by The Onion | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Friday, June 12, 2015
Man Treats Mother To Detail About His Personal Life
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
How to Design a Metaphor
[ed. A metaphor designer. Who would've thought something like that would ever be a job title? But today that actually makes a lot of sense.]
If you could ask Dante where he got the idea of life as a road, or Rilke where he found the notion that time is a destroyer, they might have said the metaphors were hewn from their minds, or drawn from a stock of poetic imagery. Their readers might have said the imagery had origins more divine, perhaps even diabolical. But neither poets nor readers would have said the metaphors were designed. That is, the metaphors didn’t target people’s cognitive processes. They weren’t engineered to affect us in a specific way.
Can metaphors be designed? I’m here to tell you that they can, and are. For five years I worked full-time as a metaphor designer at the FrameWorks Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC, whose clients are typically large US foundations (never political campaigns or governments). I continue to shape and test metaphors for private-sector clients and others. In both cases, these metaphors are meant to help people to understand the unfamiliar. They aren’t supposed to make someone remark: ‘That’s beautiful.’ They’re meant to make someone realise that they’ve only been looking at one side of a thing.
Here’s an example. In the 1960s, the US philosopher Donald Schön spent some time at the consulting firm Arthur D Little (he eventually became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nearby). He was working with product researchers trying to figure out why a new paintbrush design with synthetic bristles didn’t apply paint smoothly. As Schön related it later, someone in the group suddenly said: ‘A paintbrush is a kind of pump!’
Ordinarily, seeing a paintbrush this way would be considered a mistake. In this case, what the researchers knew about pumps suddenly became available for thinking about paintbrushes too. ‘Paintbrush as pump’ isn’t beautiful, but it’s very useful. It was, as Schön wrote later, ‘a generative metaphor for the researchers in the sense that it generated new perceptions, explanations, and inventions’. (Among other things, it led to new bristle designs that would bend the right way.)
Metaphor designers create these pseudo-mistakes deliberately. Sometimes the metaphors end up in op-eds or public-service announcements. Sometimes they’re useful for helping people conceive of solutions to problems, or for internal communications in organisations. The challenge for the designer is to generate lots of pseudo-mistakes, some of which can be used for thinking and that have the power to stick around. For someone like me who is reflexively metaphorical (my wedding invite was built around the idea of a labyrinth), these are satisfying tasks, and, as a writer, I have no problem leaving material on the cutting room floor. But it’s when we start testing our metaphors for their social and cognitive usability that design can become really powerful. (...)
That said, you do have to be careful with emotional responses. I worked on a project about childhood resilience. The question was how do children turn out well despite difficult circumstances? We had become acquainted with the metaphor of dandelions and orchids, which originated with the paediatrician Tom Boyce at Berkeley. He used it to describe two types of child, one who did well in a range of circumstances (the dandelion), and one who succeeded only under a narrow set of circumstances (the orchid). Journalists liked it – the US science writer David Dobbs was writing a book under this title. It was thought to be conventionally successful. But it had never been tested with users.
We found that people knew what orchids and dandelions were (not always something you can count on). Also, the comparison appeared to help them understand why certain children do well and others don’t. Yet there was a problem: people valued the orchid and looked down on the dandelion. The culture said they should value the rare, beautiful thing, not the sturdy weed. And so the average American saw no sense in making more dandelions. Besides, their child was not common but special and rare. When people won’t use a term to describe their own kids, that’s a giveaway that the metaphor won’t work. In the end, we developed the metaphor of a weighing scale to explain how positive influences can outweigh negative ones in a child’s early life, thereby making resilience not a trait of the individual person but a function of that person’s environment.
When I describe my work, people often ask whether these new metaphors actually change how people think. They can. When my colleagues and I tested a set of candidate metaphors on the streets, asking random strangers what skills are, the respondents mumbled in their usual ways. Then we gave them a metaphor in which skills are like ropes, woven out of many components braided together, and asked them more questions. It’s not that they became silver-tongued, exactly, but the fumbling abated. They began to talk about the parts of skills, how they have to be combined, and so on. It’s as if this new idea, which we gave to them, had taken them by the hand. Now they were walking down the street together, and the metaphor was showing them things. That’s how we knew that what we were doing with metaphors was working.
by Michael Erard, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Gallery Stock
If you could ask Dante where he got the idea of life as a road, or Rilke where he found the notion that time is a destroyer, they might have said the metaphors were hewn from their minds, or drawn from a stock of poetic imagery. Their readers might have said the imagery had origins more divine, perhaps even diabolical. But neither poets nor readers would have said the metaphors were designed. That is, the metaphors didn’t target people’s cognitive processes. They weren’t engineered to affect us in a specific way.
Can metaphors be designed? I’m here to tell you that they can, and are. For five years I worked full-time as a metaphor designer at the FrameWorks Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC, whose clients are typically large US foundations (never political campaigns or governments). I continue to shape and test metaphors for private-sector clients and others. In both cases, these metaphors are meant to help people to understand the unfamiliar. They aren’t supposed to make someone remark: ‘That’s beautiful.’ They’re meant to make someone realise that they’ve only been looking at one side of a thing.
Here’s an example. In the 1960s, the US philosopher Donald Schön spent some time at the consulting firm Arthur D Little (he eventually became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nearby). He was working with product researchers trying to figure out why a new paintbrush design with synthetic bristles didn’t apply paint smoothly. As Schön related it later, someone in the group suddenly said: ‘A paintbrush is a kind of pump!’Ordinarily, seeing a paintbrush this way would be considered a mistake. In this case, what the researchers knew about pumps suddenly became available for thinking about paintbrushes too. ‘Paintbrush as pump’ isn’t beautiful, but it’s very useful. It was, as Schön wrote later, ‘a generative metaphor for the researchers in the sense that it generated new perceptions, explanations, and inventions’. (Among other things, it led to new bristle designs that would bend the right way.)
Metaphor designers create these pseudo-mistakes deliberately. Sometimes the metaphors end up in op-eds or public-service announcements. Sometimes they’re useful for helping people conceive of solutions to problems, or for internal communications in organisations. The challenge for the designer is to generate lots of pseudo-mistakes, some of which can be used for thinking and that have the power to stick around. For someone like me who is reflexively metaphorical (my wedding invite was built around the idea of a labyrinth), these are satisfying tasks, and, as a writer, I have no problem leaving material on the cutting room floor. But it’s when we start testing our metaphors for their social and cognitive usability that design can become really powerful. (...)
That said, you do have to be careful with emotional responses. I worked on a project about childhood resilience. The question was how do children turn out well despite difficult circumstances? We had become acquainted with the metaphor of dandelions and orchids, which originated with the paediatrician Tom Boyce at Berkeley. He used it to describe two types of child, one who did well in a range of circumstances (the dandelion), and one who succeeded only under a narrow set of circumstances (the orchid). Journalists liked it – the US science writer David Dobbs was writing a book under this title. It was thought to be conventionally successful. But it had never been tested with users.
We found that people knew what orchids and dandelions were (not always something you can count on). Also, the comparison appeared to help them understand why certain children do well and others don’t. Yet there was a problem: people valued the orchid and looked down on the dandelion. The culture said they should value the rare, beautiful thing, not the sturdy weed. And so the average American saw no sense in making more dandelions. Besides, their child was not common but special and rare. When people won’t use a term to describe their own kids, that’s a giveaway that the metaphor won’t work. In the end, we developed the metaphor of a weighing scale to explain how positive influences can outweigh negative ones in a child’s early life, thereby making resilience not a trait of the individual person but a function of that person’s environment.
When I describe my work, people often ask whether these new metaphors actually change how people think. They can. When my colleagues and I tested a set of candidate metaphors on the streets, asking random strangers what skills are, the respondents mumbled in their usual ways. Then we gave them a metaphor in which skills are like ropes, woven out of many components braided together, and asked them more questions. It’s not that they became silver-tongued, exactly, but the fumbling abated. They began to talk about the parts of skills, how they have to be combined, and so on. It’s as if this new idea, which we gave to them, had taken them by the hand. Now they were walking down the street together, and the metaphor was showing them things. That’s how we knew that what we were doing with metaphors was working.
by Michael Erard, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Gallery Stock
How the Legendary Birkin Bag Remains Dominant
When Hermès opens its new Miami Design District flagship on Nov. 6, local clients will find a selection of leather goods, fashion, and accessories chosen specifically for them. Every Hermès outpost is run like an independent boutique, with a store director who visits Paris each year to buy pieces he or she believes will appeal to the location’s particular flavor.
But certain items resonate, no matter where in the world they land. Consider the Birkin Sellier 40, the latest version of what a casual observer might call the original It Bag. Crafted out of what is called Hunter cowhide—which holds its shape without much manipulation—the 40-centimeter-long style is unlined, with raw-edge straps, palladium hardware, and a retail price of $14,900.
The Sellier 40 will be available in Miami, although “available” is a relative term. Birkins of all shapes, sizes, and styles still sell out instantly, with wait lists typical of 10 or 15 years ago. The Birkin really holds up, says Robert Chavez, Hermès’s chief executive officer in the U.S. “Customers appreciate the quality, craftsmanship and timeless style.” ‘
Elite Sales
Yes, clients are suckers for a solid product that takes 18 to 20 hours to make from start to finish, all done by one craftsperson (who starts by selecting just the right piece of leather or exotic skin for the bag and ends with a series of painstaking quality control tests). But they are also suckers for careful, shadow marketing, high prices, limited supply, and a permanent air of exclusivity. It’s probaby the latter, more than the former, that has kept the Birkin the most elite handbag in the world. (...)
How to Get a Birkin
“No one can walk in and buy a Birkin ‘from the back,’” says Michelle Goad, CEO of P.S. Dept., a personal shopping app that services 20,000 luxury customers globally. "The key to getting one is to find someone who has a relationship with one of their associates, [which means they’ve] bought one in the past."
If this sounds a bit like a Catch-22, that's because it is: To be sold a Birkin, you have to have bought one already. Unless you get lucky.
Very occasionally customers can waltz into an Hermès shop and scoop up a surprisingly available version—the 2009 memoir, Bringing Home the Birkin: My Life in Hot Pursuit of the World's Most Coveted Handbag, detailed personal shopper Michael Tonello’s experience in doing that very thing—but that’s far from the norm. Instead, you need to snag a spot on an unofficial waitlist. And then wait.
“Think of it like almost being interviewed,” says Goad. “You have to have a purchase history at the store to just get started, then they meet with you, assess how serious you are about spending, and then you go on their list.
by Lauren Sherman, Bloomberg Business | Read more:
Image: Jeremy Allen
But certain items resonate, no matter where in the world they land. Consider the Birkin Sellier 40, the latest version of what a casual observer might call the original It Bag. Crafted out of what is called Hunter cowhide—which holds its shape without much manipulation—the 40-centimeter-long style is unlined, with raw-edge straps, palladium hardware, and a retail price of $14,900.The Sellier 40 will be available in Miami, although “available” is a relative term. Birkins of all shapes, sizes, and styles still sell out instantly, with wait lists typical of 10 or 15 years ago. The Birkin really holds up, says Robert Chavez, Hermès’s chief executive officer in the U.S. “Customers appreciate the quality, craftsmanship and timeless style.” ‘
Elite Sales
Yes, clients are suckers for a solid product that takes 18 to 20 hours to make from start to finish, all done by one craftsperson (who starts by selecting just the right piece of leather or exotic skin for the bag and ends with a series of painstaking quality control tests). But they are also suckers for careful, shadow marketing, high prices, limited supply, and a permanent air of exclusivity. It’s probaby the latter, more than the former, that has kept the Birkin the most elite handbag in the world. (...)
How to Get a Birkin
“No one can walk in and buy a Birkin ‘from the back,’” says Michelle Goad, CEO of P.S. Dept., a personal shopping app that services 20,000 luxury customers globally. "The key to getting one is to find someone who has a relationship with one of their associates, [which means they’ve] bought one in the past."
If this sounds a bit like a Catch-22, that's because it is: To be sold a Birkin, you have to have bought one already. Unless you get lucky.
Very occasionally customers can waltz into an Hermès shop and scoop up a surprisingly available version—the 2009 memoir, Bringing Home the Birkin: My Life in Hot Pursuit of the World's Most Coveted Handbag, detailed personal shopper Michael Tonello’s experience in doing that very thing—but that’s far from the norm. Instead, you need to snag a spot on an unofficial waitlist. And then wait.
“Think of it like almost being interviewed,” says Goad. “You have to have a purchase history at the store to just get started, then they meet with you, assess how serious you are about spending, and then you go on their list.
by Lauren Sherman, Bloomberg Business | Read more:
Image: Jeremy Allen
Miracle Tree
Moringa oleifera, also called the “miracle tree,” is a native of northern India and a distant relative of mustard and cabbage. It’s a small deciduous tree with compound leaves and a smooth gray trunk, often curiously swollen, like a baobab’s. It is an impressive organism by any reckoning, and it tends to inspire unreasoning, near-hysterical adulation. According to the website Cancer Tutor:Moringa oleifera is a tree brought from the mind of God to the hands of man. It was recognized by the National Institutes of Health as the Botanical of the Year for 2007, and praised again in 2011 and 2012. It is valued worldwide for its ability to treat over 300 diseases. It has the ability to retain high concentrations of electrolyte minerals, allowing it to stay internally hydrated in the driest of conditions. Africans have honored it with names that translate to: “Never Die,” and “The Only Thing that Grows in the Dry Season,” and “Mother’s Milk.” I think it’s safe to say that this plant has saved more lives in 3rd world countries than any other.That list of three hundred diseases includes: prostate disorders, tonsillitis, tuberculosis, stomach ulcers, skin infections, cholera, conjunctivitis, psoriasis, asthma, anemia, gonorrhea, semen deficiency, colitis, jaundice, malaria, arthritis, cancer, and stroke.
These are outrageous claims, but I share the author’s enthusiasm. I have a moringa tree growing in a small pot outside. It’s 88 degrees today, and the dew point is 76, and the sun—I live close to the Tropic of Cancer—is almost directly overhead and so hot that it will boil all the water out of the tree’s black pot as soon as I pour it in there. But I don’t need to pour any water in there, because the moringa tree doesn’t mind the heat at all. I can almost watch it grow. And this is a potted moringa tree, too. If it were in the ground, it would sink a taproot all the way to the aquifer and it wouldn’t mind if it never rained again.
Many parts of the miracle tree are edible. The leaves are particularly nutritious, containing large amounts of vitamins and minerals and a staggering amount of protein—9.4 grams per 100 gram serving, almost three times as much as cow’s milk. They are a popular cooking green in many parts of the tropical world, and an ingredient in Cambodian samlor korko, various South Indian and Sri Lankan lentil dishes, Bengali curries, and Maldivian fish soups. The immature seedpods are also edible, as are the mature seeds, which can be roasted like nuts or pressed to make oil. Even the roots are edible, or at least some people eat them (other people say they’re toxic). They can be grated, like the roots of the moringa’s relatives in the mustard family, to make a spicy condiment. For this reason it’s sometimes called the “horseradish tree.”
And the wonders continue: Moringa oil burns clean and clear, and can be used as a fuel. And some of those medical claims are real, although more research is needed. Most amazing of all, cakes of the pressed seed husk can be used to purify water.
by Aaron Thier, Lucky Peach | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Camming as a Long-Term Career Path
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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:
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.
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
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
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,
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
Monday, June 8, 2015
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:
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
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
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