Studio Musicians

[ed. See also: (from the same film) Lykke Li - I Follow Rivers ]

Colouring Books Used to be Fun. When Did They Get So... Mindful?

Although I’m a grown-up, I always get a colouring book for Christmas. Last year, I knew something was up when, instead of “Tudor Fashions” or “Mythical Beasts”, it had the words “art therapy” stamped across the front. Staring back at me for my colouring pleasure was the baroque visage of a cat; the face was fashioned from tiny boxes, each of those boxes contained more tiny boxes and the miniature colour-me rhomboids in its unblinking irises – barely large enough to fit the nib of a pencil – receded to infinity. Looking at the image, I felt faintly distressed. Nothing about it said: kick off your shoes and crack open the Caran d’Ache.

“These exquisite art therapy patterns allow you to access your inner creativity, balancing your physical, spiritual and emotional well-being,” says the Bromleigh House series Relax With Art. “You will embark on a personal journey exploring the world of creative art, discovering the secrets of harmony, balance [and] tranquillity and accessing your inner voice.” Five minutes colouring the Inca moggie and my inner voice was baying for release.

Last year the Telegraph ran a piece saying that French women were turning to adult colouring books in droves. Sylvie, a crèche worker from Marseilles, described herself as “anguished and stressed by nature” and colouring was helping. Last year that melancholic nation sold 3.5 million colouring books in the art therapy category. Similar titles now have vast audiences in the US and UK. Clearly I was missing something. (...)

The bizarre thing about the new adult colouring books is they are virtually impossible to complete. They have to be difficult, because adults are still embarrassed to be seen working away at infant activities. “So many people have said to me that they used to do secret colouring in when their kids were in bed,” said Johanna Basford recently: her ornate Secret Garden colouring book has sold over 1.5 million copies and Zooey Deschanel is a fan. “Now it is socially acceptable, it’s a category of its own.”

This “category” is a piece of marketing ­genius. By branding themselves as “analogue” activities, the new colouring books seize on our half-formed anxieties about living a digital life, providing commercially packaged screen-free pastimes that promise to reconnect us with ourselves. The analogue hobby then becomes a craze, with people sharing their work on Twitter or Instagram, thus bringing themselves right back to the digital world they were so keen to escape.

But the main thing making colouring “socially acceptable” is the link to mental health. The mindfulness industry has planted its flag on the business and many books are being sold as an offshoot of meditation. So you can now buy one title that calms your nerves, eases your mental pain, helps you to live in the present and become a creative artist all in one go. Result!

by Kate Mossman, New Statesman |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Takeuchi Seiho (1864 - 1942)
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Watanabe Seitei, Ducks in the Rushes
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Herman's Hermits

20 Home Pages, 500 Trackers Loaded: Media Succumbs to Monitoring Frenzy

When landing on Politico’s home page, your browser loads about 100 pieces of code known as Trackers – behind your back. These trackers are used mostly for advertising: detecting/building user profiles, serving targeted ads, picking up the brand with the best fit on a realtime bidding platform. Other trackers are beacons aimed, for instance, at following the reader from one site to another (the kind you gleefully thank when the North Face jacket you once looked at ends up pursuing you for months). Another kind of tracker is quite indispensable, it involves analytics, counting users, sessions, time spent, etc. With the advent of the social web came all sorts of trackers, users’ connectors to social or affiliation programs. For good measure, some sites also insert chunks of code aimed at organizing A/B Testing — submitting configuration A to a segment of the audience and configuration B to the other to see what works best. (Weirdly enough, A/B trackers are by far the least deployed, accounting for 1% of the total.)

In fairness, Politico is often a fast site and doesn’t always load its full stack of trackers. Most likely, the loading process times out (as show before, when I wanted to make a screenshot of the page, it was stuck to “only” 89 trackers.

Politico might be the most trackers-saturated site of our random sample, but others are not far off. The Daily Mail is one of the most popular news sites in the world with 26m uniques visitors per month at home and 67m UVs in the US, according to Comscore. A single click on its Mail Online flagship sends a whopping 672 requests, but it manages to run them at blazing speed (19 sec loading time) for a feather weight of 3 Mb, including 2.7 Mb for 578 super-optimized pictures that don’t exceed 120 Kb each.

The Mail Online wins many digital speed/weight records. It is one of the most optimized web sites in the world (see our last week story on the obesity plaguing the news industry). But when it comes to monitoring users, The Mail Online also scores high with 79 trackers loaded in one stroke (see below), of which I was able to detail only 63 in my main table:

A broader analysis conducted last week on a random selection of large news sites shows a surprising high reliance on trackers of all types: On average, their home pages load about 30 trackers (article pages usually do less). Here is the ranking:

In total, the 20 sites sample collected 516 trackers. They come from about 100 vendors displayed on this column’s header chart of (As I’m sure I’ll find its way into various presentations in the coming months, the original Keynote file is available upon request — always happy to help.) To measure this, I simply loaded the Ghostery browser extension on my Chrome and Firefox browsers (I wanted to detect discrepancies — none found). Finally, I got a table that looked like this:

The table above is available as a Google Docs Spreadsheet here and in PDF format here.

About 60% of this trackers are ad-related. The crowd is obviously dominated by the two players commanding 60% of the global digital advertising: Google (53 trackers spotted) and Facebook (33). Then comes a cohort of players, some serious, others more questionable.

by Frédéric Filloux, Monday Note | Read more:
Images: uncredited

The Smartphone is the New Sun

Today, there are well over 2bn smartphones in use, and there are between 3.5 and 4.5bn people with a mobile phone of some kind, out of only a little over 5bn adults on earth. Over the next few years almost all of the people who don't yet have a phone will get one, and almost all of the phones on earth will become smartphones. A decade ago some of that was subject to debate - today it isn't. What all those people pay for data, and how they charge their phones, may be a challenge, but the smartphone itself is close to a universal product for humanity - the first the tech industry has ever had. 

With billions of people buying a device every two years, on average, the phone business dwarfs the PC business, which has an install base of 1.5-1.6bn devices replaced every 4-5 years. PC sales are a bit over 300m units a year where phone sales are now close to 2bn, of which well over half, and growing, are now smartphones.

That in turn means that the smartphone supply chain is replacing the PC supply chain as a key driver of the tech industry. In the past if you wanted to put a 'computer' in something, after a certain level of complexity that meant a PC - commodity PC components and a commodity PC operating system (i.e. Linux or Windows). Hence, ATMs run Windows XP. Mobile supplants that with a new supply chain. The smartphone wars mean there's now a firehose of cheap, low-power, ever-more-sophisticated smartphone components available for anyone else to use - it's as though someone dumped a shipping container worth of Lego on the floor and we're working out what to make. In parallel, the contract manufacturers that make all of those smartphones can also make other things with those components. These two factors - the components and the contract manufacturers, together the supply chain - are behind the explosion of smart devices of every kinds - drones, wearables, internet of things, connected homes, cars, TVs and so on.

All of this also means that the companies and places that set the agenda in tech have changed. In the past you'd have gone to Seattle, Finland and Japan to see the future, or you'd have talked to Microsoft, Intel, Nokia or NTT DoCoMo. Now, you talk to Apple, Google or Facebook, Qualcomm, Mediatek or ARM, and go to the San Francisco Bay area, or China.

When we ask, then, how many people will own a smart watch, or a tablet or smart thermostat and so on, or how connected cars work, or who will control them or what software they will run, it seems to me that the best way to think of this is as a solar system - the smartphone is the Sun and everything else orbits around it. Those other segments might be big or small and near or far, and there will be moons too. Some will be full of life, some interesting, some important, others boring but worthwhile. Some, like Pluto, might not seem to have much to do with the smartphone at all, really (smart meters, perhaps?), but the pull is always there in some form. Some devices will have their own computing and UI and leverage smartphone components, and others will just be dumb glass, sensors or pipes that are explicitly dependent on a smartphone. But for almost everything, the smartphone industry supplies the components and manufacturers, and the smartphone itself is mostly how you control and interact.

In this light, incidentally, Satya Nadella's suggestion that Xbox is no longer core was as interesting as the end of 'Windows Everywhere' (which I discussed here). Microsoft has been working on adding computing to TV since before phones even had screens. But it turns out that it's the smartphone, not the TV, that's the centre of the experience, and the TV is dumb glass just as the mobile network is a dumb pipe.

by Benedict Evans |  Read more:

Image: Andreesen Horowitz

The Deepest Dive

Modern free diving is a sport in which divers, on a single breath, descend hundreds of feet, into cold and darkness, and often pass out before they return. It is frequently described as the world’s second most dangerous sport, after jumping off skyscrapers with parachutes. There are eight disciplines, three of which are conducted in a pool; the rest are called deep disciplines. The pool disciplines are static apnea, which is holding one’s breath; dynamic with fins (swimming underwater as far as one can, sometimes with flippers or with a monofin, which looks like a mermaid’s tail); and dynamic without fins. The five main deep disciplines are free immersion, which involves pulling oneself up and down a rope in open water; constant weight, in which a diver wears fins and a small amount of weight; constant weight without fins; variable weight, in which a diver descends on a metal device called a sled and swims to the surface; and no limits, in which a diver rides a sled and is then pulled to the surface by an air bag. Competitions are not held in no limits or variable weight, because they are so dangerous; divers can only attempt records. No divers have died in free-diving competitions. (Death by free diving usually occurs when spear fishermen who dive alone stay down too long. A few years ago, one drowned when he speared a huge grouper that fled into a hole; the fisherman’s spear gun was tied to his wrist and he couldn’t get free.) Divers, however, have died trying to set records in no limits. The most famous case was that of a twenty-eight-year-old Frenchwoman named Audrey Mestre, who drowned in 2002, during a poorly supervised dive with her husband, when her air bag didn’t inflate, leaving her too deep to reach the surface.

The most prestigious discipline is constant weight—the diver must return to the surface with the weight that he or she wore to descend. The women’s record for constant weight is ninety-six metres, which took three minutes and thirty-four seconds. (The men’s record is a hundred and twenty-two metres.) For women, a hundred metres is a barrier something like the four-minute mile used to be, and the diver who is the first to accomplish the feat will have a prominent place in the annals of the sport. Only two women are thought to be capable of it. One is Sara Campbell, a British diver who lives in Egypt, and the other is Natalia Molchanova, a Russian who lives in Moscow. Campbell set the record of ninety-six metres in April, in the Bahamas, breaking Molchanova’s record of ninety-five, which had broken Campbell’s record of ninety. Five days after Campbell reached ninety-six metres, she dived to a hundred, returned to the surface, took two breaths, and passed out. (A safety diver caught her.) The rules governing record dives require that a diver remain conscious for sixty seconds after surfacing, so Campbell’s dive was nullified. (...)

The day before a competition, a diver announces the dive that he or she will attempt. This gives the judges time to send scuba divers to set the rope at the proper length and to leave at the bottom a plate with a tag that the free diver brings back to the surface. The diver attaches a lanyard to the rope with a carabiner for safety, but if he pulls the rope with his hands, except within a certain zone at the bottom, he is disqualified. Many divers, Campbell among them, don’t like to wear goggles or a mask during competition and so dive with their eyes closed most of the way. (As for knowing where the surface is, Molchanova has written, “It is possible to feel the thickness of water layer above and below you, in front of you and behind.”) I asked Campbell whether she could announce a hundred-metre dive, then, once she’d started, decide whether she could complete it. She shook her head. “You commit to a dive or you don’t,” she said. “If any part of my mind has an awareness that I can turn, I probably will turn. For me, the process of a dive starts a week before the dive. If you start training yourself to think, I’ll announce a hundred, but maybe I’ll turn at eighty, well, it takes only a split second to grab the line for a negative thought, and that’s your dive.” (...)

Campbell did not dive the next day, which was Saturday. On Sunday morning, in the white-hot Egyptian sun, I went with her to the Hyperbaric Medical Center, in Sharm al-Sheikh, a small building with glass doors. The biggest object in the office was a hyperbaric chamber the size of a small house trailer—it looked like a propane tank—for treating scuba divers suffering from the bends, which is caused by excessive nitrogen in the tissues and blood. (Free divers do not typically get the bends, apparently because there is not enough nitrogen in a single held breath to provoke it.) The doctor, a heavyset Egyptian, asked Campbell about her symptoms. She said she felt a little better. The doctor made some notes, and then he said, “You shouldn’t compete. You shouldn’t risk your life.”

Campbell exhaled, and her jaw seemed to tighten. “You will have a chance to do it again,” the doctor said soothingly. “Although probably not before your rival does.”

by Alec Wilkinson, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Dan Burton

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, Villa Borghese
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Beach Town

From one end of town to the other, one-pound bricks of butter melt slowly into metal crocks, thick layers of white froth gathering on the surface. In the bars, the seasonal visitors drink Heineken out of chilled bottles. The townies drink Bud Light.

The smell, when you walk down the street, is of French fries, cooked in the same hot grease as the clams—though clam strips is what it says on the #10 cans they come in. They are dunked into banks of deep-fryers by the same people who do the roofing and house painting in the spring. French fries and clam strips are joined in the bubbling oil by scallops and shrimp, flounder fillets, and rings of squid, all coated in the same universal breading. By the town pier there are funnel cakes and the fudge shop, adding a sickly sweet note to the airborne miasma of atomized fat. As you walk down Main Street after the dinner rush, past the Shell Shop, the Shirt Shop, the Dinghy Dock, Neptune Lounge, Olde Towne Tavern, Cap’n Barnes Galley Bar, Candles ’N’ Things, Reggie’s Pizza, and the Scupper, you hear the clatter of hundreds of lobster carcasses scraping against heavy Buffalo China plates.

Tomorrow morning, former cheerleaders from the local high school will cut lemons into wedges, fill bowls with pilot biscuits in little plastic wrappers, pluck sprigs of curly parsley to float in ice water. They’ll line up monkey dishes and ramekins, top off the ketchup bottles, restock the lobster bibs, fold napkins, and gather around garbage stockades in rear parking lots to smoke and gossip about last night.

I’m six years old, playing with molded plastic army men in the beach grass of the dunes. Here comes the truck that sprays insecticide in a huge, smoky cloud from its rear; I join the other children from the block, running in its wake. For dinner, there will be mussels and steamed lobster, corn on the cob, Jersey tomatoes.

I’m twelve years old, same dunes, smoking pilfered menthol cigarettes with some girls who are older. For dinner, there will be pan-fried tails of the blowfish I caught off the dock, or take-out pizza. Somebody’s dad will fire up the grill and cook hamburgers and hot dogs in a backyard of pebbles and crushed seashells. The adults will get tipsy and play charades or rummy or Mille Bornes or whatever game is popular that summer. The kids will slip off into the dark to build fires on the beach.

I’m seventeen years old, “wrapping the bakes” in the cellar of the Riptide Lounge—there’s a sinkful of potatoes I am detailed to seal in portion-controlled squares of tinfoil, which I’ll then pierce with a fork. After that, I’ll pull the muscles off a bushel of sticky sea scallops, wash the spinach and romaine, dodge the pots and pans the cooks throw into the pot sink next to me. Then it’s bust suds, dive for pearls (wash dishes) from five to midnight, mop the kitchen, strip the stove, drag the mats out into the parking lot to hose them down. Then it’s the glorious walk home. The town’s other restaurants are closing down too—dishwashers running their last loads, bar customers with raised voices laughing at unheard jokes, the clatter of plates loaded into trays, boat whistles, the occasional foghorn.

I’m eighteen years old and the menu is clam chowder, kale soup, shrimp cocktail, lobster salad, Caesar salad, oysters on the half, clams on the half, broiled fish, fried fish, fisherman’s platter, steamed cherrystones, squid stew, cioppino, steamed mussels in red sauce, steamed mussels in white wine, steamed lobster, broiled lobster, stuffed lobster, stuffed flounder, broiled bluefish, haddock amandine, New York strip, ribeye. I can cook the whole menu and think I’m fucking Escoffier.

by Anthony Bourdain, Lucky Peach |  Read more:

Image: Cari Vander Yacht

Wim Vandekeybus, What the Body Does Not Remember
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How To Get A Cheap Motorcycle And Not Crash It

The problem is, most things are Good in inverse proportion to the degree to which they’re Fun. Broccoli is Good; Bacon is Fun. Taxes are Good; Casinos are Fun. Gyms are Good; Bars are Fun. You get the picture. But assuming, as I do, that all of us must live at least a little, few things are less Good and more Fun than a motorcycle. And no motorcycle is less Good and more Fun than a cheap o
ne.

I speak from experience. I bought my motorcycle some years ago for $500—nearly a week’s pay for a teenage booze-cruise deckhand. I proceeded to paint it, wrench it, crash it, fix it, and use it as my primary means of wheeled transport for about three years. I cannot think of money I have spent better. Today it sits in a garage in Vermont, a testament to phlegmy carbs and small-scale electrical fires, calling me back like Danny from The Shining.

There are many Good things a motorcycle cannot do. A motorcycle cannot haul useful quantities of anything. A motorcycle cannot be used to bring your friends to the movies. A motorcycle cannot keep you dry in the rain, or especially safe in any sort of impact. A motorcycle cannot play your favorite songs. Sure, with a little know-how, a motorcycle can do all these things, but once you’ve put the engineering in, all you’ve built is a Fiat 500, which is neither Good nor Fun.

What a motorcycle can do is much more interesting. Being atop your transportation, as opposed to inside it, forces a certain mental presence. Flying down the road on the back of an incredibly dumb robot encourages you to pay attention to your surroundings, lest you become violently embedded in them. But this connection pays dividends. Your commute becomes an activity, your vehicle an extension of yourself, your world a bit more playful. All of this is to say, if you ride a motorcycle down a good road on a green day, you will smile. You should try it.

Getting Started

The first thing you’ll need is a motorcycle permit. Most jurisdictions will require you to take a short test, and provide a study guide to help you do it. Read this, in full, several times. You are essentially sitting on a sawhorse and encouraging the world to attack you at 60 miles an hour; you should have a grasp on the basics. Once you’ve demonstrated your minimum proficiency at booklet retention, you can begin to shop.

Most modern motorcycles are designed around a purpose. Cruisers make you look like a Son of Anarchy. Touring bikes help you go to Alaska with, or away from, your wife. Dual-sports and enduros let you ride to nature, then through it. Sport bikes are for going very fast. Standards are kind of alright at everything.

What Your Money Will Buy You

$0-1,000: DEATHTRAPS

At this price range, you’re mostly looking at used Japanese Standards, low-displacement cruiser-style bikes, and sports bikes with problems. Actually, everything here is going to have problems. You’re going to see a lot of bikes that need new batteries and carburetor cleaning, which are buyer-beware bywords for bikes that have been sitting forever and weren’t maintained in the first place.

I bought a Yamaha XS400 from a dealer who was patient enough to answer my questions when I had to, say, push the non-running bike to the shop, yell a question, and then run two miles to work in boots and a leather jacket. When I returned, he had it running again out of pure sympathy. What I’m saying is that you can get a deal here, or a project, but I’d recommend a hard look from someone with mechanical expertise. The same electrical failures, steering lockups, and soft brakes that are inconvenient in cars can mean a trip to the hospital in a bike.

$1,000-3,000: KNOCKAROUNDS

Here, you’ll find decently maintained or rebuilt UJMs, used sport bikes that aren’t time bombs, and cruisers that are.

$3,000-6,000: RESPECTABLES

This is the sweet spot, or would be if you weren’t buying a toy that could kill you for the price of a European vacation. Used cruisers, sport bikes, and standards in good mechanical condition abound. If you’re no mechanic and want something you can ride every day and fix mostly with wrenches, this is the category for you.

$6,000-10,000: BRAND NEW

Here you can buy a new Sportster or Triumph or sport bike. They’re new. They will have fewer or no quirks. Google, ask the dealer a lot of questions, and shop around on price.

$10,000+: LOOK AT YOU!

At this point, you’re doing one of three things: track racing, taking a sabbatical ride around the world, or trying to reclaim your masculinity. I can’t help with the first two, and my rates for the third are unreasonable.

by Samuel Wadhams, Adequate Man | Read more:
Images: Jim Cooke and Getty

Your Backyard Is the Wild West for Drones

You may have caught the story last week about the Kentucky man who was arrested after shooting down a drone in his backyard. William Merideth said that the vehicle was hovering over his teenage daughter, who was sunbathing. Whatever your views on private ownership of firearms (to say nothing of their discharge for this purpose), the case reminds us that the increasing private use of unmanned aircraft raises yet-unresolved questions about privacy.

Civilian drones have been shot down before. Other means, too, have been employed against them. In June, firefighters used a hose to blast a drone that was recording a house fire. After the Los Angeles Kings won the Stanley Cup in 2014, ecstatic fans used a T-shirt to knock a drone from the sky (I'm still trying to picture this), then continued their celebration by pounding it with a skateboard. Evidently, few of us are comfortable at the thought that another person might be watching from above.

Certainly Merideth didn't like the idea. "It was hovering," he told Ars Technica. "I would never have shot it if it was flying. When he came down with a video camera right over my back deck, that's not going to work. I know they're neat little vehicles, but one of those uses shouldn't be flying into people's yards and videotaping."

Most of us would worry about other people using technology to peek in our windows or hover over our yards. But mounting concerns about drones and privacy have so far received little official response, as government agencies have instead prioritized their own operations.

So have the many companies eagerly awaiting the opportunity to exploit drone technology. The Federal Aviation Administration has estimated that by 2030, there will be more than 30,000 private unmanned vehicles competing for U.S. airspace. As it happens, NASA last week hosted the initial Unmanned Aerial Systems Traffic Management Convention in Mountain View, California. In remarks to the meeting, Gur Kimchi, vice president of Amazon Prime Air, proposed dividing Class G airspace -- that is, the space below 500 feet, the usual beginning of navigable airspace -- into three zones. From the ground up to 200 feet would be reserved for hobbyists, 200 to 400 feet would constitute a high-speed zone for commercial use, and the space between 400 and 500 feet would remain a buffer, as now.

Notice that this division would not solve the problem of drones hovering over presumably private spaces in backyards -- the concern that led Merideth to take up arms. Nor is the FAA, which regulates the nation's airspace, likely to be of much assistance. Under the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, the agency is required to issue regulations for private drone use. The rules, now expected in 2016, will likely to be generous to both commercial operators and hobbyists.

But the FAA's proposed regulations deal with such matters as the qualifications for operators and the precise systems for keeping track of the unmanned vehicles in flight. Although the agency "notes that privacy concerns have been raised about unmanned aircraft operation," it hastens to add that the privacy question is "beyond the scope of the rulemaking." Not to worry, though. The FAA assures us that there's a "multi-stakeholder engagement process" for that.

In other words, the FAA plans to kick the privacy issue down the road, licensing the use of drones without regard to sunbathing teenagers, or others who might just want to be left alone. The agency suggests that the privacy question be determined under state law.

But nobody knows where state law stands. Some argue that low-flying drones are trespassers. A telephone wire strung across my property without consent violates my property rights. Why not an aircraft? From the late 16th century, the common law took the position that property ownership extended infinitely into the heavens. The era of aviation put an end to that maxim. Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1946 decision in U.S. v. Causby, it has been generally accepted that the property rights of a homeowner end 83 feet above the ground. That's awfully close to the ground. Never mind peeking in apartment windows; recording high definition video from 100 feet up doesn't present any sort of challenge.

by Stephen L. Carter, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Martin Divisek

Giorgio de Chirico - Metaphysical Interior with Biscuits 1916
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Jethro Tull (Ian Anderson)

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

[ed. See also: This excerpt - Off Diamond Head]

There’s a passage near the beginning of Middlemarch in which the narrator describes the view out of a carriage window that depicts, better than anything I’ve ever read, the pleasure of knowing a place intimately. “Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood,” George Eliot writes. She goes on to cite a list of beloved natural features: trees that lean in a certain way, abrupt slopes, a bald spot in a pasture.

These are the things that make the gamut of joy in landscape to [the area’s] souls—the things they toddled among, or perhaps learned by heart standing between their father’s knees while he drove leisurely.

This capacity for geographical familiarity—knowing exactly where the neighbor’s fence warps slightly—is a visceral kind of knowledge, gained organically, and it atrophies as we age. Learning a place by heart is a luxury rarely afforded to adults, and unless absolutely forced to, one seldom even notices that the ability has been lost.

In his new book, the New Yorker staff writer and veteran war reporter William Finnegan demonstrates the advantages of keeping meticulous mental maps. For him, memorizing a place is a matter of nostalgia, of metaphysical well-being, but also of life and death. Finnegan’s memoir is not about his professional life reporting on blood-soaked Sudan or Bosnia or Nicaragua; it’s about the “disabling enchantment” that is his lifelong hobby.

“The close, painstaking study of a tiny patch of coast, every eddy and angle, even down to individual rocks, and in every combination of tide and wind and swell…is the basic occupation of surfers at their local break,” he writes in Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. Surfers, like children, naturally develop sensory affinity for their surroundings: they can detect minor changes in the smell of the sea, track daily the rise and fall of sandbars, are grateful for particularly sturdy roots onto which they can grab when scurrying down bluffs. The environment becomes an almost anatomical extension of them, mostly because it has to.

Unlike football or baseball or even boxing, surfing is a literarily impoverished sport. The reasons for this are practical. It’s not a spectator sport: it is hard to see surfers from the shore. That the best waves are seldom anywhere near civilization makes it an activity especially resistant to journalism, and first-rate writing by surfers is also rare: the impulse to surf—a “special brand of monomania,” Finnegan calls it—is at direct odds with the indoor obligations of writing.

In many ways this is true for any athletic activity—that its very best practitioners will very seldom be the same people who document it—but it’s particularly true of surfing, which demands more traveling, logistical planning, and waiting around than any other athletic endeavor. Even when surfers are not surfing, they’re thinking about it: listening to buoy reports, peering off cliffs with binoculars, preventing themselves from buying new boards.

Though middle school students have worn surfwear-branded clothing for decades now and surfing has become increasingly popular among the billionaires of Santa Clara County, it remains an elusive pastime in the minds of most everyone who has never done it. The reasons for this too are practical. Appropriate beaches are rare; high schools don’t have teams; and while not as prohibitively expensive as skiing, surfing requires roughly the same amount of cumbersome gear and is, if possible, even more physically uncomfortable. There are the damp, mildewed wetsuits; the feet cut by coral; the sunburns and the salt-stung eyes. Pair all this with the specter of Jeff Spicoli (the surfer and pot smoker played by Sean Penn in the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and the easy-to-imitate accent, and you have a hobby that is easy to mock, if not ignore. It’s certainly not a pastime anyone associates with ambition or mental agility.

Which is precisely what makes the propulsive precision of Finnegan’s writing so surprising and revelatory. For over half a century at this point, readers have taken it as a given (and writers as a professional prerogative) that lowbrow culture is deserving of bookish analysis. But unlike so many writhing attempts to extort meaning from topics that seem intellectually bankrupt, Finnegan’s treatment of surfing never feels like performance. Through the sheer intensity of his descriptive powers and the undeniable ways in which surfing has shaped his life, Barbarian Days is an utterly convincing study in the joy of treating seriously an unserious thing.

“Getting a spot wired—truly understanding it—can take years,” Finnegan writes, continuing, later, to say that “all surfers are oceanographers.” Over the course of a life spent in and out of the water, he has amassed a truly staggering amount of applied knowledge, of marine biology and carpentry and cartography. Surfing requires kinetic intuition, physical fitness, and courage in the face of an indifferent force, but it also demands the sort of mental work we don’t typically associate with extreme sports. Any good writing about an underexamined way of life must be, at least at times, expository, and Finnegan is lucid when it comes to the necessary task of explaining to the uninitiated some of the most basic tenets of surfing: why waves break where they do; how it’s possible to stand on a floating piece of fiberglass, go into a moving tube of water, and emerge looking just as you did upon entry. But despite all this, surfing, as Finnegan renders it, is more than just a fun physical activity: it’s a way of being in the world, with its own private politics and etiquette and benchmarks of success.

by Alice Gregory, NYRB |  Read more:

Image: Josh Humbert/National Geographic Creative

Ralph Steadman, Gregorian Thwacksplat
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Yuta Onoda
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Joni Mitchell

[ed. Best wishes for a complete and speedy recovery.]

The Raise that Roared

There are times when Dan Price feels as if he stumbled into the middle of the street with a flag and found himself at the head of a parade.

Three months ago, Mr. Price, 31, announced he was setting a new minimum salary of $70,000 at his Seattle credit card processing firm, Gravity Payments, and slashing his own million-dollar pay package to do it. He wasn’t thinking about the current political clamor over low wages or the growing gap between rich and poor, he said. He was just thinking of the 120 people who worked for him and, let’s be honest, a bit of free publicity. The idea struck him when a friend shared her worries about paying both her rent and student loans on a $40,000 salary. He realized a lot of his own employees earned that or less.

Yet almost overnight, a decision by one small-business man in the northwestern corner of the country became a swashbuckling blow against income inequality.

The move drew attention from around the world — including from some outspoken skeptics and conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, who smelled a socialist agenda — but most were enthusiastic. Talk show hosts lined up to interview Mr. Price. Job seekers by the thousands sent in résumés. He was called a “thought leader.” Harvard business professors flew out to conduct a case study. Third graders wrote him thank-you notes. Single women wanted to date him.

What few outsiders realized, however, was how much turmoil all the hoopla was causing at the company itself. To begin with, Gravity was simply unprepared for the onslaught of emails, Facebook posts and phone calls. The attention was thrilling, but it was also exhausting and distracting. And with so many eyes focused on the firm, some hoping to witness failure, the pressure has been intense.

More troubling, a few customers, dismayed by what they viewed as a political statement, withdrew their business. Others, anticipating a fee increase — despite repeated assurances to the contrary — also left. While dozens of new clients, inspired by Mr. Price’s announcement, were signing up, those accounts will not start paying off for at least another year. To handle the flood, he has already had to hire a dozen additional employees — now at a significantly higher cost — and is struggling to figure out whether more are needed without knowing for certain how long the bonanza will last.

Two of Mr. Price’s most valued employees quit, spurred in part by their view that it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises. Some friends and associates in Seattle’s close-knit entrepreneurial network were also piqued that Mr. Price’s action made them look stingy in front of their own employees.

Then potentially the worst blow of all: Less than two weeks after the announcement, Mr. Price’s older brother and Gravity co-founder, Lucas Price, citing longstanding differences, filed a lawsuit that potentially threatened the company’s very existence. With legal bills quickly mounting and most of his own paycheck and last year’s $2.2 million in profits plowed into the salary increases, Dan Price said, “We don’t have a margin of error to pay those legal fees.”

As Mr. Price spoke in the Gravity conference room, he could see a handful of employees setting up beach chairs in the parking lot for an impromptu meeting. The office is in Ballard, a fast-gentrifying neighborhood of Seattle that reflects the wealth gap that Mr. Price says he wants to address. Downstairs is a yoga studio, and across the street is a coffee bar where customers can sip velvet soy lattes on Adirondack-style chairs. But around the corner, beneath the elevated roadway, a homeless woman silently appeals to drivers stopped at the red light with a cardboard sign: “Plz Help.”

In his own way, Mr. Price is trying to respond to that request.

“Income inequality has been racing in the wrong direction,” he said. “I want to fight for the idea that if someone is intelligent, hard-working and does a good job, then they are entitled to live a middle-class lifestyle.”

The reaction to his salary pledge has led him to think that if his business continues to prosper, his actions could have far-reaching consequences. “The cause has expanded,” he said. “Whether I like it or not, the stakes are higher.”

by Patricia Cohen, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: NY Times