Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Monday, July 13, 2015
The Really Big One
The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle
Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.
Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.
Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they point toward the ceiling. Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. “This is one time that I’m hoping all the science is wrong, and it won’t happen for another thousand years,” Murphy says.
In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger—or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it. The truly worrisome figures in this story are these: Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.
by Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Christoph Nieman, Map by Ziggymaj/Getty
Yanis Varoufakis Opens Up About His Five Month Battle to Save Greece
[ed. A terrible deal that's far from settled. And punitive: $50 billion worth of Greek assets as collateral? See also: After "Deal", Here's What's Next for Greece. It's beyond my comprehension how Greece could agree to this.]
Greece has finally reached an agreement with its creditors. The specifics have not yet been published, but it is clear that the deal signed is more punitive and demanding than the one that its government has spent the past five months desperately trying to resist.
The accord follows 48 hours in which Germany demanded control of Greece’s finances or its withdrawal from the euro. Many observers across Europe were stunned by the move. Yanis Varoufakis was not. When I spoke with Greece’s former finance minister last week, I asked him whether any deal struck in the days ahead would be good for his country.
“If anything it will be worse,” he said. “I trust and hope that our government will insist on debt restructuring, but I can’t see how the German finance minister [Wolfgang Schäuble] is ever going to sign up to this. If he does, it will be a miracle.”It’s a miracle the Greek people are likely to be waiting for a long time for. On Friday night, when Greece’s parliament agreed to an austerity programme that voters had overwhelmingly rejected in a referendum five days earlier, a deal seemed imminent. A partial write-off of its debt owed to the so-called "Troika" – the IMF, the European Central bank and the European Commission – was unlikely but possible. Now, despite its government’s capitulation, Greece has no debt relief and may yet be thrown out of the Eurozone.
Varoufakis, who resigned a week ago, has been criticised for not signing an agreement sooner, but he said the deal that Greece was offered was not made in good faith – or even one that the Troika wanted completed. In an hour-long telephone interview with the New Statesman, he called the creditors’ proposals – those agreed to by the Athens government on Friday night, which now seem somehow generous – “absolutely impossible, totally non-viable and toxic …[they were] the kind of proposals you present to another side when you don’t want an agreement.”
Varoufakis added: “This country must stop extending and pretending, we must stop taking on new loans pretending that we’ve solved the problem, when we haven’t; when we have made our debt even less sustainable on condition of further austerity that even further shrinks the economy; and shifts the burden further onto the have-nots, creating a humanitarian crisis.” (...)
It is well known that Varoufakis was taken off Greece’s negotiating team shortly after Syriza took office; he was still in charge of the country’s finances but no longer in the room. It’s long been unclear why. In April, he said vaguely that it was because “I try and talk economics in the Eurogroup” – the club of 19 finance ministers whose countries use the Euro – “which nobody does.” I asked him what happened when he did.
“It’s not that it didn’t go down well – there was point blank refusal to engage in economic arguments. Point blank. You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on, to make sure it’s logically coherent, and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. What you say is independent of what they say. You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem – you’d have got the same reply.”
This weekend divisions surfaced within the Eurogroup, with countries split between those who seemed to want a “Grexit” and those demanding a deal. But Varoufakis said they were always been united in one respect: their refusal to renegotiate.
“There were people who were sympathetic at a personal level, behind closed doors, especially from the IMF.” He confirmed that he was referring to Christine Lagarde, the IMF director. “But then inside the Eurogroup [there were] a few kind words and that was it: back behind the parapet of the official version. … Very powerful figures look at you in the eye and say ‘You’re right in what you’re saying, but we’re going to crunch you anyway’.”
Varoufakis was reluctant to name individuals, but added that the governments that might have been expected to be the most sympathetic towards Greece were actually their “most energetic enemies”. He said that the “greatest nightmare” of those with large debts – the governments of countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland – “was our success”. “Were we to succeed in negotiating a better deal, that would obliterate them politically: they would have to answer to their own people why they didn’t negotiate like we were doing.”
He suggested that Greece’s creditors had a strategy to keep his government busy and hopeful of a compromise, but in reality they were slowly suffering and eventually desperate. (...)
His conclusion was succinct. “We were set up.”
And he was adamant about who is responsible. I asked whether German attitudes control the outlook of the Eurogroup. Varoufakis went further. “Oh completely and utterly. Not attitudes – the finance minister of Germany. It is all like a very well-tuned orchestra and he is the director.
“Only the French minister [Michel Sapin] made noises that were different from the German line, and those noises were very subtle. You could sense he had to use very judicious language, to be seen not to oppose. And in the final analysis, when Dr Schäuble responded and effectively determined the official line, the French minister would always fold.”
If Schäuble was the unrelenting enforcer, the German chancellor Angela Merkel presented a different face. While Varoufakis never dealt with her, he said, “From my understanding, she was very different. She tried to placate the Prime Minister [Tsipras] – she said ‘We’ll find a solution, don’t worry about it, I won’t let anything awful happen, just do your homework and work with the institutions, work with the Troika; there can be no dead end here.’”
The divide seems to have been brief, and perhaps even deliberate. Varoufakis thinks that Merkel and Schäuble’s control over the Eurogroup is absolute, and that the group itself is beyond the law.
Days before Varoufakis’s resignation on 6 July, when Tsipras called the referendum on the Eurogroup’s belated and effectively unchanged offer, the Eurogroup issued a communiqué without Greek consent. This was against Eurozone convention. The move was quietly criticised by some in the press before being overshadowed by the build-up to the referendum, but Varoufakis considered it pivotal.
When Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the European Council President, tried to issue the communiqué without him, Varoufakis consulted Eurogroup clerks – could Dijsselbloem exclude a member state? The meeting was briefly halted. After a handful of calls, a lawyer turned to him and said, “Well, the Eurogroup does not exist in law, there is no treaty which has convened this group.”
“So,” Varoufakis said, “What we have is a non-existent group that has the greatest power to determine the lives of Europeans. It’s not answerable to anyone, given it doesn’t exist in law; no minutes are kept; and it’s confidential. No citizen ever knows what is said within . . . These are decisions of almost life and death, and no member has to answer to anybody.”
by Harry Lambert, New Statesman | Read more:
Images: Getty and ZeroHedge
Sunday, July 12, 2015
On Not Being There: The Data-Driven Body at Work and at Play
The protagonist of William Gibson’s 2014 science-fiction novel The Peripheral, Flynne Fisher, works remotely in a way that lends a new and fuller sense to that phrase. The novel features a double future: One set of characters inhabits the near future, ten to fifteen years from the present, while another lives seventy years on, after a breakdown of the climate and multiple other systems that has apocalyptically altered human and technological conditions around the world.
In that “further future,”only 20 percent of the Earth’s human population has survived. Each of these fortunate few is well off and able to live a life transformed by healing nanobots, somaticized e-mail (which delivers messages and calls to the roof of the user’s mouth), quantum computing, and clean energy. For their amusement and profit, certain “hobbyists” in this future have the Borgesian option of cultivating an alternative path in history—it’s called “opening up a stub”—and mining it for information as well as labor.
Flynne, the remote worker, lives on one of those paths. A young woman from the American Southeast, possibly Appalachia or the Ozarks, she favors cutoff jeans and resides in a trailer, eking out a living as a for-hire sub playing video games for wealthy aficionados. Recruited by a mysterious entity that is beta-testing drones that are doing “security” in a murky skyscraper in an unnamed city, she thinks at first that she has been taken on to play a kind of video game in simulated reality. As it turns out, she has been employed to work in the future as an “information flow”—low-wage work, though the pay translates to a very high level of remuneration in the place and time in which she lives.
What is of particular interest is the fate of Flynne’s body. Before she goes to work she must tend to its basic needs (nutrition and elimination), because during her shift it will effectively be “vacant.” Lying on a bed with a special data-transmitting helmet attached to her head, she will be elsewhere, inhabiting an ambulatory robot carapace—a “peripheral”—built out of bio-flesh that can receive her consciousness.
Bodies in this data-driven economic backwater of a future world economy are abandoned for long stretches of time—disposable, cheapened, eerily vacant in the temporary absence of “someone at the helm.” Meanwhile, fleets of built bodies, grown from human DNA, await habitation.
Alex Rivera explores similar territory in his Mexican sci-fi film The Sleep Dealer (2008), set in a future world after a wall erected on the US–Mexican border has successfully blocked migrants from entering the United States. Digital networks allow people to connect to strangers all over the world, fostering fantasies of physical and emotional connection. At the same time, low-income would-be migrant workers in Tijuana and elsewhere can opt to do remote work by controlling robots building a skyscraper in a faraway city, locking their bodies into devices that transmit their labor to the site. In tank-like warehouses, lined up in rows of stalls, they “jack in” by connecting data-transmitting cables to nodes implanted in their arms and backs. Their bodies are in Mexico, but their work is in New York or San Francisco, and while they are plugged in and wearing their remote-viewing spectacles, their limbs move like the appendages of ghostly underwater creatures. Their life force drained by the taxing labor, these “sleep dealers” end up as human discards.
Despite his discomfort, Dancy seems unable to disconnect, unhook, or go offline. He is not alone. The focus of much recent interest in the entrance of tracking technology, counting devices, and calculation strategies into the domain of self-understanding is the Quantified Self (QS) movement. Founded in 2007 through the efforts of Kevin Kelly, then of Wired magazine, and Gary Wolf, a Bay Area writer, the movement brought together self-trackers ranging from the ardent to the merely curious. Under the banner of “self-knowledge through numbers”—those numbers gathered through biometrics, sociometrics, and psychometrics—enthusiasts combine platforms and tools to find new ways of gathering data and teasing out correlations. “Once you know the facts, you can live by them” is another guiding principle of the movement, and QS-ers continue to form groups across the United States and in thirty other countries, meeting weekly to share results. During the week of March 15, 2015, for example, groups came together in London, Washington, St. Louis, Denton, Texas, and Thessaloniki, Greece. Typically, such gatherings report on their tracking of a range of phenomena from the mundane (cups of coffee drunk per day, pulse rate, sleep hours) to the more esoteric (“spiritual well-being,” scores on personality tests or a “narcissism index,” or a repository of “all the ideas I’ve had since 1984”) via devices that might be attached to the wrist (Fitbit), the lower back (UpRight), the chest (Spire), or eating utensils (HAPIfork), if not stowed away in one’s pockets (as smartphone apps).
The movement marked its arrival in the cultural mainstream with the publication in 2010 of Wolf’s manifesto, “The Data-Driven Life,” in the New York Times Magazine. His fascination with the obsessively self-regarding project came through most clearly in his example of the tracker who had kept all of his ideas for the past several decades:
by Rebecca Lemov, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
In that “further future,”only 20 percent of the Earth’s human population has survived. Each of these fortunate few is well off and able to live a life transformed by healing nanobots, somaticized e-mail (which delivers messages and calls to the roof of the user’s mouth), quantum computing, and clean energy. For their amusement and profit, certain “hobbyists” in this future have the Borgesian option of cultivating an alternative path in history—it’s called “opening up a stub”—and mining it for information as well as labor.
Flynne, the remote worker, lives on one of those paths. A young woman from the American Southeast, possibly Appalachia or the Ozarks, she favors cutoff jeans and resides in a trailer, eking out a living as a for-hire sub playing video games for wealthy aficionados. Recruited by a mysterious entity that is beta-testing drones that are doing “security” in a murky skyscraper in an unnamed city, she thinks at first that she has been taken on to play a kind of video game in simulated reality. As it turns out, she has been employed to work in the future as an “information flow”—low-wage work, though the pay translates to a very high level of remuneration in the place and time in which she lives.
What is of particular interest is the fate of Flynne’s body. Before she goes to work she must tend to its basic needs (nutrition and elimination), because during her shift it will effectively be “vacant.” Lying on a bed with a special data-transmitting helmet attached to her head, she will be elsewhere, inhabiting an ambulatory robot carapace—a “peripheral”—built out of bio-flesh that can receive her consciousness.
Bodies in this data-driven economic backwater of a future world economy are abandoned for long stretches of time—disposable, cheapened, eerily vacant in the temporary absence of “someone at the helm.” Meanwhile, fleets of built bodies, grown from human DNA, await habitation.
Alex Rivera explores similar territory in his Mexican sci-fi film The Sleep Dealer (2008), set in a future world after a wall erected on the US–Mexican border has successfully blocked migrants from entering the United States. Digital networks allow people to connect to strangers all over the world, fostering fantasies of physical and emotional connection. At the same time, low-income would-be migrant workers in Tijuana and elsewhere can opt to do remote work by controlling robots building a skyscraper in a faraway city, locking their bodies into devices that transmit their labor to the site. In tank-like warehouses, lined up in rows of stalls, they “jack in” by connecting data-transmitting cables to nodes implanted in their arms and backs. Their bodies are in Mexico, but their work is in New York or San Francisco, and while they are plugged in and wearing their remote-viewing spectacles, their limbs move like the appendages of ghostly underwater creatures. Their life force drained by the taxing labor, these “sleep dealers” end up as human discards.
Flickering In and Out
What is surprising about these sci-fi conceits, from “transitioning” in The Peripheral to “jacking in” in The Sleep Dealer, is how familiar they seem, or at least how closely they reflect certain aspects of contemporary reality. Almost daily, we encounter people who are there but not there, flickering in and out of what we think of as presence. A growing body of research explores the question of how users interact with their gadgets and media outlets, and how in turn these interactions transform social relationships. The defining feature of this heavily mediated reality is our presence “elsewhere,” a removal of at least part of our conscious awareness from wherever our bodies happen to be. As MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle has shown in pioneering work that extends from The Second Self (1984) to Alone Together (2012), the social ramifications of these new disembodied (or semi-disembodied) arrangements are radical. They introduce a “new kind of intimacy with machines,” a “special relationship” in the space beyond the screen, and a withering away of once-central, physically mediated social bonds. Turkle’s focus, and the focus of much literature on video-game playing and online behavior, is on these engrossing relationships between humans (particularly children) and computers, the social fallout of those relationships, and the resulting effects on self-formation, as hauntingly described in an early work by Turkle on “computer holding power”:
What is surprising about these sci-fi conceits, from “transitioning” in The Peripheral to “jacking in” in The Sleep Dealer, is how familiar they seem, or at least how closely they reflect certain aspects of contemporary reality. Almost daily, we encounter people who are there but not there, flickering in and out of what we think of as presence. A growing body of research explores the question of how users interact with their gadgets and media outlets, and how in turn these interactions transform social relationships. The defining feature of this heavily mediated reality is our presence “elsewhere,” a removal of at least part of our conscious awareness from wherever our bodies happen to be. As MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle has shown in pioneering work that extends from The Second Self (1984) to Alone Together (2012), the social ramifications of these new disembodied (or semi-disembodied) arrangements are radical. They introduce a “new kind of intimacy with machines,” a “special relationship” in the space beyond the screen, and a withering away of once-central, physically mediated social bonds. Turkle’s focus, and the focus of much literature on video-game playing and online behavior, is on these engrossing relationships between humans (particularly children) and computers, the social fallout of those relationships, and the resulting effects on self-formation, as hauntingly described in an early work by Turkle on “computer holding power”:
The [thirteen-year-old] girl is hunched over the console. When the tension momentarily lets up, she looks up and says, “I hate this game.” And when the game is over she wrings her hands, complaining that her fingers hurt. For all of this, she plays every day “to keep up my strength.” She neither claims nor manifests enjoyment in any simple sense. One is inclined to say she is more “possessed” by the game than playing it.The young teens Turkle watched playing Asteroids and Space Invaders are now in their mid-forties, and the dynamic of absorption, tension, possession, and disappearance is, of course, no longer confined to games. Much discussion of data-gathering technologies in daily domains focuses on their inescapability, as Tom McCarthy recently pointed out: “Every website that you visit, each keystroke and click-through are archived: even if you’ve hit delete or empty trash it’s still there, lodged within some data fold or enclave, some occluded-yet-retrievable avenue of circuitry.”
Self-Knowledge Through Numbers
But seemingly undaunted by the extent to which we are now routinely subjected to the data gathering of others, many people are now driven to accumulate endless quantities of data about themselves, their bodies, their activities, their moods, even their thoughts and reveries. The “most connected human on earth,” Chris Dancy, a former information technology specialist who took to gathering data about himself after being laid off from his job, bills himself as a “Data Exhaust Cartographer,” “The Versace of Silicon Valley,” and “Cyborg.”He bedecks his body with myriad wearables and promotes himself as the locus of up to 700 devices or online services that collect, crunch, save, and collate the data he generates. The metrics he tracks include pulse, REM sleep, skin temperature, and mood, among others. Perhaps not surprisingly, all of this self-tracking eventually led Dancy to a crisis of alienation. He became increasingly aware that his intense connection was also a form of disconnection: “I was coming slightly unhinged with the amount of information I had about myself. It started to make me feel slightly detached from reality.” As a result, he says, he was “almost waterboarded with awareness. It’s one thing to Google yourself. It’s another to Google…your life. I could see too much.”
But seemingly undaunted by the extent to which we are now routinely subjected to the data gathering of others, many people are now driven to accumulate endless quantities of data about themselves, their bodies, their activities, their moods, even their thoughts and reveries. The “most connected human on earth,” Chris Dancy, a former information technology specialist who took to gathering data about himself after being laid off from his job, bills himself as a “Data Exhaust Cartographer,” “The Versace of Silicon Valley,” and “Cyborg.”He bedecks his body with myriad wearables and promotes himself as the locus of up to 700 devices or online services that collect, crunch, save, and collate the data he generates. The metrics he tracks include pulse, REM sleep, skin temperature, and mood, among others. Perhaps not surprisingly, all of this self-tracking eventually led Dancy to a crisis of alienation. He became increasingly aware that his intense connection was also a form of disconnection: “I was coming slightly unhinged with the amount of information I had about myself. It started to make me feel slightly detached from reality.” As a result, he says, he was “almost waterboarded with awareness. It’s one thing to Google yourself. It’s another to Google…your life. I could see too much.”
Despite his discomfort, Dancy seems unable to disconnect, unhook, or go offline. He is not alone. The focus of much recent interest in the entrance of tracking technology, counting devices, and calculation strategies into the domain of self-understanding is the Quantified Self (QS) movement. Founded in 2007 through the efforts of Kevin Kelly, then of Wired magazine, and Gary Wolf, a Bay Area writer, the movement brought together self-trackers ranging from the ardent to the merely curious. Under the banner of “self-knowledge through numbers”—those numbers gathered through biometrics, sociometrics, and psychometrics—enthusiasts combine platforms and tools to find new ways of gathering data and teasing out correlations. “Once you know the facts, you can live by them” is another guiding principle of the movement, and QS-ers continue to form groups across the United States and in thirty other countries, meeting weekly to share results. During the week of March 15, 2015, for example, groups came together in London, Washington, St. Louis, Denton, Texas, and Thessaloniki, Greece. Typically, such gatherings report on their tracking of a range of phenomena from the mundane (cups of coffee drunk per day, pulse rate, sleep hours) to the more esoteric (“spiritual well-being,” scores on personality tests or a “narcissism index,” or a repository of “all the ideas I’ve had since 1984”) via devices that might be attached to the wrist (Fitbit), the lower back (UpRight), the chest (Spire), or eating utensils (HAPIfork), if not stowed away in one’s pockets (as smartphone apps).
The movement marked its arrival in the cultural mainstream with the publication in 2010 of Wolf’s manifesto, “The Data-Driven Life,” in the New York Times Magazine. His fascination with the obsessively self-regarding project came through most clearly in his example of the tracker who had kept all of his ideas for the past several decades:
Mark Carranza—[who] makes his living with computers—has been keeping a detailed, searchable archive of all the ideas he has had since he was 21. That was in 1984. I realize that this seems impossible. But I have seen his archive, with its million plus entries, and observed him using it.… Most thoughts are tagged with date, time, and location. What for other people is an inchoate flow of mental life is broken up into elements and cross-referenced.Wolf went on to describe how numbers inexorably enter the domain of the personal, insisting that no place should be considered sacrosanct or beyond the probing sensors of quantification.
by Rebecca Lemov, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Friday, July 10, 2015
Dipping on the Kenai
[ed. Few people know that the personal use fishery at the mouth of the Kenai River was initially an experiement designed to protect upstream riverbank habitat from over-trampling (and provide a counterbalance to murky subsistence issues that were bubbling along in rural communities and political circles at the time). The thinking was: just move the teeming hordes down to the beaches where sand, instead of vegetation, would absorb the foot traffic that had been destroying sensitive streambanks and infuriating landowners up and down the river for years. Dippers could catch a ton of fish, enough to 'fill their freezers', and in so doing, decrease hook and line pressure throughout the system. Little consideration was given to what would actually happen at the mouth of the river once those regulations were passed (nor did anyone particularly care what the City of Kenai thought). Fragile beach dunes and adjacent wetlands were threatened by the onslaught of tens of thousands of new dipnetters. This was a problem, not only because of the sensitivity of these habitats, but their function in protecting nearby bluff properties from erosion. I had the opportunity to secure a grant that helped the City install concrete barriers along the entire access road to the beach, construct boardwalks, expand parking and turnaround areas, and develop signage, which, for the last couple decades, has worked out pretty well. The dunes and wetlands have been protected. But I remember appreciating the relative calm back then when maybe 20-30 people at most were out dipping and the salmon were just piling into the river (you could stand in a couple feet of water and get hit in the ankles). It would take a while for the new fishery to catch on, but it was clear it was going to be HUGE; and, like the Alaskan Permanent Fund, (and cessation of State taxes) would probably evolve into another 'untouchable' institution, never to be revoked once established. And so it goes. Now it's shoulder to shoulder combat dipping, fights, drunks, squatters, mountains of trash, and general overall insanity. I'm glad I got to enjoy it when it was a more peaceful pursuit.]
The Sounders and the Fury
The less savvy residents of Portland are aware that this whole soccer deal is kind of a thing (MLS game attendance has tripled across the country in the last decade, and stadium sellouts in Seattle and Portland are commonplace), but are ignorant to the tectonic plates of hatred that divide my bright, key lime Pantone 370C green from the Timbers’ dank, moldy 350C. My coworker Marvin, for instance, doesn’t get it. He stopped by my desk recently to say, “My buddies have season tickets in the Portland Timbers Army section. Maybe you can come along next weekend?”
I knew he was trying to be kind, asking me to join the Portscum Timsuck Army, that ridiculous muck of drunk, angry hypocrites decrying the Sounders for being “sellouts” with their NFL-grade premium stadium and big-name Microsoft sponsorship, bile spewed while wearing their very own airline corporate sponsor’s logo across their hearts. A tide of morons in hunter and gold gear that could pull double duty rooting on the University of Oregon Ducks, since the Timbers’ brass wasn’t adventurous enough to think of two original colors. A hoard of lumbersexual hipsters wearing scarves with a blaring yellow ax emblem, surely designed to pay homage to the gigantic chip each of them has whittled onto their shoulder that screams We’re Soccer City USA! We’re not bandwagoners!
No, Marvin wasn’t aiming for that nerve. So I smiled and thanked him. “Sorry, I’m only interested in professional soccer games.” (...)
On most days I can carry on as a citizen of Oregon without conflict. I moved there from my hometown east of Tacoma, Washington in 2003 for college. I met a native, fell in love, and just never left. I’ll battle to the death over Portland’s superiority in brunch entrée execution, its wine production, fabulous literary scene, and ease of parking. If the chance to move back to Washington arrives, I’d let it pass me by.
But then there are days when I go to the local fast-food favorite Burgerville on Carman Drive for a tasty Tillamook cheeseburger, and the cashier hands me a Diet Coke receptacle stamped with that loathsome axe. “Do you have any not-Timbers cups?” I ask. They are confused; they stare at the corporate-mandated drink cup, as I’m the first to raise a fuss. I say, “A Timbers-free smoothie tumbler will work fine.”
When I attend rivalry matches at Portland’s Providence Park — or, as my GPS Saved List knows it, “Providump” — I’ve learned to come prepared with a Sharpie. Axe-clad pint cups are the only ones available at Timbsuck games, and there’s nothing quite as satisfying as whipping a fat black pen out of my purse in front of a line of thirsty Army brats to blot out their beloved emblem. (...)Since Mom now refuses to cross state lines on game day, I accompany Dad when he comes down to Portland for matches — and the battle stories we’ve accrued haven’t inspired her to have another go. Last August, Dad and I drove into Downtown Portland early in my Oregon-plated disguise car, and parked a fair distance from the stadium. “We’ll have time for brunch!” I rejoiced, and recommended an elegant southern restaurant in the Pearl District. It was a perfect Northwest summer morning, all blue sky and sunshine with Mount Hood peeking in from across the river. Saying no to the streetside patio would have been a crime.
As we sat on the wrought-iron bistro chairs, mulling the menu while live jazz music wafted from the window and mimosas appeared before the water glasses did, I felt like a parent at her kids’ piano recital. My city was hitting all the right notes, with its hair combed and in some freshly pressed pants. “Rabbit hash,” Dad read from the specials leaflet. “That’s something you’re not going to find in Seattle.”
Then I saw them rounding the corner, a gaggle of forest green asshats fresh off a morning preload at Deschutes Brewery. I flicked my gaze back to the menu; there was enough lovely city for everyone and the match wasn’t for a few more hours. As long as you didn’t look right into the eye of the cyclops it might just keep walking.
“Enjoying our local fine foods, are we?” a smug frat-boy-turned-silicone-forest type asked, halting the posse behind him. Dad and I half-smiled, our eyes hidden behind sunglasses. For a second I thought he might keep walking. “Why don’t you go home and CHOKE ON A SALMON? SEAAATTTLE…SELLOUTS!”
“Did we just get insulted over brunch?” I asked as soon as they’d clucked their way down to the streetcar. Was there any more Portland way to be heckled than over mimosas with a side of beignets?
by Tabitha Blankenbiller, Narratively | Read more:
Image: Tabitha Blankenbiller
Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes in From the Cold
Eric Holder has gone back to work for his old firm, the white-collar defense heavyweight Covington & Burling. The former attorney general decided against going for a judgeship, saying he's not ready for the ivory tower yet. "I want to be a player," he told the National Law Journal, one would have to say ominously.
Holder will reassume his lucrative partnership (he made $2.5 millionthe last year he worked there) and take his seat in an office that reportedly – this is no joke – was kept empty for him in his absence.
The office thing might have been improper, but at this point, who cares? More at issue is the extraordinary run Holder just completed as one of history's great double agents. For six years, while brilliantly disguised as the attorney general of the United States, he was actually working deep undercover, DiCaprio in The Departed-style, as the best defense lawyer Wall Street ever had.
Holder denied there was anything weird about returning to one of Wall Street's favorite defense firms after six years of letting one banker after another skate on monstrous cases of fraud, tax evasion, market manipulation, money laundering, bribery and other offenses.
"Just because I'm at Covington doesn't mean I will abandon the public interest work," he told CNN. He added to the National Law Review that a big part of the reason he was going back to private practice was because he wanted to give back to the community.
"The firm's emphasis on pro bono work and being engaged in the civic life of this country is consistent with my worldview that lawyers need to be socially active," he said.
Right. He's going back to Covington & Burling because of the firm's emphasis on pro bono work.
Here's a man who just spent six years handing out soft-touch settlements to practically every Too Big to Fail bank in the world. Now he returns to a firm that represents many of those same companies: Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, to name a few.
Collectively, the decisions he made while in office saved those firms a sum that is impossible to calculate with exactitude. But even going by the massive rises in share price observed after he handed out these deals, his service was certainly worth many billions of dollars to Wall Street.
Now he will presumably collect assloads of money from those very same bankers. It's one of the biggest quid pro quo deals in the history of government service. Congressman Billy Tauzin once took a $2 million-a-year job lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry just a few weeks after helping to pass the revolting Prescription Drug Benefit Bill, but what Holder just did makes Tauzin look like a guy who once took a couple of Redskins tickets.
In this light, telling reporters that you're going back to Covington & Burling to be "engaged in the civic life of this country" seems like a joke for us all to suck on, like announcing that he's going back to get a doctorate at the University of Blow Me.
Holder doesn't look it, but he was a revolutionary. He institutionalized a radical dualistic approach to criminal justice, essentially creating a system of indulgences wherein the world's richest companies paid cash for their sins and escaped the sterner punishments the law dictated.
Here are five pillars of the Holder revolution:
Holder will reassume his lucrative partnership (he made $2.5 millionthe last year he worked there) and take his seat in an office that reportedly – this is no joke – was kept empty for him in his absence.
The office thing might have been improper, but at this point, who cares? More at issue is the extraordinary run Holder just completed as one of history's great double agents. For six years, while brilliantly disguised as the attorney general of the United States, he was actually working deep undercover, DiCaprio in The Departed-style, as the best defense lawyer Wall Street ever had.Holder denied there was anything weird about returning to one of Wall Street's favorite defense firms after six years of letting one banker after another skate on monstrous cases of fraud, tax evasion, market manipulation, money laundering, bribery and other offenses.
"Just because I'm at Covington doesn't mean I will abandon the public interest work," he told CNN. He added to the National Law Review that a big part of the reason he was going back to private practice was because he wanted to give back to the community.
"The firm's emphasis on pro bono work and being engaged in the civic life of this country is consistent with my worldview that lawyers need to be socially active," he said.
Right. He's going back to Covington & Burling because of the firm's emphasis on pro bono work.
Here's a man who just spent six years handing out soft-touch settlements to practically every Too Big to Fail bank in the world. Now he returns to a firm that represents many of those same companies: Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, to name a few.
Collectively, the decisions he made while in office saved those firms a sum that is impossible to calculate with exactitude. But even going by the massive rises in share price observed after he handed out these deals, his service was certainly worth many billions of dollars to Wall Street.
Now he will presumably collect assloads of money from those very same bankers. It's one of the biggest quid pro quo deals in the history of government service. Congressman Billy Tauzin once took a $2 million-a-year job lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry just a few weeks after helping to pass the revolting Prescription Drug Benefit Bill, but what Holder just did makes Tauzin look like a guy who once took a couple of Redskins tickets.
In this light, telling reporters that you're going back to Covington & Burling to be "engaged in the civic life of this country" seems like a joke for us all to suck on, like announcing that he's going back to get a doctorate at the University of Blow Me.
Holder doesn't look it, but he was a revolutionary. He institutionalized a radical dualistic approach to criminal justice, essentially creating a system of indulgences wherein the world's richest companies paid cash for their sins and escaped the sterner punishments the law dictated.
Here are five pillars of the Holder revolution:
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty
Thursday, July 9, 2015
The Less I Know the More I Want You
I have a lot of friends who are freaking out about not being married yet. They appear to be channeling all of their existential anxiety into that one goal, perhaps because it is easier to have a container for one's anxiety than let it float freely. They seem to feel that if they could just put that piece of the puzzle together, then everything, in all areas of life, would be OK.
Romantic comedies often end with a wedding. But what about after? What do you do with a lifetime of longing, the forward motion of love-anxiety, once you've hit your target? Does it just become existential anxiety again?
I think the velocity of pursuit is an addictive state. It's often why the people who rejected us, or whom we perceive rejected us, are the hardest to get over. When we get rebuffed in the moment that occurs right before we touch the love object—or when we are spurned in the peak of an early-stage love high—we want to get back there forever. We might not even really miss the person. We might just miss the feeling.
The other day I saw my hot neighbor Edward making out with a woman by her car. Edward is an eternal boy—sun-kissed and scruffy. Rumor has it that the only furniture in his studio apartment is a futon bed. I've never seen him without a board of some kind—surf or skate. I totally want Edward. But more than anything, I think I want to be Edward.
It was very early Sunday morning, very postcoital, and I knew this woman wasn't his girlfriend. I knew it because Edward is in no way the type to have a girlfriend. Also, I've seen a lot of other women come and go from his apartment. But the way that he had his arm gently around her waist, and the electricity and spit between them, made it look to me—in that one moment—like they were each others' forever.
In the book The Evolution of Human Sexuality , Donald Symons writes, "The partner with the lesser emotional investment in a relationship controls the relationship." The woman had her arms wrapped tightly around Edward. I noticed that she was holding on just a little bit tighter than he was. I also noticed that he was the one who stopped kissing first. When she got in her car, she looked back to see if he was still looking at her. He wasn't.
All week, after witnessing the postcoital makeout, I pretended I was this woman. On Sunday night I felt the anxiety of wondering whether he would text or not. On Monday, I pictured her semi-hopeful for a text; Tuesday, growing impatient, checking her phone all day. Wednesday brought the reality that it might not ever happen, and the depression that comes with a rejection. I felt her wondering how he could not desire more of the sex that had led to that kissing moment, which seemed so beautiful and romantic. Thursday was empty and listless. Friday, like: Fuck him, he's an asshole. Saturday, nostalgic for the Saturday night before. Sunday, just saying "fuck it" and texting him.
I have no way of knowing whether or not this was her experience. I haven't seen either of them in a week, so maybe they are huddled together on his futon. Maybe he is texting her every day. But this is the narrative I projected on them, perhaps to ease the sadness I felt when the moment of beauty they shared was not mine.
Recently I made a list of every person I have ever kissed. Most of them were more than just kissing: oral sex, fucking, fingering, or at least rolling around in our undies. But I wanted to look at the full count of everyone I've ever engaged with romantically. I looked at the people on the list with whom I felt the most obsessed. I put an asterisk next to them. I then looked at the people whom I initially pined for, but then quickly grew lukewarm. Next to them I placed a dot. Then I looked at the people I have loved, but for whom I never longed, burned, or crushed in a dramatic or poetic way. Next to them I put an X.
Romantic comedies often end with a wedding. But what about after? What do you do with a lifetime of longing, the forward motion of love-anxiety, once you've hit your target? Does it just become existential anxiety again?I think the velocity of pursuit is an addictive state. It's often why the people who rejected us, or whom we perceive rejected us, are the hardest to get over. When we get rebuffed in the moment that occurs right before we touch the love object—or when we are spurned in the peak of an early-stage love high—we want to get back there forever. We might not even really miss the person. We might just miss the feeling.
The other day I saw my hot neighbor Edward making out with a woman by her car. Edward is an eternal boy—sun-kissed and scruffy. Rumor has it that the only furniture in his studio apartment is a futon bed. I've never seen him without a board of some kind—surf or skate. I totally want Edward. But more than anything, I think I want to be Edward.
It was very early Sunday morning, very postcoital, and I knew this woman wasn't his girlfriend. I knew it because Edward is in no way the type to have a girlfriend. Also, I've seen a lot of other women come and go from his apartment. But the way that he had his arm gently around her waist, and the electricity and spit between them, made it look to me—in that one moment—like they were each others' forever.
In the book The Evolution of Human Sexuality , Donald Symons writes, "The partner with the lesser emotional investment in a relationship controls the relationship." The woman had her arms wrapped tightly around Edward. I noticed that she was holding on just a little bit tighter than he was. I also noticed that he was the one who stopped kissing first. When she got in her car, she looked back to see if he was still looking at her. He wasn't.
All week, after witnessing the postcoital makeout, I pretended I was this woman. On Sunday night I felt the anxiety of wondering whether he would text or not. On Monday, I pictured her semi-hopeful for a text; Tuesday, growing impatient, checking her phone all day. Wednesday brought the reality that it might not ever happen, and the depression that comes with a rejection. I felt her wondering how he could not desire more of the sex that had led to that kissing moment, which seemed so beautiful and romantic. Thursday was empty and listless. Friday, like: Fuck him, he's an asshole. Saturday, nostalgic for the Saturday night before. Sunday, just saying "fuck it" and texting him.
I have no way of knowing whether or not this was her experience. I haven't seen either of them in a week, so maybe they are huddled together on his futon. Maybe he is texting her every day. But this is the narrative I projected on them, perhaps to ease the sadness I felt when the moment of beauty they shared was not mine.
Recently I made a list of every person I have ever kissed. Most of them were more than just kissing: oral sex, fucking, fingering, or at least rolling around in our undies. But I wanted to look at the full count of everyone I've ever engaged with romantically. I looked at the people on the list with whom I felt the most obsessed. I put an asterisk next to them. I then looked at the people whom I initially pined for, but then quickly grew lukewarm. Next to them I placed a dot. Then I looked at the people I have loved, but for whom I never longed, burned, or crushed in a dramatic or poetic way. Next to them I put an X.
by So Sad Today, Vice | Read more:
Image: Joel Benjamin
How Esquire Engineered the Modern Bachelor
The social connotations of being a single man in America have changed a lot over the past three centuries. According to John Gilbert McCurdy in Citizen Bachelors: Manhood and the Creation of the United States, the word “bachelor” was first enshrined into American law in 1703, as part of a New York City ordinance taxing unmarried men at the same rate as married men for a new city project. This ordinance was one in a series of laws that determined that single men were capable of financial contribution to the state, even if they did not own property. After the Revolutionary War, American leaders were intent on differentiating the new nation from their former British masters, and redefining manhood became part of that change. John Adams saw British bachelors as “effeminate,” yet touted American bachelors as virtuous and able to resist temptations of vice. McCurdy writes that once bachelors were seen as equal to married men under the law (a common regulation by 1800), the image of the bachelor became associated with masculine independence and autonomy, even as he remained a subject of suspicion when it came to morality; the common sentiment at the time, according to McCurdy, was that “a bachelor may make all the wrong decisions and devote himself to a life of luxury, but this was the bachelor’s prerogative, which few Americans felt any compunction to hinder.”
The bachelor remained a fixture of public life and popular culture throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the most important developments in bachelor culture was the emergence of sporting-male societies in the early eighteen hundreds, which celebrated male friendship, exclusive clubs, and vigorous exercise. In American sporting-male culture, middle- and working-class men spent time together in gambling houses, brothels, and billiard clubs; their independence and autonomy were held up as markers of masculinity among their peers—having a wife and children was a trap to be avoided for any man who valued his freedom. Some sporting-male bachelors had left their families in other countries or in other parts of the country, resulting in less surveillance from relatives and communities. And even though many bachelors held down steady white-collar jobs and lived with family members, many who had blue-collar jobs lived alone in boarding or rooming houses (some of these houses were exclusively held for bachelors, and became clubhouses as well as lodging). One example of this celebration of homosocial (and sometimes homosexual) bachelor subculture is the -essay collection by writer Donald Mitchell, called Reveries of a Bachelor, published in 1850:
In the twenties and thirties, the bachelor rose to prominence in pop culture as a symbol of a hedonistic life that some men were leading, and others wished they could. Unmarried or married, George Chauncey writes in “Trade, Wolves, and the Boundaries of Normal Manhood,” the bachelor subcultures of nineteen-twenties New York, particularly for working-class immigrants, were home to men who “forged an alternative definition of manliness that was predicated on a rejection of family obligations.” This rejection was often based on immigration or migration circumstances, but in other cases, it was a choice to be a bachelor, or at least to pretend to be one to avoid responsibility or to meet other men.
This wishful thinking fuelled Esquire’s approach to the bachelor lifestyle. (...)
This ideal reader was sophisticated, rich, and interested in the finer things in life. He also did what he wanted—freedom from obligation was crucial to the Esquire brand, and that obligation extended to freedom from women. Instead of highlighting the realities of single life, Esquire‘s portrayal of bachelorhood was based on looking and acting the part of the swinging ladies’ man, even though most of the magazine’s readers were married. Esquire’s idealized postwar bachelor had no obligations outside of his own desire for women and luxury products (often considered one in the same). He bought his own clothes, drove his own car, and took solo vacations to exotic places. The bachelor became a symbol of postwar consumerism and hedonism, and as a result, became a symbol of freedom for white American men looking for a way to feel important again. Because Esquire relied on corporate advertising to continue existing, overthrowing corporate hierarchy and stratification didn’t factor into their discussions of masculine rejuvenation. In the Handbook, women were presented as an obstacle to men’s success at entertaining, which reinforced the theory that women were ultimately responsible for men’s inability to control their lives.
The ideal life of the bachelor may have been one of absolute freedom, but the instructional elements of the Handbook made it clear that there was a right way to live a bachelor life, and it involved buying the right clothes, décor, food, and drinks. By lumping bachelors and married men together, the book’s editors implied that one could be a bachelor in every way but semantics, if he could follow the rules. Esquire encouraged both groups to consider themselves part of a new revolution in bachelorhood that didn’t actually require a man to be single, but to act like he was one by purchasing the luxury clothes, food, and other items necessary to convey a hedonistic lifestyle.
by Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Esquire
The bachelor remained a fixture of public life and popular culture throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the most important developments in bachelor culture was the emergence of sporting-male societies in the early eighteen hundreds, which celebrated male friendship, exclusive clubs, and vigorous exercise. In American sporting-male culture, middle- and working-class men spent time together in gambling houses, brothels, and billiard clubs; their independence and autonomy were held up as markers of masculinity among their peers—having a wife and children was a trap to be avoided for any man who valued his freedom. Some sporting-male bachelors had left their families in other countries or in other parts of the country, resulting in less surveillance from relatives and communities. And even though many bachelors held down steady white-collar jobs and lived with family members, many who had blue-collar jobs lived alone in boarding or rooming houses (some of these houses were exclusively held for bachelors, and became clubhouses as well as lodging). One example of this celebration of homosocial (and sometimes homosexual) bachelor subculture is the -essay collection by writer Donald Mitchell, called Reveries of a Bachelor, published in 1850:Can a man stake his bachelor respectability, his independence, and comfort, upon the die of absorbing, unchanging, relentless marriage, without trembling at the venture? Shall a man who has been free to chase his fancies over the wide-world, without let or hindrance, shut himself up to marriage-ship, within four walls called Home, that are to claim him, his time, his trouble, and his tears, thenceforward forever more, without doubts thick, and thick-coming as Smoke?By 1900, the image of the bachelor had become firmly intertwined with the image of the rugged American man—a Marlboro Man-type who embodied a frontier spirit of self-reliance and separation from workplace hierarchies, salaried jobs, and the demands of marriage and family life. Around this time, a growing parenting movement encouraged middle-class men to be more involved in their children’s lives, to a point; it was thought that fathers could provide necessary moral and career knowledge to their sons. So while more middle-class men engaged in childrearing activities that kept them closer to home, popular literature, film, and advertising celebrated the lone wolf persona of the bachelor in his many forms: hardboiled detective, rugged adventurer, artist, or writer. In all of these situations, it was the detachment of the man from his environment, along with his rejection of class structure that made him an appealing character to readers and viewers.
In the twenties and thirties, the bachelor rose to prominence in pop culture as a symbol of a hedonistic life that some men were leading, and others wished they could. Unmarried or married, George Chauncey writes in “Trade, Wolves, and the Boundaries of Normal Manhood,” the bachelor subcultures of nineteen-twenties New York, particularly for working-class immigrants, were home to men who “forged an alternative definition of manliness that was predicated on a rejection of family obligations.” This rejection was often based on immigration or migration circumstances, but in other cases, it was a choice to be a bachelor, or at least to pretend to be one to avoid responsibility or to meet other men.
This wishful thinking fuelled Esquire’s approach to the bachelor lifestyle. (...)
This ideal reader was sophisticated, rich, and interested in the finer things in life. He also did what he wanted—freedom from obligation was crucial to the Esquire brand, and that obligation extended to freedom from women. Instead of highlighting the realities of single life, Esquire‘s portrayal of bachelorhood was based on looking and acting the part of the swinging ladies’ man, even though most of the magazine’s readers were married. Esquire’s idealized postwar bachelor had no obligations outside of his own desire for women and luxury products (often considered one in the same). He bought his own clothes, drove his own car, and took solo vacations to exotic places. The bachelor became a symbol of postwar consumerism and hedonism, and as a result, became a symbol of freedom for white American men looking for a way to feel important again. Because Esquire relied on corporate advertising to continue existing, overthrowing corporate hierarchy and stratification didn’t factor into their discussions of masculine rejuvenation. In the Handbook, women were presented as an obstacle to men’s success at entertaining, which reinforced the theory that women were ultimately responsible for men’s inability to control their lives.
The ideal life of the bachelor may have been one of absolute freedom, but the instructional elements of the Handbook made it clear that there was a right way to live a bachelor life, and it involved buying the right clothes, décor, food, and drinks. By lumping bachelors and married men together, the book’s editors implied that one could be a bachelor in every way but semantics, if he could follow the rules. Esquire encouraged both groups to consider themselves part of a new revolution in bachelorhood that didn’t actually require a man to be single, but to act like he was one by purchasing the luxury clothes, food, and other items necessary to convey a hedonistic lifestyle.
by Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Esquire
The Death of Golf
[ed. Maybe it could die a little sooner so I could get a tee time.]
One night last September, my 15-year-old daughter, Esmee, told me her plan to try out for the girls golf team here in Pacific Palisades, California. While I was pleased with her interest in golf — which I'd played semiseriously, along with seemingly every other man under 40 in the Tiger-dominated late '90s — I felt I had to prepare her for the inevitable letdown. She lacked the requisite power and the repeating, compact swing I assumed were required of a varsity golfer. Do your best, I told her, but be prepared for the possibility that you might not make the team.
When she texted me a week later to say she'd made the cut, I was stunned. In the years I'd gone to the school, the golf team was a bunch of country club regulars whose swings were nice right-path whips, golfers who'd been playing for a half-decade by the time they got to high school. I asked the coach, James Paleno, what had changed.
"There just isn't the interest we used to have 14, 15 years ago," he says. "Now I have kids showing up who have never hit a golf ball before. Kids are just less aware of golf. They have too many other options. And then when they find out it takes five and a half hours to play 18 holes, they're just not interested."
By any measure, participation in the game is way off, from a high of 30.6 million golfers in 2003 to 24.7 million in 2014, according to the National Golf Foundation (NGF). The long-term trends are also troubling, with the number of golfers ages 18 to 34 showing a 30 percent decline over the last 20 years. Nearly every metric — TV ratings, rounds played, golf-equipment sales, golf courses constructed — shows a drop-off. "I look forward to a time when we've got the wind at our back, but that's not what we're expecting," says Oliver "Chip" Brewer, president and CEO of Callaway. "This is a demographic challenge." (...)
Not long ago, the game could count on young fathers to hide out on the links, and weekend tee slots are still filled with plenty of off-duty dads. But it takes two to properly helicopter-parent a family these days, and that means parents are spending more of their weekends at the playground than at the country club.
During the Tiger boom, everything about the game seemed to expand, from the length of the putters to the size of driver heads to the scale of the courses themselves. "When I won the U.S. Open at Bellerive in 1965, the course measured 7,191 yards. It was a monster," notes Gary Player, the only non-American to win a career Grand Slam. "Now," he says, "7,500-yard courses are everywhere." And those courses have raised their greens fees. Pebble Beach may be able to charge $495 for a round, but when your local public course wants $150, it gets steep. And many of those golf courses weren't designed merely for golf; they were the lure for tens of thousands of homes that aimed to deliver one version of the American dream: golf course frontage. (...)
By now the various attempts to "save" golf by making the game faster, cheaper, and easier to play have all taken on an air of desperation. There have been a number of initiatives and innovations designed to lure younger players onto the course — most of them attempts to speed up the game. "Golf is losing fans because of time," says Phil Smith. "We need to provide for that." That means shorter courses, some three- or four-hole loops that can be played "through" existing courses, or bigger holes or short-game areas — anything so that a player can go out and swing a club and get back before sundown. "We have to shorten the courses and change the equipment," Gary Player says. "Your average golfer will have a much better experience if he or she doesn't feel the need to hit a driver off of every tee box."
There is also FootGolf, essentially golf played with a soccer ball, and Big Hole Golf, where the game is played with cups as wide as 15 inches, and, of course, Frisbee golf. The PGA and USGA have introduced Tee It Forward, which encourages players to set their tees well ahead of their normal tees, with the hope that beginner players can finish a round in three hours. "I'd like to play a game that can take place in three hours," Nicklaus told CNN this past January. "And something that isn't going to cost me an arm and a leg."
At every turn, the game is trying to lure younger golfers into the clubhouse. The USGA sponsors Drive, Chip & Putt, a skills program for juniors similar to the NFL's Punt, Pass & Kick, and one of last year's participants, 11-year-old Lucy Li, became the youngest player in history to qualify for the U.S. Women's Open. The First Tee, a partner of the PGA, LPGA, and several major corporations, has focused on introducing golf into schools by donating equipment and providing a golf-friendly curriculum.
Still, the sparse crowd on a Saturday afternoon at the Los Angeles Golf Show definitely skews more Arnold Palmer than Lucy Li. In fact, there's hardly anyone under the age of 50 who isn't manning a booth. There were a few dozen golf courses and country clubs trolling for members: Angeles National, Rio Hondo, the Crossings at Carlsbad, each offering deeply discounted rounds and practically begging me to play at their courses. Their sales managers touted their yardage, conditions — "the only Nicklaus Design golf course in Los Angeles County," a "$44 weekday special including a hot dog and a soda" — and said they believed the golf business was finally rebounding. But I didn't have to press very hard to get them to admit that business was slow. "It's a challenge," says Debora Main, marketing and sales manager of Candlewood. "It's been a tough few years."
Nearly everyone I spoke with at the convention pointed to one company as the potential savior. "Maybe Topgolf is our Tiger," says Callaway's Brewer, which owns just under 20 percent of Topgolf, the company that has devised a simulated version of the game by putting microchips into balls at high-tech driving ranges. Players hit into the target area as a computer screen keeps score based on how accurate the shots are. In between drinking, eating, and listening to the house DJs, they stand on an Astroturf mat and play 20 balls. It's golf's version of bowling. The company was formed in the U.K. but was acquired by a U.S. investment group in 2005. Topgolf has 13 locations in the U.S., and will have 20 by the end of the year and as many as 50 by the end of 2017, including a 105,000-square-foot facility adjacent to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. It's golf as karaoke, with crowds of young people sitting in hitting bays and partying between taking their hacks. And the company is booming, with revenue far exceeding $100 million this year. Most important for the golf industry, 54 percent of its 4 million visitors last year were between the ages of 18 and 34.
One night last September, my 15-year-old daughter, Esmee, told me her plan to try out for the girls golf team here in Pacific Palisades, California. While I was pleased with her interest in golf — which I'd played semiseriously, along with seemingly every other man under 40 in the Tiger-dominated late '90s — I felt I had to prepare her for the inevitable letdown. She lacked the requisite power and the repeating, compact swing I assumed were required of a varsity golfer. Do your best, I told her, but be prepared for the possibility that you might not make the team.
When she texted me a week later to say she'd made the cut, I was stunned. In the years I'd gone to the school, the golf team was a bunch of country club regulars whose swings were nice right-path whips, golfers who'd been playing for a half-decade by the time they got to high school. I asked the coach, James Paleno, what had changed."There just isn't the interest we used to have 14, 15 years ago," he says. "Now I have kids showing up who have never hit a golf ball before. Kids are just less aware of golf. They have too many other options. And then when they find out it takes five and a half hours to play 18 holes, they're just not interested."
By any measure, participation in the game is way off, from a high of 30.6 million golfers in 2003 to 24.7 million in 2014, according to the National Golf Foundation (NGF). The long-term trends are also troubling, with the number of golfers ages 18 to 34 showing a 30 percent decline over the last 20 years. Nearly every metric — TV ratings, rounds played, golf-equipment sales, golf courses constructed — shows a drop-off. "I look forward to a time when we've got the wind at our back, but that's not what we're expecting," says Oliver "Chip" Brewer, president and CEO of Callaway. "This is a demographic challenge." (...)
Not long ago, the game could count on young fathers to hide out on the links, and weekend tee slots are still filled with plenty of off-duty dads. But it takes two to properly helicopter-parent a family these days, and that means parents are spending more of their weekends at the playground than at the country club.
During the Tiger boom, everything about the game seemed to expand, from the length of the putters to the size of driver heads to the scale of the courses themselves. "When I won the U.S. Open at Bellerive in 1965, the course measured 7,191 yards. It was a monster," notes Gary Player, the only non-American to win a career Grand Slam. "Now," he says, "7,500-yard courses are everywhere." And those courses have raised their greens fees. Pebble Beach may be able to charge $495 for a round, but when your local public course wants $150, it gets steep. And many of those golf courses weren't designed merely for golf; they were the lure for tens of thousands of homes that aimed to deliver one version of the American dream: golf course frontage. (...)
By now the various attempts to "save" golf by making the game faster, cheaper, and easier to play have all taken on an air of desperation. There have been a number of initiatives and innovations designed to lure younger players onto the course — most of them attempts to speed up the game. "Golf is losing fans because of time," says Phil Smith. "We need to provide for that." That means shorter courses, some three- or four-hole loops that can be played "through" existing courses, or bigger holes or short-game areas — anything so that a player can go out and swing a club and get back before sundown. "We have to shorten the courses and change the equipment," Gary Player says. "Your average golfer will have a much better experience if he or she doesn't feel the need to hit a driver off of every tee box."
There is also FootGolf, essentially golf played with a soccer ball, and Big Hole Golf, where the game is played with cups as wide as 15 inches, and, of course, Frisbee golf. The PGA and USGA have introduced Tee It Forward, which encourages players to set their tees well ahead of their normal tees, with the hope that beginner players can finish a round in three hours. "I'd like to play a game that can take place in three hours," Nicklaus told CNN this past January. "And something that isn't going to cost me an arm and a leg."
At every turn, the game is trying to lure younger golfers into the clubhouse. The USGA sponsors Drive, Chip & Putt, a skills program for juniors similar to the NFL's Punt, Pass & Kick, and one of last year's participants, 11-year-old Lucy Li, became the youngest player in history to qualify for the U.S. Women's Open. The First Tee, a partner of the PGA, LPGA, and several major corporations, has focused on introducing golf into schools by donating equipment and providing a golf-friendly curriculum.
Still, the sparse crowd on a Saturday afternoon at the Los Angeles Golf Show definitely skews more Arnold Palmer than Lucy Li. In fact, there's hardly anyone under the age of 50 who isn't manning a booth. There were a few dozen golf courses and country clubs trolling for members: Angeles National, Rio Hondo, the Crossings at Carlsbad, each offering deeply discounted rounds and practically begging me to play at their courses. Their sales managers touted their yardage, conditions — "the only Nicklaus Design golf course in Los Angeles County," a "$44 weekday special including a hot dog and a soda" — and said they believed the golf business was finally rebounding. But I didn't have to press very hard to get them to admit that business was slow. "It's a challenge," says Debora Main, marketing and sales manager of Candlewood. "It's been a tough few years."
Nearly everyone I spoke with at the convention pointed to one company as the potential savior. "Maybe Topgolf is our Tiger," says Callaway's Brewer, which owns just under 20 percent of Topgolf, the company that has devised a simulated version of the game by putting microchips into balls at high-tech driving ranges. Players hit into the target area as a computer screen keeps score based on how accurate the shots are. In between drinking, eating, and listening to the house DJs, they stand on an Astroturf mat and play 20 balls. It's golf's version of bowling. The company was formed in the U.K. but was acquired by a U.S. investment group in 2005. Topgolf has 13 locations in the U.S., and will have 20 by the end of the year and as many as 50 by the end of 2017, including a 105,000-square-foot facility adjacent to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. It's golf as karaoke, with crowds of young people sitting in hitting bays and partying between taking their hacks. And the company is booming, with revenue far exceeding $100 million this year. Most important for the golf industry, 54 percent of its 4 million visitors last year were between the ages of 18 and 34.
by Karl Taro Greenfeld, Men's Journal | Read more:
Image: Todd Anthony
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)