Early Risers

In Alaska, people eat breakfast. Pretty much every day. They eat cornflakes and smoothies and the odd sausage-and-egg McGriddle. I can verify this because I have woken up in Alaska more mornings than I’ve woken up anywhere else, and I have eaten all of those things for breakfast.

Charming restaurants all over the state have made the most of Alaska’s bounty. A Ship Creek Benedict from Snow City Café in Anchorage is two fresh salmon cakes (maybe pulled out of the actual Ship Creek, which is a mile down the road) served over English muffins with hollandaise sauce and poached eggs. At the Bake Shop in Girdwood, you can get pancakes made from a sourdough starter they’ve had going since 1963 (which they acquired from a gold miner). Most respectable places give you the option of adding a crab leg to go with your omelet, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen a place that didn’t have at least a passing notion of what to do with reindeer sausage.

But those are not my Alaskan breakfast. My Alaskan breakfast was made by only one man, eaten on one river (called the Alexander Creek, but don’t let the name fool you—in Alaska, even our creeks are rivers), and served only on Memorial Day weekend, the first morning after king-salmon fishing was opened to the public.

Here is how you make breakfast in Alaska. Start with a skillet, cast-iron and as big as you can find, seasoned for no less than a generation—more if you’re serious. The skillet that cooked the best of my Alaskan breakfasts was the size of a winter tire, passed from my grandfather to my uncle Kent. I don’t remember how long it had been in our family, but I do remember that, greased up for the fire, you could see your face in it.

Next, catch a fish—salmon, ideally. Kent was a marine biologist and a passionate, tireless fisherman. Employed by Fish & Game to make sure greedy hands didn’t overfish the rivers, he could never quite figure out how to spend his time off. So while the rest of the family slept off the trip into camp, Kent woke up early and spent his morning in a flat-bottomed boat with a pole in the water and an eye out for trouble. I spent twelve summers on that river with my uncle before he died, and I, too, was an early riser. These excursions, unknown to many of the other kids, made me feel naughty and chosen and lucky. I watched him take dozens of fish out of the water before anybody else was awake. He loved fishing as much as any human ever has, and nothing riled him more than a guy who took more than his share.

Once caught, the fish gets cleaned and the roe stored for the next expedition. Fillets are brought up to the fire. At that point the skillet is over the fire; it’s been there long enough to mean business. Onions first, then Yukon potatoes. (Mentioning that Kent chopped these things with a machete seems like a cheap shot for effect, but here’s the thing: Kent chopped these things with a machete.) Once the potatoes have taken on enough color to be called hash browns, they get pushed to the side, and a dozen eggs—maybe a dozen and a half, if my brother is around—get cracked into the open space, scrambled, and garnished with rogue ash from the fire. Lastly come the fillets, the third stripe in the Neapolitan, just long enough for a sear on each side.

by Genevieve Roth, Lucky Peach |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Real Reason For The War On Cash

[ed. See also: Why The Keynesian Market Wreckers Are Now Coming For Even Your Ben Franklins]

Originally posted Op-Ed via The Wall Street Journal:

These are strange monetary times, with negative interest rates and central bankers deemed to be masters of the universe. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that politicians and central bankers are now waging a war on cash. That’s right, policy makers in Europe and the U.S. want to make it harder for the hoi polloi to hold actual currency.

Mario Draghi fired the latest salvo on Monday when he said the European Central Bank would like to ban €500 notes. A day later Harvard economist and Democratic Party favorite Larry Summers declared that it’s time to kill the $100 bill, which would mean goodbye to Ben Franklin. Alexander Hamilton may soon—and shamefully—be replaced on the $10 bill, but at least the 10-spots would exist for a while longer. Ol’ Ben would be banished from the currency the way dead white males like him are banned from the history books.

Limits on cash transactions have been spreading in Europe since the 2008 financial panic, ostensibly to crack down on crime and tax avoidance. Italy has made it illegal to pay cash for anything worth more than €1,000 ($1,116), while France cut its limit to €1,000 from €3,000 last year. British merchants accepting more than €15,000 in cash per transaction must first register with the tax authorities. Fines for violators can run into the thousands of euros. Germany’s Deputy Finance Minister Michael Meister recently proposed a €5,000 cap on cash transactions. Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan predicted last month that cash won’t survive another decade.

The enemies of cash claim that only crooks and cranks need large-denomination bills. They want large transactions to be made electronically so government can follow them. Yet these are some of the same European politicians who blew a gasket when they learned that U.S. counterterrorist officials were monitoring money through the Swift global system. Criminals will find a way, large bills or not.

The real reason the war on cash is gearing up now is political: Politicians and central bankers fear that holders of currency could undermine their brave new monetary world of negative interest rates. Japan and Europe are already deep into negative territory, and U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said last week the U.S. should be prepared for the possibility. Translation: That’s where the Fed is going in the next recession.

Negative rates are a tax on deposits with banks, with the goal of prodding depositors to remove their cash and spend it to increase economic demand. But that goal will be undermined if citizens hoard cash. And hoarding cash is easier if you can take your deposits out in large-denomination bills you can stick in a safe. It’s harder to keep cash if you can only hold small bills.

So, presto, ban cash. This theme has been pushed by the likes of Bank of England chief economist Andrew Haldane and Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff, who wrote in the Financial Times that eliminating paper currency would be “by far the simplest” way to “get around” the zero interest-rate bound “that has handcuffed central banks since the financial crisis.” If the benighted peasants won’t spend on their own, well, make it that much harder for them to save money even in their own mattresses.

All of which ignores the virtues of cash for law-abiding citizens. Cash allows legitimate transactions to be executed quickly, without either party paying fees to a bank or credit-card processor. Cash also lets millions of low-income people participate in the economy without maintaining a bank account, the costs of which are mounting as post-2008 regulations drop the ax on fee-free retail banking. While there’s always a risk of being mugged on the way to the store, digital transactions are subject to hacking and computer theft.

Cash is also the currency of gray markets—amounting to 20% or more of gross domestic product in some European countries—that governments would love to tax. But the reason gray markets exist is because high taxes and regulatory costs drive otherwise honest businesses off the books. Politicians may want to think twice about cracking down on the cash economy in a way that might destroy businesses and add millions to the jobless rolls. The Italian economy might shut down without cash.

via: Zero Hedge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Failing and Flying

Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

by Jack Gilbert
from Refusing Heaven
Alfred A. Knopf, 2005

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Bjork by Nick Knight for Dior
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Start Preparing for the Collapse of the Saudi Kingdom

For half a century, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been the linchpin of U.S. Mideast policy. A guaranteed supply of oil has bought a guaranteed supply of security. Ignoring autocratic practices and the export of Wahhabi extremism, Washington stubbornly dubs its ally “moderate.” So tight is the trust that U.S.special operators dip into Saudi petrodollars as a counterterrorism slush fund without a second thought. In a sea of chaos, goes the refrain, the kingdom is one state that’s stable.

But is it?

In fact, Saudi Arabia is no state at all. There are two ways to describe it: as a political enterprise with a clever but ultimately unsustainable business model, or so corrupt as to resemble in its functioning a vertically and horizontally integrated criminal organization. Either way, it can’t last. It’s past time U.S. decision-makers began planning for the collapse of the Saudi kingdom.

In recent conversations with military and other government personnel, we were startled at how startled they seemed at this prospect. Here’s the analysis they should be working through.

Understood one way, the Saudi king is CEO of a family business that converts oil into payoffs that buy political loyalty. They take two forms: cash handouts or commercial concessions for the increasingly numerous scions of the royal clan, and a modicum of public goods and employment opportunities for commoners. The coercive “stick” is supplied by brutal internal security services lavishly equipped with American equipment.

The U.S. has long counted on the ruling family having bottomless coffers of cash with which to rent loyalty. Even accounting today’s low oil prices, and as Saudi officials step up arms purchases and military adventures in Yemen and elsewhere, Riyadh is hardly running out of funds.

Still, expanded oil production in the face of such low prices—until the Feb. 16 announcement of a Saudi-Russian freeze at very high January levels—may reflect an urgent need for revenue as well as other strategic imperatives. Talk of a Saudi Aramco IPO similarly suggests a need for hard currency.

A political market, moreover, functions according to demand as well as supply. What if the price of loyalty rises?

It appears that is just what’s happening. King Salman had to spend lavishly to secure the allegiance of the notables who were pledged to the late King Abdullah. Here’s what played out in two other countries when this kind of inflation hit. In South Sudan, an insatiable elite not only diverted the newly minted country’s oil money to private pockets but also kept up their outsized demands when the money ran out, sparking a descent into chaos. The Somali government enjoys generous donor support, but is priced out of a very competitive political market by a host of other buyers—with ideological, security or criminal agendas of their own.

Such comparisons may be offensive to Saudi leaders, but they are telling. If the loyalty price index keeps rising, the monarchy could face political insolvency.

Looked at another way, the Saudi ruling elite is operating something like a sophisticated criminal enterprise, when populations everywhere are making insistent demands for government accountability. With its political and business elites interwoven in a monopolistic network, quantities of unaccountable cash leaving the country for private investments and lavish purchases abroad, and state functions bent to serve these objectives, Saudi Arabia might be compared to such kleptocracies as Viktor Yanukovich’s Ukraine.

by Sarah Chayes and Alex de Waal, Defense One | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia

Ms. Electronica

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Shawn Brackbill, Adam Lippes AW16
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The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens

[ed. I love Tumblr. It's a universe unto itself and the closest thing left to what the 'old internet' used to feel like.]

When Pizza reached 100,000 followers on Tumblr, she posted a picture of a pizza box, takeout chicken wings, and an orange soda spread out on her bed: “pizza and chicken wings 2 celebrate.” One fan replied, “CONGRATULATIONS GIRL! YOU DESERVE IT!” Another: “MOTHER OF GOD 100K?!?!” An anonymous user was unimpressed: “you only have 100k because of ur url.” But Pizza shot that down: “uh no i had 93k before i got this url so excuse u.”

It had taken Pizza more than two years to reach this milestone. In late 2010 she had signed up for Tumblr, the then-three-year-old social network, and secured the URL IWantMyFairyTaleEnding.tumblr.com. At first, she mostly posted photos of party outfits—hipster photos, she thought. They were the kind of images you might find under the “summery” Tumblr tag: poolside drinks, sunsets, sundresses, palm trees, tiny succulents; a shopping list of the things she wanted to buy, if only she had the money. Pizza also wrote some funny one-liners, but otherwise she reblogged jokes, switching back and forth between fashion and comedy. She tried out new names, new personas, changing her URL a few times; after a couple of years, she went all-joke. By the end of 2012, she had amassed 90,000 followers, a respectable number for a Tumblr, a sign she’d earned a certain amount of fame in her circle—the teens who reblogged her jokes. She then changed her domain to pizza.tumblr.com, her followers started to call her Pizza, and her numbers began to climb. That same year, she turned 15.

Pizza’s strategy was brilliant: When a random Tumblr would write about “pizza”—either the food or herself—she’d reblog the post to her huge audience. Once, when a user wrote “so is tumblr user pizza god or beyonce,” she dug up the post and reblogged it with the comment “I’d like to confirm that i am both.” Users marveled at how quickly she responded, how you could “summon Pizza.” It made her seem all-knowing, but not superior. After Ellen DeGeneres ordered 20 large pies at the 2014 Academy Awards, Pizza dashed off the line “did u guys see me at the Oscars.” The post received almost 500,000 notes and was reblogged by John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars, with the comment “You looked great, pizza. Congrats on everything. I love you.”

One of Pizza’s most successful posts was “josh hutcherson’s parents are probably called josh hutcherdad and josh hutchermom.” It received over 419,000 notes. The joke was copied like crazy by humor accounts on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. @RelatableQuotes’s version gathered 2,958 retweets and 4,425 favorites. @SoDamnTrue tweeted it for 1,630 retweets and 2,879 favorites. In June 2014, Pizza had more than 1 million followers and was the biggest star of the Tumblr teen comedy world. Two months later, her blog was gone.

Type in pizza.tumblr.com today and you’ll get a simple, haunting message: “There’s nothing here.” The 1 million left behind began to buzz: Where was Pizza? Why did Pizza go? Who killed Pizza? Tumblr users began to piece together the mystery of her disappearance. They wrote mournful posts: “i miss tumblr user pizza *insert titanic ‘come back’ gif*.” A fake conspiracy blog joked she quit after leaving the illuminati because of a fight with Beyoncé over “how to wittily answer anonymous hate mail.” A rumor spread her blog was terminated for being racist. A Reddit user called her blog’s death “one of the biggest scandals to have ever happened on Tumblr.” Last fall, OfficialUnitedStates, another humor blog with a large following, wrote, “i miss pizza.tumblr.com … sometimes late at night i wonder what tumblr would be like if she hadnt disappeared into the night one year ago today.”

-----

Each social media network creates a particular kind of teenage star: Those blessed with early-onset hotness are drawn to YouTube, the fashionable and seemingly wealthy post to Instagram, the most charismatic actors, dancers, and comedians thrive on Vine. On Facebook, every link you share and photo you post is a statement of your identity. Tumblr is the social network that, based on my reporting, is seen by teens as the most uncool. A telling post from 2014: “I picked joining Tumblr and staying active on here because: 1. I’m not attractive enough to be a Youtuber 2. Not popular enough for twitter 3. Facebook is dumb.” You don’t tell people your Tumblr URL, you aren’t logging the banalities of your day—you aren’t even you. On Tumblr, you can revel in anonymity, say whatever you want without fear of it going on your permanent record. You can start as many Tumblrs as you like, one for each slice of your personality, whether that’s gymnastics fandom (how I got into Tumblr) or Barack Obama-Harry Styles slashfic (it exists) or akoisexual identity (when your feelings of sexual attraction fade once they’re reciprocated). A Tumblr staffer pointed me to a blog called Dolph Lundgren & His Action Nips, which is just shirtless photos of the actor with his nipples turned into blinking GIFs.

When Tumblr launched in 2007, the simple layout—text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, video—was its primary appeal: less bloggy than Blogger, less puzzling than WordPress. Tumblr’s templates were more customizable than Facebook, making it a good place to put your portfolio, perhaps some journal entries. But the defining feature of Tumblr culture is reblogging: Any user can repost content from any other Tumblr and add their own comments. All of these likes, reblogs, and comments pile up in a log of “notes” appended to the original post as it travels through the network’s feed. Celebrating someone else’s brilliance is part of the content you offer, giving exposure to both the creator and the reblogger.

To grow a following on Tumblr beyond people you know, you have to post more than updates on your personal life—you need stuff that will resonate with strangers. Viral fame on Tumblr in the early 2010s was an uncertain path to fortune. The most common was the Tumblr-to-book phenomenon: The creator of Hipster Puppies closed a five-figure book deal in 2010. While other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn generated billions upon billions of dollars, Tumblr gradually evolved into a fast-moving conversation focused on jokes, art, and sex. The culture of Tumblr began to be dominated by teens—weird teens.

In a joke that explains the dynamic, a user posted a screenshot showing he had 264 followers, writing:

a darkened auditorium with 264 silent people in the seats. on the stage, me, sitting on a stool, lit by a spotlight, the only light in the theatre. i hold up a photo of my cat, 10 people applaud, two or three hold up photocopies of the same photo, the rest do nothing, watching, waiting.

When I began reporting on the world of Tumblr teens, I first wanted to explain the absurdist comedy of Pizza and dozens of other Tumblrs like hers. But I soon discovered a secret world hidden in plain sight, one in which teenagers, through wit and luck, had stumbled into a new kind of viral fame and fortune, by outsmarting internet ad networks and finding ways to earn thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars from their intentionally unambitious jokes.

by Elspeth Reeve, New Repubic |  Read more:

Image: Jun Cen

The Ballad of Mike Love

A Beach Boy asks, "Why am I the villain?"

Mike Love bounds up the stairs inside his massive Lake Tahoe home (10 bedrooms in all, 12 bathrooms, two elevators, not to be believed) and into a large walk-in closet stuffed to overflowing with garish, multicolored shirts and a gazillion baseball caps, many of them emblazoned with the name of his band, the Beach Boys. A suitcase rests on the floor. Love nods at it, prods it with his foot. "A lot more shirts are in there," he says, "because, if you must know, I haven't unpacked."

And why should he unpack? For the past 54 years, he and various versions of the Beach Boys, which these days include only him as an original member, have toured almost constantly. On his current outing, he has 172 dates lined up, cramming 19 European shows into 22 days this past December, for instance, and shortly thereafter flying back stateside to give the 6,500 citizens of tiny Avon, Colorado, the chance to hear all about California girls. From there, it's onward, evermore, venues big and small, makes no difference to him. The man is 74. You'd think he'd want to mothball the Beach Boys caps and Hawaiian shirts he always wears onstage, maybe do something else with the years that remain. Not a chance.

"My cousin Brian loved the studio, but I like performing," he says. "I mean, I've probably sung 'Fun, Fun, Fun' live close to 6,000 times, and there are county fairs where we've broken the attendance records, playing to the biggest crowds they've ever had, 50- to 70-year-olds mostly, their children and their grandchildren. I love making music, and there's never been a time in my life when there wasn't music."

And the fans sure do get their money's worth, with more than 40 songs crammed into a typical two-hour show by the time "Fun, Fun, Fun" finally fades out, the soaring nasal twang of Love's bass-to-baritone range, so essential to the band's five-part-harmony stack, memorable and distinctive, leaving all the Dockers-wearing duffers buzzing happily, if not a little bittersweetly.

The Beach Boys: cars, girls and surfboards. Home movies on a backdrop. All the original members in a swimming pool, falling into and out of a life raft, laughing, fully dressed. Dennis Wilson, gone since 1983, drowned while drunk. Carl Wilson, cancer got him in 1998. Al Jardine, the band's Ringo, still kicking but quietly. Brian Wilson, 73 now, the group's musical genius, visionary, guiding light and the bearer of all those wonderful harmonies, a little wobbly in the mind since 1968, due to drug and alcohol problems and mental illness. Love, still going strong, looking fit and trim, just as he did back in the day, as always the entertaining cornball, joke-telling frontman, the souped-up, flamboyant counterpoint to his introverted cousin Brian, both entirely necessary to the band's enduring success.

At the same time, however, Love is considered one of the biggest assholes in the history of rock & roll. That's been the popular opinion of him for several decades. He just can't seem to shake it. There are "I Hate Mike Love" websites and a "Mike Love Is a Douchebag" group on Facebook. He's been called a clown, the Devil, an evil, egotistical prick, a greedy bully, sarcastic and mean-spirited, and, let's not forget, "if he were a fish, he'd be a plastic bag wrapped around the neck of a beautiful sea lion." Love is mostly able to laugh off this hateful venom, but on occasion he will break down, turn to his wife of 21 years, Jackie, and ask her, "What did I do? Why am I the villain? How did it get to this?"

According to his detractors, it all started in 1966, in a recording studio, with Love expressing his dislike for Brian's work on what became Pet Sounds, one of the greatest albums of all time. "Who's gonna hear this shit? The ears of a dog?" he is said to have said, though he strongly denies it. A year later, he supposedly so criticized the Smile project that Brian, that beautiful sea lion of a man, shelved it for 37 years. He has sued or threatened to sue Brian numerous times. Plus, in the 1970s, he used to wear gold-lamé bell-bottoms that were so tight that his (somewhat enviable) package seemed to have equal billing with everyone else. He made the insipid 1988 song "Kokomo," which Brian doesn't appear on and that has become the biggest-selling Beach Boys tune of all time, Love so proud of lyrics like "Aruba, Jamaica, ooh, I wanna take ya." He coughed up $5,000 in seed money so Tipper Gore could start her campaign to censor music. And then there's the baseball cap he wears everyplace he goes, onstage or not. It's universally despised. Even wife Jackie isn't a fan. ("When we go out on dates, I always ask, 'Can you leave the hat at home?'") Everybody knows he's bald. He should embrace it.

He's wearing one today. He steps out of the closet and plucks it off his head. He bends forward. "Yeah, well," he says. "You really don't want to blind oncoming traffic, OK?" And back on it goes.

So, he's got his reasons for the cap, as well as for most everything else, a good bit of which, he says, is just plain flat-out wrong. "The fable is that I'm such an asshole, but a lot of that stuff is skewed by the crazies," he says. "I never said half the shit that's attributed to me. I mean, I must be pretty prolific in asshole-type things to say, like, I get up in the morning thinking, 'I've got a job to do. How can I be a total jerk today?'" Later, he says, "I've become cannon fodder." He pauses and grins. He could pull back, or continue a serious discussion of how he has been pilloried and why it's so off-base, maybe even apologize for some of the things he's said. But such, apparently, is not his way. "It's o-pun season," he says, making a pun for pun's sake, with little regard for how it might sound to those around him.

by Erik Hedegaard, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Bryce Duffy

16 Mobile Theses

We’re now coming up to 9 years since the launch of the iPhone kicked off the smartphone revolution, and some of the first phases are over - Apple and Google both won the platform war, mostly, Facebook made the transition, mostly, and it’s now perfectly clear that mobile is the future of technology and of the internet. But within that, there's a huge range of different themes and issues, many of which are still pretty unsettled.

In this post, I outline what I think are the 16 topics to think about within the current generation, and then link to the things I’ve written about them. In January, I’ll dig into some of the themes for the future - VR, AR, drones and AI, but this is where we are today.

by Benedict Evans |  Read more:

Image: via:

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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

Kate Jenkins
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Shure MV51 Digital Large-Diaphragm Condenser Microphone

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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

photo: markk

Georgetown, Seattle
photo: markk