Friday, November 13, 2015
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Splat Goes the Theory
Few people are indifferent to the sun-drenched cherry tomatoes served up in every picturesque Italian village trattoria; or a well-tended vegetable garden where the branches of each tomato plant are carefully tied by hand with a green ribbon – these fruits are harvested with loving care. Most likely you feel that such tomatoes should be organically grown, on small fields, reflecting tradition and history. You might think that, this way, they accrue authenticity, honesty and truth, that their production will be small-scale, and preferably local.
But how ‘good’ are they really? And what does ‘good’ mean in this context? Are the organic hand-picked tomatoes sold at farmers’ markets really better, in a technical sense, or do they just make us feel like better consumers – perhaps even better human beings? If the organic tomato is just a vehicle for romantic fallacy, then we have to look dispassionately at how they are grown from the perspective of sustainability.
The logic of farmers’ markets begins with this: that the route from harvest to plate ought to be as direct as possible. That’s fine if farmers live round the corner from consumers. But urban land is in short supply, expensive, often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture. And there is more. Even in a short chain from farm to table, produce can get spoiled. A fresh tomato is not dead; like all fresh products, it’s a living organism with an active metabolism, post-harvesting, that provides a fertile substrate for microorganisms and causes tomatoes to deteriorate very fast. Freshness does not in itself translate into sustainability: unless the supply chain is well‑organised, losses can be considerable. And food losses come down to a waste of land, water, energy and chemicals used to produce what is ultimately discarded. This ought to be a good argument for local markets, but it is not. Everything depends on transportation, storage and speed. Poorly packed products go to waste in a matter of hours.
Thanks to decades of research, we now understand the interacting metabolisms of vegetables and microorganisms. We can design high-tech transport and storage techniques that slow down, even halt, deterioration through the use of harmless mixtures of gases. Chips fitted to containers give off signals when the gas composition and temperature need adjusting to plan ripening at the exact moment of delivery. Likewise, to minimise food losses in supermarkets, packaging techniques and materials have been developed to prolong shelf life. Surprising but true: modern treatments with biodegradable plastic bags and sealing create an optimal environment inside the package and reduce loss. So does the industrial washing of packed and cut vegetables, which also saves water, compared with household‑level processing.
What then of labour? While ‘handpicked’ sounds attractive to the urban consumer or occasional gardener, this type of manual labour is backbreaking if done all day long. Remuneration is poor, job security close to zero, and only few are willing to do this kind of work. To top it all, the yield from organic farming is low. So think about the alternative: harvesting vegetables such as tomatoes with smart robots that carefully grab each fruit, after assessing its ripeness with a special camera; using smart technology to fine-tune the dosing of fertiliser to every stage of plant development. This enhances flavour and texture, and reduces the overall amount of fertiliser needed. The result is that, in greenhouses, one square metre of tomato plants produces more than 70 kilos of high‑quality tomatoes, all of which make it to consumers’ kitchens.
Since we’re on the subject of freshness, consider this: ketchup might actually be better for us than fresh tomatoes – and not just because of economics (the tomatoes used in ketchup are subgrade ones that would otherwise be destroyed). While fresh tomatoes contribute to a healthy diet, human digestive systems are not tuned to extracting most nutrients from fresh tomatoes. Tomatoes are far more nutritious when cooked or processed into ketchup or paste. So, ketchup is no bad thing – unless overloaded with sugar and salt. Indeed, a growing body of evidence suggests that the discovery of fire and cooking – that is, heating food – has been essential in the evolution of the human brain because it allowed for a better absorption of nutrients. Moreover, drying and smoking promoted the preservation of perishable foodstuffs, and perhaps facilitated the emergence of a more complex diet and division of labour.
But surely, you’ll object, tomatoes grown in small-scale gardens taste better. Not so! Double-blind tasting panels have been unable to pick out the greenhouse tomatoes as lacking in flavour, or tomatoes grown without fertiliser as more tasteful. According to Dutch reports on such testing, taste is more dependent on the variety of tomato than on the way it is grown. More importantly, the context of eating determines everything. The on-the-vine tomatoes you consume with mozzarella and olive oil on a village square in Italy will never taste the same at home. It’s a matter of psychology and gastronomy, not chemistry and biology.
by Louise O Fresco, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Yuki Murata/Getty
Do You Drive Stick? Fans of Manual Transmission Can’t Let Go
Alan Macey is clutching the past. Three years ago, he persuaded his wife to ditch the family automatic for a car with a manual transmission, once commonly known as the stick shift.
“I had just had enough of driving this soulless refrigerator,” he said.
But the 33-year-old Michigan man, a designer at Jeep, part of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, knows only too well the downshifting fortunes of the stick.
The proportion of cars and light trucks in the U.S. sold with manual transmissions has fallen to around 7% in 2014 from 35% in 1980, according to WardsAuto, which keeps data on car manufacturing and sales.
The decline is expected to accelerate as high-performance sports cars, once holdouts, increasingly shift to hybrid automatics.
While some young buyers still crave the clutch, most are disinclined to manually shift gears, according to Clay Voorhees, an associate professor at Michigan State University, who studies the attitude of millennials toward cars.
“The high of getting the Facebook update outweighs the emotional high of experiencing the G-forces of going around a corner,” Mr. Voorhees said. In other words, he explained, “Driving a manual is going to make you less able to text or check your phone.”
Mr. Macey is among those in the minority. “We find joy in those fleeting moments between ratios; the crescendo of rpm, the gentle click of the gate, the building inertia in our chest as the drivetrain becomes whole again,” he wrote in a manifesto that helped give birth to The Manual Gearbox Preservation Society, a movement in the making whose Facebook page has 27 likes.
“I had just had enough of driving this soulless refrigerator,” he said.But the 33-year-old Michigan man, a designer at Jeep, part of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, knows only too well the downshifting fortunes of the stick.
The proportion of cars and light trucks in the U.S. sold with manual transmissions has fallen to around 7% in 2014 from 35% in 1980, according to WardsAuto, which keeps data on car manufacturing and sales.
The decline is expected to accelerate as high-performance sports cars, once holdouts, increasingly shift to hybrid automatics.
While some young buyers still crave the clutch, most are disinclined to manually shift gears, according to Clay Voorhees, an associate professor at Michigan State University, who studies the attitude of millennials toward cars.
“The high of getting the Facebook update outweighs the emotional high of experiencing the G-forces of going around a corner,” Mr. Voorhees said. In other words, he explained, “Driving a manual is going to make you less able to text or check your phone.”
Mr. Macey is among those in the minority. “We find joy in those fleeting moments between ratios; the crescendo of rpm, the gentle click of the gate, the building inertia in our chest as the drivetrain becomes whole again,” he wrote in a manifesto that helped give birth to The Manual Gearbox Preservation Society, a movement in the making whose Facebook page has 27 likes.
by Zusha Elinson, WSJ | Read more:
Image: shazam 791
The Marshawn Lynch Encyclopedia
[ed. A true original. See also: The Sound and the Fury.]
Marshawn Lynch never gives interviews, but has several of the NFL's most famous quotes. He says over and over again he wants to avoid media attention, but gets called an attention-seeker. His job description includes getting tackled, but he inflicts more pain than the tacklers.
Marshawn Lynch makes so little sense in this world that wherever he goes, he leaves a trail of fascinating things in his wake. Sometimes they're weird words. Sometimes they're brutalized defenders. We can't hope to understand him, but we've tried to compile all the wonderful, strange, and good things about Marshawn Lynch in one post. This is the Marshawn Lynch Encyclopedia.
by Rodger Sherman, SB Nation | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Biologists Announce They’re All Done With Rodents
by The Onion | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Bento Boxes and the Grade-School Power Lunch
“Bento Monogatari,” a Belgian short film that was released in 2010, a woman makes her husband a bento box for lunch each day, in an attempt to salvage their marriage. Traditionally, bento is a single-portion meal, served in a box that contains small amounts of several types of food. In Japan, bento, which dates back hundreds of years, is highly aesthetic, reflecting clean lines, ordered geometries, and uncluttered space; today, it often includes food shaped into adorable characters. And so the wife in “Bento Monogatari,” who wears Harajuku-style dresses and fills her house with Japanese tchotchkes, molds rice balls into elaborate rabbits and piglets. Her husband, however, is more interested in his beautiful male co-worker, and he throws away the food. When the wife finds out, she explodes. “Don’t forget that I wake up at five every morning to prepare this ‘garbage’ for you!” she snaps. But the allure of bento prevails in the end: in a surreal twist, the husband is transformed into a bento character, and the beautiful co-worker eats him for lunch.
The film played at Cannes, in 2011, a small part of a wave of international interest in bento over the past few years. A decade ago, it was difficult to find bento supplies outside Japan. Now bento-dedicated blogs and Pinterest boardsabound. There are bento contests and bento how-to books. As of this month, the best-selling lunchbox on Amazon.com was a set of three-compartment “Bento Lunch Box Containers.” This year’s flurry of back-to-school media coverage included reports on bento from the “Today” show, the Guardian, and the Halifax Chronicle Herald, to name a few. The term “bento” has also spread beyond lunch, to describe balanced, compartmentalized, and aesthetically appealing design in any field. In fashion, for example, the online retailerMM.LaFleur offers customers a stylist-curated bento consisting of three to five base garments and an assortment of accessories. (“We often hear from customers that they feel like we ‘know’ them and have solved a major problem in their lives,” Sarah LaFleur, the company’s founder and C.E.O., wrote to me in an e-mail.)
It’s in the realm of food, though, and especially food for children, that bento has become a status symbol. The trendy version of bento depicted in “Bento Monogatari” follows mainly from the contemporary Japanese practice of charaben, which features food sculpted into intricate and adorable characters, like SpongeBob SquarePants and Pikachu. Charaben makers painstakingly fashion the food using stencils, specialized picks, cutters, and other tools, with the aim of achieving kawaii, a type of cuteness associated with things like babies, snowmen, and baby pandas. For his book “Face Food: The Visual Creativity of Japanese Bento Boxes,” Christopher D. Salyers photographed the elaborate bento made by Japanese mothers (and one father), who told him that they would often wake up at 5 A.M. to tweeze seaweed and tapioca into piglets and manga princesses. “The devotion they had to the craft was one inspired by an absolute avidity toward pleasing their children,” Salyers writes.
Online bento culture is focussed on the exquisite and the practical. Shirley Wong, a Singaporean blogger who goes by the moniker Little Miss Bento, runs workshops to teach people how to make the perfect charaben. Elsewhere, bloggers like Sheri Chen, of Happy Little Bento, and Li Ming Lee, at Bento Monsters, document the bento they build for their families. (Caroline Miros, the C.E.O. of PlanetBox, a maker of bento-like containers, told me that about ninety per cent of people sharing lunches on her company’s social-media pages are women.) The downside of this conspicuous creativity is the expectations it can place on parents. A recent article by Kimberly Leonard in U.S. News and World Report suggested that pressure born of bento-dedicated social media, in particular, is excessive. “For parents who make these lunches and for those who don’t, the topic of what they are feeding their kids is deeply personal, rife with insecurity, anxiety, judgment and criticism,” she writes. Bettina Elias Siegel, a food-policy commentator who blogs about children and food at The Lunch Tray, wrote to me in an e-mail, “Are [bloggers] justifiably proud of their work and entitled to show off a little, the way we all trumpet our accomplishments on social media these days? Or are they coming across as morally superior?”
As Kenji Ekuan, the Japanese designer best known for creating the Kikkoman soy-sauce bottle, writes in his 1998 book, “The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox,” these social concerns are woven into the history of the bento box. The bento has humble beginnings, tracing back to twelfth-century Japanese farmers who used them to carry simple balls of rice into the fields. A more elaborate bento culture flourished during the Edo period (1603–1867), when it became the province of the élite. Sightseers would carry koshibento, or “waist bento,” which consisted of easily portable rice balls wrapped in bamboo leaves and tucked into a woven bamboo box. Makunouchi bento, or “between-the-acts bento,” consisting of cylinders of rice and side dishes, were served during intermissions of Noh and Kabuki performances.
Later, bento became prevalent in more areas of Japanese society—in offices, as white-collar workers began to carry their lunches in compartmentalized aluminum containers, and at train stations, which came to feature a wide selection of to-go bento. By mid-century, factories were churning out cheap bento boxes, to the dismay of some élites. “The quality of these mass-produced lunchboxes is appallingly low, making them an entirely different breed from their gorgeous ancestors,” Ekuan writes. “In many cases, the rice is no longer even shaped or wrapped but simply crammed into the assigned portion.”
The film played at Cannes, in 2011, a small part of a wave of international interest in bento over the past few years. A decade ago, it was difficult to find bento supplies outside Japan. Now bento-dedicated blogs and Pinterest boardsabound. There are bento contests and bento how-to books. As of this month, the best-selling lunchbox on Amazon.com was a set of three-compartment “Bento Lunch Box Containers.” This year’s flurry of back-to-school media coverage included reports on bento from the “Today” show, the Guardian, and the Halifax Chronicle Herald, to name a few. The term “bento” has also spread beyond lunch, to describe balanced, compartmentalized, and aesthetically appealing design in any field. In fashion, for example, the online retailerMM.LaFleur offers customers a stylist-curated bento consisting of three to five base garments and an assortment of accessories. (“We often hear from customers that they feel like we ‘know’ them and have solved a major problem in their lives,” Sarah LaFleur, the company’s founder and C.E.O., wrote to me in an e-mail.)It’s in the realm of food, though, and especially food for children, that bento has become a status symbol. The trendy version of bento depicted in “Bento Monogatari” follows mainly from the contemporary Japanese practice of charaben, which features food sculpted into intricate and adorable characters, like SpongeBob SquarePants and Pikachu. Charaben makers painstakingly fashion the food using stencils, specialized picks, cutters, and other tools, with the aim of achieving kawaii, a type of cuteness associated with things like babies, snowmen, and baby pandas. For his book “Face Food: The Visual Creativity of Japanese Bento Boxes,” Christopher D. Salyers photographed the elaborate bento made by Japanese mothers (and one father), who told him that they would often wake up at 5 A.M. to tweeze seaweed and tapioca into piglets and manga princesses. “The devotion they had to the craft was one inspired by an absolute avidity toward pleasing their children,” Salyers writes.
Online bento culture is focussed on the exquisite and the practical. Shirley Wong, a Singaporean blogger who goes by the moniker Little Miss Bento, runs workshops to teach people how to make the perfect charaben. Elsewhere, bloggers like Sheri Chen, of Happy Little Bento, and Li Ming Lee, at Bento Monsters, document the bento they build for their families. (Caroline Miros, the C.E.O. of PlanetBox, a maker of bento-like containers, told me that about ninety per cent of people sharing lunches on her company’s social-media pages are women.) The downside of this conspicuous creativity is the expectations it can place on parents. A recent article by Kimberly Leonard in U.S. News and World Report suggested that pressure born of bento-dedicated social media, in particular, is excessive. “For parents who make these lunches and for those who don’t, the topic of what they are feeding their kids is deeply personal, rife with insecurity, anxiety, judgment and criticism,” she writes. Bettina Elias Siegel, a food-policy commentator who blogs about children and food at The Lunch Tray, wrote to me in an e-mail, “Are [bloggers] justifiably proud of their work and entitled to show off a little, the way we all trumpet our accomplishments on social media these days? Or are they coming across as morally superior?”
As Kenji Ekuan, the Japanese designer best known for creating the Kikkoman soy-sauce bottle, writes in his 1998 book, “The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox,” these social concerns are woven into the history of the bento box. The bento has humble beginnings, tracing back to twelfth-century Japanese farmers who used them to carry simple balls of rice into the fields. A more elaborate bento culture flourished during the Edo period (1603–1867), when it became the province of the élite. Sightseers would carry koshibento, or “waist bento,” which consisted of easily portable rice balls wrapped in bamboo leaves and tucked into a woven bamboo box. Makunouchi bento, or “between-the-acts bento,” consisting of cylinders of rice and side dishes, were served during intermissions of Noh and Kabuki performances.
Later, bento became prevalent in more areas of Japanese society—in offices, as white-collar workers began to carry their lunches in compartmentalized aluminum containers, and at train stations, which came to feature a wide selection of to-go bento. By mid-century, factories were churning out cheap bento boxes, to the dismay of some élites. “The quality of these mass-produced lunchboxes is appallingly low, making them an entirely different breed from their gorgeous ancestors,” Ekuan writes. “In many cases, the rice is no longer even shaped or wrapped but simply crammed into the assigned portion.”
by Adrienne Raphel, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Mikey Burton
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
The Guilded Age
The seal is broken on the “sharing economy.” There is a chance we can roll back that name; the collection of things it represents, however, is sticking around in some form. Uber has steamrolled through municipality after municipality. Airbnb Head of Global Policy Chris Lehane, at a press conference following the defeat of Proposition F, a ballot measure that would have more stringently regulated Airbnb-style rentals in San Francisco, described this change as emblematic of “a broader evolution in capitalism.” He’s probably right. Airbnb’s pitch, that your home is not just a place you live but an underutilized asset, represents a kind of systemic creep that’s hard to reverse. In the coming years, with or without interruption, various Uber-fors will grow in size and influence. (...)
In the meantime, sharing economy companies must deal with more immediate issues. For example: A lot of the things they help people do are not quite legal. By extension, despite these companies’ best efforts to evade liability and pass it to their partners, some of the things they do are not quite legal. A lot of the things they help people do, as self-evident as these companies may think they are, are either not widely understood or are running up against some pushback. Some of this pushback comes from incumbent competitors, to whom the sharing economy companies represent a more efficient or cheaper competitor. So they’re trying to change the law; they’re trying to alter public opinion; they’re trying to win private and public battles in politics and public relations. They’re hiring the biggest-shot lawyers and PR people in the world. They’re also trying to mobilize their users, “partners,” and anyone else who’s using their various platforms. (...)
Uber’s regulatory battles will, to some extent, pave the way for other services, be they car-hailing apps or delivery networks or privatized replacements for public transit or just other types of on-demand labor whatevers. Airbnb’s will free up, to some extent, Airbnb competitors. But because they’re first, and because they’re huge, and because their investors have lots of adjacent interests, these regulatory battles belong to them. This means our next laws regarding how people drive and get driven, and the next sets of rules determining what and where a hotel can be, will be written largely by these companies. Or, at least, in the context of the specific battles these companies are fighting. Let’s say you don’t have any, or many, qualms about this “broader evolution” in capitalism and all the changes it may entail in our ideas about labor, ownership, and capital itself. Or just that you’re directly invested in it: you use or drive for Uber; you use or host on Airbnb. Your interests, in the near term, would obviously align with Uber’s and Airbnb’s! They’re fighting for your ability to use Uber and Airbnb. Of course you want that. You have demonstrated that you want that! These companies are fighting on your behalf in a real way. But they’re doing so as an unavoidable side effect of fighting for themselves. Airbnb in particular is comfortable speaking as a perfect representative of the concept it popularized, and the types of laws it would seek to defeat or enact would have to be somewhat well-aligned with the general idea of person-to-person nightly room rentals. But an ascendant Airbnb is different from a dominant Airbnb. An Uber battling with taxi companies is different from an Uber that has replaced taxi companies. These companies know this. Their leaders are CEOs and investors, not activists. Their interests will change, and not necessarily in parallel with the interests of their partners.
In the meantime, sharing economy companies must deal with more immediate issues. For example: A lot of the things they help people do are not quite legal. By extension, despite these companies’ best efforts to evade liability and pass it to their partners, some of the things they do are not quite legal. A lot of the things they help people do, as self-evident as these companies may think they are, are either not widely understood or are running up against some pushback. Some of this pushback comes from incumbent competitors, to whom the sharing economy companies represent a more efficient or cheaper competitor. So they’re trying to change the law; they’re trying to alter public opinion; they’re trying to win private and public battles in politics and public relations. They’re hiring the biggest-shot lawyers and PR people in the world. They’re also trying to mobilize their users, “partners,” and anyone else who’s using their various platforms. (...)Uber’s regulatory battles will, to some extent, pave the way for other services, be they car-hailing apps or delivery networks or privatized replacements for public transit or just other types of on-demand labor whatevers. Airbnb’s will free up, to some extent, Airbnb competitors. But because they’re first, and because they’re huge, and because their investors have lots of adjacent interests, these regulatory battles belong to them. This means our next laws regarding how people drive and get driven, and the next sets of rules determining what and where a hotel can be, will be written largely by these companies. Or, at least, in the context of the specific battles these companies are fighting. Let’s say you don’t have any, or many, qualms about this “broader evolution” in capitalism and all the changes it may entail in our ideas about labor, ownership, and capital itself. Or just that you’re directly invested in it: you use or drive for Uber; you use or host on Airbnb. Your interests, in the near term, would obviously align with Uber’s and Airbnb’s! They’re fighting for your ability to use Uber and Airbnb. Of course you want that. You have demonstrated that you want that! These companies are fighting on your behalf in a real way. But they’re doing so as an unavoidable side effect of fighting for themselves. Airbnb in particular is comfortable speaking as a perfect representative of the concept it popularized, and the types of laws it would seek to defeat or enact would have to be somewhat well-aligned with the general idea of person-to-person nightly room rentals. But an ascendant Airbnb is different from a dominant Airbnb. An Uber battling with taxi companies is different from an Uber that has replaced taxi companies. These companies know this. Their leaders are CEOs and investors, not activists. Their interests will change, and not necessarily in parallel with the interests of their partners.
Evil But Stupid
On May 10, the London Review of Books published “The Killing of Osama bin Laden,” a 10,000-word piece by veteran reporter Seymour Hersh. The story argued that the official White House narrative of the al Qaeda leader’s killing was a fabrication. The intelligence blogger R. J. Hillhouse had made similar claims a few years earlier, which had gone largely ignored in the US. But these allegations came from the most celebrated investigative journalist of the past half-century — they received more attention. The number of people trying to read Hersh’s story online was enough to crash the LRB’s website, something their many articles on Greco-Roman numismatics had previously failed to do.
Hersh’s story was largely sourced from an unnamed retired US intelligence official, whose direct quotes are scattered through the piece, and whose account of the bin Laden raid is backed by testimony from several defense consultants and the former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (all of whom, as Hersh’s detractors quickly pointed out, are retired or otherwise out of the loop). Its main claim was that Pakistan’s government had been holding bin Laden under house arrest in a compound in Abbottabad since 2006. The US government claims the raid was the result of years of patient intelligence work, which culminated in the identification of bin Laden’s courier (through the use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques, as famously depicted in the movie Zero Dark Thirty), who was then tracked back to the compound. Hersh says the precipitating event was, instead, just an unplanned accident: in 2010, a retired officer of the Pakistani intelligence service walked into the US Embassy and offered to reveal bin Laden’s location in exchange for $25 million, the reward the US had offered since 2001.
This initial event set off a chain of consequences. First, Hersh says, the US attempted to confirm the story with Pakistan’s chief of army staff and the head of the country’s intelligence service. Eventually, after threats, bribery, and blackmail, Pakistani officials admitted they had custody of bin Laden and were coerced into offering a sample of his DNA to prove it. Pakistan’s situation, Hersh claims, was complicated: they were using bin Laden as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Taliban and al Qaeda, and they were also receiving payments from bin Laden’s Saudi Arabian sources to finance his upkeep. They needed foreign aid and support, but they couldn’t publicly hand bin Laden, a popular hero in Pakistan, over to the US. According to Hersh, the deal they struck was that they wouldn’t oppose a US raid on bin Laden’s compound, but bin Laden had to be killed.
The raid was planned for May 2, 2011. As it was in the interest of both sides to keep their cooperation secret, the initial plan, according to Hersh, was to say that bin Laden had been killed by a drone strike in the mountains on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where he was widely believed to be hiding. The Pakistan Army agreed that on the night of the raid they would turn a blind eye to the presence of American helicopters in their airspace. The guards at bin Laden’s compound were ordered to leave as soon as they heard the sound of approaching choppers.
The broad outlines of Hersh’s account match those of the official version: two Black Hawk helicopters brought an elite team of Navy SEALs to bin Laden’s compound. One crashed on the lawn while attempting to land. The SEALs forced their way into the building, blasted through security doors, and surprised bin Laden in his room. But Hersh’s story features no armed guards, no firefight, no wives used as human shields. Nor was bin Laden killed in self-defense, as the White House still maintains. One of the pleasures of reading Hersh’s account is the way it elegantly dismantles aspects of the story that seemed suspect from the beginning, and first among these is the notion that bin Laden, had he surrendered, would have been taken alive. “Let’s face it,” the retired intelligence officer told Hersh. “We’re going to commit a murder.”
After this point Hersh’s story and the administration’s largely jibe. Although they offer differing assessments of the quantity and value of the intelligence gathered from bin Laden’s compound, and the care with which it was collected, both agree that the SEALs took at least some of bin Laden’s papers (the administration claimed there was also computer equipment, which Hersh’s source denies) and went outside to wait for a backup helicopter. Before they left, the SEALs set a controlled explosion in the crashed helicopter to destroy its communications equipment. Hersh argues that these last actions should be seen as indirect confirmation of Pakistan’s support for the raid: if there really was a high risk of detection — the sort of risk you might expect when landing two helicopters in the heart of Pakistan’s military establishment — the SEALs would have abandoned their body armor and weapons, left the damaged helicopter intact for the Pakistanis to find, and crammed into the remaining helicopter for the return trip.
After the raid was complete, Hersh claims, there was a third unplanned event: the White House rushed to share the news. The original plan had been to wait a week and then claim that a drone strike had killed bin Laden in the Hindu Kush mountains, just across the border in Afghanistan. But given the helicopter crash and resulting fireball, the Obama Administration felt the raid would be impossible to keep under wraps for a week. With the vocal exception, Hersh says, of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Obama’s advisers urged him to go public with the story as quickly as possible, before the Pentagon could announce it and take credit for it. According to Hersh, the White House had no press plan to implement should the raid go awry, no backup story. So they had to make up the story as they presented it to the world. Over the course of a few weeks, this scrambling produced inconsistencies. Bin Laden used a woman as a human shield; then he didn’t. Bin Laden was buried at sea from a naval vessel; the ship’s log has no record of any such burial. Bin Laden was shooting at SEALs when he was shot; or he wasn’t. And so on.
Hersh’s article solved several puzzles in the official report of bin Laden’s death. How could he have been hiding in a compound less than a mile from an elite military academy without Pakistan’s knowledge (a question raised in the days after the attack by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Dianne Feinstein, among others)? Why, when bin Laden’s neighbors called the Abbottabad police after the SEALs’ helicopter crashed, did the Pakistani military tell the police not to respond? Why had Obama, in his speech announcing the news, originally claimed that the raid was due to the help of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, only to refute this claim the next day? Why were the pictures of bin Laden’s supposed burial at sea at first kept classified and then said to have been destroyed?
Then the melee began. (...)
Is Hersh paranoid? In some ways, the label seems appropriate. He has written about the private lives of the Kennedys and claimed that high-ranking military officials are members of the Knights of Malta and Opus Dei (although, as Greg Grandin pointed out in the Nation, a number of current and former high-ranking military officials really have been members of extreme right-wing Christian sects such as the Knights of Malta). In its unending accumulation of detail after disastrous detail, Hersh’s reporting often has the screwball plotting of a Pynchon novel. If the subject matter weren’t so upsetting, his reports would be funny.
But in other respects, the term doesn’t fit. Hersh’s stories break down complex events into chains of isolated, largely reactive individual decisions. His reporting never points back, as Pynchon’s novels do, to shadowy conspiracies; there is no titanic clash between impersonal forces, no central organizing principle, only human action churning away. Near the beginning of Hersh’s book on the Iraq war, an intelligence official complaining about the “enhanced interrogation” tactics at Guantánamo says, “It was wrong and also dysfunctional.” A few pages later, this refrain is repeated by another source: “It’s evil, but it’s also stupid.”
Evil but also stupid: that’s the keynote of the book, and in some ways of Hersh’s entire career. He is a great chronicler of bureaucracy. His stories are powered by scenes of administrative incompetence, organizational stupidity, turf warfare, inadequate foresight, random outbursts of violence, disorganized reactions, and self-serving attempts by everyone involved to spin the narrative of events to their own advantage. The bin Laden story depends on a string of uncoordinated accidents — the walk-in, the helicopter crash — and a series of mostly unsuccessful responses, culminating in the White House’s rush to claim public credit for the raid without informing the Pentagon or its Pakistani allies.
Hersh’s story was largely sourced from an unnamed retired US intelligence official, whose direct quotes are scattered through the piece, and whose account of the bin Laden raid is backed by testimony from several defense consultants and the former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (all of whom, as Hersh’s detractors quickly pointed out, are retired or otherwise out of the loop). Its main claim was that Pakistan’s government had been holding bin Laden under house arrest in a compound in Abbottabad since 2006. The US government claims the raid was the result of years of patient intelligence work, which culminated in the identification of bin Laden’s courier (through the use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques, as famously depicted in the movie Zero Dark Thirty), who was then tracked back to the compound. Hersh says the precipitating event was, instead, just an unplanned accident: in 2010, a retired officer of the Pakistani intelligence service walked into the US Embassy and offered to reveal bin Laden’s location in exchange for $25 million, the reward the US had offered since 2001.This initial event set off a chain of consequences. First, Hersh says, the US attempted to confirm the story with Pakistan’s chief of army staff and the head of the country’s intelligence service. Eventually, after threats, bribery, and blackmail, Pakistani officials admitted they had custody of bin Laden and were coerced into offering a sample of his DNA to prove it. Pakistan’s situation, Hersh claims, was complicated: they were using bin Laden as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Taliban and al Qaeda, and they were also receiving payments from bin Laden’s Saudi Arabian sources to finance his upkeep. They needed foreign aid and support, but they couldn’t publicly hand bin Laden, a popular hero in Pakistan, over to the US. According to Hersh, the deal they struck was that they wouldn’t oppose a US raid on bin Laden’s compound, but bin Laden had to be killed.
The raid was planned for May 2, 2011. As it was in the interest of both sides to keep their cooperation secret, the initial plan, according to Hersh, was to say that bin Laden had been killed by a drone strike in the mountains on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where he was widely believed to be hiding. The Pakistan Army agreed that on the night of the raid they would turn a blind eye to the presence of American helicopters in their airspace. The guards at bin Laden’s compound were ordered to leave as soon as they heard the sound of approaching choppers.
The broad outlines of Hersh’s account match those of the official version: two Black Hawk helicopters brought an elite team of Navy SEALs to bin Laden’s compound. One crashed on the lawn while attempting to land. The SEALs forced their way into the building, blasted through security doors, and surprised bin Laden in his room. But Hersh’s story features no armed guards, no firefight, no wives used as human shields. Nor was bin Laden killed in self-defense, as the White House still maintains. One of the pleasures of reading Hersh’s account is the way it elegantly dismantles aspects of the story that seemed suspect from the beginning, and first among these is the notion that bin Laden, had he surrendered, would have been taken alive. “Let’s face it,” the retired intelligence officer told Hersh. “We’re going to commit a murder.”
After this point Hersh’s story and the administration’s largely jibe. Although they offer differing assessments of the quantity and value of the intelligence gathered from bin Laden’s compound, and the care with which it was collected, both agree that the SEALs took at least some of bin Laden’s papers (the administration claimed there was also computer equipment, which Hersh’s source denies) and went outside to wait for a backup helicopter. Before they left, the SEALs set a controlled explosion in the crashed helicopter to destroy its communications equipment. Hersh argues that these last actions should be seen as indirect confirmation of Pakistan’s support for the raid: if there really was a high risk of detection — the sort of risk you might expect when landing two helicopters in the heart of Pakistan’s military establishment — the SEALs would have abandoned their body armor and weapons, left the damaged helicopter intact for the Pakistanis to find, and crammed into the remaining helicopter for the return trip.
After the raid was complete, Hersh claims, there was a third unplanned event: the White House rushed to share the news. The original plan had been to wait a week and then claim that a drone strike had killed bin Laden in the Hindu Kush mountains, just across the border in Afghanistan. But given the helicopter crash and resulting fireball, the Obama Administration felt the raid would be impossible to keep under wraps for a week. With the vocal exception, Hersh says, of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Obama’s advisers urged him to go public with the story as quickly as possible, before the Pentagon could announce it and take credit for it. According to Hersh, the White House had no press plan to implement should the raid go awry, no backup story. So they had to make up the story as they presented it to the world. Over the course of a few weeks, this scrambling produced inconsistencies. Bin Laden used a woman as a human shield; then he didn’t. Bin Laden was buried at sea from a naval vessel; the ship’s log has no record of any such burial. Bin Laden was shooting at SEALs when he was shot; or he wasn’t. And so on.
Hersh’s article solved several puzzles in the official report of bin Laden’s death. How could he have been hiding in a compound less than a mile from an elite military academy without Pakistan’s knowledge (a question raised in the days after the attack by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Dianne Feinstein, among others)? Why, when bin Laden’s neighbors called the Abbottabad police after the SEALs’ helicopter crashed, did the Pakistani military tell the police not to respond? Why had Obama, in his speech announcing the news, originally claimed that the raid was due to the help of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, only to refute this claim the next day? Why were the pictures of bin Laden’s supposed burial at sea at first kept classified and then said to have been destroyed?
Then the melee began. (...)
Is Hersh paranoid? In some ways, the label seems appropriate. He has written about the private lives of the Kennedys and claimed that high-ranking military officials are members of the Knights of Malta and Opus Dei (although, as Greg Grandin pointed out in the Nation, a number of current and former high-ranking military officials really have been members of extreme right-wing Christian sects such as the Knights of Malta). In its unending accumulation of detail after disastrous detail, Hersh’s reporting often has the screwball plotting of a Pynchon novel. If the subject matter weren’t so upsetting, his reports would be funny.
But in other respects, the term doesn’t fit. Hersh’s stories break down complex events into chains of isolated, largely reactive individual decisions. His reporting never points back, as Pynchon’s novels do, to shadowy conspiracies; there is no titanic clash between impersonal forces, no central organizing principle, only human action churning away. Near the beginning of Hersh’s book on the Iraq war, an intelligence official complaining about the “enhanced interrogation” tactics at Guantánamo says, “It was wrong and also dysfunctional.” A few pages later, this refrain is repeated by another source: “It’s evil, but it’s also stupid.”
Evil but also stupid: that’s the keynote of the book, and in some ways of Hersh’s entire career. He is a great chronicler of bureaucracy. His stories are powered by scenes of administrative incompetence, organizational stupidity, turf warfare, inadequate foresight, random outbursts of violence, disorganized reactions, and self-serving attempts by everyone involved to spin the narrative of events to their own advantage. The bin Laden story depends on a string of uncoordinated accidents — the walk-in, the helicopter crash — and a series of mostly unsuccessful responses, culminating in the White House’s rush to claim public credit for the raid without informing the Pentagon or its Pakistani allies.
by The Editors, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Pete Sousa
The Birth of “The New Yorker Story”
[ed. See also: The covers of the New Yorker magazine.]
The fifties were a key decade in the evolution of American magazine fiction. Earlier in the century, there had been a large stable of magazines to which writers like Katherine Anne Porter and F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a fine living by selling short stories. Later in the century, The New Yorker was preeminent; placing a story in its pages was the grail of budding writers, the ultimate validation. By the end of the century, the magazine essentially had the commercial market for short fiction to itself.
It was also in the fifties that “the New Yorker story” emerged, quite suddenly, as a distinct literary genus. What made a story New Yorker was its carefully wrought, many-comma’d prose; its long passages of physical description, the precision and the sobriety of which created a kind of negative emotional space, a suggestion of feeling without the naming of it; its well-educated white characters, who could be found experiencing the melancholies of affluence, the doldrums of suburban marriage, or the thrill or the desolation of adultery; and, above all, its signature style of ending, which was either elegantly oblique or frustratingly coy, depending on your taste. Outside the offices of The New Yorker, its fiction editors were rumored to routinely delete the final paragraph of any story accepted for publication.
The heyday of “the New Yorker story” coincided so neatly with the tenure of William Shawn, who succeeded Harold Ross as editor in 1952 and presided until 1987, that it might instead be called “the Shawn story.” The one story from the Ross era in this volume, Roald Dahl’s “Taste,” is written in an older and more conventional register. Its setting—the dinner party of a parvenu stockbroker—is still recognizable and relevant today, but its high-concept premise and its O. Henry ending hark back to the decades when magazine fiction supplied the sort of popular entertainment now considered television’s province. The fifties put an end to that, and “the New Yorker story,” with its emphasis on sentence craft and its rejection of neatly tied-up endings, can be understood, in part, as a retreat from the pressure of commercial TV, a retrenchment in provinces beyond the reach of visual media.
The fifties were a key decade in the evolution of American magazine fiction. Earlier in the century, there had been a large stable of magazines to which writers like Katherine Anne Porter and F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a fine living by selling short stories. Later in the century, The New Yorker was preeminent; placing a story in its pages was the grail of budding writers, the ultimate validation. By the end of the century, the magazine essentially had the commercial market for short fiction to itself.
It was also in the fifties that “the New Yorker story” emerged, quite suddenly, as a distinct literary genus. What made a story New Yorker was its carefully wrought, many-comma’d prose; its long passages of physical description, the precision and the sobriety of which created a kind of negative emotional space, a suggestion of feeling without the naming of it; its well-educated white characters, who could be found experiencing the melancholies of affluence, the doldrums of suburban marriage, or the thrill or the desolation of adultery; and, above all, its signature style of ending, which was either elegantly oblique or frustratingly coy, depending on your taste. Outside the offices of The New Yorker, its fiction editors were rumored to routinely delete the final paragraph of any story accepted for publication.The heyday of “the New Yorker story” coincided so neatly with the tenure of William Shawn, who succeeded Harold Ross as editor in 1952 and presided until 1987, that it might instead be called “the Shawn story.” The one story from the Ross era in this volume, Roald Dahl’s “Taste,” is written in an older and more conventional register. Its setting—the dinner party of a parvenu stockbroker—is still recognizable and relevant today, but its high-concept premise and its O. Henry ending hark back to the decades when magazine fiction supplied the sort of popular entertainment now considered television’s province. The fifties put an end to that, and “the New Yorker story,” with its emphasis on sentence craft and its rejection of neatly tied-up endings, can be understood, in part, as a retreat from the pressure of commercial TV, a retrenchment in provinces beyond the reach of visual media.
In the fifties, and for a long time afterward, The New Yorker didn’t identify its fiction as fiction. The author’s name appeared only at the end, in small capital letters, the same way the magazine’s journalists and critics were credited. What began, perhaps, as an affectation of Harold Ross’s became an emblem of the magazine’s definition of itself: the writing literally came first, the author’s ego-bearing name last. Although fiction in those days was usually given pride of place at the front of the magazine (rather than being secreted near the back, as is the case today), the number of short stories varied from issue to issue, which left it to the reader to determine whether the text in front of her was fiction or nonfiction. The respect the magazine thereby accorded fiction writers—the implication that what mattered about a piece was its sentence-by-sentence excellence, not its genre, not the weight of its subject matter—was part of what made The New Yorker the place every young American story writer dreamed of being published.
“The New Yorker story” was a stereotype, of course, and inevitably an unfair one—Shawn ran dozens of shtetl stories by I. B. Singer and Irish country stories by Frank O’Connor, and he devoted most of one issue to the experimental novel Snow White, by Donald Barthelme, who at the time was not well known. But it was “the New Yorker story,” as it developed in the fifties, that became the model for aspiring writers, because it seemed to be the key to getting into the magazine, and by the seventies the model was so dominant that it generated mockery and backlash. Too many stories about mopey suburbanites. Too many well-off white people. A surfeit of descriptions, a paucity of action. Too much privileging of prose for the sake of prose, too little openness to rougher energies. And those endings? A style repeated too often devolves into a tic. After Shawn retired and the magazine’s fiction section became more of a free-for-all, more multivalent and multiethnic, the “New Yorker story” began to look like a form in well-deserved retirement—a relic of an era when subscribers had still had the patience and the time, in New Canaan, in Armonk, on a beach in the Hamptons, to read slow-moving stories in which nothing much happened at the end.
“The New Yorker story” was a stereotype, of course, and inevitably an unfair one—Shawn ran dozens of shtetl stories by I. B. Singer and Irish country stories by Frank O’Connor, and he devoted most of one issue to the experimental novel Snow White, by Donald Barthelme, who at the time was not well known. But it was “the New Yorker story,” as it developed in the fifties, that became the model for aspiring writers, because it seemed to be the key to getting into the magazine, and by the seventies the model was so dominant that it generated mockery and backlash. Too many stories about mopey suburbanites. Too many well-off white people. A surfeit of descriptions, a paucity of action. Too much privileging of prose for the sake of prose, too little openness to rougher energies. And those endings? A style repeated too often devolves into a tic. After Shawn retired and the magazine’s fiction section became more of a free-for-all, more multivalent and multiethnic, the “New Yorker story” began to look like a form in well-deserved retirement—a relic of an era when subscribers had still had the patience and the time, in New Canaan, in Armonk, on a beach in the Hamptons, to read slow-moving stories in which nothing much happened at the end.
by Jonathan Franzen, The New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Adrian Tomine
Portuguese Bean Soup
[ed. A fall tradition.]Portuguese Bean Soup
Serves approx. 10-12
Ingredients:
3 Smoked Ham Hocks (these are usually available in the meat freezer section. Make sure they’re smoked). [ed. I also add additional ham shanks]
1 Large Portuguese Sausage (any brand), cut into bite-size pieces (I used MUCH more than 1 for this batch, since that’s how much I had)
1 bag of dry kidney beans
1-2 cups (uncooked) macaroni (add more or less at your discretion)
2 medium-sized potatoes, peeled and cut into bite size pieces
1 white round onion, diced
2 large carrots, peeled and chopped into bite size pieces
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 bunch cilantro, chopped (save some extra unchopped for garnish)
2 bay leaves
1 six oz. can Tomato Paste (this will help to slightly thicken it)
1 fourteen oz. can Stewed Tomatoes
1 fourteen oz. can chicken stock
Salt and Pepper
Water
5 quart (or larger) pot or dutch oven
*Options: You can also add chopped celery and/or cabbage. I didn’t because there was no room for it. You can also substitute canned Kidney Beans for the uncooked type used here.
The most important part of this soup is the ham hock soup stock base it’s started with. This provides the dish with its “porky”, slightly smoky signature.
by Pomai, The Tasty Island | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Monday, November 9, 2015
In the Stream of Internet Radio, Music Stations Hold Their Own
[ed. KEXP is the best (but you already knew that, right?). Check out YouTube and all the artists they've spotlighted over the years)]
Internet radio was supposed to squash small FM music stations like KEXP. Someone forget to tell that to KEXP, the little station that has helped start the careers of big music acts like the Lumineers and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.
Last week John Richards, the morning D.J. at KEXP, walked through the station’s gleaming new headquarters not far from the Space Needle. It is a $15 million project intended to further the station’s evolution into a brick-and-mortar music programmer for the Internet age.
As workers put the finishing touches on the soaring public performance space near the building’s entrance, Mr. Richards pointed to a corner that will eventually have a cafe and another that will house a record store. A large soundproof window provided an aquarium-like view into the booth that Mr. Richards and other D.J.s will begin broadcasting from next month.
“It’s like ‘Star Trek’ in here,” Mr. Richards said, inspecting the electronic consoles, microphones and computer displays inside the booth.
Music fans live in a time of plenty, when nearly every song for any musical taste can be listened to in an instant over the Internet, from Spotify, Pandora and dozens of other sources. Satellite and commercial radio crowd the airwaves with further options for discovering new music and listening to the old.
And yet a handful of nonprofit music stations like KEXP with roots in college radio have never been doing better. They are using the Internet to reach bigger audiences around the globe, adding to their video programming and seeking to become in-person destinations for fans.
Most of all, they are trying to stand out with their music programming, with genre-hopping mixes selected by D.J.s rather than software or dictated by program directors at commercial radio chains.
The abundance of music and methods of distribution has increased demand for human tour guides for all of it.
“There’s so much music out there, so many places to go,” said Roger LaMay, general manager of WXPN, a public music station in Philadelphia, and chairman of the board of National Public Radio. “But finding curation from a trusted source is a lifeline for most music lovers who don’t have the time or wherewithal to sift through it all on their own.”
Internet radio was supposed to squash small FM music stations like KEXP. Someone forget to tell that to KEXP, the little station that has helped start the careers of big music acts like the Lumineers and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.
Last week John Richards, the morning D.J. at KEXP, walked through the station’s gleaming new headquarters not far from the Space Needle. It is a $15 million project intended to further the station’s evolution into a brick-and-mortar music programmer for the Internet age.As workers put the finishing touches on the soaring public performance space near the building’s entrance, Mr. Richards pointed to a corner that will eventually have a cafe and another that will house a record store. A large soundproof window provided an aquarium-like view into the booth that Mr. Richards and other D.J.s will begin broadcasting from next month.
“It’s like ‘Star Trek’ in here,” Mr. Richards said, inspecting the electronic consoles, microphones and computer displays inside the booth.
Music fans live in a time of plenty, when nearly every song for any musical taste can be listened to in an instant over the Internet, from Spotify, Pandora and dozens of other sources. Satellite and commercial radio crowd the airwaves with further options for discovering new music and listening to the old.
And yet a handful of nonprofit music stations like KEXP with roots in college radio have never been doing better. They are using the Internet to reach bigger audiences around the globe, adding to their video programming and seeking to become in-person destinations for fans.
Most of all, they are trying to stand out with their music programming, with genre-hopping mixes selected by D.J.s rather than software or dictated by program directors at commercial radio chains.
The abundance of music and methods of distribution has increased demand for human tour guides for all of it.
“There’s so much music out there, so many places to go,” said Roger LaMay, general manager of WXPN, a public music station in Philadelphia, and chairman of the board of National Public Radio. “But finding curation from a trusted source is a lifeline for most music lovers who don’t have the time or wherewithal to sift through it all on their own.”
by Nick Wingfield, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ruth Fremson
The Vanished World of ‘Stoner’
That same year, a teacher from Northeast Texas published a novel about one such determined young man. Stoner, by the professor and novelist John Williams, tells the story of a man whose life was shaped by the higher education system. The book traces the life of Bill Stoner, an upwardly-mobile student who leaves his parents’ farm to matriculate at the University of Missouri, where he studies, and then teaches, for the rest of his life. “William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year of 1910, at the age of nineteen,” the book begins:
Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they took his courses. When he died, his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: “Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues.”The opening paragraph, muted in tone, presents the book’s plot in miniature. Williams takes readers from Stoner’s birth on a farm in 1891 to his death throes on a sunny day sixty-five years later. The novel asks readers to assess the value of the life it describes. During his many decades at the university, Stoner suffers one painful setback after another: a loveless marriage, a ruthless professional rival, a thwarted love affair, and, finally, a cancerous tumor that kills him. Williams recounts each of these events in unsparing detail; his lucid prose renders acute emotional distress without ever tipping into melodrama. The book is as brutal in feeling as it is narrow in scope. It is the story of a man whose suffering, and minor successes, were lost to history.
Stoner itself met a similarly quiet fate. It sold only 2000 copies in the years after its first publication. But it wormed its way into the hearts of academics, writers, and teachers. Over the years, Irving Howe and C.P. Snow championed it in print. According to the writer Steve Almond, grad students in the 1990s passed it around like some form of delicious contraband. The novel was re-released by NYRB Classics in 2006, and it’s been on an upward trajectory ever since. Morris Dickstein sang its praises in the New York Times. In 2013 it was a bestseller across Europe. The New Yorker called it “The Greatest American Novel You’ve Never Heard Of,” while the Guardian named it one of the “must-read books” of 2013. This month, NYRB is releasing a 50th anniversary edition. It’s the perfect holiday gift for anyone who views teaching as a vocation.
For many of us who teach at the college level, though, reading Stoner on its fiftieth anniversary is an ironic experience. Stoner’s tragic life is, at once, familiar and aspirational. We recognize his love of teaching and devotion to his students. What looks increasingly unfamiliar, though, is the professional stability that Williams describes, and on which the plot of his novel depends. (...)
Times have changed. Today, an academic life is a precarious one, thanks to significant changes to the practice of academic hiring. Cost-cutting administrators aim to balance university budgets by relying on contingent, rather than permanent, instructors. In the 1970s, roughly two-thirds of university faculty were tenured or tenure-track. Today, only 24 per cent of faculty are on the tenure-track. The rest are adjuncts, hired on a course-by-course basis, or full-time instructors, often hired for periods of several years, who are ineligible for tenure.
Adjuncts are cheap: for a semester-long course, an adjunct will cost the university only a couple thousand dollars (the median pay across the nation is $2,700 for a semester-long course). Unless an adjunct works thirty hours at the same institution, he or she won’t be eligible for benefits. As a result, most adjuncts teach at multiple colleges and spend hours commuting from campus to campus. Many rely on food stamps or Medicaid; a study by the University of California at Berkeley found that roughly one quarter of the nation’s one million part-time college faculty receives some form of government aid. Meanwhile, since 1975, college tuition has more than tripled.
The gap between our academic climate and the world Williams describes is what gives Stoner its peculiar poignancy. Both the highpoints and crises of Stoner’s teaching career seem nearly unimaginable from our current vantage point. (...)
Still, one can long for an academic environment in which teaching was prioritized, and in which dedicated teachers were recognized. This is the world Williams’s novel returns to us. After several years of teaching, Stoner manages to bridge the “gulf that lay between what he felt for his subject and what he delivered in the classroom.” Williams’s description of this change is one that will resonate with teachers today:
He suspected that he was beginning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and figure he saw was both more and less than he had once imagined it to be. He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.Stoner, tragic figure though he is, finds something much described and more rarely seen: teaching as a vocation.
by Maggie Doherty, TNR | Read more:
Image: Stoner, John Williams
GoFundMe Gone Wild
As someone with the keen observational skills of Mr. Magoo, it took me a long time to notice a problem social-media acquaintances had been talking about for months.
“I woke up to four new people today asking me for money on four different donation platforms,” one friend said. “One was my ex-babysitter announcing her wedding and where I could send cash. No invitation to the wedding. Just cash.”
“I’m a believer in giving to real charities: medical research, school drives, the Red Cross, etc.,” said Heidi Knodle, owner of a picture framing store in San Francisco. “I’m tired of people asking for a vacation, funds for a wedding or their college tuition.”
The crime writer Mark Ebner, whose mailboxes have been increasingly filled with monetary requests, has a theory about it all. “I think online begging has become the new economy.”
I thought my friends were exaggerating. After all, a visit to GoFundMe or YouCaring yields site after site of worthy donation recipients. People whose homes were wiped out by natural disasters. People with diseases I’d never heard of, with no insurance and staggering medical expenses. Kids trying to pay for their parents’ funerals. Parents with seriously ill children wanting a trip to Disney World, and sick animals owned by people who couldn’t afford the vet bills.
One man had set up a fund for a friend who needed to take a couple of months off while his wife died of brain cancer.
But then, there were others. Many, many others. Education funds are great, but do I really want to pay for a friend to travel to Peru to become a shaman?
Should the woman who has lost a lot of weight (good for you!) ask her friends to pay for $2,500 worth of laser skin tightening? What about the girl seeking $600 for her “personal development journey”? (Not much to ask, but she was so beautiful, I didn’t understand why she didn’t develop herself into a model and make a whole lot more than that.)
Another woman was asking for help with the legal bills for her divorce, as her new husband had bolted to Israel. She was a little dramatic in her plea: “My life — the innocent, carefree life which I had known, and the blissful happy life of hopes and dreams shattered overnight. Instead of partaking of gourmet meals and donning my kalla/bridal trousseau, chaos and turmoil, sprinkled with vicious gossip became my daily food and clothing.”
The requests continued.
“I woke up to four new people today asking me for money on four different donation platforms,” one friend said. “One was my ex-babysitter announcing her wedding and where I could send cash. No invitation to the wedding. Just cash.”
“I’m a believer in giving to real charities: medical research, school drives, the Red Cross, etc.,” said Heidi Knodle, owner of a picture framing store in San Francisco. “I’m tired of people asking for a vacation, funds for a wedding or their college tuition.”The crime writer Mark Ebner, whose mailboxes have been increasingly filled with monetary requests, has a theory about it all. “I think online begging has become the new economy.”
I thought my friends were exaggerating. After all, a visit to GoFundMe or YouCaring yields site after site of worthy donation recipients. People whose homes were wiped out by natural disasters. People with diseases I’d never heard of, with no insurance and staggering medical expenses. Kids trying to pay for their parents’ funerals. Parents with seriously ill children wanting a trip to Disney World, and sick animals owned by people who couldn’t afford the vet bills.
One man had set up a fund for a friend who needed to take a couple of months off while his wife died of brain cancer.
But then, there were others. Many, many others. Education funds are great, but do I really want to pay for a friend to travel to Peru to become a shaman?
Should the woman who has lost a lot of weight (good for you!) ask her friends to pay for $2,500 worth of laser skin tightening? What about the girl seeking $600 for her “personal development journey”? (Not much to ask, but she was so beautiful, I didn’t understand why she didn’t develop herself into a model and make a whole lot more than that.)
Another woman was asking for help with the legal bills for her divorce, as her new husband had bolted to Israel. She was a little dramatic in her plea: “My life — the innocent, carefree life which I had known, and the blissful happy life of hopes and dreams shattered overnight. Instead of partaking of gourmet meals and donning my kalla/bridal trousseau, chaos and turmoil, sprinkled with vicious gossip became my daily food and clothing.”
The requests continued.
by Judith Newman, NY Times | Read more:
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