Could an Old-School Tube Amp Make the Music You Love Sound Better?

Like a lot of adults who attended too many rock concerts in their reckless youth, my hearing is not what it used to be. On more than one occasion, I remember stumbling out of Winterland in San Francisco after seeing high-watt bands like Hot Tuna or Pink Floyd, putting the key in the car’s ignition, giving it a turn, and then having no idea whatsoever if the engine had roared to life.

That’s what four or five hours of standing in front of a wall of speakers pumping music at more than 100 decibels will do to a person’s hearing—for the following 30 or 40 minutes, the world sounds soft and muffled, as if the air is thick with invisible clouds of cotton balls. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that I was doing lasting damage to the cochlea in my inner ear, and all these years later, I don’t necessarily wince at every sound that happens to be loud. But I do have trouble hearing someone speaking to me in a crowded restaurant, and certain sounds with the wrong acoustic profile (for me, anyway) will make my ears ring for hours.

Most painful—emotionally and literally—is the mediocre fidelity of my home stereo system, which teases the listener with the occasional splash of treble or thump of bass, but mostly delivers cacophonous mush. It’s the opposite of what most people would describe as “warm,” which is a narrow, technical term of art among audiophiles. For the rest of us, warm suggests rich and rounded tones, notes and chords of such depth the listener can almost imagine he’s in the presence of the singer or musician performing without the aid of microphones or amplifiers. Warm is intimate, warm is clean and pure, warm doesn’t make my ears ring.

Uniquely, tube amplifiers, which use vacuum tubes to amplify electrical signals, are said to deliver this sublime auditory experience more reliably than their solid-state counterparts, which use transistors to do the same thing. (Digital devices run on integrated circuits, and use software to achieve their sound, so they are not considered here.) In particular, most tube amps are regarded as being less likely to create harmonic distortions at higher frequencies than all but the best and most expensive solid-state amps. They are generally worse at the lower frequencies, but our ears don’t hear most of those lower frequency distortions very well, which makes them “sonically benign.” Distortion at high frequencies, however, is easily heard and contributes to listening fatigue (i.e., ringing ears), which may be one of the reasons why tube amps are said to sound warm.

I don’t know much about harmonics, but I can vouch for the sound quality of tube amplifiers. I grew up listening to music played through my parents’ Fisher 500-C stereo receiver, a tube amp from the early 1960s that did wondrous things to albums like “Let It Bleed” by the Rolling Stones when played at very high volumes. My ears never rang after listening to that, no matter how loud. The same could not be said for the Kenwood KR-7200 solid-state receiver I took with me to college—if memory serves, I sold it to a wide-eyed freshman early in my sophomore year.

Lately, the desire to replicate the warm auditory memories of my youth has become a musical preoccupation of mine, since I’m secretly—if only aspirationally—in the market for a new stereo. Sure, a tube amplifier won’t help me hear someone talking to me in a noisy restaurant, but it does promise relief from the worst sonic indignity of all—not being able to listen to the music I love at a respectable volume without destroying what’s left of my hearing. If tubes could do that, it would be nothing short of a miracle.

So, I went shopping. Not for equipment yet, but for knowledge. Is there something about the way in which tubes, or “valves” as they are known in the U.K., amplify sound that changes how we experience it once it finds its way through our ear canals and into our brains? And although I know what the word “warm” means to me, what does it mean to the audiophiles and the people who make tube amplifiers and other types of hi-fi stereo equipment for a living? To get answers to these and other questions, I spoke to some of the leading authorities and manufacturers of tube and solid-state amplifiers in the United States. And, the icing on the cake, I got to listen to best stereo system I’ve ever heard.

To begin, I consulted the highly regarded “Sounds Like?” audio glossary, written by the late, great J. Gordon Holt, who founded “Stereophile” magazine in 1962. According to Holt, warm describes sound that is “the same as dark, but less tilted.” In case you’re curious, “dark” refers to “the audible effect of a frequency response which is clockwise-tilted across the entire range, so that output diminishes with increasing frequency,” while “tilted” indicates an “across-the-board rotation of an otherwise flat frequency response, so that the device’s output increases or decreases at a uniform rate with increasing frequency.”

This is not at all what I was expecting. Turns out, my definition of warm (“intimate,” “clean and pure,” “doesn’t make my ears ring”) is too “euphonic” for Holt, which is a word he dismisses in the “E” section of his glossary as “pleasing to the ear” but having “a connotation of exaggerated richness rather than literal accuracy.”

Audiophiles, it seems, have no use for emotional words like “warm,” but isn’t “pleasing to the ear” what I want? In the world of high-end hi-fi, which is where you need to go if you want to learn anything meaningful about tubes and tube amplifiers, the answer to that seemingly simple question is just about always “no.”

by Ben Marks, Collectors Weekly |  Read more:

Image: McIntosh

Farther Away

[ed. See also: Why The End of the Tour isn't really about my friend David Foster Wallace]

On the eve of my departure for Santiago, I visited my friend Karen, the widow of the writer David Foster Wallace. As I was getting ready to leave her house, she asked me, out of the blue, whether I might like to take along some of David’s cremation ashes and scatter them on Masafuera. I said I would, and she found an antique wooden matchbox, a tiny book with a sliding drawer, and put some ashes in it, saying that she liked the thought of part of David coming to rest on a remote and uninhabited island. It was only later, after I’d driven away from her house, that I realized that she’d given me the ashes as much for my sake as for hers or David’s. She knew, because I had told her, that my current state of flight from myself had begun soon after David’s death, two years earlier. At the time, I’d made a decision not to deal with the hideous suicide of someone I’d loved so much but instead to take refuge in anger and work. Now that the work was done, though, it was harder to ignore the circumstance that, arguably, in one interpretation of his suicide, David had died of boredom and in despair about his future novels. The desperate edge to my own recent boredom: might this be related to my having broken a promise to myself? The promise that, after I’d finished my book project, I would allow myself to feel more than fleeting grief and enduring anger at David’s death? (...)

David wrote about weather as well as anyone who ever put words on paper, and he loved his dogs more purely than he loved anything or anyone else, but nature itself didn’t interest him, and he was utterly indifferent to birds. Once, when we were driving near Stinson Beach, in California, I’d stopped to give him a telescope view of a long-billed curlew, a species whose magnificence is to my mind self-evident and revelatory. He looked through the scope for two seconds before turning away with patent boredom. “Yeah,” he said with his particular tone of hollow politeness, “it’s pretty.” In the summer before he died, sitting with him on his patio while he smoked cigarettes, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the hummingbirds around his house and was saddened that he could, and while he was taking his heavily medicated afternoon naps I was studying the birds of Ecuador for an upcoming trip, and I understood the difference between his unmanageable misery and my manageable discontents to be that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not.

He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill. The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took the person away from us and made him into a very public legend. People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in the Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul. A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure. Of course, he was a national treasure, and, being a writer, he didn’t “belong” to his readers any less than to me. But if you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more lovable—funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies—than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.

The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms. What makes this especially strange is the near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love. Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe. What we get, instead, are characters keeping their heartless compulsions secret from those who love them; characters scheming to appear loving or to prove to themselves that what feels like love is really just disguised self-interest; or, at most, characters directing an abstract or spiritual love toward somebody profoundly repellent—the cranial-fluid-dripping wife in “Infinite Jest,” the psychopath in the last of the interviews with hideous men. David’s fiction is populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates, and yet the people who had only glancing or formal contact with him took his rather laborious hyper-considerateness and moral wisdom at face value.

The curious thing about David’s fiction, though, is how recognized and comforted, how loved, his most devoted readers feel when reading it. To the extent that each of us is stranded on his or her own existential island—and I think it’s approximately correct to say that his most susceptible readers are ones familiar with the socially and spiritually isolating effects of addiction or compulsion or depression—we gratefully seized on each new dispatch from that farthest-away island which was David. At the level of content, he gave us the worst of himself: he laid out, with an intensity of self-scrutiny worthy of comparison to Kafka and Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, the extremes of his own narcissism, misogyny, compulsiveness, self-deception, dehumanizing moralism and theologizing, doubt in the possibility of love, and entrapment in footnotes-within-footnotes self-consciousness. At the level of form and intention, however, this very cataloguing of despair about his own authentic goodness is received by the reader as a gift of authentic goodness: we feel the love in the fact of his art, and we love him for it.

David and I had a friendship of compare and contrast and (in a brotherly way) compete. A few years before he died, he signed my hardcover copies of his two most recent books. On the title page of one of them, I found the traced outline of his hand; on the title page of the other was an outline of an erection so huge that it ran off the page, annotated with a little arrow and the remark “scale 100%.” I once heard him enthusiastically describe, in the presence of a girl he was dating, someone else’s girlfriend as his “paragon of womanhood.” David’s girl did a wonderfully slow double take and said, “What?” Whereupon David, whose vocabulary was as large as anybody’s in the Western Hemisphere, took a deep breath and, letting it out, said, “I’m suddenly realizing that I’ve never actually known what the word ‘paragon’ means.”

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it’s because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he’d seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love. (...)

Adulatory public narratives of David, which take his suicide as proof that (as Don McLean sang of van Gogh) “this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you,” require that there have been a unitary David, a beautiful and supremely gifted human being who, after quitting the antidepressant Nardil, which he’d been taking for twenty years, succumbed to major depression and was therefore not himself when he committed suicide. I will pass over the question of diagnosis (it’s possible he was not simply depressive) and the question of how such a beautiful human being had come by such vividly intimate knowledge of the thoughts of hideous men. But bearing in mind his fondness for Screwtape and his demonstrable penchant for deceiving himself and others—a penchant that his years in recovery held in check but never eradicated—I can imagine a narrative of ambiguity and ambivalence truer to the spirit of his work. By his own account to me, he had never ceased to live in fear of returning to the psych ward where his early suicide attempt had landed him. The allure of suicide, the last big score, may go underground, but it never entirely disappears. Certainly, David had “good” reasons to go off Nardil—his fear that its long-term physical effects might shorten the good life he’d managed to make for himself; his suspicion that its psychological effects might be interfering with the best things in his life (his work and his relationships)—and he also had less “good” reasons of ego: a perfectionist wish to be less substance-dependent, a narcissistic aversion to seeing himself as permanently mentally ill. What I find hard to believe is that he didn’t have very bad reasons as well. Flickering beneath his beautiful moral intelligence and his lovable human weakness was the old addict’s consciousness, the secret self, which, after decades of suppression by the Nardil, finally glimpsed its chance to break free and have its suicidal way.

This duality played out in the year that followed his quitting Nardil. He made strange and seemingly self-defeating decisions about his care, engaged in a fair amount of bamboozlement of his shrinks (whom one can only pity for having drawn such a brilliantly complicated case), and in the end created an entire secret life devoted to suicide. Throughout that year, the David whom I knew well and loved immoderately was struggling bravely to build a more secure foundation for his work and his life, contending with heartbreaking levels of anxiety and pain, while the David whom I knew less well, but still well enough to have always disliked and distrusted, was methodically plotting his own destruction and his revenge on those who loved him.

That he was blocked with his work when he decided to quit Nardil—was bored with his old tricks and unable to muster enough excitement about his new novel to find a way forward with it—is not inconsequential. He’d loved writing fiction, “Infinite Jest” in particular, and he’d been very explicit, in our many discussions of the purpose of novels, about his belief that fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude. Fiction was his way off the island, and as long as it was working for him—as long as he’d been able to pour his love and passion into preparing his lonely dispatches, and as long as these dispatches were coming as urgent and fresh and honest news to the mainland—he’d achieved a measure of happiness and hope for himself. When his hope for fiction died, after years of struggle with the new novel, there was no other way out but death. If boredom is the soil in which the seeds of addiction sprout, and if the phenomenology and the teleology of suicidality are the same as those of addiction, it seems fair to say that David died of boredom. In his early story “Here and There,” the brother of a perfection-seeking young man, Bruce, invites him to consider “how boring it would be to be perfect,” and Bruce tells us:

I defer to Leonard’s extensive and hard-earned knowledge about being boring, but do point out that since being boring is an imperfection, it would by definition be impossible for a perfect person to be boring.

It’s a good joke; and yet the logic is somehow strangulatory. It’s the logic of “everything and more,” to echo yet another of David’s titles, and everything and more is what he wanted from and for his fiction. This had worked for him before, in “Infinite Jest.” But to try to add more to what is already everything is to risk having nothing: to become boring to yourself.

by Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Zohar Lazar

The Blue Dress (by heather ~)
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Strunk and White’s Macho Grammar Club

“Be clear.” “Omit needless words.” “Do not overwrite.” “Avoid fancy words.” “Use the active voice.” Who can argue with such common sense commandments, especially when they’re delivered with Voice-of-God authority? Certainly not the generations of students, secretaries, working writers, and wannabe Hemingways who’ve feared and revered Strunk and White’s Elements of Style as the Bible of “plain English style,” as E.B. White calls it in his introduction. (Since 1959, when White revised and substantially expanded the brief guide to prose style self-published in 1918 by William Strunk Jr., a professor of English literature at Cornell, Strunk & White, as most of us know it, has sold more than 10 million copies.)

Can it really be coincidence that, smack on the first page, in a note about exceptions to one of his Elementary Rules Of Usage (“Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding ‘s..., whatever the final consonant”), Strunk gives as an example, “Moses’ laws”? The Elements of Style, more than another book, has set in stone American ideas about proper usage and, more profoundly, good style. Professor Strunk wrote his little tract as a stout defense of “the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated,” the red-flag word in that sentence being “violated.”

Usage absolutists are the Scalia-esque Originalists of the language-maven set. Their emphasis on “timeless” grammatical truths, in opposition to most linguists’ view of language as a living, changing thing, is at heart conservative; their fulminations about the grammatical violations perpetrated by the masses mask deeper anxieties about moral relativism and social turbulence. (Strunk published Elements in the last year of the Great War, a cataclysm that turned Europe into history’s goriest slaughter bench, fanned the flames of revolution in Russia, and shaped the cynical, disillusioned worldview of Hemingway and his “lost generation,” as Gertrude Stein called them.) For usage purists, the decline of the language portends the fall of the republic. We’re only one misplaced comma away from the barbarians at the gates, my fellow Romans.

“No book is genuinely free from political bias,” George Orwell wrote, in his essay “Why I Write.” “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” The opinion that the canon laws of usage, composition, and style—our unquestioned assumptions about what constitutes “good prose”—have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude. Obviously, it’s easier for you to make out my meaning if the pane you’re peering through isn’t some Baroque fantasy in stained glass. But the Anglo-American article of faith that clarity can only be achieved through words of one syllable and sentences fit for a telegram is pure dogma. The Elements of Style is as ideological, in its bow-tied, wire-rimmed way, as any manifesto.

Strunkian style embraces the cultural logic of the Machine Age, which by 1918 was well underway. The head-whipping speedup of the 20th century, its throttle thrown wide open by faster modes of travel and accelerating social change, soon found poetic expression in the aerodynamic aesthetic known as streamlining: toasters with speedlines, teardrop-shaped prototype cars, cocktail shakers that looked like they could break the sound barrier. Anticipating streamlining, Strunk decrees, “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” Likewise, his golden rule, “omit needless words,” complements the “less is more” ethos of the Bauhaus school of design, another expression of Machine Age Modernism. Optimized for peak efficiency, Strunk’s is a prose for an age of standardized widgets and standardized workers, when the efficiency gospel of F.W. Taylor, father of “scientific management,” was percolating out of the workplace, into the culture at large. “Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of the masses,” wrote the Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin, in 1936. Why not standardize the mass production of prose? “Prefer the standard to the offbeat,” admonishes White, cautioning against “eccentricities in language” in the “Approach to Style” he appended to his 1959 revision. Strunk & White is a child of its times—the early Machine Age, when the Professor first published it, and the gray-flannel ‘50s, when White revised it—in other ways, too. There’s much talk of vigorous prose, “vigor” being a byword in Strunk’s day for cold-shower masculinity of the strenuous, Teddy Roosevelt sort. White juxtaposes the bicep-flexing “toughness” of good writing with the “unwholesome,” sometimes even “nauseating” ickiness of “rich, ornate prose.” “If the sickly sweet word, the overblown phrase are your natural form of expression,” he counsels, “you will have to compensate for it by a show of vigor.” The implication is obvious: if a lean, mean Modernist prose of “plainness, simplicity, orderliness, [and] sincerity” is manly, then a style that rejoices in ornament and complexity and sharpens its wit with the knowing insincerity of irony or camp is unmanly—feminine or, worse yet, sissified. (Pop quiz: Why do we call overwrought language “flowery”? Because flowers recall that unmentionable part of a lady’s anatomy, and the effeminization of language saps it of its potency. Why is purple prose purple? Because purple has been synonymous with foppish unmanliness ever since Oscar Wilde wore mauve gloves to the premiere of Lady Windemere’s Fan.)

by Mark Dery, Daily Beast |  Read more:

Image: New York Times Co./Getty Images

Here Is Everything I Learned in New York City

Wear Comfortable Shoes

Yes, there are women who walk around New York in five-inch stilettos. There are also people who like to have sex hanging from a ceiling with a ball gag in their mouth. This world is strange and mysterious. But New York is a walking city, a city of derring-do, and you don’t want to be limping behind.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for What You Want

When I first came to New York, I was intimidated by delis, which is a little bit like being frightened of lawn sprinklers. But my heart would pound at the counter as I approached, feeling the impending pressure of a public decision.

“Whaddaya want?” the man would ask me.

“Um, what do you have?” I’d ask, accustomed to a detailed list of signature sandwiches from which to choose.

The man would look at an expansive glass case of cold cuts and cheeses splayed out before me with a gesture that suggested: What do you need, lady, a map? Ordering a sandwich at a deli is, technically, the easiest way to order a sandwich, because they will make it exactly as you want it. But I spent so much of my life suppressing exactly what I wanted in favor of what was available that I had no idea how I liked my sandwiches. I preferred to take other people’s suggestions, and then, when they weren’t looking, pick off the parts I didn’t like—which is an apt metaphor for my life at that time.

Sometimes I panicked. “I’ll take a pastrami on rye,” I said once, because it sounded like something a Woody Allen character would order, and god forbid the old lady buying cat food behind me should think of me as anything less than an authentic New Yorker.

I was embarrassed to ask for what I really wanted: Ham and American cheese on white bread with spicy mustard, which is possibly the least exotic, least adventurous, did-you-order-that-for-your-invisible-seven-year-old-child request you can make at a deli.

But in life, you can either ask for what you want and suffer the possibility of judgment, or you can pretend you want something else and almost certainly get it. It’s remarkable to me how long I chose the latter.

When I finally asked for a sandwich as I really wanted it, the man behind the counter simply nodded. “That all?” he asked.

My face prickled with embarrassment. “Should I get something else?”

He shrugged. “It’s not my sandwich!”

And that was the thing: It was not his sandwich. Why on earth would he care what kind of sandwich I ate, and if he did care what kind of sandwich I ate, what the hell was wrong with him? “I feel self-conscious for such a boring order,” I told him.

He smiled. “You’re an easy order.”

And from then on, we were friends. He knew my order, because few others asked for it. In fact, you could say it was my signature sandwich.

Be Decisive

People complain New Yorkers are rude, which is imprecise. New Yorkers are some of the kindest, most good-hearted people I’ve ever met. But New Yorkers are busy, and they cannot tolerate dawdling. And that’s a challenge, because the city is a choose-your-own-adventure game of constant decisions: Cab or subway? Express or local? Highway or side street? Which do you want? Answer now!

At first, I found this crippling, because I was obsessed with making the right decision and felt like I kept whiffing it. I lived in the hipster Brooklyn neighborhood of handlebar mustaches, when I would have been happier in the bougie neighborhood of spendy trattorias. I went to the dive bar, when all I wanted was a craft cocktail. This kind of thinking will make you miserable, because you will always feel the life you deserve is not only out of reach but being enjoyed by thinner, smarter people down the hall. But eventually, I realized there is only one bad decision, the decision I moved to New York to avoid: Doing nothing at all. That is unforgivable.

by Sarah Hepola, TMN |  Read more:

Image: Robert Moses, The Panorama of the City of New York, 1964.

La bicicleta sense ombra by Magí Puig
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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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