Thursday, September 17, 2015
On Walden Pond
It is one of the great American sententiae, as sonorous and moving as the Gettysburg Address. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Henry David Thoreau went to the woods in 1845, living for two years and two months in a cabin he had built on the north shore of Walden Pond. The book resulting from his experiment in simplicity was published in 1854, to lukewarm reviews. A century and a half later, however, “Walden” is a fundamental text of the ecological movement, and the pond, a crucial topos of American history, has become a place of pilgrimage.
I come to the woods in a taxi from Logan Airport, leaving Boston on Route 2. My taxi driver is a young Ethiopian woman with a printed headscarf wound around her head, nervous on her first day of work. We leave the highway at the turn-off for Lincoln, and up there on the exit sign I see the name in big letters: Walden Pond. It has become a destination in itself.
The pond lies a few miles out of Concord village in the state of Massachusetts. The pond isn’t really a pond, at least not in the English sense of a small body of standing water, often found at the bottom of a garden. It’s a roundish lake surrounded by forest, with a patch of boggy meadow at its western end. The water in this kettle lake or pothole lake (as geographers variously define it), tinged benignly blue-green at the edges and scarily black towards the middle where it plunges to a depth of 33 metres, is filtered as it pushes up through the sandy soil around it, and has a mesmerising clarity I’ve never seen in any English pond. (...)
The first shock is how close this place, so peaceful in Thoreau’s description, now lies to the seething city, to gas stations and roadside fast-food joints and roaring highways like the one we have just exited to join a county road, sliding past the pond on its way to the small town of Lincoln. The second is how busy I find it on this first Sunday in September. Yellow sandwich boards announce that the pond car park is now full up and officially closed to further traffic; barriers block off access roads to left and right. Families pad along the roadside with blow-up floaters, folding chairs and other beach equipment. A woman stands by the zebra crossing, shaking the forest sand out of her shoes.
The afternoon carries a charge of accumulated summer, a weary hangover heat passed on from earlier in the day and the season. From the taxi window I glimpse the lake for the first time, gleaming through a fringe of high trees in the low, late light. I never expected it to look this inviting. I had stored up the pond in that part of my brain reserved for ideals, for places long imagined, and was used to thinking of it, not bright and Brighton-beachy, but in wintry chiaroscuro, leafless and cheerless.
Thoreau’s Walden B&B, where I am lodged, turns out to be the only construction within sight of the pond. It’s a blowsy suburban house that must have been built just before Walden Pond, and the forest around it, became a State Reservation managed by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.
“You’ll want a towel,” says the landlady, Barbara, almost accusingly. She is assuming that I won’t waste time before heading for the water.
She’s right: I can’t put off the moment. Across the street and into the trees and down the steps to a small grey beach where the scent of coconut oil hangs in the warm air. Children shrieking and running, parents sitting and calling – it could be a scene on any beach anywhere in the world at any point in the summer.
Under the high trees there is shade and dappled light. Against a background rumble of traffic, an old-fashioned ice-cream vendor with a tinny fairground melody echoes somewhere in the woods.
by Paul Richardson, More Intelligent Life | Read more:
Image: Michelle McCarron
Henry David Thoreau went to the woods in 1845, living for two years and two months in a cabin he had built on the north shore of Walden Pond. The book resulting from his experiment in simplicity was published in 1854, to lukewarm reviews. A century and a half later, however, “Walden” is a fundamental text of the ecological movement, and the pond, a crucial topos of American history, has become a place of pilgrimage.
I come to the woods in a taxi from Logan Airport, leaving Boston on Route 2. My taxi driver is a young Ethiopian woman with a printed headscarf wound around her head, nervous on her first day of work. We leave the highway at the turn-off for Lincoln, and up there on the exit sign I see the name in big letters: Walden Pond. It has become a destination in itself.The pond lies a few miles out of Concord village in the state of Massachusetts. The pond isn’t really a pond, at least not in the English sense of a small body of standing water, often found at the bottom of a garden. It’s a roundish lake surrounded by forest, with a patch of boggy meadow at its western end. The water in this kettle lake or pothole lake (as geographers variously define it), tinged benignly blue-green at the edges and scarily black towards the middle where it plunges to a depth of 33 metres, is filtered as it pushes up through the sandy soil around it, and has a mesmerising clarity I’ve never seen in any English pond. (...)
The first shock is how close this place, so peaceful in Thoreau’s description, now lies to the seething city, to gas stations and roadside fast-food joints and roaring highways like the one we have just exited to join a county road, sliding past the pond on its way to the small town of Lincoln. The second is how busy I find it on this first Sunday in September. Yellow sandwich boards announce that the pond car park is now full up and officially closed to further traffic; barriers block off access roads to left and right. Families pad along the roadside with blow-up floaters, folding chairs and other beach equipment. A woman stands by the zebra crossing, shaking the forest sand out of her shoes.
The afternoon carries a charge of accumulated summer, a weary hangover heat passed on from earlier in the day and the season. From the taxi window I glimpse the lake for the first time, gleaming through a fringe of high trees in the low, late light. I never expected it to look this inviting. I had stored up the pond in that part of my brain reserved for ideals, for places long imagined, and was used to thinking of it, not bright and Brighton-beachy, but in wintry chiaroscuro, leafless and cheerless.
Thoreau’s Walden B&B, where I am lodged, turns out to be the only construction within sight of the pond. It’s a blowsy suburban house that must have been built just before Walden Pond, and the forest around it, became a State Reservation managed by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.
“You’ll want a towel,” says the landlady, Barbara, almost accusingly. She is assuming that I won’t waste time before heading for the water.
She’s right: I can’t put off the moment. Across the street and into the trees and down the steps to a small grey beach where the scent of coconut oil hangs in the warm air. Children shrieking and running, parents sitting and calling – it could be a scene on any beach anywhere in the world at any point in the summer.
Under the high trees there is shade and dappled light. Against a background rumble of traffic, an old-fashioned ice-cream vendor with a tinny fairground melody echoes somewhere in the woods.
by Paul Richardson, More Intelligent Life | Read more:
Image: Michelle McCarron
The War of the Hoverboards
The war of the hoverboards began in earnest in mid-February, in New York City, in the rainbow-colored halls of the 2015 Toy Fair. That much we know. Beyond that — where exactly in the Javits Center the first skirmish occurred, who the aggressor was, whether there were injured parties on the ground — that depends who you talk to.
Ask Shane Chen — holder of United States Patent No. 8,738,278B2, for “a two-wheel, self-balancing personal vehicle” — and he’ll tell you that things first heated up outside his booth. That’s where John Soibatian, the president of IO Hawk, the leading American distributor of the newly popular “personal mobility devices” (they’re all made in China) zoomed up to him aboard what Chen immediately recognized as a 2-foot-long knockoff. Chen’s lawyers had notified Soibatian at the Consumer Electronics Show the month prior that the IO Hawk violated Chen’s patent, and now Soibatian had come down to Chen’s booth — where he was showing off his device, the Hovertrax — to ask him to back off, to think about dropping it.
“I’ve had this idea since I was a kid,” Soibatian pleaded with Chen.
“Many people had this idea when they were a kid,” Chen responded firmly. “But they didn’t patent it.”
Ask Soibatian, who disputes most of Chen’s account, and you’ll get a different story. According to him, things got testy when Chen rolled over to the IO Hawk booth aboard a Solowheel, a kind of unicycle version of the hoverboard, which Chen has also patented. Chen informed Soibatian that he held the patent on devices of the type, and that this was how he made a living: by filing patents and waiting for other companies to violate them. Now that someone had built a salable version of his idea, he wanted to make a deal. Soibatian thought Chen sounded like a patent troll, like a scumbag. He told Chen he would have his lawyers look at the patent.
Later that day, after Chen wheeled away, one of the models Soibatian hired to scoot alluringly around trade shows reported that she had hovered by Chen’s booth and beheld a fiasco: people falling off the Hovertrax, lying on the floor. Soibatian mounted his IO Hawk and, model at his side, sped down to Chen’s booth, where he asked if he could give Hovertrax a try. Chen consented. Soibatian stepped aboard.
“I thought, Holy moly, what are you doing here, buddy?” Soibatian recalls. “It was garbage.” Why would he make a deal with the guy who built this piece of junk?
Chen, as you might expect, recalls the encounter differently. He stresses that Soibatian initially came to his booth, not the other way around. One person did fall down, but he was riding Orbit Wheels, another one of Chen’s inventions, one with a much steeper learning curve. And Chen says Soibatian never dismounted his IO Hawk. It was the model who tried Hovertrax, and she stayed upright the entire time. Chen agrees that he rode up to Soibatian’s booth, but not to make a deal; he went there to give the guy a break and offer him a few extra days to get patent-compliant.
Whatever the sequence of events, after the show, Soibatian says he showed Chen’s patent to his lawyers. “They told me I’d be crazy to pay him anything,” he says.
Four months later, Chen filed a lawsuit against Soibatian for patent infringement. The stakes of the war of the hoverboards had been set, and set high. Who had the right to profit off the future: the guy who patented the idea, or the guy who imported it in bulk from China?
And that was before Mark Cuban decided to get involved.
The 2-foot-long, two-wheeled, twin-motored plastic board that glided to the forefront of American popular culture this summer could be the skateboard of the young century. The similarities are there. It’s a zeitgeisty short-distance ride that has started to yield its own, self-sustaining viral culture. And you can definitely draw a line from the amateur videos that helped skate culture conquer America to the sudden tide of Vines and Instagram videos that have made the boards a phenomenon. Then again, the so-called hoverboards could simply be the Tickle Me Elmos of 2015 — ubiquitous, overpriced trinkets with a single holiday-season half-life. Time and the collective attention span of America’s teenagers will tell.
This much is certain: For some weeks or years to come, these devices will be part of the future. Celebrity endorsements on television and social media, enthusiastic word of mouth, and a sudden crop of internet distributors that can barely import the things fast enough to mark them up and meet demand have seen to that.
Unlike most of the toy crazes of the past 20 years, however, hoverboards aren’t simply a case of a major brand developing a product followed by a rash of cheap imitators. Their popularity is weirder and harder to trace. Hoverboards have been part of the American popular imagination since at least 1989, when Michael J. Fox snapped the handle off of a little girl’s levitating scooter to escape from a gang of future toughs in Back to the Future Part II. Since then, like jetpacks and flying cars, levitating skateboards have been something between an expectation and a punchline, a time-capsule agreement that the future has arrived. The past 25 years have seen an intermittent series of viral pranks, garage-bound failures, and science projects that have made good headline fodder, but done little to bring Robert Zemeckis’s dream to the consumer masses.
This year, that changed. An army of stodgy literalists is quick to point out that today’s hoverboards don’t hover. But they do glide satisfyingly, and they’re easy to use, and most important, they’re mass-produced. As Wired reported earlier this summer, all of the dozen or so tiny American companies that sell the devices, including IO Hawk, buy from Chinese manufacturers like Hangzhou Chic Intelligent Technology (Chic) and make changes to the boards, typically cosmetic, before selling them in the States. Chic likely sold the first scooters directly, last summer, in Asia. But that doesn’t mean Chic invented them.
And it certainly doesn’t mean Chic, or any of the companies that sell Chic-manufactured boards, have anything like brand recognition in America. Confusion over the name of the product class — are they hoverboards? are they scooters? — bespeaks the fact that none of the brands is strong enough to become a household catchall for the boards, like, say, Jet Ski for personal watercraft. Commercial frenzies around toys patented by individual creators aren’t unique; both Furby and Super Soaker were patented by entrepreneurs who sold exclusive licenses to large companies that marketed them skillfully. But the difference here is the frenzy and the patent fight are happening at the same time. Money is flying thanks to the unparalleled marketing power of social media, but without a giant corporation to pull it all down.
by Joseph Bernstein, BuzzFeed | Read more:
Image: Alex Eben Meyer
Ask Shane Chen — holder of United States Patent No. 8,738,278B2, for “a two-wheel, self-balancing personal vehicle” — and he’ll tell you that things first heated up outside his booth. That’s where John Soibatian, the president of IO Hawk, the leading American distributor of the newly popular “personal mobility devices” (they’re all made in China) zoomed up to him aboard what Chen immediately recognized as a 2-foot-long knockoff. Chen’s lawyers had notified Soibatian at the Consumer Electronics Show the month prior that the IO Hawk violated Chen’s patent, and now Soibatian had come down to Chen’s booth — where he was showing off his device, the Hovertrax — to ask him to back off, to think about dropping it.
“I’ve had this idea since I was a kid,” Soibatian pleaded with Chen.“Many people had this idea when they were a kid,” Chen responded firmly. “But they didn’t patent it.”
Ask Soibatian, who disputes most of Chen’s account, and you’ll get a different story. According to him, things got testy when Chen rolled over to the IO Hawk booth aboard a Solowheel, a kind of unicycle version of the hoverboard, which Chen has also patented. Chen informed Soibatian that he held the patent on devices of the type, and that this was how he made a living: by filing patents and waiting for other companies to violate them. Now that someone had built a salable version of his idea, he wanted to make a deal. Soibatian thought Chen sounded like a patent troll, like a scumbag. He told Chen he would have his lawyers look at the patent.
Later that day, after Chen wheeled away, one of the models Soibatian hired to scoot alluringly around trade shows reported that she had hovered by Chen’s booth and beheld a fiasco: people falling off the Hovertrax, lying on the floor. Soibatian mounted his IO Hawk and, model at his side, sped down to Chen’s booth, where he asked if he could give Hovertrax a try. Chen consented. Soibatian stepped aboard.
“I thought, Holy moly, what are you doing here, buddy?” Soibatian recalls. “It was garbage.” Why would he make a deal with the guy who built this piece of junk?
Chen, as you might expect, recalls the encounter differently. He stresses that Soibatian initially came to his booth, not the other way around. One person did fall down, but he was riding Orbit Wheels, another one of Chen’s inventions, one with a much steeper learning curve. And Chen says Soibatian never dismounted his IO Hawk. It was the model who tried Hovertrax, and she stayed upright the entire time. Chen agrees that he rode up to Soibatian’s booth, but not to make a deal; he went there to give the guy a break and offer him a few extra days to get patent-compliant.
Whatever the sequence of events, after the show, Soibatian says he showed Chen’s patent to his lawyers. “They told me I’d be crazy to pay him anything,” he says.
Four months later, Chen filed a lawsuit against Soibatian for patent infringement. The stakes of the war of the hoverboards had been set, and set high. Who had the right to profit off the future: the guy who patented the idea, or the guy who imported it in bulk from China?
And that was before Mark Cuban decided to get involved.
The 2-foot-long, two-wheeled, twin-motored plastic board that glided to the forefront of American popular culture this summer could be the skateboard of the young century. The similarities are there. It’s a zeitgeisty short-distance ride that has started to yield its own, self-sustaining viral culture. And you can definitely draw a line from the amateur videos that helped skate culture conquer America to the sudden tide of Vines and Instagram videos that have made the boards a phenomenon. Then again, the so-called hoverboards could simply be the Tickle Me Elmos of 2015 — ubiquitous, overpriced trinkets with a single holiday-season half-life. Time and the collective attention span of America’s teenagers will tell.
This much is certain: For some weeks or years to come, these devices will be part of the future. Celebrity endorsements on television and social media, enthusiastic word of mouth, and a sudden crop of internet distributors that can barely import the things fast enough to mark them up and meet demand have seen to that.
Unlike most of the toy crazes of the past 20 years, however, hoverboards aren’t simply a case of a major brand developing a product followed by a rash of cheap imitators. Their popularity is weirder and harder to trace. Hoverboards have been part of the American popular imagination since at least 1989, when Michael J. Fox snapped the handle off of a little girl’s levitating scooter to escape from a gang of future toughs in Back to the Future Part II. Since then, like jetpacks and flying cars, levitating skateboards have been something between an expectation and a punchline, a time-capsule agreement that the future has arrived. The past 25 years have seen an intermittent series of viral pranks, garage-bound failures, and science projects that have made good headline fodder, but done little to bring Robert Zemeckis’s dream to the consumer masses.
This year, that changed. An army of stodgy literalists is quick to point out that today’s hoverboards don’t hover. But they do glide satisfyingly, and they’re easy to use, and most important, they’re mass-produced. As Wired reported earlier this summer, all of the dozen or so tiny American companies that sell the devices, including IO Hawk, buy from Chinese manufacturers like Hangzhou Chic Intelligent Technology (Chic) and make changes to the boards, typically cosmetic, before selling them in the States. Chic likely sold the first scooters directly, last summer, in Asia. But that doesn’t mean Chic invented them.
And it certainly doesn’t mean Chic, or any of the companies that sell Chic-manufactured boards, have anything like brand recognition in America. Confusion over the name of the product class — are they hoverboards? are they scooters? — bespeaks the fact that none of the brands is strong enough to become a household catchall for the boards, like, say, Jet Ski for personal watercraft. Commercial frenzies around toys patented by individual creators aren’t unique; both Furby and Super Soaker were patented by entrepreneurs who sold exclusive licenses to large companies that marketed them skillfully. But the difference here is the frenzy and the patent fight are happening at the same time. Money is flying thanks to the unparalleled marketing power of social media, but without a giant corporation to pull it all down.
by Joseph Bernstein, BuzzFeed | Read more:
Image: Alex Eben Meyer
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Raising a Daughter? Handle With Care — Especially When She's 14
When my first baby was born, the doctor handed her to me and said, "Meet your future teenage daughter." Then she got on the phone with her own teenage daughter, and the two of them got into a loud argument about what to eat for dinner. I still remember the daughter's aggrieved voice, audible through her mother's flip phone: "That is REVOLTING and I would rather eat DOG FOOD."
My husband and I raised our eyebrows at each other over our own daughter's downy head. Surely this sweet, elfin, cashew-shaped bundle would never pick a fight with us about veal scallopini. We'd be there for her and hear her; if she became a vegetarian, we would develop a taste for seitan. When this baby reached adolescence, our groovy brand of friend-parenthood and open lines of communication would upend the traditional I-hate-you-don't-leave-me dynamic.
(Are you laughing? I am.)
Fourteen years later, here's what I'd tell my new mom self about my current teenage daughter — who, despite occasional tiffs, really is well worth the wait.
1. You never know who will come downstairs in the morning. One morning, she'll be all smiles and cheer — she loves your new sweater. The next day, she'll be mute and scowling. She'll gesture with her chin at the sweater you're now wearing for the second day in a row because she said she liked it, and this time she'll say, "Are you really wearing that?"
2. Most of the time, she doesn't want a hug. But when she does, she'll wrap her arms around your waist and rest her head on your shoulder, and the effect is reminiscent of happening upon a warm spot in a freezing cold lake. You don't know why it's there — maybe you don't want to know — but you float there for a while, enjoying the view. Fifty percent of the time, as she's extracting herself from your arms, she'll say, "Can I have money to buy Julia a birthday present?"
3. You know you need to keep your opinions to yourself. The problem is, sometimes she wants your opinion: on clothes, on a sticky situation with a friend, on whom she should write about for her project for Women's History Month. You will share a rewarding dialogue, but the next day, when you say, "Did you learn anything interesting about Susan B. Anthony?" she'll look at you as if she has no idea what you're talking about. In fact, she'll look at you as if she has no idea who you are. #coldspot
4. After a decade of making late-night small talk with baby sitters, nothing beats having your own teenager meet you and your spouse at the front door in her pajamas. She says her little sister was scared, "so I put her to bed in my room." She wants to know if the two of you had fun, if you liked the movie, what you had for dessert. #warmspot
5. You think she's wasting her money on cheap black booties from Forever21.com. When they arrive in the mail, you're pleasantly surprised that they look chic and stylish on her. When she goes to bed, you try them on. Guess what? You look like a 41-year-old mom wearing cheap shoes.
My husband and I raised our eyebrows at each other over our own daughter's downy head. Surely this sweet, elfin, cashew-shaped bundle would never pick a fight with us about veal scallopini. We'd be there for her and hear her; if she became a vegetarian, we would develop a taste for seitan. When this baby reached adolescence, our groovy brand of friend-parenthood and open lines of communication would upend the traditional I-hate-you-don't-leave-me dynamic.(Are you laughing? I am.)
Fourteen years later, here's what I'd tell my new mom self about my current teenage daughter — who, despite occasional tiffs, really is well worth the wait.
1. You never know who will come downstairs in the morning. One morning, she'll be all smiles and cheer — she loves your new sweater. The next day, she'll be mute and scowling. She'll gesture with her chin at the sweater you're now wearing for the second day in a row because she said she liked it, and this time she'll say, "Are you really wearing that?"
2. Most of the time, she doesn't want a hug. But when she does, she'll wrap her arms around your waist and rest her head on your shoulder, and the effect is reminiscent of happening upon a warm spot in a freezing cold lake. You don't know why it's there — maybe you don't want to know — but you float there for a while, enjoying the view. Fifty percent of the time, as she's extracting herself from your arms, she'll say, "Can I have money to buy Julia a birthday present?"
3. You know you need to keep your opinions to yourself. The problem is, sometimes she wants your opinion: on clothes, on a sticky situation with a friend, on whom she should write about for her project for Women's History Month. You will share a rewarding dialogue, but the next day, when you say, "Did you learn anything interesting about Susan B. Anthony?" she'll look at you as if she has no idea what you're talking about. In fact, she'll look at you as if she has no idea who you are. #coldspot
4. After a decade of making late-night small talk with baby sitters, nothing beats having your own teenager meet you and your spouse at the front door in her pajamas. She says her little sister was scared, "so I put her to bed in my room." She wants to know if the two of you had fun, if you liked the movie, what you had for dessert. #warmspot
5. You think she's wasting her money on cheap black booties from Forever21.com. When they arrive in the mail, you're pleasantly surprised that they look chic and stylish on her. When she goes to bed, you try them on. Guess what? You look like a 41-year-old mom wearing cheap shoes.
by Elisabeth Egan, Chicago Tribune | Read more:
Image: onebluelight / E+
Beware the Manic Pixie Dream Boyfriend
When I was in college I dated a guy who always checked that I was listening closely before making proclamations like “Dead flowers are more beautiful than live flowers.” After learning my building had roof access, he insisted we sit up there one night and chain-smoke Marlboro 27s. I was too anxious that my super would find out, and he was disappointed. “You’re totally closed off!" he exclaimed. “You’re never open to what the world is telling you.”
By “the world,” he obviously meant himself. If the world was telling me anything, it was Dump this idiot. (He was hot, though.)
This sort of guy can be irresistible, especially to goal-oriented women who need a break from obsessing about work. “I had serious obligations, and cared about success, and he was just, YOLO,” explains Beth, a 26-year-old union organizer, of her ex-boyfriend. “He was like, I'll read you my poetry and be romantic and freeing because I'll find things about you that are valuable that have nothing to do with your personal or career goals.” In your early 20s, they’re the opposite of the boring lawyer you “should” be dating.
The college guy was my first encounter with a type I have come to think of as the Manic Pixie Dream Boy: the self-mythologizing “free-spirited” dude who’s determined to make your life magical, whether you want it or not.
Think of him as a variation on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a term A.V. Club writer Nathan Rabin coined in 2007 to describe the whimsical female onscreen love interest whose sole narrative purpose is to help the sad boy hero cheer up. The Manic Pixie Dream Boy has a cultivated crunchy-eclectic-hipster aesthetic. (“He had a tattoo of a deer woodcut with a banner that said, ‘Stay Hungry,’” recalled my friend Jenna, 31, of her MPDB. “While we were making out he kept the poncho on that he got in Guatemala during his gap year,” said another friend, Margaux, 28.) Back when I was in school, he listened to Panda Bear; ten years later, as a late-20-something, he listens to Getz/Gilberto — on vinyl, obviously. He relishes breaking rules, and relishes even more his complete lack of concern that he’ll get caught. He gushes about tripping on mushrooms at Burning Man and he’s happy to supply you with some, as long as you promise to do them in nature. And he is determined to show women — no matter how much more successful, wealthy, beautiful, happy, and confident they are than him — that they aren’t living life to the fullest.
by Anna Breslaw, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Cultura/DUEL/Getty Images
By “the world,” he obviously meant himself. If the world was telling me anything, it was Dump this idiot. (He was hot, though.)This sort of guy can be irresistible, especially to goal-oriented women who need a break from obsessing about work. “I had serious obligations, and cared about success, and he was just, YOLO,” explains Beth, a 26-year-old union organizer, of her ex-boyfriend. “He was like, I'll read you my poetry and be romantic and freeing because I'll find things about you that are valuable that have nothing to do with your personal or career goals.” In your early 20s, they’re the opposite of the boring lawyer you “should” be dating.
The college guy was my first encounter with a type I have come to think of as the Manic Pixie Dream Boy: the self-mythologizing “free-spirited” dude who’s determined to make your life magical, whether you want it or not.
Think of him as a variation on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a term A.V. Club writer Nathan Rabin coined in 2007 to describe the whimsical female onscreen love interest whose sole narrative purpose is to help the sad boy hero cheer up. The Manic Pixie Dream Boy has a cultivated crunchy-eclectic-hipster aesthetic. (“He had a tattoo of a deer woodcut with a banner that said, ‘Stay Hungry,’” recalled my friend Jenna, 31, of her MPDB. “While we were making out he kept the poncho on that he got in Guatemala during his gap year,” said another friend, Margaux, 28.) Back when I was in school, he listened to Panda Bear; ten years later, as a late-20-something, he listens to Getz/Gilberto — on vinyl, obviously. He relishes breaking rules, and relishes even more his complete lack of concern that he’ll get caught. He gushes about tripping on mushrooms at Burning Man and he’s happy to supply you with some, as long as you promise to do them in nature. And he is determined to show women — no matter how much more successful, wealthy, beautiful, happy, and confident they are than him — that they aren’t living life to the fullest.
by Anna Breslaw, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Cultura/DUEL/Getty Images
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
The Fed is About to Attempt the Greatest Monetary Experiment in History
But there’s another important consideration that isn’t asked nearly enough: Can the Fed raise interest rates?
That query is more than academic. With the US economy looking increasingly strong, some still think the Federal Reserve could act to raise rates after its monetary policy committee, the Federal Open Market Committee, meets this week (Sept. 16 and 17).
Such Fed rate increases used to be commonplace. But those days are long gone. It’s been roughly nine years since the US central bank last ratcheted up its once primary policy rate, known as the Fed funds rate.
And in the near decade since then, pretty much every rule, technique, and guideline the Fed once relied on has been drastically rewritten, revamped, or removed. That blank slate underscores the fact that seven years after the financial crisis, the US economy continues to feel the reverberations.
In the words of one analyst, when the Fed tries to raise interest rates “their actions will entail the largest monetary policy experiment in human history.”
Here’s what you need to understand it.
How rates move
Once upon a time, the Federal Reserve altered monetary policy by raising and lowering its target for the Fed funds rate.
What are Fed funds?
They’re the reserves that banks have to hold—for large banks a 10% fraction of their deposits—by law. These funds are essentially for safekeeping, and can’t be invested. (Though since 2008 the Fed has had the power to pay interest on them.)
But funds in excess of that 10% ratio can be invested and lent out within the Federal Reserve system. This is the Fed funds market, where banks that have more reserves than they need lend to banks that don’t have enough, usually on an overnight basis. And the cost of borrowing money in this market is the Fed funds rate.
Here’s the problem: Right now, everybody has way more reserves than they need. That’s because the Federal Reserve has pumped large volumes of reserves into the system in recent years, in an effort to first contain the financial crisis and, later, support economic growth.
How did the Fed push these reserves into the system? Easy. It created them out of thin air, and used them to buy government securities from banks.
And why did it do it? To push interest rates down. (Supply and demand creates prices. All else equal, a rising supply of reserves pushes the price of reserves—the Fed funds rate—down.)
Here’s the trick: Traditionally, in order to raise interest rates, the Fed has to find ways to suck some those reserves back out of the system.
But that’s gotten a lot harder to do.
by Matt Phillips, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Andrew Harnik/AP
How Grown-Ups Deal With 'Microaggressions'
Whenever I first heard the word "microaggression," sometime in the last five years, I'm sure I was unaware how big "micro" could get. The accusation of a microaggression was about to become a pervasive feature of the Internet, and particularly social media. An offense most of us didn't even know existed, suddenly we were all afraid of being accused of.
We used to call this "rudeness," "slights" or "ignorant remarks." Mostly, people ignored them. The elevation of microaggressions into a social phenomenon with a specific name and increasingly public redress marks a dramatic social change, and two sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, have a fascinating paper exploring what this shift looks like, and what it means. (Jonathan Haidt has provided a very useful CliffsNotes version.)
Western society, they argue, has shifted from an honor culture -- in which slights are taken very seriously, and avenged by the one slighted -- to a dignity culture, in which personal revenge is discouraged, and justice is outsourced to third parties, primarily the law. The law being a cumbersome beast, people in dignity cultures are encouraged to ignore slights, or negotiate them privately by talking with the offender, rather than seeking some more punitive sanction.
Microagressions mark a transition to a third sort of culture: a victim culture, in which people are once again encouraged to take notice of slights. This sounds a lot like honor culture, doesn't it? Yes, with two important differences. The first is that while victimhood is shameful in an honor culture -- and indeed, the purpose of taking vengeance is frequently to avoid this shame -- victim status is actively sought in the new culture, because victimhood is a prerequisite for getting redress. The second is that victim culture encourages people to seek help from third parties, either authorities or the public, rather than seeking satisfaction themselves. (...)
I'm using microaggressions broadly here: to define the small slights by which any majority group subtly establishes its difference from its minority members. That means that I am including groups that may not come to mind for victim status, like conservatives in very liberal institutions. And no doubt many of my readers are preparing to deliver a note or a comment saying I shouldn't dare to compare historically marginalized groups with politically powerful ones. (...)
A while back, when I wrote about shamestorming, I ended up in a Twitter discussion with a guy who chided me for letting my privilege blind me to the ways that minorities (specifically women in tech, and more broadly on the Internet), experience microaggressions. You know how that conversation ended? When I pointed out that he had just committed a classic microagression: mansplaining to me something that I had actually experienced, and he had not. As soon as I did, he apologized, though that hadn't really been my intent. My intent was to point out that microaggressions are often unintentional (this guy clearly considered himself a feminist ally).
But I inadvertently demonstrated an even greater difficulty: Complaints about microaggressions can be used to stop complaints about microaggressions. There is no logical resting place for these disputes; it's microaggressions all the way down. And in the process, they make impossible demands on members of the ever-shrinking majority: to know everything about every possible victim group, to never inadvertently appropriate any part of any culture in ways a member doesn't like, or misunderstand something, or make an innocent remark that reads very differently to someone with a different experience. Which will, of course, only hasten the scramble for members of the majority to gain themselves some sort of victim status that can protect them from sanction.
by Megan McArdle, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Graham Barclay
We used to call this "rudeness," "slights" or "ignorant remarks." Mostly, people ignored them. The elevation of microaggressions into a social phenomenon with a specific name and increasingly public redress marks a dramatic social change, and two sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, have a fascinating paper exploring what this shift looks like, and what it means. (Jonathan Haidt has provided a very useful CliffsNotes version.)Western society, they argue, has shifted from an honor culture -- in which slights are taken very seriously, and avenged by the one slighted -- to a dignity culture, in which personal revenge is discouraged, and justice is outsourced to third parties, primarily the law. The law being a cumbersome beast, people in dignity cultures are encouraged to ignore slights, or negotiate them privately by talking with the offender, rather than seeking some more punitive sanction.
Microagressions mark a transition to a third sort of culture: a victim culture, in which people are once again encouraged to take notice of slights. This sounds a lot like honor culture, doesn't it? Yes, with two important differences. The first is that while victimhood is shameful in an honor culture -- and indeed, the purpose of taking vengeance is frequently to avoid this shame -- victim status is actively sought in the new culture, because victimhood is a prerequisite for getting redress. The second is that victim culture encourages people to seek help from third parties, either authorities or the public, rather than seeking satisfaction themselves. (...)
I'm using microaggressions broadly here: to define the small slights by which any majority group subtly establishes its difference from its minority members. That means that I am including groups that may not come to mind for victim status, like conservatives in very liberal institutions. And no doubt many of my readers are preparing to deliver a note or a comment saying I shouldn't dare to compare historically marginalized groups with politically powerful ones. (...)
A while back, when I wrote about shamestorming, I ended up in a Twitter discussion with a guy who chided me for letting my privilege blind me to the ways that minorities (specifically women in tech, and more broadly on the Internet), experience microaggressions. You know how that conversation ended? When I pointed out that he had just committed a classic microagression: mansplaining to me something that I had actually experienced, and he had not. As soon as I did, he apologized, though that hadn't really been my intent. My intent was to point out that microaggressions are often unintentional (this guy clearly considered himself a feminist ally).
But I inadvertently demonstrated an even greater difficulty: Complaints about microaggressions can be used to stop complaints about microaggressions. There is no logical resting place for these disputes; it's microaggressions all the way down. And in the process, they make impossible demands on members of the ever-shrinking majority: to know everything about every possible victim group, to never inadvertently appropriate any part of any culture in ways a member doesn't like, or misunderstand something, or make an innocent remark that reads very differently to someone with a different experience. Which will, of course, only hasten the scramble for members of the majority to gain themselves some sort of victim status that can protect them from sanction.
by Megan McArdle, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Graham Barclay
There Is No Theory of Everything
Frank (which is how he was always referred to) has recently become the subject of an interesting book by David Ellis, “Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Shirt Sleeves.” It gives a very good sense of what it felt like to be in a room with Frank. Truth to tell, Ellis’s title is deceptive, as I never recall Frank in shirtsleeves. He wore a sweater, usually inside out. He never had laces in the work boots he always wore, and strangest of all, because of an acute sensitivity to fabrics, he wore pajamas underneath his clothes at all times. The word “disheveled” doesn’t begin to describe the visual effect that Frank had on the senses. He was a physically large, strong-looking man, about 6-foot-4. The pajamas were clearly visible at the edges of his sweater, his fly was often undone (some years later, his only word of teaching advice to me was “always check your fly”) and he sometimes seemed to hold his pants up with a piece of string. In his pockets would be scraps of paper with typewritten quotations from favorite writers like George Eliot, Tolstoy or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, whom he revered. (...)
Despite the astonishing breadth of his interests, Frank’s core obsession in teaching turned on the relation between science and the humanities. More particularly, his concern was with the relation between the causal explanations offered by science and the kinds of humanistic description we find, say, in the novels of Dickens or Dostoevsky, or in the sociological writings of Erving Goffman and David Riesman. His quest was to try and clarify the occasions when a scientific explanation was appropriate and when it was not, and we need instead a humanistic remark. His conviction was that our confusions about science and the humanities had wide-ranging and malign societal consequences.
Let me give an example. Imagine that you are depressed, because of the death of a loved one, heartbreak or just too much hard and seemingly pointless work. You go to see a doctor. After trying to explain what ails you, with the doctor fidgeting and looking at his watch, he exclaims: “Ah, I see the problem. Take this blue pill and you will be cured.” However efficacious the blue pill might be, in this instance the doctor’s causal diagnosis is the wrong one. What is required is for you to be able to talk, to feel that someone understands your problems and perhaps can offer some insight or even suggestions on how you might move forward in your life. This, one imagines, is why people go into therapy.
But let’s flip it around. Let’s imagine that you are on a ferry crossing the English Channel during a terrible winter storm. Your nausea is uncontrollable and you run out onto the deck to vomit the contents of your lunch, breakfast and the remains of the previous evening’s dinner. You feel so wretched that you no longer fear death — you wish you were dead. Suddenly, on the storm-tossed deck, appears R.D. Laing, the most skilled, charismatic and rhetorically gifted existential psychiatrist of his generation, in a blue velvet suit. He proceeds to give you an intense phenomenological description of how your guts feel, the sense of disorientation, the corpselike coldness of your flesh, the sudden loss of the will to live. This is also an error. On a ferry you want a blue pill that is going to alleviate the symptoms of seasickness and make you feel better.
Frank’s point is that our society is deeply confused by the occasions when a blue pill is required and not required, or when we need a causal explanation and when we need a further description, clarification or elucidation. We tend to get muddled and imagine that one kind of explanation (usually the causal one) is appropriate in all occasions when it is not. (...)
This is the risk of what some call “scientism” — the belief that natural science can explain everything, right down to the detail of our subjective and social lives. All we need is a better form of science, a more complete theory, a theory of everything. Lord knows, there are even Oscar-winning Hollywood movies made about this topic. Frank’s point, which is still hugely important, is that there is no theory of everything, nor should there be. There is a gap between nature and society. The mistake, for which scientism is the name, is the belief that this gap can or should be filled.
by Simon Critchley, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tucker Nichols
How the NFL is Reshaping Surveillance Society
As guards were going so far as to check inside NFL fans' wallets as part of routine security measures before a recent preseason game at Levi's Stadium, a different form of surveillance was taking place on the inside of the San Francisco 49ers' 1-year-old, $1.3 billion home here in Silicon Valley.
We're not talking about facial recognition devices, police body cams, or other security measures likely zeroing in on fans. Instead, employees from San Jose-based Zebra Technologies had recently finished scanning the NFL uniforms of the 49ers and of their opponents—the Dallas Cowboys. All of a sudden, an on-the-field de facto surveillance society was instantly created when Zebra techies activated nickel-sized Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) chips that were fastened inside players' shoulder pads. Every movement of every player now could be monitored within an accuracy level of all but a few inches.
On its surface, this seems pretty innocuous. Cameras already track things like total player movement in sports, allowing teams to better recognize tendencies or gauge the physical toll on players. RFID chips, however, can provide more accurate, more granular information along these lines. The NFL's new real-time player tracking data—including things such as player speed and team formations—undoubtedly promises to reformat the game in terms of fan participation, team practicing methods, and potentially game-time strategy.
There's a larger story playing itself out as well. The league's RFID initiative may push far beyond the gridiron.
That's because this so-called geo-fencing technology has a geekier side, and it will likely recast things like fantasy football, the Microsoft's Xbox One experience, and perhaps even the Madden NFL video game produced by Electronic Arts. What's more, the technology potentially opens up new proposition gambling bets in Las Vegas sports books or other gambling venues. But its most unexpected impact will have nothing to do with sports at all. Fortune 500 companies are watching the NFL closely, examining how they might incorporate the RFID chip to monitor every move of their onsite employees from the construction site, the office, and beyond.
by David Kravets, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image:Christopher Schodt
We're not talking about facial recognition devices, police body cams, or other security measures likely zeroing in on fans. Instead, employees from San Jose-based Zebra Technologies had recently finished scanning the NFL uniforms of the 49ers and of their opponents—the Dallas Cowboys. All of a sudden, an on-the-field de facto surveillance society was instantly created when Zebra techies activated nickel-sized Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) chips that were fastened inside players' shoulder pads. Every movement of every player now could be monitored within an accuracy level of all but a few inches.On its surface, this seems pretty innocuous. Cameras already track things like total player movement in sports, allowing teams to better recognize tendencies or gauge the physical toll on players. RFID chips, however, can provide more accurate, more granular information along these lines. The NFL's new real-time player tracking data—including things such as player speed and team formations—undoubtedly promises to reformat the game in terms of fan participation, team practicing methods, and potentially game-time strategy.
There's a larger story playing itself out as well. The league's RFID initiative may push far beyond the gridiron.
That's because this so-called geo-fencing technology has a geekier side, and it will likely recast things like fantasy football, the Microsoft's Xbox One experience, and perhaps even the Madden NFL video game produced by Electronic Arts. What's more, the technology potentially opens up new proposition gambling bets in Las Vegas sports books or other gambling venues. But its most unexpected impact will have nothing to do with sports at all. Fortune 500 companies are watching the NFL closely, examining how they might incorporate the RFID chip to monitor every move of their onsite employees from the construction site, the office, and beyond.
by David Kravets, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image:Christopher Schodt
Monday, September 14, 2015
One Symptom in New Medical Codes: Doctor Anxiety
[ed. How about patient anxiety? If there's an upside for anyone here other than insurance companies (who would deny your claim), I'm not seeing it.]
The nation’s health care providers are under orders to start using a new system of medical codes to describe illnesses and injuries in more detail than ever before. The codes will cover common ailments: Did a diabetic also have kidney disease? But also included are some that are far less common: whether the patient was crushed by a crocodile or sucked into a jet engine.The more than 100,000 new codes, which will take effect on Oct. 1, have potential benefits, as they will require doctors to make a deeper assessment of many patients.
But the change is causing waves of anxiety among health care providers, who fear that claims will be denied and payments delayed if they do not use the new codes, or do not use them properly. Some doctors and hospitals are already obtaining lines of credit because they fear that the transition to the new system will cause cash-flow problems.
“It’s a sea change for physicians,” said Dr. Pardeep Kumar, a 46-year-old internist here who is counting down to Oct. 1. “We will have to be very much more specific.” (...)
The codes, from the 10th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, or ICD-10, have significant implications for patients. For example, Dr. Kumar said, doctors may need to perform additional tests to help determine if a patient with high blood pressure has heart failure.
ICD-10 includes 68,000 diagnostic codes, compared with 14,000 in the current compendium. The number of codes for inpatient hospital procedures will expand to 87,000, from 4,000.
Consumers often need prior approval from insurers for expensive tests and medical procedures. To get approval, they need a valid diagnostic code.
Dr. Michael R. Marks, an orthopedic surgeon and coding expert in Connecticut, said that if doctors did not use the proper codes, insurers could delay approval. “The patient,” he said, “will get frustrated and ask: ‘Why has my M.R.I. not been authorized yet? Why has my surgery not been scheduled?’ ” (...)
As people make the change, doctors and hospital executives say, it is inevitable that some claims will be denied for services that were provided but not properly coded. Patients may see the denials in statements they receive from insurers.
Many doctors and hospitals say they will step up efforts to collect the patient’s share of the bill, including deductibles and co-payments, at the time of service.
by Robert Pear, NY Times | Read more:
Image: James Brosher
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)