Saturday, June 6, 2015
Killing Tenure is Academia’s Point Of No Return
Under Gov. Scott Walker, Wisconsin has become one of the great laboratories of conservative governance, with a record of union-busting, abortion-restricting, voter-ID-enacting policies that are at odds with the state’s tradition of progressivism. Unlike neighboring Minnesota, which has remained far more liberal — and whose economy is doing far better than Wisconsin’s — the Badger State has seen its Republican establishment increasingly entrenched by enacting policies of fear, resentment and suspicion of the sort that were so well described in Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”
Given this record, it’s not surprising that the Republican-controlled legislature should go after universities, especially with the state’s ongoing budget woes necessitating steep cuts to education. And now the state’s Joint Finance Committee has voted 12-4 to eliminate tenure protections from the state statute, add limits to faculty participation in shared governance and make it easier to fire tenured faculty in good standing for ill-defined reasons of “program modification” or “redirection” rather than the previous requirement of financial emergency (which is already being abused to get rid of entire academic units and their professors across the country). Predictably, if frighteningly, the response of the University of Wisconsin system president and chancellors of the most important campuses has been weak-kneed and not at all comforting for the rank-and-file faculty who need the support of their senior administrators if the fight to protect tenure is to have a chance.
It is extremely difficult to underestimate the impact of this move on higher education in the United States. A comparable event would be Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the aircraft controllers’ strike in 1981 by firing 12,000 workers, which completely changed the balance of power between labor on the one hand and government and corporations on the other. The breaking of the strike coincided with the rise of conservative policies as the guiding force of American governance. In the decades since, unions have become increasingly weak, as epitomized by Walker’s demolishing of collective bargaining rights for public employee unions in 2011.
One of the defining characteristics of this era is precisely the weakening of solidarity among unionized workers and between them and the greater public. The participation of workers in unions dropped from 28.3 percent in 1954 to about 11.3 percent in 2013 — a 100-year low. In just the last two years, the percentage of unionized public employees dropped 2 points, just as union leaders feared and conservatives hoped.
A similar process is already playing out nationally in academia. The share of the more than 1.5 million faculty (teachers at accredited two- and four-year colleges and universities) who are tenured or on tenure track is as low as a quarter by some counts — half the share of the 1970s and one-third of the 78 percent of the late 1960s, at the height of the postwar boom in university education. At the same time, the share of nontenured or adjunct faculty has skyrocketed to upward of 75 percent of teachers, while the number working in university administration and commanding outsize paychecks has grown massively. With the elimination of tenure, the drive to corporatize the university is reaching its end stages.
Given this record, it’s not surprising that the Republican-controlled legislature should go after universities, especially with the state’s ongoing budget woes necessitating steep cuts to education. And now the state’s Joint Finance Committee has voted 12-4 to eliminate tenure protections from the state statute, add limits to faculty participation in shared governance and make it easier to fire tenured faculty in good standing for ill-defined reasons of “program modification” or “redirection” rather than the previous requirement of financial emergency (which is already being abused to get rid of entire academic units and their professors across the country). Predictably, if frighteningly, the response of the University of Wisconsin system president and chancellors of the most important campuses has been weak-kneed and not at all comforting for the rank-and-file faculty who need the support of their senior administrators if the fight to protect tenure is to have a chance.It is extremely difficult to underestimate the impact of this move on higher education in the United States. A comparable event would be Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the aircraft controllers’ strike in 1981 by firing 12,000 workers, which completely changed the balance of power between labor on the one hand and government and corporations on the other. The breaking of the strike coincided with the rise of conservative policies as the guiding force of American governance. In the decades since, unions have become increasingly weak, as epitomized by Walker’s demolishing of collective bargaining rights for public employee unions in 2011.
One of the defining characteristics of this era is precisely the weakening of solidarity among unionized workers and between them and the greater public. The participation of workers in unions dropped from 28.3 percent in 1954 to about 11.3 percent in 2013 — a 100-year low. In just the last two years, the percentage of unionized public employees dropped 2 points, just as union leaders feared and conservatives hoped.
A similar process is already playing out nationally in academia. The share of the more than 1.5 million faculty (teachers at accredited two- and four-year colleges and universities) who are tenured or on tenure track is as low as a quarter by some counts — half the share of the 1970s and one-third of the 78 percent of the late 1960s, at the height of the postwar boom in university education. At the same time, the share of nontenured or adjunct faculty has skyrocketed to upward of 75 percent of teachers, while the number working in university administration and commanding outsize paychecks has grown massively. With the elimination of tenure, the drive to corporatize the university is reaching its end stages.
by Mark LeVine, Aljazeera America | Read more:
Image: Steve Apps
Negotiation Lessons From Walter White
Walter White could teach us many things: how to read the periodic table; how to destroy a tub with hydrofluoric acid; how to build a battery; how to make poison out of castor beans; how to build a bomb under a wheelchair; how to use the remote control of the car to operate a machine gun; and how to coordinate multiple assassinations of prison informants within thirty seconds of one another. But these are niche skills at best. Is there anything useful we can learn from Walter White?
As it turns out, Walter White can also teach us how to negotiate— or, to be more precise, watching Walter White negotiate in Breaking Bad helps us think more clearly about what we are doing when we negotiate. For the student of negotiation, Breaking Bad is an absolute treasure trove, producing an incredibly complex and varied array of bargaining parties and negotiated transactions, episode after episode. What’s so fascinating about these transactions is that they draw on familiar, foundational negotiation concepts in the service of less familiar, usually illicit ends. Put another way, when we watch Walter White negotiate, we watch a mega-criminal anti-hero implement the same “value-neutral” strategies that we teach lawyers and businesspeople. Learning to negotiate from Walter White, therefore, allows us to engage in an analytical exercise that explores the conventional wisdom around negotiation in a fresh, modern context, while implicating more critical conversations around value neutrality and other normative concerns in negotiation theory and practice.
Breaking Bad ran for five seasons. This article examines five negotiations, one from each season, each featuring Walter White. The close readings provided show how the five negotiations demonstrate and/or disrupt foundational negotiation concepts or skills. The Article then suggests some possible takeaways for negotiators and analysts and concludes with a brief thought about ethical implications in negotiation theory and practice.
I. LESSON ONE, SEASON ONE: BE TRUSTING–– BUT NOT TOO TRUSTING
A. The Rule
Experienced negotiators say that the ability to build rapport and trust promotes success in negotiations. Although trust is not always necessary to arrive at a negotiated agreement, the quality of outcomes generally correlates with the level of trust between the parties. This is because high trust and good relationships often equate to high levels of information sharing, which in turn makes value creation possible. Parties who can share information are better equipped to develop creative options that address both sides’ interests. Additionally, negotiating parties who trust one another are better positioned in the distributional phase of the negotiation. To the extent that parties can frame the distributional question as a joint problem to solve, it is more likely they will come to creative and fair apportionments. By contrast, parties who do not trust each other are less likely to share information, which can lead to bargaining over positions, haggling, impasse, strained relationships, and/or suboptimal agreements that leave money on the table.
People who trust one another are more likely to share information and, conversely, people who share information are more likely to trust one another. This is true not only of information related to substantive interests within the proposed transaction but also of information that is more personal and social in nature. Negotiators sometimes refer to this latter type of information as the “schmooze factor”––the strategic deployment of small talk in the early stages of negotiating. Friendly small talk fosters trust, in part because people tend to want to trust and do business with friendly people. In literature related to conducting email negotiations, commentators recommend that email negotiators be extra solicitous and warm in their email exchanges to compensate for the lack of personal interaction and thus cultivate trust between the parties.Doing so promotes creative problem solving and helps prevent the other side from drawing negative conclusions about one’s motives and trustworthiness.
From the foregoing discussion a general rule emerges: early in the negotiation, share personal information and small talk with a negotiating counterpart in an effort to develop trust and create the conditions for information sharing, option generation, and joint problem-solving around distributional questions. Generally speaking, this approach will make it easier to reach an acceptable negotiated agreement.
B. The Set-Up
Consider the application of this rule in one of the most high-stakes negotiations imaginable: bargaining for one’s life. In an episode titled “. . . and the Bag’s in the River,” Walter and his partner Jesse Pinkman capture and imprison a rival methamphetamine dealer named Krazy-8 in Jesse’s basement. Convinced that Krazy-8 (whose real name is Domingo) will kill them if they let him go, Walter and Jesse flip a coin to decide which of them will commit murder. Walter loses the coin flip and reluctantly prepares himself for the task. His heart is not in it, though, and after bringing Krazy-8 a sandwich and a beer, Walter engages him in conversation:
Walter is not as certain. Accepting Krazy-8’s logic means that he must commit an act (murder) that he would rather not do. In the above exchange, Walter is wondering if he can trust Krazy-8. Trust has been defined as “a willingness to become vulnerable to another based on confident positive expectation of the other’s conduct.” Freeing Krazy-8 indeed would make Walter vulnerable, so Walter is looking for evidence that he can reliably have a “confident positive expectation” of Krazy-8’s promises not to harm him and to forget the whole thing. If Walter can trust Krazy-8, then he can let him go and avoid committing murder. Hence Walter’s attempt at a more personal, trust-promoting conversation—and Krazy-8 quickly catches on:
Viewers of the show know what happens next. While retrieving the key from the kitchen, Walter notices the shards of a dinner plate that he accidentally dropped in the basement earlier, before the beers and the conversation. A hint of doubt forms in his mind. He fishes the shards out of the trashcan and fits them together like a puzzle. All the pieces are accounted for except one: a large pointy piece shaped like a knife blade. Having thus “put the pieces together,” Walter concludes that Krazy-8 was deceiving him all along and hiding the shard in order to kill Walter as soon as he was unlocked. Applying this additional information to the situation, and believing that he has exhausted the possibilities offered by negotiation, Walter returns to the basement and chokes Krazy-8 to death.
Note that Walter’s conclusion that Krazy-8 intends to kill him is not the only possible conclusion supported by the evidence. Krazy-8 is relatively immobile given that he is secured to a metal pole with a bike lock around his neck. The shard may have skittered across the basement floor when the plate smashed. The shard may have cracked into multiple pieces when it broke off the plate, making it unusable as a weapon. The shard may indeed be in Krazy-8’s possession, but only for defensive reasons— after all, Krazy-8 is the one locked to a pole by his throat. Of course, when Walter starts choking Krazy-8 with the bike lock, Krazy-8 pulls out the shard and swings it wildly around, stabbing Walter in the leg. Even that action, however, could be justified as a normal response to being choked.
But Walter has no interest in thinking through alternative explanations. For him, the missing shard can mean only one thing: Krazy-8 is hiding information and therefore cannot be trusted. Trust was absolutely necessary to any agreement here, because Walter had no other leverage or post-deal protections. The trust that grew out of Walter and Krazy-8’s basement conversation was fragile, and it disappeared the moment Walter realized that the shard was missing.
This scene illustrates how an otherwise good person may start “breaking bad.” To survive in the underworld, Walter must learn whether and how he can trust others. In terms of the narrative arc of the show, Walter’s decision to piece together the plate and interpret the hidden shard as evidence of hostile intention symbolizes the early stages of his transformation into a criminal. When situations are ambiguous, given the deadly nature of the drug trade, distrust is the safer course.
by Jennifer W. Reynolds, New Mexico Law Review | Read more: (pdf)
[ed. More NM Law Review, Special Edition related to Breaking Bad]
Image: Breaking Bad
h/t New Shelton Wet/Dry
As it turns out, Walter White can also teach us how to negotiate— or, to be more precise, watching Walter White negotiate in Breaking Bad helps us think more clearly about what we are doing when we negotiate. For the student of negotiation, Breaking Bad is an absolute treasure trove, producing an incredibly complex and varied array of bargaining parties and negotiated transactions, episode after episode. What’s so fascinating about these transactions is that they draw on familiar, foundational negotiation concepts in the service of less familiar, usually illicit ends. Put another way, when we watch Walter White negotiate, we watch a mega-criminal anti-hero implement the same “value-neutral” strategies that we teach lawyers and businesspeople. Learning to negotiate from Walter White, therefore, allows us to engage in an analytical exercise that explores the conventional wisdom around negotiation in a fresh, modern context, while implicating more critical conversations around value neutrality and other normative concerns in negotiation theory and practice.Breaking Bad ran for five seasons. This article examines five negotiations, one from each season, each featuring Walter White. The close readings provided show how the five negotiations demonstrate and/or disrupt foundational negotiation concepts or skills. The Article then suggests some possible takeaways for negotiators and analysts and concludes with a brief thought about ethical implications in negotiation theory and practice.
I. LESSON ONE, SEASON ONE: BE TRUSTING–– BUT NOT TOO TRUSTING
A. The Rule
Experienced negotiators say that the ability to build rapport and trust promotes success in negotiations. Although trust is not always necessary to arrive at a negotiated agreement, the quality of outcomes generally correlates with the level of trust between the parties. This is because high trust and good relationships often equate to high levels of information sharing, which in turn makes value creation possible. Parties who can share information are better equipped to develop creative options that address both sides’ interests. Additionally, negotiating parties who trust one another are better positioned in the distributional phase of the negotiation. To the extent that parties can frame the distributional question as a joint problem to solve, it is more likely they will come to creative and fair apportionments. By contrast, parties who do not trust each other are less likely to share information, which can lead to bargaining over positions, haggling, impasse, strained relationships, and/or suboptimal agreements that leave money on the table.
People who trust one another are more likely to share information and, conversely, people who share information are more likely to trust one another. This is true not only of information related to substantive interests within the proposed transaction but also of information that is more personal and social in nature. Negotiators sometimes refer to this latter type of information as the “schmooze factor”––the strategic deployment of small talk in the early stages of negotiating. Friendly small talk fosters trust, in part because people tend to want to trust and do business with friendly people. In literature related to conducting email negotiations, commentators recommend that email negotiators be extra solicitous and warm in their email exchanges to compensate for the lack of personal interaction and thus cultivate trust between the parties.Doing so promotes creative problem solving and helps prevent the other side from drawing negative conclusions about one’s motives and trustworthiness.
From the foregoing discussion a general rule emerges: early in the negotiation, share personal information and small talk with a negotiating counterpart in an effort to develop trust and create the conditions for information sharing, option generation, and joint problem-solving around distributional questions. Generally speaking, this approach will make it easier to reach an acceptable negotiated agreement.
B. The Set-Up
Consider the application of this rule in one of the most high-stakes negotiations imaginable: bargaining for one’s life. In an episode titled “. . . and the Bag’s in the River,” Walter and his partner Jesse Pinkman capture and imprison a rival methamphetamine dealer named Krazy-8 in Jesse’s basement. Convinced that Krazy-8 (whose real name is Domingo) will kill them if they let him go, Walter and Jesse flip a coin to decide which of them will commit murder. Walter loses the coin flip and reluctantly prepares himself for the task. His heart is not in it, though, and after bringing Krazy-8 a sandwich and a beer, Walter engages him in conversation:
WALT: So, Domingo, you from around town here or someplace else?Here Krazy-8 neatly lays out the obstacle to any negotiated agreement: the only reason Walter will let Krazy-8 go is if Walter believes that Krazy-8 will not hurt him or his family afterward. But there is no way for Krazy-8 to make that case convincingly since he and Walter have no preexisting or ongoing relationship. They have no reason to trust the other’s character and no stake in the other’s well-being, as one might trust or have a stake in the continued well-being of a friend, relative, or business partner. When Krazy-8 evaluates the probable bargaining outcomes, he concludes that Walter will kill him; indeed, that is the action Krazy-8 himself would take under the circumstances.
KRAZY-8: Look Walter, you getting to know me is not going to make it easier for you to kill me. Not that I mind, you understand.
WALT: You know, you keep telling me that I don’t have it in me. Well maybe, but maybe not. I sure as hell am looking for any reason not to. I mean, any good reason at all. Sell me. Tell me what it is.
KRAZY-8: [Pauses] I guess I’d start off by promising that if you let me go, I won’t come after you. That you’d be safe. I guess I’d say what happened between us never happened, and what’s best for both parties is we forget all about it. But you know that anybody in my situation would make promises like that. Even though in my case they happen to be true, you never know for sure. So what else can I tell you?
WALT: I don’t know. But you gotta convince me, and you’re going nowhere until you do.
Walter is not as certain. Accepting Krazy-8’s logic means that he must commit an act (murder) that he would rather not do. In the above exchange, Walter is wondering if he can trust Krazy-8. Trust has been defined as “a willingness to become vulnerable to another based on confident positive expectation of the other’s conduct.” Freeing Krazy-8 indeed would make Walter vulnerable, so Walter is looking for evidence that he can reliably have a “confident positive expectation” of Krazy-8’s promises not to harm him and to forget the whole thing. If Walter can trust Krazy-8, then he can let him go and avoid committing murder. Hence Walter’s attempt at a more personal, trust-promoting conversation—and Krazy-8 quickly catches on:
KRAZY-8: Hey yeah, yeah. I’m from here in town, man. ABQ. Born and bred. Never left. Studied business administration over at UNM. Got my degree.As it turns out, the reason Walter knows Tampico Furniture is that sixteen years ago, he and his wife Skyler bought their son Walter Jr.’s crib there. Krazy-8 observes that he worked at the store every day after school and may have helped ring up Walter at the checkout line. Walter and Krazy-8 then sing the store’s late-night commercial jingle together. As they drink another beer, Krazy-8 gently asks whether Jesse or Walter’s family knows that Walter has been diagnosed with cancer. Walter admits that the only person he has told is Krazy-8. Krazy-8 again encourages Walter to let him go, this time as one friend to another: “Like I said Wal ter, this line of work doesn’t suit you. Get out before it’s too late.” Walter agrees to get the key.
WALT: Really? [Chuckles] Does that, uh, come in handy in the drug trade? [Sits back down]
KRAZY-8: Doesn’t hurt. I was gonna study music originally. Maybe even try out for Oberlin or Berkeley. My pops talked me out of it. Said there was no money in it unless I wound up some bullshit rockstar, and I had a snowball’s chance of that.
WALT: What does your dad do?
KRAZY-8: He owns Tampico Furniture over on Menaul.
WALT: Wait a minute. I know that place.
Viewers of the show know what happens next. While retrieving the key from the kitchen, Walter notices the shards of a dinner plate that he accidentally dropped in the basement earlier, before the beers and the conversation. A hint of doubt forms in his mind. He fishes the shards out of the trashcan and fits them together like a puzzle. All the pieces are accounted for except one: a large pointy piece shaped like a knife blade. Having thus “put the pieces together,” Walter concludes that Krazy-8 was deceiving him all along and hiding the shard in order to kill Walter as soon as he was unlocked. Applying this additional information to the situation, and believing that he has exhausted the possibilities offered by negotiation, Walter returns to the basement and chokes Krazy-8 to death.
Note that Walter’s conclusion that Krazy-8 intends to kill him is not the only possible conclusion supported by the evidence. Krazy-8 is relatively immobile given that he is secured to a metal pole with a bike lock around his neck. The shard may have skittered across the basement floor when the plate smashed. The shard may have cracked into multiple pieces when it broke off the plate, making it unusable as a weapon. The shard may indeed be in Krazy-8’s possession, but only for defensive reasons— after all, Krazy-8 is the one locked to a pole by his throat. Of course, when Walter starts choking Krazy-8 with the bike lock, Krazy-8 pulls out the shard and swings it wildly around, stabbing Walter in the leg. Even that action, however, could be justified as a normal response to being choked.
But Walter has no interest in thinking through alternative explanations. For him, the missing shard can mean only one thing: Krazy-8 is hiding information and therefore cannot be trusted. Trust was absolutely necessary to any agreement here, because Walter had no other leverage or post-deal protections. The trust that grew out of Walter and Krazy-8’s basement conversation was fragile, and it disappeared the moment Walter realized that the shard was missing.
This scene illustrates how an otherwise good person may start “breaking bad.” To survive in the underworld, Walter must learn whether and how he can trust others. In terms of the narrative arc of the show, Walter’s decision to piece together the plate and interpret the hidden shard as evidence of hostile intention symbolizes the early stages of his transformation into a criminal. When situations are ambiguous, given the deadly nature of the drug trade, distrust is the safer course.
by Jennifer W. Reynolds, New Mexico Law Review | Read more: (pdf)
[ed. More NM Law Review, Special Edition related to Breaking Bad]
Image: Breaking Bad
h/t New Shelton Wet/Dry
Friday, June 5, 2015
Waze and the Traffic Panopticon
Indeed, the deal promises to help the city improve some of its traffic and infrastructure systems (L.A. still uses paper to manage pothole patching, for example), but it also acknowledges Waze’s role in the complex new reality of urban traffic planning. Traditionally, traffic management has been a largely top-down process. In Los Angeles, it is coördinated in a bunker downtown, several stories below the sidewalk, where engineers stare at blinking lights representing traffic and live camera feeds of street intersections. L.A.’s sensor-and-algorithm-driven Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control System is already one of the world’s most sophisticated traffic-mitigation tools, but it can only do so much to manage the city’s eternally unsophisticated gridlock. Los Angeles appears to see its partnership with Waze as an important step toward improving the bridge between its subterranean panopticon and the rest of the city still further, much like other metropolises that have struck deals with Waze under the company’s Connected Cities program. (...)
Many of the public data sets that Waze is drawing from—including both C.H.P. reports and L.A’s public-works database—are already available to anyone, but formalizing the information-sharing with cities arguably lends Waze additional reach and credibility, forestalls political interference, and opens the door to deeper collaboration in the future. From cities’ perspective, working with Waze signals a recognition that, if they don’t bring the company into their planning processes, Waze and its users will reshape cities on their own. In Los Angeles, where ten per cent of the populace uses Waze, this has already been taking place. (...)
As a regional coördinator, May oversees thousands of Waze volunteers in seven Western states. He says that he has spent much more time than he should, late into most evenings, fiddling with Waze’s maps, which is how he and others in the community got to wondering what might happen if they flattened all of L.A.’s roads. “Flattened” refers, here, to levelling the rankings assigned to roads in the algorithmic backbones with which Waze directs motorists. Typically, highways (including L.A.’s notorious freeways) are given so much weight that, once you’re stuck on one, the app is unlikely to reroute you, or even to provide alternative paths. May and others on Waze’s community boards began thinking about what might happen if they ranked pretty much every road other than an honest-to-God highway as a minor highway. Eventually they prevailed on the company to introduce the change. “Once we started trying it out, holy smokes!” he said. If you’ve used Waze, you know the thrilling feeling of going on a crazy Mr. Toad’s Wild Reroute to beat traffic.
Those reroutes have drawn ire from some of the tonier enclaves around Los Angeles. Richard Close, the president of the homeowners’ association in Sherman Oaks and an occasional Waze user (“I shouldn’t eat French fries, either,” he said on a local radio show, “but what can I do? Traffic is horrendous. So I indulge”), has said repeatedly that his neighborhood has been overrun with commuters. His aim, he says, is to reclaim formerly quiet residential streets now “invaded by people.” Close and other Angelenos have complained enough that, in the last week of April, the city councilman Paul Krekorian introduced a motion to “reduce the impact of cut-through traffic that results from use of Waze,” which might include moves like restricting the number of trips on some side roads. The “streets were never a secret meant for a select few,” Brian K. Roberts, a co-author of “L.A. Shortcuts: The Guidebook for Drivers Who Hate to Wait,” argued in a Los Angeles Times op-ed. He compared Krekorian’s demands to no-left-turn signs that were posted by residents in some neighborhoods following the release of his book in 1989, and suggested that those upset by Waze direct their efforts toward campaigning for better mass transit.
by Ryan Bradley, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Charly Kurz/IAF/Redux
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
How I Came Out as Gray
It was supposed to be our secret. My hairdresser claimed to possess a special elixir that could subtly, naturally, almost undetectably “blend away” gray hair, which, at 45, I had a touch of.
Sitting before a mirror in her chair, uncertain whether to start the masquerade, I examined my head in a way I shied away from when I was alone at home, without support. I looked at myself from angles I wasn’t used to, discovering that the gray was more extensive than I’d been willing to admit.
Instead of threading its way between the darker hairs, it had consumed whole sectors of my head, especially on the sides and in the back. It was advancing the way frost does, or like mold.
“I suggest we leave some in,” my hairdresser said. “Just enough to make you look distinguished.” I nodded, but the word did not sit well with me. It sounded exactly like what it was: another way of saying “old.”
Color of the Seasons
This conversation, or some version of it, was repeated every month for seven years. The world moved along, the seasons changed, but my hair stayed the same, or approximately the same.
Toward the end of each color cycle, my natural color — or lack of it — would reassert itself, a bit more conspicuously each time, forcing me deeper and deeper into fraudulence.
My girlfriend during this period, now my wife, began to argue (mildly at first but increasingly emphatically) that gray hair looked terrific on men my age. For evidence, she pointed to various luminaries who looked terrific no matter what. George Clooney. Bill Clinton. The journalist Anderson Cooper.
They were the silver all-stars, and I hated them. I hated them not for their age-defying male beauty but for their ability to accept themselves.
In Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Mask,” a rakish man about town who loves the night life collapses at a dance. While attempting to revive him, a doctor notices that he is wearing a lifelike, youthful mask. The doctor cuts it off with scissors, revealing the man’s white hair and wrinkled face.
I’d read this story when I was young myself, along with other similar tales of postponed decrepitude such as “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Their gloomy, common message seemed to be that when it comes to signs of aging, you can run but not hide — and that the longer you attempt to run, the worse the final reckoning will be.
My hairdresser seemed to disagree: Her faith in modern products was that strong. And so was mine, until six months ago, when my hairdresser tried a stronger potion, convinced that the old one would no longer suffice.
Sitting before a mirror in her chair, uncertain whether to start the masquerade, I examined my head in a way I shied away from when I was alone at home, without support. I looked at myself from angles I wasn’t used to, discovering that the gray was more extensive than I’d been willing to admit.Instead of threading its way between the darker hairs, it had consumed whole sectors of my head, especially on the sides and in the back. It was advancing the way frost does, or like mold.
“I suggest we leave some in,” my hairdresser said. “Just enough to make you look distinguished.” I nodded, but the word did not sit well with me. It sounded exactly like what it was: another way of saying “old.”
Color of the Seasons
This conversation, or some version of it, was repeated every month for seven years. The world moved along, the seasons changed, but my hair stayed the same, or approximately the same.
Toward the end of each color cycle, my natural color — or lack of it — would reassert itself, a bit more conspicuously each time, forcing me deeper and deeper into fraudulence.
My girlfriend during this period, now my wife, began to argue (mildly at first but increasingly emphatically) that gray hair looked terrific on men my age. For evidence, she pointed to various luminaries who looked terrific no matter what. George Clooney. Bill Clinton. The journalist Anderson Cooper.
They were the silver all-stars, and I hated them. I hated them not for their age-defying male beauty but for their ability to accept themselves.
In Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Mask,” a rakish man about town who loves the night life collapses at a dance. While attempting to revive him, a doctor notices that he is wearing a lifelike, youthful mask. The doctor cuts it off with scissors, revealing the man’s white hair and wrinkled face.
I’d read this story when I was young myself, along with other similar tales of postponed decrepitude such as “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Their gloomy, common message seemed to be that when it comes to signs of aging, you can run but not hide — and that the longer you attempt to run, the worse the final reckoning will be.
My hairdresser seemed to disagree: Her faith in modern products was that strong. And so was mine, until six months ago, when my hairdresser tried a stronger potion, convinced that the old one would no longer suffice.
by Matt Chase, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via:
Where Are the China Hawks?
On Monday, Lindsey Graham announced his presidential candidacy in a speechdevoted mostly to foreign policy. He mentioned variations of the word “Islam” six times. He said “the nuclear ambitions of the radical Islamists who control Iran” constitute the “biggest threat” to the United States. He twice emphasized his devotion to Israel. And once, about halfway through his remarks, he mentioned China.
In American politics today, especially in the GOP, Graham’s priorities are typical. Two years ago, during Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel’s contentious seven-and-a-half-hour grilling by the Armed Services Committee, senators mentioned Israel 178 times and Iran 171 times. The number of references to China? Five.
The emphasis is odd because it’s likely that the “biggest threat” to America’s national security is neither Iran nor “radical Islam” writ large. It is China.
The Islamic extremists in ISIS and other violent jihadist groups kill between 10 and 20 Americans a year. That number could spike dramatically, of course, as it did on 9/11. But for many years now, the trend has been toward lone-wolf-style attacks where very small numbers of Americans die.
For its part, Iran is a midsize power with a noxious regime. It aspires to dominate the Middle East, but it is likely to fail in that endeavor. It’s likely to fail in part because the other powerful countries in the region (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey), backed by the United States, want it to fail. And it’s likely to fail because, as a Shiite power in a mostly Sunni region inflamed by Sunni-Shiite conflict, Iranian domination doesn’t have much appeal.
Of course, if Iran develops a nuclear weapon, or even a nuclear-weapons capacity, its power will grow. But it will still face neighbors—Israel, Pakistan, India—with larger nuclear arsenals of their own. And there is no reason to believe that Tehran will commit regime suicide by using a nuclear weapon against Israel or anyone else, and thus invite a massive nuclear response, given that it has proved emphatically non-suicidal during its 36 years in power.
China, by contrast, is not a midsize power. It’s a superpower. At current prices, its GDP is 28 times larger than Iran’s. Its military budget is roughly 13 times larger. Its willingness to invest vast sums in the economic development of other nations gives it tremendous soft power. And it is claiming much of the South China Sea as its own, thus asserting dominion over a territory with vast oil and gas reserves through which one-third of the world’s shipping travels.
From 1941 to 1989, the United States risked war to prevent great powers from dominating the world’s economic and industrial heartlands, and thus gaining veto power over America’s ability to conduct international commerce. That’s what China is seeking today.
So why aren’t Lindsey Graham and his GOP presidential competitors talking more about China? (To be fair, Hillary Clinton isn’t talking much about China either. But her campaign thus far has been much less weighted toward foreign policy in general.)
Three reasons come to mind.
by Peter Beinart, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Carlos Barria / Reuters
In American politics today, especially in the GOP, Graham’s priorities are typical. Two years ago, during Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel’s contentious seven-and-a-half-hour grilling by the Armed Services Committee, senators mentioned Israel 178 times and Iran 171 times. The number of references to China? Five.The emphasis is odd because it’s likely that the “biggest threat” to America’s national security is neither Iran nor “radical Islam” writ large. It is China.
The Islamic extremists in ISIS and other violent jihadist groups kill between 10 and 20 Americans a year. That number could spike dramatically, of course, as it did on 9/11. But for many years now, the trend has been toward lone-wolf-style attacks where very small numbers of Americans die.
For its part, Iran is a midsize power with a noxious regime. It aspires to dominate the Middle East, but it is likely to fail in that endeavor. It’s likely to fail in part because the other powerful countries in the region (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey), backed by the United States, want it to fail. And it’s likely to fail because, as a Shiite power in a mostly Sunni region inflamed by Sunni-Shiite conflict, Iranian domination doesn’t have much appeal.
Of course, if Iran develops a nuclear weapon, or even a nuclear-weapons capacity, its power will grow. But it will still face neighbors—Israel, Pakistan, India—with larger nuclear arsenals of their own. And there is no reason to believe that Tehran will commit regime suicide by using a nuclear weapon against Israel or anyone else, and thus invite a massive nuclear response, given that it has proved emphatically non-suicidal during its 36 years in power.
China, by contrast, is not a midsize power. It’s a superpower. At current prices, its GDP is 28 times larger than Iran’s. Its military budget is roughly 13 times larger. Its willingness to invest vast sums in the economic development of other nations gives it tremendous soft power. And it is claiming much of the South China Sea as its own, thus asserting dominion over a territory with vast oil and gas reserves through which one-third of the world’s shipping travels.
From 1941 to 1989, the United States risked war to prevent great powers from dominating the world’s economic and industrial heartlands, and thus gaining veto power over America’s ability to conduct international commerce. That’s what China is seeking today.
So why aren’t Lindsey Graham and his GOP presidential competitors talking more about China? (To be fair, Hillary Clinton isn’t talking much about China either. But her campaign thus far has been much less weighted toward foreign policy in general.)
Three reasons come to mind.
by Peter Beinart, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Carlos Barria / Reuters
Pause
I recently came across an old cryalog that I kept during the month of April in 1998. ‘C’ stands for the fact that I cried, the number of C’s represents the number of times I cried, and ‘NC’ indicates that I did not cry on that day.
The saddest thing is, I now find the cryalog very funny, and laugh when I look at it.
But when I kept it, I wanted to die. Literally, to kill myself – with an iron, a steaming hot turned-on iron.
This was not depression, this was menopause.
Reading this, or any other thing ever written about menopause, will not help you in any way, for how you respond to menopause is not up to you, it is up to your body, and though you believe now that you can control your body (such is your strength after all that yoga) you cannot.
Of course, you may be lucky: I know a woman who experienced menopause in no way whatsoever except that one day she realized it had been a couple of years since her last period, which was indeed her last.
You hear a lot about hot flashes, but hot flashes are the least of it, totally inconsequential in every way: you get as hot as a steam iron at odd moments – so what? The media would have you believe that hot flashes are the single most significant symptom toward which you should direct your attention and businesses their products, but when I think of menopause I don’t think of hot flashes; I am not here to talk about hot flashes.
Except to tell you that they do not cease even after you have completely gone through menopause; they become a part of your life the way periods were, they are periodic and, after a while, you stop talking about them.
No, I am here to tell you that one woman, a woman who is the most undepressed, optimistic, upbeat person I know, awoke one morning and walked straight into her kitchen and grabbed a butcher’s knife (she is a world class cook) with the intent of driving it through her heart. That was menopause.
If you take the time to peruse the annals of any nineteenth century asylum, as I have, you will discover that the ‘cause of admittance’ for all women over forty is listed as ‘change of life’.
In other words, you go crazy. When you go crazy, you don’t have the slightest inclination to read anything Foucault ever wrote about culture and madness.
It may be that you recall your thirteenth year on earth. Menopause is adolescence all over again, only you are an adult and have to go out into the world every day in ways you did not have to when you were in school, where you were surrounded by other adolescents, safe, or relatively so, in the asylum of junior high.
You are a thirteen-year-old with the experience and daily life of a forty-five-year-old.
You have on some days the desire to fuck a tree, or a dog, whichever is closest.
You have the desire to leave your husband or lover or partner, whatever.
No matter how stable or loving the arrangement, you want out.
You may decide to take up an insane and hopeless cause. You may decide to walk to Canada, or that it is high time you begin to collect old blue china, three thousand pieces of which will leave you bankrupt. Suddenly the solution to all problems lies in selling your grandmother’s gold watch or drinking your body weight in cider vinegar. A kind of wild forest blood runs in your veins.
This, and other behaviors, will horrify you. You will seek medical help because you are intelligent, and none of the help will help.
The saddest thing is, I now find the cryalog very funny, and laugh when I look at it.
But when I kept it, I wanted to die. Literally, to kill myself – with an iron, a steaming hot turned-on iron.This was not depression, this was menopause.
Reading this, or any other thing ever written about menopause, will not help you in any way, for how you respond to menopause is not up to you, it is up to your body, and though you believe now that you can control your body (such is your strength after all that yoga) you cannot.
Of course, you may be lucky: I know a woman who experienced menopause in no way whatsoever except that one day she realized it had been a couple of years since her last period, which was indeed her last.
You hear a lot about hot flashes, but hot flashes are the least of it, totally inconsequential in every way: you get as hot as a steam iron at odd moments – so what? The media would have you believe that hot flashes are the single most significant symptom toward which you should direct your attention and businesses their products, but when I think of menopause I don’t think of hot flashes; I am not here to talk about hot flashes.
Except to tell you that they do not cease even after you have completely gone through menopause; they become a part of your life the way periods were, they are periodic and, after a while, you stop talking about them.
No, I am here to tell you that one woman, a woman who is the most undepressed, optimistic, upbeat person I know, awoke one morning and walked straight into her kitchen and grabbed a butcher’s knife (she is a world class cook) with the intent of driving it through her heart. That was menopause.
If you take the time to peruse the annals of any nineteenth century asylum, as I have, you will discover that the ‘cause of admittance’ for all women over forty is listed as ‘change of life’.
In other words, you go crazy. When you go crazy, you don’t have the slightest inclination to read anything Foucault ever wrote about culture and madness.
It may be that you recall your thirteenth year on earth. Menopause is adolescence all over again, only you are an adult and have to go out into the world every day in ways you did not have to when you were in school, where you were surrounded by other adolescents, safe, or relatively so, in the asylum of junior high.
You are a thirteen-year-old with the experience and daily life of a forty-five-year-old.
You have on some days the desire to fuck a tree, or a dog, whichever is closest.
You have the desire to leave your husband or lover or partner, whatever.
No matter how stable or loving the arrangement, you want out.
You may decide to take up an insane and hopeless cause. You may decide to walk to Canada, or that it is high time you begin to collect old blue china, three thousand pieces of which will leave you bankrupt. Suddenly the solution to all problems lies in selling your grandmother’s gold watch or drinking your body weight in cider vinegar. A kind of wild forest blood runs in your veins.
This, and other behaviors, will horrify you. You will seek medical help because you are intelligent, and none of the help will help.
by Mary Ruefle, Granta | Read more:
Image: Mary Ruefle
Who The @!#$&% is John Legere?
"The fuckers hate you."
"I can’t wait to watch the peckers scream and cry."
"I’m bombing their factories."
Action-movie villains spit this kind of venom. Comedy writers hurl similarly foul tirades at one another. And as the Sony email hack revealed, business executives can speak this way too. In private. But in the open, CEOs—particularly those running multibillion-dollar, publicly traded companies—present a soothing stream of bromides, buzzwords, and nonanswers. All except John Legere, the man responsible for those quotes. At a downtown Manhattan loft this past March, the club music thumps as a crowd of telecom analysts and press wait expectantly for the CEO of T-Mobile to spew his gutter talk. He does not disappoint. Legere, 57, takes the stage at "Un-carrier 9.0," the latest in a series of T-Mobile news events, wearing a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt emblazoned with a hot pink T on the chest. On his feet: hot pink skater sneakers. With his wave of shoulder-length brown hair and mild paunch protruding from what was once an athletic physique, Legere looks like he might have been a member of Kiss rather than a lifelong telecom executive. Once he starts talking, he becomes the anthropomorphized embodiment of the tall can of Red Bull in his left hand.
He launches his opening salvo: "It’s safe to say that our friends in the cozy little duopoly have been shitting themselves more in the past two years than in history." Legere is going straight at T-Mobile’s much larger competitors, AT&T and Verizon. "Dumb and dumber," or "the pricks," as Legere usually refers to them, watched T-Mobile win 8.3 million new customers last year alone. A smile oozes from his asymmetrical mouth. "Yes, that’s in the first minute that I swore," he flirts with the crowd. He knows they’ll be tweeting his feistiest lines. In fact, he’s counting on it. "Those of you with the f-bomb pool will have to wait a little bit longer," he quips. (If you had bet that he’d drop one within the first four minutes, you won.)
This performance—to announce new terms for T-Mobile’s business customers—would get most CEOs fired or sued, especially in the buttoned-up telecom industry. Legere, though, gets an ovation when he takes the stage and another when he’s done.
Amid the applause, questions hover: Who the @#$% is John Legere? Why is he presenting himself as an amalgam of faith healer, social media stuntman, professional trash-talker, and drunken boardwalk pitchman? Is he a marketing genius? A bullshit artist? Or both? He has certainly anointed himself the Dr. House of telecom, jamming a syringe full of adrenaline into the heart of the wireless business. As one industry journalist, Dan O’Shea, tells me, "This guy is being treated like he just popped out of a spaceship from nowhere, but everybody has a history."
Perhaps the most important question is: Why have Legere’s antics worked? Since he first recast T-Mobile as the underdog anti-carrier in the spring of 2013, it has come back from near death. In addition to customer growth, revenues increased 13% year over year in the first quarter of 2015 (though the company continues to lose money), and it is now on par with the incumbent No. 3, Sprint. Virtually every time T-Mobile unleashes a new "un-carrier" move—abolishing contracts and international roaming fees; giving away streaming music; handing out unlimited upgrades for new iPhones; offering to pay off customers’ AT&T contracts if they switch—"the pricks" do their best to match it. Legere is singlehandedly dragging the industry into a new era. Even Verizon’s acquisition of AOL can be seen, in part, as a reaction to T-Mobile’s rising profile.
Camouflaged beneath Legere’s profane shtick and age-inappropriate wardrobe is the germ of an alternative, thoroughly modern model for corporate leadership. A generation ago, if a customer knew of a CEO, it was because he projected an avuncular gravitas on TV that helped to sell Chrysler cars or chocolate Frostys. The public today, inherently skeptical and weaned on social media bluntness, no longer trusts a canned talking head. Both customers and employees expect more, a CEO in the maelstrom just like them. Authenticity of the sort Legere projects is what moves merchandise. Even if it’s just an act. (...)
Legere’s official debut came four months into his tenure, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2013. He had already started to loosen up his wardrobe now that his customers were millennials and not milquetoast CIOs. "Open coat, nice collared shirt" is how Legere’s longtime friend David Carey, T-Mobile’s EVP for corporate services, describes Legere’s first steps toward finding the clothes that would make the man. "It was very Silicon Valley–like," he says.
But Legere began to worry he still looked like too much of a suit. "We were up in the suite," Carey says, recalling the night before T-Mobile’s press event at CES, "and he said, ‘What should I wear?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, look at me. What the hell are you asking me for?’ " The two fiftysomething dudes bantered for a bit, until Carey suggested "this cool hipster kind of sport coat that he had just gotten." Legere was receptive but still flummoxed. "What shirt?" he asked. Carey told him, "I’m not a fashion guy, but I think you’re supposed to wear one of those T-shirt kinda things to get that cool look going."
Legere came up with a twist. What if it was a magenta T-shirt with a giant T on it? Vegas, baby, Vegas. They had the T-shirt made overnight.
When he showed up at the Venetian hotel the next day for his first public introduction to the technology industry as T-Mobile’s new CEO, Legere had accessorized the hip sport-coat-over-a-T-shirt look with a dangling silver chain and a chunky white plastic watch. He donned a New York Yankees cap in a nod to a partnership with Major League Baseball.
Legere had a script, but something about his sartorial transformation encouraged him to scrap it. He had all those frustrations coursing through him from listening to those customer service calls, so he channeled that. "My head exploded," Legere says now, "and I just went on a rant about the wireless industry and how I didn’t get it." Like a preacher finding his groove, Legere hit upon a recurring bit, what in one conversation he calls his I-just-landed-from-Mars technique and in another the 5-year-old kid questions: Why, why, why? "People hate contracts. Let’s not have them! ‘You can’t,’ companies say. Why?" (...)
Legere’s performance at the Venetian, which alternated between attacking his competitors and presenting himself as the customer’s only friend in the business, was viewed as a tour de force as it was taking place. "T-Mobile CEO John Legere is killing it," tweeted one reporter from CNet. "Holy moley John Legere is the UnCarrierCEO," said another from PC Magazine. To the outside world, Legere had just dropped in from Mars. But for longtime industry observers who remembered Legere the suit, this irreverent channeling of consumer wrath was even more shocking. "It was obvious that he was going to be quite different in this new role," says analyst Jan Dawson, who covered Legere during his time at Global Crossing. "This was John Legere 2.0."
by Danielle Sacks, Fast Company | Read more:
Image: Jeff Lysgaard; Source Photo: Steve Sands, Getty Images
"I can’t wait to watch the peckers scream and cry."
"I’m bombing their factories."
Action-movie villains spit this kind of venom. Comedy writers hurl similarly foul tirades at one another. And as the Sony email hack revealed, business executives can speak this way too. In private. But in the open, CEOs—particularly those running multibillion-dollar, publicly traded companies—present a soothing stream of bromides, buzzwords, and nonanswers. All except John Legere, the man responsible for those quotes. At a downtown Manhattan loft this past March, the club music thumps as a crowd of telecom analysts and press wait expectantly for the CEO of T-Mobile to spew his gutter talk. He does not disappoint. Legere, 57, takes the stage at "Un-carrier 9.0," the latest in a series of T-Mobile news events, wearing a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt emblazoned with a hot pink T on the chest. On his feet: hot pink skater sneakers. With his wave of shoulder-length brown hair and mild paunch protruding from what was once an athletic physique, Legere looks like he might have been a member of Kiss rather than a lifelong telecom executive. Once he starts talking, he becomes the anthropomorphized embodiment of the tall can of Red Bull in his left hand.He launches his opening salvo: "It’s safe to say that our friends in the cozy little duopoly have been shitting themselves more in the past two years than in history." Legere is going straight at T-Mobile’s much larger competitors, AT&T and Verizon. "Dumb and dumber," or "the pricks," as Legere usually refers to them, watched T-Mobile win 8.3 million new customers last year alone. A smile oozes from his asymmetrical mouth. "Yes, that’s in the first minute that I swore," he flirts with the crowd. He knows they’ll be tweeting his feistiest lines. In fact, he’s counting on it. "Those of you with the f-bomb pool will have to wait a little bit longer," he quips. (If you had bet that he’d drop one within the first four minutes, you won.)
This performance—to announce new terms for T-Mobile’s business customers—would get most CEOs fired or sued, especially in the buttoned-up telecom industry. Legere, though, gets an ovation when he takes the stage and another when he’s done.
Amid the applause, questions hover: Who the @#$% is John Legere? Why is he presenting himself as an amalgam of faith healer, social media stuntman, professional trash-talker, and drunken boardwalk pitchman? Is he a marketing genius? A bullshit artist? Or both? He has certainly anointed himself the Dr. House of telecom, jamming a syringe full of adrenaline into the heart of the wireless business. As one industry journalist, Dan O’Shea, tells me, "This guy is being treated like he just popped out of a spaceship from nowhere, but everybody has a history."
Perhaps the most important question is: Why have Legere’s antics worked? Since he first recast T-Mobile as the underdog anti-carrier in the spring of 2013, it has come back from near death. In addition to customer growth, revenues increased 13% year over year in the first quarter of 2015 (though the company continues to lose money), and it is now on par with the incumbent No. 3, Sprint. Virtually every time T-Mobile unleashes a new "un-carrier" move—abolishing contracts and international roaming fees; giving away streaming music; handing out unlimited upgrades for new iPhones; offering to pay off customers’ AT&T contracts if they switch—"the pricks" do their best to match it. Legere is singlehandedly dragging the industry into a new era. Even Verizon’s acquisition of AOL can be seen, in part, as a reaction to T-Mobile’s rising profile.
Camouflaged beneath Legere’s profane shtick and age-inappropriate wardrobe is the germ of an alternative, thoroughly modern model for corporate leadership. A generation ago, if a customer knew of a CEO, it was because he projected an avuncular gravitas on TV that helped to sell Chrysler cars or chocolate Frostys. The public today, inherently skeptical and weaned on social media bluntness, no longer trusts a canned talking head. Both customers and employees expect more, a CEO in the maelstrom just like them. Authenticity of the sort Legere projects is what moves merchandise. Even if it’s just an act. (...)
Legere’s official debut came four months into his tenure, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2013. He had already started to loosen up his wardrobe now that his customers were millennials and not milquetoast CIOs. "Open coat, nice collared shirt" is how Legere’s longtime friend David Carey, T-Mobile’s EVP for corporate services, describes Legere’s first steps toward finding the clothes that would make the man. "It was very Silicon Valley–like," he says.
But Legere began to worry he still looked like too much of a suit. "We were up in the suite," Carey says, recalling the night before T-Mobile’s press event at CES, "and he said, ‘What should I wear?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, look at me. What the hell are you asking me for?’ " The two fiftysomething dudes bantered for a bit, until Carey suggested "this cool hipster kind of sport coat that he had just gotten." Legere was receptive but still flummoxed. "What shirt?" he asked. Carey told him, "I’m not a fashion guy, but I think you’re supposed to wear one of those T-shirt kinda things to get that cool look going."
Legere came up with a twist. What if it was a magenta T-shirt with a giant T on it? Vegas, baby, Vegas. They had the T-shirt made overnight.
When he showed up at the Venetian hotel the next day for his first public introduction to the technology industry as T-Mobile’s new CEO, Legere had accessorized the hip sport-coat-over-a-T-shirt look with a dangling silver chain and a chunky white plastic watch. He donned a New York Yankees cap in a nod to a partnership with Major League Baseball.
Legere had a script, but something about his sartorial transformation encouraged him to scrap it. He had all those frustrations coursing through him from listening to those customer service calls, so he channeled that. "My head exploded," Legere says now, "and I just went on a rant about the wireless industry and how I didn’t get it." Like a preacher finding his groove, Legere hit upon a recurring bit, what in one conversation he calls his I-just-landed-from-Mars technique and in another the 5-year-old kid questions: Why, why, why? "People hate contracts. Let’s not have them! ‘You can’t,’ companies say. Why?" (...)
Legere’s performance at the Venetian, which alternated between attacking his competitors and presenting himself as the customer’s only friend in the business, was viewed as a tour de force as it was taking place. "T-Mobile CEO John Legere is killing it," tweeted one reporter from CNet. "Holy moley John Legere is the UnCarrierCEO," said another from PC Magazine. To the outside world, Legere had just dropped in from Mars. But for longtime industry observers who remembered Legere the suit, this irreverent channeling of consumer wrath was even more shocking. "It was obvious that he was going to be quite different in this new role," says analyst Jan Dawson, who covered Legere during his time at Global Crossing. "This was John Legere 2.0."
by Danielle Sacks, Fast Company | Read more:
Image: Jeff Lysgaard; Source Photo: Steve Sands, Getty Images
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
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