Inside Facebook’s Decision to Blow Up the Like Button

The most drastic change to Facebook in years was born a year ago during an off-site at the Four Seasons Silicon Valley, a 10-minute drive from headquarters. Chris Cox, the social network’s chief product officer, led the discussion, asking each of the six executives around the conference room to list the top three projects they were most eager to tackle in 2015. When it was Cox’s turn, he dropped a bomb: They needed to do something about the “like” button.

The like button is the engine of Facebook and its most recognized symbol. A giant version of it adorns the entrance to the company’s campus in Menlo Park, Calif. Facebook’s 1.6 billion users click on it more than 6 billion times a day—more frequently than people conduct searches on Google—which affects billions of advertising dollars each quarter. Brands, publishers, and individuals constantly, and strategically, share the things they think will get the most likes. It’s the driver of social activity. A married couple posts perfectly posed selfies, proving they’re in love; a news organization offers up what’s fun and entertaining, hoping the likes will spread its content. All those likes tell Facebook what’s popular and should be shown most often on the News Feed. But the button is also a blunt, clumsy tool. Someone announces her divorce on the site, and friends grit their teeth and “like” it. There’s a devastating earthquake in Nepal, and invariably a few overeager clickers give it the ol’ thumbs-up.

Changing the button is like Coca-Cola messing with its secret recipe. Cox had tried to battle the like button a few times before, but no idea was good enough to qualify for public testing. “This was a feature that was right in the heart of the way you use Facebook, so it needed to be executed really well in order to not detract and clutter up the experience,” he says. “All of the other attempts had failed.” The obvious alternative, a “dislike” button, had been rejected on the grounds that it would sow too much negativity.

Cox told the Four Seasons gathering that the time was finally right for a change, now that Facebook had successfully transitioned a majority of its business to smartphones. His top deputy, Adam Mosseri, took a deep breath. “Yes, I’m with you,” he said solemnly.

Later that week, Cox brought up the project with his boss and longtime friend. Mark Zuckerberg’s response showed just how much leeway Cox has to take risks with Facebook’s most important service. “He said something like, ‘Yes, do it.’ He was fully supportive,” Cox says. “Good luck,” he remembers Zuckerberg telling him. “That’s a hard one.”

The solution would eventually be named Reactions. It will arrive soon. And it will expand the range of Facebook-compatible human emotions from one to six.

Cox isn’t a founder, doesn’t serve on the boards of other companies, and hasn’t written any best-selling books. He’s not a billionaire, just a centi-millionaire. He joined Facebook in 2005, too late to be depicted in The Social Network, David Fincher’s movie about the company’s early days. While Zuckerberg manages an expanding portfolio of side businesses and projects—Instagram, WhatsApp, the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset, a planned fleet of 737-size, carbon-fiber, Internet-beaming drones—Cox runs “the big blue app.” That’s Facebook’s term for the social network that we all compulsively check a few dozen times a day. He’s also the keeper of the company’s cultural flame, the guy who gives a rousing welcome speech to new recruits every Monday morning at 9 a.m. It’s a safe bet that all 12,000 Facebook employees know his name.

He’s probably the closest thing Internet users have to an editor-in-chief of their digital life. Cox’s team manages the News Feed, that endless scroll of Facebook updates. Invisible formulas govern what stories users see as they scroll, weighing baby pictures against political outrage. “Chris is the voice for the user,” says Bret Taylor, Facebook’s former chief technology officer. “He’s the guy in the room with Zuckerberg explaining how people might react to a change.”

by Sarah Frier, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Adam Amengual

Why the Calorie is Broken

Bo Nash is 38. He lives in Arlington, Texas, where he’s a technology director for a textbook publisher. He has a wife and child. And he’s 5’10” and 245 lbs—which means he is classed as obese.

In an effort to lose weight, Nash uses an app to record the calories he consumes and a Fitbit band to track the energy he expends. These tools bring an apparent precision: Nash can quantify the calories in each cracker crunched and stair climbed. But when it comes to weight gain, he finds that not all calories are equal. How much weight he gains or loses seems to depend less on the total number of calories and more on where the calories come from and how he consumes them. The unit, he says, has a “nebulous quality to it."

Tara Haelle is also obese. She had her second son on St Patrick’s Day in 2014 and hasn’t been able to lose the 70 lbs she gained during pregnancy. Haelle is a freelance science journalist based in Illinois. She understands the science of weight loss, but like Nash, she doesn’t see it translate into practice. “It makes sense from a mathematical and scientific and even visceral level that what you put in and what you take out, measured in the discrete unit of the calorie, should balance,” says Haelle. “But it doesn’t seem to work that way.”(...)

The process of counting calories begins in an anonymous office block in Maryland. The building is home to the Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center, a facility run by the US Department of Agriculture. When we visit, the kitchen staff are preparing dinner for people enrolled in a study. Plastic dinner trays are laid out with meatloaf, mashed potatoes, corn, brown bread, a chocolate-chip scone, vanilla yoghurt and a can of tomato juice. The staff weigh and bag each item, sometimes adding an extra two-centimeter sliver of bread to ensure a tray’s contents add up to the exact calorie requirements of each participant. “We actually get compliments about the food,” says David Baer, a supervisory research physiologist with the Department.

The work that Baer and colleagues do draws on centuries-old techniques. Nestle traces modern attempts to understand food and energy back to a French aristocrat and chemist named Antoine Lavoisier. In the early 1780s, Lavoisier developed a triple-walled metal canister large enough to house a guinea pig. Inside the walls was a layer of ice. Lavoisier knew how much energy was required to melt ice, so he could estimate the heat the animal emitted by measuring the amount of water that dripped from the canister. What Lavoisier didn’t realize—and never had time to find out; he was put to the guillotine during the Revolution—was that measuring the heat emitted by his guinea pigs was a way to estimate the amount of energy they had extracted from the food they were digesting.

Until recently, the scientists at Beltsville used what was essentially a scaled-up version of Lavoisier’s canister to estimate the energy used by humans: a small room in which a person could sleep, eat, excrete, and walk on a treadmill, while temperature sensors embedded in the walls measured the heat given off and thus the calories burned. (We now measure this energy in calories. Roughly speaking, one calorie is the heat required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius.) Today, those ‘direct-heat’ calorimeters have largely been replaced by ‘indirect-heat’ systems, in which sensors measure oxygen intake and carbon dioxide exhalations. Scientists know how much energy is used during the metabolic processes that create the carbon dioxide we breathe out, so they can work backwards to deduce that, for example, a human who has exhaled 15 liters of carbon dioxide must have used 94 calories of energy.

The facility’s three indirect calorimeters are down the halls from the research kitchen. “They’re basically nothing more than walk-in coolers, modified to allow people to live in here,” physiologist William Rumpler explains as he shows us around. Inside each white room, a single bed is folded up against the wall, alongside a toilet, sink, a small desk and chair, and a short treadmill. A couple of airlocks allow food, urine, faeces and blood samples to be passed back and forth. Apart from these reminders of the room’s purpose, the vinyl-floored, fluorescent-lit units resemble a 1970s dorm room. Rumpler explains that subjects typically spend 24 to 48 hours inside the calorimeter, following a highly structured schedule. (...)

Measuring the calories in food itself relies on another modification of Lavoisier’s device. In 1848, an Irish chemist called Thomas Andrews realized that he could estimate calorie content by setting food on fire in a chamber and measuring the temperature change in the surrounding water. (Burning food is chemically similar to the ways in which our bodies break food down, despite being much faster and less controlled.) Versions of Andrews’s ‘bomb calorimeter’ are used to measure the calories in food today. At the Beltsville center, samples of the meatloaf, mashed potatoes and tomato juice have been incinerated in the lab’s bomb calorimeter. “We freeze-dry it, crush into a powder, and fire it,” says Baer.

Humans are not bomb calorimeters, of course, and we don’t extract every calorie from the food we eat. This problem was addressed at the end of the 19th century, in one of the more epic experiments in the history of nutrition science. Wilbur Atwater, a Department of Agriculture scientist, began by measuring the calories contained in more than 4,000 foods. Then he fed those foods to volunteers and collected their faeces, which he incinerated in a bomb calorimeter. After subtracting the energy measured in the faeces from that in the food, he arrived at the Atwater values, numbers that represent the available energy in each gram of protein, carbohydrate and fat. These century-old figures remain the basis for today’s standards. When Baer wants to know the calories per gram figure for that night’s meatloaf, he corrects the bomb calorimeter results using Atwater values.

Trouble begins

This entire enterprise, from the Beltsville facility to the numbers on the packets of the food we buy, creates an aura of scientific precision around the business of counting calories. That precision is illusory.

The trouble begins at source, with the lists compiled by Atwater and others. Companies are allowed to incinerate freeze-dried pellets of product in a bomb calorimeter to arrive at calorie counts, though most avoid that hassle, says Marion Nestle. Some use the data developed by Atwater in the late 1800s. But the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also allows companies to use a modified set of values, published by the Department of Agriculture in 1955, that take into account our ability to digest different foods in different ways.

Atwater’s numbers say that Tara Haelle can extract 8.9 calories per gram of fat in a plate of her favorite Tex-Mex refried beans; the modified table shows that, thanks to the indigestibility of some of the plant fibers in legumes, she only gets 8.3 calories per gram. Depending on the calorie-measuring method that a company chooses—the FDA allows two more variations on the theme, for a total of five—a given serving of spaghetti can contain from 200 to 210 calories. These uncertainties can add up. Haelle and Bo Nash might deny themselves a snack or sweat out another few floors on the StairMaster to make sure they don’t go 100 calories over their daily limit. If the data in their calorie counts is wrong, they can go over regardless.

There’s also the issue of serving size. After visiting over 40 US chain restaurants, including Olive Garden, Outback Steakhouse and PF Chang’s China Bistro, Susan Roberts of Tufts University’s nutrition research center and colleagues discovered that a dish listed as having, say, 500 calories could contain 800 instead. The difference could easily have been caused, says Roberts, by local chefs heaping on extra french fries or pouring a dollop more sauce. It would be almost impossible for a calorie-counting dieter to accurately estimate their intake given this kind of variation.

Even if the calorie counts themselves were accurate, dieters like Haelle and Nash would have to contend with the significant variations between the total calories in the food and the amount our bodies extract. These variations, which scientists have only recently started to understand, go beyond the inaccuracies in the numbers on the back of food packaging. In fact, the new research calls into question the validity of nutrition science’s core belief that a calorie is a calorie.

Using the Beltsville facilities, for instance, Baer and his colleagues found that our bodies sometimes extract fewer calories than the number listed on the label. Participants in their studies absorbed around a third fewer calories from almonds than the modified Atwater values suggest. For walnuts, the difference was 21 per cent. This is good news for someone who is counting calories and likes to snack on almonds or walnuts: he or she is absorbing far fewer calories than expected. The difference, Baer suspects, is due to the nuts’ particular structure. “All the nutrients—the fat and the protein and things like that—they’re inside this plant cell wall.” Unless those walls are broken down—by processing, chewing or cooking—some of the calories remain off-limits to the body, and thus are excreted rather than absorbed.

by Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Catherine Losing

Fishing day
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Papio
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Michael Ward
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[ed. I finally have an answer for my fourth grade spelling teacher.]
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The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you are a 22-year-old college student in Kampala, Uganda. You’re sitting in class and discreetly scrolling through Facebook on your phone. You see that there has been another mass shooting in America, this time in a place called San Bernardino. You’ve never heard of it. You’ve never been to America. But you’ve certainly heard a lot about gun violence in the U.S. It seems like a new mass shooting happens every week.

You wonder if you could go there and get stricter gun legislation passed. You’d be a hero to the American people, a problem-solver, a lifesaver. How hard could it be? Maybe there’s a fellowship for high-minded people like you to go to America after college and train as social entrepreneurs. You could start the nonprofit organization that ends mass shootings, maybe even win a humanitarian award by the time you are 30.

Sound hopelessly naïve? Maybe even a little deluded? It is. And yet, it’s not much different from how too many Americans think about social change in the “Global South.”

If you asked a 22-year-old American about gun control in this country, she would probably tell you that it’s a lot more complicated than taking some workshops on social entrepreneurship and starting a non-profit. She might tell her counterpart from Kampala about the intractable nature of our legislative branch, the long history of gun culture in this country and its passionate defenders, the complexity of mental illness and its treatment. She would perhaps mention the added complication of agitating for change as an outsider.

But if you ask that same 22-year-old American about some of the most pressing problems in a place like Uganda — rural hunger or girl’s secondary education or homophobia — she might see them as solvable. Maybe even easily solvable.

I’ve begun to think about this trend as the reductive seduction of other people’s problems. It’s not malicious. In many ways, it’s psychologically defensible; we don’t know what we don’t know.

If you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course you’d be attracted to solving problems that seem urgent and readily solvable. Of course you’d want to apply for prestigious fellowships that mark you as an ambitious altruist among your peers. Of course you’d want to fly on planes to exotic locations with, importantly, exotic problems.

There is a whole “industry” set up to nurture these desires and delusions — most notably, the 1.5 million nonprofit organizations registered in the U.S., many of them focused on helping people abroad. In other words, the young American ego doesn’t appear in a vacuum. Its hubris is encouraged through job and internship opportunities, conferences galore, and cultural propaganda — encompassed so fully in the patronizing, dangerously simple phrase “save the world.”

by Courtney Martin, Medium |  Read more:
Image: Michael Marsicano

Design for Living

What’s great about Goethe?

In the English-speaking world, we are used to thinking of our greatest writer as an enigma, or a blank. Though there’s enough historical evidence to tell us when Shakespeare was born and when he died, and more than enough to prove that he wrote the plays ascribed to him, the record is thin. Indeed, the persistence of conspiracy theories attributing Shakespeare’s work to the Earl of Oxford or other candidates is a symptom of how little we actually understand about his life. His religious beliefs, his love affairs, his relationships with other writers, his daily routine—these are permanent mysteries, and biographies of Shakespeare are always mostly speculation.

To get a sense of how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dominates German literature, we would have to imagine a Shakespeare known to the last inch—a Shakespeare squared or cubed. Goethe’s significance is only roughly indicated by the sheer scope of his collected works, which run to a hundred and forty-three volumes. Here is a writer who produced not only some of his language’s greatest plays but hundreds of major poems of all kinds—enough to keep generations of composers supplied with texts for their songs. Now consider that he also wrote three of the most influential novels in European literature, and a series of classic memoirs documenting his childhood and his travels, and essays on scientific subjects ranging from the theory of colors to the morphology of plants.

Then, there are several volumes of his recorded table talk, more than twenty thousand extant letters, and the reminiscences of the many visitors who met him throughout his sixty-year career as one of Europe’s most famous men. Finally, Goethe accomplished all this while simultaneously working as a senior civil servant in the duchy of Weimar, where he was responsible for everything from mining operations to casting actors in the court theatre. If he hadn’t lived from 1749 to 1832, safely into the modern era and the age of print, but had instead flourished when Shakespeare did, there would certainly be scholars today theorizing that the life and work of half a dozen men had been combined under Goethe’s name. As it is, in the words of Nicholas Boyle, his leading English-­language biographer, “More must be known, or at any rate there must be more to know, about Goethe than about almost any other human being.”

Germans began debating the significance of the Goethe phenomenon while he was still in his twenties, and they have never stopped. His lifetime, spanning some of the most monumental disruptions in modern history, is referred to as a single whole, the Goethezeit, or Age of Goethe. Worshipped as the greatest genius in German history and as an exemplary poet and human being, he has also been criticized for his political conservatism and quietism, which in the twentieth century came to seem sinister legacies. Indeed, Goethe was hostile to both the French Revolution and the German nationalist movement that sprang up in reaction to it. More radical and Romantic spirits especially disdained the way this titan seemed content to be a servant to princes—and Grand Duke Karl August of Weimar, despite his title, was a fairly minor prince—in an age of revolution.

One famous anecdote concerns Goethe and Beethoven, who were together at a spa resort when they unexpectedly met a party of German royalty on the street. Goethe deferentially stood aside and removed his hat, while Beethoven kept his hat firmly on his head and plowed through the royal group, forcing them to make way—which they did, while offering the composer friendly greetings. Here was a contrast of temperaments, but also of generations. Goethe belonged to the courtly past, when artists were the clients of princes, while Beethoven represented the Romantic future, when princes would clamor to associate with artists. Historians dispute whether the incident actually took place, but if it didn’t the story is arguably even more revealing; the event became famous because it symbolized the way people thought about Goethe and his values.

Goethe’s fame notwithstanding, he is strangely neglected in the English-speaking world. English readers are notoriously indifferent to the poets of other cultures, and Goethe’s poems, unfortunately, seldom come across vividly in translation. This is partly because Goethe so often cloaks his sophistication in deceptively simple language. “Heidenröslein,” one of his earliest great poems, is written in the style of a folk song and almost entirely in words of one or two syllables: “Sah ein Knab’ ein Röslein stehn” (“A boy saw a little rose standing”). “The Essential Goethe” (Princeton), a rich new anthology, a thousand pages long, edited by Matthew Bell, which valiantly seeks to display every facet of Goethe’s genius, gives the poem in a translation by John Frederick Nims:

Urchin blurts: “I’ll pick you, though,
Rosebud in the heather!”
Rosebud: “Then I’ll stick you so
That there’s no forgetting, no!
I’ll not stand it, ever!”

Nims reproduces the rhythm of the original precisely. But to do so he adds words that aren’t in the original (“though”) and resorts to distractingly winsome diction (“urchin,” “I’ll not”). The result is clumsy and charmless. The very simplicity of Goethe’s language makes his poetry practically untranslatable.

English speakers are more hospitable to fiction in translation, and yet when was the last time you heard someone mention “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship” or “Elective Affinities,” Goethe’s long fictions? These books have a good claim to have founded two of the major genres of the modern novel—respectively, the Bildungsroman and the novel of adultery. Goethe’s first novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” is better known, mainly because it represented such an enormous milestone in literary history; the first German international best-seller, it is said to have started a craze for suicide among young people emulating its hero. But in English it remains a book more famous than read.

This wasn’t always the case. Victorian intellectuals revered Goethe as the venerable Sage of Weimar. Thomas Carlyle implored the reading public to “close thy Byron, open thy Goethe”—which was as much as to say, “Grow up!” Matthew Arnold saw Goethe as a kind of healer and liberator, calling him the “physician of the Iron Age,” who “read each wound, each weakness” of the “suffering human race.” For these writers, Goethe seemed to possess something the modern world lacked: wisdom, the ability to understand life and how it should be lived. It was this very quality that led to his fall from favor in the post-Victorian age. For the modernists, being spiritually sick was a condition of intellectual respectability, and T. S. Eliot wrote that “there is something artificial and even priggish about Goethe’s healthiness.” Reading Goethe today, even through the veil of translation, is most valuable as an encounter with a way of thinking and feeling that has grown foreign to us.

by Adam Kirsch, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Boris Pelcher

lava rock
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Valerie Schmidt
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In Search of Whales
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A Drug to Cure Fear

Who among us hasn’t wanted to let go of anxiety or forget about fear? Phobias, panic attacks and disorders like post-traumatic stress are extremely common: 29 percent of American adults will suffer from anxiety at some point in their lives.

Sitting at the heart of much anxiety and fear is emotional memory — all the associations that you have between various stimuli and experiences and your emotional response to them. Whether it’s the fear of being embarrassed while talking to strangers (typical of social phobia) or the dread of being attacked while walking down a dark street after you’ve been assaulted (a symptom of PTSD), you have learned that a previously harmless situation predicts something dangerous.

It has been an article of faith in neuroscience and psychiatry that, once formed, emotional memories are permanent. Afraid of heights or spiders? The best we could do was to get you to tolerate them, but we could never really rid you of your initial fear. Or so the thinking has gone.

The current standard of treatment for such phobias revolves around exposure therapy. This involves repeatedly presenting the feared object or frightening memory in a safe setting, so that the patient acquires a new safe memory that resides in his brain alongside the bad memory. As long as the new memory has the upper hand, his fear is suppressed. But if he is re-traumatized or re-exposed with sufficient intensity to the original experience, his old fear will awaken with a vengeance.

This is one of the limitations of exposure therapy, along with the fact that it generally works in only about half of the PTSD patients who try it. Many also find it upsetting or intolerable to relive memories of assaults and other traumatizing experiences.

We urgently need more effective treatments for anxiety disorders. What if we could do better than creating a new safe memory — and actually get rid of emotions attached to the old bad one?

New research suggests that it may be possible not just to change certain types of emotional memories, but even to erase them. We’ve learned that memories are uniquely vulnerable to alteration at two points: when we first lay them down, and later, when we retrieve them.

Merel Kindt, a professor of psychology at the University of Amsterdam, and her colleagues have seemingly erased the emotional fear response in healthy people with arachnophobia. For a study published last month in the journal Biological Psychiatry, she compared three groups made up of 45 subjects in total. One group was exposed to a tarantula in a glass jar for two minutes, and then given a beta-blocker called propranolol that is commonly prescribed to patients for performance anxiety; one was exposed to the tarantula and given a placebo; and one was just given propranolol without being shown the spider, to rule out the possibility that propranolol by itself could decrease spider fear.

Dr. Kindt assessed the subjects’ anxiety when they were shown the spider the first time, then again three months later, and finally after a year. What she found was remarkable. Those who got the propranolol alone and those who got the placebo had no improvement in their anxiety. But the arachnophobes who were exposed to the spider and given the drug were able to touch the tarantula within days and, by three months, many felt comfortable holding the spider with their bare hands. Their fear did not return even at the end of one year.

How does this work? Well, propranolol blocks the effects of norepinephrine in the brain. This chemical, which is similar to adrenaline, enhances learning, so blocking it disrupts the way a memory is put back in storage after it is retrieved — a process called reconsolidation.

Arachnophobes have an emotional memory that involves an association between spiders and a dreaded outcome, like a spider bite. This “fear memory” is the source of their phobia — even if (as is often the case) it never actually happened. The basic idea is that when Dr. Kindt briefly exposed the subjects to the spider, she reactivated their fear, which made the fear memory susceptible to the influence of propranolol.

Reconsolidation is a bit like pulling up a file on your computer, rewriting the same material in a bigger, bolder font and saving it again. Disrupting reconsolidation with propranolol or another drug is akin to retrieving this document, erasing some or all of the text and then writing something new in its place.

Dr. Kindt is not the first to demonstrate that disrupting reconsolidation can weaken or erase emotional memories. Several studies of rats done in 2000 showed that a drug called anisomycin, which blocks the synthesis of proteins in the brain, could reduce fear associations. In one, researchers taught rats to fear a sound by pairing it with a shock. After the animals were fear-conditioned, they were presented with the sound and then immediately given the drug. When the animals were exposed to the sound again, they no longer appeared afraid; they had forgotten their original fear.

Curiously, there is a very narrow time window after retrieving a fear memory when you can disrupt that memory — hours, in the animal studies — before it closes and the drug has no effect.

These studies suggest that someday, a single dose of a drug, combined with exposure to your fear at the right moment, could free you of that fear forever. But there’s a flip side to this story about how to undo emotional learning: how to strengthen it. We can do that with drugs as well, and may have been doing it for some time.

by Richard A. Friedman , NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jillian Tamaki

Work Imitates Life

Few companies could announce a new office in the messianic way that Google did last February. Then again, few companies have ever built this sort of office.

‘Google’s presence in Mountain View is simply so strong that it can’t be the fortress that shuts away… the neighbours. It really needs to become a neighbourhood in Mountain View,’ intones the lead architect Bjarke Ingels of the Danish firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) in the introductory video. The camera sweeps high over an edenic Mountain View in the San Francisco Bay Area. It pulls back to reveal Google’s proposed new office: a neighbourhood nested beneath glittering glass domes.

On approximately 3.5 million square feet of commercial land, Google intended to build a campus office that might best be described as a new part of town. Beneath the glass canopies, a thriving neighbourhood hosts stores, bike paths and modular office spaces. In building this new neighbourhood, Google hoped to expand their working space while accommodating the Mountain View population inclined to view them as a ‘fortress’. The utopian campus was meant to assuage fears that spiking numbers of Google employees would create a Google voting bloc, according to The New York Times. Such fears are understandable. As of 2013, the company employed roughly 10 per cent of Mountain View’s workforce and owned approximately the same proportion of taxable property.

Despite promises that the campus would be open to all, in May 2015 the Mountain View City Council denied Google the majority of the land they’d requested. Google submitted a similar but smaller plan to the city later that month. This one proposes to treat its own water supply and expand the suite of amenities that, anecdotally, have enabled at least a few Google employees to forgo private housing – sometimes by sleeping in trucks and vans while otherwise living on campus.

‘We’re blurring the outside world and the inside world,’ explains Thomas Heatherwick, the London-based designer who is the project’s other lead, in the Mountain View video. He cites the ‘historic city model of making streets’ as Google’s inspiration. As The New Yorker writer Nathan Heller put it: ‘Inside, it is about turning Google into not only a life style but a fully realised life.’

It’s a life many want. Google boasts more than 2 million job applicants a year. National media hailed its office plans as a ‘glass utopia’. There are hosts of articles for businesspeople on how to make their offices more like Google’s workplace. A 2015 CNNMoney survey of business students around the world showed Google as their most desired employer. Its campus is a cultural symbol of that desirability.

The specifics of Google’s proposed Mountain View office are unprecedented, but the scope of the campus is part of an emerging trend across the tech world. Alongside Google’s neighbourhood is a recent Facebook open office on their campus that, as the largest open office in the world, parallels the platform’s massive online community. Both offices seem modest next to the ambitious and fraught effort of Tony Hsieh, CEO of the online fashion retailer Zappos, to revitalise the downtown Las Vegas area around Zappos’ office in the old City Hall.

Such offices symbolise not just the future of work in the public mind, but also a new, utopian age with aspirations beyond the workplace. The dream is a place at once comfortable and entrepreneurial, where personal growth aligns with profit growth, and where work looks like play.

Yet though these tech campuses seem unprecedented, they echo movements of the past. In an era of civic wariness and economic fragility, the ‘total’ office heralds the rise of a new technocracy. In a time when terrorism from abroad provokes our fears, this heavily-planned workplace harks back to the isolationist values of the academic campus and even the social planning of the company town. As physical offices, they’re exceptional places to work – but while we increasingly uphold these places as utopic models for community, we make questionable assumptions about the best version of our shared life and values.

Just as Google sought to build a new neighbourhood in Mountain View, so did Thomas Jefferson in 1819 intend to make the campus of the University of Virginia an ‘academical village’. The famed architect Le Corbusier once described the US college campus as ‘a world in itself’, and it’s these cloistered worlds that launched our technological ideals. Tony Hsieh of Zappos had a formative business experience manning a dormitory diner in Quincy House at Harvard College; David Fincher’s film The Social Network (2010) would have you believe that Mark Zuckerberg’s empire – which earned $12.47 billion in 2014 alone – is still, at its core, a vengeful dorm-room enterprise.

‘Certainly tech campuses – not just in their layout but in their work rhythms – are meant to resemble college life,’ said Nikil Saval, the author of Cubed (2014), a history of the office. ‘The fact that you’re meant to put in long hours but those hours are punctuated by hours of leisure, boredom – you know, you can take a nap.’ (...)

These offices are seen as utopian partly because ‘they’re more thought-out than most American offices,’ explained Saval. ‘The reason they’re more thought-out is that those companies are in some ways obliged to care in a way that other American corporations in other industries aren’t.’ (...)

Ultimately, school campuses seek to shape rounded and informed citizens. On corporate campuses, workers are still workers. But in both environments, people are encouraged to bring their whole selves to their work. So the campus culture that seeks to serve, shape and employ the whole worker has as its corollary a boom in positive psychology – management principles centred on things such as mindfulness, perceived autonomy, and the feeling of being part of something bigger than yourself.

by Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Google / BIG / Heatherwick Studio

Tomorrow’s Child

He did not want to be the father of a small blue pyramid. Peter Horn hadn’t planned it that way at all. Neither he nor his wife imagined that such a thing could happen to them. They had talked quietly for days about the birth of their coming child, they had eaten normal foods, slept a great deal, taken in a few shows, and, when it was time for her to fly in the helicopter to the hospital, her husband held her and kissed her.

“Honey, you’ll be home in six hours,” he said. “These new birth-mechanisms do everything but father the child for you.”

She remembered an old-time song. “No, no, they can’t take that away from me!” and sang it, and they laughed as the helicopter lifted them over the green way from country to city.

The doctor, a quiet gentleman named Wolcott, was very confident. Polly Ann, the wife, was made ready for the task ahead and the father was put, as usual, out in the waiting room where he could suck on cigarettes or take highballs from a convenient mixer. He was feeling pretty good. This was the first baby, but there was not a thing to worry about. Polly Ann was in good hands.

Dr. Wolcott came into the waiting room an hour later. He looked like a man who has seen death. Peter Horn, on his third highball, did not move. His hand tightened on the glass and he whispered: “She’s dead.”

“No,” said Wolcott, quietly. “No, no, she’s fine. It’s the baby.”

“The baby’s dead, then.”

“The baby’s alive, too, but—drink the rest of that drink and come along after me. Something’s happened.”

Yes, indeed, something had happened. The “something” that had happened had brought the entire hospital out into the corridors. People were going and coming from one room to another. As Peter Horn was led through a hallway where attendants in white uniforms were standing around peering into each other’s faces and whispering, he became quite ill.

“Hey, looky looky!” “The child of Peter Horn! Incredible!”

They entered a small clean room. There was a crowd in the room, looking down at a low table. There was something on the table.

A small blue pyramid.

“Why’ve you brought me here?” said Horn, turning to the doctor. The small blue pyramid moved. It began to cry.

Peter Horn pushed forward and looked down wildly. He was very white and he was breathing rapidly. “You don’t mean that’s it?”

The doctor named Wolcott nodded.

The blue pyramid had six blue snakelike appendages and three eyes that blinked from the tips of projecting structures.

Horn didn’t move.

“It weighs seven pounds, eight ounces,” someone said.

Horn thought to himself, they’re kidding me. This is some joke. Charlie Ruscoll is behind all this. He’ll pop in a door any moment and cry “April Fool!” and everybody’ll laugh. That’s not my child. Oh, horrible! They’re kidding me.

Horn stood there, and the sweat rolled down his face.

“Get me away from here.” Horn turned and his hands were opening and closing without purpose, his eyes were flickering.

Wolcott held his elbow, talking calmly. “This is your child. Understand that, Mr. Horn.”

“No. No, it’s not.” His mind wouldn’t touch the thing. “It’s a nightmare. Destroy it!”

“You can’t kill a human being.”

“Human?” Horn blinked tears. “That’s not human! That’s a crime against God!”

The doctor went on, quickly. “We’ve examined this—child—and we’ve decided that it is not a mutant, a result of gene destruction or rearrangement. It’s not a freak. Nor is it sick. Please listen to everything I say to you.”

Horn stared at the wall, his eyes wide and sick. He swayed. The doctor talked distantly, with assurance.

“The child was somehow affected by the birth pressure. There was a dimensional distructure caused by the simultaneous short-circuitings and malfunctionings of the new birth and hypnosis machines. Well, anyway,” the doctor ended lamely, “your baby was born into—another dimension.”

Horn did not even nod. He stood there, waiting.

Dr. Wolcott made it emphatic. “Your child is alive, well, and happy. It is lying there, on the table. But because it was born into another dimension it has a shape alien to us. Our eyes, adjusted to a three-dimensional concept, cannot recognize it as a baby. But it is. Underneath that camouflage, the strange pyramidal shape and appendages, it is yourchild.”

Horn closed his mouth and shut his eyes. “Can I have a drink?”

by Ray Bradbury, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Mark S. Fisher

Wood roses
photo: markk

Keomoku church
photo: markk

The Fang Playbook

Jim Cramer, who coined the “FANG” acronym as a descriptor for the high-flying Facebook, Amazon,Netflix, and Google group of tech stocks that have dramatically outperformed the market, made clear yesterday that his endorsement wasn’t necessarily connected to the underlying companies:

A note on these stocks. I picked them largely because over the years they have become anointed by a group of go-go managers, meaning managers who like to be affiliated with the stocks of companies with the most momentum. I by no means have said “buy these stocks” because they represent great value. What I have been saying is that because of the scarcity of actual high-growth stocks these have become default names that managers naturally gravitate to.

It’s not an unreasonable position: the demand for growth in a low-interest-rate environment flooded with capital, plus a healthy dose of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) has certainly played a role in the rise of unicorns; it makes sense that the same dynamics would play out in the stock market as well. It’s also a position that has had the good fortune of being right: in 2015 the FANG group accounted for more than the entire return of the S&P 500.

In fact, though, Cramer was more right than he apparently knows: the performance of the FANG group is entirely justified because of the underlying companies, or, to be more precise, because the underlying companies are following the exact same playbook. Sometimes the market does get it right.

THE STATE OF FANG

Each of the FANG companies is in a similar position in their respective industries: they haven’t so much disrupted incumbents as they have subsumed them:

Facebook: The late David Carr, who first broke the news about Facebook’s Instant Articles initiative back in 2014, worried that “media companies would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns.” However, as I noted in The Facebook Reckoning, publishers already are.Facebook’s status as the Internet’s home page means that publishers have no choice but to accommodate themselves to the social network, whether that be Instant Articles or an increased focus on video.

Amazon: While the biggest driver of Amazon’s increased valuation has almost certainly been AWS, the e-commerce side of the business continues to grow like gangbusters as well, taking over half of every additional dollar spent by U.S. consumers online, and a quarter of all retail growth online or off. The vast majority of those sales are actually from 3rd-party merchants using Amazon as a discovery and fulfillment platform, but these merchants’ market power relative to Amazon is not unlike publishers relative to Facebook, because Amazon.com is where the buyers are.

From a certain perspective this paradigm applies to AWS as well: the reason why AWS’s profitability increases along with growth is that Amazon achieves economies of scale, which is another way to say that AWS’s suppliers have no choice but to be squeezed in order to indirectly serve the customers they used to sell to directly

Netflix: The Internet — and Netflix — made fun of an NBC executive who claimed that “The reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.” Here’s the thing, though: he’s right, in part thanks to Netflix. According to this February 2015 list, 42 past and present NBC shows are streamable on Netflix, for which the latter is certainly paying a material amount. Indeed, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Netflix’s meteoric rise is the fact that the same content producers who are ultimately threatened in the battle for attention are increasingly unable to stop themselves from selling their content to Netflix: the streaming company has too many customers adding to a pile of content money that is too big to ignore.

Google: Google’s position is similar to Facebook’s: any business that wants to be discovered by potential customers has no choice but to follow the search company’s directives, whether that be cleaning up dubious SEO strategies, making their pages mobile-friendly, or soon, adopting Accelerated Mobile Pages. Every now and then someone, usually a set of publishers, tries to defy the search engine’s influence, only to come crawling back within weeks once traffic craters. The reality is that most people find most web pages through Google, which means Google calls the shots — and sells the most expensive advertising of all.

There is a clear pattern for all four companies: each controls, to varying degrees, the entry point for customers to the category in which they compete. This control of the customer entry point, by extension, gives each company power over the companies actually supplying what each company “sells”, whether that be content, goods, video, or life insurance.

by Ben Thompson, Stratechery |  Read more:

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Bill Belichick Visits Terminally Ill Fan

BOSTON—Stressing the importance of taking time to make such trips to local medical centers, New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick reportedly visited Massachusetts General Hospital Thursday to watch terminally ill fan Brian Keller die. “Brian’s a big fan of the team, and as soon as I heard that he had taken a turn for the worse, I came right over to watch him struggle until the end,” said Belichick, who stood outside Keller’s room in the intensive care unit for over three hours and silently stared through the glass as the 28-year-old’s organs shut down and he went into cardiac arrest. “I try to make it out here as many weekends as I can. Sometimes I’ll be here for six or seven hours on a Saturday visiting fans in the cancer ward who are just hanging on by a thread. The look on their faces when they’ve lost consciousness for the last time—you can just see the life draining out of them. It means so much to me to be there in those moments.” Sources confirmed that Belichick stayed to take pictures with Keller for several minutes after doctors had pronounced him dead.

by The Onion

Image: uncredited

Side Effects May Include Anything

A couple of days ago a patient said he’d become depressed after starting Xolair, a new asthma drug I know nothing about.

On the one hand, lots of things that mess with the immune system can cause depression. On the other, patients are notorious for blaming drugs for any random thing that happens around the same time they started taking them. So I did what any highly-trained competent medical professional would: I typed “does xolair cause depression?” into Google.

The results seemed promising. The first site was called “Can Xolair cause depression?”. The second was “Is depression a side effect of Xolair?”. Also on the front page were “Could Xolair cause major depression?” and “Xolair depression side effects”. Clearly this is a well-researched topic that lots of people cared about, right?

Let’s look closer at one of those sites, EHealthMe.com. It says: “Major depression is found among people who take Xolair, especially for people who are female, 40-49 old, also take medication Singulair, and have Asthma. We study 11,502 people who have side effects while taking Xolair from FDA and social media. Among them, 14 have Major depression. Find out below who they are, when they have Major depression and more.” Then it offers a link: “Join a support group for people who take Xolair and have Major depression”.

First things first: if there were actually 11502 people taking Xolair, and only 14 of them had major depression, that would be a rate of 0.1%, compared to 6.9% in the general population. In other words, Xolair would be the most effective antidepressant on Earth. But of course nobody has ever done an n=11502 study on whether a random asthma medication causes depression, and EHealthMe is just scraping the FDA databases to see how many people reported depression as a side effect to the FDA. But only a tiny percent of people who get depression report it, and depression sometimes strikes at random times whether you’re taking Xolair or not. So this tells us nothing.

And yet a patient who worries that Xolair might be causing their depression will Google “can xolair cause depression?”, and she will end up on this site that says “major depression is found among people who take Xolair”, which is one of the worst examples of weasel words I’ve ever heard. Then she will read that there are entire support groups for depressed Xolair sufferers. She will find all sorts of scary-looking information like that Xolair-related depression has been increasing since 2008. And this is above and beyond just the implications of somebody bothering to write an entire report about the Xolair-depression connection!

In case you haven’t guessed the twist – no one’s ever investigated whether Xolair causes depression. EHealthMe’s business model is to make an automated program that runs through every single drug and every possible side effect, scrapes the FDA database for examples, then autopublishes an ad-filled web page titled “COULD $DRUG CAUSE $SIDE_EFFECT?”. It populates the page by spewing random FDA data all over it, concludes “$SIDE_EFFECT is found among people who take $DRUG”, and offers a link to a support group for $DRUG patients suffering from $SIDE_EFFECT. Needless to say, the support group is an automatically-generated forum with no posts in it.

And it’s not just EHealthMe. This is a whole market, with competitors elbowing their way past one another to the top of the Google search results. Somebody who doubts EHealthMe and seeks an online second opinion will probably just end up at PatientsVille, whose page is called “Xolair Depression Side Effects”, which contains the same FDA data, and which gets the Google description text “This opens a possibility that Xolair could cause Depression”. Or Treato, whose page claims to contain 56 reader comments on Xolair and depression, but which has actually just searched the Web for every single paragraph that contains “Xolair” and “depression” together and then posted garbled excerpts in its comment section. For example, one of their comments – and this is not at all clear from Treato’s garbled excerpt – is from a tennis forum, where a user with the handle Xolair talks about how his tennis serve is getting worse with age; another user replies “Xolair, I read this and get depressed, I just turned 49.” But if you don’t check whether it came from a tennis forum or not, 56 reports of a connection between a drug and a side effect sounds convincing!

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

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