Powerful Ripples of Crazy

Forget about Oscar-nominated movies and peak TV—the best entertainment of this, or any, year is the race for the Republican presidential nomination. It’s got drama, comedy, tragedy and yelling (mostly yelling). Also, did I mention everyone is nuts? Think of it as a phenomenon similar to those newly discovered gravitational waves: Long after we’re gone, powerful ripples of crazy will still be spreading across the universe.

Let’s get you up to date. Remember Ted Cruz? He’s the one with the voice of Marvin the Martian and the world view of Yosemite Sam. During a recent debate, Marco Rubio called Cruz a liar. Then Donald Trump called Cruz “the single biggest liar”—because to Trump, everything is always the single biggest anything. Cruz later called Rubio and Trump whiners. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush called his mom and asked if he could stop trying to be president now.

Things have been tough for Rubio since Iowa, where he gave a memorable victory speech (it was memorable primarily because he finished third). A political algorithm in a suit, Rubio has been assailed for repeating his talking points, word for word, time after time, without care as to whether the message fits the context. Here’s a typical exchange:

Marco: “Let’s dispel this notion that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

Speaker box: “Um, I just asked if you want fries with that.”

To his credit, Mr. Robot got through the last debate without falling into a programming loop, which is good news for his campaign and terrible news for humanity. This means it’s learning. Soon it will become self-aware and then there’s no stopping the Rubio-Skynet ticket.

Anyway, all that stuff about who’s the lyingest liar? Turns out that was the classy part of the debate. Later on, Trump defended having referred to Cruz as a “pussy”—saying it wasn’t so bad because, FYI, Bush had publicly threatened to “take off his pants and moon everybody.” It was around this time that the moderator interjected: “We’re in danger of driving this into the dirt.” In danger? The Republican race is a tire fire wrapped in a train wreck inside The Adventures of Pluto Nash. We’re watching as one of the world’s most successful political parties goes Dumpster diving for a leader.

The news networks are struggling to adapt. They still cover the race as though it’s a normal campaign. It’s not. We’ve passed into some next-level Narnia-talking-animal strangeness. Still, every night you can find on CNN a pundit confidently predicting Donald Trump’s demise. But Trump never demises! Everything that should kill him politically only makes him stronger. And, weirdly, oranger.

by Scott Feschuk, Macleans | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Kanye West Is Fixing His Album in Public. You’ll Want to Read the Edits

When Kanye West first tweeted a handwritten 10-song track list for his seventh album, “The Life of Pablo,” late last month, the photo was captioned, “So happy to be finished with the best album of all time.”

Best? Could happen. Finished? Not even close.

Instead, the rollout of “Pablo” has been an unprecedented public marathon, with Mr. West adding songs, revising lyrics on quick notice, adding and dropping contributors, changing the album’s title and release date several times, and gabbing about it all on Twitter. The process has also included televised live performances, public squabbles, unauthorized leaks of demo recordings — the sort of stuff Dylan archivists typically wait decades to hear — and a fashion show with 1,000 models.

The result is an exemplar of modern celebrity musicmaking: a dramatic, rococo, continuous (and possibly still continuing) narrative that spans music, fashion, theater and politics. Mr. West has turned the album release process — historically a predictably structured event, and lately rewritten by stars like Beyoncé as precise, sudden assault — into a public conversation, one taking place on Twitter, YouTube, Periscope and in Madison Square Garden as much as in the studio. With flux embedded in its DNA, “Pablo” is crisply alive, like water that’s still boiling even though the flame is off. Pay close attention to the multiple iterations and you hear an artist at work, as well as a celebrity tending his image. It’s everything bared — process as art.

What is “The Life of Pablo” then? Is it one of the notepad-scrawled track listings Mr. West released on Twitter? Is it the nine-track version of the album that played at Mr. West’s Madison Square Garden extravaganza, illegally ripped and made available for unauthorized download soon after the show (which some critics chose to review)? Is it the 18-track album that was very, very briefly made available for sale early Sunday morning, for $20, via Tidal (which included an incorrect file, a duplicate of one song)? Is it that same (now corrected) version, now not for sale anywhere, that remains available for streaming on Tidal (though even Tidal has referred to this version as “partial”)?

Is there even a finished version of “Pablo” that will stand still long enough to comment on?

That’s especially relevant given that Mr. West seems to already be building outside feedback into the process of making this album. Take, for example, the saga of the song “Famous.”

Two days before Mr. West played “Pablo” for the world at a Feb. 11 fashion show at Madison Square Garden, he held a listening session for friends, family and representatives of his record label. The next day, a Reddit user began a thread titled, “Rumor: Kanye West is going to diss Taylor Swift on his new album.” The post went on to detail the opening lines from “Famous”: “I feel like Taylor Swift still owe me sex/ Why? I made that bitch famous.” He also made an insulting reference to Amber Rose, an ex-girlfriend.

But the “Famous” Mr. West played at Madison Square Garden two days later was different. The reference to Ms. Rose was gone, and the line about Ms. Swift was clunkier: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex.” (The “owe me sex” conceit was a callback to Mr. West’s verse on Young Jeezy’s 2008 hit “Put On.”)

So had Mr. West toned down the lyrics? The answers weren’t clear until Thursday, when a demo version of the first verse of “Famous” leaked online, with the lyrics as the Reddit user had reported them. That means that at some point, quite possibly between the night of Feb. 9 and the afternoon of Feb. 11, Mr. West decided to soften the blow. (...)

All this instability makes for a fascinating close-reading experience, but it also calls into question the ostensible finished version of “Pablo” as it has been promoted so far. A couple of the leaked songs, “The Mind Is Powerful” and “Fall Out of Heaven” — which may or may not be from the “Pablo” sessions — are half-song, half-sketch, with Mr. West mumbling his way through the melody, moving from scribbled outline to completed thought and back again.

These are incomplete, right? Sure. But then, there are at least three songs on “Pablo” on which Mr. West mumbles his way through a sticky portion of a song. On the album, those moments feel like conscious artistic decisions, but in the wake of these demos, they suggest that perhaps Mr. West just wasn’t quite finished, or that being slightly unfinished is the new finished.

So will “Pablo” ever be done? Perhaps that’s the wrong question. Think of how we understand pop music titans like Dylan or Prince. Over time, more demos and alternate versions and live versions get released — officially or not — and our understanding of their process deepens. Given the speed and porousness of the Internet era, we may soon be able to assess and comprehend Mr. West in much the same way. Albums that seem to be complete will only get less so. Songs that sound fixed in stone will be revealed to be the product of much trial and error. The process will be laid bare, as fascinating as the end result.

So let Mr. West be messy. The music, the fashion show, the merchandise, the Twitter digressions, the “S.N.L.” performances and leaked backstage meltdown: “The Life of Pablo” will be remembered for all of it.

If there ever will be a truly complete take on “Pablo,” it should include all of these things: maybe a collector’s edition that includes T-shirts and handstitched tweets and a fashion lookbook and behind-the-scenes documentary video footage and cached web pages and exhaustive demos documenting the songs at their various phases of evolution. Thanks to Mr. West’s living, breathing creative process, the album is no longer just a snapshot, but an unending data stream.

by Jon Caramanica, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Keller

[ed. I've always said this.]
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Robot Art Raises Questions about Human Creativity

Image: AARON

A Son Rises in the West

Twenty years ago a Seattle boy moved to Nepal after being recognized as the reincarnation of a revered Tibetan lama. The public’s reaction to his mother’s decision to let him go says as much about our understanding of parenting as it does about Buddhism.

In the final years of his third life, Dezhung Rinpoche enjoyed short walks around the block near his home in Seattle’s Ravenna neighborhood. Dressed in the traditional maroon robes of a Tibetan Buddhist lama, he would shuffle along with the help of an attendant and the crutch that had been his constant companion since a botched knee surgery had hobbled him several years earlier. This was the mid-’80s, nearly a decade before Tibetan Buddhism would become a cultural phenomenon in the United States, so the sight of a robed holy man circumambulating the block would have inspired more than a few double-takes in this relatively enlightened enclave that borders the University of Washington.

Born Könchok Lhündrup in 1906, the Buddhist teacher grew up in the cold, arid foothills of east Tibet, with little in the way of scenery to distract him from his religious studies. But here in his adopted home—where he’d lived since 1960, originally as a guest of the UW—he was surrounded by greenery. And he cherished his afternoon sidewalk amblings for the opportunity they provided to soak up the flora he’d missed out on as a young man.

That bum knee made for tough sledding, though, so Dezhung Rinpoche made frequent stops, often hunkering down in a neighbor’s front yard. (A former neighbor found it so disconcerting to watch the lama regularly sully his robes in their wet grass that they began leaving out a lawn chair for his use.) It was during one of these pit stops that the aged man pulled close Adrienne Chan, his attendant and student for nearly a decade. He had decided where he would be reborn, and he wanted to share the news.

In the quarter century since fleeing his homeland, where the Chinese had set about burning Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in 1959, Dezhung Rinpoche had traveled extensively. He’d taught and studied throughout India and the United States, so according to tradition he could have honored any of those locations with his next reincarnation. But as Chan leaned in, Dezhung Rinpoche said simply, “I will be reborn in Seattle. It is nice and clean and fresh.”

Not long after, in May 1987, the lama died in Nepal. And then the wait for his return began.

Dezhung Rinpoche was four years into his fourth life when the country learned his name. You may remember him if you were a regular reader of The Seattle Times. Or The New York Times. Or USA Today. For six weeks 20 years ago, he was the most famous toddler in America.

Yet his rebirth in November 1991 went largely unheralded. There were no reporters, no cameras to document the occasion; at that point no one knew for sure who he really was. But even if they had, it’s possible he still would have been regarded as little more than a curiosity by anyone outside of the Sakya Monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist center in Greenwood where his parents practiced. The Dalai Lama was only two years removed from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, and the faith had yet to break through into the American mainstream.

Two years later, the boy born Sonam Wangdu was formally recognized as Dezhung Rinpoche’s reincarnation, due in large part to a series of visions and dreams shared by his mother and the Sakya Monastery’s head lama. More than 4,000 people attended Dezhung Rinpoche IV’s enthronement in Nepal—his mother would later note that he behaved himself and even sat still for most of the ceremony—but still the media didn’t pounce.

It wasn’t until December 1995, shortly after Christmas, that Seattleites and the rest of the country took notice of the boy lama. His story had become newsworthy for two reasons. For starters, he was preparing to move to Kathmandu, Nepal—almost completely cut off from his family—where he would study the dharma for 20 years to continue on the path to enlightenment he’d presumably started three lives ago.

Then there was the matter of his family. His father, who died before Sonam’s second birthday when his car ran a red light and was struck by a Gray Lines tour bus downtown, was a Tibetan man named Tenzin Lama. His mother was white and grew up Catholic in small-town Indiana. And tucked into each story about Dezhung Rinpoche’s rebirth was the suggestion—sometimes overt, sometimes not so overt—that this American woman was shirking her biological duties by shipping off her young, innocent son to live out his childhood in the windswept tundra of eastern Asia. “Sonam will stay in the monastery, home to 38 monks, and live behind its eight-foot wall for five to eight years,” wrote USA Today’s Andrea Stone. “He will see his mother just twice a year, or whenever she can scrape together the $1,200 airfare.” The media had come for the mysticism and stayed for the moral outrage.

Save for a handful of television interviews over the next few years, the little lama’s mother retreated from the limelight and back to the relative safety of the monastery after he departed for Nepal. She’d said goodbye to her son willingly, but she lost a good deal of her dignity by force.

by Matthew Halverson, Seattle Met |  Read more:

Image: Kin Lok

Interview: Robert Caro

The inspiration for the authoritative book on power in New York City came from the author’s realization that he understood nothing of it. “I spent a lot of time thinking, if you’re really interested in political power, everything you do is bullshit,” Robert Caro told us recently.

Caro, who was a reporter covering Robert Moses at Newsday in the late 1960s, took seven years to write The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, a good chunk of it spent researching in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room of the main branch of the New York Public Library. Until April 7, the NYPL has a kiosk in the McGraw Rotunda one floor above the Allen Room featuring some of Caro’s primary source material.

Last week, Caro took a break from writing the fifth and final installment of The Years of Lyndon Johnson—a series he began researching 42 years ago—to talk about how his time at the library helped him during a dark period of his life, why the decisions Robert Moses made are still gridlocking New York, and what he misses most about being a newspaper reporter. (...)

I got to be an investigative reporter totally by accident. Let’s say I was 23 and I didn’t know what I was doing. We had this managing editor who was really out of The Front Page, and he didn’t like guys from the Ivy League. They hired me when he was on vacation [Laughs]. For awhile I was the only guy in the newsroom who’d gone to the Ivy League and he didn’t talk to me for awhile. Then I did something almost by accident on an investigation that they were interested in, and he said “I didn’t know someone from Princeton could go through files like this, from now on you do investigative work.” So with my usual savoir faire, I say, “But I don’t know anything about investigative work.” He said, "We’ll put you next to Bob Greene."

We had these little tin desks, and Bob Greene weighed about 300 pounds. So when he’d sit down, Bob Greene was half in my desk. The fact is that I learned a lot from him.

I started to realize, I was doing political reporting, and I came to realize almost by accident that this guy Robert Moses had so much power. He wanted to build this bridge across Long Island Sound, and Newsday had me look into it.

Around then, I was a Nieman fellow. Ina’s mother was dying that year, so she couldn’t come up to Cambridge with me, so I don’t like to go to social things myself, and there were a lot of social things. But everybody had an office of their own, and I spent a lot of time thinking, if you’re really interested in political power, everything you do is bullshit.

You’re not saying in every story, power comes from being elected, but your whole work as a political reporter is based on the premise that power in a democracy comes from being elected. And here’s a guy who has never been elected to anything and he has more power than anyone who was elected, and he has more power than the mayor and any governor or any mayor or governor put together—look, he’s built the whole landscape of your life.

So I thought I was going to do that in a newspaper series. I was gonna need months to do this, how am I gonna get them to do months? It was just too big, I was gonna have to do a book, but I thought I’d be done with the book in nine months.

In the NYPL exhibit on The Power Broker, you’re quoted as saying, “I had been living for seven years with people saying no one would pay attention to a book on Robert Moses.” Is this because no one knew who he was? Or is it because his legacy had already been cemented? No, there was this vague knowledge. I went to Horace Mann, and the other night a bunch of us who were in the same class together had dinner. I thought I was exaggerating this, but no: when we were juniors, everybody had to write a paper on the same topic, and the topic was, “Robert Moses was the perfect example of the white knight in literature.” He was the hero, you know?

But when I started bumping into him as a reporter, you’d say, who is this guy? Nobody knows who he is. And nobody knows how he got his power. I remember there was not only not a book, but not a single magazine article that had explored the public authority as a source of political power. They just saw public authorities as things that sold bonds to build a bridge, collected tolls until the bonds were paid off, then went out of business.

No one knew he was interesting. I only knew one editor, and they gave me the world’s smallest advance. For years I was working up in the Bronx, it was before I came to the library. You work on a book for years, and if you don’t have writers around to tell you that books take years—it was sort of a terrible time, because we were broke, really broke for years. It was terrible because Moses had stopped everyone from talking to me for a long time. But it was also terrible because you felt, what am I doing? No one’s interested in this! You’re keeping your family impoverished, you know? All of a sudden you’re in a room with 10 other people who are all sort of doing the same things.

I was very moved by this [NYPL] kiosk. It reminded me of how much that library meant to me. For the first time you were in a room full of writers. This guy, James Flexner, who was an idol of mine, he came over one day and said, “How long have you been working on this?” Which was the question that I just dreaded, you know? And whatever my answer was at the time, “five years,” or whatever. He said, “Oh that’s not so long, my Washington book took 14 years!”

There was another guy in the room named Ferdinand Lundberg, nobody knows this guy’s name. Ferdinand Lundberg wrote a book in the ‘30s that was one of the greatest examples of political reporting. It’s called America’s 60 Families. This would be our one-tenth of 1 percent—it’s about how 60 families controlled 95 percent of the wealth in the United States. I came across that book as I was researching the robber barons and I thought it was the greatest book.

One day I was doodling titles, and I decided I was going to call it The Power Broker, and my first editor didn’t like that title. But I knew this was going to be the title. And I wrote it, and all of a sudden Lundberg was standing behind me. He said, “Is that the title?” And I said yes. “Don’t let them change that,” he said. So there were things that happened in that room, right at the beginning, that made everything change all of a sudden.

There were other famous writers, like Barbara Tuchman had been there, she had just left when I got there. And then there were a bunch of writers like me, who no one knew. Like, Susan Brownmiller, she wrote a book called Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, and it was groundbreaking. Susan had the next desk from me, and no one had ever heard of her either, and her editor wasn’t returning her calls. We used to make a bet, whose editor would return our call first! [Laughs]

Sometimes the bet would go on for a long time, but I still remember Susan’s feet. She wore these socks with bright horizontal stripes, and she’d stick them under this partial carrel, so they’d be sticking under my desk, and when I was writing I’d see them. So when you were writing you weren’t lonely.

Why write about individual people and not systems of power? I would be lying to you if I said I know now why. As I was writing this book, I realized—realized is probably an exaggerated word—I realized that if I did his life right, I would be explaining not just him, but how urban political power worked. Not just in New York but in all the cities of America.

Moses had done something no one else had ever done. Everyone thought power comes from being elected. He wasn’t elected, he realizes he’s never going to get elected to anything, so he’s got to figure out a way to get all this power without getting elected, and he does it. I didn’t understand it, no one else understood it, even La Guardia says to him, “Don’t tell me what to do,” or whatever the quote is, “I’m the boss, you just work for me.”

And Moses writes, and I saw this letter in La Guardia’s papers, he sends back the letter and he writes across it, “You’d better read the contracts, mayor.”

I gradually came to understand that because he had done this thing, that no one else had ever done, gotten all this power without being elected, if I could find out how he did it and explain how he did it, I would be explaining something that no one else understood and I thought they really should understand, which is, how does power really work in cities? Not what we’re taught in textbooks, but what’s the raw, bottom, naked essence of real power?

I’m writing this book, and I suddenly say, God, this isn’t really a biography, this is a book about political power. I said I’d love to do the same thing with national power. Who’s the one guy who did something that no one else did? The thing that got me about Lyndon Johnson wasn’t him being president. It was about him being Senate Majority Leader.

In your lifetime or in my lifetime, the Senate has never worked. Around the Civil War you have Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, but after the Civil War, until Johnson becomes majority leader, which is like, 90 years, the Senate is the same mess it is today. Exactly. People think it’s different, but it’s the same.

Johnson becomes Majority Leader, for five years, ‘55 through ‘60, the Senate really works. The Senate writes the bills. It’s his civil rights bill, not Eisenhower’s. He leaves, and it’s so dramatic!

He did something like Moses, that no one else did, so if I could just find out how power in the Senate works, I could just explain it to people. In a democracy you want to explain to people how power works.

by Christopher Robbins, The Gothamist |  Read more:

Image: Scott Heins / Gothamist

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Dictionnaire universel d'histoire naturelle by Orbigny, Charles Dessalines d’, 1806-1876
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Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me

On a Thursday morning a few months ago, I got a call from my doctor’s assistant telling me that I have Stage 4 cancer. The stomach cramps I was suffering from were not caused by a faulty gallbladder, but by a massive tumor.

I am 35. I did the things you might expect of someone whose world has suddenly become very small. I sank to my knees and cried. I called my husband at our home nearby. I waited until he arrived so we could wrap our arms around each other and say the things that must be said. I have loved you forever. I am so grateful for our life together. Please take care of our son. Then he walked me from my office to the hospital to start what was left of my new life.

But one of my first thoughts was also Oh, God, this is ironic. I recently wrote a book called “Blessed.”

I am a historian of the American prosperity gospel. Put simply, the prosperity gospel is the belief that God grants health and wealth to those with the right kind of faith. I spent 10 years interviewing televangelists with spiritual formulas for how to earn God’s miracle money. I held hands with people in wheelchairs being prayed for by celebrities known for their miracle touch. I sat in people’s living rooms and heard about how they never would have dreamed of owning this home without the encouragement they heard on Sundays.

I went on pilgrimage with the faith healer Benny Hinn and 900 tourists to retrace Jesus’ steps in the Holy Land and see what people would risk for the chance at their own miracle. I ruined family vacations by insisting on being dropped off at the showiest megachurch in town. If there was a river running through the sanctuary, an eagle flying freely in the auditorium or an enormous, spinning statue of a golden globe, I was there. (...)

The modern prosperity gospel can be directly traced to the turn-of-the-century theology of a pastor named E. W. Kenyon, whose evangelical spin on New Thought taught Christians to believe that their minds were powerful incubators of good or ill. Christians, Kenyon advised, must avoid words and ideas that create sickness and poverty; instead, they should repeat: “God is in me. God’s ability is mine. God’s strength is mine. God’s health is mine. His success is mine. I am a winner. I am a conqueror.” Or, as prosperity believers summarized it for me, “I am blessed.”

One of the prosperity gospel’s greatest triumphs is its popularization of the term “blessed.” Though it predated the prosperity gospel, particularly in the black church where “blessed” signified affirmation of God’s goodness, it was prosperity preachers who blanketed the airwaves with it. “Blessed” is the shorthand for the prosperity message. We see it everywhere, from a TV show called “The Blessed Life” to the self-justification of Joel Osteen, the pastor of America’s largest church, who told Oprah in his Texas mansion that “Jesus died that we might live an abundant life.”

Over the last 10 years, “being blessed” has become a full-fledged American phenomenon. Drivers can choose between the standard, mass-produced “Jesus Is Lord” novelty license plate or “Blessed” for $16.99 in a tasteful aluminum. When an “America’s Next Top Model” star took off his shirt, audiences saw it tattooed above his bulging pectorals. When Americans boast on Twitter about how well they’re doing on Thanksgiving, #blessed is the standard hashtag. It is the humble brag of the stars. #Blessed is the only caption suitable for viral images of alpine vacations and family yachting in barely there bikinis. It says: “I totally get it. I am down-to-earth enough to know that this is crazy.” But it also says: “God gave this to me. [Adorable shrug.] Don’t blame me, I’m blessed.”

Blessed is a loaded term because it blurs the distinction between two very different categories: gift and reward. It can be a term of pure gratitude. “Thank you, God. I could not have secured this for myself.” But it can also imply that it was deserved. “Thank you, me. For being the kind of person who gets it right.” It is a perfect word for an American society that says it believes the American dream is based on hard work, not luck.

If Oprah could eliminate a single word, it would be “luck.” “Nothing about my life is lucky,” she argued on her cable show. “Nothing. A lot of grace. A lot of blessings. A lot of divine order. But I don’t believe in luck. For me luck is preparation meeting the moment of opportunity.” This is America, where there are no setbacks, just setups. Tragedies are simply tests of character.

It is the reason a neighbor knocked on our door to tell my husband that everything happens for a reason.

“I’d love to hear it,” my husband said.

“Pardon?” she said, startled.

“I’d love to hear the reason my wife is dying,” he said, in that sweet and sour way he has.

My neighbor wasn’t trying to sell him a spiritual guarantee. But there was a reason she wanted to fill that silence around why some people die young and others grow old and fussy about their lawns. She wanted some kind of order behind this chaos. Because the opposite of #blessed is leaving a husband and a toddler behind, and people can’t quite let themselves say it: “Wow. That’s awful.” There has to be a reason, because without one we are left as helpless and possibly as unlucky as everyone else.

by Kate Bowler, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Dadu Shin

Free Tools to Keep Those Creepy Online Ads From Watching You

[ed. I've been using Privacy Badger and have no complaints (although some sites seem to take a little longer to load as the Badger checks things out - especially those with embedded automatic music players, which I absolutely hate). I'll check out Disconnect, but so far I'm pretty satisfied.]

Say you’re doing a web search on something like the flu. The next thing you know, an ad for a flu remedy pops up on your web browser, or your video streaming service starts playing a commercial for Tylenol.

The content of those ads is no coincidence. Digital ads are able to follow people around the Internet because advertisers often place invisible trackers on the websites you visit. Their goal is to collect details on everywhere you go on the Internet and use that data to serve targeted ads to your computer, smartphone and connected television.

This global commercial surveillance of consumers is poised to become more extensive as tech companies expand into the Internet of Things, a category that includes wearable computers and connected home appliances like smart thermostats and refrigerators. Amazon, eBay, Facebook and Google can already follow users from device to device because people log in to their services with the same IDs on various gadgets.

For other marketing companies, tracking people on multiple Internet-connected devices has become a holy grail. The process is complex, because some lack the direct relationship with people that the giant tech companies already have. Only about 6 percent of marketers can reliably track a customer on all of that customer’s devices, according to the research firm eMarketer. But advertisers are working toward the goal.

“Our privacy is completely under assault with all these connected devices,” said Jeremiah Grossman, the founder of WhiteHat Security, a web security firm.

So what better time to get a head start on defending yourself against web snoops (as if email trackers, which this column covered last year, weren’t annoying enough already)? Many companies offer tools to help obscure your digital footprints while you’re browsing the web. We researched and tested four tracker blockers and found their results varied widely. In the end, the app Disconnect became our anti-tracking tool of choice.

by Brian X. Chen and Natasha Singer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Minh Uong

Feng Li

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On Marrying the Wrong Person

Anyone we could marry would, of course, be a little wrong for us. It is wise to be appropriately pessimistic here. Perfection is not on the cards. Unhappiness is a constant. Nevertheless, one encounters some couples of such primal, grinding mismatch, such deep-seated incompatibility, that one has to conclude that something else is at play beyond the normal disappointments and tensions of every long-term relationship: some people simply shouldn’t be together.

How do the errors happen? With appalling ease and regularity. Given that marrying the wrong person is about the single easiest and also costliest mistake any of us can make (and one which places an enormous burden on the state, employers and the next generation), it is extraordinary, and almost criminal, that the issue of marrying intelligently is not more systematically addressed at a national and personal level, as road safety or smoking are.

It’s all the sadder because in truth, the reasons why people make the wrong choices are easy to lay out and unsurprising in their structure. They tend to fall into some of the following basic categories.

One: We don’t understand ourselves

When first looking out for a partner, the requirements we come up with are coloured by a beautiful non-specific sentimental vagueness: we’ll say we really want to find someone who is ‘kind’ or ‘fun to be with’, ‘attractive’ or ‘up for adventure…’

It isn’t that such desires are wrong, they are just not remotely precise enough in their understanding of what we in particular are going to require in order to stand a chance of being happy – or, more accurately, not consistently miserable.

All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses. They have to grasp where these have come from, what they make them do – and most importantly, what sort of people either provoke or assuage them. A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet), it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities.

The very idea that we might not be too difficult as people should set off alarm bells in any prospective partner. The question is just where the problems will lie: perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us, or we can only relax when we are working, or we’re a bit tricky around intimacy after sex, or we’ve never been so good at explaining what’s going on when we’re worried. It’s these sort of issues that – over decades – create catastrophes and that we therefore need to know about way ahead of time, in order to look out for people who are optimally designed to withstand them. A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: ‘And how are you mad?’

The problem is that knowledge of our own neuroses is not at all easy to come by. It can take years and situations we have had no experience of. Prior to marriage, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner – and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably don’t care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures. On our own, when we’re furious, we don’t shout, as there’s no one there to listen – and therefore we overlook the true, worrying strength of our capacity for fury. Or we work all the time without grasping, because there’s no one calling us to come for dinner, how we manically use work to gain a sense of control over life – and how we might cause hell if anyone tried to stop us. At night, all we’re aware of is how sweet it would be to cuddle with someone, but we have no opportunity to face up to the intimacy-avoiding side of us that would start to make us cold and strange if ever it felt we were too deeply committed to someone. One of the greatest privileges of being on one’s own is the flattering illusion that one is, in truth, really quite an easy person to live with.

With such a poor level of understanding of our characters, no wonder we aren’t in any position to know who we should be looking out for.

Two: We don’t understand other people

This problem is compounded because other people are stuck at the same low level of self-knowledge as we are. However well-meaning they might be, they too are in no position to grasp, let alone inform us, of what is wrong with them.

Naturally, we make a stab at trying to know them. We go and visit their families, perhaps the place they first went to school. We look at photos, we meet their friends. All this contributes to a sense we’ve done our homework. But it’s like a novice pilot assuming they can fly after sending a paper plane successfully around the room.

In a wiser society, prospective partners would put each other through detailed psychological questionnaires and send themselves off to be assessed at length by teams of psychologists. By 2100, this will no longer sound like a joke. The mystery will be why it took humanity so long to get to this point.

We need to know the intimate functioning of the psyche of the person we’re planning to marry. We need to know their attitudes to, or stance on, authority, humiliation, introspection, sexual intimacy, projection, money, children, aging, fidelity and a hundred things besides. This knowledge won’t be available via a standard chat.

In the absence of all this, we are led – in large part – by what they look like. There seems to be so much information to be gleaned from their eyes, nose, shape of forehead, distribution of freckles, smiles… But this is about as wise as thinking that a photograph of the outside of a power station can tell us everything we need to know about nuclear fission.

by The School of Life |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Sath, Mallorca (Spain, 2012)
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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