To Save California, Read “Dune”

[ed. We might also stop promoting unsustainable developments. Las Vegas, anyone? See also: Holy Crop.] 

Fifty years ago science-fiction author Frank Herbert seized the imagination of readers with his portrayal of a planet on which it never rained. In the novel Dune, the scarcest resource is water, so much so that the mere act of shedding a tear or spitting on the floor takes on weighty cultural significance.

To survive their permanent desert climate, the indigenous Fremen of Dune employ every possible technology. They build “windtraps” and “dew collectors” to grab the slightest precipitation out of the air. They construct vast underground cisterns and canals to store and transport their painstakingly gathered water. They harvest every drop of moisture from the corpses of the newly dead. During each waking moment they dress in “stillsuits”—head-to-toe wetsuit-like body coverings that recycle sweat, urine, and feces back into drinking water.

Described by Dune’s “planetary ecologist,” Liet-Kynes, as “a micro-sandwich—a high-efficiency filter and heat exchange system”—the stillsuit is a potent metaphor for reuse, reclamation, and conservation. Powered by the wearer’s own breathing and movement, the stillsuit is the technical apotheosis of the principle of making do with what one has.

Someday, sooner than we’d like, it’s not inconceivable that residents of California will be shopping on Amazon for the latest in stillsuit tech. Dune is set thousands of years in the future, but in California in 2015, the future is now. Four years of drought have pummeled reservoirs and forced mandatory 25 percent water rationing cuts. The calendar year of 2014 was the driest (and hottest) since records started being kept in the 1800s. At the end of May, the Sierra Nevada snowpack—a crucial source of California’s water—hit its lowest point on record: zero. Climate models suggest an era of mega-droughts could be nigh.

Which brings us to Daniel Fernandez, a professor of science and environmental policy at California State University, Monterey Bay, and Peter Yolles, the co-founder of a San Francisco water startup, WaterSmart, that assists water utilities in encouraging conservation by crunching data on individual water consumption. Fernandez spends his days building and monitoring fogcatchers, remarkably Dune-like devices that have the property of converting fog into potable water. “I think about Dune a lot,” Fernandez says. “The ideas have really sat with me. In the book, they revere water, and ask, what do we do?” Similarly, Yolles says, “I remember being fascinated by the stillsuits. That was a striking technology, really poignant.” And inspiring. The fictional prospect of a dystopian future, Yolles says, “helped me see problems that we have, and where things might go.”

Science fiction boasts a long history of influencing the course of scientific and technological development. The inventors of the submarine and the helicopter credited Jules Verne for dreaming up both their inventions. Star Trek’s tricorder inspired generations of engineers to perfect the smartphone. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman credits a character in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy for his motivation: “I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behavior to save civilization.” “Anything one man can imagine, another man can make real,” wrote Verne in Around the World in 80 Days. The future is as malleable as the written word.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that two innovative thinkers devising means to address drought in California should be talking about Dune. As I visited with Yolles and Fernandez to learn about their work confronting drought, I realized the missions of both men embodied a deeper ecological message in Dune. The novel’s ecologist Kynes is famous for teaching that “the highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.” The implicit lesson for society, as it marshals technology to address a waterless world, is that technological fixes work only in the context of an environmentally and socially connected vision. It’s the vision that guided Herbert in creating Dune, and it owes as much to our ancient past as it is a speculation on the future.

According to a biography of Herbert, Dreamer of Dune, written by his son Brian, the genesis of the novel came when Herbert, a long-time journalist who worked for a string of Northern California newspapers, landed an assignment in 1957 to write a story about a United States Department of Agriculture project to control spreading sand dunes with European beach grasses on the coast of Oregon. Surveying the highway-encroaching dunes from a low-flying aircraft, Herbert became fascinated by the implications of this clash between human and nature. The project, he later wrote, “fed my interest in how we inflict ourselves upon our planet. I could begin to see the shape of a global problem, no part of it separated from any other—social ecology, political ecology, economic ecology.” He chose the title Dune, he said, because of its onomatopoetic similarity to the word “doom.” He hoped Dune would serve as an “ecological awareness handbook.”

His wish came true. Along with Rachel Carson’s environmental call to arms, Silent Spring, published in 1962, Dune, says Robert France, a professor of watershed management at Dalhousie University, “played a very important role in increasing global consciousness about environmental concerns in general.” France says the massively popular reaction to Dune was a key part in the events that led up to the creation of Earth Day. Herbert frequently corresponded with the founder of Earth Day, Ira Einhorn, and was a featured speaker at the first Earth Day, in 1970.

Herbert’s role in the budding environmental movement is proof science fiction can and does play a role in how we live in the present. But one of the more remarkable things about Dune is how rooted its story is in the ancient past. According to Brian Herbert, his father spent five years researching desert cultures and “dry-land ecology” before writing the novel. There’s a reason why the Fremen language looks and sounds like Arabic, and the Fremen people bear more than a passing resemblance to Bedouin nomads. Herbert did his homework. A civilization flourished in the Middle East 2,000 years ago that, by necessity, used every bit of available technology to maximize their access to water. “The closest historic parallel to the Dune Fremen,” says France, “are the Nabateans, proto-Semitic Arabs who lived at the southern end of the Dead Sea.”

by Andrew Leonard, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Gary Jamroz-Palma

Machine Ethics: The Robot’s Dilemma

In his 1942 short story 'Runaround', science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov introduced the Three Laws of Robotics — engineering safeguards and built-in ethical principles that he would go on to use in dozens of stories and novels. They were: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Fittingly, 'Runaround' is set in 2015. Real-life roboticists are citing Asimov's laws a lot these days: their creations are becoming autonomous enough to need that kind of guidance. In May, a panel talk on driverless cars at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington DC, turned into a discussion about how autonomous vehicles would behave in a crisis. What if a vehicle's efforts to save its own passengers by, say, slamming on the brakes risked a pile-up with the vehicles behind it? Or what if an autonomous car swerved to avoid a child, but risked hitting someone else nearby?

“We see more and more autonomous or automated systems in our daily life,” said panel participant Karl-Josef Kuhn, an engineer with Siemens in Munich, Germany. But, he asked, how can researchers equip a robot to react when it is “making the decision between two bad choices”?

The pace of development is such that these difficulties will soon affect health-care robots, military drones and other autonomous devices capable of making decisions that could help or harm humans. Researchers are increasingly convinced that society's acceptance of such machines will depend on whether they can be programmed to act in ways that maximize safety, fit in with social norms and encourage trust. “We need some serious progress to figure out what's relevant for artificial intelligence to reason successfully in ethical situations,” says Marcello Guarini, a philosopher at the University of Windsor in Canada.

Several projects are tackling this challenge, including initiatives funded by the US Office of Naval Research and the UK government's engineering-funding council. They must address tough scientific questions, such as what kind of intelligence, and how much, is needed for ethical decision-making, and how that can be translated into instructions for a machine. Computer scientists, roboticists, ethicists and philosophers are all pitching in.

“If you had asked me five years ago whether we could make ethical robots, I would have said no,” says Alan Winfield, a roboticist at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, UK. “Now I don't think it's such a crazy idea.”

Learning machines

In one frequently cited experiment, a commercial toy robot called Nao was programmed to remind people to take medicine.

“On the face of it, this sounds simple,” says Susan Leigh Anderson, a philosopher at the University of Connecticut in Stamford who did the work with her husband, computer scientist Michael Anderson of the University of Hartford in Connecticut. “But even in this kind of limited task, there are nontrivial ethics questions involved.” For example, how should Nao proceed if a patient refuses her medication? Allowing her to skip a dose could cause harm. But insisting that she take it would impinge on her autonomy.

To teach Nao to navigate such quandaries, the Andersons gave it examples of cases in which bioethicists had resolved conflicts involving autonomy, harm and benefit to a patient. Learning algorithms then sorted through the cases until they found patterns that could guide the robot in new situations.

With this kind of 'machine learning', a robot can extract useful knowledge even from ambiguous inputs (see go.nature.com/2r7nav). The approach would, in theory, help the robot to get better at ethical decision-making as it encounters more situations. But many fear that the advantages come at a price. The principles that emerge are not written into the computer code, so “you have no way of knowing why a program could come up with a particular rule telling it something is ethically 'correct' or not”, says Jerry Kaplan, who teaches artificial intelligence and ethics at Stanford University in California.

Getting around this problem calls for a different tactic, many engineers say; most are attempting it by creating programs with explicitly formulated rules, rather than asking a robot to derive its own. Last year, Winfield published the results of an experiment that asked: what is the simplest set of rules that would allow a machine to rescue someone in danger of falling into a hole? Most obviously, Winfield realized, the robot needed the ability to sense its surroundings — to recognize the position of the hole and the person, as well as its own position relative to both. But the robot also needed rules allowing it to anticipate the possible effects of its own actions.

Winfield's experiment used hockey-puck-sized robots moving on a surface. He designated some of them 'H-robots' to represent humans, and one — representing the ethical machine — the 'A-robot', named after Asimov. Winfield programmed the A-robot with a rule analogous to Asimov's first law: if it perceived an H-robot in danger of falling into a hole, it must move into the H-robot's path to save it.

Winfield put the robots through dozens of test runs, and found that the A-robot saved its charge each time. But then, to see what the allow-no-harm rule could accomplish in the face of a moral dilemma, he presented the A-robot with two H-robots wandering into danger simultaneously. Now how would it behave?

The results suggested that even a minimally ethical robot could be useful, says Winfield: the A-robot frequently managed to save one 'human', usually by moving first to the one that was slightly closer to it. Sometimes, by moving fast, it even managed to save both. But the experiment also showed the limits of minimalism. In almost half of the trials, the A-robot went into a helpless dither and let both 'humans' perish. To fix that would require extra rules about how to make such choices. If one H-robot were an adult and another were a child, for example, which should the A-robot save first? On matters of judgement like these, not even humans always agree. And often, as Kaplan points out, “we don't know how to codify what the explicit rules should be, and they are necessarily incomplete”.

by Boer Deng, Nature |  Read more:

Image: Peter Adams and Day The Earth Stood Still

via:

Night On Earth - Rome

[ed. See also: Night on Earth - Paris and New York]

The Kid Brother

Consider yourself lucky if you have one

Yes, we tossed him like a football when he was two years old. We did. And yes, we folded him like a smiling gangly awkward puppet into a kitchen cabinet. We did that. Yes, we painted his face blue once, and sent him roaring into our teenage sister’s room to wake her up on a Saturday. We did that, too. Yes, we stood in the hospital parking lot with our dad and waved up at the room where our mom stood in the window brandishing our new kid brother who looked from where we stood like a bundle of laundry more than a kid brother. Yes, we gawped at him with disappointment when he came home and was placed proudly on the couch like a mewling prize and we muttered later quietly in our room that he seemed totally useless, brotherwise. We kept checking on him the rest of the day and he never did do anything interesting that we noticed, not even wail or bellow like babies did in the movies and on television, even when you poked him with a surreptitious finger. He just sprawled there looking perfect, and after a while we lost interest and we went upstairs to plot against our sister.

As he grew, he remained the most cheerful compliant complaisant child you ever saw, never complaining in the least when we tossed him or decked him or chose him last for football games or sent him in first as lonely assault force in conflicts of all sorts, and we were always half-forgetting him when we dashed off on adventures and expeditions, and we were always half-absorbed by and half-annoyed with his littlebrotherness, happy to defend him adamantly against the taunts and shoves of others but not at all averse to burling him around like a puppy ourselves. We buried him in the sand up to his jaw at the beach. We spoke to him curtly and cuttingly when we felt that he was the apple of the grandmotherly eye and we were the peach pits, the shriveled potato skins, the sad brown pelts of dead pears. We did that.

And never once that I remember did he hit back, or assault us, or issue snide and sneering remarks, or rat on us to the authorities, or shriek with rage, or abandon us exasperated for the refuge of his friends. Never once that I can remember, and I am ferociously memorious, can I remember him sad or angry or bitter or furious. When I think of him, I see his smile, and never any other look on his face, and isn’t that amazing? Of how many of our friends and family can that be said? Not many, not many; nor can I say it of myself.

But I can say it of my kid brother, and this morning I suggest that those of us with kid brothers are immensely lucky in life, and those of us without kid brothers missed a great gentle gift unlike any other; for older brothers are stern and heroic and parental, lodestars to steer by or steer against, but kid brothers, at least in their opening chapters, are open books, eager and trusting, innocent and gentle; in some deep subtle way they are the best of you, the way you were, the way you hope some part of you will always be; in some odd way, at least for a while, they were the best of your family, too, the essence of what was good and true and holy about the blood that bound you each to each.

by Brian Doyle, The American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: markk

Finding the Right Fit for Flying Private

[ed. I usually keep a G450 or AS350 (AStar) on standby, but loan them out to friends occasionally.]

Carlos Urrutia's job is to fly a private jet. But when he is on board the Bombardier Challenger 300, which he has flown for tens of thousands of hours, he does much more than that.

He welcomes the passengers on board. He stows their luggage. He offers each passenger a drink before takeoff, anything from water to coffee to a cocktail that he will mix. If someone can’t figure out how to work one of the eight seats that swivel, or close the lavatory door, he’ll walk back while his co-pilot takes over and explain how it works.

Mr. Urrutia’s plane will also arrive at the destination faster and with less frustration than any first-class traveler on a commercial airline could dream of. It’s a nice way to travel — if you can afford the $10,000 an hour for the trip.

This is the world of private aviation. But even in that world, there are degrees of convenience, comfort and, to many, excess.

“Sometimes people don’t know the difference between their needs and wants,” said Kevin O’Leary, president of Jet Advisors, which offers advice on private aviation options. “We help them analyze their need first and then look at services.”

Those services break down into four categories: chartering a jet, buying a set number of hours in a jet program, getting a fractional interest in a plane or putting down tens of millions of dollars for your own aircraft. Each one has its defenders and its detractors. But Mr. O’Leary says what matters the most is how a private plane is to be used, whether by just one person or several executives.

Chartering a jet works best for those who can plan their trips in advance and are less concerned with the type of aircraft they get.

“Charter is the most flexible,” said Mark H. Lefever, president and chief operating officer of Avjet, a broker and adviser. “You have no monthly bills. You make up how much you want to spend per year and how many trips you want to do.”

He said the cost of a trip from Los Angeles, where Avjet is based, to Martha’s Vineyard would depend on how many people are flying and the level of comfort desired. A smaller Gulfstream G150 would cost about $35,000 one way, while the larger, newer Gulfstream G450 would be $55,000. (...)

The next step up is an hours program, commonly called a jet card. VistaJet allows people to fix their costs by buying the hours they think they’ll need, and adding more if they go over.

The company has 50 Bombardier jets in two sizes — one for flights up to a cross-country trip and another for trans-Atlantic travel — and it is trying to appeal to a global audience with a service branded like a luxury hotel, said Thomas Flohr, VistaJet’s chairman and founder.

For the longer-range Bombardier Global, the cost is $16,000 an hour, meaning 200 hours a year would cost $3.2 million. Over five years, that works out to be about as much as the upfront cost of a quarter share of the same plane, which would be about $14 million, but any share program has additional membership fees and fuel surcharges.

by Paul Sulivan, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Christopher Capozziello

[ed. So many incredible photos here it was impossible to pick the best, so I just selected the first. Definitely, check this out.]

Trey Ratcliff
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Hudson Tattoo
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The Vote on the Greek Referendum

[ed. And in other news, the Shanghai Composite Index has lost more than 20 percent since June 12, and Puerto Rico is defaulting on its debt. Batten down the hatches.]

[ed. Addendum: See also: Trillions Spent, but Crises Like Greece’s Persist. I especially like this comment: 

If you have ten trillion but use it only to swap private debt into public debt with even more progressively draconian terms, if you use some of these billions to guarantee a lifeline to corporations and oligopolies that are otherwise illiquid and insolvent in order to arrest the creative destruction of capitalism, the status quo will limp along but otherwise there will be no burst of growth or even of investment. In fact, everything will remain more or less morosely frozen into place.

But, if those $10 trillion had actually been spent in *people* in the mode of subsidies for education, in creating entire new industries such as solar or space, in bringing healthcare and child care to folks otherwise unable to work without it, in paying the unemployed to start new businesses and educate our youth, and in actually funding main street and everyday folks with an entrepreneurial spirit, what a world this would be!]

The rising crescendo of bickering and acrimony within Europe might seem to outsiders to be the inevitable result of the bitter endgame playing out between Greece and its creditors. In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics.

Of course, the economics behind the programme that the “troika” (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) foisted on Greece five years ago has been abysmal, resulting in a 25% decline in the country’s GDP. I can think of no depression, ever, that has been so deliberate and had such catastrophic consequences: Greece’s rate of youth unemployment, for example, now exceeds 60%.

It is startling that the troika has refused to accept responsibility for any of this or admit how bad its forecasts and models have been. But what is even more surprising is that Europe’s leaders have not even learned. The troika is still demanding that Greece achieve a primary budget surplus (excluding interest payments) of 3.5% of GDP by 2018.

Economists around the world have condemned that target as punitive, because aiming for it will inevitably result in a deeper downturn. Indeed, even if Greece’s debt is restructured beyond anything imaginable, the country will remain in depression if voters there commit to the troika’s target in the snap referendum to be held this weekend.

In terms of transforming a large primary deficit into a surplus, few countries have accomplished anything like what the Greeks have achieved in the last five years. And, though the cost in terms of human suffering has been extremely high, the Greek government’s recent proposals went a long way toward meeting its creditors’ demands.

We should be clear: almost none of the huge amount of money loaned to Greece has actually gone there. It has gone to pay out private-sector creditors – including German and French banks. Greece has gotten but a pittance, but it has paid a high price to preserve these countries’ banking systems. The IMF and the other “official” creditors do not need the money that is being demanded. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the money received would most likely just be lent out again to Greece.

But, again, it’s not about the money. It’s about using “deadlines” to force Greece to knuckle under, and to accept the unacceptable – not only austerity measures, but other regressive and punitive policies.

But why would Europe do this? Why are European Union leaders resisting the referendum and refusing even to extend by a few days the June 30 deadline for Greece’s next payment to the IMF? Isn’t Europe all about democracy?

by Joe Stiglitz, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: via:

Carol Staub, Mixed Emotions 7
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The Lonely End

Three months ago in an apartment on the outskirts of Osaka, Japan, Haruki Watanabe died alone. For weeks his body slowly decomposed, slouched in its own fluids and surrounded by fetid, fortnight-old food. He died of self-neglect, solitude, and a suspected heart problem. At 60, Watanabe, wasn’t old, nor was he especially poor. He had no friends, no job, no wife, and no concerned children. His son hadn’t spoken to him in years, nor did he want to again.

For three months no one called, no one knew, no one cared. For three months Watanabe rotted in his bedsheets, alongside pots of instant ramen and swarming cockroaches. The day that someone eventually called, he came not out of concern but out of administration. Watanabe had run out of money, and his bank had stopped paying the rent. The exasperated landlord, Toru Suzuki, had rung and rung, but no one had picked up. Sufficiently angry, he made the trip from his own home, in downtown Osaka, to the quiet suburb where his lodger lived. (Both men’s names are pseudonyms.)

First, there was the smell, a thick, noxious sweetness oozing from beneath the door frame. Second, there was the sight, the shape of a mortally slumped corpse beneath urine-soaked bedsheets. Third, there was the reality: Suzuki had come to collect his dues but had instead found his tenant’s dead body.

Disgusted, angry, but mostly shocked that this could happen to him, the landlord rang the police. The police came; they investigated with procedural dispassion and declared the death unsuspicious. This wasn’t suicide in the traditional sense, they said, but it did seem that the deceased had wanted to die. They’d seen it before, and it was an increasingly common occurrence throughout Japan: a single man dying, essentially, from loneliness.

They noted down what was required by their forms, wrapped up the body in officialdom, tied it with red tape, and removed it amid gawps and gags of inquisitive neighbors. The police then departed for the cemetery, where, because no family member had stepped forward to claim the body, they would intern Watanabe in an unmarked grave alongside the rest of Japan’s forgotten dead.

Suzuki was now left to his festering property and precarious financials. He was concerned. He didn’t know who to call or how to deal with the situation. In Japan, suicide can dramatically reduce the value of a property, and although this wasn’t suicide, his neighbors had seen enough; the gossip would spread fast. He heard whispers of kodokushi, a word bandied about since the Great Hanshin earthquake in 1995, when thousands of elderly Japanese were relocated to different residences and started dying alone, ostracized or isolated from family and friends. But what did that really mean for Suzuki, and how was he going to deal with it? Like most Japanese, he had heard of the “lonely death” but had not really believed in it; he certainly didn’t know what to do in such circumstances. So he turned to the Internet, and after hours of fruitless searching found a company called Risk-Benefit, run by a man named Toru Koremura. (...)

Watanabe was, at 60 years old, the average age of most male victims, and having suffered from a heart problem, he died in the manner most common to kodokushi.

“Around 90 percent of the cases I deal with are men,” Koremura says. “Unlike women, men seem incapable of integrating themselves into a community when they live alone.”

Watanabe was a child of the “boom years” and of the “Japanese dream,” and it is therefore probable that his death was linked to the faltering economy. In Japan, the identity of many businessmen, or “salarymen” as they are commonly known, is fused with that of their business. During the boom years many of these workers sacrificed family and friends for the growth of their companies. However, when the Japanese economy eventually crashed in the early ’90s, many of these salarymen lost their jobs or were forced into smaller, less prestigious roles with less social security. Having lost their status they found they had no purpose in life. Scott North argues that “the fact that most deaths are between 60 and 64 [years old] supports the idea that separation from the workplace community and inability to adapt to retirement may contribute to isolated deaths.”

Although the apartment is crammed with ephemera, it is empty of identifying belongings. There are no letters. There are no postcards. There are no family photographs, no paintings or pictures. The nicotine-stained walls are bare but for the ominous shadows of the workers, whose faint silhouettes are the dead man’s gruesome legacy. Family, so important in Japanese tradition, is absent here.

by Matthew Bremner, Roads and Kingdoms |  Read more:

Image: Matthew Bremner

Ghosting: The Ultimate Silent Treatment

[ed. Whatever the term, this method of ending a relationship has to be one of the most hurtful and destructive things a person can do to someone that once loved you. In the end, it's just simple cowardice and a lack of character, no matter how it's rationalized.]

It was not long ago that Sean Penn and Charlize Theron were a happy couple: appearing together in the front row of fashion shows and at film festivals, hugging on the beach. Recently, though, it was reported that Ms. Theron had stopped responding to Mr. Penn’s calls and text messages. She was “ghosting” him.

What’s Ghosting?

Ghost, a word more commonly associated with Casper, the boy who saw dead people and a 1990 movie starring Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze, has also come to be used as a verb that refers to ending a romantic relationship by cutting off all contact and ignoring the former partner’s attempts to reach out.

Who’s Doing It?

The term has already entered the polling lexicon: In October 2014, a YouGov/Huffington Post poll of 1,000 adults showed that 11 percent of Americans have “ghosted” someone. A more informal survey from Elle magazine that polled 185 people found that about 16.7 percent of men and 24.2 percent of women have been ghosts at some point in their lives.

Victims of Ghosting Speak

Justine Bylo, 26, an independent account manager in publishing, has felt what this is like firsthand. She once invited a man she had been dating casually for about eight months to a wedding. As the day approached, he stopped responding to Ms. Bylo’s text messages, and she ended up attending the wedding alone. A few weeks ago, she found out that he had been dating another woman at the time.

“It happens to me so often that I’ve come to expect it,” Ms. Bylo said. “People don’t hold themselves accountable anymore because they can hide behind their phones.”

Elena Scotti, 27, a senior photo editor and illustrator at Fusion, the media company, has also been a victim of ghosting. She once flew to Chicago to attend Lollapalooza and spend time with a man she had fallen for while studying abroad. “We were inseparable,” Ms. Scotti said. “I was talking to him every day and sleeping in the same bed with him for six months.”

After the one date in Chicago: crickets. “He fell off the face of the planet,” said Ms. Scotti, who didn’t see him again until he moved into her building in Brooklyn with his girlfriend three years later. The silent treatment continued, Ms. Scotti’s former flame ignoring her even as they passed each other in the hallway.

In a less dramatic but similarly confounding fashion, Aaron Leth, 29, a fashion editor, found his texts unanswered when a man he had been dating for a month disappeared after he and Mr. Leth had bought the ingredients for a dinner they planned to cook later that evening. “He went home to take a nap and said, ‘I’ll call you,’ ” Mr. Leth said. “I’m still waiting, two years later.”

But Wait. Let the Ghosts Explain Themselves.

Many of those who have ghosted are contrite, citing their own fear, insecurity and immaturity. Jenny Mollen, 36, an actress, avid Twitter user and the author of “I Like You Just the Way I Am,” a collection of essays, had been dating a man for three months when she told him her grandmother died, and froze him out of her life.

Her grandmother had died — months earlier. “He came to my house one night banging on my door, and I pretended I wasn’t there,” Ms. Mollen said. “I didn’t know how else to extricate from relationships. It was me being young and not knowing how to disappoint.” She theorized that people who fade away do so out of a desperate need to be loved, even after a breakup. “If you disappear completely, you never have to deal with knowing someone is mad at you and being the bad guy,” she said.

by Valeriya Safronova, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mike Coppola/Getty Images

Seattle Pride

June 28, 2015 
photos: markk (more pics after the jump)

A Reasonable Part of the House

There was, in most homes, a small, boxy machine affixed to the wall, usually in the kitchen, and this machine was called a telephone. —Wikipedia, 2030

The home telephone had a good hundred-year run. Its days are numbered now. Its name, truncated to just phone, will live on, attached anachronistically to the diminutive general-purpose computers we carry around with us. (We really should have called them teles rather than phones.) But the object itself? It’s headed for history’s landfill, one layer up from the PalmPilot and the pager.

A remarkable thing about the telephone, in retrospect, is that it was a shared device. It was familial rather than personal. That entailed some complications.

In his monumental study of the forms of human interlocution, published posthumously in 1992 as the two-volume Lectures on Conversation, the sociologist Harvey Sacks explained how the arrival of the home telephone introduced a whole new role in conversation: that of the answerer. There was the caller, there was the called, and then there was the answerer, who might or might not also be the called. The caller would never know for sure who would answer the phone — it might be the called’s mom or dad rather than the called — and what kind of pre-conversational rigamarole might need to be endured, what pleasantries might need to be exchanged, what verbal gauntlet might need to be run, before the called would actually take the line. As for the answerer, he or she would not know, upon picking up the phone, whether he or she would also be playing the role of the called or would merely serve as the answerer, a kind of functionary or go-between. Each ringing of the telephone set off little waves of subterranean tension in the household: expectation, apprehension, maybe even some resentment.

“Hello?”

“Is Amy there?”

“Who’s calling?”

Sacks:

In non-professional settings by and large, it’s from among the possible calleds that answerers are selected; answerer being now a merely potential resting state, where you’ve made preparations for turning out to be the called right off when you say “Hello.” Answerers can become calleds, or they can become non-calleds-but-talked-to, or they can remain answerers, in the sense of not being talked to themselves, and also having what turn out to be obligations incumbent on being an answerer-not-called; obligations like getting the called or taking a message for the called.

As I said: complications. And also: an intimate entwining of familial interests.

The answerer, upon realizing that he is not the called, Sacks continues, occupies “the least happy position” in the exchange.

Having done the picking up of the phone, they have been turned into someone at the mercy of the treatment that the caller will give them: What kind of jobs are they going to impose? Are they even going to talk to them? A lot of family world is implicated in the way those little things come out, an enormous amount of conflict turning on being always the answerer and never the called, and battles over who is to pick up the phone.

“I’ll get it!”

But what exactly will you get?

And so here we have this strange device, this technology, and it suddenly appears in the midst of the home, in the midst of the family, crouching there with all sorts of inscrutable purposes and intents. And yet — and this is the most remarkable thing of all — it doesn’t take long for it to be accommodated, to come to feel as though it’s a natural part of the home. Rather than remaking the world, Sacks argues, the telephone was subsumed into the world. The familial and social dynamics that the telephone revealed, with each ring, each uncradling of the receiver, are ones that were always already there.

Here’s an object introduced into the world 75 years ago. And it’s a technical thing which has a variety of aspects to it. It works only with voices, and because of economic considerations people share it … Now what happens is, like any other natural object, a culture secretes itself onto it in its well-shaped ways. It turns this technical apparatus which allows for conversation, into something in which the ways that conversation works are more or less brought to bear … 

What we’re studying, then, is making the phone a reasonable part of the house. … We can read the world out of the phone conversation as well as we can read it out of anything else we’re doing. That’s a funny kind of thing, in which each new object becomes the occasion for seeing again what we can see anywhere; seeing people’s nastinesses or goodnesses and all the rest, when they do this initially technical job of talking over the phone. This technical apparatus is, then, being made at home with the rest of our world. And that’s a thing that’s routinely being done, and it’s the source for the failures of technocratic dreams that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed. Where what happens is that the object is made at home in the world that has whatever organization it already has.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me.”

by Nicholas Carr, Rough Type |  Read more:

Image: Bell System advertisement, circa 1960

Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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Fahamu Pecou
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Fat-Free Chocolate and Absolutely No Smoking: Why Our Guilt About Consumption is All-Consuming

During a recent visit to California, I attended a party at a professor's house with a Slovene friend, a heavy smoker. Late in the evening, my friend became desperate and politely asked the host if he could step out on the veranda for a smoke. When the host (no less politely) said no, my friend suggested that he step out on to the street, and even this was rejected by the host, who claimed such a public display of smoking might hurt his status with his neighbours … But what really surprised me was that, after dinner, the host offered us (not so) soft drugs, and this kind of smoking went on without any problem – as if drugs are not more dangerous than cigarettes.

This weird incident is a sign of the impasses of today's consumerism. To account for it, one should introduce the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment elaborated by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan: what Lacan calls jouissance (enjoyment) is a deadly excess beyond pleasure, which is by definition moderate. We thus have two extremes: on the one hand the enlightened hedonist who carefully calculates his pleasures to prolong his fun and avoid getting hurt, on the other the jouisseur propre, ready to consummate his very existence in the deadly excess of enjoyment – or, in the terms of our society, on the one hand the consumerist calculating his pleasures, well protected from all kinds of harassments and other health threats, on the other the drug addict or smoker bent on self-destruction. Enjoyment is what serves nothing, and the great effort of today's hedonist-utilitarian "permissive" society is to tame and exploit this un(ac)countable excess into the field of (ac)counting.

Enjoyment is tolerated, solicited even, but on condition that it is healthy, that it doesn't threaten our psychic or biological stability: chocolate, yes, but fat-free; Coke, yes, but diet; coffee, yes, but without caffeine; beer, yes, but without alcohol; mayonnaise, yes, but without cholesterol; sex, yes, but safe sex …

So, what is going on here? In the last decade or so there has been a shift in the accent of marketing, a new stage of commodification that the economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin designated "cultural capitalism". We buy a product – an organic apple, say – because it represents the image of a healthy lifestyle. As this example indicates, the very ecological protest against the ruthless capitalist exploitation of natural resources is already caught in the commodification of experiences: although ecology perceives itself as the protest against the virtualisation of our daily lives and advocates a return to the direct experience of sensual material reality, ecology itself is branded as a new lifestyle. What we are effectively buying when we are buying "organic food" etc is already a certain cultural experience, the experience of a "healthy ecological lifestyle". (...)

What we are witnessing today is the direct commodification of our experiences themselves: what we are buying on the market is fewer and fewer products (material objects) that we want to own, and more and more life experiences – experiences of sex, eating, communicating, cultural consumption, participating in a lifestyle. Michel Foucault's notion of turning one's self itself into a work of art thus gets an unexpected confirmation: I buy my bodily fitness by way of visiting fitness clubs; I buy my spiritual enlightenment by way of enrolling in the courses on transcendental meditation; I buy my public persona by way of going to the restaurants visited by people I want to be associated with.

by Slavoj Žižek, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Prix Pictet Hong Hao My Things No 1

Fear of Longer Commutes

[ed. See also: Many options, no single solution.]

At 4:35 a.m. each weekday, Stan Paul drives out of his Southern California suburb with 10 passengers in a van, headed to his job as an undergraduate counselor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Some 80 miles and 90 minutes later, the vanpoolers finally arrive to start their workday.

On the return trip, Los Angeles' infamously snarled traffic often stretches their afternoon commute to three hours. Since Paul joined in 2001, he has spent roughly 1 1/2 years aboard the vanpool and traveled far enough to complete a round trip to the moon.

"These super commuters, they don't just give you a day's work," he said. "They give you their lives."

Transportation experts say Paul's long journey offers a warning for the future, when traffic rivaling a major holiday might someday be the norm for many more Americans.

"If we don't change, in 2045, the transportation system that powered our rise as a nation will instead slow us down," the Department of Transportation said in report earlier this year titled "Beyond Traffic."

"Transit systems will be so backed up that riders will wonder not just when they will get to work, but if they will get there at all," the report said. "At the airports, and on the highway, every day will be like Thanksgiving is today." (...)

Elected officials and transportation professionals generally agree on the nation's intensifying traffic congestion but are divided about how to address it.

The Obama administration leans heavily toward getting people out of their vehicles, a solution preferred by many urban planners. New highway lanes aren't enough, the theory goes, because they will simply attract drivers who had been taking other routes and encourage more sprawl. Soon congestion will be as bad as ever.

One alternative is to encourage people to trade suburban amenities for more densely developed neighborhoods where they can easily take transit, walk or bike to jobs, stores and entertainment.

"As the population surges, we're going to have more bottlenecks, so giving people another option is really important," Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in an interview. Rail transit can be a release valve for highway congestion, he said, taking enough vehicles off the road to help traffic move more smoothly.

Although ridership for trains and buses is at a 50-year peak, it remains only a tiny fraction of all trips nationally.

Conservative lawmakers in Washington and many state capitals tend to advocate road building, which better serves their primarily suburban and rural constituents. They question the effectiveness of enlarging big-city rail systems, which typically carry people from suburbs to jobs in the urban core, when so much commuting today is from suburb to suburb.

by Joan Lowry and Justin Pritchard, AP |  Read more:

Image: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

Gay is Not Enough Anymore

From Capitol Hill in Seattle to Dupont Circle in Washington, gay bars and nightclubs have turned into vitamin stores, frozen yogurt shops and memories. Some of those that remain are filled increasingly with straight patrons, while many former customers say their social lives now revolve around preschools and playgrounds.

Rainbow-hued “Just Be You” messages have been flashing across Chase A.T.M. screens in honor of Pride month, conveying acceptance but also corporate blandness. Directors, filmmakers and artists are talking about moving past themes of sexual orientation, which they say no longer generate as much dramatic energy.

The Supreme Court on Friday expanded same-sex marriage rights across the country, a crowning achievement but also a confounding challenge to a group that has often prided itself on being different. The more victories that accumulate for gay rights, the faster some gay institutions, rituals and markers are fading out. And so just as the gay marriage movement peaks, so does a debate about whether gay identity is dimming, overtaken by its own success.

“What do gay men have in common when they don’t have oppression?” asked Andrew Sullivan, one of the intellectual architects of the marriage movement. “I don’t know the answer to that yet.”

John Waters, the film director and patron saint of the American marginal, warned graduates to heed the shift in a recent commencement speech at the Rhode Island School of Design. “Refuse to isolate yourself. Separatism is for losers,” he said, adding, “Gay is not enough anymore.”

No one is arguing that prejudice has come close to disappearing, especially outside major American cities, as waves of hate crimes, suicides by gay teenagers and workplace discrimination attest. Far from everyone agrees that marriage rights are the apotheosis of liberation. But even many who raced to the altar say they feel loss amid the celebrations, a bittersweet sense that there was something valuable about the creativity and grit with which gay people responded to stigma and persecution.

For decades, they built sanctuaries of their own: neighborhoods and vacation retreats where they could escape after workdays in the closet; bookstores where young people could find their true selves and one another. Symbols like the rainbow flag expressed joy and collective defiance, a response to disapproving families, laws that could lead to arrests for having sex and the presumption that to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender was shameful.

“The thing I miss is the specialness of being gay,” said Lisa Kron, who wrote the book and lyrics for “Fun Home,” a Broadway musical with a showstopping number sung by a young girl captivated by her first glimpse of a butch woman. “Because the traditional paths were closed, there was a consciousness to our lives, a necessary invention to the way we were going to celebrate and mark family and mark connection. That felt magical and beautiful.”

by Jodi Kantor, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: John Waters by Michael Dwyer/Associated Press