Spamming for Attention

At last, some good news! True, Donald Trump’s still running for president, and a massive earthquake’s going to destroy Seattle – but according to a report from the security firm Symantec, spam now accounts for less than 50% of all email, for the first time in more than a decade. Of the 704bn messages sent in June 2015, a mere 353bn were spam. Which is fantastic news for everyone, except the occasional son of a deposed dictator looking to transfer $5m out of his country, and hoping that you, as a Trusted Business Associate, might care for a piece of the action.

Except, let me guess: I bet you haven’t been seriously troubled by spam in years. Thanks to huge advances in filtering technology, plus prosecutions of botnet operators, it’s a rare week that a true piece of spam makes it into my Gmail inbox. Historically speaking, this is extraordinary: in the 1990s, experts regularly wondered whether the internet would collapse beneath the sheer weight of junk. Yet, instead, spam has slipped way down the list of daily irritations.

But we shouldn’t celebrate too hastily. As “classic” spam has declined, it’s become clear that the internet in general – indeed, life in general – has become an awful lot spammier. Partly, this is simply because spammers have found ways to spam that don’t involve email, using texts, Twitter, Gchat and so on. But there’s a deeper point here, too. When you really think hard about what spam is – as I first did in 2013, when I interviewed Finn Brunton, who researched the phenomenon in detail – it’s hard to escape the conclusion that we’re drowning in it.

Email spam thrives, to the extent it still does so, because spammers can reach millions of eyeballs at virtually no cost. The proportion of gullible fools who’ll reply to any given message is microscopic – but it only needs to be microscopic, because the cost of reaching each of them is effectively nil. For a spammer, there’s no incentive to try to limit the recipients to those who actually want to do business with fake dictators’ sons, or pay large sums of money for penis-enlargement pills. Everyone already checks their emails all the time, so all you need do is get into as many inboxes as possible. Spam, in the broad definition Brunton gave in his fascinating book Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, is using “information technology to exploit existing gatherings of attention.”

But this raises a question. If spamming is about abusing the resource of other people’s attention, the ethos of spam is everywhere: in clickbait headlines that promise far more than they deliver; in tweets that exploit the “curiosity gap” by tantalizingly omitting key information; in the daily email I now receive – it isn’t spam, technically, because I agreed to it – from a clothing store where I once bought one shirt. Scroll to the fetid lower reaches of many a reputable site and you’ll find links (provided, most often, by Outbrain or Taboola) to the products of content farms, or, as Brunton describes them: “vast algal blooms of linked content with catchy titles, top-10 lists about trending topics, wild claims and needlessly contrarian stances.” None of these were written because a journalist thought the topic mattered; they’re created in response to what’s trending, to exploit the attention already gathered.

But for any journalist, even more alarming possibilities lurk here. What makes me not a spammer? To the best of my abilities, I’ve written this piece so as to make you want to keep reading; the headline’s intended to grab your attention, even if you’d been planning to get up and go jogging instead. My editors and I will profit, albeit modestly, as a result. For that matter, what about the Facebook updates you so lovingly construct, in an effort to stop people scrolling, read closely, then reward you with flattering ‘likes’?

What all this demonstrates, in the end, is how strange a phenomenon attention is. It’s a limited resource, just like money: if I spend it on one thing, it’s no longer available for something else. Yet I give it away far more freely than I’d ever give my money – and to pretty much whoever asks.

by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Ian Waldie/Getty Images

The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give

While away at a conference in Minneapolis, I was awakened at dawn by a call from my husband in our New York apartment. Our 8-year-old son had just roused him with the suspicion that they might not make their 7:30 a.m. flight to join me because it was now 7:40 and they were still at home.

The original plan had us all traveling to Minneapolis together. I would attend my conference, my musician husband would do a show at this cool club, and our son would get hotel pool time: a triple win.

Then my husband was offered a great gig in New York for the same day we were set to leave, so he called to change his and our son’s tickets. Changing them, he learned, was going to cost more than buying a new pair of one-way tickets out. So he did that instead, planning to use their original return tickets, not realizing that if you don’t use the first leg, they cancel the second. That meant buying new return tickets at a cost somewhere between “Ugh” and “What have you done?”

Now, after all that, my family had missed the first leg of the new itinerary. On hold with the airline yet again, my husband was texting me sexy emojis.

“Focus,” I replied, with an emoji of an airplane.

He sent me an emoji of a flan.

He and I married young for our urban friend group — in our late 20s — and now, in our late 30s, we find ourselves attending the weddings of peers. My husband of 11 years and I sit at these weddings listening to our in-thrall friends describe all the ways in which they will excel at being married.

“I will always be your best friend,” they say, reading from wrinkled pieces of paper held in shaking hands. “I will never let you down.”

I clap along with everyone else; I love weddings. Still, there is so much I want to say.

I want to say that one day you and your husband will fight about missed flights, and you’ll find yourself wistful for the days when you had to pay for only your own mistakes. I want to say that at various points in your marriage, may it last forever, you will look at this person and feel only rage. You will gaze at this man you once adored and think, “It sure would be nice to have this whole place to myself.”

In Zen Buddhism, meditation helps practitioners detach from the cycle of desire and suffering. In my brief stint as a religious studies major, I preferred Pure Land Buddhism, an alternate path to enlightenment for people who (as one professor told us) may find it difficult to abandon worldly pain and passion because those things can also yield such beauty and comfort. He summed it up as: “Life is suffering — and yet.”

I think about that all the time: “And yet.” Such hedging, to me, is good religion and also the key to a successful marriage. In the course of being together forever, you come across so many “and yets,” only some of them involving domestic air travel.

I love this person, and yet she’s such a mess. And yet when I’m sick, he’s not very nurturing. And yet we don’t want the same number of children. And yet I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be single again.

The longer you are with someone, the more big and little “and yets” rack up. You love this person. Of course you plan to be with him or her forever. And yet forever can begin to seem like a long time. Breaking up and starting fresh, which everyone around you seems to be doing, can begin to look like a wonderful and altogether logical proposition.

But “and yet” works the other way, too. Even during the darkest moments of my own marriage, I have had these nagging exceptions. And yet, we still make each other laugh. And yet, he is still my person. And yet, I still love him.

And so you don’t break up, and you outlast some more of your friends’ marriages.

“The way to stay married,” my mother says, “is not to get divorced.”

by Ada Calhoun, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Brian Rea

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Bruce Stanfield
via: The complicated politics of where to come

Sonny Boy Williamson

[ed. Sonny. One scary dude. See also: Nine Below Zero.] 

Samuli Heimonen
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European politics resume...
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[ed. See also: Greek Prime Minister Asked Putin For $10 Billion To "Print Drachmas", Greek Media Reports.]

Golf's New $25 Million Man*

*And that might be low.

[ed. Jordan surges into the lead in the third round of the British Open. See also: Head of the Class.]

Turning points usually don't walk up, slap you in the face and shout, "This is important—pay attention!" More often, they're recognized after the fact. The accomplishments of Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan and even Jack Nicklaus look bigger now than they did at the time, the appreciation growing with the years. But occasionally, a moment occurs with such sudden brilliance that it amounts to a face slap. When Tiger Woods won the 1997 Masters by 12 strokes at the age of 21, it was one of those moments. And so, too, it seems was the victory this year by 21-year-old Jordan Spieth at Augusta National Golf Club. "There are certain tournaments when we know we're watching the beginning of a new era," says Casey Alexander, director of research and special-situations analyst for golf stocks at Gilford Securities Inc. "And clearly, that was true in this Masters." Like Woods, Spieth won people over not just with his golf but with his essence. Woods was a young, dynamic man of color in a staid, white sport. And that was a refreshing change for golf.

Spieth emerges now as a similarly refreshing change: a young, dynamic new-age champion. Quite simply, Spieth slipped into a green jacket and the role as one of the most marketable athletes in all of sports—in fact, one of the most marketable in all of entertainment.

Call him the $25 Million Man—at the very least. That's the new base for his yearly off-course income, multiple agents and marketing experts tell Golf Digest. That, combined with his on-course winnings, could jump Spieth from No. 16 this year on the Golf Digest 50 all-encompassing money list to as high as No. 3 in the 2016 ranking, trailing only Woods and Phil Mickelson.

The significance of Spieth's Masters victory was that it extended his brand beyond the world of golf to the public at large—especially a younger, hipper crowd obsessed not so much with sports as with celebrity.

According to the Celebrity DBI, which measures consumer perception of 3,600 celebrities for the promotions and marketing agency The Marketing Arm, 19 percent of consumers knew who Spieth was in mid-March, before the Masters. On April 16, after the victory at Augusta, his consumer awareness was 35 percent. (There's room for growth there: Tiger is known by 97 percent.)

In overall appeal/likability, Spieth went from No. 1,500 to No. 129, ahead of Tina Fey (134) and Jack Nicholson (135). In aspiration (think: "I want to be like Mike"), Spieth went from No. 333 to No. 4, behind only Tom Hanks, Bill Gates and Kate Middleton. In endorsement value, Spieth went from No. 529 to No. 5, behind Hanks, Morgan Freeman, Betty White and Michael Jordan, and ahead of Arnold Palmer, Angelina Jolie and Sofía Vergara.

"When it comes to the sports-marketing checklist, Spieth seemingly checks all the boxes," says David Carter, a principal for The Sports Business Group and a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. "He's competitive, a strong communicator and appears to fully appreciate what he has and what he represents to the sport. Roll up all of these attributes, including the fact that he's likely to be on the scene for a very long time, and all those that invest in golf are understandably bullish about his future."

Under Armour, the sports clothing, shoe and accessory company, felt bullish enough to sign Spieth to a 10-year contract in January, before he won the Masters. The deal, which industry insiders say has "Tiger-like numbers," includes an eight-figure guarantee annually, bonus benchmarks (for things like winning a major), stock options and, in the future, a signature line of clothing.

by Ron Sirak, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Walter Iooss Jr. 

Zhang Jia Wu
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The Chinese Logistical Sublime and Its Wasted Remains

On our thirteenth day at sea, after having been battered by 6 meter waves and snow, gale-force winds and storm, having watched the ship’s skeleton snake and bend with the force of rough seas from within the depths of its passageways, I woke up on a calm, quiet morning to a sea that had turned a lighter shade of blue. From my porthole, delighted, I watched as seagulls weaved in an out of the wind currents above the containers, seaweed merrily skimmed the surface of the ocean, and fishing vessels began dotting the horizon. Land was near. Less than a day later, we drew into the port of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Terminals stretched for miles from two harbor mouths, the air a humid, sticky breeze, the pilot’s Mandarin accent sounding suddenly like home.

The transition from sea to land has been almost too quick. After days suspended over liquid blue, spent imagining the ocean from what Derek Walcott has termed the “subtle and submarine”, the looming horizon of the sedentary state with all its territorial weight seemed almost churlish. Everything since touching land has been a blur. We spent 36 hours in Kaohsiung, during which a majority of the 4000 containers on the vessel were unloaded, then surged onward to Yantian, where 16 hours in port – aided by gantry cranes larger than I have ever seen – allowed not more than a hasty trip to the city center for a dinner of mushroom and chive dumplings (desperately welcomed after a six-week parade of meat and potatoes), before we set sail again for Hong Kong. Now, after a mere 15 hours there, we are in Kaohsiung once more. Tonight we leave for Taipei with four different currencies in my pocket and my head swirling from switching back and forth between two different tongues. After 42 days at sea, in less than twelve hours I will be off the Ever Cthulhu forever, never to return.

In the meantime, I am allowing myself to be taken in by the fearsome, monstrous smoothness of the East Asian logistical sublime. I had expected the delays we experienced on the US west coast to have created a massive backlog in China, but we arrived to clear seas and empty anchorages. The Chinese ports have a clockwork, kinetic edge. The transitions are quick – almost blinding. Once the ship berths, security rolls out a portable security checkpoint on the shore below, gangs of workers appear from under the towering gantries, and a rolling stream of workers climbs up the gangway. Lashings go off, trucks and straddle cranes slide into place, the agent appears, papers and loading plans are signed, and the cargo operations begin. There are no breaks, no pauses, no delays. The entire machinery of the port, already in gear, accommodates the ship in one smooth gesture.

In Yantian, walking down city streets and neon-lit stores stocked to the seams with the latest fashions, I stood in a corner for a while, watching in wonder as throngs of China’s developing middle class milled about. As laughing families strolled and shopped in suits and camel coats, they emanated a kind of faith Chinese economy. The captain noted that none of the gleaming high-rise apartments that rose around us had been there on his previous shore visit five years before. On its worst days, the Chief mate reports that Yantian moves weight at almost thrice the speed of LA on its good ones. The port handled its 100 millionth TEU in 2013, and in 2007 became the first port in the world to reach an annual throughput exceeding 10 million TEUs. All ports race to become number one, and the cities that conspire around them become affluent reflections of this competition.

Yet, while today’s urban spaces enfold inhabitants within their grand infrastructural projects, inviting us to live, work and play in new skyscrapers and squares, the port marks modernity differently. Situated on the edges of the city yet walled off from the city’s eyes, the port declares its success by proxy in ‘key performance indicators’ and throughput handling statistics, though few are there to watch it happen. We drive past their gates, read about their integral role in the health of our economies, and live around them, both benefiting from their economic success and suffering from their environmental impact. Yet few gain entrance into their inner worlds. This is perhaps why, on my way back to the ship from Hong Kong one night, I paused amidst the roar of port operations bustling even at midnight, and found myself strangely moved, feeling small and helpless in the face of these vast technological landscapes. I ran across sweeping truck traffic and stood under the colossal hull of the Ever Cthulhu for a while, measuring my insignificance in the light of its grandiosity, watching gantry spreaders rise 200 feet above my head. There was a cinematic quality to all the swish and seamlessness, an allure that made the fantasies underpinning logistics’ aspirations toward omnipotence seem, in that moment, almost sensible.

Almost. Almost, because there is also a shadow economy that revolves around these Chinese ports and probes at the discordant edges of its homogenizing fantasies. Outside, on the “shore side” of a ship at berth, one beholds the fearsome fury of cargo soaring into the sky and being placed on an endless rumble of trucks. But a walk around the other side of the ship to its “sea side,” where starboard faces the quieter harbor waters, quickly reveals a different kind of marketplace. An entire industry has risen to ‘manage’ the mass metabolism of waste that constantly threatens to overwhelm the ship, a grand string of waste workers, small businessmen, garbage disposal trucks, and sludge barges that emerge from the peripheries of the port to help the ship clear its bowels after its weeks at sea. On Ever Cthulhu’sstarboard, a constant supply of barges and cleaning operators come alongside the vessel in the afternoon, tasked with pumping dirty fuel out of tanks, collecting mountains of accumulated garbage and scrap, and cleaning out used pipes.

by Charmaine Chua, The Disorder of Things |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Future Queer

If I were to write a novel about a gay man like myself in the future—let’s say the year 2035—his ability to marry another man, whatever the Supreme Court ruling, wouldn’t be in question—it could even be the conventional choice, the one his friends laugh at even as they attend because they love him. He might even be descended from two generations of officially recognized gay marriages. “Gay,” “Queer,” “Straight,” “Same-Sex”: these would be deeply retrograde terms—orthodoxies to be resisted, or historical fictions, even. Given the press of overpopulation on us now, I could imagine my character as having chosen a childless, single queerness, and could depict this as the green choice, sexually and emotionally. The rearing of children could be something that is done only rarely, especially given its increasing cost. More and more, having children is something only the wealthy can afford in the United States, so in 2035 it wouldn’t be science fiction to imagine an entrenched oligarchy as the only class legally allowed to have them. In a political twist, China’s one-child policy could be seen retroactively as both visionary and not having gone far enough.

My protagonist could find the process of questioning his sexuality and gender as normal as we now find deciding what to watch on television. He might have no single sexual identification—omnisexuality—and that could be the overwhelmingly mainstream norm. Or he could be a part of an elite group of wealthy gay men, all of them seronegative and residing in an intentional community sexually sealed off from anyone who can’t pass a credit check and an HIV test.

Marrying more than one person at the same time might also be possible for him within this system, especially if marriage is finally seen as the economic system it is—with fundamentalist Mormonism as something of a model for the legal future queer, but more like if the sister wives all ran away with each other and set up a home together. Or maybe my protagonist lives closeted inside a Christian radical white supremacist plantation state, complete with death camps for sexual deviants, married to a woman who is, perhaps, closeted herself.

Yet, when I think of the future for myself in real life and not fiction, I stick to what I know. Which is almost nothing. My hope is that marriage equality queers marriage, rather than straightening queers—that we reinvent it and keep reinventing it, and sexuality is finally acknowledged as having no inherent moral value except, perhaps, when it is ignored.

by Alexander Chee, New Republic |  Read more:

Image: Neil Gilks

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Tiger Swing

[ed. Less body and more arms it seems to me (or some kind of synchronization issue - look where his belt buckle ends up). See also: How Jordan Cured Me of Tiger Woods]

When There’s Nothing to Celebrate

Recently, I left work so late my kids were already asleep by the time I got home. Part of me wanted to wake my daughter up, ask her about her day, and stay up late talking about all the things she had done throughout the day. I wanted to scoop up my sleeping son, smell his baby-ness and cover him with kisses. The other half of me was so exhausted, I was glad that my husband had put them to bed before I had gotten home. I fell into bed, asleep before my head even hit the pillow. I woke up the next morning before anyone else was awake, put on a clean pair of scrubs, and went back to work, rested and renewed, but determined to finish charting in time to be home at a normal hour.

It was busy that day. A few hours before shift-change, a young mother came in to be triaged because she hadn’t felt her baby move for almost twelve hours. All of our triage beds were full, so we had to put her in a labor room. When I couldn’t find her baby’s heartbeat, there were so many things I wanted to say to her, but couldn’t. It wasn’t the right time and I was only her nurse. But this is what I wish I could have told her:

• It didn’t take me long to stop looking for your baby’s heartbeat. I knew then the next chain of events that were about to occur. I couldn’t tell you anything, even though I wanted to, because I have to wait for your doctor to break the news. I hope they’re not too far away, and that they’ll be able to get here quickly.
• The moment I stopped trying to find the heartbeat, I know all of your suspicions were confirmed, even though neither of us said a word. Your husband did not know to be concerned yet, because he wasn’t the one that had stopped feeling the movement. I know you needed him, so I chose my words carefully: Because I could not find your baby’s heartbeat with the monitor, I’m going to get someone to do an ultrasound. I will also call your doctor. Do you understand what I’m saying? Your eyes were glossed over with tears, but you did not cry. Your husband put down his phone.
• When I walked out of your room to call your doctor, I prayed the entire way to the nurse’s station that maybe I was wrong. When I got to the nurse’s station, every single nurse, unit secretary, and tech asked me if I had been able to find the heartbeat. When I told them no, the tone changed on the entire unit.
• When I called your doctor to tell them, I heard their voice catch in their throat. They didn’t have to tell me; I knew they were going to drop everything and come straight to the hospital.
• When I walked back into your room, your husband was holding you and crying. I told you that your doctor was on his way to see you. I was so thankful that your husband finally understood and was next to you, comforting you.
• When the ultrasound confirmed everything we already knew, you cried silently and your family cried hysterically. It’s usually like that. You won’t cry hysterically until you deliver your baby and see her with your own eyes.
• As a labor nurse, when we are going to deliver someone whose baby has died, we hope with everything we have that the baby hasn’t been dead for long. We want you to remember her as she was: perfect, only sleeping, silent, and still.
• You will want to know a reason, but you probably won’t get one. If you do, it won’t make anything easier, but, like you, I still hope you get one.
• Even if you came to the hospital the moment you stopped feeling her move, it would have been too late. So don’t blame yourself for anything you did or could have done

I did not cry in front of the patient. I hugged her and kissed her head, got her towels and helped her into the bath. Afterwards, I put extra pillows in her bed as I tried to prepare her for her induction. I didn’t feel there were any words I could say at that time. She probably won’t remember that I stroked her arm when the doctor verbalized her fears. She probably won’t remember me telling her husband to call her mother. She probably didn’t know that I went home and cried for her, while I was in my bath. And she probably doesn’t know that I’m still thinking about her and writing about this, months and months later.

by Adventures of a Labor Nurse |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The End of Capitalism Has Begun

The red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse.

Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.

If you lived through all this, and disliked capitalism, it was traumatic. But in the process technology has created a new route out, which the remnants of the old left – and all other forces influenced by it – have either to embrace or die. Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism.

As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.

Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.

Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.

Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue.

Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post-2008 crisis.

You only find this new economy if you look hard for it. In Greece, when a grassroots NGO mapped the country’s food co-ops, alternative producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems they found more than 70 substantive projects and hundreds of smaller initiatives ranging from squats to carpools to free kindergartens. To mainstream economics such things seem barely to qualify as economic activity – but that’s the point. They exist because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff. It seems a meagre and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of Edward III.
Sharing the fruits of our labour. 

New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”. Buzzwords such as the “commons” and “peer-production” are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself.

I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do. And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: “This is no longer simply my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way of living in the process of formation.”

by Paul Mason, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Joe Magee

Against Honeymoons

My wife is seated in a beach chair. She peers over her book and sees me approaching some seals hauled up on the sand. There are only a little over a thousand of these Hawaiian monk seals in existence. When they are discovered on beaches, volunteers rope off an area around them to form a zone where they can rest undisturbed.

So my transgression of one of these knee-high boundary ropes draws the attention of everyone who has been standing at the edge of the rope watching the seals. Hauled up, they look like smooth brown boulders lying on the sand. They don’t move. All spectators, wife included, hold their breath as I continue to bear down on the group. When I get very close—just a couple of steps away—the nearest seal heaves its head back. Its nose is suddenly drawn directly upwards. It lets out a double “haauwll … haauwll” that is Jabba-like: a wheezy barking that vibrates in the air in a way that communicates girth.

My wife’s favorite part of our honeymoon is this moment: my shoulders-up posture of mortal fear, stunned sandaled foot stuck out momentarily in mid-stride; then the acrobatic leap-pivot of redirection that looks like I have bounced off of something springy. To the spectators, until then incredulous at the edge of the rope, I am pardoned. Not a rule-flouting asshole after all. Just oblivious. Or, more precisely, actually that oblivious. As it lays its head back on the ground, the seal makes a sound like the last of the water gurgling down a drain.

Then a hard, sand-scattering sniff. I retreat at a pace slowed so as not to recall prey in flight. A tall woman with short blond hair smiles at me commiseratingly as I cross back over the very bright and obvious orange rope. Maybe it has unconsciously struck some of the spectators as an image of all our trespassing on the island.

Probably there are lots of different ways to be distracted. You can be distracted because you are elsewhere, like if I had been walking on the beach but really, in my mind, I was having a conversation with my sister or something. Then there are various ways of being in a “state of distraction,” where the mind can’t get a grip on anything, e.g. kids with ADHD. Then there is the way in which I was distracted on the beach. This was different. I wasn’t thinking about anything else. I was in paradise, with no responsibilities whatsoever, but my mind was like that of someone with stage fright: attention bent back on itself, focus jammed up and cresting like the big storm-heaved Hawaiian breakers. In some sense I think I saw the seals.

I was on my honeymoon. The strange and tricky thing about a honeymoon is that even while it’s happening, it’s already lived as a story. We sit inside it saying, “We will have been here.” (...)

In the twentieth century the honeymoon was for intimacy and initiation. In the last couple of generations, it lost this more direct function. Now intimacy and initiation take place in the first months of, as we put it in our maximally understated and sweetly simple way, “being with” someone.

What happens when the honeymoon loses its function? Does it just become a vacation with a special name? That’s basically how I approached it (not really thinking one thing or another about it). I thought it was a good excuse to go somewhere warm in December. We were, as everyone else we know is, exhausted. I vaguely figured that if twenty-first-century honeymooners don’t fall into each other’s arms anymore, well, then they collapse on the bed side by side. It sounded nice. But my experience was that that’s not quite the honeymoon’s mood either. Instead the honeymoon has gone the way of weddings and a lot of other traditional things: what was once performative becomes commemorative.

by Charles Comey, The Point | Read more:
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Gretchen Roehrs
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How Moms Won the Internet

You have probably never heard of the LittleThings.com — and Little Things is really proud of that. They’ve only been around eight months, too short a time to be a household name just yet. And still, somehow, this unremarkable, freshly dug well of “inspiring, uplifting, and engaging content” pulls in something like 1 million visitors a day.

It’s not magic or brilliance pumping those numbers up, either. Nope, Little Things — like Upworthy and Viral Nova and all their other identical ilk — rely on moms, the not-so-secret weapons conquering the viral Internet.

“All of our writers have sources, of course,” Little Things’s content director, Maia McCann, said with a sigh like the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “But I always tell writers to go on Facebook and, you know — look at their moms.”

McCann’s writers are not the only ones following this directive. At Viral Nova, the content farm that sold just last week for $100 million, founder Scott DeLong coaches his writers to think like “40- or 45-year-old women.” At Upworthy, a site that recently promised to incorporate more demographic data into its story selection process, the audience skews both female and 40+.

A survey of the top viral content mills shows, in fact, that all lean older, and heavily female. You’ve heard, perhaps, that millennials created this vapid virtual cesspool of feel-good “virality.” But it’s not millennials: It’s their mothers.

If you ask Neetzan Zimmerman, a sort of one-man, proto-Viral Nova who defined the viral news genre in the early days, he’ll tell you that the momification of the Internet is something we should have seen coming a long way away. For one thing, moms own Facebook, statistically speaking, and Facebook owns the viral news industry. (“Facebook was obviously always going to be co-opted by moms,” Zimmerman said. “It’s all about gossip, baby photos, schmaltzy stuff — it’s so mom already.”) On top of that, marketers and advertisers adore mothers, the people responsible for most household spending.

Moms are the motherlode, so to speak.

“I don’t think we targeted this demographic on purpose,” hedged McCann, Little Things’s content director. “But … [middle-aged women] are really desirable, because they’re the most likely to share on Facebook. And obviously, to a viral site, that’s the most important thing.”

Why, exactly, are our mothers propagating this omg-you-won’t-believe-it drivel about dogs and public proposals and babies? Half of it is showing up, it would seem: According to eMarketer, there are just a lot of women older than 45 on Facebook. The site skews female anyway, and the general greying of Facebook’s user base means that a third of all users are now well into middle-age.

by Caitlin Dewey, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: iStock

[ed. Legendary amp builder Marshall (yes, that Marshall) has introduced a new phone. I wonder if this reflects a new trend in branding.]

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