Thursday, July 23, 2015
My Month of Hell
Day 1
Coach Brad is a magnificent, roaring Clydesdale of a man, standing 6-and-a-half feet tall, with blond hair, a golden complexion, and deep-set blue eyes. He speaks in a core-shaking baritone. His head looks like it ought to be atop a pedestal in the antiquities wing of the Met, where it could be quietly admired. His facial features are so architectural that I scribble in my notebook, “Looks part Klingon.” Then Coach Brad slaps his hands together and booms: “Excellent! You should all be taking notes, like this guy!” I haven’t a clue what he’s been talking about for the past five minutes to our timid group of misshapen nerds, but have jotted down odd words like “burpee,” “snatch,” and “jumping squat.”
Each level of the Black Box, an open-floor-plan CrossFit gym in the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, is divided into four “pods.” Some CrossFitters from other gyms around the city criticize the Black Box for its factory-like atmosphere, where classes of different skill levels, with about 20 students each, stream in and out with blazing efficiency all day long, nearly every hour from about 5 a.m. until 8 at night.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, about a half dozen of us are in the southwest pod of the second floor for Elements Class 1, our introduction to CrossFit. All around us there’s a psychotic whir of jump ropes slicing through the air, well-bred young women in yoga pants and ponytails swooping like orangutans along wooden rings suspended from the ceiling, and scores of people crawling guerrilla-style along the floor. The whole thing has a sort of Taylor Swift-meets-jihad feel.
Three days ago, when I set out to report on doing a month of CrossFit, I was put in touch with Craig Convissar, a 30-year-old attorney and one of CrossFit’s biggest cheerleaders. We met at one of the Black Box’s monthly LGBT workout classes that he helps organize. He’s a self-appointed liaison between LGBT CrossFitters and the gym through a Facebook group called Black Box: Guerrilla Queer WOD (it has 229 members). He’s also active in a citywide LGBT CrossFit community called OUTWOD. “WOD” is CrossFit jargon for “Workout of the Day” and is pronounced “wad.”
“I’ve definitely gotten stronger, and my cardiovascular endurance has gotten way better,” Convissar says. “I know I’m a much better athlete than I thought I was.” He’s been doing CrossFit for almost two years, and before that took trampoline classes and had been a member of a gym geared toward the musical theater community.
“I look at it this way: I have a share in the Pines with nine other boys. Most of them look better than me when they take their shirts off, but I know that in a physical fitness competition I could crush any of them,” he says, which I find bizarre because it looks like he could club a seal with his biceps and deflect bullets with the pecs stretching out his crossfit south brooklyn T-shirt.
He also has huge, bloody calluses on his hands. When I ask another CrossFitter, Steve, about his own scabby calluses, he says, “I guess I haven’t found any lifting gloves that I really like yet,” which I later learn is probably a lie. No one in CrossFit wears lifting gloves, because massive, disgusting, bloody hands are a sort of hanky code among members — a way to spot your own in society, as well as a badge of honor.
CrossFit gyms, in further parlance, are called “boxes.” They are pared-down, bare-bones facilities that reflect the gritty CrossFit philosophy, which mixes Olympic weight lifting, calisthenics, and gymnastics with that eye-rolling paleo diet (what the cavemen would have eaten!) — heavy on meat and veggies and forbidding sugars, grains, and dairy.
After the gay workout, a guy named Jake invites a bunch of us to his rooftop around the corner for drinks. “If you’re on the paleo diet, you can only drink wine and tequila,” he explains.
Jake is one of the few not excessively cheerful people in CrossFit.
“I hate New York,” he says. He’s leaning against the ledge, watching airplanes fly northward along the West Side of Manhattan while his fellow CrossFitters gather in circles to talk about CrossFit. He has a hobby of memorizing flight paths and can identify aircraft from the ground, saying things like, “That’s a US Airways Embraer 190, probably the 3 o’clock from Reagan to LaGuardia.”
“CrossFit is designed for someone who doesn’t have a life outside of CrossFit,” Jake says. “All these guys have really drunk the Kool-Aid.”
Steve, who does CrossFit six days a week on top of swimming and boxing classes at two other gyms, pipes up from several feet away. “They actually didn’t drink Kool-Aid at Jonestown,” he says, referring to the 1978 mass cultic suicide of more than 900 people. “It was actually Flavor Aid.”
Day 2
As part of our warm-up, we move back and forth across the pod several times, first like a crab, then like a bear, then like Frankenstein. Everyone looks completely stupid. It seems to me an exercise in humiliation designed to crush the ego and subjugate.
I spot Craig in the pod next door and flash him a big, dumb grin while waving exaggeratedly, but he only looks at me wide-eyed and gives a cryptic nod before darting away. It is sort of like the most popular girl in school being spotted by that differently abled girl she was nice to that one time. (...)
A CrossFit gym opens somewhere on earth every few hours. In the 1990s, a personal trainer in Southern California named Greg Glassman kept getting kicked out of gyms for his unorthodox training philosophy. In 1995, he started his own operation in Santa Cruz, and in 2000, he founded CrossFit Inc. In 2009 there were around 1,000 CrossFit-affiliated gyms in the world; six years later that number is approaching 13,000 (for comparison, in 2014, the global number of Starbucks stores was 21,000). CrossFit claims between 2 million and 4 million members, with more than 100,000 “level 1 certificate holders” (trainers), according to Russell Berger, a spokesperson for CrossFit.
There is no board of directors at CrossFit Inc. Glassman owns 100% of the company and has been known to pop into affiliates across the country unannounced. CrossFit ruthlessly pursues legal action not only against non-affiliated gyms for brand infringement, but against researchers who question the safety and effectiveness of the workout. The company has also been accused of retaliating for negative press coverage. Glassman has been quoted saying things like, “We’re changing the world. We’re doing all the right things for all the right people for all the right reasons,” and “The strength and value of CrossFit lies entirely within our total dominance of other athletes, and this is a truth that cannot be divined through debate, only competition.” In a recent interview with CBS News, a correspondent remarked that the way he talks about CrossFit sounds like preparation for war.
“Yeah, why not?” he said. “Getting ready for war, getting ready for [an] earthquake, getting ready for mugging, getting ready for the horrible news that you have leukemia. What awaits us all is [a] challenge, that’s for sure.”
I phone Daniel Shaw, a psychoanalyst in Manhattan and volunteer for the International Cultic Studies Association. He moderates a support group once a month for cult survivors, sees several former cult members in his private practice, and wrote the book Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation. He is also a former member of Siddha Yoga, which, in a 1994 New Yorkerarticle, was exposed for widespread abuse and cultishness.
“At the head of [any cult] is a person whose narcissism has led them to believe they are superior to others and therefore entitled in ways that other people are not to control people,” Shaw explains. “What they basically are saying is, because of my superiority, I and only I can give you what you need to fix you and make you better, to make you be what you’re supposed to be, and you need me.”
“In a cult, there is a mission,” he continues, “whether it’s world peace or spiritual enlightenment or whatever. Religions often have a mission — say, to build a community of the faithful who support each other and do good work. Well, if you look at the church [as being that], they are fulfilling their vision. When you look at a cult who say they’re creating world peace, they’re not creating world peace. They are, however, creating a very wealthy and powerful leader. That’s the difference.”
Contrary to popular belief, says Shaw, even everyday, healthy people are susceptible to getting involved in cults. “Everybody can be at some point in their life vulnerable to be lonely or frustrated or despairing or discouraged, and cults make tremendous promises,” he says. “They’re great advertisers. They offer solutions. They are friendly and they have communities.”
Coach Brad is a magnificent, roaring Clydesdale of a man, standing 6-and-a-half feet tall, with blond hair, a golden complexion, and deep-set blue eyes. He speaks in a core-shaking baritone. His head looks like it ought to be atop a pedestal in the antiquities wing of the Met, where it could be quietly admired. His facial features are so architectural that I scribble in my notebook, “Looks part Klingon.” Then Coach Brad slaps his hands together and booms: “Excellent! You should all be taking notes, like this guy!” I haven’t a clue what he’s been talking about for the past five minutes to our timid group of misshapen nerds, but have jotted down odd words like “burpee,” “snatch,” and “jumping squat.”
Each level of the Black Box, an open-floor-plan CrossFit gym in the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, is divided into four “pods.” Some CrossFitters from other gyms around the city criticize the Black Box for its factory-like atmosphere, where classes of different skill levels, with about 20 students each, stream in and out with blazing efficiency all day long, nearly every hour from about 5 a.m. until 8 at night.On a recent Wednesday afternoon, about a half dozen of us are in the southwest pod of the second floor for Elements Class 1, our introduction to CrossFit. All around us there’s a psychotic whir of jump ropes slicing through the air, well-bred young women in yoga pants and ponytails swooping like orangutans along wooden rings suspended from the ceiling, and scores of people crawling guerrilla-style along the floor. The whole thing has a sort of Taylor Swift-meets-jihad feel.
Three days ago, when I set out to report on doing a month of CrossFit, I was put in touch with Craig Convissar, a 30-year-old attorney and one of CrossFit’s biggest cheerleaders. We met at one of the Black Box’s monthly LGBT workout classes that he helps organize. He’s a self-appointed liaison between LGBT CrossFitters and the gym through a Facebook group called Black Box: Guerrilla Queer WOD (it has 229 members). He’s also active in a citywide LGBT CrossFit community called OUTWOD. “WOD” is CrossFit jargon for “Workout of the Day” and is pronounced “wad.”
“I’ve definitely gotten stronger, and my cardiovascular endurance has gotten way better,” Convissar says. “I know I’m a much better athlete than I thought I was.” He’s been doing CrossFit for almost two years, and before that took trampoline classes and had been a member of a gym geared toward the musical theater community.
“I look at it this way: I have a share in the Pines with nine other boys. Most of them look better than me when they take their shirts off, but I know that in a physical fitness competition I could crush any of them,” he says, which I find bizarre because it looks like he could club a seal with his biceps and deflect bullets with the pecs stretching out his crossfit south brooklyn T-shirt.
He also has huge, bloody calluses on his hands. When I ask another CrossFitter, Steve, about his own scabby calluses, he says, “I guess I haven’t found any lifting gloves that I really like yet,” which I later learn is probably a lie. No one in CrossFit wears lifting gloves, because massive, disgusting, bloody hands are a sort of hanky code among members — a way to spot your own in society, as well as a badge of honor.
CrossFit gyms, in further parlance, are called “boxes.” They are pared-down, bare-bones facilities that reflect the gritty CrossFit philosophy, which mixes Olympic weight lifting, calisthenics, and gymnastics with that eye-rolling paleo diet (what the cavemen would have eaten!) — heavy on meat and veggies and forbidding sugars, grains, and dairy.
After the gay workout, a guy named Jake invites a bunch of us to his rooftop around the corner for drinks. “If you’re on the paleo diet, you can only drink wine and tequila,” he explains.
Jake is one of the few not excessively cheerful people in CrossFit.
“I hate New York,” he says. He’s leaning against the ledge, watching airplanes fly northward along the West Side of Manhattan while his fellow CrossFitters gather in circles to talk about CrossFit. He has a hobby of memorizing flight paths and can identify aircraft from the ground, saying things like, “That’s a US Airways Embraer 190, probably the 3 o’clock from Reagan to LaGuardia.”
“CrossFit is designed for someone who doesn’t have a life outside of CrossFit,” Jake says. “All these guys have really drunk the Kool-Aid.”
Steve, who does CrossFit six days a week on top of swimming and boxing classes at two other gyms, pipes up from several feet away. “They actually didn’t drink Kool-Aid at Jonestown,” he says, referring to the 1978 mass cultic suicide of more than 900 people. “It was actually Flavor Aid.”
Day 2
As part of our warm-up, we move back and forth across the pod several times, first like a crab, then like a bear, then like Frankenstein. Everyone looks completely stupid. It seems to me an exercise in humiliation designed to crush the ego and subjugate.
I spot Craig in the pod next door and flash him a big, dumb grin while waving exaggeratedly, but he only looks at me wide-eyed and gives a cryptic nod before darting away. It is sort of like the most popular girl in school being spotted by that differently abled girl she was nice to that one time. (...)
A CrossFit gym opens somewhere on earth every few hours. In the 1990s, a personal trainer in Southern California named Greg Glassman kept getting kicked out of gyms for his unorthodox training philosophy. In 1995, he started his own operation in Santa Cruz, and in 2000, he founded CrossFit Inc. In 2009 there were around 1,000 CrossFit-affiliated gyms in the world; six years later that number is approaching 13,000 (for comparison, in 2014, the global number of Starbucks stores was 21,000). CrossFit claims between 2 million and 4 million members, with more than 100,000 “level 1 certificate holders” (trainers), according to Russell Berger, a spokesperson for CrossFit.
There is no board of directors at CrossFit Inc. Glassman owns 100% of the company and has been known to pop into affiliates across the country unannounced. CrossFit ruthlessly pursues legal action not only against non-affiliated gyms for brand infringement, but against researchers who question the safety and effectiveness of the workout. The company has also been accused of retaliating for negative press coverage. Glassman has been quoted saying things like, “We’re changing the world. We’re doing all the right things for all the right people for all the right reasons,” and “The strength and value of CrossFit lies entirely within our total dominance of other athletes, and this is a truth that cannot be divined through debate, only competition.” In a recent interview with CBS News, a correspondent remarked that the way he talks about CrossFit sounds like preparation for war.
“Yeah, why not?” he said. “Getting ready for war, getting ready for [an] earthquake, getting ready for mugging, getting ready for the horrible news that you have leukemia. What awaits us all is [a] challenge, that’s for sure.”
I phone Daniel Shaw, a psychoanalyst in Manhattan and volunteer for the International Cultic Studies Association. He moderates a support group once a month for cult survivors, sees several former cult members in his private practice, and wrote the book Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation. He is also a former member of Siddha Yoga, which, in a 1994 New Yorkerarticle, was exposed for widespread abuse and cultishness.
“At the head of [any cult] is a person whose narcissism has led them to believe they are superior to others and therefore entitled in ways that other people are not to control people,” Shaw explains. “What they basically are saying is, because of my superiority, I and only I can give you what you need to fix you and make you better, to make you be what you’re supposed to be, and you need me.”
“In a cult, there is a mission,” he continues, “whether it’s world peace or spiritual enlightenment or whatever. Religions often have a mission — say, to build a community of the faithful who support each other and do good work. Well, if you look at the church [as being that], they are fulfilling their vision. When you look at a cult who say they’re creating world peace, they’re not creating world peace. They are, however, creating a very wealthy and powerful leader. That’s the difference.”
Contrary to popular belief, says Shaw, even everyday, healthy people are susceptible to getting involved in cults. “Everybody can be at some point in their life vulnerable to be lonely or frustrated or despairing or discouraged, and cults make tremendous promises,” he says. “They’re great advertisers. They offer solutions. They are friendly and they have communities.”
by Chadwick Moore, Out | Read more:
Image: Luke Austin-Paglialonga
The Low Road
The first boy to break my heart was the first one to whom I gave it. This is pretty standard; if your teen romance ended not in tears and mournful mixtapes, you probably did it wrong.
His name was Geoff and he was tall and lanky and white, after a fashion. I was tall and shapely and black, after a fashion. We met at boarding school in New Hampshire, a strange and chilly place, surreal for both of us. He took me for pizza, made me mixtapes, introduced me to the Sugar Hill Gang, gave me a dozen red roses for Valentine’s Day. I took it all, wary and ecstatic. No male human being save my brother had ever really loved me before, but Geoff’s affection meant such loving was possible. Part of me prayed it would last forever. Part of me knew it would not.
I don’t remember the precise reason it fell apart. Maybe because I wouldn’t sleep with him or maybe he got bored or maybe I was a confused and contradictory mess. Maybe he was young and confused himself, finding his way in a bifurcated world: white skin, black stepfather, child of Harlem and fancy boarding school. I don’t even remember how he told me, what words he used, whether we stood together in the snow outside my dorm or the pain sliced over the phone. All I remember is that it hurt deeply for awhile and then less so, and that he moved on to someone else before getting into trouble and being expelled from school.
What lessons we take from life depend so much on the classroom to which we’ve been assigned. By the time I landed in boarding school I was pretty sure I was too much to be loved: too tall, too fat, too black. There are reasons for this—absent father, mother herself unloved and overwhelmed, an omnipresent cultural representation of blackness as ugliness—but in general people did the best they could with the tools they had at the time and so this is not about assigning blame. The point is simply that I entered the world of romantic love not believing myself worthy, and so what I took from that first heartbreak was confirmation. Geoff was the first boy to break my heart but it never occurred to me to seek revenge against him. This was the right impulse but the reason behind it, strangely, was wrong.
Not everyone who breaks your heart is a monster. Not everyone who wounds you deserves to be wounded in return. Geoff was not and did not but those are not the reasons I failed to consider revenge. I sought no revenge against Geoff because his wounding of me seemed not only expected but justifiable: the sure and natural course of things. Geoff hurt me but I was never angry at his hurting, not even a little. It was my own damn fault for losing his love. (...)
In such case, writes Nietzsche, a person will forgo revenge for only three reasons:
Between Geoff and the first rising of my revenge lay some 30-odd years of relationships, the bulk of which I spent with one very good and decent man. S. and I met when I was 19 and he was 20. I was a sophomore in college, plowing my way forward to a more secure life. He had dropped out and was working in a restaurant and hanging out with friends, trying to figure out how to restart his life. Turned out I could help with that.
During our time together I graduated and got a job as a reporter and he went back to school and I got another job and he got his degree and I got another job and we moved to Philadelphia and he went to grad school and we got married and I got another job and he finished his Ph.D. and we moved to New York and got a dog and had a child and I wrote a novel and quit my job and had another child and he got a job and we moved to Boston and the marriage came slowly apart. My fault, or so I reasoned. If S. was a good and well-intentioned man, which he was, and if he loved me, which he did or tried to, as best he could, and if the marriage was still unsustainable then it must be because there was something deep and broken inside of myself. Almost none of the women in my family had sustained a marriage beyond a decade but we all believed this to be the result of choosing untenable men. If somehow I had managed to chose a decent guy and still couldn’t make it work, what did that mean?
Coming apart was terrible anger and pain and woundedness. The worst thing he said, during our divorce mediation, was that he feared I would take the children and move to California to be near my family. I was astonished that a man who had known me for twenty years would think I would take my children from their father, given how much my father’s absence from my life had wounded me. But then I understood: he didn’t really think I would do such a thing to be near family. He thought I might do it out of anger. Even after twenty years of knowing me, he still thought me capable of wounding my children out of spite.
Which is strange because there are no spiteful women in my family. Grudge-holders, yes; there are women in my family who can hold a grievance like Pavarotti could hold high C. But grudge-holding, of course, serves only to wound the grudge-holder; the object of unforgiveness goes skipping on with his life. Still, these seemed to be the options: wounded acceptance or self-destructive unforgiveness.
Turns out there is another way.
His name was Geoff and he was tall and lanky and white, after a fashion. I was tall and shapely and black, after a fashion. We met at boarding school in New Hampshire, a strange and chilly place, surreal for both of us. He took me for pizza, made me mixtapes, introduced me to the Sugar Hill Gang, gave me a dozen red roses for Valentine’s Day. I took it all, wary and ecstatic. No male human being save my brother had ever really loved me before, but Geoff’s affection meant such loving was possible. Part of me prayed it would last forever. Part of me knew it would not.I don’t remember the precise reason it fell apart. Maybe because I wouldn’t sleep with him or maybe he got bored or maybe I was a confused and contradictory mess. Maybe he was young and confused himself, finding his way in a bifurcated world: white skin, black stepfather, child of Harlem and fancy boarding school. I don’t even remember how he told me, what words he used, whether we stood together in the snow outside my dorm or the pain sliced over the phone. All I remember is that it hurt deeply for awhile and then less so, and that he moved on to someone else before getting into trouble and being expelled from school.
What lessons we take from life depend so much on the classroom to which we’ve been assigned. By the time I landed in boarding school I was pretty sure I was too much to be loved: too tall, too fat, too black. There are reasons for this—absent father, mother herself unloved and overwhelmed, an omnipresent cultural representation of blackness as ugliness—but in general people did the best they could with the tools they had at the time and so this is not about assigning blame. The point is simply that I entered the world of romantic love not believing myself worthy, and so what I took from that first heartbreak was confirmation. Geoff was the first boy to break my heart but it never occurred to me to seek revenge against him. This was the right impulse but the reason behind it, strangely, was wrong.
Not everyone who breaks your heart is a monster. Not everyone who wounds you deserves to be wounded in return. Geoff was not and did not but those are not the reasons I failed to consider revenge. I sought no revenge against Geoff because his wounding of me seemed not only expected but justifiable: the sure and natural course of things. Geoff hurt me but I was never angry at his hurting, not even a little. It was my own damn fault for losing his love. (...)
Revenge, wrote Nietzsche, can be either self-preservation (striking out at a person to prevent further hurt) or readjustment (a usually futile attempt to settle scores.) Futile because revenge will not return whatever was destroyed by the action of the offender—unless that thing was honor. Limbs and loved ones and burned houses cannot be reclaimed if taken, but honor can. An intentional attack proves the attacker is not afraid of us. Revenge proves we are not afraid of him. Thus balance is restored.
In such case, writes Nietzsche, a person will forgo revenge for only three reasons:
- He loves the offender.
- He finds the offender beneath his contempt and bother.
- He kinda despises himself. “Depending on whether he projects himself strongly or weakly into the soul of his opponent and the spectators, his revenge will be more embittered or tamer; if he lacks this type of imagination entirely, he will not think of revenge at all, for in that case the feeling for ‘honor’ is not present in him and hence cannot be injured.”
Between Geoff and the first rising of my revenge lay some 30-odd years of relationships, the bulk of which I spent with one very good and decent man. S. and I met when I was 19 and he was 20. I was a sophomore in college, plowing my way forward to a more secure life. He had dropped out and was working in a restaurant and hanging out with friends, trying to figure out how to restart his life. Turned out I could help with that.
During our time together I graduated and got a job as a reporter and he went back to school and I got another job and he got his degree and I got another job and we moved to Philadelphia and he went to grad school and we got married and I got another job and he finished his Ph.D. and we moved to New York and got a dog and had a child and I wrote a novel and quit my job and had another child and he got a job and we moved to Boston and the marriage came slowly apart. My fault, or so I reasoned. If S. was a good and well-intentioned man, which he was, and if he loved me, which he did or tried to, as best he could, and if the marriage was still unsustainable then it must be because there was something deep and broken inside of myself. Almost none of the women in my family had sustained a marriage beyond a decade but we all believed this to be the result of choosing untenable men. If somehow I had managed to chose a decent guy and still couldn’t make it work, what did that mean?
Coming apart was terrible anger and pain and woundedness. The worst thing he said, during our divorce mediation, was that he feared I would take the children and move to California to be near my family. I was astonished that a man who had known me for twenty years would think I would take my children from their father, given how much my father’s absence from my life had wounded me. But then I understood: he didn’t really think I would do such a thing to be near family. He thought I might do it out of anger. Even after twenty years of knowing me, he still thought me capable of wounding my children out of spite.
Which is strange because there are no spiteful women in my family. Grudge-holders, yes; there are women in my family who can hold a grievance like Pavarotti could hold high C. But grudge-holding, of course, serves only to wound the grudge-holder; the object of unforgiveness goes skipping on with his life. Still, these seemed to be the options: wounded acceptance or self-destructive unforgiveness.
Turns out there is another way.
by Kim McLarin, TMN | Read more:
Image: Luis Molina-Pantin, Scenery III (Women's Jail), 1997
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Body Shaming Black Female Athletes Is Not Just About Race
I know, you think this article is about racism. It’s not.
Misty Copeland just became the first African-American woman to be named principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre. But when she was 13, she was rejected from a ballet academy for having the wrong body type. As an ad featuring Ms. Copeland put it, summarizing the responses she received early in her career: “Dear candidate, Thank you for your application to our ballet academy. Unfortunately, you have not been accepted. You lack the right feet, Achilles tendons, turnout, torso length, and bust.” At 13? That criticism of her body being too muscular and “mature” has followed her throughout her career. “There are people who say that I don’t have the body to be a dancer, that my legs are too muscular, that I shouldn’t be wearing a tutu, that I don’t fit in,” Copeland said in response.
What do these two highly successful athletic women have in common? They seem to endure more body shaming than their white, less successful counterparts.
(Still not about racism.)
In her novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes, “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.” Morrison’s assessment of social ideals for physical beauty as destructive is harshly accurate. We have established a definition of beauty so narrow that almost no one can live up to it. Women struggle to fit within the constrictions of social expectations of thin, youthful, sexuality as constricting as a Victorian corset. We display these paragons of beauty from billboards and magazine covers and Victoria Secret ads with the full knowledge that because of the use of photo-enhancing, lighting, makeup, and other morphing techniques, the women shown are as real as the CGI-created Hulk in the Avengersmovies.
There’s plenty of evidence showing how harmful this beauty standard is to society. The typical American woman spends about $15,000 on makeup over a lifetime (if that same money were invested into a retirement plan, it would give her about $100,000 at age 70). Even though Americans spend the most on cosmetics in the world, we are ranked only 23rd in one list of “satisfaction with life.” In a futile effort to fit this mythical ideal of beauty, millions of American women torture their feet with high heels, undergo unnecessary cosmetic surgeries, starve themselves, and make themselves physically and mentally miserable—all over an imaginary ideal they didn’t even create.
OK, I lied: Some of the body shaming of athletic black women is definitely a racist rejection of black women’s bodies that don’t conform to the traditional body shapes of white athletes and dancers. No one questions the beauty of black actresses such as Kerry Washington (Scandal) or Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave) because they fit the lithe image perpetuated by women’s fashion magazines. The body shaming of Williams and Copeland is partly because they don’t fit the Western ideal of femininity. But another cause is our disrespectful ideal of the feminine body in general.
by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Time | Read more:
Image: Julian Finney—Getty Images
Fake Road Trippin' Through Europe in a Computer-Generated Truck
The call of the open road can be unrelenting. Once you hear it, it takes hold of you, whispering “go, get out” every time you're in the driver’s seat. You start zooming out your GPS just for fun. Anything with wheels seems like a conduit for adventure.
In most cases, I would advise you to just go for it. But if you simply can’t throw off your shackles, there is another option. It’s called Euro Truck Simulator 2.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 (or, as its buddies call it, ETS2) is made by a Czech company called SCS Software, and it’s pretty much what it sounds like—a simulation game in which you drive a truck around Europe. You start out with a dream and not much else, working as a trucker-for-hire for companies that want to ship dry milk from Duisburg to Dortmund or lumber from Germany to France.
You make money by completing jobs well and on time, and lose it for damaging cargo, breaking traffic laws, or crushing the small innocent vehicles that drive too close to the median. If you shift your gears right, you can build up enough cash to buy your own trucks and truck yards and, of course, redecorate your truck with fun paint jobs. And you do all this by “driving”—little taps of the arrow keys that rev you up and down the highways and byways of scores of realistically-rendered European cities (and even more, if you install the expansion packs).
The original Euro Truck Simulator wasn’t much to CB radio home about, and neither were its single-nation followups. But Euro Truck Simulator 2 has garnered critical acclaim, several awards, and a cultish following. More dedicated fans trade favorite routes on Reddit, post time-lapse videos of good drives, and even build themselves desktop control centers complete with pedals, steering wheels, and multiple screens.
While some enjoy the challenge of becoming a trucking titan, others seem to prefer just zoning out and “driving,” taking life turn by turn. In a feature for PC Gamer, Andy Kelly documents a multi-day trip, from Odense, Denmark to Bergen, Norway: “Euro Truck is a bizarre kind of therapy for me,” he writes. “It’s pure escapism, with trucks.”
It struck me, while investigating this fervor, that Euro Truck Simulator 2 might be a great option for someone who can’t squeeze in a European road trip whenever she wants—in other words, someone like me. So with all the spontaneity of someone stuffing their things in a backpack and taking off, I paid my $23 (way less than a tank of gas in Europe), chose my rig, and set to truckin’.
In most cases, I would advise you to just go for it. But if you simply can’t throw off your shackles, there is another option. It’s called Euro Truck Simulator 2.
You make money by completing jobs well and on time, and lose it for damaging cargo, breaking traffic laws, or crushing the small innocent vehicles that drive too close to the median. If you shift your gears right, you can build up enough cash to buy your own trucks and truck yards and, of course, redecorate your truck with fun paint jobs. And you do all this by “driving”—little taps of the arrow keys that rev you up and down the highways and byways of scores of realistically-rendered European cities (and even more, if you install the expansion packs).
The original Euro Truck Simulator wasn’t much to CB radio home about, and neither were its single-nation followups. But Euro Truck Simulator 2 has garnered critical acclaim, several awards, and a cultish following. More dedicated fans trade favorite routes on Reddit, post time-lapse videos of good drives, and even build themselves desktop control centers complete with pedals, steering wheels, and multiple screens.
While some enjoy the challenge of becoming a trucking titan, others seem to prefer just zoning out and “driving,” taking life turn by turn. In a feature for PC Gamer, Andy Kelly documents a multi-day trip, from Odense, Denmark to Bergen, Norway: “Euro Truck is a bizarre kind of therapy for me,” he writes. “It’s pure escapism, with trucks.”
It struck me, while investigating this fervor, that Euro Truck Simulator 2 might be a great option for someone who can’t squeeze in a European road trip whenever she wants—in other words, someone like me. So with all the spontaneity of someone stuffing their things in a backpack and taking off, I paid my $23 (way less than a tank of gas in Europe), chose my rig, and set to truckin’.
by Cara Giaimo, Atlas Obscura | Read more:
Image: Euro Truck Simulator 2/Joshua Livingston/Flikr
Is This a Selfie?
All selfies are photos. Not all photos are selfies. This distinction is lost on many — including brands on Twitter, television news anchors, your parents, and let’s be real, newspapers — which have used the word “selfie” to describe group photos, buildings, scenery and more. It’s time to clear up what exactly a selfie is.
I held a camera and took a photo of myself.
That is a selfie.
I took a photo of myself and two friends.
That is a selfie. Also called a groupie.
I set the self-timer on a camera, stepped back five feet, and it took my photo.
That’s in the selfie family, but isn’t a pure selfie. Consider it a self-portrait.
I took a photo of a slice of pizza and called it a “pizza selfie.”
Are you in the photo with the pizza?
No, it is just of the pizza.
Not a selfie.
I took a photo of a photo of myself.
That is a photo of a photo of yourself.
I used a selfie stick to take a photograph of myself.
That is a selfie.
I used a 300-foot selfie stick to take a photograph of myself, but because of the distance, I am barely visible in the photo.
That is still a selfie.
I used a 300-foot selfie stick to take a photograph of myself, but before the camera went off, a migrating trumpeter swan grabbed the camera, somehow aimed it at me, and tapped the shutter.
The bird took a photo of you. Not a selfie.
The bird also took a photo of itself.
Then the bird also took a selfie.
I swallowed a camera that is programmed to take a photograph every time I breathe.
Is that safe? Please check with a doctor.
by Jason Fiefer, NY Tiimes | Read more:
Video: The Chainsmokers/YouTube
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
GOP Enters Panic Mode
[ed. Hilarious. But, as much as it pains me, I have to agree with The Donald: McCain was no war hero. What's heroic about being captured as a POW? You survive (or not). That's it. Many others have had similar experiences. McCain hasn't done shit for veterans. Plus, he gave us Sarah Palin. 'Nuff said.]
But the biggest mistake the GOP did is their inability to comprehend that either the US public enjoys being trolled, or is just so sick of the left/right paradigm, it will gladly latch on to anyone, even the most farcical, self-lampooning candidate, who promises a break from the old routine which has proven not to work for the common American.
The latest confirmation that the Trump "nightmare" is causing not only sleepless nights but also panic attacks for a GOP that is scrambling to respond to the Donald's juggernaut is not only open attempts at caricature, which however merely feed Trump's ego and push him to troll his accusers even more, but to use the influential Des Moines Register, Iowa's largest newspaper and a critical voice when it comes to endorsing, or panning, presidential candidates in this first caucus state, to call on Donald Trump to drop out of the 2016 presidential race.
Officially the Register's position was simply in escalation to the furor over the real estate magnate's weekend comments about Sen. John McCain's service during the Vietnam War. As Fox reports, in an editorial piece published late Monday, the Register said Trump's comments were "not merely offensive, they were disgraceful. So much so, in fact, that they threaten to derail not just his campaign, but the manner in which we choose our nominees for president."
The paper, the most influential in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, went on to say that if "[Trump] had not already disqualified himself through his attempts to demonize immigrants as rapists and drug dealers, he certainly did so by questioning [McCain's] war record."Unofficially, it is called throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks.
Following this weekend's firestorm, Trump - who clearly enjoys playing the starring role in every social scandal - appeared to back off some of his comments Monday, telling Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that "if there was a misunderstanding, I would totally take that back." However, Trump also said he "used to like [McCain] a lot. I supported him ... but I would love to see him do a much better job taking care of the veterans."
Whether Trump's apology is sincere or not, the nationwide response he got for his comments, coupled with his popularity surge, will merely encourage him. And since for the real estate magnate, advertising is everything, the fact that he has become the only topic of discussion, whether at the water cooler or during the prime time news circuit, expect the Trump-eting to continue to whatever bitter end is in store.
by Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge | Read more:
Image: williambanzai7
The NRA Was Here - Until It Wasn't
[ed. See also: Coming in Heavy and Gundamentalism.]
And there was a massacre in a South Carolina church.
As a gun owner, I’d like to think that four of those five headlines could have been avoided.
Let’s say there could be a national organization committed to gun safety and common sense. Such an organization could fight hard for intensive safety training for gun buyers, educate the gun-owning populace about the dangers of open carry, participate in a feasibility study about arming drunken frat boys, and help establish a timeline for gently disarming octogenarians suffering from Alzheimer’s.
The organization could be led by people with a formidable collective expertise about firearms, making it a trusted and respected go-to source on the subject. It could have a PR department skilled in reaching out to both sides of the trigger, but not afraid to take a clear stand on a particular side when the common welfare of everyone called for it. It could take these stands because it would be a gun owners’ association, an advocate for the sport and the hobby, and a responsible organizational citizen.
As such, it would never dream of acting as a lobbyist for the manufacturers. If anything, it would lobby the manufacturers to become members and adopt the organization’s platforms on safety, integrity, social responsibility, and civic sanity.
Such potential the NRA has pissed away.
But I don’t want to come across as being completely down on the National Rifle Association. I’m not the type to send donations every time the group has yelped for funds, but that doesn’t mean I’ve never been a paying member.
As an idealist, I could cling to the memory of an organization that was once a proud model of personal integrity and civic responsibility. As a gun owner, I could look to the group’s non-political activities and see some really valuable resources still being offered to young people, hunters, trainers, range owners, safety officers, and a dozen other groups connected with shooting sports.
And besides, when I joined the NRA I got $2,500 worth of insurance for my guns, for free.
But as an average American, the organization makes me ill. It knows about the inadequate training and clueless buying and haphazard range regulation that goes on, but just try advocating changing any of that through legal requirements. Any lawmaker who does is slapped with an NRA-sanctioned TYRANT label, and the group’s full arsenal of political influence is brought to bear against the “gun-grabbing traitor.” (Go to the NRA-ILA web site, but have plenty of antacids on hand.)
In an ideal world where things make sense, a respected and respectable NRA could intervene in the name of safety and responsibility when, say, a reckless state lawmaker goes the other way and tries to remove any requirements for gun ownership, except maybe needing to solemnly recite the Second Amendment from memory. And it would intervene when that lawmaker ignores the advice of law enforcers who know, from decades of experience that a rookie-level legislator doesn’t have, what the fallout can be from gun laws conceived by dipshits.
But the NRA doesn’t intervene on behalf of anything that benefits or advances a civil society. Instead, it just rants and bellows and lies and threatens and makes fools of members like me. Which is why I’m not a member anymore.
Okay, wait. There was that one time, just a year or so ago, when the NRA actually spoke against certain gun owners and condemned a weekend flurry of open-carry wackos who carried their military-style rifles into Texas restaurants. Wisely, carefully, the NRA author of that online statement pointed out that scaring the living hell out of unarmed families is not an effective way to convert new souls to the gun cause.
The exact term that the NRA statement used for this activity was “downright weird.”
I had to agree that carrying ARs into Waffle Houses and causing customers to shit themselves was a bizarre way to try and make gun friends. But the extremists on the other side pushed back hard, and just 24 hours later the NRA erased its statement and blamed it on an “unauthorized” scribe who presumably would be executed immediately by an in-house firing squad.
It could have been the NRA’s finest hour. The organization could have used its powerful voice to project continued calm analysis of a stupid situation. A sudden turn toward rational leadership in a mini-crisis where leaders were needed could have brought swarms of new pro-gun converts into the nest. Hell, I would have re-upped my membership immediately and proudly. Go, NRA!
By rediscovering its long-lost main focus on safety and responsibility, the NRA could have refereed a conflict that will only become more dangerous. Unarmed bystanders will keep hurling insults and angry protests at ignorant armed madmen—and women—who threaten the unarmed and their families. And armed advocates will keep wanting to “educate” the ignorant unarmed about the safety and normality of military rifles in social settings.
Eventually one of the parties will find the continued conflict intolerable. Hint: it won’t be the unarmed that cause the resulting tragedy.
This is why the NRA tried to defuse the tension by telling the extremists to keep their rifles at home because the “education” campaign wasn’t working as intended, and never could. It was alienating the undecided and pushing fence-sitters over to the I Will Never Own a Gun Because Those Fuckers Are Crazy side of the divide.
For an all-too-brief moment in history, the NRA shined brightly as a voice of reason and guidance about a “rifles in your face” campaign that was misguided and self-defeating. But then, once again and literally overnight, the NRA ran away and resumed its usual mantra: People can perish. Profits are cherished.
As a gun owning NRA member, I didn’t want to fight against gun safety. I refused to swear allegiance to high-capacity ammo magazines. I wasn’t an automatic advocate for any firearms or munitions manufacturer just because it existed. And because I have a heart, I couldn’t go into a defensive posture every time a mass shooting happens, deflecting attention away from the pain others are experiencing and onto my own Second Amendment rights instead.
In the news lately: a woman adjusting her bra holster shot herself in the head, a guy open-carrying the handgun he’d owned for one day had the gun stolen by an armed robber, Texas encourages guns on college campuses, and Ronald Reagan allegedly carried concealed well into his 80s after the attempt on his presidential life.“Universal” background checks will never be “universal” because criminals won’t submit to them, and magazine bans will only put the law-abiding at a disadvantage against multiple attackers.— David Keene, Past President, National Rifle Association
And there was a massacre in a South Carolina church.
As a gun owner, I’d like to think that four of those five headlines could have been avoided.
Let’s say there could be a national organization committed to gun safety and common sense. Such an organization could fight hard for intensive safety training for gun buyers, educate the gun-owning populace about the dangers of open carry, participate in a feasibility study about arming drunken frat boys, and help establish a timeline for gently disarming octogenarians suffering from Alzheimer’s.The organization could be led by people with a formidable collective expertise about firearms, making it a trusted and respected go-to source on the subject. It could have a PR department skilled in reaching out to both sides of the trigger, but not afraid to take a clear stand on a particular side when the common welfare of everyone called for it. It could take these stands because it would be a gun owners’ association, an advocate for the sport and the hobby, and a responsible organizational citizen.
As such, it would never dream of acting as a lobbyist for the manufacturers. If anything, it would lobby the manufacturers to become members and adopt the organization’s platforms on safety, integrity, social responsibility, and civic sanity.
Such potential the NRA has pissed away.
But I don’t want to come across as being completely down on the National Rifle Association. I’m not the type to send donations every time the group has yelped for funds, but that doesn’t mean I’ve never been a paying member.
As an idealist, I could cling to the memory of an organization that was once a proud model of personal integrity and civic responsibility. As a gun owner, I could look to the group’s non-political activities and see some really valuable resources still being offered to young people, hunters, trainers, range owners, safety officers, and a dozen other groups connected with shooting sports.
And besides, when I joined the NRA I got $2,500 worth of insurance for my guns, for free.
But as an average American, the organization makes me ill. It knows about the inadequate training and clueless buying and haphazard range regulation that goes on, but just try advocating changing any of that through legal requirements. Any lawmaker who does is slapped with an NRA-sanctioned TYRANT label, and the group’s full arsenal of political influence is brought to bear against the “gun-grabbing traitor.” (Go to the NRA-ILA web site, but have plenty of antacids on hand.)
In an ideal world where things make sense, a respected and respectable NRA could intervene in the name of safety and responsibility when, say, a reckless state lawmaker goes the other way and tries to remove any requirements for gun ownership, except maybe needing to solemnly recite the Second Amendment from memory. And it would intervene when that lawmaker ignores the advice of law enforcers who know, from decades of experience that a rookie-level legislator doesn’t have, what the fallout can be from gun laws conceived by dipshits.
But the NRA doesn’t intervene on behalf of anything that benefits or advances a civil society. Instead, it just rants and bellows and lies and threatens and makes fools of members like me. Which is why I’m not a member anymore.
Okay, wait. There was that one time, just a year or so ago, when the NRA actually spoke against certain gun owners and condemned a weekend flurry of open-carry wackos who carried their military-style rifles into Texas restaurants. Wisely, carefully, the NRA author of that online statement pointed out that scaring the living hell out of unarmed families is not an effective way to convert new souls to the gun cause.
The exact term that the NRA statement used for this activity was “downright weird.”
I had to agree that carrying ARs into Waffle Houses and causing customers to shit themselves was a bizarre way to try and make gun friends. But the extremists on the other side pushed back hard, and just 24 hours later the NRA erased its statement and blamed it on an “unauthorized” scribe who presumably would be executed immediately by an in-house firing squad.
It could have been the NRA’s finest hour. The organization could have used its powerful voice to project continued calm analysis of a stupid situation. A sudden turn toward rational leadership in a mini-crisis where leaders were needed could have brought swarms of new pro-gun converts into the nest. Hell, I would have re-upped my membership immediately and proudly. Go, NRA!
By rediscovering its long-lost main focus on safety and responsibility, the NRA could have refereed a conflict that will only become more dangerous. Unarmed bystanders will keep hurling insults and angry protests at ignorant armed madmen—and women—who threaten the unarmed and their families. And armed advocates will keep wanting to “educate” the ignorant unarmed about the safety and normality of military rifles in social settings.
Eventually one of the parties will find the continued conflict intolerable. Hint: it won’t be the unarmed that cause the resulting tragedy.
This is why the NRA tried to defuse the tension by telling the extremists to keep their rifles at home because the “education” campaign wasn’t working as intended, and never could. It was alienating the undecided and pushing fence-sitters over to the I Will Never Own a Gun Because Those Fuckers Are Crazy side of the divide.
For an all-too-brief moment in history, the NRA shined brightly as a voice of reason and guidance about a “rifles in your face” campaign that was misguided and self-defeating. But then, once again and literally overnight, the NRA ran away and resumed its usual mantra: People can perish. Profits are cherished.
As a gun owning NRA member, I didn’t want to fight against gun safety. I refused to swear allegiance to high-capacity ammo magazines. I wasn’t an automatic advocate for any firearms or munitions manufacturer just because it existed. And because I have a heart, I couldn’t go into a defensive posture every time a mass shooting happens, deflecting attention away from the pain others are experiencing and onto my own Second Amendment rights instead.
by Robert Lawrence, McSweeny's | Read more:
Image: The Truth About Guns
Don't Call the Cops
[ed. Calling all criminals! Burglaries, stolen cars, vandalism, arson... no problem!]
Janelle La Chaux paid a visit to Oakland police headquarters Friday to fill out a crime report. She believed her former roommate on 31st Street had stolen her 22-inch flat-screen and she wanted to document the theft.
"I could have called them when I was at the place where it happened, but I just decided to come down here because I don't want to wait," La Chaux, 30, said as she filled out a form in the lobby. "Sometimes I call them and it just takes a long, long time to come."
Nowadays, police may not come at all.
On Tuesday, the city laid off 80 officers to help eliminate a $30.5 million budget deficit, prompting the department to announce that officers would no longer be dispatched to take reports for most nonviolent crimes. "With current levels of staffing, we are unable to respond to many lower-priority calls," said Officer Jeff Thomason, a police spokesman.
Instead, Oakland residents now have to file certain crime reports online or visit a police station. Those without a computer can ask that a blank form be mailed to them or pick one up at a library. Residents can still call 911 to report emergencies and crimes such as shootings, robberies, rapes and assaults.
Janelle La Chaux paid a visit to Oakland police headquarters Friday to fill out a crime report. She believed her former roommate on 31st Street had stolen her 22-inch flat-screen and she wanted to document the theft.
"I could have called them when I was at the place where it happened, but I just decided to come down here because I don't want to wait," La Chaux, 30, said as she filled out a form in the lobby. "Sometimes I call them and it just takes a long, long time to come."
Nowadays, police may not come at all.
On Tuesday, the city laid off 80 officers to help eliminate a $30.5 million budget deficit, prompting the department to announce that officers would no longer be dispatched to take reports for most nonviolent crimes. "With current levels of staffing, we are unable to respond to many lower-priority calls," said Officer Jeff Thomason, a police spokesman.Instead, Oakland residents now have to file certain crime reports online or visit a police station. Those without a computer can ask that a blank form be mailed to them or pick one up at a library. Residents can still call 911 to report emergencies and crimes such as shootings, robberies, rapes and assaults.
'Never going to hang up'
No matter how crimes are reported, police said the department still wants to hear about them - even if the layoffs mean that no one will investigate if a suspect can't be identified or is long gone.
"You can still call the Oakland Police Department and say, 'I need a report.' We'll always direct you to the right place," Thomason said. "We're never going to hang up on someone and say, 'We don't do that anymore.' "
Crime analysts will use the reports to discern patterns, said Lt. Jim Meeks, who oversees investigations of property crimes and theft.
"It's designed to still provide us with intelligence," Meeks said. "It still counts. The only way we're going to know that something is going on is through the reporting."
Over the past two years, residents have been able to go to oaklandpolice.com and report lost property, theft, vandalism, vehicle burglary and vehicle tampering. In the past, however, people could ask for an officer to come take a report. That will no longer be the case.
By Aug. 2, Oakland police intend to expand the online system - called Coplogic - so residents can report seven other types of crimes, including residential burglaries in which the suspects aren't known.
"There will be no follow-up investigation and the primary purpose for filing the report is for insurance purposes," according to the department.
No matter how crimes are reported, police said the department still wants to hear about them - even if the layoffs mean that no one will investigate if a suspect can't be identified or is long gone.
"You can still call the Oakland Police Department and say, 'I need a report.' We'll always direct you to the right place," Thomason said. "We're never going to hang up on someone and say, 'We don't do that anymore.' "
Crime analysts will use the reports to discern patterns, said Lt. Jim Meeks, who oversees investigations of property crimes and theft.
"It's designed to still provide us with intelligence," Meeks said. "It still counts. The only way we're going to know that something is going on is through the reporting."
Over the past two years, residents have been able to go to oaklandpolice.com and report lost property, theft, vandalism, vehicle burglary and vehicle tampering. In the past, however, people could ask for an officer to come take a report. That will no longer be the case.
By Aug. 2, Oakland police intend to expand the online system - called Coplogic - so residents can report seven other types of crimes, including residential burglaries in which the suspects aren't known.
"There will be no follow-up investigation and the primary purpose for filing the report is for insurance purposes," according to the department.
by Henry K. Lee, SFGate | Read more:
Image: Chris/Kevin
Up in the Air: The Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
This sort of thing happens to Schlappig nearly everywhere he goes. On this trip, his fans will witness Schlappig's latest mission: a weekend jaunt that will slingshoot him across East Asia — Hong Kong, Jakarta, Tokyo — and back to New York, in 69 hours. He'll rarely leave the airports, and when he does he'll rest his head only in luxury hotels. With wide ears, Buddy Holly glasses and a shock of strawberry-blond hair, Schlappig resembles Ralphie from A Christmas Story if he'd grown up to become a J. Crew model. Back beyond the curtain in business class, a dozen jowly faces cast a stony gaze on the crescendos of laughter and spilled champagne — another spoiled trust-fund kid, they've judged, living off his parents' largesse. But Schlappig has a job. This is his job.
Schlappig, 25, is one of the biggest stars among an elite group of obsessive flyers whose mission is to outwit the airlines. They're self-styled competitors with a singular objective: fly for free, as much as they can, without getting caught. In the past 20 years, the Internet has drawn together this strange band of savants with an odd mix of skills: the digital talent of a code writer, a lawyer's love affair with fine print, and a passion for airline bureaucracy. It's a whirring hive mind of IT whizzes, stats majors, aviation nerds and everyone else you knew who skipped the prom.
Schlappig owes his small slice of fame to his blog "One Mile at a Time," a diary of a young man living the life of the world's most implausible airline ad. Posting as often as six times a day, he metes out meticulous counsel on the art of travel hacking — known in this world as the Hobby. It's not simply how-to tips that draw his fans, it's the vicarious thrill of Schlappig's nonstop-luxury life — one recent flight with a personal shower and butler service, or the time Schlappig was chauffeured across a tarmac in a Porsche. But his fans aren't just travel readers — they're gamers, and Schlappig is teaching them how to win.
"I'm very fortunate in that I do what I love," says Schlappig, stretching out in an ergonomic armchair as we reach 30,000 feet and just before the mushroom consommé arrives. In the past year, since ditching the Seattle apartment he shared with his ex-boyfriend, he's flown more than 400,000 miles, enough to circumnavigate the globe 16 times. It's been 43 exhausting weeks since he slept in a bed that wasn't in a hotel, and he spends an average of six hours daily in the sky. He has a freewheeling itinerary, often planning his next destination upon hitting the airport. Just last week, he rocketed through Dallas, Dubai, Oman, Barcelona and Frankfurt. Yet for all his travel, it would be a mistake to call Schlappig a nomad. The moment that he whiffs the airless ambience of a pressurized cabin, he's home.
"An airplane is my bedroom," he says, stretching to reach his complimentary slippers. "It's my office, and it's my playroom." The privilege of reclining in this personal suite costs around $15,000. Schlappig typically makes this trip when he's bored on the weekend. He pays for it like he pays for everything: with a sliver of his gargantuan cache of frequent-flyer miles that grows only bigger by the day. Hong Kong, he says, is his favorite hub, and "the only city I could ever live in." The 16-hour trip has become so routine that it's begun to feel like a pajama-clad blur of champagne and caviar — or, in Schlappig's terminology, a "two-hangover flight."
As the sun descends over the polar circle, a recumbent Schlappig loses himself in a 2 Broke Girls marathon playing on a free-standing flatscreen. "The fact is, we are beating the airlines at their own game," he said last year at a gathering of the Hobby's top talent. "The people who run these programs are idiots." Then he paused. "And we'll always be one step ahead of them."
by Ben Wofford, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Bryan Derballa
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.
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.
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.”
“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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