I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago

[ed. Brilliant.]

Hi! Today seems like a good day to answer some frequently asked questions.

Q: Are you marking any significant anniversaries today?

A: Yes, yes I am! Today is the second anniversary of Steve’s death.

Q: Who is Steve?

A: Steve was my husband uh DOI.

Q: Urm, now I feel bad for not knowing that.

A: It’s fine. At the two year point I find myself having to make more and more choices about whether or not I immediately blurt out HEYDIDYOUKNOWI’MAWIDOWTHAT’SMYFUNFACT!!!!!!! People in my life are less likely to have been around then and more likely to need to be briefed on this backstory. This is extremely annoying because after two years, I still don’t have a better way to relate this information than all caps-no spaces shouting.

But beneath that, it’s actually a super awesome thing, because it means that my world has gotten so much bigger in these two years. I’ve met a lot of people, and done a lot of things that I maybe only mildly imagined doing before.

Q: Dude, that sort of makes it sound like you’re glad Steve died.

A: I’m not, and that’s kind of a dick thing to say.

Q: I’M SORRY, I’M SORRY, I’M SORRY!

A: Ha ha, SIKE! I’m just fucking with you. I’m not glad Steve died, not even a little. He has missed SO MUCH COOL SHIT. He missed the opening with Cuba, which he would have been really stoked about. He’s missing an equality revolution in spaces around gender and sexual identity, race, police power, capital, and class. He’s missing whatever they’re doing with Hine over at Eastern Market. He’s missing our cat Claudia’s turbulent adolescence. He’s missing BERNIE SANDERS ELIZABETH WARRREN AND LAWRENCE LESSIG ‘NUFF SAID.

Also, I’m missing him. Obviously. A lot. BUT: I have a cousin who’s also a widow, and she told my sister that she’s not sure if she’d bring her husband back. Which sounds TOTALLY CRAZY to other people, BUT: When you experience a loss like this, you get to see a really wild new amount of life. Suddenly the range of the type of sad you can feel, to the type of happy you can feel, is busted open. The spectrum from happy to sad isn’t a foot wide anymore — it’s as far as your arms can stretch and then to the edges of the room and then up the block and over into the next neighborhood.

So I am not happy that Steve died. But I am happy a lot of the time, which I didn’t really anticipate on this day two years ago.

Q: What happened on this day two years ago?

A: Good question! While many people know that I am a widow, probably not a ton know what went down. Pretty much no one knows exactly what went down, because I don’t even know what happened.

What I do know is that for a couple of weeks, Steve had what we thought was a summer cold. Some coughing, some sneezing. Then he started a new job, and felt like that stress was compounding the illness — but it didn’t occur to either of us that this was a thing that was more than just something passing. He certainly didn’t think it was worth taking a sick day during his first week of work.

That Friday he came home from work REALLY REALLY sick. He’d barely been able to drive. I made him get up off the couch and go to an urgent care. The doctor there prescribed him an antibiotic and said “it’s either the flu or it’s not, so this will either work or it won’t.” We went to CVS and got the scrip filled right as they were closing. I had to pull a cry face to get them to fill it, and when I got back to the car I was pretty proud of myself for badgering them into doing it — I told Steve that “bitches get shit done.” Tina Fey went on to steal this line from me. (Right? I’m pretty sure that’s how this went down, but my memory isn’t great.)

Steve didn’t sleep very well that night. Around 5 a.m. he couldn’t sleep, so we woke up and watched some 30 Rock together. (The degree to which Tina Fey figures into this story is only being revealed to me now, two years later.) I went back to sleep. Around 9 a.m. I made my way up to Eastern Market to get groceries, and when I got back, Steve came down the stairs, carrying a bunch of his sick dude things — probably some Kleenexes, his thermometer, a seltzer can. I joked about him doing a Rachael Ray carry. Then he started coughing.

I don’t remember the sequence of events very well. He was sitting on the couch at one point and I encouraged him to cough it up, whatever it was. At one point he went into the kitchen and looked out the glass door to the patio, and said “Oh fuck.”

He started coughing up blood. I went to get him a bowl to cough into, and then said “that’s it, I’m calling 911.” And then he collapsed onto his knees, and fell on the ground.

The 911 operator wasn’t super helpful. I kept asking if I should do CPR and she kept asking if he was responsive, if he was breathing. I was surprised by how hard it was to tell. At one point I pulled on his ear to see if he would respond. I turned him on his side and tried to clear his airway. I cajoled the 911 operator, but weirdly, in the moment, I was really focused on being polite. Like, using a ton of please and thank you, as if that would make the fire truck get up Florida Avenue faster. Finally, after a couple of minutes, I heard the sirens and the operator said to me “well, let me just make sure that’s for you.” Because, Welcome to Washington, D.C., District Slogan: Those Sirens Might Not Be For You.

The EMTs cut off his shirt and intubated him, but they didn’t shock him. They used a machine to tell them whether or not to do it, and the machine said “don’t.” I don’t know if it was “don’t bother” or “you don’t need to.” I don’t know if they knew this wasn’t going to end well or not. They asked me how old he was, which I assume was to gauge whether to keep working or not.

Once we were in the ambulance, I asked where we were going and one of the EMTs just sort of nodded “no” to me, and indicated I should hold on. It felt like we sat there for a long time, trying to figure out what was happening. I struggled to call my parents with my cellphone — which was, ironically a recurring nightmare for me. That something was happening to Steve and I’d have to dial 911 and I wouldn’t be able to unlock my phone or dial the right number. Eventually I got my dad, who was in North Carolina, and he sent my sister over, who luckily was already down in the city helping a friend move.

Then I had to call Steve’s parents, which was horrible. Steve’s mom was excited to hear from me, since on their end, it was just a normal Saturday morning. And I had to say, no, turn down, your son’s in the back of an ambulance and the EMT just gave me a “no” nod.

Eventually we took off for Howard University Hospital, which was the closest ER. They took me into a tiny little room that wasn’t square, so all of the furniture was crammed in at weird angles. A chaplain came in and said some very anatomically specific prayers, which even as they were cutting Steve open and trying to resuscitate his heart directly, I thought was funny. My sister Sarah showed up, and they called a Catholic chaplain so he could give Steve last rites. I don’t know how the last rites went, but in terms of dealing with the non-dying, that guy was fucking terrible. I wish I could remember his name so I could pan him on Yelp.

Doctors would come in pretty frequently to update me, but only one or two of those times were they hopeful. Apparently his heart caught a couple of times, but it never stayed working. When the doctor came in to tell me that they’d declared a time of death, I made him tell it to Steve’s parents on the phone.

Sarah and I saw him at least twice, once while they were still working on him, and once after they’d cleaned him up. As they led me out of the ER, I told the nurse that I was conflicted about whether or not I should take a photo of his body. She told me I’d see him again, at the funeral, and that I should just focus on sleeping and eating. And then I said “I can’t believe it, he was such a good husband.”

And she said, “Yeah, but he did a shitty thing today.”

And that was the first time I laughed after Steve died.

Ultimately what seems to have happened is that an infection developed in his heart. This is probably related to the surgery he’d had around Christmas, to repair an aneurysm in a valve in his heart. I don’t have better clarity than this, and to some extent, the facts I did dig up, I’ve forgotten. It’s impossible to overstate what a hit your memory takes when you lose someone. It’s also impossible to overstate what a bureaucratic clusterfuck it is. GUYS, I CAN’T STRESS THIS ENOUGH: IF YOU SHARE A PHONE PLAN WITH SOMEONE, MAKE SURE EVERYONE’S AN AUTHORIZED USER.

Q: Um damn, I’m like, a little overwhelmed now.

A: Yeah, me too. I’ve been that way for two years. So if you sent me an email and I didn’t respond to it, that’s what happened. I couldn’t respond to your query about a story pitch because my husband coughed to death.

Q: So how are you doing in general?

by Rachel Ward, Medium |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Kiyoshi Saito
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Hello Elo

[ed. Plug your favorite team into Elo's calculator here.]

A good deal of FiveThirtyEight’s NFL coverage last season used Elo ratings, a simple system that estimates each team’s skill level using only the final scores and locations of each game. For 2015, we’re not only bringing Elo back (with a few small tweaks — more on those in a moment), but we’ve also built a continually updating Elo NFL predictions page that allows you to see the latest rankings, plus win probabilities and point spreads for the current week of NFL games.

Check out win and loss projections and playoff odds for all 32 NFL teams.

How do our Elo work? FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote a detailed FAQ about the formula before the 2014 season, and almost all of it still applies.

by Neil Paine, FiveThirtyEight |  Read more:

Image: Timothy A. Clary

Yfat Eluk
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We're on the Brink of a Revolution in Crazy-Smart Digital Assistants

Voice interfaces have been around for years, but let’s face it: Thus far, they’ve been pretty dumb. We need not dwell on the indignities of automated phone trees (“If you’re calling to make a payment, say ‘payment’”). Even our more sophisticated voice interfaces have relied on speech but somehow missed the power of language. Ask Google Now for the population of New York City and it obliges. Ask for the location of the Empire State Building: good to go. But go one logical step further and ask for the population of the city that contains the Empire State Building and it falters. Push Siri too hard and the assistant just refers you to a Google search. Anyone reared on scenes of Captain Kirk talking to theEnterprise’s computer or of Tony Stark bantering with Jarvis can’t help but be perpetually disappointed.

Ask around Silicon Valley these days, though, and you hear the same refrain over and over: It’s different now.

One hot day in early June, Keyvan Mohajer, CEO of SoundHound, shows me a prototype of a new app that his company has been working on in secret for almost 10 years. You may recognize SoundHound as the name of a popular music-recognition app—the one that can identify a tune for you if you hum it into your phone. It turns out that app was largely just a way of fueling Mohajer’s real dream: to create the best voice-based artificial-intelligence assistant in the world.

The prototype is called Hound, and it’s pretty incredible. Holding a black Nexus 5 smartphone, Mohajer taps a blue and white microphone icon and begins asking questions. He starts simply, asking for the time in Berlin and the population of Japan. Basic search-result stuff—followed by a twist: “What is the distance between them?” The app understands the context and fires back, “About 5,536 miles.”

Mohajer rattles off a barrage of questions, and the app answers every one. Correctly.

Then Mohajer gets rolling, smiling as he rattles off a barrage of questions that keep escalating in complexity. He asks Hound to calculate the monthly mortgage payments on a million-dollar home, and the app immediately asks him for the interest rate and the term of the loan before dishing out its answer: $4,270.84.

“What is the population of the capital of the country in which the Space Needle is located?” he asks. Hound figures out that Mohajer is fishing for the population of Washington, DC, faster than I do and spits out the correct answer in its rapid-fire robotic voice. “What is the population and capital for Japan and China, and their areas in square miles and square kilometers? And also tell me how many people live in India, and what is the area code for Germany, France, and Italy?” Mohajer would keep on adding questions, but he runs out of breath. I’ll spare you the minute-long response, but Hound answers every question. Correctly.

Hound, which is now in beta, is probably the fastest and most versatile voice recognition system unveiled thus far. It has an edge for now because it can do speech recognition and natural language processing simultaneously. But really, it’s only a matter of time before other systems catch up.

After all, the underlying ingredients—what Kaplan calls the “gating technologies” necessary for a strong conversational interface—are all pretty much available now to whoever’s buying. It’s a classic story of technological convergence: Advances in processing power, speech recognition, mobile connectivity, cloud computing, and neural networks have all surged to a critical mass at roughly the same time. These tools are finally good enough, cheap enough, and accessible enough to make the conversational interface real—and ubiquitous.

But it’s not just that conversational technology is finally possible to build. There’s also a growing need for it. As more devices come online, particularly those without screens—your light fixtures, your smoke alarm—we need a way to interact with them that doesn’t require buttons, menus, and icons.

At the same time, the world that Jobs built with the GUI is reaching its natural limits. Our immensely powerful onscreen interfaces require every imaginable feature to be hand-coded, to have an icon or menu option. Think about Photoshop or Excel: Both are so massively capable that using them properly requires bushwhacking through a dense jungle of keyboard shortcuts, menu trees, and impossible-to-find toolbars. Good luck just sitting down and cropping a photo. “The GUI has topped out,” Kaplan says. “It’s so overloaded now.”

That’s where the booming market in virtual assistants comes in: to come to your rescue when you’re lost amid the seven windows, five toolbars, and 30 tabs open on your screen, and to act as a liaison between apps and devices that don’t usually talk to each other.

You may not engage heavily with virtual assistants right now, but you probably will soon. This fall a major leap forward for the conversational interface will be announced by the ding of a push notification on your smartphone. Once you’ve upgraded to iOS 9, Android 6, or Windows 10, you will, by design, find yourself spending less time inside apps and more chatting with Siri, Google Now, or Cortana. And soon, a billion-plus Facebook users will be able to open a chat window and ask M, a new smart assistant, for almost anything (using text—for now). These are no longer just supplementary ways to do things. They’re the best way, and in some cases the only way. (In Apple’s HomeKit system for the connected house, you make sure everything’s off and locked by saying, “Hey Siri, good night.”)

At least in the beginning, the idea behind these newly enhanced virtual assistants is that they will simplify the complex, multistep things we’re all tired of doing via drop-down menus, complicated workflows, and hopscotching from app to app. Your assistant will know every corner of every app on your phone and will glide between them at your spoken command. And with time, they will also get to know something else: you.

by David Pierce, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Francesco Muzzi

Black Dub

Journey of a Tea Bag
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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

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

Olivier Bonhomme aka Bonom, Journey To New Orleans, 2015
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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.

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

Why the Arctic's Big Mosquito Problem Is Getting a Lot Worse

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The Fed is About to Attempt the Greatest Monetary Experiment in History

For years, everyone involved with investing has wanted to know: When will the Federal Reserve raise interest rates?

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

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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

There Is No Theory of Everything

I want to talk here about an undergraduate teacher of mine about whom many stories were told, but who is not so widely known. His name was Frank Cioffi (1928-2012), an Italian-American from a peasant family who spent his early years close to Washington Square. His mother died giving birth to him, and his distraught father died when Frank was an infant. He was then brought up by his grandparents, who spoke in a Neapolitan dialect. He dropped out of high school, spent time with the United States Army in Japan and then in France trying to identify dug-up corpses of American soldiers for the war grave commission. In 1950, he somehow managed to get into Ruskin College, Oxford, on the G.I. Bill, where he began to study philosophy and discovered the work of Wittgenstein, whose later thinking was just then beginning to circulate. After teaching in Singapore and Kent, he became the founding professor of the philosophy department at the University of Essex in the early 1970s. I encountered him there in 1982. It was memorable.

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:
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Newly Risen From the Yeast: THC
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