Cacio e Pepe (Mac and Cheese)

One of the earliest known recipes for macaroni and cheese comes from the 13th-century tome "Liber de Coquina," an Italian cookbook. In it, a recipe called "de lasanis" calls for cut-up sheets of pasta to be tossed with parmesan cheese, which sounds a lot like cacio e pepe to me.

If you've never tried it, cacio e pepe is one of the great, incredibly simple pastas of Rome. In an episode of "No Reservations," wandering chef Anthony Bourdain went so far as to say the dish "could be the greatest thing in the history of the world."

July 14 is National Mac and Cheese Day, but the Italian version still reigns supreme over elbow noodles and powdered cheese.

by April Walloga, Business Insider |  Read more:

Image: Netflix/No Reservations

The Return of Bloom County

Seven years ago, Berkeley Breathed, trim and grinning, sat in the D.C. offices of his then-syndicate, the Washington Post Writers Group, and shared old stories and well-remembered personal anecdotes. I listened to him speak with a kinetic quickness; he was charismatic, a bit rushed and more than a bit restless. He recounted a nautical accident, and I couldn’t help but think: This sounds like a man ready to tack toward a new direction.

Within months that year, Breathed announced he was ending his comic strip “Opus.” The beloved penguin of three decades would apparently flap his flightless wings no more.

“I drew the last image ever of Opus at midnight while Puccini was playing and I got rather stupid,” Breathed told me at the time of the penguin’s farewell ‘toon. “Thirty years. A bit like saying goodbye to a child — which is ironic because I was never, never sentimental about him as many of his fans were. I think ‘Madama Butterfly’ pushed me over the top, though. He suddenly seemed alive, really. Rare for me.”

Then suddenly, on Sunday, Breathed teased (via Facebook) the return of Opus. I, like most all Opus fans, raised an intrigued eyebrow of hope. Then yesterday, we were rewarded: Breathed posted a full strip of an awakened Opus who had Rip Van Winkle’d his way through a quarter-century and now was freshly aroused. The slumbering waterfowl had returned … to a Milo puberty joke.

Yes, “Bloom County,” the Pulitzer-winning ’80s strip that once attracted tens of millions of daily readers on the still-mighty wings of the Reagan-era newspaper syndication model, was back. And still frisky, at that.

by Michael Cavna, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Berkeley Breathed

Making the Cut

Why choosing the right surgeon matters even more than you know

In February 2012, LaVerne Stiles went to Citrus Memorial Hospital near her home in central Florida for what should have been a routine surgery.

The bubbly retired secretary had been in a minor car accident weeks earlier. She didn’t worry much about her sore neck until a scan detected a broken bone.

The operation she needed, a spinal fusion, is done tens of thousands of times a year without incident. Stiles, 71, had a choice of three specially trained surgeons at Citrus Memorial, which was rated among the top 100 nationally for spinal procedures.

She had no way of knowing how much was riding on her decision. The doctor she chose, Constantine Toumbis, had one of the highest rates of complications in the country for spinal fusions. The other two doctors had rates among the lowest for postoperative problems like infections and internal bleeding.

It’s conventional wisdom that there are “good” and “bad” hospitals — and that selecting a good one can protect patients from the kinds of medical errors that injure or kill hundreds of thousands of Americans each year.

But a ProPublica analysis of Medicare data found that, when it comes to elective operations, it is much more important to pick the right surgeon.

Today, we are making public the complication rates of nearly 17,000 surgeons nationwide. Patients will be able to weigh surgeons’ past performance as they make what can be a life-and-death decision. Doctors themselves can see where they stand relative to their peers.

The numbers show that the stark differences that Stiles confronted at Citrus Memorial are commonplace across America. Yet many hospitals don’t track the complication rates of individual surgeons and use that data to force improvements. And neither does the government.

A small share of doctors, 11 percent, accounted for about 25 percent of the complications. Hundreds of surgeons across the country had rates double and triple the national average. Every day, surgeons with the highest complication rates in our analysis are performing operations in hospitals nationwide.

Subpar performers work even at academic medical centers considered among the nation’s best.

A surgeon with one of the nation’s highest complication rates for prostate removals in our analysis operates at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, a national powerhouse known for its research on patient safety. He alone had more complications than all 10 of his colleagues combined — though they performed nine times as many of the same procedures.

By contrast, some of the nation’s best results for knee replacements were turned in by a surgeon at a small-town clinic in Alabama who insists on personally handling even the most menial aspects of each patient’s surgery and follow-up care.

ProPublica compared the performance of surgeons by examining five years of Medicare records for eight common elective procedures, including knee and hip replacements, spinal fusions and prostate removals.

To be fair to surgeons, ProPublica’s analysis accounted for factors such as patients’ health and age. We focused only on elective cases because they typically involve healthier patients with the best odds of a smooth recovery.

by Marshall Allen and Olga Pierce, ProPublica | Read more:
Image: Miguel Montaner

Yo La Tengo

Dole Girl

At first I had a hard time telling the difference between fancy and choice. My forelady, Ethel Tanaka, was always on me about letting a choice pineapple go by and not putting it into the tray. “Hey, girlie, look at this spot,” she would say, picking up a pine I had checked, her blue cap pulled down over her hairline so you couldn’t see her hairnet. The rest of us wore white caps, our long hair coiled up in the back. We looked like a gang of sweaty, knife-wielding nuns. “This pine is dull,” Ethel Tanaka would say, “only good for chunk.” After a few weeks I could see that fancy pineapple was bright yellow with an almost translucent quality, while choice was rough and colorless, an anemic cousin to the luminous fancy pines. Choice pines ended up as chunk or crushed or even juice, though most of the time juice pines were sorted out before they got to the trimmers. Fancy pineapples were sliced and then each stack of golden discs was nestled in its own can of syrup.

We didn’t eat much canned pineapple in Hawai'i because fresh was so much better, but I guessed it was different on the mainland, in Wisconsin and Iowa and all those cold states I’d read about in books with their snow storms and blizzards. We didn’t even wear sweaters, though some old aunties would shiver in February and March when it rained almost every day. This is what I thought about as we left the fancy pineapples on the line and threw the choice in plastic tubs that were picked up by a group of boys, who flirted with us and made rude comments.

The Dole Cannery was just off Dillingham Boulevard, halfway between Diamond Head and Pearl Harbor. I applied everywhere else, but no one was hiring, or no one was hiring me. I was leaving Hawai'i in August for college in the Mainland, and I wanted at least $500. At Dole they paid $1.25 an hour, and more for overtime. In 1970 you could get a used VW bug for $300, and my dream was to go where I could drive for more than fifty miles. I had only applied to colleges on the East Coast, so I could get far away from my father’s weekly sermons on burning in hell. He was the minister of a small mission in Wai'anae and wanted me to go to Oral Roberts University or some other good Christian college, but I hadn’t studied so hard during high school to end up singing hymns and passing around the collection plate for missions in Africa. I had bigger plans. I had just become a vegetarian. I wanted a vegetarian boyfriend. We would live in a house with a fireplace and eat big bowls of vegetable soup by the roaring fire. I wanted to be cold for once.

Two weeks before school was out I applied for the job at Dole. They told me to come in on Monday after graduation and wear covered shoes and long pants. All my life I had passed the cannery and felt sorry for the people who worked there. During high season in the summer, the smell of pineapple permeated the air for miles around the cannery. Even the trade winds that kept the temperatures in the islands a moderate eighty-five degrees couldn’t dilute the sweet smell of hundreds of thousands of pineapples being peeled, cored, trimmed, sliced, crushed, juiced, and canned in the enormous tin-roofed factory. Above the factory loomed a giant steel and aluminum water tower in the shape of a pineapple, like the totem of some religious cult.

The first three weeks I worked at the cannery, I didn’t watch television. I couldn’t even read. I could barely eat. I would take a shower, wash out my white nylon apron and cap, hang them on the line, put out my clothes for the next day, and then go into my bedroom and cry myself to sleep. But over the weeks I made myself as hard as lava. I wasn’t one of the heroines in the novels I loved so much—going to balls, sipping tea, and taking long walks in the countryside. No, I was Jane Eyre, but worse because I was working in a factory. There were no Mr. Rochesters at Dole, no Darcys or Bingleys. No one was going to save me.

by Barbara Hamby, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: chuddlesworth

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John Gallagher, Snoopy the Ace
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[ed. Yep, that's pretty much me.]
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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.

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

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.

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”:

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.”

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:

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Dipping on the Kenai

See: Long-handled nets in hand, hordes of anglers prepare to storm Kenai beaches

[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.]

Jayson Lilley, Columbia Road Flower Market
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The Sounders and the Fury

My Portland office cubicle holds what may be the largest collection of Seattle Sounders paraphernalia gathered within the Oregon state boundaries. Ticket stubs, game day programs, the sports section of The Seattle Times declaring this year’s smashing 3-0 season opener victory against the New England Revolution. The newer soccer fans in the office walk by briskly, while the more senior members have already learned the best routes of avoidance. They’re all fans of the Portland Timbers — my Sounders’ most-despised rival — and we have an unspoken understanding of mutual mouth-shuttage. Nobody wants to get fired.

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:

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty