We Are Hopelessly Hooked

“As smoking gives us something to do with our hands when we aren’t using them, Time gives us something to do with our minds when we aren’t thinking,” Dwight Macdonald wrote in 1957. With smartphones, the issue never arises. Hands and mind are continuously occupied texting, e-mailing, liking, tweeting, watching YouTube videos, and playing Candy Crush.

Americans spend an average of five and a half hours a day with digital media, more than half of that time on mobile devices, according to the research firm eMarketer. Among some groups, the numbers range much higher. In one recent survey, female students at Baylor University reported using their cell phones an average of ten hours a day. Three quarters of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds say that they reach for their phones immediately upon waking up in the morning. Once out of bed, we check our phones 221 times a day—an average of every 4.3 minutes—according to a UK study. This number actually may be too low, since people tend to underestimate their own mobile usage. In a 2015 Gallup survey, 61 percent of people said they checked their phones less frequently than others they knew.

Our transformation into device people has happened with unprecedented suddenness. The first touchscreen-operated iPhones went on sale in June 2007, followed by the first Android-powered phones the following year. Smartphones went from 10 percent to 40 percent market penetration faster than any other consumer technology in history. In the United States, adoption hit 50 percent only three years ago. Yet today, not carrying a smartphone indicates eccentricity, social marginalization, or old age.

What does it mean to shift overnight from a society in which people walk down the street looking around to one in which people walk down the street looking at machines? We wouldn’t be always clutching smartphones if we didn’t believe they made us safer, more productive, less bored, and were useful in all of the ways that a computer in your pocket can be useful. At the same time, smartphone owners describe feeling “frustrated” and “distracted.” In a 2015 Pew survey, 70 percent of respondents said their phones made them feel freer, while 30 percent said they felt like a leash. Nearly half of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds said they used their phones to “avoid others around you.”

It is the troubling aspects of social and mobile media that Sherry Turkle attends to in her wise and observant new book, Reclaiming Conversation. A clinical psychologist and sociologist who teaches at MIT, Turkle is by no means antitechnology. But after a career examining relations between people and computers, she blends her description with advocacy. She presents a powerful case that a new communication revolution is degrading the quality of human relationships—with family and friends, as well as colleagues and romantic partners. The picture she paints is both familiar and heartbreaking: parents who are constantly distracted on the playground and at the dinner table; children who are frustrated that they can’t get their parents’ undivided attention; gatherings where friends who are present vie for attention with virtual friends; classrooms where professors gaze out at a sea of semiengaged multitaskers; and a dating culture in which infinite choice undermines the ability to make emotional commitments.

Turkle finds the roots of the problem in the failure of young people absorbed in their devices to develop fully independent selves, a topic she began to explore in Alone Together (2011). In that book, she examined the way interaction with robotic toys and “always on” connections affect adolescent development. She argued that phones and texting disrupt the ability to separate from one’s parents, and raise other obstacles to adulthood. Curating a Facebook profile alters the presentation of self. Absorption in a gaming avatar can become a flight from the difficulties of real life. Young people face new anxieties around the loss of privacy and the persistence of online data.

In her new book, she expresses a version of those concerns that is as much philosophic as psychiatric. Because they aren’t learning how to be alone, she contends, young people are losing their ability to empathize. “It’s the capacity for solitude that allows you to reach out to others and see them as separate and independent,” Turkle writes. Without an ability to look inward, those locked into the virtual worlds of social media develop a sensibility of “I share, therefore I am,” crafting their identities for others. Continuous digital performance leaves teenagers experiencing what ought to be the satisfactions of solitude only as “disconnection anxiety.”

As in her earlier work, Turkle considers this loss of empathy as both a clinician and an ethnographer. She culls from hundreds of interviews she has done since 2008, the first year many high school and college students became armed with smartphones. Unhappy teachers at one private middle school in upstate New York describe students who don’t make eye contact or respond to body language, who have trouble listening and talking to teachers, and can’t see things from another’s point of view, recognize when they’ve hurt someone, or form friendships based on trust. “It is as though they all have some signs of being on an Asperger’s spectrum,” one teacher tells her. Turkle even seeks to quantify the damage, repeatedly citing a study that shows a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students over the past twenty years as measured by standard psychological tests.

For young people, she observes, the art of friendship is increasingly the art of dividing your attention successfully. Speaking to someone who isn’t fully present is irritating, but it’s increasingly the norm. Turkle has already noticed considerable evolution in “friendship technologies.” At first, she saw kids investing effort into enhancing their profiles on Facebook. More recently, they’ve come to prefer Snapchat, known for its messages that vanish after being viewed, and Instagram, where users engage with one another around a stream of shared photos, usually taken by phone. Both of these platforms combine asynchronicity with ephemerality, allowing you to compose your self-presentation, while looking more causal and spontaneous than on a Facebook profile. It’s not the indelible record that Snapchat’s teenage users fear. It’s the sin of premeditated curating—looking like you’re trying too hard. (...)

The thing young people never do on their smartphones is actually speak to one another. Their comments about live conversation are telling: “I never really learned how to do a good job with talking in person.” “Even when I’m with my friends, I’ll go online to make a point…. I’m more at home.” An Ivy league–bound high school student worries that college is going to require “a fair amount of on-the-spot talking.” Collectively, teens “make it clear that the back-and-forth of unrehearsed ‘real-time’ conversation is something that makes you ‘unnecessarily’ vulnerable,” Turkle writes. Reading these accounts, one is caught between dismay at the flight from personal contact and admiration for human ingenuity in devising new modes of communication. One group of students explains that when they get together physically, they “layer” online conversations on top of face-to-face ones, with people who are in the same room.

by Jacob Weisberg, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Eric Pickersgill

Medicines to Keep Addiction Away

America’s drug crisis, which now kills more people each day than car crashes or gun violence, has challenged the conventional wisdom about recovery. With addiction inside the homes of families who thought themselves immune, we are starting to embrace the idea that addiction is a not a character flaw but a chronic disease requiring long-term management — the subject of last week’s Fixes column.

This week, another idea whose time has come: trying to kick opioid addiction without medicines is as smart as relying on willpower to overcome diabetes or asthma. Medicines greatly increase the chance of success and reduce the risk of death.

Here’s what’s out there now.

by Tina Rosenberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Leslye Davis

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Follower: The “Creepiest Social Network” That Follows You In Real Life

It’s been called “the creepiest ‘social network’ ever”: you sign up, and some woman follows you around all day, watching your every move.

How does she know where her surveillance targets are?

Because they’ve willingly signed over access to their iPhones’ location data.

Her targets constantly share their location with her app, which is called, appropriately enough,“Follower.”

Why?, you may ask.

Well, on the “followee” side of it, some people aren’t quite satisfied with the random, sort-of anonymous interaction you get on a site like Twitter, the premise goes.

As outlined in an introductory video, those craving a follower want to share their day with somebody, but they might not want to go through the work of establishing an actual relationship.

From the site’s FAQ:

We imagine it might offer some other form of interaction or relationship you have not had before, perhaps a way to experience new feelings, a different way of being in the world. Maybe it adds a little excitement or magic to your day, maybe it gives you a different perspective on your life.

As far as the “follower” side goes, the why is that it’s an art project being undertaken by Lauren McCarthy, an artist, programmer and “provocateur” who teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts: a hands-on, DIY maker program.

She’s the one who follows.

If you’ve applied to be followed and have been selected – sorry, this is only for iPhone now, only available in New York City, and only for people who don’t completely freak out McCarthy and her team with their “why I want to be followed”/”why you deserve to be followed” essay – you’ll get a link to install Follower.

Then, you can sit back and await the date of your following.

She promises to give you that eerie feeling of somebody watching you, all day, as she lurks, staying “within your consciousness but just beyond your sight – following, observing, appreciating each moment, without interfering.”

by Lisa Vaas, Naked Security |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock.com

Proposals Toward the End of Writing

I. The Solution to Cliché

…whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove—there is an opportunity for the machine.
—Vannevar Bush

Some writers morbidly fixate on computer interference in their working lives: it’s a distraction, an unwanted convenience; it debases the written word, revolutionizes form, or is “making us stupid.” Often it’s framed as anathema to serious writing: Philip Roth worries that books “can’t compete with the screen”; Zadie Smith credits the Internet-blocking app Freedom in the Acknowledgements of NW; Doris Grumbach grumbles that word processors allow people to write too much; Jonathan Franzen squirts superglue into his laptop’s Ethernet port.

For all this handwringing, there’s less discussion about technology’s direct interventions in the writing itself, especially in an editorial capacity. Consider spellcheck, whose influence is obscure but probably quietly tremendous, not just on writing but on writers themselves—a 2012 British survey found that two-thirds of people used spellcheck “all or most of the time,” and one-third misspelled “definitely.” (The organization blamed this on the “auto-correct generation,” though the causal link appears baseless.) And can we ever measure contemporary literature’s debt to cut-and-paste, find-replace, versioned backup, web research, online correspondence, Track Changes?

Of course, these general-purpose functions influence far more than just literature, but we’re also beginning to see text analysis tools with a specific literary focus. These tools promise to show us our true reflections in the form of hard statistical data—insights beyond the reach of mere human editors. These include everything from word counters and sentence-length analyzers to hundreds of more boutique gizmos: Gender Guesser tries to ascertain an author’s gender by comparing it against the word frequency trends in prose written by women and by men, while MetaMind can be programmed to assess a writing sample’s “viewpoint,” from its political leanings to its “positivity.” Services like Turnitin circumvent plagiarism, while others like PhraseExpress insert entire sentences right under your fingertips.

The recent Hemingway app goes even further, offering dogmatic editorial guidance to make your prose “bold and clear”:

Hemingway highlights long, complex sentences and common errors; if you see a yellow sentence, shorten or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red.

It also recommends the indiscriminate excision of adverbs and passive constructions. Tallying up all the infelicities, it assigns the passage a numerical grade, representing “the lowest education level needed to understand your text,” which oddly equates boldness and clarity with legibility to young children (presumably, the best score would be “Illiterate”). Ernest Hemingway’s own prose often fails the test, though, as Ian Crouch observes, Hemingway is usually making a stylistic point wherever he trespasses against his own putative rules. Meanwhile, Nabokov’s “Spring in Fialta” gets the worst possible score of 25 (a second-year post-doc?).

With inventions like these, many of which are intended to improve prose’s suitability to a particular purpose, it seems inevitable that we’ll soon have programs aimed at broader literary purposes. Imagine, for instance, a computer program that detects clichés at the sentence level. Existing attempts are based on small databases of fixed idioms. Suppose our cliché detector is a simple extension of the language-checking features already baked into most word processing software, underlining each trite phrase with a baby-blue squiggle. It analyzes the text for any sequences of words that statistically tend to accompany each other—and the statistical database of clichés, in turn, is based on a Zipfian distribution of word groupings obtained from the quantitative analysis of a large prose corpus. Every phrase ranked above a certain score is flagged as a cliché. No more “in any case” or “at this rate,” no more “battling cancer” or “wry grin” or “boisterous laughter”—though the program might forgive idioms that lack basic synonyms, like “walking the dog.”

The larger the corpus, the better; Google could team up with the NSA to digitize and index every word ever written or recorded, and make this omni-corpus available for indexing, mining, and categorizing. Or by being trained on a personal corpus of writing samples, the detector could be adapted to learn an author’s pet phrases. Zadie Smith pointed out that in all of her novels someone “rummages in their purse”; our program would flag each instance, as well as any variations: “they had rummaged through their purses,” “purses were rummaged,” etc. And it could be tailored to specific genres: “heaving bosoms” in romance, “throughout history” in student papers, “please advise” in business emails. (...)

II. Art in the Age of Mechanical Production

But I have no native language,
I can’t judge, I suspect I write garbage.
—Eugene Ostashevsky, Iterature

One can never assume that tools will only be used for their intended purposes. In the same way that people have appropriated plagiarism detectors to gather research citations, it’s easy to imagine people using the cliché detector as a composition aid. Picture an uninspired-yet-tenacious user—the Lazy Student—slamming out a cliché-infested rough draft, then methodically stepping through it, iterating through elegant variations like a slot machine until he finds one that sounds right, repeating as necessary. All that’s required is a decent ear to produce sentences that will be, statistically speaking, highly original. If this method of editing proved more efficient and at least as good as traditional writing, it would put taste at a premium, and render talent as unnecessary and quaint as good penmanship. Better writing produced by worse writers.

Being particular to sentence-level flaws, the cliché detector we’ve described is just a rudimentary line-editor, a nose-hair trimmer. It doesn’t address the larger problems of clichéd sentiment, faddish style, stylistic vampirism, stereotyped characters, shopworn narrative devices. It has no sense of context, and wouldn’t be able to distinguish clichés from quotations, allusions, parodies, or collage pieces.

But you could suppose that each of these problems is just an engineering hurdle waiting to be jumped. If spellcheckers correct words and cliché detectors fix phrases, what would a coarser-grained cliché detector that addressed whole sentences and scenes look like?

by Tony Tulathimutte, The Believer | Read more:
Image: Bucky Miller

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The Digital Iceberg

Fashion brands are adapting their marketing strategies for a digital reality that goes far deeper than online sales.

On the opening night of the Frieze Art Fair, Chanel’s Mademoiselle Privé, a museum-like exhibition promising “an enchanted journey through the house’s creativity,” touched down, quite fittingly, at the Chelsea gallery owned by British-Iraqi advertising legend Charles Saatchi.

The latest in a string of public marketing spectacles staged by major luxury brands, the exhibition — designed by the same team that creates Chanel’s blockbuster runway shows — attracted a star-studded opening night crowd, including Stella Tennant, Julianne Moore and Lily-Rose Depp, along with a cadre of industry insiders and top Chanel clients. But the brand’s real target was the much wider audience following the action on their social media feeds. “I think what is fantastic with this exhibition is that, from scratch, everything has been thought of digitally,” says Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president for fashion.

A DIGITAL TIPPING POINT

The focus on digital is linked to shifting buying behaviour. In the five-year period from 2009 to 2014, online sales of luxury goods grew four times faster than offline sales. In fact, in 2014, nearly all luxury market growth came from e-commerce, with online sales registering the sharpest spike on record, reaching €14 billion, up 50 percent from 2013, according to a report by McKinsey & Company, a global consulting firm which predicts a “tipping point” in luxury e-commerce. The firm expects the share of luxury sales occurring online to triple in the next 10 years, from roughly 6 percent today to 18 percent in 2025, making e-commerce the world’s third largest luxury market after China and the US.

But e-commerce is just the tip of the digital iceberg. What lurks below the surface of shifting buying behaviour is a change that’s harder to track, but even more colossal. According to recent data presented by Michael J. Wolf, founder and chief executive of technology and strategy consulting firm Activate, the average American spends more time on digital media and technology than work or sleep. And, already, nearly three quarters of all luxury goods purchases, even if they take place in physical stores, are influenced by what consumers do online, according to McKinsey. “My assumption in the long term would be 99 percent,” says Nathalie Remy, who leads the firm’s fashion and luxury goods practice for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “Ninety-nine percent of purchases will be influenced by digital in one way or other.”

A NEW MARKETING MODEL

In response, fashion brands have been rethinking where they advertise, shifting media buys from offline to online. “The spend in digital nowadays, even for the conservative brands, is over 15 or 20 percent. And for some brands that embrace digital in a higher way, it is more than 50 percent,” says Mario Ortelli, a senior luxury goods analyst at Sanford C. Berstein. But simply buying more digital ad space is what Remy calls “the easy part.” Changing not just where but how brands communicate and connect with consumers is more challenging.

The Internet has rewired media, upending the traditional relationship between companies and consumers, and forcing brands to rewrite their marketing strategies. In the pre-Internet era, when media was a monologue to a passive, captive audience paging through a print magazine, for instance, the dominant marketing model was built on interruption, paid reach and repetition. Fashion brands mostly built their marketing strategies around seasonal print campaigns. “Before, you made one campaign per season. You had the same campaign that you put in Vogue or the Financial Times for three months,” says Ortelli.

But media today is fundamentally different. Rather than a monologue, it’s a ‘multilogue’ unfolding in real time across a network of media-technology platforms where consumers are voluntary, active participants, meaning brands can no longer monopolise the conversation and, instead, must forge symbiotic, reciprocal relationships with others. “Online, you don’t completely own your way of communicating, because people can copy and paste, they can comment and share and so really it becomes an ecosystem,” continues Ortelli.

The ascendance of digital has also contributed to a rise in the number of touchpoints between consumers and brands, who now come into continuous contact with each other across a much wider range of platforms, from Instagram to e-commerce sites, resulting in more complex, non-linear paths to purchase. But according to McKinsey, which conducted a recent study on “the luxury consumer decision journey” across 21 touchpoints, ranging from Internet search to social media to store visits, luxury shoppers overwhelmingly tend to purchase from brands with which they are already familiar. Indeed, unlike in other sectors, like consumer electronics, for example, where active product evaluation plays a much bigger role in shaping customer preference, more than three quarters of luxury goods purchases come from the handful of brands that were already being considered by shoppers at the very beginning of their purchase journeys.

“The implication here is that luxury brands need to continue building their pre-eminence over time in order to be at the top of a consumer’s mind whenever a purchase occasion occurs,” reports McKinsey. “This process is more of a marathon than a sprint, requiring long-term building of brand awareness, reputation and category relevancy in a powerful and consistent manner.”

In this new reality, where media is networked and constant brand-building is more critical than ever, marketing success is less about simply reallocating ad spend and more about earning attention and distribution by nurturing the platforms where consumers spend time with emotional content experiences they will voluntarily seek out and share. “In terms of mindset, it's a major shift from simply buying the best advertising space to creating content,” says McKinsey’s Remy.

by Vikram Alexei Kansara,  Business of Fashion |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

How Marshawn Lynch Changed Seattle Sports Forever

On the noisiest sports day of the year, Marshawn Lynch stole the national spotlight without saying a word. With just a photo of a hanging pair of cleats along with a peace sign emoji, he was gone. Retired from a game that thrust him into a spotlight he was never ready for, that demanded things he was never willing to give.

On the field, Lynch was as compelling a player as you’ll see. Violent, explosive, tenacious, dynamic, unyielding and utterly self-sacrificing. On the sidelines, Lynch was as captivating a sideshow as you’ll ever see. Tummy aches, halftime siestas, an insatiable sweet tooth, and an all-around weirdo.

And then there was off the field.

From the start, Lynch did it his way. In an era where few could escape the spotlight, and even fewer wanted to, Lynch did what no other sports star has managed to do in the last decade: remain a total mystery. No interviews, no desperate calls for attention, no subtweets. And we loved him for it. The more he shied away from the spotlight, the more mythical he became.

It would be one thing if Lynch was just a self-obsessed hermit, but he wasn’t. Part of his genius was how he steadfastly refused to be anything other than himself, and still parlayed his obstinate aloofness into cult hero status and all the attendant branding dollars. In an era where the “look at me! look at me! look at me!” tactics for brand-building are as tired as they are shameless, Lynch built an empire around his anti-hero antics (“I’m just here so I won’t get fined”) and his one-of-a-kind parlance (“I’m just ‘bout that action, boss”).

Whenever Lynch let us catch a glimpse of him, be it on the field or his glorious video game sessions with Conan O’Brien, it was appointment viewing.

Years from now, when the book is written on this golden generation of Seattle Seahawks football, there will be plenty of credit to share: Pete Carroll for changing the culture, John Schneider for constructing a winning roster, Russell Wilson for raising the bar offensively, Kam Chancellor for raising it defensively, Earl Thomas and Richard Sherman for affording the team unique schematic flexibility, and so on. But ultimately, the engine that made this entire team go — the best player on the best Seattle team we’ll see in our lifetimes — was Lynch, the one who started the turnaround, and rekindled Seattle’s love affair with the Seahawks.

by Ross Richendrfer, Sports Illustrated | Read more:
Image: Marshawn Lynch

'Narconomics': How The Drug Cartels Operate Like Wal-Mart And McDonald's

When Tom Wainwright became the Mexico correspondent for The Economist in 2010, he found himself covering the country's biggest businesses, including the tequila trade, the oil industry and the commerce of illegal drugs.

"I found that one week I'd be writing about the car business and the next week I'd be writing about the drugs business," Wainwright tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I gradually came to see that the two actually were perhaps more similar than people normally recognize."

During the three years he spent in Mexico and Central and South America, Wainwright discovered that the cartels that control the region's drug trade use business models that are surprisingly similar to those of big-box stores and franchises. For instance, they have exclusive relationships with their "suppliers" (the farmers who grow the coca plants) that allow the cartels to keep the price of cocaine stable even when crop production is disrupted.

"The theory is that the cartels in the area have what economists call a 'monopsony,' [which is] like a monopoly on buying in the area," Wainwright says. "This rang a bell with me because it's something that people very often say about Wal-Mart."

Wainwright describes his new book, Narconomics, as a business manual for drug lords — and also a blueprint for how to defeat them. When it comes to battling the cartels, Wainwright says governments might do better to focus on controlled legalization rather than the complete eradication of the product.

"The choice that I think we face isn't really a choice between a world without drugs and a world with drugs," he says. "I think the choice we face really is between a world where drugs are controlled by governments and prescribed by pharmacists and doctors, and a world where they're dealt by the mafia, and given that choice, I think the former sounds more appealing."

by Terry Gross, NPR |  Read more:

Image: AFP/AFP/Getty Images

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The Pirate Bay of Science

Researcher illegally shares millions of science papers free online to spread knowledge

[ed. See also: Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No.]

A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles - almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published - freely available online. And she's now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world's biggest publishers.

For those of you who aren't already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it's sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn't afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it's since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court - a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.

"Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them,"Elbakyan told Torrent Freak last year. "Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal."

If it sounds like a modern day Robin Hood struggle, that's because it kinda is. But in this story, it's not just the poor who don't have access to scientific papers - journal subscriptions have become so expensive that leading universities such as Harvard and Cornell have admitted they can no longer afford them. Researchers have also taken a stand - with 15,000 scientists vowing to boycott publisher Elsevier in part for its excessive paywall fees.

Don't get us wrong, journal publishers have also done a whole lot of good - they've encouraged better research thanks to peer review, and before the Internet, they were crucial to the dissemination of knowledge.

But in recent years, more and more people are beginning to question whether they're still helping the progress of science. In fact, in some cases, the 'publish or perish' mentality is creating more problems than solutions, with a growing number of predatory publishers now charging researchers to have their work published - often without any proper peer review process or even editing.

by Fiona Macdonald, Science Alert |  Read more:

Image: Sergei25/Shutterstock.com

What Romance Really Means After 10 Years of Marriage

[ed. See also: Love and Death]

I'm an advice columnist, so sometimes people ask me about how they can "keep the romance alive" in their marriages. This stumps me a little because, by "romance," I know they mean the traditional version, the one that depends on living inside a giant, suspenseful question mark. This version of romance is all about that thrilling moment when you think that someone may have just materialized who will make every single thing in the world feel delicious and amazing and right forever and ever. It springs forth from big questions, like "Can I really have what I've been looking for? Will I really feel loved and desired and truly adored at last? Can I finally be seen as the answer to someone else's dream, the heroine with the glimmering eyes and sultry smile?" And this version of romance peaks at the exact moment when you think, Holy Christ, I really am going to melt right into this other person (who is a relative stranger)! It really IS physically intoxicating and perfect! And it seems like we feel the exact same way about each other! Traditional romance is heady and exciting precisely because — and not in spite of the fact that — there are still lingering questions at the edges of the frame: "Will I be enough for this person? Will she stop wanting me someday? Is he as amazing as he seems/feels/tastes?"

But once you’ve been married for a long time (my tenth anniversary is in a few months!), a whole new kind of romance takes over. It’s not the romance of rom-coms, which are predicated on the question of “Will he/she really love me (which seems impossible), or does he/she actually hate me (which seems far more likely and even a little more sporting)?" Long-married romance is not the romance of watching someone’s every move like a stalker, and wanting to lick his face but trying to restrain yourself. It’s not even the romance of “Whoa, you bought me flowers, you must REALLY love me!” or “Wow, look at us here, as the sun sets, your lips on mine, we REALLY ARE DOING THIS LOVE THING, RIGHT HERE.” That’s dating romance, newlywed romance. You’re still pinching yourself. You’re still fixated on whether it’s really happening. You’re still kind of sort of looking for proof. The little bits of proof bring the romance. The question of whether you’ll get the proof you require brings the romance. (The looking for proof also brings lots of fights, but that’s a subject for another day.)

After a decade of marriage, if things go well, you don’t need any more proof. What you have instead — and what I would argue is the most deeply romantic thing of all — is this palpable, reassuring sense that it’s okay to be a human being. Because until you feel absolutely sure that you won’t eventually be abandoned, it’s maybe not 100 percent clear that any other human mortal can tolerate another human mortal. The smells. The sounds. The repetitive fixations on the same dumb shit, over and over. Even as you develop a kind of a resigned glaze of oh, this again in, say, marital years one through five, you also feel faintly unnerved by your own terrible mortal humanness.

Or you should feel that way. (...)

And now I’m going to tell you my most romantic story of all. I was very sick out of the blue with some form of dysentery. It hit overnight. I got up to go to the bathroom, and I fainted on the way and cracked my ribs on the side of the bathtub. My husband discovered me there, passed out, in a scene that … well, imagine what would happen if you let Todd Solondz direct an episode of Game of Thrones. Think about what that might look like. I’m going to take your delicate sensibilities into account and resist the urge to paint a clearer picture for you.

My husband was not happy about this scene. But he handled it without complaint. That is the very definition of romantic: not only not being made to feel crappy about things that are clearly out of your control, but being quietly cared for by someone who can shut up and do what needs to be done under duress. That is the definition of sexy, too. People think they want a cowboy, because cowboys are rugged and macho and they don't whine. But almost anyone can ride a stallion across a beautiful prairie and then come home and eat a giant home-cooked steak without whining about it. Entering into a Todd Solondz–directed Game of Thrones dysentery scene, though, will try the most stalwart and unflinching souls among us.

Now let’s tackle something even darker and more unpleasant, the seeming antithesis of our modern notion of romance: Someone is dying in their own bed, and someone’s spouse is sitting at the bedside, holding the dying person’s hand, and also handling all kinds of unspeakable things that people who aren’t drowning in gigantic piles of cash sometimes have to handle all by themselves. To me, that’s romance. Romance is surviving and then not surviving anymore, without being ashamed of any of it.

Because survival is ugly. Survival means sometimes smelling and sounding the wrong way. It’s one thing for a person to buy you flowers, to purchase a nice dinner, to PROVE that they truly, deeply want to have some good sweet-talky time and some touching time alone with you, and maybe they’d like to do that whole routine forever and ever and ever. That’s a heady thing. Really? Me? Forever? YOUR HEART SINGS. And you imagine eating out at nice restaurants, and screwing, and eating out and screwing and eating out and screwing. It's like that Bongwater song about Pretty Woman, where romance boils down to "sucking and shopping and sucking and shopping and sucking and shopping!" Romance, in this view, is like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, except he's repeating the same sexily suspenseful moment over and over again.

True romance, though, is more like the movie True Romance: Two deluded, lazy people face a bewildering sea of filth and blood and gore together, but they make it through somehow, some way, without losing their minds completely.

by Heather Havrilesky, The Cut |  Read more:

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A Country Breaking Down

[ed. See also: What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?]

It would be helpful if there were another word for “infrastructure”: it’s such an earnest and passive word for the blood vessels of this country, the crucial conveyors and connections that get us from here to there (or not) and the ports that facilitate our trade (or don’t), as well as the carriers of information, in particular broadband (if one is connected to it), and other unreliable structures. The word “crisis” is also overused, applied to the unimportant as well as the crucial. But this country has an infrastructure crisis.

The near-total failure of our political institutions to invest for the future, eschewing what doesn’t yield the quick payoff, political and physical, has left us with hopelessly clogged traffic, at risk of being on a bridge that collapses, or on a train that flies off defective rails, or with rusted pipes carrying our drinking water. Broadband is our new interstate highway system, but not everyone has access to it—a division largely based on class. Depending on the measurement used, the United States ranks from fourteenth to thirtieth among all nations in its investments in infrastructure. The wealthiest nation on earth is nowhere near the top.

Congress’s approval last December of a five-year bill to spend $305 billion to improve the nation’s highway system occasioned much self-congratulation that the lawmakers actually got something done. But with an increase in the gasoline tax politically off-limits, the means for paying for it are dubious and uncertain. This was the longest-term highway bill passed since 1998 and the thirty-fifth extension of an authorization of highway construction since 2005. Some of the extensions of the highway program approved by Congress lasted for only three months. The previous extension was for just over three weeks. Such practices don’t allow for much planning of the construction or repair of highways and bridges and mass transit systems.

Our political myopia has put us in actual physical danger as we go about the mundane business of getting about. We let essential structures and facilities deteriorate or go unbuilt. A politician is more likely get in trouble with constituents for spending federal money than for not spending federal money. Moreover, as a rule Washington politicians, whether in office for two or four or six years, aren’t keen on spending for something that doesn’t have a near-term payoff—perhaps a structure that they can dedicate and even get their names inscribed on.

The water pipes underneath the White House are said to still be made of wood, as are some others in the nation’s capital and some cities across the country. We admire Japan’s and France’s “bullet trains” that get people to their destination with remarkable efficiency, but many other nations have them as well, including Russia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. A friend of mine recently rode on the Turkish bullet train and noted that the coffee in his full cup didn’t spill. Last year, Japan demonstrated its new maglev train, which, using electromagnets, levitates above the tracks, and can go about an amazing 375 miles per hour, making it the fastest train in the world. The fastest commercially used maglev, in Shanghai, goes up to 288 miles per hour. But the United States hasn’t a single system that meets all the criteria of high-speed rail. President Obama has proposed a system of high-speed railroads, which has gone nowhere in Congress.

by Elizabeth Drew, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Allen Brisson-Smith/The New York Times/Redux

Sociability, Golf Courses, and the Performance of Institutional Investors

Abstract 

We hypothesize that prestigious golf courses attract golfers and visitors from across the country, providing greater opportunities for nearby investors to build social connections. Our evidence suggests that institutional investors located near prestigious golf courses earn significantly better benchmark- and risk-adjusted returns. This reflects the benefits of sociability as our findings are stronger for golf courses with reciprocal guest policies that allow wider participation and increase when major golf championships rotate to the state. Their portfolios reveal hallmarks of active trading – higher concentration, greater selectivity, more frequent turnover – and include more distant stocks. To establish a causal link, we exploit the fact that golf is a weather-dependent outdoor activity. We find that their outperformance occurs during times of low precipitation around golf courses, evaporating when bad weather keeps golfers off the greens.

by Chishen Wei and Lei Zhang, Nanyang Technological University |  Read more: (pdf)

Image: markk

The Internet of Way Too Many Things

At a design conference recently, I was introduced to Leeo, a new product that I initially understood to be a reboot of something really in need of a redesign: the smoke detector. As the designer explained his process, I quickly came to understand that Leeo was nothing of the sort. It was a gadget, a night light that “listens” for your smoke detector to go off and then calls your smartphone to let you know your house might be on fire.

So, to “improve” a $20 smoke alarm, the designer opted to add a $99 night light and a several-hundred-dollar smartphone.

This is not good design.

Alas, Leeo is no isolated case, but rather representative of a whole spectrum of products designed for the so-called Smart Home, products integral to the much-lauded, much-misunderstood Internet of Things. (You know, that thing where a bunch of other things will be connected to the Internet.)

Like you, I once had many products that each fulfilled a separate function: a landline, a cellphone, a camera, a video recorder, a stereo, a calendar. Now, I have one product that does all of those things — a smartphone. This level of product integration was a revolution in product design. We can debate the extent to which technology does or doesn’t improve our lives, but it is fair to say that in terms of usability, convenience and sustainability, one product doing the work of five or six is a win.

Not, however, if you’re in the business of selling stereos or cameras. Or monetizing the data obtained from their use.

A veritable museum of Leeo-ish products is currently on display in San Francisco at Target’s Open House, a new store designed to attract folks before they head to the multiplex upstairs — but more specifically, to give Target a piece of the plethora of disruptive innovation happening in the Bay Area by helping start-ups bring their products to market.

What the products on display have in common is that they don’t solve problems people actually have. Technology is integrated not because it is necessary, but because the technology exists to integrate it — and because it will enable companies to sell you stuff you never knew you were missing.

by Allison Arieff, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Leeo

Harry Nilsson

[ed. Happy Valentine's Day.]