Bringing Up Genius

Is every healthy child a potential prodigy?

Before Laszlo Polgár conceived his children, before he even met his wife, he knew he was going to raise geniuses. He’d started to write a book about it. He saw it moves ahead.

By their first meeting, a dinner and walk around Budapest in 1965, Laszlo told Klara, his future bride, how his kids’ education would go. He had studied the lives of geniuses and divined a pattern: an adult singularly focused on the child’s success. He’d raise the kids outside school, with intense devotion to a subject, though he wasn’t sure what. "Every healthy child," as he liked to say, "is a potential genius." Genetics and talent would be no obstacle. And he’d do it with great love.

Fifty years later in a leafy suburb of St. Louis, I met one of Laszlo’s daughters, Susan Polgár, the first woman ever to earn the title of chess grandmaster. For several years, Susan had led the chess team of Webster University — a small residential college with a large international and online footprint — to consecutive national titles. Their spring break had just begun, and for the next few days, in a brick-and-glass former religious library turned chess hall, the team would drill for a four-team tournament in New York City to defend the title.

The students, sporting blue-and-yellow windbreakers and polos, huddled around a checked board of white and black, a queen, rook, and pawn stacked in a row. They had started with the King’s Indian Defense, a well-mapped terrain. Now they were in the midgame. Polgár sat to the side, behind a laptop synced to the game, algorithms whirring. What should be the next move? she asked. "Be active and concrete."

Jocular debate broke out, accents betraying origins: Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Brazil, Cuba, Vietnam, Hungary. "This is not human," one student said. "It looks magical," said another. Computers have long since outclassed humans in chess; they’re vital in training, but their recommended moves can seem quixotic. "No, it’s very human," Polgár assured them. The students, most of them grandmasters, grew quiet, searching the more than 100,000 positional situations they had ingrained over their lifetimes, exploring possible moves and the future problems they implied — moving down the decision tree. It’s the knot at the heart of chess: Each turn, you must move; when you move, a world of potential vanishes.

"Bishop G4?"

"Bishop G4," Polgár confirmed.

"That’s not a human move!"

"It’s a human move," she said. "It’s actually very pretty." The arrangement is close to a strategy she used before, against her sister. "I beat Judit on that."

The students murmured. This demanded respect. Susan Polgár may be the first woman ever to earn the grandmaster title, but her younger sister is the best female chess player of all time.

There are three Polgár sisters, Zsuzsa (Susan), Zsofia (Sofia), and Judit: all chess prodigies, raised by Laszlo and Klara in Budapest during the Cold War. Rearing them in modest conditions, where a walk to the stationery store was a great event, the Polgárs homeschooled their girls, defying a skeptical and chauvinist Communist system. They lived chess, often practicing for eight hours a day. By the end of the 1980s, the family had become a phenomenon: wealthy, stars in Hungary and, when they visited the United States, headline news.

The girls were not an experiment in any proper form. Laszlo knew that. There was no control. But soon enough, their story outgrew their lives. They became prime examples in a psychological debate that has existed for a century: Does success depend more on the accidents of genetics or the decisions of upbringing? Nature or nurture? In its most recent form, that debate has revolved around the position, advanced by K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University, that intense practice is the most dominant variable in success. The Polgárs would seem to suggest: Yes.

You may have heard of Ericsson. His work was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 best seller, Outliers, which spawned the notion of 10,000 hours of practice, in particular, as a mythical threshold to success. It’s a cultural fixture. Turn on the radio and you’ll hear a musician talking about "getting his 10,000 hours" in. This popularization also caused a backlash — documented in David Epstein’s book The Sports Gene and elsewhere — of researchers arguing that genetics and other factors are as important as practice. It’s a value-laden struggle, with precious few facts. In a globalized world where returns concentrate to top performers, research showing the primacy of practice is a hopeful, democratic message. "The scientific formulation of the American dream," as one psychologist told me. The Polgárs embody that hope. Is it a false hope? (...)

Equipped with celebrity and influence, Susan is an excellent recruiter. Many of her students are ranked higher than her; three have topped even Judit. Yet despite their great individual skill, the team members enjoy camaraderie. They visit the gym together. They’ve absorbed the Polgár way.

"Life and chess, they are similar in some points," Andre Diamant, a Brazilian graduate student and the team’s longest-tenured player, said during a break from practice. "Chess players know they need to study. They need to work. They need to improve. And they do that. In life, they have this same thing."

You’re probably nodding your head. Few would dismiss the value of hard work. But if there’s a snag to the Polgár method of success, it might arise from a simple question: Susan and her sisters had similar childhoods. So why was Judit so much better?

by Paul Voosen, Chronicle of Higher Education |  Read more:

Image: Polly Becker

I Knew I Would Never Drive a Taxi Again

Whenever someone claims that it’s not about the money, you know the chances are that really, it is. And I’d be lying if I said my decision to switch away from driving a taxi and start driving for Lyft had nothing to do with the amount I was earning. But money was only part of my decision—and probably not in the way you might think.

Instead it was one part of a culmination of events that led me to renounce everything I’d said before, to become a traitor, a scab, and to betray many people I’d come to know in the cab business.

I wasn’t the first, and I surely wouldn’t be the last. But that didn’t make me feel any better about it. There were people who I’d come to care about, good people, people that I counted among my genuine friends, who would be deeply disappointed by my treachery. Perhaps it had simply taken me way too long — and even a stint in rehab — to finally accept that I couldn’t spend my life trying to live up to other people’s expectations. And after all, isn’t that what loyalty is really all about?

When I first started driving a taxi, Saturday nights were the most coveted shift of the week. Typically, only medallion owners and drivers with the most seniority got them. Once in a while, if you were lucky or willing to wait around for several hours, then a driver like me — with only a few years under his belt — could get a cab to drive on a Saturday night, and the chance to make $400, or even $500, in a single shift.

Nowadays, however, with Uber and Lyft cars flooding the streets, it’s become the hardest shift to fill. It’s not uncommon for a Saturday night taxi to go one, or even two hours at a stretch without a single fare. What used to be exciting is now something drivers dread: I certainly know that driving around empty in a sea of vacant taxis, while watching people all around me hop into their Uber and Lyft rides, left me feeling desperate and frustrated.

It used to be that late at night, and not just on Saturdays, I could park my cab right outside the door of the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco — a nightclub just off the beaten path. Excited to see an available taxi waiting, people exiting the club would jump right in, one fare after the other, it was my spot. But soon, people leaving the club began waving me off. “No thanks,” they’d say, as they pulled out their iPhones and waited five or 10 minutes, sometimes even in the rain, until a car with one of those ridiculous pink moustaches, or a glowing blue “U” on it would pull up and drive them off into the night.

I didn’t get it.

I’m right here.

I’m ready to go.

All I got was “No thanks,” from person after person after person. I felt dejected. It made no sense to me.

I got a reprieve from my frustrations when I was offered a part-time job in the cab company’s operations office. Back then, the phones were still constantly ringing, and dispatch was busy with customers calling for cabs. The money was good, and the shifts were shorter than on the road. Best of all though, a job in the office usually came with the ability to get a cab — a good cab — immediately, whenever I wanted. My days of waiting around for hours just so that I could go to work were finally over. Or so I thought.

As it turned out, drivers with better or more longstanding connections were getting put out in taxis ahead of me, and I was still being made to wait. Except now the wait was even longer because more and more drivers were fighting for shifts, and for good cabs to drive. Meanwhile, the day drivers were making things even worse by keeping their cabs out longer, attempting to make up for their falling incomes. Every hour, hell, every minute that I waited, I could feel the crisp $20s just slipping through my grasp.

The topic being discussed among the various huddles of angry cabbies waiting there with me was always the same: Uber and Lyft. One driver heard that the mayor’s daughter had invested in Lyft. Another had heard that the mayor had exclaimed, “Uber has finally solved San Francisco’s taxi problem!” I didn’t know if either was true, but it was no secret that Mayor Ed Lee was a vocal supporter of “the sharing economy.” He led visiting politicos on tours through Uber’s headquarters, and had even officially declared July 13th as “Lyft Day” in San Francisco. I couldn’t think of a bigger slap in the face.

Still, as much as I hated Uber and Lyft—and as much as I hated our mayor—I knew that none of them were going away anytime soon. I continued to see Lyft, and particularly Uber, as illegal bullies that were flaunting the law. The whole rideshare premise, that these were just regular folks, “citizen drivers,” who just happened to be going your way and would give you a ride, was complete bullshit. It reminded me of the last line in The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” No, call it what you want, but this was deregulation.

Even so, as I looked down my nose at these intruders, and their over-reliance on GPS to find their way through the maze of my city, I found myself feeling conflicted. While they were already doing essentially the same job as me, I knew these rideshare drivers would never have considered actually becoming taxi drivers, nor did they think of themselves in this way. Things just weren’t that simple. There was something else, something other than the money, that kept them coming back out here day after day, and night after night.

So when my fellow cab drivers complained that “Uber and Lyft are stealing my passengers!” I’d reply, “They aren’t stealing anything — we’re giving them away.”

I would argue that every time they refused to accept a credit card, and every time they refused to take passengers to their homes in the Sunset, or the Richmond Districts, they were only creating more Uber customers.

But they just looked at me like there was something growing out of my head.

I began to sense a chasm widening between us. Even while they could feel everything slipping away, they continued behaving as though there would always be more customers, more tourists, more conventioneers, to replace the ones we were losing. In their eyes—in their cab driver’s eyes—the passengers were there for them, and not the other way around. It had always been that way. Why should anything change now?

I remember imagining the person who decided to chop down the last remaining tree on Easter Island, and in doing so cued the collapse of an entire civilization. I became convinced; it had to have been a cab driver.

by Jon Kessler, On Demand |  Read more:

Image: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

Japan Deco Matchbox Art

Masao Shimojima's, on his book "The Art of Japanese Matcbox Labels" describes the rise of cafes, bars, coffee shops and restaurants in the post-World War I period as war weary people sought to escape the pressures of life. They were "enthusiastic about visiting cafes or beer halls for an easy pastime and to seek temporary peace". This became even more pronounced after the Great Earthquake of 1923 when nudes and other risque artwork became popular on matchbox labels.

Young designers trained in Germany and Europe returned to Japan and produced elegant advertising for large companies such as Shiseido. Local artists and painters were both influenced by these national brands and spurred to produce more original designs. Many of these designs still showed the asymmetry and stylized flat shapes typical of Japanese woodblock prints. Some had amazingly clever use of only red and black ink colors while others used gold and silver metallic inks to add to their palette.

The Japanese matchbox labels are breathtaking in their stark beauty and simplicity: just a hand holding a glass or a dancing figure frozen in time. They were only low end ephemera but their reflection on the culture that produced them speaks of a world long gone.

by Arnon Reisman, A Phillumenist | Read more:

Art by Jane McDevitt via: Flickr

Antonello Silverini, Marcel Proust
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The Secret Sneaker Market — and Why it Matters

00:12  This is the Air Jordan 3 Black Cement. This might be the most important sneaker in history. First released in 1988, this is the shoe that started Nike marketing as we know it. This is the shoe that propelled the entire Air Jordan lineage, and perhaps saved Nike. The Air Jordan 3 Black Cement did for sneakers what the iPhone did for phones. It's been re-released four times. Every celebrity's been seen wearing it. There's a site about what to wear with the Black Cement. It's been right under your nose for decades and you never looked down. And right about now, most of you are probably thinking, "Sneakers?"

00:57  (Laughter)

00:59  Yes. Yes, sneakers. Some extraordinary things about sneakers and data and Nike and how they're all related, possibly, to the future of all online commerce.

01:14  In 2011, the last time the Jordan 3 Black Cement was released, at a retail of 160 dollars, it sold out globally in minutes. And that's because people were camped outside of sneaker stores for days before it went on sale. And just minutes after that, thousands of those pairs were on eBay for two and three times retail. In fact, there's over 1,000 pairs on eBay right now, four years later. But here's the thing:this happens every single Saturday. Every week there's another release or two or three, and every shoe has a story as rich and compelling as the Jordan 3 Black Cement.

01:53  This is Nike building the marketplace for sneakerheads -- people who collect sneakers -- and my daughter.

02:02  (Laughter)

02:04  That's an "I love Dad" T-shirt.

02:07  For the brands, sneakerheads are a very important demographic. These are the tastemakers; these are the Apple fanboys. Because who else is going to buy a pair of $8,000 Back to the Future sneakers?

02:19 ( Laughter)

02:21  Yeah, 8,000 dollars.

02:24  And while that's obviously the anomaly, the resell sneaker market is definitely not. Thirty years in the making, what started as an underground culture of a few people who like sneakers just a bit too much --

02:36  (Laughter)

02:39  Now we have sneaker addictions. In a market where in the past 12 months, there have been over nine million pairs of shoes resold in the United States alone, at a value of 1.2 billion dollars. And that's a conservative estimate -- I should know, I am a sneakerhead. This is my collection. In the pantheon of great collections, mine doesn't even register. I have about 250 pairs, but trust me, I am small-time.People have thousands.

03:09  I'm a very typical 37-year-old sneakerhead. I grew up playing basketball when Michael Jordan played, I always wanted Air Jordans, my mother would never buy me Air Jordans, as soon as I got some money I bought Air Jordans -- literally, we all have the exact same story. But here's where mine diverged. After starting three companies, I took a job as a strategy consultant, when I very quickly realized that I didn't know the first thing about data. But I learned, because I had to, and I liked it. So I thought, I wonder if I could get ahold of some sneaker data, just to play with for my own amusement. The goal was to develop a price guide, a real data-driven view of the market. And four years later, we're analyzing over 25 million transactions, providing real-time analytics on thousands of sneakers. Now sneakerheads check prices while camping out for releases. Others have used the data to validate insurance claims.And the top investment banks in the world now use resell data to analyze the retail footwear industry.And here's the best part: sneakerheads have sneaker portfolios.

04:17  (Laughter)

04:19  Sneakerheads can track the value of their collection over time, compare it to others, and have access to the same analytics you might for your online brokerage account. So sneakerhead Dan builds his collection and identifies which 352 are his. He can see it's worth 103,000 dollars -- frankly, a modest collection. At the asset level, he can see gain-loss by shoe. Here he's made over 600 dollars on one pair. I have one of those.

04:46  (Laughter)

04:49  So an unregulated 1.2 billion dollar industry that thrives as much on the street as it does online, and has spawned fundamental financial services for sneakers? At some point I asked myself what's really going on in the market, and two comparisons started to emerge. Are sneakers more like stocks or drugs?

by Josh Luber, TED |  Read more:

Image: via:

The Samoan Pipeline

[ed. Half of my high school football team was Samoan. Physicality. It's in the culture.]

How does a tiny island, 5,000 miles from the U.S. mainland, produce so many professional football players?

Pronounced Saa-moa, the territory, which is 5,000 miles from the mainland United States, was annexed at the turn of the 20th century for its strategic, deep-water harbor. Today it has a population of about 55,000, nearly all of whom live on the 52 square miles of Tutuila, a land mass that is substantially smaller than Washington, D.C. In many ways, the culture on The Rock still hews to the ethos documented in Margaret Mead’s landmark but controversial work of anthropology, Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928. There may be cellphones and internet and plenty of pickup trucks and consumer goods, but the kids still go home after football practice and do their chores, which typically involve feeding pigs, harvesting taro root and bananas, gathering coconuts, building a fire, cooking dinner, and serving the adults, whose word is paramount.

There is one main road on Tutuila, about 35 miles long. There are no stoplights. The speed limit is 25 miles per hour. Two tuna canneries are the largest employers; workers make less than $10,000 a year. The island has one McDonald’s, one movie theater, several new Chinese restaurants, and a T-shirt shop called Pacific Roots. With job opportunities limited and an unemployment rate between 10 and 20 percent — a main reason for the diaspora — it is not surprising to learn that American Samoa has the highest rate of military enlistment of any U.S. state or territory.

“The biggest dream of everyone in Samoa is to leave the island and look for a better future,” says Peter Gurr, the deputy director of the American Samoa Department of Agriculture. “Right now, if you don’t get a college scholarship, the only thing to do is join the military. And then there’s football. Our largest exports are the tuna and football.” Even though school is conducted in both Samoan and English — often mixed into the same paragraph or sentence — the largest obstacle for football hopefuls is college standardized tests.

Samoans have been playing rugby since the 1920s, when it was introduced by Marist missionaries. American football didn’t come to the island until the 1960s, after an article in Reader’s Digest, headlined “America’s Shame in the Pacific,” brought attention to the deplorable conditions of the tropical-island-cum-American-military-base: “Amid enchanting scenery and smiling Polynesians — praised by Robert Louis Stevenson as ‘God’s best, at least God’s sweetest, works’ — the visitor is shocked to encounter government buildings peeling and rotting on their foundations, beautiful Pago Pago Bay marred and befouled by hideous over-water outhouses, rutty and teeth-jarring roads unrepaired for years.”

Responding to the outrage that followed, the Kennedy administration provided a makeover that pushed the culture into modernity. Along with plumbing, electricity, roads, schools, and a high school football program, the Samoans received cable TV. Watching football became a favorite pastime.

The first Samoan to play in the NFL was Al Lolotai. After starring at Mormon-affiliated Weber State University in Utah, he played for the Washington Redskins in 1945 and then five more years in the now-defunct All-America Football Conference. It wasn’t long before the island was discovered as a wellspring of football talent. Leading the way were coaches at universities with strong Mormon ties. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which believes that Polynesians are heirs to the blessings promised to Abraham’s descendants, has been sending missionaries to the region since the mid-1800s.

Over the years football coaches have found on the island a ready inventory of large, big-boned, and nimble Samoans, with the kind of solid base that football coaches love: massive from the waist down but still able to move their feet. Samoans’ facility with footwork is often attributed to tribal dances and the common practice of going barefoot. Their love of combat is derived from a fierce warrior culture that goes back hundreds of years. With an upbringing that stresses hard work, discipline, and devotion to authority, both heavenly and earthbound, Polynesians have come to be considered the ultimate clay from which to mold a football player. It is as if a childhood of gentle obedience translates into a passion for ferocious violent contact, the kind of collisions that resonate through a stadium and electrify the crowd.

By the 1970s, coaches from Hawaii and Utah began to recruit heavily from Polynesia; in time, the practice spread. More than 100 Polynesians have since played in the NFL. By now the names are well-known. Troy Polamalu, Junior Seau, Jesse Sapolu — and last year’s Heisman winner, Mariota. Hundreds more, like Coach Oak and Pati Pati, have benefited from scholarships.

by Mike Sager, California Sunday Magazine | Read more:
Image: Nathanael Turner

Genetically Engineered Salmon Approved for Consumption

A genetically engineered salmon from AquaBounty Technologies, rear, with a conventionally raised sibling roughly the same age.

Federal regulators on Thursday approved a genetically engineered salmon as fit for consumption, making it the first genetically altered animal to be cleared for American supermarkets and dinner tables.

by Andrew Pollack, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Paul Darrow for The New York Times

The Cult of the Toto Toilet

[ed. See also: Electronic Bidet Toilet Seat Is the Luxury You Won’t Want to Live Without. Even Tom Brady has one.]

Last year, Bennett Friedman, who owns a plumbing showroom in Manhattan called AF New York, took a business trip to Milan. On the morning of his return he faced a choice: stop in the bathroom there or wait until he got home. The flight was nine hours. He waited.

The move seems almost masochistic. But in his home and office bathrooms, Mr. Friedman had installed a Toto washlet. To sit upon a standard commode, he said, would be like “going back to the Stone Age.”

“It feels very uncivilized,” he said.

For those who own Japanese toilets, there is a cultish devotion. They boast heated seats, a bidet function for a rear cleanse and an air-purifying system that deodorizes during use. The need for toilet paper is virtually eliminated (there is an air dryer) and “you left the lid up” squabbles need never take place (the seat lifts and closes automatically in many models).

Jean Z. Poh, founder of the luxury jewelry e-commerce site Swoonery.com, said a washlet is, in its own way, a luxury item.

“I’ve had conversations about washlets with people and it’s always, ‘How good is your life now?’” Ms. Poh said. “It’s about the heated seats. Your life is really good when you have a heated toilet seat.”

Ms. Poh, who lives on the Upper East Side, first encountered a washlet while living in Asia, where they are widespread, especially in Japan, where hotels, restaurants, airports and baseball stadiums are equipped with them, in addition to millions of private homes.

In America, washlets remain, like the metric system, a foreign cultural curiosity that has never widely caught on. The bidet tends to cause embarrassment; the electronic push-button controls to confound.(...)

Toto doesn’t sell its washlets in big-box stores like Home Depot, preferring the showroom experience instead. The company also plans to open an educational gallery in Manhattan next spring, where people can learn about the Toto technology. Most washlet owners, then, are converted after trying one out in the world. At a boutique hotel, say, or on a trip to Asia.

Such was the case with Robert Aboulache. Before he and his family went on a vacation to Japan, he said, friends who had visited the country told him he would love the toilets. “I thought, ‘How great can the toilets be?’” Mr. Aboulache said. “They were amazing. Some have noisemakers to cover up the sound. You can pivot that little sprayer. The water can be heated or not. We got home, and I thought, ‘This is not the same.’”

Three days later, Mr. Aboulache went online and bought a Toto washlet, which he installed in the shared upstairs bathroom of his home in Los Angeles as a surprise for his wife and son.

“We’ve been delighted,” he said. “It’s our favorite toilet.”

by Steven Kurutz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Toto

Liz Climo
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Otagi Nembutsuji rakan
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The Tragically Short Half-Life of Online Empathy

Everything’s accelerated these days, and the same must be said for grief online. The Internet cycles through all five stages in as many tweets. We find it hurtling toward us: unavoidable, wall-to-wall.

And then, before we’ve processed it, the grief’s already gone.

In the four days since extremists slaughtered 129 people in Paris, millions of witnesses — present only through their computer screens — posted prayers and pictures and promised solidarity. For four hours, then five, then six, they trended Twitter hashtags like #PorteOuverte and #PrayforParis. They laid French flags over their Facebook photos and shared images by artists like Jean Jullien. And just as quickly, their posts reverted: back to quips about sports teams, viral videos, pictures with friends — now posted by little avatars striped in the French blue, white and red.

These posts feel inappropriate — indecorous, somehow. As if their posters were telling jokes at a very somber funeral. The world must move on, of course; no one’s saying it shouldn’t. And social media makes an imprecise weather vane for our collective conscience.

Still, it makes one wonder: Is there a half-life to grief? And has the Internet shortened it, as it has all other things?

What's the half-life of Internet solidarity?

On Twitter, the hashtag #PrayforParis trended globally for only five hours and 35 minutes on Saturday; #ParisAttacks did a little better, at six hours and change. (The Twitter algorithm is biased toward novelty.)

By Sunday, not a single solidarity hashtag made the top 100 trending topics, as measured by the analytics site Trendinalia. By Monday, even news organizations had cut their Paris tweets by half or more. I tallied every tweet sent by every major online-only publisher from Nov. 14 to Nov. 16, figuring these guys are the ones who best “get” the Internet; of them, only Business Insider has maintained the same ratio of Paris tweets — and it didn’t have much to begin with.

This is not, to be clear, meant as criticism: It’s merely an observation of fact. News breaks, and we’re devoured by it; interest decays logarithmically, online and off it, after that.

by Caitlin Dewey, Washington Post | Read more:

Image: EPA/Guillaume Horcajuelo

Breaking Bad was a UI Problem

We are, by most accounts, in the throes of a new “golden age” of “prestige television,” or whatever it is you want to call this current abundance of extremely serious hour-long dramas that inspire such fanatical devotion. It is hard work even for those who don’t watch. With the notable exception of timely and topical late night talk shows, we have largely moved from “Did you see [an episode]?” to “Do you watch [an entire series]?” Viewership has become a commitment, even an obligation.

As with most forms of media, there is now far more than we could ever keep up with, but I’m not here to scold you — go right ahead, watch as much as you want! Life outside is exhausting, and nobody faults you for wanting to melt into your couch the moment you walk through the front door. It’s not that there is too much television. There is, with some acceptable margin of error, roughly the right amount of television, whatever that means as determined by audience attention and other nebulous cultural and market forces. What’s weird is that so much of it is headed in the same direction.

When Breaking Bad debuted in 2008 — to comparatively little critical acclaim, at first — Netflix still had less than 10 million subscribers to its hybrid service, which combined a lackluster streaming library with DVDs sent by mail. Today they now have 30 million subscribers, most paying for the streaming feature alone. Nearly forty percent of American homes pay for access to a streaming video service like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video. A theory: even excluding forays into original programming, their prevalence has now started to shape the material they present.

As we’ve seen from a decade of arms races in SEO and social media, content evolves to jockey for position with its audience. Across its supported devices, Netflix has many slight variations on its user interface, all of which are atrocious by any measure except one: the array of available options is reliably insane, impossible to parse, but its mere presence usually does entice you to eventually click on something, if only because you want the list of titles to disappear and give way to something more entertaining than scrolling.

If consumers find all the options overwhelming, a simple and obvious result is gravitating toward serials; you get dozens, even hundreds of hours of entertainment without having to face down another decision. The shows can’t help but cater to this, because otherwise they will cease to exist, so even the introduction of light serial elements into previously episodic formats will pay off. Sitcoms are no longer purely driven by situations, instead relying on the progression of a character along a story arc — Mindy Kaling’s love life, Leslie Knope’s budding political career, lasting effects of Sterling Archer’s endless shenanigans. Details matter more than they used to. Picking something to watch can be exhausting if you put any thought into the decision; anything the show can do to help is appreciated, and the quickest way to the top of the user interface is through the “Recently Watched” list. The primary force driving the death of channel surfing may be the decreasingly viability of bundling programs and channels, but a close second is that the shows just don’t lend themselves to it.

This is a huge change from the pre-internet world of broadcast television, when many popular shows were isolated plot nuggets because it couldn’t be assumed that the viewer had been following previous installments. Now the entire back catalog is all right there, hidden beneath a button hovering just to the north. That in itself also just threatens more fatigue: which episode to watch? Damn, another decision to wrestle with!

Better to just line them all up in order.

Increased access brings its own kind of exhaustion, no matter the interface. Unless you have some bizarre taste for repeatedly facing down inconsequential decisions, your selections are likely driven by information overload. Information overload is a fundamental feature of the internet. The internet has introduced scales that tower beyond anything else we’ve invented aside from telescopes and microscopes. You are far less likely to own either of those than you are to have a Netflix subscription.

Serial television may be on the rise in response to consumer fatigue, but it is probably still a good thing for the medium — short-form stories and sketches are still fair game, and shorter episodic detours can still be embedded within a larger trajectory, and it’s easier to be creatively ambitious when the format allows larger canvases. Mainstream television is probably better overall than it was ten or twenty years ago, and since it is our most voluminous professional cultural product, this change should be applauded no matter how much of it you actually partake in.

But the power balance is clear. A few years ago, Netflix reported to Wired that 75% of user activity is driven by recommendation algorithms, which were fed classification data by a team of 40 data entry folks with varying degrees of industry engagement. At the time, they also employed 800 software developers. So engineering trumps cultural knowledge — is it really such a huge leap to then say the user interface shapes the script?

by Vijith Assar, The Message | Read More:
Image: Breaking Bad

Giordano Poloni
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Great Pretenders

One Sunday evening recently, I went to a stranger’s apartment for my first ‘larp’ (live‑action role-play). I was ushered into the living room, where I found three makeshift tents, reminiscent of forts I used to make as a child. Other props – trail snacks, water bottles, hiking gear – littered the floor. It was a little like arriving at a four-year-old’s playdate. I wasn’t sure my make‑believe skills were what they used to be. For the next few hours in that room in Oakland, California, I and five other brave souls would become immersed in The Climb, a game that had us imagine summiting a Himalayan peak 6,900 metres above the Tarphel Valley of Bhutan.

Six nametags lay on the floor. After much hesitation, I picked ‘Mercer: an internet zillionaire’. I’ve spent much time satirising the tech start-up scene, so this character wasn’t too much of a stretch. Profile sheets told us about our driving motivations and relationships with the other summiteers. Mercer had a crush on a character called Sweet, and had also funded the climbing expedition. All right then. One of my fellow climbers turned on the stereo, and an MP3 of snow-storm sound effects started to play.

The game was designed so that only two of the six players would be able to summit. Part of the drama would be selecting those two players. But the point of the exercise wasn’t to ‘win’ and be the one to summit. The point was to be present to the dynamics of the experience. We weren’t going to play The Climb. We were going to live it.

Larp had caught my attention as an interesting subculture. No longer just a medium for nerds running around in the woods with swords, it was increasingly billed as a vehicle for deep emotional exploration and cultural experimentation. In addition to the traditional Viking, vampire and zombie scenarios, larps have been designed around serious themes – refugee crisis, gender, homelessness, HIV/AIDS, imprisonment. As someone who cares deeply about social change and personal transformation, that was exciting to me. Larps were said to let players experience particular emotions, to step into each other’s perspective, possibly even explore artistic and political visions for new forms of society. (...)

When the Belgian artist and scientist Angelo Vermeulen became the crew commander of HI-SEAS, a Mars mission simulation that had six pretend astronauts live for four months in a dome on a barren lava field in Hawaii, he was effectively engaged in a larp. During the mission, Vermeulen experimented with food production, leadership style (the crew rotated its leaders), and exercise regimes. NASA funded the research as a way of exploring future space‑colony design.

But why stop there? What if we had used role-playing games to model different approaches to banking and finance after the financial crisis? Or experiment with the use of crypto-currencies? What if we used pop-up temporary realities to explore the redistribution of resources or alternatives to the welfare state? At a time of growing alienation, larps can help us explore communitarian possibilities. Not ready to open your relationship, but interested in dabbling in non-monogamy? Try larping.

by Alexa Clay, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Peter Steffen/dpa/Corbis

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