Monday, November 16, 2015
The Praying Mantis Moment
A high school kid asks me this morning, What’s the greatest sports moment you ever saw? Before my brain can rumble into gear and produce the 1986 Boston Celtics (the best basketball team I ever saw), or the 2004 Boston Red Sox (the greatest comeback in the history of baseball), or the 1969 New York Mets (for sheer shocking unbelievability, not to mention that I got to watch that whole World Series on a television in our grade school classroom—how cool was that), or the 1980 Miracle on Ice USA Olympic hockey team, or Doug Flutie’s incredible last-second touchdown for Boston College against Miami, or autistic teenager Jason McElwain drilling seven long shots in four minutes when his Athena High coach put the diligent cheerful team manager into uniform for the first time at the very end of the last home game of his senior season and he went bonkers and the whole student body went bonkers and they carried him off the floor and every time I see the film again I am elevated to tears … Before I can recall any of this, I say this instead:
One time when my twin sons were little, maybe six years old, and they were playing soccer, in the town league in which every single kid I think proudly donned his or her blue uniform with blue socks every Saturday so that anywhere and everywhere you went in our town on Saturdays you would be surrounded by small blue grinning chirping people, not just on the fields and in parking lots but in burger joints and pizza places and the farmers market and the library and the grocery store, and it was a crisp beautiful golden October afternoon, and I was standing with the other parents along the sideline, half paying attention and half keeping an eye out for hawks, when suddenly the tiny intent players on the field all formed a loose circle on the field, and play stopped.
I remember seeing the ball roll slowly by itself into a corner of the field. I remember that the coach, one of those dads who was really into victory even though the boys and girls were three feet tall and could hardly tie their laces, was yelping and expostulating. I remember that two of the moms ran out onto the field, worried that a child was hurt. I remember that the referee, a lean long teenager who had been the most desultory and unengaged of referees up to that point, sprinted toward the circle, worried that a child was hurt.
And then the circle devolved into a sort of procession, with all the players on both teams following a girl in front, and cupped in this girl’s hands was a praying mantis, which she and all the other players on both teams were escorting reverently off the field, because, as a child helpfully explained to me afterward, the praying mantis was on the field first, and maybe even lived there, while we were all visitors, and you are supposed to be polite when you visit someone’s house.
One time when my twin sons were little, maybe six years old, and they were playing soccer, in the town league in which every single kid I think proudly donned his or her blue uniform with blue socks every Saturday so that anywhere and everywhere you went in our town on Saturdays you would be surrounded by small blue grinning chirping people, not just on the fields and in parking lots but in burger joints and pizza places and the farmers market and the library and the grocery store, and it was a crisp beautiful golden October afternoon, and I was standing with the other parents along the sideline, half paying attention and half keeping an eye out for hawks, when suddenly the tiny intent players on the field all formed a loose circle on the field, and play stopped.I remember seeing the ball roll slowly by itself into a corner of the field. I remember that the coach, one of those dads who was really into victory even though the boys and girls were three feet tall and could hardly tie their laces, was yelping and expostulating. I remember that two of the moms ran out onto the field, worried that a child was hurt. I remember that the referee, a lean long teenager who had been the most desultory and unengaged of referees up to that point, sprinted toward the circle, worried that a child was hurt.
And then the circle devolved into a sort of procession, with all the players on both teams following a girl in front, and cupped in this girl’s hands was a praying mantis, which she and all the other players on both teams were escorting reverently off the field, because, as a child helpfully explained to me afterward, the praying mantis was on the field first, and maybe even lived there, while we were all visitors, and you are supposed to be polite when you visit someone’s house.
by Brian Doyle, American Scholar | Read more:
Image: Flickr/sparkys
Sunday, November 15, 2015
The Steagles
[ed. G-20 countries appear ready to do something or other (but possibly not much!) - eleven years after the fact. See also: End of ‘Too-Big-to-Fail’ Banking Era Endorsed by World Leaders]
Fun fact: During the 1943 professional football season, the World War II draft had so depleted the ranks of football players that the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles were forced to unite their teams into a joint production that became colloquially known as “the Steagles.” In a heartwarming turn, this plucky band of men went on to one of the winningest seasons in the history of Pennsylvania football. That was, alas, their only season; the next year each city fielded its own team, and the proud name of the Steagles retreated into history.
I’m beginning to think that we should revive it, however, not for football players, but for those intrepid souls who continue to fiercely agitate for the return of the Glass-Steagall financial regulations. Like the Steagles, these people are not daunted by the many obstacles in their path. Like the Steagles, they are passionate in their determination. Probably also like the Steagles, they mostly don’t know much about Glass-Steagall.
And we desperately need a name for Team Steagles, because they seem to have become a powerful force in the Democratic Party. Last night’s Democratic debate, like the first one, featured lengthy paeans to the joys, and urgency, of a modern Glass-Steagall act. Somehow, an obscure Depression-era banking regulation has turned into a banal political talking point. Or worse -- a distraction.
You, like the Steagles, may not know much about Glass-Steagall. That’s all right. There is no particular reason that most of us should know about Glass-Steagall, and many people manage to live perfectly happy and fulfilling lives anyway.
Here's a quick introduction: The first thing you should know is that there are actually two Glass-Steagalls. For some reason, Washington likes to refer to many laws by the names of their congressional sponsors, rather than the actual title of the law, which is why many people know our most recent major campaign finance law as McCain-Feingold rather than the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.
Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and Representative Henry B. Steagall of Alabama, both Democrats, co-sponsored two major financial bills. The first concerned the operation of the Federal Reserve system, which is complicated. When most people speak about “bringing back Glass-Steagall” they are referring to the second law, otherwise known as the Banking Act of 1933.
This act had a number of provisions, the most important of which are:
Glass-Steagall II was never “repealed.” The FDIC is still very much around, as is the FOMC. The Federal Reserve still has quite a lot of power to regulate banks. If you get control of a bank and use it to write yourself unlimited loans, you can still expect to spend quite a bit of time in the pokey when you get caught.
However, Glass-Steagall II has been extensively modified by subsequent regulation. For example, amendments through the 1940s modified the FOMC to make it more like the modern version. The rules about interest rates were eventually scrapped, which is why you now get 0.0025 percent interest on your checking, instead of a free toaster for opening an account, the way Grandma did back in the good old days. And the provisions limiting the entrance of commercial banks into investment activities (and vice versa) were gradually relaxed, and then abolished with Gramm-Leach-Bliley (the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999).
Calls to “bring back Glass-Steagall” are, in fact, almost always calls to bring back this one provision. The average person agitating to bring back Glass-Steagall (a group which includes Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders), probably doesn’t know quite what the FOMC does. They are not overly concerned about the danger of interest-bearing checking accounts. But boy, do they want the commercial and investment banks split apart.
by Megan McArdle, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: via:
Fun fact: During the 1943 professional football season, the World War II draft had so depleted the ranks of football players that the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles were forced to unite their teams into a joint production that became colloquially known as “the Steagles.” In a heartwarming turn, this plucky band of men went on to one of the winningest seasons in the history of Pennsylvania football. That was, alas, their only season; the next year each city fielded its own team, and the proud name of the Steagles retreated into history.
I’m beginning to think that we should revive it, however, not for football players, but for those intrepid souls who continue to fiercely agitate for the return of the Glass-Steagall financial regulations. Like the Steagles, these people are not daunted by the many obstacles in their path. Like the Steagles, they are passionate in their determination. Probably also like the Steagles, they mostly don’t know much about Glass-Steagall.And we desperately need a name for Team Steagles, because they seem to have become a powerful force in the Democratic Party. Last night’s Democratic debate, like the first one, featured lengthy paeans to the joys, and urgency, of a modern Glass-Steagall act. Somehow, an obscure Depression-era banking regulation has turned into a banal political talking point. Or worse -- a distraction.
You, like the Steagles, may not know much about Glass-Steagall. That’s all right. There is no particular reason that most of us should know about Glass-Steagall, and many people manage to live perfectly happy and fulfilling lives anyway.
Here's a quick introduction: The first thing you should know is that there are actually two Glass-Steagalls. For some reason, Washington likes to refer to many laws by the names of their congressional sponsors, rather than the actual title of the law, which is why many people know our most recent major campaign finance law as McCain-Feingold rather than the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.
Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and Representative Henry B. Steagall of Alabama, both Democrats, co-sponsored two major financial bills. The first concerned the operation of the Federal Reserve system, which is complicated. When most people speak about “bringing back Glass-Steagall” they are referring to the second law, otherwise known as the Banking Act of 1933.
This act had a number of provisions, the most important of which are:
- The creation of the federal deposit insurance program
- The forcible separation of commercial banking and investment banking activities (except that commercial banks could still buy lots of government bonds, because hey, look who’s writing the law)
- Outlawing interest rates on checking accounts, and capping the interest rates that could be paid on other sorts of accounts, colloquially known as “Regulation Q”
- The creation of the Federal Open Market Committee
- Tighter control by the Federal Reserve over the activities of banks, and reporting requirements for said banks to facilitate same
Glass-Steagall II was never “repealed.” The FDIC is still very much around, as is the FOMC. The Federal Reserve still has quite a lot of power to regulate banks. If you get control of a bank and use it to write yourself unlimited loans, you can still expect to spend quite a bit of time in the pokey when you get caught.
However, Glass-Steagall II has been extensively modified by subsequent regulation. For example, amendments through the 1940s modified the FOMC to make it more like the modern version. The rules about interest rates were eventually scrapped, which is why you now get 0.0025 percent interest on your checking, instead of a free toaster for opening an account, the way Grandma did back in the good old days. And the provisions limiting the entrance of commercial banks into investment activities (and vice versa) were gradually relaxed, and then abolished with Gramm-Leach-Bliley (the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999).
Calls to “bring back Glass-Steagall” are, in fact, almost always calls to bring back this one provision. The average person agitating to bring back Glass-Steagall (a group which includes Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders), probably doesn’t know quite what the FOMC does. They are not overly concerned about the danger of interest-bearing checking accounts. But boy, do they want the commercial and investment banks split apart.
by Megan McArdle, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: via:
Reimagining Suburbia
Today, architects’ attitudes to suburbia tend to split three ways. The first and most common attitude is indifference. Architects are largely urban creatures, working for urban developers and museum boards and teaching in urban architectural schools. For decades, they have tried to fend off inner-city decay using strategies good (historic preservation) and very bad (“towers in the park” urban renewal). Now that many big-city American downtowns have been revived and gentrified, architects remain as city-transfixed as ever.
The second mode, espoused by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in the late 1960s and early ’70s, is an appreciation, more or less ironic, for the pop art charms of endlessly repeated little houses and the “jazzed-up” road signs that Peter Blake so loathed. Attitude number three is the anti-suburban crusade led by the traditionalist architects and planners who call themselves New Urbanists. This group wants to eradicate cul-de-sacs and two-car garages and replace them with dense, walkable urban districts that mix different kinds of buildings and human activities. Suburban sprawl is a cancer, they say, a blight.
It is hard to argue with the urgency that the New Urbanists feel. Suburbia has many problems, and ugly buildings are just the start: a debased public realm, low-quality (or nonexistent) public transportation, and road designs that isolate residents rather than connect them. Worst of all is the environmental impact: compared with city dwellers, residents of a conventional suburb use more energy to heat and cool their homes, and drive almost everywhere out of necessity.
But even when the money is on hand for large-scale redevelopment of a suburb (and it usually isn’t), rewriting the zoning code isn’t enough. Great places need imaginative, contemporary architecture, too, and this has been in short supply in suburban makeovers. Many of the new ersatz “town centers” have turned out just as cheap looking and bland as the shopping malls they replaced.
Part of the problem is that developers and government officials assume buildings are for suburbs, while Architecture-with-a-capital-A is for cities. The bar has been set too low. But architects aren’t exactly hastening to raise it. The avant-garde architect Charles Renfro, for instance, while talking last year about suburbia, called it “reprehensible.”
To condemn suburbia in moral terms like this, to call it a cancer or dismiss its residents as gas-guzzling yahoos, is unfair to the millions of people who actually live there (your author included). It also betrays ignorance of how the suburbs have changed since the days of white flight and Leave It to Beaver. As American suburbs mature, they become ethnically diverse—often more so than the cities they border—and acquire layers and juxtapositions. A school moves into the shell of a Kmart; a Hindu temple abuts the golf course; informal mercados spring up on cracked parking lots. New places begin to develop the texture we prize so much in old ones.
Maybe suburbia is, as Venturi famously wrote, almost all right. Maybe we just don’t understand how it’s evolving, the way we couldn’t conceive of an urban renaissance a generation ago.
by Amanda Kolson Hurley, American Scholar | Read more:
Image: Renzo Piano Building Workshop/VBNB/Nicolas Boutet and Vincent Barué
Premium Shock: Shopping Season for Medicare
About a third of people on Medicare got a nasty surprise last month. For a while, it seemed that their Medicare Part B premiums might jump by 52 percent.
Last week brought good news, sort of. The budget deal just passed by Congress will ease that hike to about 17 percent.
The news comes as the annual “open enrollment” period for Medicare is underway. (It lasts until Dec. 7.) That’s the period in which people can shop among Medicare Advantage, prescription drug plans and Medigap. Those are ways to cover the things that Medicare doesn’t.
The premium hike may prompt people to take a closer look at their choices. So, let’s look first at the nasty surprise. Then let’s examine the choice between Medicare Advantage and Medigap with Part D pharmacy coverage.
Everybody who pays their Medicare premiums through their Social Security payments can relax. The premium hike doesn’t affect them. Rather, it affects Medicare Part B recipients who don’t yet get Social Security payments, and people new to Medicare.
The increase reflects a 6 percent rise in the cost of caring for old people, and the fact that the law protects Social Security recipients from actual reductions in their payments due to rising Part B premiums. Social Security payments will be flat next year, due to absent inflation, and raising Medicare premiums would mean smaller checks. So, the rising cost gets passed on to Medicare recipients who don’t get Social Security.
Until last week, it looked like their Part B premiums would rise from the current $104.90 per month to $159.30 for those sorry recipients. The proposed fix would raise them to $120 per month in 2016, plus a $3-per-month surcharge.
High-income recipients, meaning $85,000 in income for singles and $170,000 for marrieds, already pay higher charges, and the fix will raise them further.
Smart Medicare recipients protect themselves from the big coverage gaps in Medicare. The problem:
There are two methods — Medicare Advantage and Medigap insurance coupled with Part D pharmacy coverage.
Which to choose?
Think of it this way, says Sandy Leith, who knows this stuff. With a Medigap policy and Part D, you pay more now, but less when you’re really sick. With Medicare Advantage, it’s the other way around, says Leith, who heads Illinois’ advice program for Medicare recipients, called SHIP.
So, if you think you’ll stay healthy, Medicare Advantage can save you money. If you’re already seeing doctors a lot, Medigap may be better. (...)
Now for the details.
by Jim Gallagher, St. Louis Post-Dispatch | Read more:
Image: via:
Last week brought good news, sort of. The budget deal just passed by Congress will ease that hike to about 17 percent.
The news comes as the annual “open enrollment” period for Medicare is underway. (It lasts until Dec. 7.) That’s the period in which people can shop among Medicare Advantage, prescription drug plans and Medigap. Those are ways to cover the things that Medicare doesn’t.The premium hike may prompt people to take a closer look at their choices. So, let’s look first at the nasty surprise. Then let’s examine the choice between Medicare Advantage and Medigap with Part D pharmacy coverage.
Everybody who pays their Medicare premiums through their Social Security payments can relax. The premium hike doesn’t affect them. Rather, it affects Medicare Part B recipients who don’t yet get Social Security payments, and people new to Medicare.
The increase reflects a 6 percent rise in the cost of caring for old people, and the fact that the law protects Social Security recipients from actual reductions in their payments due to rising Part B premiums. Social Security payments will be flat next year, due to absent inflation, and raising Medicare premiums would mean smaller checks. So, the rising cost gets passed on to Medicare recipients who don’t get Social Security.
Until last week, it looked like their Part B premiums would rise from the current $104.90 per month to $159.30 for those sorry recipients. The proposed fix would raise them to $120 per month in 2016, plus a $3-per-month surcharge.
High-income recipients, meaning $85,000 in income for singles and $170,000 for marrieds, already pay higher charges, and the fix will raise them further.
Smart Medicare recipients protect themselves from the big coverage gaps in Medicare. The problem:
- Recipients must pay 20 percent of medical charges under Part B, which covers doctors, outpatient services and equipment.
- Part A, the hospital coverage, has a $1,260 deductible for each hospitalization separated by 60 days.
- There are co-pays for hospital stays over 60 days.
- Parts A and B don’t cover drugs.
There are two methods — Medicare Advantage and Medigap insurance coupled with Part D pharmacy coverage.
Which to choose?
Think of it this way, says Sandy Leith, who knows this stuff. With a Medigap policy and Part D, you pay more now, but less when you’re really sick. With Medicare Advantage, it’s the other way around, says Leith, who heads Illinois’ advice program for Medicare recipients, called SHIP.
So, if you think you’ll stay healthy, Medicare Advantage can save you money. If you’re already seeing doctors a lot, Medigap may be better. (...)
Now for the details.
by Jim Gallagher, St. Louis Post-Dispatch | Read more:
Image: via:
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Dark Times For Diners
There are no Michelin stars on the door, but you will not find a better breakfast in New York City than at the Bel Aire Diner in Astoria, Queens. The coffee, a lighter roast than Starbucks' and brewed three gallons at a time, is always fresh because just about every customer gets a refill or three. The Greek Breakfast entrée is a masterpiece of the line cook's art, a combination of eggs (any style), feta cheese, soft black olives and grilled fresh tomatoes whose juice seasons the toasted pita.
The Bel Aire is run under the glare of Argyris "Archie" Dellaportas, who immigrated to Queens in 1972 at age 18 from the Greek island of Cephalonia. He baked bread at the Westway Diner in Hell's Kitchen and other joints before being hired to run a diner in Maryland, which meant long stretches away from his wife and children.
In 1996, Dellaportas came back when he bought the Bel Aire for $350,000. The diner is open 24 hours a day, and for many years Dellaportas toiled during most of them, going to work at 5 in the morning and staying until 11 at night or later. The backbreaking work paid off when, in 2001 and again in 2005, the Daily News named the Bel Aire New York's best diner. Food tourists and curiosity seekers—including Tina Fey and James Gandolfini, whose television series were filmed nearby—flocked to the corner of Broadway and 21st Street, if only to see the exemplar of what is at once a classic symbol and generic staple of New York culture.
"To me, the Bel Aire epitomizes the diner," said Astoria native Nick Papamichael. "So much in New York has changed, but the Bel Aire is the same great place."
At least for now, Dellaportas, who is 62 and hasn't taken a vacation in 20 years, has dialed back his hours and is contemplating retirement. That would mean passing on the business to his two sons, whom he's been grooming for a while. But, truth be told, he isn't sure they're up to the task. Diners, historically more profitable than most restaurants, have seen their margins halved in recent years, owing to the rising cost of rent, staff and even eggs.
In this environment, Dellaportas isn't sure his boys have the personalities to compete. "You have to be tough in this business; otherwise people will cheat you," he said one recent afternoon as he ate an early dinner of grilled skirt steak and fries. "I don't know if my sons are tough enough."
The situation at the Bel Aire says a lot about what's happening throughout New York's diner culture, where the helpings are huge, the prices are right, and poring over the laminated pages of Greek, Italian and American menu options takes about as long as reading a Russian novel.
But these breakfast conveniences, lunch go-tos, dinners of last resort and midnight hangouts are closing at a rapid rate. Between economic pressures, changes in eating habits and a next-generation not as interested as their parents in spending 16 hours a day manning a cash register, the city's diner scene may soon no longer exist. (...)
Historians devoted to the study of diners—yes, that's a thing—estimate there were 1,000 diners in the city a generation ago. There are now only 398 establishments that describe themselves as diners or coffee shops, according to city Department of Health records. (...)
t's also a business with its own distinct place in popular culture. Exhibit A: Edward Hopper's iconic Nighthawks painting, with its depiction of three customers and a waiter burning the midnight oil. Exhibit B: Seinfeld, the classic sitcom whose main characters regularly noshed at Monk's, an imaginary Upper West Side greasy spoon modeled after Tom's Diner at West 112th Street and Broadway. (Tom's was also the subject of a song by Suzanne Vega, who attended nearby Barnard College.) Exhibit C: Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, the long-running Food Network series starring Guy Fieri.
A diner is where Tony Soprano had what may have been his last meal and where John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson's characters discussed the difference between miracles and acts of God in Pulp Fiction. Just recently, a scene in The Good Wife was shot at the Bel Aire.
The draw of diners for cultural tastemakers may have something to do with their egalitarian nature, drawing the high and mighty as well as average Joes. (...)
The Bel Aire is run under the glare of Argyris "Archie" Dellaportas, who immigrated to Queens in 1972 at age 18 from the Greek island of Cephalonia. He baked bread at the Westway Diner in Hell's Kitchen and other joints before being hired to run a diner in Maryland, which meant long stretches away from his wife and children.In 1996, Dellaportas came back when he bought the Bel Aire for $350,000. The diner is open 24 hours a day, and for many years Dellaportas toiled during most of them, going to work at 5 in the morning and staying until 11 at night or later. The backbreaking work paid off when, in 2001 and again in 2005, the Daily News named the Bel Aire New York's best diner. Food tourists and curiosity seekers—including Tina Fey and James Gandolfini, whose television series were filmed nearby—flocked to the corner of Broadway and 21st Street, if only to see the exemplar of what is at once a classic symbol and generic staple of New York culture.
"To me, the Bel Aire epitomizes the diner," said Astoria native Nick Papamichael. "So much in New York has changed, but the Bel Aire is the same great place."
At least for now, Dellaportas, who is 62 and hasn't taken a vacation in 20 years, has dialed back his hours and is contemplating retirement. That would mean passing on the business to his two sons, whom he's been grooming for a while. But, truth be told, he isn't sure they're up to the task. Diners, historically more profitable than most restaurants, have seen their margins halved in recent years, owing to the rising cost of rent, staff and even eggs.
In this environment, Dellaportas isn't sure his boys have the personalities to compete. "You have to be tough in this business; otherwise people will cheat you," he said one recent afternoon as he ate an early dinner of grilled skirt steak and fries. "I don't know if my sons are tough enough."
The situation at the Bel Aire says a lot about what's happening throughout New York's diner culture, where the helpings are huge, the prices are right, and poring over the laminated pages of Greek, Italian and American menu options takes about as long as reading a Russian novel.
But these breakfast conveniences, lunch go-tos, dinners of last resort and midnight hangouts are closing at a rapid rate. Between economic pressures, changes in eating habits and a next-generation not as interested as their parents in spending 16 hours a day manning a cash register, the city's diner scene may soon no longer exist. (...)
Historians devoted to the study of diners—yes, that's a thing—estimate there were 1,000 diners in the city a generation ago. There are now only 398 establishments that describe themselves as diners or coffee shops, according to city Department of Health records. (...)
t's also a business with its own distinct place in popular culture. Exhibit A: Edward Hopper's iconic Nighthawks painting, with its depiction of three customers and a waiter burning the midnight oil. Exhibit B: Seinfeld, the classic sitcom whose main characters regularly noshed at Monk's, an imaginary Upper West Side greasy spoon modeled after Tom's Diner at West 112th Street and Broadway. (Tom's was also the subject of a song by Suzanne Vega, who attended nearby Barnard College.) Exhibit C: Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, the long-running Food Network series starring Guy Fieri.
A diner is where Tony Soprano had what may have been his last meal and where John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson's characters discussed the difference between miracles and acts of God in Pulp Fiction. Just recently, a scene in The Good Wife was shot at the Bel Aire.
The draw of diners for cultural tastemakers may have something to do with their egalitarian nature, drawing the high and mighty as well as average Joes. (...)
Gutman, who was a consultant to the 1982 Barry Levinson film Diner, explained that "there's a certain unpretentiousness to diners, with the counter, stools and booths. But there's also action and a friendliness you can partake of in a way you can't in a chain restaurant."
There's even a patois particular to diners, where rye bread is referred to as "whiskey," rye toast is "whiskey down," "black and blue" is a rare steak, and "84 scrambled" means eight scrambled eggs served on four plates.
Foodie culture also has taken to diners. Champs Diner in Brooklyn specializes in vegan fare such as tofu Benedict and "soysage" patties. The Empire Diner in Chelsea, whose kitchen until July was run by celebrity chef Amanda Freitag, offers a vintage look and upmarket fare like $25 pan-roasted, antibiotic-free chicken and a $16 Greek salad with "protein additions," such as seared yellowfin tuna, for an additional $7. "The Empire became the first diner to put on airs," said Gutman. "A diner has got to be affordable. Otherwise it gets too uppity."
There's even a patois particular to diners, where rye bread is referred to as "whiskey," rye toast is "whiskey down," "black and blue" is a rare steak, and "84 scrambled" means eight scrambled eggs served on four plates.
Foodie culture also has taken to diners. Champs Diner in Brooklyn specializes in vegan fare such as tofu Benedict and "soysage" patties. The Empire Diner in Chelsea, whose kitchen until July was run by celebrity chef Amanda Freitag, offers a vintage look and upmarket fare like $25 pan-roasted, antibiotic-free chicken and a $16 Greek salad with "protein additions," such as seared yellowfin tuna, for an additional $7. "The Empire became the first diner to put on airs," said Gutman. "A diner has got to be affordable. Otherwise it gets too uppity."
by Aaron Elstein, Crain's | Read more:
Image: Buck Ennis
Friday, November 13, 2015
Findings
Officials at Yosemite National Park hoped that designated selfie zones might prevent millennials from falling into rivers and drowning. Restricting access to suicide hot spots reduces deaths by 90 percent. A blood test in combination with a questionnaire can predict suicidal thoughts in bipolar patients with 98 percent accuracy. Austerity increases suicides in male European adolescents. Having a reason to live reduces suicide among the transgendered. Participants in Becoming a Man, a program that seeks to reduce “automatic behavior” among Chicago boys, were 44 percent less likely to be arrested for a violent crime. Mystical experiences are not ineffable. By downregulating posterior-medial-frontal-cortex activity via transcranial magnetic stimulation, an interdisciplinary team reduced subjects’ belief in God. A newly discovered microsnail can easily pass through the eye of a needle, camel’s milk was declared beneficial for autistic children by scientists at India’s National Research Centre on Camel, and the richest 1 percent of humanity was found to possess half the world’s wealth. The tweets of the rich express more anger and fear than the tweets of the poor, which express more disgust, sadness, and surprise; joy does not vary.
by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Camouflage, Anna Bella Geiger. Courtesy Galería Aural, Alicante, Spain
It’s a $cam!
The American Way of War in the Twenty-First Century
Let’s begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil money held in the U.S. The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003. Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at least $1.2 to $1.6 billion of it was stolen and ended up years later in a mysterious bunker in Lebanon. And that’s just what happened as the starting gun went off.
It’s never ended. In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in the American “reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, for instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed “as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security.” It was, however, so poorly constructed that it proved a health hazard. In 2006, “feces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student barracks” and that was only the beginning of its problems.
When the bad press started, Parsons Corporation, the private contractor that built it, agreed to fix it for nothing more than the princely sum already paid. A year later, a New York Times reportervisited and found that “the ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are crumbling, and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets are filthy and nonfunctioning.” This seems to have been par for the course. Typically enough, the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, a $40 million prison Parsons also contracted to build, was never even finished.
And these were hardly isolated cases or problems specific to Iraq. Consider, for instance, those police stations in Afghanistan believed to be crucial to “standing up” a new security force in that country. Despite the money poured into them and endless cost overruns, many were either never completed or never built, leaving new Afghan police recruits camping out. And the police were hardly alone. Take the $3.4 million unfinished teacher-training center in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, that an Iraqi company was contracted to build (using, of course, American dollars) and from which it walked away, money in hand.
And why stick to buildings, when there were those Iraqi roads to nowhere paid for by American dollars? At least one of them did at least prove useful to insurgent groups moving their guerrillas around (like the $37 million bridge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built between Afghanistan and Tajikistan that helped facilitate the region's booming drug trade in opium and heroin). In Afghanistan, Highway 1 between the capital Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar, unofficially dubbed the “highway to nowhere,” was so poorly constructed that it began crumbling in its first Afghan winter.
And don’t think that this was an aberration. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hired an American nonprofit, International Relief and Development (IRD), to oversee an ambitious road-building program meant to gain the support of rural villagers. Almost $300 million later, it could point to “less than 100 miles of gravel road completed.” Each mile of road had, by then, cost U.S. taxpayers $2.8 million, instead of the expected $290,000, while a quarter of the road-building funds reportedly went directly to IRD for administrative and staff costs. Needless to say, as the road program failed, USAID hired IRD to oversee other non-transportation projects.
In these years, the cost of reconstruction never stopped growing. In 2011, McClatchy Newsreported that “U.S. government funding for at least 15 large-scale programs and projects grew from just over $1 billion to nearly $3 billion despite the government's questions about their effectiveness or cost.”
The Gas Station to Nowhere
So much construction and reconstruction -- and so many failures. There was the chicken-processing plant built in Iraq for $2.58 million that, except in a few Potemkin-Village-like moments, never plucked a chicken and sent it to market. There was the sparkling new, 64,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art, $25 million headquarters for the U.S. military in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, that doubled in cost as it was being built and that three generals tried to stop. They were overruled because Congress had already allotted the money for it, so why not spend it, even though it would never be used? And don’t forget the $20 million that went into constructing roads and utilities for the base that was to hold it, or the $8.4 billion that went into Afghan opium-poppy-suppression and anti-drug programs and resulted in... bumper poppy crops and record opium yields, or the aid funds that somehow made their way directly into the hands of the Taliban (reputedly its second-largest funding source after those poppies).
There were the billions of dollars in aid that no one could account for, and a significant percentage of the 465,000 small arms (rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and the like) that the U.S. shipped to Afghanistan and simply lost track of. Most recently, there was the Task Force for Business Stability Operations, an $800-million Pentagon project to help jump-start the Afghan economy. It was shut down only six months ago and yet, in response to requests from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the Pentagon swears that there are “no Defense Department personnel who can answer questions about” what the task force did with its money. As ProPublica’s Megan McCloskey writes, “The Pentagon’s claims are particularly surprising since Joseph Catalino, the former acting director of the task force who was with the program for two years, is still employed by the Pentagon as Senior Advisor for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism."
Still, from that pile of unaccountable taxpayer dollars, one nearly $43 million chunk did prove traceable to a single project: the building of a compressed natural gas station. (The cost of constructing a similar gas station in neighboring Pakistan: $300,000.) Located in an area that seems to have had no infrastructure for delivering natural gas and no cars converted for the use of such fuel, it represented the only example on record in those years of a gas station to nowhere.
All of this just scratches the surface when it comes to the piles of money that were poured into an increasingly privatized version of the American way of war and, in the form of overcharges andabuses of every sort, often simply disappeared into the pockets of the warrior corporations that entered America’s war zones. In a sense, a surprising amount of the money that the Pentagon and U.S. civilian agencies “invested” in Iraq and Afghanistan never left the United States, since it went directly into the coffers of those companies.
Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a bender, while the domestic infrastructure began to fray. At $109 billion by 2014, the American reconstruction program in Afghanistan was already, in today's dollars, larger than the Marshall Plan (which helped put all of devastated Western Europe back on its feet after World War II) and still the country was a shambles. In Iraq, a mere$60 billion was squandered on the failed rebuilding of the country. Keep in mind that none of this takes into account the staggering billions spent by the Pentagon in both countries to build strings of bases, ranging in size from American towns (with all the amenities of home) to tiny outposts. There would be 505 of them in Iraq and at least 550 in Afghanistan. Most were, in the end, abandoned, dismantled, or sometimes simply looted. And don’t forget the vast quantities of fuel imported into Afghanistan to run the U.S. military machine in those years, some of which was siphoned off by American soldiers, to the tune of at least $15 million, and sold to local Afghans on the sly.
In other words, in the post-9/11 years, “reconstruction” and “war” have really been euphemisms for what, in other countries, we would recognize as a massive system of corruption.
It’s never ended. In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in the American “reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, for instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed “as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security.” It was, however, so poorly constructed that it proved a health hazard. In 2006, “feces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student barracks” and that was only the beginning of its problems.
When the bad press started, Parsons Corporation, the private contractor that built it, agreed to fix it for nothing more than the princely sum already paid. A year later, a New York Times reportervisited and found that “the ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are crumbling, and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets are filthy and nonfunctioning.” This seems to have been par for the course. Typically enough, the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, a $40 million prison Parsons also contracted to build, was never even finished.
And these were hardly isolated cases or problems specific to Iraq. Consider, for instance, those police stations in Afghanistan believed to be crucial to “standing up” a new security force in that country. Despite the money poured into them and endless cost overruns, many were either never completed or never built, leaving new Afghan police recruits camping out. And the police were hardly alone. Take the $3.4 million unfinished teacher-training center in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, that an Iraqi company was contracted to build (using, of course, American dollars) and from which it walked away, money in hand.
And why stick to buildings, when there were those Iraqi roads to nowhere paid for by American dollars? At least one of them did at least prove useful to insurgent groups moving their guerrillas around (like the $37 million bridge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built between Afghanistan and Tajikistan that helped facilitate the region's booming drug trade in opium and heroin). In Afghanistan, Highway 1 between the capital Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar, unofficially dubbed the “highway to nowhere,” was so poorly constructed that it began crumbling in its first Afghan winter.
And don’t think that this was an aberration. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hired an American nonprofit, International Relief and Development (IRD), to oversee an ambitious road-building program meant to gain the support of rural villagers. Almost $300 million later, it could point to “less than 100 miles of gravel road completed.” Each mile of road had, by then, cost U.S. taxpayers $2.8 million, instead of the expected $290,000, while a quarter of the road-building funds reportedly went directly to IRD for administrative and staff costs. Needless to say, as the road program failed, USAID hired IRD to oversee other non-transportation projects.
In these years, the cost of reconstruction never stopped growing. In 2011, McClatchy Newsreported that “U.S. government funding for at least 15 large-scale programs and projects grew from just over $1 billion to nearly $3 billion despite the government's questions about their effectiveness or cost.”
The Gas Station to Nowhere
So much construction and reconstruction -- and so many failures. There was the chicken-processing plant built in Iraq for $2.58 million that, except in a few Potemkin-Village-like moments, never plucked a chicken and sent it to market. There was the sparkling new, 64,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art, $25 million headquarters for the U.S. military in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, that doubled in cost as it was being built and that three generals tried to stop. They were overruled because Congress had already allotted the money for it, so why not spend it, even though it would never be used? And don’t forget the $20 million that went into constructing roads and utilities for the base that was to hold it, or the $8.4 billion that went into Afghan opium-poppy-suppression and anti-drug programs and resulted in... bumper poppy crops and record opium yields, or the aid funds that somehow made their way directly into the hands of the Taliban (reputedly its second-largest funding source after those poppies).
There were the billions of dollars in aid that no one could account for, and a significant percentage of the 465,000 small arms (rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and the like) that the U.S. shipped to Afghanistan and simply lost track of. Most recently, there was the Task Force for Business Stability Operations, an $800-million Pentagon project to help jump-start the Afghan economy. It was shut down only six months ago and yet, in response to requests from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the Pentagon swears that there are “no Defense Department personnel who can answer questions about” what the task force did with its money. As ProPublica’s Megan McCloskey writes, “The Pentagon’s claims are particularly surprising since Joseph Catalino, the former acting director of the task force who was with the program for two years, is still employed by the Pentagon as Senior Advisor for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism."
Still, from that pile of unaccountable taxpayer dollars, one nearly $43 million chunk did prove traceable to a single project: the building of a compressed natural gas station. (The cost of constructing a similar gas station in neighboring Pakistan: $300,000.) Located in an area that seems to have had no infrastructure for delivering natural gas and no cars converted for the use of such fuel, it represented the only example on record in those years of a gas station to nowhere.
All of this just scratches the surface when it comes to the piles of money that were poured into an increasingly privatized version of the American way of war and, in the form of overcharges andabuses of every sort, often simply disappeared into the pockets of the warrior corporations that entered America’s war zones. In a sense, a surprising amount of the money that the Pentagon and U.S. civilian agencies “invested” in Iraq and Afghanistan never left the United States, since it went directly into the coffers of those companies.
Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a bender, while the domestic infrastructure began to fray. At $109 billion by 2014, the American reconstruction program in Afghanistan was already, in today's dollars, larger than the Marshall Plan (which helped put all of devastated Western Europe back on its feet after World War II) and still the country was a shambles. In Iraq, a mere$60 billion was squandered on the failed rebuilding of the country. Keep in mind that none of this takes into account the staggering billions spent by the Pentagon in both countries to build strings of bases, ranging in size from American towns (with all the amenities of home) to tiny outposts. There would be 505 of them in Iraq and at least 550 in Afghanistan. Most were, in the end, abandoned, dismantled, or sometimes simply looted. And don’t forget the vast quantities of fuel imported into Afghanistan to run the U.S. military machine in those years, some of which was siphoned off by American soldiers, to the tune of at least $15 million, and sold to local Afghans on the sly.
In other words, in the post-9/11 years, “reconstruction” and “war” have really been euphemisms for what, in other countries, we would recognize as a massive system of corruption.
by Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch | Read more:
A River Ran Through It
Way up in the mountains of Allegheny National Forest in northern Pennsylvania, you can dip your toe into a creek with no name. In minutes, the molecules of water sliding by your skin will be part of the Otter Branch. In hours, they’ll gain membership to Minister Creek.
Over the course of the following day, those same molecules will sing the battle hymn of the Allegheny River and then march alongside billions of their brethren as part of the Ohio River.
Eventually, the droplets from the no-name-creek will rage along the banks of the Mississippi and oxygenate the gills of a thresher shark in the Gulf of Mexico.
Water connects us—from fields and streams to mountains and beaches, and back again. Water molecules never lose their life-sustaining importance, but during their journey, they meander in and out of various levels of federal, state, tribal, and local protection.
That is why a team of scientists wants to create the first-ever riparian conservation network—a nationwide system of protected creeks, streams, and rivers the likes of which the world has never seen.
Riparian zones consist of rivers, floodplains, and wetlands, and Alexander Fremier, a Washington State University ecologist, thinks having these lush corridors connect protected lands to each other would be a bonanza for the environment. In a new paper outlining the idea in Biological Conservation, he and his co-authors explain how these links could improve water quality and help combat habitat loss and fragmentation.
Allowing more trees and shrubs to grow along banks staves off erosion, and banning livestock from grazing around rivers and streams could reduce sedimentation and nitrification (what happens when they, um, overfertilize a body of water). Less industrial pollution might also head downstream if there were tighter restrictions on mining and manufacturing near rivers.
Riparian corridors don’t just facilitate the flow of water from one region to the next; they also act as highways for wildlife. In one study of predators in California wine country, scientists found that coyotes and other small carnivores prefer to travel through forests, but when no trees are in sight, they take to the riverbanks. The research showed that waterways not only are important for the usual suspects of fish, ducks, muskrats, and the like, but are crucial routes for just about any animal looking to avoid humans and other dangers (think roads) on their journey.
OK, you may be thinking, this is all great, but connecting protected river corridors across the United States sounds like a daunting, if not impossible, undertaking—one that would require the cooperation of millions of private landowners and hundreds of federal, state, tribal, and local agencies. And you’d be right. But according to Fremier, this liquid network kind of, sort of exists already.
Over the course of the following day, those same molecules will sing the battle hymn of the Allegheny River and then march alongside billions of their brethren as part of the Ohio River.
Eventually, the droplets from the no-name-creek will rage along the banks of the Mississippi and oxygenate the gills of a thresher shark in the Gulf of Mexico.Water connects us—from fields and streams to mountains and beaches, and back again. Water molecules never lose their life-sustaining importance, but during their journey, they meander in and out of various levels of federal, state, tribal, and local protection.
That is why a team of scientists wants to create the first-ever riparian conservation network—a nationwide system of protected creeks, streams, and rivers the likes of which the world has never seen.
Riparian zones consist of rivers, floodplains, and wetlands, and Alexander Fremier, a Washington State University ecologist, thinks having these lush corridors connect protected lands to each other would be a bonanza for the environment. In a new paper outlining the idea in Biological Conservation, he and his co-authors explain how these links could improve water quality and help combat habitat loss and fragmentation.
Allowing more trees and shrubs to grow along banks staves off erosion, and banning livestock from grazing around rivers and streams could reduce sedimentation and nitrification (what happens when they, um, overfertilize a body of water). Less industrial pollution might also head downstream if there were tighter restrictions on mining and manufacturing near rivers.
Riparian corridors don’t just facilitate the flow of water from one region to the next; they also act as highways for wildlife. In one study of predators in California wine country, scientists found that coyotes and other small carnivores prefer to travel through forests, but when no trees are in sight, they take to the riverbanks. The research showed that waterways not only are important for the usual suspects of fish, ducks, muskrats, and the like, but are crucial routes for just about any animal looking to avoid humans and other dangers (think roads) on their journey.
OK, you may be thinking, this is all great, but connecting protected river corridors across the United States sounds like a daunting, if not impossible, undertaking—one that would require the cooperation of millions of private landowners and hundreds of federal, state, tribal, and local agencies. And you’d be right. But according to Fremier, this liquid network kind of, sort of exists already.
by Jason Bittel, Pacific Standard | Read more:
Image: Ralph Tiner/USFWS
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
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