The Examined Lie

On March 24, 2003, Chief Warrant Officer Randy Summerlin, 31, looked out the window of his Chinook helicopter and became concerned. Several men were running across the Iraqi desert. They were whirling what appeared to be white towels over their heads to signal the impending approach of Summerlin’s three-copter convoy. Farther ahead, two figures emerged from a Nissan pickup. One held an AK-47 rifle, the other a rocket launcher.

What came next happened in a flash. “I felt a shudder in the aircraft and a big boom,” Summerlin told Stars and Stripes. A rocket-propelled grenade ripped through a cargo container the helicopter was transporting on a sling. Another tore a melon-sized hole into the aircraft’s tail housing. Two rounds from the AK-47 pierced the cabin, one hitting an electrical panel and the other nicking a soldier’s cheek. The Chinook retreated, ran into a sandstorm, and made an emergency landing many miles away, in a safer bowl of dust.

An hour or so later, a helicopter deterred by another sandstorm arrived and offered assistance. It was a run-of-the-mill detour, except for one detail: NBC News anchor Brian Williams was on board. The significance of Williams’s presence at this location wouldn’t be relevant until Williams publicly recalled the incident as “a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG.” He told versions of this story several times—all in public venues and all placing himself nearby or inside the downed aircraft—until January 2015, when his narrative, as well as his reputation, collapsed under scrutiny.

The ensuing public condemnation, wavering between moral outrage and mockery, was overwhelming. Williams responded by saying that he had “misremembered” the incident. The general public—at least most of it—would have none of that. He lied. Flat out. Bald faced. The weight of social media reinforced Williams’s new reputation as a scoundrel. NBC placed him on unpaid leave for six months (that’s a $5 million mistake, for those counting). Mission veterans put the final nails of judgment in Williams’s coffin. “I don’t know how he could have mistaken that,” one said.

“I don’t think it was a mistake.”

The most captivating public controversies are the ones where the response reveals more than the transgression. The “pants-on-fire” reaction by the public to Williams’s fabrication, the almost gleeful vehemence expressed on Facebook pages and across the Twittersphere, certainly confirms the seductive pleasure of catching someone red-handed. But this reaction also obscures the underlying messiness of the Big Lie. The gavel-like finality with which Williams was judged absolves us of pondering the deeper questions about how a situation like this one arises. What is the machinery of memory? How does memory concoct the stories we tell about ourselves? The failure to address these questions is unfortunate. The road to Truth might be paved with righteousness, but the precarious relationship all of us have with the past also lends false assurance to the stories that we consider to be objectively true. Condemning Williams and leaving it at that is an all-too-easy response to a much more interesting phenomenon: unintentionally misrepresenting the truth.

Autobiographical (or as psychologists call it, episodic) memory is necessarily flawed. The colloquialisms used to describe it—“etched into my brain,” “seared into my memory,” “if memory serves,” “never forget”—might emphasize its reliability. But these catchphrases capture an outmoded understanding of memory. It’s memory as an ageless photograph instead of memory as a time-sensitive dive into murky psychic territory. Psychologists who study the mysteries of memory speak with a tellingly different lexicon. Transience, misattribution, binding failure, and positive illusions—terms that point to the messiness of recollection—present memory as it really is: a necessarily flawed reconstruction of past experience rather than a carbon copy retrieved from a static cognitive archive.

If retrieving memory is a process—and recounting it a performance—then there are numerous ways its accuracy can derail. Daniel Schacter, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has spent his career researching those ways. In The Seven Sins of Memory, he notes how “binding failures,” which happen when memory latches onto an inaccurate detail and deems it true, create “confusions between events we actually experience and those we only think about or imagine.” Our innate suggestibility tempts us to weave extraneous details from subsequent events—conversing with friends, absorbing miscellaneous media bytes, reading a novel—into the fabric of our original recollection. The gist remains (you know you landed in a helicopter in a desert amid a frisson of danger) but, as Schacter and others explain, the specifics can blur into impressions that in some cases disappear altogether. It’s not exactly a comforting thought, but every time we return to the incident, we take a different route to reach it and, in turn, come home with a slightly—or not so slightly—different story. The mind never remembers the same way twice.

Considerable research into the neurobiology of memory retrieval supports the idea that our recollections are inherently shaky. According to a literature review in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, the molecular mechanisms underscoring what scientists call memory reconsolidation—basically, the recovery of a memory that has already been coded into the brain—highlight the presence of a “labile period” during which “the memory can be modified.” The initial consolidation of a memory depends on a protein synthesis. When protein synthesis inhibitors are introduced into the brain after retrieval of the original consolidated memory, the updated memory, which has passed through the labile phase, takes a different cellular pathway. The result is an alteration of the original memory.

by James McWilliams, The American Scholar | Read more:

Image: David Herbick

Letter of Recommendation: Uni-ball Signo UM-151

Writers are supposed to have some mystical bond with their pens. With solemn gravity, in places like Paris Review interviews, they are asked what they write with, as if their pen strokes were what readers ultimately consumed. At times, I feel as if I should have some weighty, burnished fountain pen that, as that ad for some luxury product goes, I don’t own but merely “look after for the next generation.” But as a left-­hander with world-­historically abysmal handwriting — in college, college, I once had to read an essay out loud to an indulgent professor from my exam blue book — I have never managed much affection for manual writing instruments.

That changed some years ago when an architect friend introduced me to the pleasures of inexpensive Japanese pens. In a small black notebook with graph-­paper pages, he was incessantly sketching or inscribing with a precision that left me achingly envious. His to-­do lists were works of Vitruvian wonder. If only my own writing could look so exact, then my very thoughts might become more clear. One day, I took a closer look at his pen. It was thin, plastic and decorated with kanji characters. “Kinokuniya,” he said. “You’ve got to go.”

And so, on a lunch break from the main branch of the New York Public Library, I made my first of countless pilgrimages to that Japanese bookstore. Feeling a bit too much like the sort of trenchcoat-­wearing creep who used to inhabit Times Square, I would, semifurtively, repair to the stationery department with a frequency that probably made the security guy nervous.

There, arrayed like a kind of shrine, was the pen collection. Not behind glass, not packaged, just there, a thousand vessels of ink to be held, examined and written with on helpfully supplied pieces of paper. The variety was staggering. Where an American shop would offer some desultory Paper Mate ballpoints in blue and black, here were countless brands I had never heard of, in a ridiculous spectrum of colors, with more nib sizes than I knew existed. In a sweaty otaku fervor — like those fanboys who haunt Tokyo’s manga shops — I would carefully pick a dozen and scuttle back to the library.

The pen that emerged as my favorite, always clipped on a shirt pocket or floating in my satchel, was the Uni-­ball Signo UM-­151, in black gel ink with a 0.38-mm tip. It is manufactured by the Mitsubishi Pencil Company of Tokyo. (It is not, however, part of the large keiretsu that makes Mitsubishi cars, electronics, chemicals and hundreds of other products — though this is a common misconception.)

For me, the pen’s virtues are multifarious. The cost is such that I do not mind if I lose it (almost inevitably, I will). Aesthetically, there is the sleek silhouette, the smooth barrel, the graceful link of the arcing clip to the gentle curving cap; viewed on its side, the pen perfectly evokes a Shinkansen bullet train. I love the way the silver conical tip sits visible through its clear plastic housing, like a rocket waiting to be deployed. I love the small black rubber grip, with its pairs of dimples, arranged in a pattern whose logic evades but intrigues me. The pen slides discreetly into a pocket, and like a sinuous dagger it just feels meant to be held.

I often make notes in between lines on drafts, so I write in a small script. And yet, as I already find the act of handwriting so taxing — using a standard ballpoint feels to me like shoveling dirt — I need this to be as effortless as possible. The Signo, for me, hits the perfect balance between surgical accuracy and lubricating ink flow; there’s enough ink to help the pen glide smoothly along the page with grace, but not so much that, as I’m a lefty, it smudges. Of course, at times the 0.38-mm nib, like most small nibs, can admittedly be a bit scratchy. Brad Dowdy, who runs the wonderful blog The Pen Addict, calls this “feedback.” Wider tips offer a smoother ride, but with less awareness of what you are doing. I like to use a car analogy: In a small, highly tuned sports car, you feel the nuances of the road. In a big lumbering S.U.V., you drive in vaguely anesthetized comfort.

by Tom Vanderbilt, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Hannah Whitaker for The New York Times. Prop stylist: Randi Brookman Harris

Mind Your Own Business

At about the beginning of this decade, mass-market mindfulness rolled out of the Bay Area like a brand new app. Very much like an app, in fact, or a whole swarm of apps. Previous self-improvement trends had been transmitted via books, inspirational speakers, and CDs; now, mindfulness could be carried around on a smartphone. There are hundreds of them, these mindfulness apps, bearing names like Smiling Mind and Buddhify. A typical example features timed stretches of meditation, as brief as one minute, accompanied by soothing voices, soporific music, and images of forests and waterfalls.

This is Buddhism sliced up and commodified, and, in case the connection to the tech industry is unclear, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist blurbed a seminal mindfulness manual by calling it “the instruction manual that should come with our iPhones and BlackBerries.” It’s enough to make you think that the actual Buddha devoted all his time under the Bodhi Tree to product testing. In the mindfulness lexicon, the word “enlightenment” doesn’t have a place.

In California, at least, mindfulness and other conveniently accessible derivatives of Buddhism flourished well before BlackBerries. I first heard the word in 1998 from a wealthy landlady in Berkeley, advising me to be “mindful” of the suffocating Martha Stewart-ish decor of the apartment I was renting from her, which of course I was doing everything possible to un-see. A possible connection between her “mindfulness” and Buddhism emerged only when I had to turn to a tenants’ rights group to collect my security deposit. She countered with a letter accusing people like me—leftists, I suppose, or renters—of oppressing Tibetans and disrespecting the Dalai Lama.

During the same stint in the Bay Area, I learned that rich locals liked to unwind at Buddhist monasteries in the hills, where, for a few thousand dollars, they could spend a weekend doing manual labor for the monks. Buddhism, or some adaptation thereof, was becoming a class signifier, among a subset of Caucasians anyway, and nowhere was it more ostentatious than in Silicon Valley, where star player Steve Jobs had been a Buddhist or perhaps a Hindu—he seems not to have made much of a distinction—even before it was fashionable for CEOs to claim a spiritual life. Mindfulness guru and promoter Soren Gordhamer noticed in 2013 that tech leaders from Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other major tech companies seemed to be “tapped into an inner dimension that guides their work.” He called it “wisdom” and named his annual conferences Wisdom 2.0—helpful shorthand, as it happens, for describing the inner smugness of the Bay Area elite.

Today, mindfulness has far outgrown Silicon Valley and its signature industry, becoming another numbingly ubiquitous feature of the verbal landscape, as “positive thinking” once was. While an earlier, more arduous, version of Buddhism attracted few celebrities other than Richard Gere, mindfulness boasts a host of prominent practitioners—Arianna Huffington, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Anderson Cooper among them. “Mindful leadership” debuted at Davos in 2013 to an overflow crowd, and Wisdom 2.0 conferences have taken place in New York and Dublin as well as San Francisco, with attendees fanning out to become missionaries for the new mind-set. This year’s event in San Francisco advertises not only familiar faces from Google and Facebook, but also speeches by corporate representatives of Starbucks and Eileen Fisher. Aetna, a Fortune 100 health insurance company, offers its 34,000 employees a twelve-week meditation class, and its CEO dreams of expanding the program to include all its customers, who will presumably be made healthier by clearing their minds. Even General Mills, which dates back to the nineteenth century, has added meditation rooms to its buildings, finding that a seven-week course produces striking results. According to the Financial Times,

83 percent of participants said they were “taking time each day to optimize my personal productivity”—up from 23 percent before the course. Eighty-two percent said they now make time to eliminate tasks with limited productivity value—up from 32 percent before the course.

Productivity is only one objective of the new miniaturized meditation; there are also the more profound-sounding goals of “wisdom” and “compassion,” which are not normally associated with Silicon Valley or American business in general. Just a few years ago, say in 2005, the tech industry exemplified a very different kind of corporate ideology, featuring multitasking and perpetually divided attention—think an incoming call conducted while scanning a new product design, checking email, and deflecting the interruptions of subalterns. It was madness, but the business self-help literature encouraged people to “surf the chaos,” nourishing themselves on caffeine and adrenaline. If we needed to unclutter our minds, we were directed to the gym and an hour or so of intense physical activity. A trim muscular body, combined with an ever-flickering gaze, signified executive status.

by Barbara Ehrenreich, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Lisa Hanby

‘Yemayá’ (The Ashé series), 2012-13 - Jeannine Achón (b. 1973)
via:

via:

Birdies in a Bottle

Eras can be defined by the drug. Alcohol in the '20s, acid in the '60s, cocaine in the '80s. Though a legal prescription, Adderall is making its claim as the substance of our time. Adults all the way down to elementary-school kids are given the stimulant to treat the impulsivity and inattentiveness of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Hordes more without prescriptions abuse the pills for partying, or secretively self-medicate to give themselves the edge they feel they need—but often with scary side effects.

If Adderall can help college students cram for final exams, it follows that golfers might seek its benefits. Focus, after all, is the name of our game. To find out if it's pervasive, I posted the following on Reddit: "Has anyone ever taken Adderall before they've played golf?"

Responses poured in, 48 comments in three days. A 30-year-old accountant told of being diagnosed with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder (or ADD, which is ADHD without the hyperactivity component) after he had obtained two master's degrees. He would take Adderall in the morning, and the effects would linger when he played golf after work. The first summer he was on the medication, he went from a near-beginner to an 18-handicap. One 28-year-old golfer told me that swallowing an Adderall and smoking pot was perfect for relaxed, intense focus. Another young male, an elite player who competed in the 2011 U.S. Amateur when he was 24, was prescribed Adderall in high school, and his game steadily improved. He said he became more single-minded. Lengthy practice sessions suddenly didn't feel so monotonous.

But not everyone found a cure-all. Per one respondent: "I've done this. I played average. I think I remember feeling kinda shaky over the ball. I also sweated a lot. I mean a lot." (...)

Critics contend that the tour's policy, which began in 2008, should be at least as stringent as those of other big-time sports, and several developments have ratcheted up the talking points. The tour's insistence on not disclosing violations and suspensions for recreational drugs probably made the recent six-month leave of absence by Dustin Johnson a never-to-be-resolved mystery. (Earlier this year, Johnson denied a golf.com report that he tested positive for cocaine for a second time.) The situation helped prompt the director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to castigate the tour for its "secrets" and point to "gaps" in its program. Then John Daly and Robert Garrigus said the tour's urine testing is not random, the latter claiming the predictable sequence was based on the tour following an alphabetical list.

Not surprisingly, the tour has stood firm on keeping recreational drug-use violations private. When Matt Every was suspended for three months in 2010, his violation was revealed by his arrest for misdemeanor possession of marijuana, a charge that was dismissed. Though the tour does not use WADA guidelines, neither do other major professional sports. As for Daly and Garrigus, the tour says both are flat wrong: The policy is "random," according to tour executive vice president Ty Votaw. (...)

And now the Rio Olympics loom. Thirteen weeks before the opening of the Games in August 2016, the pool of eligible golfers will be under full WADA regulations. More drugs will be on the banned list. For golfers, that means applying for waivers for allergens and anti-inflammatories that the PGA Tour allows. Golfers in the Olympic pool will have to provide their off-course whereabouts and will be subject to testing 24/7. In the case of a PED violation, WADA mandates that the violation and banned substance be revealed.

Most important, along with providing urine samples, potential Olympians will be subject to blood tests, the only way to detect human growth hormone (HGH), a synthetic generally considered to increase speed and power, as well as accelerate healing and recovery. In the past three years, the NFL and MLB have instituted random blood testing, and NBA commissioner Adam Silver says his league is on the verge. Behind the scenes on the PGA Tour, it's the substance of most whispers. "If a player is on the way back from injury or is tired, it would be easy to use HGH," says one veteran caddie. "They [tour officials] don't test for it."

by Luke Kerr-Dineen and Jamie Diaz, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Adam Voorhes

via:

via:

Ikebana by Toshiro Kawase
via:

via:

Nicolas de Staël, Le Saladier [Salad bowl], 1954
via:

Bacon Wrapped Corn

Bacon wrapped corn (recipe)
[ed. Thanks, Deb]

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.

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:

WALT: So, Domingo, you from around town here or someplace else?
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. 

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.

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.
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.

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.

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

Waze and the Traffic Panopticon

In April, during his second annual State of the City address, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a data-sharing agreement with Waze, the Google-owned, Israel-based navigation service. Waze is different from most navigation apps, including Google Maps, in that it relies heavily on real-time, user-generated data. Some of this data is produced actively—a driver or passenger sees a stalled vehicle, then uses a voice command or taps a stalled-vehicle icon on the app to alert others—while other data, such as the user’s location and average speed, is gathered passively, via smartphones. The agreement will see the city provide Waze with some of the active data it collects, alerting drivers to road closures, construction, and parades, among other things. From Waze, the city will get real-time data on traffic and road conditions. Garcetti said that the partnership would mean “less congestion, better routing, and a more livable L.A.” Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s head of growth, acknowledged to me that these kinds of deals can cause discomfort to the people working inside city government. “It’s exciting, but people inside are also fearful because it seems like too much work, or it seems so unknown,” she said.

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

via:

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.

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

via:

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.

by Mary Ruefle, Granta |  Read more:

Image: Mary Ruefle