How Should Vegetarians Actually Live?

Ethical vegetarians abstain from eating animal flesh because they care about the harm done to farmed animals. More precisely, they believe that farmed animals have lives so bad they are not worth living, so that it is better for them not to come into existence. Vegetarians reduce the demand for meat, so that farmers will breed fewer animals, preventing the existence of additional animals. If ethical vegetarians believed animals have lives that are unpleasant but still better than non-existence, they would focus on reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers, for instance by supporting humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows.

I will argue that if vegetarians were to apply this principle consistently, wild animal suffering would dominate their concerns, and may lead them to be stringent anti-environmentalists.

If animals like free-range cows have lives that are not worth living, almost all wild animals could plausibly be thought to also have lives that are worse than non-existence. Nature is often romanticised as a well-balanced idyll, so this may seem counter-intuitive. But extreme forms of suffering like starvation, dehydration, or being eaten alive by a predator are much more common in wild animals than farm animals. Crocodiles and hyenas disembowel their prey before killing them.. In birds, diseases like avian salmonellosis produce excruciating symptoms in the final days of life, such as depression, shivering, loss of appetite, and just before death, blindness, incoordination, staggering, tremor and convulsions.While a farmed animal like a free-range cow has to endure some confinement and a premature and potentially painful death (stunning sometimes fails), a wild animal may suffer comparable experiences, such as surviving a cold winter or having to fear predators, while additionally undergoing the aforementioned extreme suffering. Wild animals do experience significant pleasure, for instance when they eat, play or have sex, or engage in other normal physical activity. One reason to suspect that this pleasure is outweighed by suffering is that most species use the reproductive strategy of r-selection, which means that the overwhelming majority of their offspring starve or are eaten shortly after birth and only very few reach reproductive age. For instance, ‘in her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1000 kits’, the vast majority of which will die before they could have had many pleasurable experiences. Overall, it seems plausible that wild animals have worse lives than, say, free-range cows. If vegetarians think the latter are better off not existing, they must believe the same thing about wild animals.

A second important empirical fact is that wild animals far outnumber farmed animals. Using figures from the FAO, Tomasik estimates that the global livestock population is 24 billion (including 17 billion chicken)..I restrict my count of wild animals to those at least as complex as chicken or small fish, which vegetarians clearly believe do have moral weight. Using studies of animal density in different biomes, Tomasik estimates conservatively that there are at least 6*1010 land birds, 1011 land mammals, and 1013 fish. Animals in each of these categories alone are several times more numerous than livestock.

If wild animals’ well-being is negative and the above numbers are remotely correct, the scale of wild animal suffering is vast. As Richard Dawkins writes, ‘During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.’. If they accept the premises so far, consistent vegetarians should focus on preventing the existence of as many wild animals as possible, since even a small reduction in the global number of wild animals would outweigh the impact of ending all livestock production. For example, they could reduce animal populations by sterilising them, or by destroying highly dense animal habitats such as rainforests. This would place them directly at odds with environmentalists who try to preserve nature from human intervention. It may even be the case that vegetarians should react to this argument by eating more meat, since feeding the livestock requires more surface area for agriculture, and fields contain far fewer wild animals per square kilometre than other biomes such as forests.

An intuitive response to wild animal suffering can be that cycles of predation and starvation are natural, and therefore they must be neutral morally. But what is natural is not necessarily what is good, for instance, humans will routinely use technology to remove diseases which are natural.

It is important to emphasize that the claim ‘wild animal suffering is bad’ does not imply a guilt claim of the form ‘predators are morally guilty’. A lion’s instinct is indeed natural and does not deserve our moral condemnation. However, we can avoid much confusion if we remember to keep separate the concepts of guilt of an agent and wrongness of an action. It is perfectly possible to claim that X is harmful and should be prevented while also holding that the direct cause of X is not a moral agent. The fact that we are so used to thinking about cases of human behaviour, where guilt and wrongness are largely aligned, may partly explain why arguments about wild animal suffering seem counter-intuitive.

Underlying some of these principled arguments is the intuition that harmful acts, like killing livestock, are worse than harmful omissions, like failing to avert wild animal suffering. I cannot begin to give a full treatment to the act/omission debate here, but one thought experiment suggests harmful omissions matter at least somewhat. Imagine you see a fire spreading in a forest and, while walking away from the fire, you see an injured fawn: a broken leg prevents her from fleeing. You carry a rifle and could instantly kill the fawn at no cost to yourself, preventing her from the extreme suffering of being burned alive. In this situation, for vegetarians who care about harm to animals, it is clear that it would be immoral to omit to act and allow wild animal suffering to happen. So the general principle ‘allowing wild animals to suffer is morally neutral’ cannot hold.

by Thomas Sittler, Practical Ethics |  Read more:

Image: Bridgena Barnard

Lee Oskar

Souping Is the New Juicing

For the last few weeks, Vivienne Zhao, an investment banker who lives and works in Manhattan, has spent each Monday on a cleanse, consuming over the course of the day five liquid-based meals delivered in single-serve plastic containers.

Among those typically included on the menu: pinto and black beans cooked with tomatoes and morsels of spinach and bok choy; garlicky carrots mixed with onions and alkaline water; and puréed pumpkin spiked with cardamom and Saigon cinnamon.

Like a growing number of people, Ms. Zhao came to the routine — known as souping, or going on a soup cleanse — after finding juice cleanses, which she tried several times, too extreme.

“The juice cleanses are difficult because you don’t chew, and you don’t feel like you’re eating anything for days at a time,” she said. “You’re just really hungry.”

Ms. Zhao orders from Splendid Spoon in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which offers vegan, gluten-free soups in single-day cleanses, with the option of adding five hearty soups as meal replacements over the course of a week. Around three-quarters of its clientele — predominantly women — choose the longer version, according to Nicole Chaszar, the company founder. Sales, she said, have tripled annually since the line was introduced in 2013.

In January, Soupure, a company that opened in Los Angeles in 2014, expanded from local delivery to shipping its cleanses nationally. It also operates a popular outpost in Brentwood Town Center there. In Philadelphia, Real Food Works, a meal delivery service, added a soup cleanse to its menu in late 2013.

The appeal of souping, in part, is that it promises an easier detox than a juice cleanse.

“When you do juice cleanses, your blood sugar can spike really high,” said Despina Hyde, a registered dietitian at NYU Langone Medical Center. “Soup cleanses are inherently lower in sugar over all because they’re using more vegetables and complex carbohydrates versus fruit. They also tend to be higher in fiber, which has so many good benefits.” (...)

Soup cleanses also tend to be quite low in calories, often hovering around the 1,200 mark for a day’s worth of soup.

“That’s right at the borderline,” said Ms. Hyde, the dietitian. “A lot of people I work with need between 1,400 and 1,600 calories a day. You’re going to lose weight on low-calorie diets, of course, but it can lead to muscle breakdown.” For that reason, she doesn’t advise souping for more than one full day at a time.

by Rachel Felder, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Danny Ghitis

The Golden Age of Drugs - If You Have Access

Friends, countrymen, heads, lend me your lobes. We live in the Golden Age of Drugs.

There's never been more headtwisters at a lower cost, with more peer review and easier to acquire than ever before in a human history littered with all manners of getting high. The only thing that keeps you, dear seeker, from getting your own drugs within a week of reading these very words is laziness and a vast overestimation of your own importance.

Thanks to the Dark Web, the many drug marketplaces (pinnacles of US laissez faire capitalism) accessible through the Tor browser (created with seed money from the US Department of Defense), almost any drug you could cream may be delivered to your door (with the smiling thumb-fingered help of the United States Postal Service). If you possess the technical competence to use eBay and perform a Google search, you can possess almost any drug known to humans (& that number is rapidly increasing thanks to the US-led prohibition leading to the creation of novel synthetics to skirt the edges of the law). Whether any of this is good or bad or utterly American is not for this horse doctor to say - but it must be known that it exists.

To wet your whistle, take five minutes and start cruising the listings and drooling over the possibilities. First, install the Tor Browser from here - your encrypted gateway to the Dark Web. For security, Tor's notoriously hard to crack according to NSA files released by Edward Snowden but it appears the FBI made a dent by hiring some ringers, allegedly paying a cool millionto Carnegie Mellon researchers to track users and leading to Operation Onymous - the second major take-down of Dark Web marketplaces after the much lauded Silk Road bust. Even though it's possible to break the anonymity on Tor, it ain't easy & the most reliable methods depend on users accessing honeypots that probably stand out like a narc at Burning Man asking “Where do you buy some drugs around here man?”

Stick to markets like the ones reviewed here on DeepDotWeb's excellent roundup. Then you will just be one more little fish in a school of tens of thousands swimming through the DarkNet picking up just enough for their own head stash.This comparison charthelps you shop around for features on the markets like escrow that ensures your vendor doesn't get paid until your purchase arrives. Many of the markets require PGP (Pretty Good Protection) – an encryption service that allows you to convert messages into incomprehensible jabberwocky to those not in possession of your private key. You can use a Dark Web market that doesn't require PGP but it's not that hard to use and it certainly makes your vendors feel safer because PGP seems to be the biggest encryption stumbling block to the NSA's attempt to decrypt every secret. If you are looking for a particular drug, unsurprisingly, the Reddit DarkNet thread hosts excellent comparisons and bickering over various vendors and favorite headtwisters.

But although everyone has their favorites, it doesn't much matter which of the big markets you choose. They all feature a review system straight out of Yelp (and often with the same persnickety types of comments). The vendor's profile makes it easy to read between the lines and find your classic neighborhood dealer who loves these drugs and gives them away with an almost messianic fervor. Bonus points if they offer harm reduction advice. The vendor refund policies are a good canary in the mineshaft because while packages almost never go missing within the domestic United States, the loss rate from Europe appears to be approximately 5%. Most vendors will cheerfully send the package again since they can check online to see that it mysteriously went missing at the US border - sometimes seized by customs but often apparently taken by an eagle eyed employee who wouldn't mind adding to their own headstash and well aware that this particular customer won't be calling to complain about a package gone missing. This also speaks to the safety of receiving by mail because even though these packages do disappear – and the first time it happens it'll worry the hell out of you – after years of listening, I've still yet to hear anyone getting busted for personal use levels sent through the mail. That's because the law in the United States favors our fair user because it's quite difficult to prove that you requested said illegal package when any asshole could have mailed it to you by mistake or as a vicious prank.

Thus, the safest option is shipping to your own home to your own name where you already receive many parcels from many places. Screwing around with drop houses, Mom & Pop mailbox stores that don't require an ID or other workarounds that appear out of the ordinary only leads to unnecessary screw ups. With 23 million packages per hour, the United States Postal Service possesses neither the resources or inclination to go after little drug packages. As this comprehensive post reveals, it's quite difficult for law enforcement to prove intent and fortune favors those who use USPS because, unlike the commercial carriers like DHL & FedEx, the United States mail is a highly protected entity and only the postal police have authority.

One post on the old Silk Road forum – now obviously disappeared - came from a reputed former assistant to a chief postal officer who said they certainly do send undercover agents to witness you sign for the package or break down doors after delivery but that's for kilograms of MDMA or pounds of heroin - not grams of weed, ‘shrooms or sparkly alphabetic powder. Plus, some of the packaging from these vendors is simply delightful as it is hard to crack. A birthday card featuring a magic fairy with DMT taped to her mushroom wishing you a 'Happy Blastoff' or GHB powder labeled as organic laundry detergent complete with helpful little scooper. Once you find a nice vendor, stick to them and make sure you leave lots of fine reviews. 

Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush, Alternet | Read more:
Image: ChrisgoldNY via Flickr

Here Is Everything I Learned in New York City

Wear Comfortable Shoes

Yes, there are women who walk around New York in five-inch stilettos. There are also people who like to have sex hanging from a ceiling with a ball gag in their mouth. This world is strange and mysterious. But New York is a walking city, a city of derring-do, and you don’t want to be limping behind.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for What You Want

When I first came to New York, I was intimidated by delis, which is a little bit like being frightened of lawn sprinklers. But my heart would pound at the counter as I approached, feeling the impending pressure of a public decision.

“Whaddaya want?” the man would ask me.

“Um, what do you have?” I’d ask, accustomed to a detailed list of signature sandwiches from which to choose.

The man would look at an expansive glass case of cold cuts and cheeses splayed out before me with a gesture that suggested: What do you need, lady, a map? Ordering a sandwich at a deli is, technically, the easiest way to order a sandwich, because they will make it exactly as you want it. But I spent so much of my life suppressing exactly what I wanted in favor of what was available that I had no idea how I liked my sandwiches. I preferred to take other people’s suggestions, and then, when they weren’t looking, pick off the parts I didn’t like—which is an apt metaphor for my life at that time.

Sometimes I panicked. “I’ll take a pastrami on rye,” I said once, because it sounded like something a Woody Allen character would order, and god forbid the old lady buying cat food behind me should think of me as anything less than an authentic New Yorker.

I was embarrassed to ask for what I really wanted: Ham and American cheese on white bread with spicy mustard, which is possibly the least exotic, least adventurous, did-you-order-that-for-your-invisible-seven-year-old-child request you can make at a deli.

But in life, you can either ask for what you want and suffer the possibility of judgment, or you can pretend you want something else and almost certainly get it. It’s remarkable to me how long I chose the latter.

When I finally asked for a sandwich as I really wanted it, the man behind the counter simply nodded. “That all?” he asked.

My face prickled with embarrassment. “Should I get something else?”

He shrugged. “It’s not my sandwich!”

And that was the thing: It was not his sandwich. Why on earth would he care what kind of sandwich I ate, and if he did care what kind of sandwich I ate, what the hell was wrong with him? “I feel self-conscious for such a boring order,” I told him.

He smiled. “You’re an easy order.”

And from then on, we were friends. He knew my order, because few others asked for it. In fact, you could say it was my signature sandwich.

Be Decisive

People complain New Yorkers are rude, which is imprecise. New Yorkers are some of the kindest, most good-hearted people I’ve ever met. But New Yorkers are busy, and they cannot tolerate dawdling. And that’s a challenge, because the city is a choose-your-own-adventure game of constant decisions: Cab or subway? Express or local? Highway or side street? Which do you want? Answer now!

At first, I found this crippling, because I was obsessed with making the right decision and felt like I kept whiffing it. I lived in the hipster Brooklyn neighborhood of handlebar mustaches, when I would have been happier in the bougie neighborhood of spendy trattorias. I went to the dive bar, when all I wanted was a craft cocktail. This kind of thinking will make you miserable, because you will always feel the life you deserve is not only out of reach but being enjoyed by thinner, smarter people down the hall. But eventually, I realized there is only one bad decision, the decision I moved to New York to avoid: Doing nothing at all. That is unforgivable.

by Sarah Hepola, The Morning News | Read more:
Image: Jewel Samad

Madonna

via:

The State of American Retirement

How 401(k)s have failed most American workers

Today, many Americans rely on savings in 401(k)-type accounts to supplement Social Security in retirement. This is a pronounced shift from a few decades ago, when many retirees could count on predictable, constant streams of income from traditional pensions (see “Types of retirement plans,” below). This chartbook assesses the impact of the shift from pensions to individual savings by examining disparities in retirement preparedness and outcomes by income, race, ethnicity, education, gender, and marital status.

The first section of the chartbook looks at retirement-plan participation and retirement account savings of working-age families. The charts in this section focus on families headed by someone age 32–61, a 30-year period before the Social Security early eligibility age of 62 when most families should be accumulating pension benefits and retirement savings. The second section looks at income sources for seniors. Since many workers transition to retirement between Social Security’s early eligibility age and the program’s normal retirement age (currently 66, formerly 65), the charts in the second section focus on retirement outcomes of people age 65 and older. (...)

Retirement wealth has not grown fast enough to keep pace with an aging population and other changes. The first chart offers what at first appears to be an encouraging picture, the growth since 1989 in retirement wealth—assets in pension funds plus savings in retirement accounts—relative to income. Unlike other charts in this section, this measure is for the entire population, not just working-age families. As Figure 1 shows, retirement wealth more than kept pace with incomes over the past quarter century, growing faster than income in the 1990s and rebounding after two stock market downturns in the 2000s. Retirement wealth nearly doubled as a share of personal disposable income between 1989 and 2013, with retirement account savings exceeding pension fund assets after 2012 (and briefly in the late 1990s and mid-2000s). The shift in wealth from pension funds to retirement accounts occurred years after participation in defined-contribution plans surpassed that in defined-benefit plans (Figure 2).

What Figure 1 does not show is that retirement wealth should have increased more to keep pace with an aging population, offset Social Security cuts, and serve as a hedge against the increased longevity risks and investment risks brought on by a shift from traditional pensions to individual savings. Retirement account savings increased before the Great Recession as the large baby boomer cohort approached retirement. However, retirement account savings by age group stagnated or declined in the new millennium even as traditional pension coverage continued to decline (Figures 2-5). Meanwhile, Social Security benefits are replacing a declining share of pre-retirement earnings due to benefit cuts passed in 1983 that are gradually taking effect (Reno, Bethell, and Walker 2011). The change in plan type should have been accompanied by an increase in retirement assets to account for the diminishing use of pooled pension funds, which benefit from economies of scale and risk pooling and are thus more cost-effective than individual accounts. In other words, in a retirement savings account system, people need to set aside more, because these accounts are not as efficient as pensions.

The shift from traditional pensions to individual savings has widened retirement gaps. In addition to retirement wealth not growing fast enough, retirement disparities have grown with the shift from traditional pensions to retirement savings accounts. These disparities are the main focus of this chartbook. As Figure 6 shows, high-income, white, college-educated, and married workers participate in defined-benefit pensions at a higher rate than other workers, but participation gaps are much larger under defined-contribution plans. The distribution of savings in retirement accounts is even more unequal than participation in these plans (Figure 7). There are large differences between mean and median retirement savings because mean savings are skewed by large balances for a few families (Figure 8). For many groups—lower-income, black, Hispanic, non-college-educated, and unmarried Americans—the typical working-age family or individual has no savings at all in retirement accounts, and for those that do have savings, the median balances in retirement accounts are very low (Figures 9–15).

by Monique Morrissey, Economic Policy Institute | Read more:
Image: Fiscal Times

Hiding in Plain Sight

America's Massive New Transportation Infrastructure System is Hiding in Plain Sight

Image: Clinton Steeds/Wikimedia

She Wanted to Do Her Research. He Wanted to Talk ‘Feelings.’

Over the past two decades as a professor, I’ve grown thousands of plants, studying how their biology shifts in response to our changing environment. Soon I’ll begin to design and build my fourth laboratory; I’ll teach classes and take on more staff members, as I do every year. Like all professors, I also do a lot of extra jobs for which I was never trained, such as advising former students as they navigate the wider world. Last year, after one of my most talented students left to start her next adventure, she would text me now and then: “This is such a great place,” “I am learning so much here” and “I know this is where I am supposed to be.”

Then, a month ago, she wrote and asked me what to do. She forwarded an email she had received from a senior colleague that opened, “Can I share something deeply personal with you?” Within the email, he detonates what he described as a “truth bomb”: “All I know is that from the first day I talked to you, there hadn’t been a single day or hour when you weren’t on my mind.” He tells her she is “incredibly attractive” and “adorably dorky.” He reminds her, in detail, of how he has helped her professionally: “I couldn’t believe the things I was compelled to do for you.” He describes being near her as “exhilarating and frustrating at the same time” and himself as “utterly unable to get a grip” as a result. He closes by assuring her, “That’s just the way things are and you’re gonna have to deal with me until one of us leaves.” (...)

The evasion of justice within academia is all the more infuriating because the course of sexual harassment is so predictable. Since I started writing about women and science, my female colleagues have been moved to share their stories with me; my inbox is an inadvertent clearinghouse for unsolicited love notes. Sexual harassment in science generally starts like this: A woman (she is a student, a technician, a professor) gets an email and notices that the subject line is a bit off: “I need to tell you,” or “my feelings.” The opening lines refer to the altered physical and mental state of the author: “It’s late and I can’t sleep” is a favorite, though “Maybe it’s the three glasses of cognac” is popular as well.

The author goes on to tell her that she is special in some way, that his passion is an unfamiliar feeling that she has awakened in him, the important suggestion being that she has brought this upon herself. He will speak of her as an object with “shiny hair” or “sparkling eyes” — testing the waters before commenting upon the more private parts of her body. Surprisingly, he often acknowledges that he is doing something inappropriate. I’ve seen “Of course you know I could get fired for this” in the closing paragraph; the subject line of the email sent to my former student was “NSFW read at your own risk!”

So much for the contents of the first email; now let’s picture its recipient. She’s shocked: Is this for real? She’s confused: Did she do something to make him think she wanted this? She’s worried: She has to see him tomorrow. Her thesis isn’t done, and she still needs his signature. What if he says no? She’s scared: If she rebuffs him, will he get angry?

The scientific method may be impartial, but the scientific culture is not. From grad-school admission on up through tenure, every promotion can hinge on a recommendation letter’s one key passage of praise, offered — or withheld — by the most recent academic adviser. Given the gender breakdown of senior scientists, most often that adviser is a man.

Perhaps she decides to ignore this first email — and this is often the case — knowing that she has little to gain, and a lot to lose, from a confrontation. Once satisfied with her tendency toward secrecy, the sender then finds a way to get her alone: invites her to coffee, into his office, out for some ostensibly group event. At said meeting he will become tentatively physical, insisting that if people knew, they just wouldn’t understand. At this point, any objection on her part wouldn’t just be professionally dangerous, it would seem heartless — and she’s not a horrible person, is she?

Then there are conferences, field trips, cocktail hours and retreats, whispering co-workers, rolling eyes and sadly shaking heads. On and on it goes, and slowly she realizes that he’s not going to stop because he doesn’t have to.

by A. Hope Jahren, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Irene Rinaldi

The Secret World of Arrietty - dir. Hiromasa Yonebayashi (2010)
via:

Understanding American Authoritarianism

As part of his PhD research for UMass Amherst, Matthew MacWilliams surveyed the psychological characteristics of authoritarians -- not the people who lead authoritarian movements, but the followers, those who defer to them.

His work echoed the independent research of Vanderbilt's Marc Hetherington and UNC's Jonathan Weiler, whose 2009 book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics concluded that a sizable fraction of the US voting public were authoritarian: people who wanted to be controlled, and wanted their neighbors to be controlled, because they were afraid the status quo was slipping away and they didn't believe that anything better would replace it.

They all posit that there are really three American parties, not two: the Democrats, the Republicans, and the authoritarian Republicans, who aren't conservatives in the sense of wanting tax cuts for the rich or caring about specific religious or moral questions. Rather, they want strong leaders who'll fight change, preserve hierarchies, and talk tough.

Vox's Amanda Taub recounts the long struggle to understand authoritarianism, something social scientists have struggled with since the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth. She describes many authoritarians as latent, waiting to be "activated" by threats -- demographic and economic shifts, messages of fear and terror.

Vox did its own polling and research to complement the earlier experiments on authoritarianism, concluding that Trump is merely the "symptom": "The rise of American authoritarianism is transforming the Republican Party and the dynamics of national politics, with profound consequences likely to extend well beyond this election."

Back in 2009, I wrote about Bob Altemeyer's "The Authoritarians", a free/open text that summarizes 30 years of research into the authoritarian mindset. I recommend reading it now.

But both schools of thought agree on the basic causality of authoritarianism. People do not support extreme policies and strongman leaders just out of an affirmative desire for authoritarianism, but rather as a response to experiencing certain kinds of threats. 

The third insight came from Hetherington and American University professor Elizabeth Suhay, who found that when non-authoritarians feel sufficiently scared, they also start to behave, politically, like authoritarians. 

But Hetherington and Suhay found a distinction between physical threats such as terrorism, which could lead non-authoritarians to behave like authoritarians, and more abstract social threats, such as eroding social norms or demographic changes, which do not have that effect. That distinction would turn out to be important, but it also meant that in times when many Americans perceived imminent physical threats, the population of authoritarians could seem to swell rapidly. 

Together, those three insights added up to one terrifying theory: that if social change and physical threats coincided at the same time, it could awaken a potentially enormous population of American authoritarians, who would demand a strongman leader and the extreme policies
necessary, in their view, to meet the rising threats.

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: Vox

The rise of American authoritarianism [Amanda Taub/Vox]

Fashion Week’s popularity on Instagram

The apparel world is just winding down from New York Fashion Week, the semi-annual designer clothing parade that this year brought us wide-leg pants, cocoon coats and whatever it was that you’d call Kanye West’s collection.

The event has been gradually transforming into a digital attraction for everyday shoppers rather than just a cloistered spectacle for industry insiders, with legions of people now getting a peek at the shows, clothes and models via livestream or social media. In other words, Fashion Week increasingly serves as a snapshot of how digital-savvy customers get their shopping ideas and interact with their favorite brands.

That’s why a new research report on Fashion Week social media engagement is especially revealing about the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for retailers as they try to use social media to sell you clothes and other types of goods.

L2, a research firm that studies brands’ digital impact, analyzed the social media posts of 192 fashion houses from Feb. 1 through 18. That time period covered the shows and the immediate lead-up to them, when retailers would likely be in overdrive working to drum up anticipatory buzz. In particular, L2 studied “engagement,” a measure of how many users were enticed enough by the social media post to take an action such as “liking” a post, commenting on it or re-sharing it from their own account.

There is a striking, even extraordinary, difference between customer engagement on Instagram versus on Facebook and Twitter. On Instagram, the women’s brands posted an average of 20 times and generated an average of 92,000 interactions. The engagement numbers seen on the other social platforms are paltry by comparison: On Twitter, where women’s brands posted an average of 26 times, tweets averaged 490 likes and 1,117 retweets. On Facebook, brands posted an average of eight posts each that generated 8,000 interactions.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, men’s fashion brands generated significantly less social engagement overall than did women’s brands. But the pattern remains the same: Instagram accounted for the vast majority — some 89 percent — of social engagement for men’s fashion.

“Instagram really is dominating the field,” said Liz Elder, the L2 research associate who produced the Fashion Week study.

Also notable is how much the social engagement mix has changed over the last three years of fashion shows. As the chart below shows, Facebook has lost quite a bit of ground, not only in its share relative to Instagram, but in overall engagement volume. And that sends a clear message: Fashion conversation and inspiration-seeking is moving at an astonishing speed from Facebook to Instagram.

by Sarah Halzack, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Ze Takahashi/MCV Photo

Swarm

[ed. Tranquil and slightly hypnotic simulation of swarming behavior in animal populations.]
Swarm Simulator
via:

The Open Refrigerator

A few decades ago I was sitting in a college seminar room listening to the professor discourse quite penetratingly on Thomas Mann’s monumental and once ubiquitous novel The Magic Mountain when my mind wandered to the question of just how this novel came to be published. Presumably, that callow and ignorant undergraduate in the basement of Goldwin Smith Hall thought someone — some editor — must have read the thing and recognized it for the great book that it was. And how hard could that have been anyway? Hell, even I knew it was a great book, if a bit long and occasionally opaque in meaning. I was a senior and the unpleasant prospect of graduation and the necessity to find some paying work was weighing on my mind. Why couldn’t I become that guy? I loved books, loved them even more than my other obsession, basketball. That might be a satisfying line of work. (...)

At the simplest, most basic level, I’ve been reading for a living for 37 years. I arrived at New American Library with a literary and intellectual sensibility formed by the unruly rebellions of the ’60s and the spiritual deflations of the ’70s, with a taste for the novelists and thinkers who had either helped to cause or best reflected and interpreted those rebellions and deflations. I’ve read thousands of books and proposals since then, and I believe I am a better reader than I was at age 27 — I know more because I’ve read more and my judgments are (I sure hope) better informed and more mature. But at the primal level where reader meets text and experiences emotions ranging from boredom and impatience to I-love-this-and-have-to-have-to-publish-it excitement, I think I am still that young man in the hunt and on the make, always searching for the big wow. This process takes place in the private arena of the mind and is entirely unrelated to the corporate arrangements of my employer. It is, quite literally, where I live, where I feel I am most myself.

As for the editing of those books that wow me when happy circumstances dictate that I get to acquire them, that process too takes place in a private arena. When I encounter a sentence that is inelegant or ungrammatical or inefficient or ambiguous in meaning, or a scene in a novel that is implausible or overdone or superfluous, or a plot that drags or goes off course or beggars credulity, or a line of exposition that falls short of the necessary clarity, or feel that some subject is missing and requires coverage, I point those things out to the author and with a carefully calculated mixture of firmness and solicitude suggest ways they might be remedied. I do this usually at nights and on weekends, sometimes on my bus ride to and from work, very occasionally in my office on slow days with my door closed (yes, I have an office with a door that closes), with a complete absence of business calculation beyond the largest context — that a book that is bad or just not good enough is a book that will embarrass me and my employer and be poorly received and will not sell.

But as I read those submissions and edit those manuscripts, on another cognitive plane I am reality testing what I am reading. What other books — the fabled and often tiresome “comp titles” — are like this one, and how did those books sell? (We are always fighting the last war.) Is it too similar to something we published recently or are publishing in the near future, or to a book some other house has or shortly will publish? Are there visual images in the book that might be utilized on the cover? What writers of note can I bug for prepublication blurbs? Is there something about the author, some intriguing or unusual backstory, some charisma radiating off the page (and maybe the author photo? Don’t act so shocked) that suggests that he or she will be a publicity asset? What might a reasonable advance be, given the amounts that have been paid recently for similar books, or might reason for some reason be thrown out the window? (A friend and colleague of mine refers to this feeling as “Let’s get stupid.” More on this matter shortly.) What colleagues in the company, in the editorial department, in marketing, publicity, and sales, could I ask to read the book to drum up support for it? What is my “handle” going to be — the phrases or brief sentences that briskly encapsulate a book’s subject matter and commercial appeal? These and all sorts of other questions will be popping up in my brain, and inevitably there is some crosstalk and bleed-through between the two cognitive spheres. If you want total purity in these matters, go join an Irish monastery and work on illuminated manuscripts, not a New York publishing house. Or at the very least a quiet and scholarly and well-endowed university press.

Nobody really knows how an editor works besides his or her authors and possibly his or her assistant. Yet I am quite certain that, allowing for differences in personal style — some editors go for close-in textual work, some prefer to hover somewhere above the text and make broader observations and suggestions — the process described above is close to the way that my fellow New York editors operate. And there really are not too many of us. I would say that, taking in the six major corporate houses and the handful of sizable independents, that there might be something like 250 editors at a rough count working in adult trade publishing. It’s a fairly clubby group. Most of us know each other either personally or by reputation, and we watch each other’s activities, especially acquisitions, obsessively, aided by our very own digital town crier, the website Publishers Lunch. The society of editors has, of course, its doppelgänger or shadow world in that of the literary agents with whom we deal and whose functions — chiefly the discovery and care and feeding of writers and creating the market for their wares — overlap considerably with ours. Let’s put the number of agents who count (sorry, but we think that way in this town) at 150, and you can grasp how really small-town and incestuous and ingrown the literary ecosystem of New York publishing is. In such a small and hyperconnected world, fueled by the twin forces of ego (our sense that we are at the top of the heap) and insecurity (our sense that we might vanish any year now under some technological Anschluss, that we are in economic terms pissants compared, to, say, the computer-game industry, and how many people in this country care about books anyway?), the arrival of a literary property that holds the promise of both review and publicity glory and substantial sales, can instantly engage the forces of irrational exuberance. And that brings me to the subject without which no consideration of the work of the New York trade editor can be complete: money.

Lord, we have a lot of it. And lord, we need a lot of it. I work in a 50-story mixed-use office and condominium complex in Midtown North, bordering on Hell’s Kitchen. When I approach this building arriving at work in the morning or returning from one of those storied publishing lunches, I look up at it and start doing calculations in my head as to what our offices must cost to rent, and to heat and light and air-condition, let alone the expense of paying the salaries and the benefits and the T&Es of all the people working here. Then I add on the cost of our humongous and totally up-to-the-minute warehouse and fulfillment center in semirural Maryland and all the folks who work there, and I ask myself what have I done to help my company cover the truly enormous nut that one day’s operation must entail and try to avoid the obvious answer that, whatever it is, it is not enough. So I head through the revolving door and up the elevator and tank up on the not-at-all-bad Flavia coffee in the common area that looks like it was decorated with fixtures from the set of some late-’60s Polish science fiction film and start answering the e-mails that have piled up since the day before. Welcome to my world.

by Gerald Howard, The Millions |  Read more:

Image: Wikimedia Commons

via:

via:

The Collective Insanity of the Publishing Industry

[ed. I can't attest to the veracity of this, but it sounds just dumb enough to be true.]

Unless you’re a writer, I imagine you haven’t been paying quite as close attention to the publishing industry and all its weirdness as I have, and that’s a shame, because it’s been really entertaining.

Actually, entertaining isn’t the right word. It’s been insane, but the kind of insane that’s unreasonably fun to watch from a safe remove. Like watching a man stop traffic to cross against a green light by shouting, “I’ll bite your car!” As long as it isn’t your car he’s threatening, it’s sort of funny.

You might imagine that as an author with published works for sale, I am not at a safe remove when it comes to the publishing industry. That’s sort of true, but only sort-of.

Here’s a superb example of the madness of which I speak, and why I’m not concerned that anyone will be biting my car.

In 2014, there was a drawn-out dispute between Amazon, and Hachette. The latter is one of the largest publishers in the world, and Amazon is a company that sells things, such as books. The essence of the dispute was that Hachette—and all the other publishers we affectionately refer to as ‘the Big 5’—wanted more control over the list price of their e-books on Amazon.

That sounds thoroughly reasonable, and it sort of is, but please let me explain because the crazy is in the details. What was happening was that Amazon was discounting the price of the ebooks, and it may seem like this is something the Big 5 would want to stop, except the markdown was coming off of Amazon’s end. In other words, if Hachette wanted to charge $15.99 for an ebook, and Amazon marked it down to $9.99, Hachette was still paid their cut of the full price of the book.

More people will buy a book at $9.99 than at $15.99, so essentially, the Big 5 was coming out ahead in this arrangement in every conceivable way. They collected royalties at an unreasonably high price point while moving the number of units that corresponded to a lower price point.

So of course that had to be stopped right away.

Hachette fought for, and won from Amazon, the return to something called the Agency Model, whereby they set their price and Amazon wasn’t allowed to reduce that price. So that $15.99 book stayed at $15.99 until Hachette decided to change it.

Soon after that contract was signed, the other Big 5 contracts came due, and they all asked for the same Agency Model arrangement. Thus, the finest minds in publishing—or one might assume—negotiated themselves out of an arrangement whereby they sold more units at a lower cost without suffering the financial impact that comes with a lower unit cost.

On purpose.

This isn’t even the crazy part.

by Gene Doucette |  Read more:

Image: Gene Doucette 

Strangers Drowning: Voyages to the Brink of Moral Extremity

Good people make us feel uncomfortable; they remind us that practising consistent generosity and selflessness isn’t nearly as impossible as we like to think. And so it is not at all surprising that we try our best to find ways of softening the embarrassment, looking eagerly for hypocrisy, inconsistency, mixed motivation or reductive explanations. Larissa MacFarquhar’s excellent book is, among other things, a bracingly sceptical examination of our scepticism. As well as giving us a series of vivid portraits of spectacularly altruistic individuals (and families), she offers a sketchy but highly intelligent overview of the various ways in which we set out to diminish those we like to call ‘do-gooders’, and concludes that these evasions won’t do: the hard question remains. If selfless devotion to relieving the pain or need of others is possible, why don’t more of us get on with it?

The book’s title relates this to the conundrum in moral philosophy that focuses on the limits of ‘disinterested’ care for others. Given the choice between rescuing a drowning relative or a total stranger in a situation of disaster, which do we go for? Does a thirty-year-old mother of four have more claim on me than my own ageing parent or unmarried sibling? It seems at first sight that a truly disinterested, truly generous love would make no fundamental differentiation between those who happen to be close to us and anyone else, so any decision about which one to give priority to would have to be made on grounds that had nothing to do with accidents of connection or instinct. MacFarquhar, by setting her narratives of ‘moral extremity’ in the context of this dilemma, highlights the way in which her heroes and heroines of moral consistency have to find some kind of calculus by which to make decisions about their ethical priorities. And this, of course, is where the problems begin. (...)

MacFarquhar frequently discusses the ideas of Peter Singer, the Australian ethicist whose passionate insistence on a fully rational morality based on detailed calculations of the effectiveness of specific acts and policies has had a huge influence on popular movements such as the Oxford-based Giving What We Can network. Many of the people we meet in the book have been deeply marked by Singer and his followers, who offer a lucid and practical programme for maximising the effectiveness of charitable generosity through painstaking research and unsentimental assessment of results. There is a lot to be said for this as a basis for action. But two uncertainties remain, one fairly specific, the other larger and more elusive. Singer and others are clear that the most effective way you might help in – say – relieving global poverty or disease may not be to work as a grassroots development economist or a medical volunteer in South Sudan, but to take a highly paid job in your own country and donate a correspondingly large sum. There is much common sense in this and it usefully deflates the dramatic impulse that tempts us to think that we help best when we suffer most, even if this means we are largely ineffectual. But it leaves hanging the question of how there might ever be a world in which the coexistence of vastly (irrationally) paid jobs in the developed world – in the financial services sector, for example – and lethally fragile economies elsewhere is not just taken for granted. The model still seems to be bound up with the practice of the rich showing benevolence towards the poor, rather than any longer-term structural adjustment in the direction of greater equality or mutuality.

This connects with the broader point. There is often an assumption in all this that ‘goodness’ is about finding and enacting the most uncomplicatedly virtuous course of action, and that such a course of action is defined quite strictly in terms of the quantifiable relief of suffering. Once again, this is a helpful corrective to vagueness and self-serving fantasy. But what if ‘goodness’ also had something to do with a quality of relation with those who receive help, not just with the long-distance solving of their problems for them? What if morality had more to do with habit and character, with the grace of receiving as well as of giving, rather than being just the sum total of right actions? Singer and many (but not all) of the figures whose stories feature in Strangers Drowning are committed Kantians in their ethics: they believe that morality is about the quest for the unequivocally good action. But, as the dilemmas flagged in the title should tell us, there are choices in which there is no unequivocally good outcome. Talking as though there were one can imperceptibly encourage us to ignore certain kinds of suffering or pain in the way touched on earlier. As many moral philosophers have insisted over the last few decades, focusing on how to make infallibly right choices (and also on hard cases where this looks practically impossible) isn’t a very useful way of thinking about a good life as opposed to an ensemble of right answers. Part of the discomfort generated by some of MacFarquhar’s case studies is to do with a sense that some people are looking almost obsessively for a scheme of ideas that will assure them beyond doubt that they are doing what is right. The more sympathetic figures in this book are those who ruefully acknowledge that their moral maximalism cannot ever quite deliver this and that the human cost along the way may be disturbingly high; or those whose generosity has about it some dimension of warmth or joy as well as effectiveness.

by Rowan Williams, Literary Review |  Read more:

Image: Strangers Drowning

[ed. See also: The Politics of the Hoodie]

via: