Hipster Hats: the Art of 'Helixing'

There are myriad ways to wear a beanie if you’re a man, which is most unfortunate. It’s not man’s fault, though – rather, it’s the fault of the men who wear them. And just as Russell Branding fobbed us off with the idea of “pillowcasing” (packing your massive hair into a beanie), and David Beckham sold us “haggising” (like pillowcasing, just with shorter hair), we have Harry Styles to thank for “helixing”, the new beanie standard.

Helixing is the counterintuitive practice of wearing a beanie towards the back of your crown, so as to expose the helix – or outer rim – of your ears. Styles has been helixing since 2014 (before he looked like a lion) and models on the Richard Nicoll catwalk were doing it in 2013. Simon Chilvers, menswear editor at Matchesfashion.com, dates it back as far as the 1990s, citing River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho as the original helixer. It’s a scrambled logic that leaves your head hot and your ears cold, still it’s here and it’s mass, so let’s dig deep as to why.

It’s worth mentioning that fashion is not always rooted in pragmatism. But, like non-prescription spectacles and most heeled shoes, there are some trends that positively mock utility and helixing is one. Unsurprisingly, Urban Dictionary, the entry point for hipster antipathy, describes it as Hipster Hat, arguing that many men are prepared to get earache from the elements because warmth is so mainstream.

Sam Wolfson is a journalist and hat fan who has been wearing his beanie like this for years. It’s nothing to do with being able to hear, he says. Rather, it sets you apart from basic beanie wearers: “It’s like the difference between like sticking a hat on a little kid for a boxing day walk so that he stays toasty, and wearing a beanie in a trendy-first-year-at-St-Martins way. Ears in is, like, too John Lewis catalogue, you know?” Chilvers agrees: “The pulled over the ears look definitely has the tendency to look a bit teen angst.”

Helixing requires a shallow beanie (Lyle & Scott does a thin, stretchy version that works well) or a fisherman beanie (ribbed, a bit smaller). Alternatively, you can fashion a regular beanie into one of the above by rolling the rim up. Fashion is divided on the amount of rolls – the blogosphere goes for double-rolling, whereas Chilvers recommends three rolls: “Beanie science – another groundbreaking turn from menswear.”

by Morwenna Ferrier, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: FilmMagic/Kirstin Sinclair

President Obama and Bill Simmons: The GQ Interview

There's the president of the United States, and then there’s the person who happens to be the President of the United States.

Bill Clinton served for eight years, but we were always more intrigued by Bill Clinton the Person—a magnetic charmer once described by Chris Rock as “a cool guy, like the president of a record company.” Clinton’s charisma defined his presidency, for better and for worse. He couldn’t always harness it. He couldn’t stop trying to win everyone over, whether it was a 60 Minutes correspondent, 500 powerful donors in a crowded banquet hall, or a fetching woman on a rope line.

If Clinton acted like someone who ran Capitol Records, Obama—both the person and the president—carries himself like Roger Federer, a merciless competitor who keeps coming and coming, only there’s a serenity about him that disarms just about everyone. At one point during the hour I spent interviewing him at the White House this fall, he casually compared himself to Aaron Rodgers, and he wasn’t bragging. Obama identified with Rodgers’s ability to keep his focus downfield despite all the chaos happening in front of him. That’s Obama’s enduring quality, and (to borrow another sports term) this has been his “career year.”

Obama lives in America’s most famous museum and uses it to his advantage. You’re sitting there in some ancient tearoom waiting for him to show up, surrounded by portraits of former first ladies and framed maps from battles that America won over the centuries. Everyone is friendly but suspicious. Everyone talks in hushed tones. You feel like you’re intruding at all times. You’re just…waiting. Suddenly, ten anonymous security guards pop out of hallways and doorways that you didn’t know were there. The energy shifts. And then, there’s Obama—big smile, big handshake, some ball-busting comments to put everyone at ease. Within seconds of greeting me, he was poking fun at my shoes and teasing me for not writing anymore.

“It’s really aggravating not having you on Grantland,” he said, almost like I betrayed him. “I go to the site and there’s no Simmons. Come on, man, it’s not the same.”

It’s an alpha-male trick—put someone off-balance, flatter them and bust their chops at the same time. A few minutes later, he was grabbing control of the interview with measured responses, knowing that he didn’t have to perform without cameras or podcast equipment. And so he took his time. And it worked. I mean, how do you interrupt the most powerful man on earth? It felt like the way Federer repeatedly jumped Novak Djokovic’s second serve in the 2015 U.S. Open Final—a savvy trick to disrupt someone’s flow, a seemingly harmless way to gain an edge. It’s what the great competitors do.

In January, Obama will begin his eighth and final year on the job. It’s an era now. What has he learned about leadership? What was his biggest regret? Why did it seem like, in 2015, he finally started letting it fly, threw on his Beefsquatch costume and let everyone know “THIS IS ME NOW!” Gay marriage, health care, Charleston, the Iran deal… If you voted against him, 2015 was the year when his inner confidence bothered you more than ever. And if you voted for him, 2015 was definitely the year when you said, “That is the guy I voted for.” But what if Barack Obama has been that guy all along?

by Bill Simmons, GQ |  Read more:

Image: INEZ + VINOODH

Reggae Shark

The Trip Planners

You can’t tell a great deal about the Web site Erowid from its home page. A tagline reads, “Documenting the Complex Relationship Between Humans & Psychoactives.” This text is surrounded by photographs: a cactus, a cannabis bud, a bottle of ketamine, tabs of LSD. The design looks old, Web 1.0 old, with a simple typeface and a black background. The Tolkienesque name, the F.A.Q. page reveals, was coined with assistance from a dictionary of Indo-European roots. It means, roughly, “earth wisdom.”

People who are interested in psychoactive cacti, ketamine, and LSD are generally unfazed by strangeness. Any such person will likely know of Erowid, as will most toxicologists and many E.R. doctors. When the site launched, in 1995, it served as a repository of drug-culture esoterica, drawing just a few hits a day. Today, Erowid contains highly detailed profiles of more than three hundred and fifty psychoactive substances, from caffeine to methamphetamine. Last year, the site had at least seventeen million unique visitors.

In October, on the twentieth anniversary of Erowid’s launch, I travelled to the home of its founders, in the Gold Country of northeast California, where the Central Valley gives way to the Sierra Nevada and road signs along I-80 start marking the altitude. The hills are dotted with Gold Rush museums and monuments, along with evidence of a thriving cannabis-growing scene. Local television weathermen refer to the region as the Mother Lode.

The founders of Erowid are a couple in their mid-forties—a man and a woman who call themselves Earth and Fire, respectively. Their names date from 1994, when, as recent college graduates living in the San Francisco Bay Area, they went to a Menlo Park storefront to sign up for a dial-up account and for their first e-mail addresses: earth@best.com and fire@best.com. They live and work in a one-bedroom post-and-beam cabin, built in 1985 and surrounded by ten acres of forested land, on a high slope facing a ravine. The property’s original owner was a collector of obsolete industrial machinery, and the house is a collage of California artifacts, including oak floorboards salvaged from nineteenth-century Southern Pacific Railroad boxcars. During my visit, Earth, who is tall and lumbering and wears his hair in a ponytail, identified strains of a Grateful Dead track wafting from the home of a distant neighbor. Fire, who is more assertive and fast-spoken than Earth, has dark hair and fine features that often earn her comparisons to Björk.

On Erowid, which is run by Earth and Fire with the help of two off-site staffers and many volunteers, you can read about drum circles in the “Mind & Spirit” section, and about Jerry Garcia in “Culture & Art.” You can also find the digitized research archives of Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized LSD. But the centerpiece of the site is “Plants & Drugs.” Each substance has a “vault,” which includes pages on such topics as dosage, effects, legal status, and history. Some of that information is derived from “experience reports,” which are descriptive accounts of drug trips that anyone can submit.

Since 2000, Erowid has received more than a hundred thousand reports and has published about a quarter of them. Some are positive: “The Inner Eternity,” “Spiritually Orgasmic.” Others are not: “Existential Horror,” “Unimaginable Depths of Terror,” “Convulsions, Seizures, Vomiting.” Reports are reviewed by a few dozen specially trained volunteers, who range from college students to computer scientists. Each submission is read twice, and the best ones are passed on to a handful of senior reviewers for final selection.

At one time, the samizdat on drugs was so rare that those who found it seemed like sages at parties and in college dorms. Earth and Fire call such enthusiasts, and anyone extremely knowledgeable on the subject, drug geeks. Earth said that he “considers it an honor” to be among them. In the eighties, President Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs sent the geeks into hiding. An ad sponsored by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America featured a father delivering a tearful graveside monologue, and showings of some Hollywood films included public-service announcements from the likes of Clint Eastwood and Pee-wee Herman, who held up vials of crack before the phrase “The thrill can kill” appeared on the screen. People who wanted both to try drugs and to know the risks had difficulty finding any credible guidance.

But by the mid-nineties a fragmentary drug-geek community had started sharing information on e-mail lists such as Leri, Web sites such as Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension, and Usenet groups such as alt.drugs.psychedelics. The geeks and the government continued to ignore one another. In 2002, during a talk at the consciousness-studies conference Mind States, in Jamaica, Fire said, “From the establishment viewpoint, it’s surprising if new data come out of the drug-using community. In the drug-using community, it’s surprising if information that’s useful comes out of the establishment.” Earth and Fire’s idea was to close the rift: to maintain a comprehensive data set that could serve as a primary reference for everyone from the village stoner to the national drug czar.

Edward W. Boyer, the chief of medical toxicology in the department of emergency medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, in Worcester, first became aware of the drug-geek sites in 1997. A pair of high-school students had ended up in his emergency room after going online and learning how to synthesize the sedative GHB at home. “My first thought was, It’s really bad—people are potentially learning online about new drugs to abuse,” he said.

In 2001, Boyer wrote a research letter to the New England Journal of Medicine alleging that Erowid and other “partisan” Web sites were outperforming federal antidrug sites in the search results for ecstasy, GHB, and certain other drugs. But during the aughts Boyer paid attention to assessments of new drugs as they went up on Erowid, and found that his emergency department did not receive an influx of poisonings. Instead, Erowid taught Boyer the street names of unfamiliar drugs, along with the basic chemicals that they contained. “We emergency physicians pride ourselves on being pretty close to the street,” Boyer told me. “Erowid just blew the doors off what we do.”

by Emily Witt, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Andrew B. Myers and Mousecake

Volkswagen and the Era of Cheating Software

For the past six years, Volkswagen has been advertising a lie: “top-notch clean diesel” cars — fuel efficient, powerful and compliant with emissions standards for pollutants. It turns out the cars weren’t so clean. They were cheating.

The vehicles used software that cleverly put a lid on emissions during testing, but only then. The rest of the time, the cars spewed up to 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide emissions. The federal government even paid up to $51 million in tax subsidies to some car owners on the false assumption of environmental friendliness.

In a world where more and more objects are run by software, we need to have better ways to catch such cheaters. As the Volkswagen case demonstrates, a smart object can lie and cheat. It can tell when it’s being tested, and it can beat the test.

The good news is that there are well-understood methods to safeguard the integrity of software systems. The bad news is that there is as yet little funding for creating the appropriate regulatory framework for smart objects, or even an understanding of the urgent need for it. We are rightly incensed with Volkswagen, but we should also consider how we have ceded a lot of power to software that runs everything from our devices to our cars, and have not persisted in keeping tabs on it. We correctly worry about hackers and data leaks, but we are largely ignoring the ramifications of introducing software, a form of intelligence, to so many realms — sometimes called the Internet of Things.

Corporate cheating is not novel: that’s why we have regulations to oversee the quality of many objects, ranging from lead in paint to pesticide residue in food. If similar precautions are not extended to the emergent realm of computer-enhanced objects, especially when the software is proprietary and thus completely controlled by the corporation that has huge incentives to exaggerate performance or hide faults during tests for regulatory benchmarks, Volkswagen will be neither the first nor the last scandal of the Internet of Cheating Things. (...)

Computational devices that are vulnerable to cheating are not limited to cars. Consider, for example, voting machines. Just a few months ago, the Virginia State Board of Elections finally decertified the use of a touch-screen voting machine called “AVS WinVote.” It turned out that the password was hard-wired to “admin” — a default password so common that it would be among the first three terms any hacker would try. There were no controls on changes that could be made to the database tallying the votes. If the software fraudulently altered election results, there would be virtually no way of detecting the fraud since everything, including the evidence of the tampering, could be erased.

If software is so smart and its traces of tampering are possible to erase, does this mean that we have no hope of catching cheaters? Not at all. We simply need to adopt and apply well-known methods for testing computing devices.

by Zeynep Tufekci, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Matt Chase; photograph by Fotosearch, via Getty Images

Building a Better Beagle

China's Bold Push into Genetically Customized Animals

China’s western Shaanxi Province is known for rugged windswept terrain and its coal and wool, but not necessarily its science. Yet at the Shaanxi Provincial Engineering and Technology Research Center for Shaanbei Cashmere Goats, scientists have just created a new kind of goat, with bigger muscles and longer hair than normal. The goats were made not by breeding but by directly manipulating animal DNA—a sign of how rapidly China has embraced a global gene-changing revolution.

Geneticist Lei Qu wants to increase goatherd incomes by boosting how much meat and wool each animal produces. For years research projects at his lab in Yulin, a former garrison town along the Great Wall, stumbled along, Qu’s colleagues say. “The results were not so obvious, although we had worked so many years,” his research assistant, Haijing Zhu, wrote in an e-mail.

That changed when the researched adopted the new gene-customizing technology called CRISPR–Cas9, a technique developed in the U.S. about three years ago. CRISPR uses enzymes to precisely locate and snip out segments of DNA, much like a word-processor finding and deleting a given phrase—a process known as “gene-editing.” Although it is not the first tool scientists have used to tweak DNA, it is by far more precise and cheaper than past technologies. The apparent ease of this powerful method now raises both tantalizing possibilities and pressing ethical questions.

Once the goat team began to deploy CRISPR, their progress was rapid. In September Qu and 25 other collaborating scientists in China published the details of their research in Nature’s Scientific Reports. In early-stage goat embryos they had successfully deleted two genes that suppressed both hair and muscle growth. The result was 10 goat kids exhibiting both larger muscles and longer fur—designer livestock—that, so far, show no other abnormalities. “We believed gene-modified livestock will be commercialized after we demonstrate [that it] is safe,” predicts Qu, who envisions this work as a simple way to boost the sale of goat meat and cashmere sweaters from Shaanxi.

The research is just one of a recent flurry of papers by Chinese scientists that describe CRISPR-modified goats, sheep, pigs, monkeys and dogs, among other mammals. In October, for instance, researchers from the country discussed their work to create unusually muscled beagles in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology. Such research has been supported via grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Science and Technology as well as provincial governments.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of Chinese institutions in both research hubs like Beijing and far-flung provincial outposts have enthusiastically deployed CRISPR. “It’s a priority area for the Chinese Academy of Sciences,” says Minhua Hu, a geneticist at the Guangzhou General Pharmaceutical Research Institute and one of the beagle researchers. A colleague, Liangxue Lai of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, adds that “China’s government has allocated a lot of financial support in genetically modified animals in both [the] agriculture field [and the] biomedicine field.”

This is raising a number of ethical worries about making new life forms. Unlike past gene therapies, changes made using CRISPR to zygotes or embryos can become “permanent”—that is, they are made to the DNA that will be passed onto future generations. For each zygote or embryo that scientists successfully transform, typically dozens, if not hundreds, of others do not work. But the technology is rapidly improving. “What is different about CRISPR is that the technology is vastly more efficient and so the possibility of it being practiced widely is that much more real,” says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard Medical School. Past efforts to manipulate the genetic code of life have been slower, more cumbersome and more unpredictable. “The ethical concerns are now upon us because the technology is real,” he adds.

This applies to CRISPR experiments to “edit” the DNA of all plants and animals—as well as in the future, perhaps, humans, if scientists like Qu further hone the technique. Unlike past gene therapies, changes made using CRISPR to zygotes or embryos become “permanent”; that is, they enter the germ line and will be passed onto future generations.

by Christina Larson, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Zou Qingjian and Lai Liangxue 

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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.

by Brian Doyle, American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: Flickr/sparkys

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:

1. The creation of the federal deposit insurance program
2. 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)
3. 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”
4. The creation of the Federal Open Market Committee
5. Tighter control by the Federal Reserve over the activities of banks, and reporting requirements for said banks to facilitate same

There were also some fiddling rules about things like bank officers borrowing from their own banks.

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:
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Harry Bliss from The Best of the Rejection Collection: 293 Cartoons That Were Too Dumb, Too Dark, or Too Naughty for The New Yorker
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Reimagining Suburbia

Renzo Piano may be the most urban, and urbane, of great architects working today. He made his name in Paris in the 1970s, when he and Richard Rogers designed the Pompidou Center, a machine of a museum bristling with exposed steel and pipes. The “inside-out” building provoked howls from Parisians at first, but the Pompidou soon became a beloved landmark and helped revive the then-ailing Marais district. Since that time, the Italian architect has designed a master plan for the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. He has built an airport in Osaka and the tallest skyscraper in London. He has left elegant, precisely crafted museums and galleries in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. So critics did a double take last year when Piano announced that he was designing a new shopping center in San Ramon, California. Renzo Piano—winner of the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s Nobel—was designing a suburban mall? (...)

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:

• 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.

Those gaps can drain your savings fast in a major illness, especially since there is no out-of-pocket maximum on what you can owe. So it’s best to buy protection.

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:
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Matthias Weischer, Untitled, 2003.
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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. (...)

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."

by Aaron Elstein, Crain's |  Read more:

Image: Buck Ennis

Eagles of Death Metal

Findings

A jaguar named Salman was sent away from the Delhi zoo for being too fat to mate, and a former meerkat expert at the London Zoo was ordered to pay £800 in restitution for breaking a glass against a monkey keeper’s face during a fight over the affections of a llama keeper. Tuscan primatologists noted that Malagasy lemurs yawn more following an episode of anxiety, the eruption of Cotopaxi threatened to kill off the Quito rocket frog, and climate change was shortening the tongues of bumblebees. Raindrops bounce ants into pitcher plants. South African helmeted turtles were observed grooming the insects off a warthog. Mad cow disease has caused the Galician wolf to eat more wild ponies. The accident-prone ponies of Dartmoor were to be painted reflective blue. American drivers at crosswalks are less likely to yield for black pedestrians.

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

Yun Ling
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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.

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.

by Jason Bittel, Pacific Standard |  Read more:

Image: Ralph Tiner/USFWS