Tuesday, June 2, 2015
The Internet Research Agency
Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message. “Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,” the message read. “Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.”
St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even heard of Columbia Chemical. St. Mary Parish had a Columbian Chemicals plant, which made carbon black, a petroleum product used in rubber and plastics. But he’d heard nothing from them that morning, either. Soon, two other residents called and reported the same text message. Arthur was worried: Had one of his employees sent out an alert without telling him?
If Arthur had checked Twitter, he might have become much more worried. Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road. “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” a man named Jon Merritt tweeted. The #ColumbianChemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville. @AnnRussela shared an image of flames engulfing the plant. @Ksarah12 posted a video of surveillance footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash of the explosion. Others shared a video in which thick black smoke rose in the distance.
Dozens of journalists, media outlets and politicians, from Louisiana to New York City, found their Twitter accounts inundated with messages about the disaster. “Heather, I’m sure that the explosion at the #ColumbianChemicals is really dangerous. Louisiana is really screwed now,” a user named @EricTraPPP tweeted at the New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Heather Nolan. Another posted a screenshot of CNN’s home page, showing that the story had already made national news. ISIS had claimed credit for the attack, according to one YouTube video; in it, a man showed his TV screen, tuned to an Arabic news channel, on which masked ISIS fighters delivered a speech next to looping footage of an explosion. A woman named Anna McClaren (@zpokodon9) tweeted at Karl Rove: “Karl, Is this really ISIS who is responsible for #ColumbianChemicals? Tell @Obama that we should bomb Iraq!” But anyone who took the trouble to check CNN.com would have found no news of a spectacular Sept. 11 attack by ISIS. It was all fake: the screenshot, the videos, the photographs.
In St. Mary Parish, Duval Arthur quickly made a few calls and found that none of his employees had sent the alert. He called Columbian Chemicals, which reported no problems at the plant. Roughly two hours after the first text message was sent, the company put out a news release, explaining that reports of an explosion were false. When I called Arthur a few months later, he dismissed the incident as a tasteless prank, timed to the anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Personally I think it’s just a real sad, sick sense of humor,” he told me. “It was just someone who just liked scaring the daylights out of people.” Authorities, he said, had tried to trace the numbers that the text messages had come from, but with no luck. (The F.B.I. told me the investigation was still open.)
The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off. (...)
Who was behind all of this? When I stumbled on it last fall, I had an idea. I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” The more I investigated this group, the more links I discovered between it and the hoaxes. In April, I went to St. Petersburg to learn more about the agency and its brand of information warfare, which it has aggressively deployed against political opponents at home, Russia’s perceived enemies abroad and, more recently, me.
St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even heard of Columbia Chemical. St. Mary Parish had a Columbian Chemicals plant, which made carbon black, a petroleum product used in rubber and plastics. But he’d heard nothing from them that morning, either. Soon, two other residents called and reported the same text message. Arthur was worried: Had one of his employees sent out an alert without telling him?If Arthur had checked Twitter, he might have become much more worried. Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road. “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” a man named Jon Merritt tweeted. The #ColumbianChemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville. @AnnRussela shared an image of flames engulfing the plant. @Ksarah12 posted a video of surveillance footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash of the explosion. Others shared a video in which thick black smoke rose in the distance.
Dozens of journalists, media outlets and politicians, from Louisiana to New York City, found their Twitter accounts inundated with messages about the disaster. “Heather, I’m sure that the explosion at the #ColumbianChemicals is really dangerous. Louisiana is really screwed now,” a user named @EricTraPPP tweeted at the New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Heather Nolan. Another posted a screenshot of CNN’s home page, showing that the story had already made national news. ISIS had claimed credit for the attack, according to one YouTube video; in it, a man showed his TV screen, tuned to an Arabic news channel, on which masked ISIS fighters delivered a speech next to looping footage of an explosion. A woman named Anna McClaren (@zpokodon9) tweeted at Karl Rove: “Karl, Is this really ISIS who is responsible for #ColumbianChemicals? Tell @Obama that we should bomb Iraq!” But anyone who took the trouble to check CNN.com would have found no news of a spectacular Sept. 11 attack by ISIS. It was all fake: the screenshot, the videos, the photographs.
In St. Mary Parish, Duval Arthur quickly made a few calls and found that none of his employees had sent the alert. He called Columbian Chemicals, which reported no problems at the plant. Roughly two hours after the first text message was sent, the company put out a news release, explaining that reports of an explosion were false. When I called Arthur a few months later, he dismissed the incident as a tasteless prank, timed to the anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Personally I think it’s just a real sad, sick sense of humor,” he told me. “It was just someone who just liked scaring the daylights out of people.” Authorities, he said, had tried to trace the numbers that the text messages had come from, but with no luck. (The F.B.I. told me the investigation was still open.)
The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off. (...)
Who was behind all of this? When I stumbled on it last fall, I had an idea. I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” The more I investigated this group, the more links I discovered between it and the hoaxes. In April, I went to St. Petersburg to learn more about the agency and its brand of information warfare, which it has aggressively deployed against political opponents at home, Russia’s perceived enemies abroad and, more recently, me.
by Adrian Chen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: James Hill
The Voice of Reason
Scientists studying the inner voice say it takes shape in early childhood and persists lifelong as companion and creative muse. It is so intimate, so constant, says British psychologist Charles Fernyhough, that it can be considered thought itself. “When asked by Theaetetus to define thought,” Fernyhough explains, “Socrates replied, ‘The talk which the soul has with itself.’” User beware: This talk may be misused or pushed to extremes, becoming a source of painful rumination or even psychosis. Yet it can also make us detached observers of our own life. Inner talk is one of the most effective, least-utilized tools available to master the psyche and foster success.
by Pamela Weintraub, Psychology Today | Read more:
Image: uncredited
When We Were Young
Self-talk starts audibly during the toddler years. The incessant self-talk of toddlers is conducted out loud as a kind of instruction manual, a self-generated road map to mastery; your voice directs you to build Lego houses, sound out words and sentences in big-letter books.
Here’s what it sounds like, as captured in the riff of a little boy guiding himself through the construction of a Tinkertoy truck: “The wheels go here, the wheels go here. Oh, we need to start it all over again. We need to close it up. See, it closes up. We’re starting it all over again.”
Dubbed private talk by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, that early out-loud self-talk “transforms the task in question, just as the use of a screwdriver transforms the task of assembling a shed,” Fernyhough says. “Putting our thoughts into words gives them a more tangible form, which makes them easier to use.”
Inner talk isn’t just mechanical, Vygotsky contended—it is the ultimate social act, an embrace and reinterpretation of teachings picked up from knowledgeable elders, pushed back out in the child’s own words. The more challenging the task, the more elaborate and vociferous the talk, all the better to help children take control of their actions and behavior.
Self-talk is the means by which the child navigates what Vygotsky famously called “the zone of proximal development,” the realm of challenges just beyond reach, too complex for a child to master alone. Children build learning partnerships with adults to gain a skill and then go off on their own, talking themselves through the task aloud. As mastery is gained, self-talk is internalized until it is mostly silent—still part of the ongoing dialogue with oneself, but more intimate, no longer broadcast.
A generation of child psychologists, led by Laura Berk at the University of Southern Illinois, has spent decades documenting the nuances: In the best circumstances, the patient teacher or caregiver teaches children the unemotional, useful, step-by-step language for mastering any task; the children, in turn, use such language in their private speech to teach themselves other things. “You can do it—try again,” the well-taught child might say to herself when she runs into trouble, guiding herself through the most challenging problems, one logical phrase at a time.
By contrast, an abrupt, angry teacher, prone to outbursts or impatience, can set children up for an enduring pattern of self-defeating self-talk. Children exposed to such teachers learn the language of frustration, becoming inefficient self-guiders, getting mad at themselves the minute they feel confused. “Idiot, you can’t do anything,” a child might say to himself, tossing his book across the room. To add injury to insult, the child also fails to master the task.
Self-talk starts audibly during the toddler years. The incessant self-talk of toddlers is conducted out loud as a kind of instruction manual, a self-generated road map to mastery; your voice directs you to build Lego houses, sound out words and sentences in big-letter books.
Here’s what it sounds like, as captured in the riff of a little boy guiding himself through the construction of a Tinkertoy truck: “The wheels go here, the wheels go here. Oh, we need to start it all over again. We need to close it up. See, it closes up. We’re starting it all over again.”Dubbed private talk by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, that early out-loud self-talk “transforms the task in question, just as the use of a screwdriver transforms the task of assembling a shed,” Fernyhough says. “Putting our thoughts into words gives them a more tangible form, which makes them easier to use.”
Inner talk isn’t just mechanical, Vygotsky contended—it is the ultimate social act, an embrace and reinterpretation of teachings picked up from knowledgeable elders, pushed back out in the child’s own words. The more challenging the task, the more elaborate and vociferous the talk, all the better to help children take control of their actions and behavior.
Self-talk is the means by which the child navigates what Vygotsky famously called “the zone of proximal development,” the realm of challenges just beyond reach, too complex for a child to master alone. Children build learning partnerships with adults to gain a skill and then go off on their own, talking themselves through the task aloud. As mastery is gained, self-talk is internalized until it is mostly silent—still part of the ongoing dialogue with oneself, but more intimate, no longer broadcast.
A generation of child psychologists, led by Laura Berk at the University of Southern Illinois, has spent decades documenting the nuances: In the best circumstances, the patient teacher or caregiver teaches children the unemotional, useful, step-by-step language for mastering any task; the children, in turn, use such language in their private speech to teach themselves other things. “You can do it—try again,” the well-taught child might say to herself when she runs into trouble, guiding herself through the most challenging problems, one logical phrase at a time.
By contrast, an abrupt, angry teacher, prone to outbursts or impatience, can set children up for an enduring pattern of self-defeating self-talk. Children exposed to such teachers learn the language of frustration, becoming inefficient self-guiders, getting mad at themselves the minute they feel confused. “Idiot, you can’t do anything,” a child might say to himself, tossing his book across the room. To add injury to insult, the child also fails to master the task.
by Pamela Weintraub, Psychology Today | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Monday, June 1, 2015
Anonymous Fearmongering on the Patriot Act
Several of the most extremist provisions of the 2001 Patriot Act are going to expire on June 1 unless Congress reauthorizes them in some form. Obama officials such as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and new Attorney General Loretta Lynch have been engaged in rank fear-mongering to coerce renewal, warning that we’ll all be “less safe” if these provisions are allowed to “sunset” as originally intended, while invoking classic Cheneyite rhetoric by saying Patriot Act opponents will bear the blame for the next attack. In an interview yesterday with the Intercept, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer explained why those scare tactics are outright frivolous.
Enter the New York Times. An article this morning by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, in the first paragraph, cites anonymous Obama officials warning that “failing to [strike a deal by the deadline] would suspend crucial domestic surveillance authority at a time of mounting terrorism threats.” Behold the next two paragraphs:
We have the invocation of wholly vague but Extremely Scary and Always Intensifying Terrorism Dangers (“at a time of mounting terrorism threats”). We have the actual terror threat that failure to accede to the government’s demands for power will result in your death (“you’re playing national security Russian roulette”); compare what Bush officials spewed in 2005 about the few members of Congress who tried to enact some mild Patriot Act reforms back then (White House press secretary Scott McClellan: “In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without these vital tools for a single moment … The time for Democrats to stop standing in the way has come”).
And we have the New York Times – in the name of reporting on White House efforts to pressure Congress to act – granting anonymity to “senior administration officials” to spew their official fear-mongering script. This isn’t even an instance where some administration “source” called the paper pretending to leak information that was really just official narrative; this was a White House-arranged call where anonymity was demanded as a condition for the honor of stenographically disseminating their words.
Worst of all, it’s all published uncritically. There’s not a syllable challenging or questioning any of these dire warnings. No Patriot Act opponent is heard from. None of the multiple facts exposing these scare tactics as manipulative and false are referenced.
It’s just government propaganda masquerading as a news article, where anonymous officials warn the country that they will die if the Patriot Act isn’t renewed immediately, while decreeing that Congressional critics of the law will have blood on their hands due to their refusal to obey. In other words, it’s a perfect museum exhibit for how government officials in both parties and American media outlets have collaborated for 15 years to enact one radical measure after the next and destroy any chance for rational discourse about it.
* * * * *
Are terror threats ever not “mounting”? It’s now embedded in the journalistic slogan: Mounting Terrorism Threats.
Enter the New York Times. An article this morning by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, in the first paragraph, cites anonymous Obama officials warning that “failing to [strike a deal by the deadline] would suspend crucial domestic surveillance authority at a time of mounting terrorism threats.” Behold the next two paragraphs:
“What you’re doing, essentially, is you’re playing national security Russian roulette,” one senior administration official said of allowing the powers to lapse. That prospect appears increasingly likely with the measure, the USA Freedom Act, stalled and lawmakers in their home states and districts during a congressional recess.
“We’re in uncharted waters,” another senior member of the administration said at a briefing organized by the White House, where three officials spoke with reporters about the consequences of inaction by Congress. “We have not had to confront addressing theterrorist threat without these authorities, and it’s going to befraught with unnecessary risk.”Those two paragraphs, courtesy of the Obama White House and the Paper of Record, have it all: the principal weapons that have poisoned post-9/11 political discourse in the U.S.
We have the invocation of wholly vague but Extremely Scary and Always Intensifying Terrorism Dangers (“at a time of mounting terrorism threats”). We have the actual terror threat that failure to accede to the government’s demands for power will result in your death (“you’re playing national security Russian roulette”); compare what Bush officials spewed in 2005 about the few members of Congress who tried to enact some mild Patriot Act reforms back then (White House press secretary Scott McClellan: “In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without these vital tools for a single moment … The time for Democrats to stop standing in the way has come”).
And we have the New York Times – in the name of reporting on White House efforts to pressure Congress to act – granting anonymity to “senior administration officials” to spew their official fear-mongering script. This isn’t even an instance where some administration “source” called the paper pretending to leak information that was really just official narrative; this was a White House-arranged call where anonymity was demanded as a condition for the honor of stenographically disseminating their words.
Worst of all, it’s all published uncritically. There’s not a syllable challenging or questioning any of these dire warnings. No Patriot Act opponent is heard from. None of the multiple facts exposing these scare tactics as manipulative and false are referenced.
It’s just government propaganda masquerading as a news article, where anonymous officials warn the country that they will die if the Patriot Act isn’t renewed immediately, while decreeing that Congressional critics of the law will have blood on their hands due to their refusal to obey. In other words, it’s a perfect museum exhibit for how government officials in both parties and American media outlets have collaborated for 15 years to enact one radical measure after the next and destroy any chance for rational discourse about it.
* * * * *
Are terror threats ever not “mounting”? It’s now embedded in the journalistic slogan: Mounting Terrorism Threats.
by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept | Read more:
Google Introduces Project Soli
[ed. Watch the video, it's really quite astonishing. Makes me aware of how much we physically have to adapt to new technology.]
Touchscreens are great, allowing us to intuitively scroll or flick through digital books and photo albums, but Google is trying to take things one step further. Last Friday, the company's lab for advanced projects demonstrated a new technology it's been working on that allows users to control virtual objects by moving their hands and fingers in the air. Called Project Soli, it uses radar waves and a fast frame rate to detect precise finger movements or finger "micro-motions." The result essentially looks like it's been taken straight out of a science-fiction film.
"The hand is the ultimate input device," says Ivan Poupyrev, the founder of Project Soli. "It's extremely precise, it's extremely fast, and it's very natural for us to use it. Capturing the possibilities of the human hand was one of my passions. How can we take this incredible capability and apply it to the virtual world?"
by Jack Lowe, Huh | Read more:
Image: Google
Craving the Other
[ed. Food as a form of cultural appropriation. See also: It's Time to Retire the Phrase "Asian Fusion"]
For a long time, Vietnamese food made me uncomfortable. It was brothy, weirdly fishy, and full of the gross animal parts that other people didn’t seem to want. It was too complicated.
I wanted the straightforward, prefabricated snacks that I saw on television: Bagel Bites, Pop-Tarts, chicken nuggets. When my grandmother babysat me, she would make tiny concessions, preparing rice bowls with chopped turkey cold cuts for me while everyone else got caramelized pork. I would make my own Bagel Bites by toasting a normal-size bagel and topping it with Chinese sausage and a dash of Sriracha. My favorite snack was a weird kind of fusion: a slice of nutrient-void Wonder Bread sprinkled with a few dashes of Maggi sauce, an ultraplain proto–banh mi that I came up with while rummaging through my grandmother’s pantry. In our food-centric family, I was the barbarian who demanded twisted simulacra of my grandmother’s masterpieces, perverted so far beyond the pungent, saucy originals that they looked like the national cuisine of a country that didn’t exist.When I entered my first year of college in Iowa, a strange pattern began to emerge as I got to know my classmates. “Oh, you’re Vietnamese?” they’d ask. “I love pho!” And then the whispered question—“Am I saying that right?” The same people who would have made fun of me for bringing a stinky rice-noodle salad to school 10 years ago talked to me as if I were the gatekeeper to some hidden temple that they had discovered on their own. Pho seemed like a shortcut for them, a way that they could tell me that they knew about my culture and our soupy ways without me having to tell them. I would hear this again and again from that point on. I’m Vietnamese? They love pho! I told people to pronounce it a different way each time they asked, knowing that they would immediately march over to their racially homogenous group of friends to correct them with the “authentic” way to pronounce their favorite dish. I’m sure that they were happy to learn a little bit about my family’s culture, but I found their motivations for doing so suspect.
What can one say in response? “Oh, you’re white? I love tuna salad!” It sounds ridiculous, mostly because no one cares if a second-generation immigrant likes American food. Rather, the burden of fluency with American culture puts a unique pressure on the immigrant kid. I paid attention during playdates with my childhood friends, when parents would serve pulled-pork sandwiches and coleslaw for lunch. (It took me a long time to understand the appeal of mayonnaise, which, as a non-cream, non-cheese, non-sauce, perplexed the hell out of me.) From watching my friends, I learned to put the coleslaw in the sandwich and sop the bread in the stray puddles of sauce in between bites. There’s a similar kind of self-checking that occurs when I take people out to Vietnamese restaurants: Through unsubtle side glances, they watch me for behavioral cues, noting how and if I use various condiments and garnishes so they can report back to their friends and family that they learned how to eat this food the “real way” from their real, live Vietnamese friend. Their desire to be true global citizens, eaters without borders, lies behind their studious gazes.
When I go to contemporary Asian restaurants, like Wolfgang Puck’s now-shuttered 20.21 in Minneapolis and Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Spice Market in New York City, it seems the entrées are always in the $16–$35 range and the only identifiable person of color in the kitchen is the dishwasher. The menus usually include little blurbs about how the chefs used to backpack in the steaming jungles of the Far East (undoubtedly stuffing all the herbs and spices they could fit into said backpacks along the way, for research purposes), and were so inspired by the smiling faces of the very generous natives—of which there are plenty of tasteful black-and-white photos on the walls, by the way—and the hospitality, oh, the hospitality, that they decided the best way to really crystallize that life-changing experience was to go back home and sterilize the cuisine they experienced by putting some microcilantro on that $20 curry to really make it worthy of the everyday American sophisticate. American chefs like to talk fancy talk about “elevating” or “refining” third-world cuisines, a rhetoric that brings to mind the mission civilisatrice that Europe took on to justify violent takeovers of those same cuisines’ countries of origin. In their publicity materials, Spice Market uses explicitly objectifying language to describe the culture they’re appropriating: “A timeless paean to Southeast Asian sensuality, Spice Market titillates Manhattan’s Meatpacking District with Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s piquant elevations of the region’s street cuisine.” The positioning of Western aesthetics as superior, or higher, than all the rest is, at its bottom line, an expression of the idea that no culture has value unless it has been “improved” by the Western Midas touch. If a dish hasn’t been eaten or reimagined by a white person, does it really exist?
Andrew Zimmern, host of Bizarre Foods, often claims that to know a culture, you must eat their food. I’ve eaten Vietnamese food my whole life, but there’s still so much that I don’t understand about my family and the place we came from. I don’t know why we can be so reticent, yet so emotional; why Catholicism, the invaders’ religion, still has such a hold on them; why we laugh so hard even at times when there’s not much to laugh about. After endless plates of com bi, banh xeo, and cha gio, I still don’t know what my grandmother thinks about when she prays.
Others appear to be on a similar quest for knowledge, though they seem to have fewer questions than answers. Like a plague of culture locusts, foodies, Chowhounders, and food writers flit from bibimbap to roti canai, fetishizing each dish as some adventure-in-a-bowl and using it as a springboard to make gross generalizations about a given culture’s “sense of family and community,” “lack of pretense,” “passion,” and “spirituality.” Eventually, a hole-in-the-wall reaches critical white-Instagrammer mass, and the swarm moves on to its next discovery, decrying the former fixation’s loss of authenticity. The foodies’ cultural cachet depends on being the only white American person in the room, braving inhumane spice levels and possible food poisoning in order to share with you the proper way to handle Ethiopian injera bread. But they can’t cash in on it unless they share their discoveries with someone else, thereby jeopardizing that sense of exclusivity. Thus, happiness tends to elude the cultural foodie.
by Soleil Ho, Bitch | Read more:
Image: Ana Benaroya
For a long time, Vietnamese food made me uncomfortable. It was brothy, weirdly fishy, and full of the gross animal parts that other people didn’t seem to want. It was too complicated.
I wanted the straightforward, prefabricated snacks that I saw on television: Bagel Bites, Pop-Tarts, chicken nuggets. When my grandmother babysat me, she would make tiny concessions, preparing rice bowls with chopped turkey cold cuts for me while everyone else got caramelized pork. I would make my own Bagel Bites by toasting a normal-size bagel and topping it with Chinese sausage and a dash of Sriracha. My favorite snack was a weird kind of fusion: a slice of nutrient-void Wonder Bread sprinkled with a few dashes of Maggi sauce, an ultraplain proto–banh mi that I came up with while rummaging through my grandmother’s pantry. In our food-centric family, I was the barbarian who demanded twisted simulacra of my grandmother’s masterpieces, perverted so far beyond the pungent, saucy originals that they looked like the national cuisine of a country that didn’t exist.When I entered my first year of college in Iowa, a strange pattern began to emerge as I got to know my classmates. “Oh, you’re Vietnamese?” they’d ask. “I love pho!” And then the whispered question—“Am I saying that right?” The same people who would have made fun of me for bringing a stinky rice-noodle salad to school 10 years ago talked to me as if I were the gatekeeper to some hidden temple that they had discovered on their own. Pho seemed like a shortcut for them, a way that they could tell me that they knew about my culture and our soupy ways without me having to tell them. I would hear this again and again from that point on. I’m Vietnamese? They love pho! I told people to pronounce it a different way each time they asked, knowing that they would immediately march over to their racially homogenous group of friends to correct them with the “authentic” way to pronounce their favorite dish. I’m sure that they were happy to learn a little bit about my family’s culture, but I found their motivations for doing so suspect.What can one say in response? “Oh, you’re white? I love tuna salad!” It sounds ridiculous, mostly because no one cares if a second-generation immigrant likes American food. Rather, the burden of fluency with American culture puts a unique pressure on the immigrant kid. I paid attention during playdates with my childhood friends, when parents would serve pulled-pork sandwiches and coleslaw for lunch. (It took me a long time to understand the appeal of mayonnaise, which, as a non-cream, non-cheese, non-sauce, perplexed the hell out of me.) From watching my friends, I learned to put the coleslaw in the sandwich and sop the bread in the stray puddles of sauce in between bites. There’s a similar kind of self-checking that occurs when I take people out to Vietnamese restaurants: Through unsubtle side glances, they watch me for behavioral cues, noting how and if I use various condiments and garnishes so they can report back to their friends and family that they learned how to eat this food the “real way” from their real, live Vietnamese friend. Their desire to be true global citizens, eaters without borders, lies behind their studious gazes.
When I go to contemporary Asian restaurants, like Wolfgang Puck’s now-shuttered 20.21 in Minneapolis and Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Spice Market in New York City, it seems the entrées are always in the $16–$35 range and the only identifiable person of color in the kitchen is the dishwasher. The menus usually include little blurbs about how the chefs used to backpack in the steaming jungles of the Far East (undoubtedly stuffing all the herbs and spices they could fit into said backpacks along the way, for research purposes), and were so inspired by the smiling faces of the very generous natives—of which there are plenty of tasteful black-and-white photos on the walls, by the way—and the hospitality, oh, the hospitality, that they decided the best way to really crystallize that life-changing experience was to go back home and sterilize the cuisine they experienced by putting some microcilantro on that $20 curry to really make it worthy of the everyday American sophisticate. American chefs like to talk fancy talk about “elevating” or “refining” third-world cuisines, a rhetoric that brings to mind the mission civilisatrice that Europe took on to justify violent takeovers of those same cuisines’ countries of origin. In their publicity materials, Spice Market uses explicitly objectifying language to describe the culture they’re appropriating: “A timeless paean to Southeast Asian sensuality, Spice Market titillates Manhattan’s Meatpacking District with Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s piquant elevations of the region’s street cuisine.” The positioning of Western aesthetics as superior, or higher, than all the rest is, at its bottom line, an expression of the idea that no culture has value unless it has been “improved” by the Western Midas touch. If a dish hasn’t been eaten or reimagined by a white person, does it really exist?
Andrew Zimmern, host of Bizarre Foods, often claims that to know a culture, you must eat their food. I’ve eaten Vietnamese food my whole life, but there’s still so much that I don’t understand about my family and the place we came from. I don’t know why we can be so reticent, yet so emotional; why Catholicism, the invaders’ religion, still has such a hold on them; why we laugh so hard even at times when there’s not much to laugh about. After endless plates of com bi, banh xeo, and cha gio, I still don’t know what my grandmother thinks about when she prays.
Others appear to be on a similar quest for knowledge, though they seem to have fewer questions than answers. Like a plague of culture locusts, foodies, Chowhounders, and food writers flit from bibimbap to roti canai, fetishizing each dish as some adventure-in-a-bowl and using it as a springboard to make gross generalizations about a given culture’s “sense of family and community,” “lack of pretense,” “passion,” and “spirituality.” Eventually, a hole-in-the-wall reaches critical white-Instagrammer mass, and the swarm moves on to its next discovery, decrying the former fixation’s loss of authenticity. The foodies’ cultural cachet depends on being the only white American person in the room, braving inhumane spice levels and possible food poisoning in order to share with you the proper way to handle Ethiopian injera bread. But they can’t cash in on it unless they share their discoveries with someone else, thereby jeopardizing that sense of exclusivity. Thus, happiness tends to elude the cultural foodie.
by Soleil Ho, Bitch | Read more:
Image: Ana Benaroya
Sunday, May 31, 2015
The Words We Wear
You know the scene. You’re trying something on in a shop, and as you look in the mirror you notice that it hangs better on one side than the other. One seam—usually the one on your left—sits slightly awkwardly, with a little pucker, so that the smooth line of the garment is broken. And you know before you even look: it’s because a label, or sometimes a whole sheaf of them, has been sewn into the seam.
When you get home, you might be able to remove the label. Might. It will rarely be clear whether the stitching on it is also holding the seam together. But if it is, the whole seam is likely to come undone, and you’ll be repairing your purchase before you’ve even worn it. Sometimes there’s a helpful dotted line and a pair of scissors printed on the label, indicating that you should cut it off. But this, you know from experience, leaves a scratchy little stump, which still spoils the hang. You might be able to pluck out the remains of the label, fibre by fibre, with tweezers, but by now this piece of clothing is starting to feel like a full-time job. And sometimes—if you’ve bought a swimsuit, say—the seam has been densely overlocked, and the truncated label is destined to remain trapped there for ever, unsightly and uncomfortable.
It’s the same story with labels at the back of the neck, which can irritate like a mosquito bite and which children routinely beg to have cut out. These usually display the brand name and they often have a little, extra-scratchy size tag attached to them. We should be grateful to those companies that have wised up and print information directly onto their products. Because a label can make the difference between whether you live in a garment, or whether it lives at the back of a cupboard.
Why do we need so much writing on our clothes? The relationship between words and what we wear must, once upon a time, have been so simple. It seems reasonable to assume, for instance, that the loincloth existed before the word “loincloth” did, and that it was centuries, or possibly millennia, before it was necessary to say anything else on the subject. But as soon as clothes began to be described—for literary, advertising or journalistic reasons—this relationship became more complex. And with the mass-production that grew from the Industrial Revolution, clothes needed words attached simply in order to, er, keep tabs on them.
The gap between the signifier and the signified is today a yawning chasm, filled to the brim with excess verbiage. Exhibit A is a pair of grey jeans I bought recently from Zara, so bristling with labels that it looks like the result of a high-speed collision between a wardrobe and a filing cabinet. There were two cardboard tags on a string plus one stitched through the waistband, all quite easy to remove; inside were five further labels of fabric, firmly sewn in. Between them they carried more than 700 words, not counting washing symbols, barcodes and numbers. (For comparison’s sake, this column is about 800 words.) That seems like a lot of words for a pair of trousers to need.
It is a consequence of globalisation that one of these labels informs me, in 31 different languages, that “this garment may fade and stain surfaces and/or other garments in lighter colours”. You have been warned. I bought the jeans for one sort of arse-covering, but got both kinds: a two-for-one deal. Washing instructions are another symptom of blame culture. They’re helpful up to a point, but when a jumper that costs £19.99 says “dry clean only”, you know it’s just so the shop can say “I told you so” if you put it in the wash and it comes out the right size for Barbie.
When you get home, you might be able to remove the label. Might. It will rarely be clear whether the stitching on it is also holding the seam together. But if it is, the whole seam is likely to come undone, and you’ll be repairing your purchase before you’ve even worn it. Sometimes there’s a helpful dotted line and a pair of scissors printed on the label, indicating that you should cut it off. But this, you know from experience, leaves a scratchy little stump, which still spoils the hang. You might be able to pluck out the remains of the label, fibre by fibre, with tweezers, but by now this piece of clothing is starting to feel like a full-time job. And sometimes—if you’ve bought a swimsuit, say—the seam has been densely overlocked, and the truncated label is destined to remain trapped there for ever, unsightly and uncomfortable.It’s the same story with labels at the back of the neck, which can irritate like a mosquito bite and which children routinely beg to have cut out. These usually display the brand name and they often have a little, extra-scratchy size tag attached to them. We should be grateful to those companies that have wised up and print information directly onto their products. Because a label can make the difference between whether you live in a garment, or whether it lives at the back of a cupboard.
Why do we need so much writing on our clothes? The relationship between words and what we wear must, once upon a time, have been so simple. It seems reasonable to assume, for instance, that the loincloth existed before the word “loincloth” did, and that it was centuries, or possibly millennia, before it was necessary to say anything else on the subject. But as soon as clothes began to be described—for literary, advertising or journalistic reasons—this relationship became more complex. And with the mass-production that grew from the Industrial Revolution, clothes needed words attached simply in order to, er, keep tabs on them.
The gap between the signifier and the signified is today a yawning chasm, filled to the brim with excess verbiage. Exhibit A is a pair of grey jeans I bought recently from Zara, so bristling with labels that it looks like the result of a high-speed collision between a wardrobe and a filing cabinet. There were two cardboard tags on a string plus one stitched through the waistband, all quite easy to remove; inside were five further labels of fabric, firmly sewn in. Between them they carried more than 700 words, not counting washing symbols, barcodes and numbers. (For comparison’s sake, this column is about 800 words.) That seems like a lot of words for a pair of trousers to need.
It is a consequence of globalisation that one of these labels informs me, in 31 different languages, that “this garment may fade and stain surfaces and/or other garments in lighter colours”. You have been warned. I bought the jeans for one sort of arse-covering, but got both kinds: a two-for-one deal. Washing instructions are another symptom of blame culture. They’re helpful up to a point, but when a jumper that costs £19.99 says “dry clean only”, you know it’s just so the shop can say “I told you so” if you put it in the wash and it comes out the right size for Barbie.
by Rebecca Willis, More Intelligent Life | Read more:
Image: Bill Brown
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