utilities are forced by law to purchase solar power generated from the rooftops of homeowners and businesses at two to three times more than it would cost to buy solar power from large, independently run solar plants. Without subsidies, rooftop solar isn’t close to cost-effective.

Recent studies by Lazard and others, however, have found that large, utility-scale solar power plants can cost as little as five cents (or six cents without a subsidy) per kilowatt-hour to build and operate in the sunny Southwest. These plants are competitive with similarly sized fossil-fueled power plants. But this efficiency is possible only if solar plants are large and located in sunny parts of the country. On average, utility-scale solar plants nationwide still cost about 13 cents per kilowatt-hour, versus around six cents per kilowatt-hour for coal and natural gas, according to the Lazard study.

Large-scale solar-power prices are falling because the cost to manufacture solar panels has been decreasing and because large solar installations permit economies of scale. Rooftop solar, on the other hand, often involves microinstallations in inefficient places, which makes the overall cost as much as 3½ times higher.

So why are we paying more for the same sun?

There are lots of reasons. Well-meaning—but ill-conceived—federal, state and local tax incentives for rooftop solar give back between 30% and 40% of the installation costs to the owner as a tax credit. But more problematic are hidden rate subsidies, the most significant of which is called net metering, which is available in 44 states. Net metering allows solar-system owners to offset on a one-for-one basis the energy they receive from the electric grid with the solar power they generate on their roof.

While this might sound logical, it isn’t. An average California resident with solar, for example, generally pays about 17 cents per kilowatt-hour for electric service when the home’s solar panels aren’t operating. When they are operating, however, net metering requires the utility to pay that solar customer the same 17 cents per kilowatt-hour. But the solar customer still needs the grid to back up his intermittent solar panels, and the utility could have purchased that same solar power from a utility-scale solar power plant for about five cents per kilowatt-hour.

This 12-cents-per-kwh cost difference amounts to a wealth transfer from average electric customers to customers with rooftop solar systems (who also often have higher incomes). This is because utilities collect much of their fixed costs—the unavoidable costs of power plants, transmission lines, etc.—from residential customers through variable-use charges, in other words, charges based on how much energy they use. When a customer with rooftop solar purchases less electricity from the utility, he pays fewer variable-use charges and avoids contributing revenue to cover the utility’s fixed costs. The result is that all of the other customers have to pick up the difference.

by Brian H. Potts, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Roger Guetta
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Swearing Off the Modern Man

The Modern Man has an iPhone 6 Plus and goes to Coachella every year. He’s thinking about starting a blog and has been “like really into standup lately.” He has a favorite microbrewery because he likes his beer really hoppy, whatever that means. He has a fun Twitter feed and interesting theories about what could happen on “House of Cards.”

Peter had all the makings of a Modern Man. His Twitter feed was super-witty. He drank only local beer. He owned one of those weed pen vapor things. He wore cardigans and insisted on managing the music at every party, saying, “Trust me, you’ll see this artist on the Coachella lineup in two years.”

Peter was funny, cultured, well dressed and well read, and I took pride in dating a guy who was so keenly cool. But like most modern men, when confronted after weeks of sleeping together with mild inquiries regarding commitment, he crumbled. The Modern Man is “just not into labels” and is “only trying to have some fun.”

When I asked Peter what that was supposed to mean, he said, “Chill.”

Yet “chill” I did not.

Later, I met a friend for lunch. “Peter and I broke up,” I announced.

“Were you guys together?” she asked.

“Well, we’d been seeing each other for a few weeks.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t on Facebook,” she said. “It’s only real if it’s on Facebook.”

I was devastated when Peter and I stopped seeing each other, except for the fact that when we stopped seeing each other, we couldn’t stop seeing each other, because we followed each other on Twitter and Instagram and were friends on Facebook. So I saw him all the time, his grinning profile picture shadowing my feed.

“Unfollow him!” my friends would roar. “You’re never going to get over him unless you unfollow him on all that stuff.”

But I couldn’t. There was something so enthralling about being able to track his social life. Was he seeing someone else? I had to know. Besides, unfollowing him was too dramatic, as if I were proclaiming, “I can’t handle this!” Remaining friends on social media, however, showed I was unfazed, cool, “chill” and whatever.

But I wasn’t any of those things. I’d find myself scrolling through his tweets and Instagram posts, which included photos of other women. I’d shove my phone into my friends’ faces, their noses practically fogging the screen, and ask, “Is she prettier than me?”

One night, drunk at 2 a.m., I was trying to decipher if an innocuous Drake lyric he tweeted could somehow be directed at me as a possible admission of affection. Sensing the craziness of that, I clicked “unfollow” and then “unfriend.” With this tiny act of defiance, I was finally free. “This is closure,” I told myself. “This is moving on.”

After that splash of romantic failure, I remembered the wisdom of George Costanza. In a classic episode of “Seinfeld” (are there any nonclassic episodes?), George, in realizing that his life is a failure, decides he should do the opposite of what he normally does, reasoning that if every instinct he has is wrong, the opposite must be right.

With this in mind, I decided to swear off modern men. No more Twitter games. No more Instagram dissections. No more Facebook predation. I wanted someone mature.

by Jochebed Smith, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Brian Rea