Worm

[ed. I have no idea, but if you want to explore - have at it.]

Worm:

An introverted teenage girl with an unconventional superpower, Taylor goes out in costume to find escape from a deeply unhappy and frustrated civilian life. Her first attempt at taking down a supervillain sees her mistaken for one, thrusting her into the midst of the local ‘cape’ scene’s politics, unwritten rules, and ambiguous morals. As she risks life and limb, Taylor faces the dilemma of having to do the wrong things for the right reasons.

The story, titled Worm, takes the form of a web serial, posted in bite-sized reads in much the same way that authors such as Mark Twain would release their works one chapter at a time in the days before full-fledged novels. Worm started in June 2011, updating twice a week, and finished in late November, 2013. It totals roughly 1,680,000 words; roughly 26 typical novels in length (or 10-11 very thick novels). The story updated on Tuesdays and Saturdays, with bonus chapters appearing on the occasional Thursday, as explained below.

The actual work is divided into a number of story arcs, each containing five to sixteen individual chapters. Interludes (side stories) are inserted between each story arc to showcase events from different perspectives or provide some background information that the reader wouldn’t get from Taylor’s point of view. Further interludes were released as bonus content when the audience reached specific donation goals, but these were found to distract from the core story (with a good reception, but still) and were paced out more in favor of additional main-story chapters.

Readers should be cautioned that Worm is fairly dark as fiction goes, and it gets far darker as the story progresses. Morality isn’t black and white, Taylor and her acquaintances aren’t invincible, the heroes aren’t winning the war between right and wrong, and superpowers haven’t necessarily affected society for the better. Just the opposite on every count, really. Even on a more fundamental level, Taylor’s day to day life is unhappy, with her clinging to the end of her rope from the story’s outset. The denizens of the Wormverse (as readers have termed it) don’t pull punches, and I try to avoid doing so myself, as a writer. There’s graphic language, descriptions of violence and sex does happen (albeit offscreen). It would be easier to note the trigger warnings that don’t apply than all the ones that do.

All in all, this probably isn’t a story for the sensitive or the young. I’d peg it with a PG-18 rating, but I think we all know that there’s kids who can handle that sort of thing and there’s adults who can’t. Use your best judgement and ask in the comments below if you’re still unsure.

If I haven’t scared you off yet, you can begin reading Taylor’s story here. Enjoy.

via:

Why Is Flying Still Expensive Even Though Fuel’s Gotten So Cheap?

The far-reaching consequences of the recent drop in oil prices have been a testimony to just how central crude is in American life: With cheap gasoline bringing more drivers onto the road, traffic deaths were up nearly 10 percentin the first nine months of 2015. Meanwhile, after remote towns in North Dakota surged with thousands ready to work the Bakken, the luxury apartments built to accommodate them are half-vacant now that demand has died down. And recycling companies have seen their business dry up as oil’s impact on the math of producing plastic has prompted manufacturers to just make their own.

But there’s one nook of the country’s economy where the plummeting price of oil hasn’t yet been felt: plane tickets.

Jet fuel—which accounts for a good portion of airlines’ expenses—currently costs about a third of what it did two years ago. Yet ticket prices have been declining much more modestly, falling roughly 3 percent per quarter over the last year.

How much do airlines stand to gain from a drop in oil prices? A good estimate, according to Volodymyr Bilotkach, a senior lecturer in economics at Newcastle University, is that fuel has typically made up about a third of airlines’ operating costs. As the price of fuel has dropped, it’s been taking up a smaller and smaller share of these expenses, to the point that now, he estimates, fuel only makes up about 15 percent of airlines’ spending (assuming their other costs have remained roughly equal).

A change of that magnitude greatly improves airlines’ bottom lines: Last year the four biggest U.S. carriers—American, Southwest, Delta, and United—brought in $22 billion in profits.

It’s not surprising that airlines would be slow to forfeit the gains they’ve seen from all those fuel savings, but, curiously, they haven’t been lowering ticket prices very much, which would be a natural way to start trying to steal customers from one another. Even some surcharges that were concocted when times were tighter—charging customers for sitting in aisle or window seats, for instance—still remain in place. Cruelly, even fees that were originally conceived to cover fuel costs have stuck around, even if they now go by different names.

So why isn’t a bigger chunk of these savings being passed onto travelers? This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen—there’s supposed to be at least one company that’s willing to lower its prices and cannibalize its competition’s customers.

But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, airlines are spending their money on buying new planes and on moves that please shareholders, such as share buybacks.

“There is not much competition left in the U.S. airline industry,” says Bilotkach. Over the past decade and a half, the industry has witnessed a ton of consolidation (most notably in mergers between Delta and Northwest, United and Continental, and American and U.S. Airways), which means that airlines are less likely to try to undercut one another on price. Yes, it’s true that a low number of carriers doesn’t necessarily imply that there’s a lack of competition—what matters is whether they’re competing on certain routes. But, Bilotkach says, it’s rare for two airlines compete directly on an a nonstop U.S. flight path.

There’s another reason that airlines aren’t competing fiercely on ticket prices: There’s a good deal of overlap in their ownership. For instance, the five biggest American fund managers together own about 17 percent of each American and Delta. As an analysis by José Azar, a senior associate at the consultancy Charles River Associates, found, ownership-overlaps like this cause tickets to be about 10 percent steeper than they would be otherwise.

Could any of this change? The Department of Justice launched an inquiry last summer (before it was clear that the precipitous fall in oil prices would last longer than a few months) into whether American airlines’ pricing decisions qualify as collusion. But to prove anything like that, federal prosecutors would need to find evidence that airlines coordinated with each other—which probably doesn’t exist. More likely, investigators will find a happily uncompetitive industry in which no formal coordination is necessary.

by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Kim Kyung Hoon / Reuters

Facebook is Eating the World

[ed. See also: More musings on media]

Something really dramatic is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere, and our journalism industry, almost without us noticing and certainly without the level of public examination and debate it deserves. Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years than perhaps at any time in the past five hundred. We are seeing huge leaps in technical capability—virtual reality, live video, artificially intelligent news bots, instant messaging, and chat apps. We are seeing massive changes in control, and finance, putting the future of our publishing ecosystem into the hands of a few, who now control the destiny of many.

Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security. The phone in our pocket is our portal to the world. I think in many ways this heralds enormously exciting opportunities for education, information, and connection, but it brings with it a host of contingent existential risks.

Journalism is a small subsidiary activity of the main business of social platforms, but one of central interest to citizens.

The internet and the social Web enable journalists to do powerful work, while at the same time helping to make the business of publishing journalism an uneconomic venture.

Two significant things have already happened that we have not paid enough attention to:

First, news publishers have lost control over distribution.

Social media and platform companies took over what publishers couldn’t have built even if they wanted to. Now the news is filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable. The news business is embracing this trend, and digital native entrants like BuzzFeed, Vox and Fusion have built their presence on the premise that they are working within this system, not against it.

Second, the inevitable outcome of this is the increase in power of social media companies.

The largest of the platform and social media companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and even second order companies such as Twitter, Snapchat and emerging messaging app companies, have become extremely powerful in terms of controlling who publishes what to whom, and how that publication is monetized.

There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect than there ever has been in the past. Networks favor economies of scale, so our careful curation of plurality in media markets such as the UK, disappears at a stroke, and the market dynamics and anti-trust laws the Americans rely on to sort out such anomalies are failing.

The mobile revolution is behind much of this.

Because of the revolution in mobile, the amount of time we spend online, the number of things we do online, and the attention we spend on platforms has exploded.

The design and capabilities of our phones (thank you Apple), favor apps, which foster different behavior. Google did recent research through its Android platform that showed, while we might have an average of 25 apps on our phones, we only use four or five of those apps every day, and of those apps we use every day, the most significant chunk of our time is spent on a social media app. And at the moment the reach of Facebook is far greater than any other social platform.

The majority of American adults are Facebook users, and the majority of those users regularly get some kind of news from Facebook, which according to Pew Research Center data, means that around 40 percent of US adults overall consider Facebook a source of news.

So let’s recap:

1. People are increasingly using their smartphones for everything.
2. They do it mostly through apps, and in particular social and messaging apps, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter.
3. The competition to become such an app is intense. Competitive advantage for platforms relies on being able to keep your users within an app. The more your users are within your app, the more you know about them, the more that information can then be used to sell advertising, the higher your revenues.

The competition for attention is fierce. The “four horsemen of the apocalypse”—Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon (five if you add in Microsoft)—are engaged in a prolonged and torrid war over whose technologies, platforms, and even ideologies will win.

In the last year, journalists and news publishers have therefore unexpectedly found themselves the beneficiaries of this conflict.

In the past year, Snapchat launched its Discover App, giving channels to brands like Vice, BuzzFeed, the Wall Street Journal, Cosmo, and the Daily Mail. Facebook launched Instant Articles, which it recently announced will be opened up to all publishers in April. Apple and Google quickly followed suit, launching Apple News and Accelerated Mobile Pages, respectively. Not wanting to be left out, Twitter also launched its own Moments, an aggregation of trending material on the platform to tell complete stories about events.

It is very good news that well-resourced platform companies are designing systems that distribute news. But as one door opens, another one is closing.

At the same time that publishers are being enticed to publish directly into apps and new systems, which will rapidly grow their mobile audiences, Apple announced it would allow ad-blocking software to be downloaded from its App store.

In other words, if as a publisher your alternative to going onto a distributed platform is to make money through mobile advertising, anyone on an iPhone can now block all ads and their invidious tracking software. Articles that appear within platforms, such as Discover on Snapchat or Instant Articles on Facebook, are largely, though not totally, immune from blockers. Effectively, the already very small share of mobile digital advertising publishers might be getting independently from mobile is potentially cut out. Of course, one might add that publishers had it coming from weighing down their pages with intrusive ads nobody wanted in the first place.

There are three alternatives for commercial publishers.

One is to push even more of your journalism straight to an app like Facebook and its Instant Articles where ad blocking is not impossible but harder than at the browser level. As one publisher put it to me, “We look at the amount we might make from mobile and we suspect that even if we gave everything straight to Facebook, we would still be better off.” The risks, though, in being reliant on the revenue and traffic from one distributor, are very high.

The second option is to build other businesses and revenues away from distributed platforms. Accept that seeking a vast audience through other platforms is not only not helping you but actively damaging your journalism, so move to a measurement of audience engagement rather than scale.

Membership or subscription are most commonly considered in this context. Ironically, the prerequisites for this are having a strong brand identity that subscribers feel affinity towards. In a world where content is highly distributed, this is far harder to achieve than when it is tied to packaged physical products. Even in the handful of cases where subscription is working, it is often not making up the shortfall in advertising.

The third is, of course, to make advertising that doesn’t look like advertising at all, so ad blockers can’t detect it. This used to be called “advertorial” or “sponsorship,” but now is known as “native advertising,” and it has grown to nearly a quarter of all digital display advertising in the US. In fact, digitally native companies like BuzzFeed, Vox, and hybrids like Vice, have disrupted the failing publishing model by essentially becoming advertising agencies—which are themselves in danger of failing. What I mean by this is that they deal directly with advertisers, they make the kind of viral video films and GIFs we see scattered all over our Facebook pages, and then they publish them to all those people who have previously “liked” or shared other material from that publisher.

The logical answer reached by many publishers to much of this is to invest in their own destination apps. But as we have seen, even your own app has to be compliant with the distribution standards of others in order to work. And investing in maintaining your own presence comes at a time when advertising (particularly in print) is under pressure, and online advertising is not growing either. The critical balance between destination and distribution is probably the hardest investment decision traditional publishers have to make right now.

Publishers are reporting that Instant Articles are giving them maybe three or four times the traffic they would expect. The temptation for publishers to go “all in” on distributed platforms, and just start creating journalism and stories that work on the social Web, is getting stronger. I can imagine we will see news companies totally abandoning production capacity, technology capacity, and even advertising departments, and delegating it all to third-party platforms in an attempt to stay afloat.

This is a high-risk strategy: You lose control over your relationship with your readers and viewers, your revenue, and even the path your stories take to reach their destination.

With billions of users and hundreds of thousands of articles, pictures, and videos arriving online everyday, social platforms have to employ algorithms to try and sort through the important and recent and popular and decide who ought to see what. And we have no option but to trust them to do this.

In truth, we have little or no insight into how each company is sorting its news. If Facebook decides, for instance, that video stories will do better than text stories, we cannot know that unless they tell us or unless we observe it. This is an unregulated field. There is no transparency into the internal working of these systems.

There are huge benefits to having a new class of technically able, socially aware, financially successful, and highly energetic people like Mark Zuckerberg taking over functions and economic power from some of the staid, politically entrenched, and occasionally corrupt gatekeepers we have had in the past. But we ought to be aware, too, that this cultural, economic, and political shift is profound.

We are handing the controls of important parts of our public and private lives to a very small number of people, who are unelected and unaccountable.

We need regulation to make sure all citizens gain equal access to the networks of opportunity and services they need. We also need to know that all public speech and expression will be treated transparently, even if they cannot be treated equally. This is a basic requirement for a functioning democracy.

For this to happen, there has to be at least some agreement that the responsibilities in this area are shifting. The people who built these platform companies did not set out to do so in order to take over the responsibilities of a free press. In fact, they are rather alarmed that this is the outcome of their engineering success.

by Emily Bell, Columbia Journalism Review |  Read more:

Image: AP

Taxicab Confessions
Image: Romina Diaz-Brarda, New York Cabs

The Church Collection Plate Goes Digital

Dylan Ciamacco, 25, first went to the Los Angeles outpost of international megachurch C3 as a teen. His mom thought a lot of the young people there—in skinny jeans, chunky sweaters, and leather jackets—dressed like him. He’d emerged recently from a “sick” (as in awesome) atheist phase, he says, mocking himself, and was looking to go back to church.

A typical service, Ciamacco says, opens with a band that would fit in at the Coachella festival, were it not for the Jesus lyrics: “What a savior, my Redeemer/Friend of sinners, one like me.” (In one podcast, a pastor, sermonizing about society’s obsession with markers of achievement, uses an Internet-approved term of endearment to channel his audience, asking, “When am I going to get my own bae?”) At the end, a member of the “worship team” will call on parishioners to tithe and pass the collection plate. But not all people reach into their wallet. Many take out their phone instead.

Ciamacco gives each week, using the Tithe.ly app. It takes fewer than five taps, and built-in geolocation means he can contribute at any of the 1,000 churches that subscribe—a feature that’s especially useful around holidays like Easter, when many people travel. Tithe.ly lets worshipers set up automatic recurring payments, but because Ciamacco’s paycheck fluctuates with his work as a freelance video producer, he tithes on demand—usually about 10 percent of whatever he’s brought in.

Although churches are saying a collective hallelujah that a new generation of devotees is filling pews, a youthful congregation has its limitations. Twentysomethings might find religion, but not a lot of them have found that six-figure job. They don’t carry cash—and what, exactly, is a personal check? Still, about a quarter of them use mobile payment apps such as PayPal and Venmo regularly, according to a recent Accenture survey. And enormously popular services such as Seamless, Uber, and Amazon.com have normalized one-tap payments—91 percent of millennials use their phone to buy something at least once a month, market-research firm Statista says.

Tithe.ly is one of a handful of apps leveraging that spending behavior for the good of the church. Pushpay, which about 3,000 congregations employ, works similarly; worshipers decide whether to donate to a general budget or a specific program the institution designates. Another, EasyTithe, features a text-to-give option. It also provides technology for a Square-like credit card reader to await the faithful in church lobbies. Regardless of which app a congregation chooses, the point is convenience. “We call it frictionless giving,” says Dean Sweetman, Tithe.ly’s co-founder and a former minister at C3 Atlanta. He designed the app with C3’s wallet-light clientele in mind: “We see people giving all times of day and night. Nothing stands in the way.

by Rebecca Greenfield, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Brandon Celi

Joe Cool

Today's consumerism is riddled with elaborate and often meaningless choices: Which brand of pasta should you buy? Would that be best with Ragu, Amy’s Organic, or Muir Glen marinara sauce? Should that be accompanied by Kraft or DiGiorno preshredded parmesan? Who cares.

As psychologist Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less argues, too much consumer choice can be demotivating rather than empowering or exciting — the direct opposite of what the core values of mainstream American consumerism would lead you to expect. Choice, Schwartz explains, “enables us to control our destinies and to come close to getting exactly what we want out of any situation. Choice is essential to autonomy, which is absolutely fundamental to well-being.” But the “fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better.” More choice comes with a cost: a haunting fear that we will choose wrong. Clinging to all the choices means we never seem to make any. Anxiety never gives way to clarity. Is this what it means to live your best life? Oprah would never agree with that.

Citing a series of studies into optional paralysis, Schwartz writes that having many options may discourage consumers because it “forces an increase in the effort that goes into making a decision. So consumers decide not to decide, and don’t buy the product. Or if they do, the effort that the decision requires detracts from the enjoyment derived from the results.”

If choice is demotivating, can its absence encourage more consumption? Would a uniform generic option be a source of liberation, as the theoretical premises of normcore would have it? If we have less choice, do we, paradoxically enough, experience more flexibility? In learning to more easily adapt to where we’re at and who we’re with rather than forever searching for short-lived ways to be “unique,” may we actually experience something closer to a better life?

Trader Joe’s is on board with going generic. It doesn’t want to burden you with unnecessary choices between redundant products battling noisily for your attention; it instead offers a curated selection of mainly store-brand versions of everything a health-conscious consumer might need, from organic brown-rice-and-quinoa fusilli pasta to organic garden lasagna, that promise to be consistently good enough, if not especially outstanding.

Unlike with other American big-box grocery stores (and Trader Joe’s parent company, the German supermarket chain Aldi), where store brands tend to connote “no frills” cheapness and inferiority, Trader Joe’s generic goods have succeeded in conveying quality, familiarity, and originality all through the brand itself. Rather than ask the consumer to choose among different brands, the Trader Joe’s consumer just has to pick which products they like most. This strategy appears to work. In a recent survey, TJ’s customers were the most satisfied of any grocery stores, despite the crowds of harried customers, crowded parking lots, and long checkout lines one often encounters there.

But the lines and packed lots themselves can be reassuring, that you have come to the right place, that you are adapting to what “everyone else” is doing. It seems like the only option, just like its limited product choices. Trader Joe’s overall in-store aesthetic tries to consolidate these genteel inconveniences into a nostalgic evocation of old-time neighborhood mom ‘n pop stores: the mini-coffee bar with its free samples, the pseudo-cultured feel provided by the “ethnic” and very not-PC types of not-white Joe’s on store-brand packaging, like Trader Giotto (Italian foods) and Trader Ming (Chinese food) and Trader Jose’s (Mexican-ish) — note there is no African-American Joe. Everything at TJ’s is suggestive of a time when life was supposedly simpler, more traditional (e.g. homogeneous) — long before the big-box superstore, parking lots the size of football fields, and the proliferation of brands in the aisles and on social media.

As part of this strategy, the company is reticent about advertising: It restricts its marketing mainly to its almanac-like “Fearless Flyer” circular that conjures quaint images of old letterpresses and coupon-clipping grandmas. No social media, no email marketing, few radio ads, no television or newspaper ads. Part of Trader Joe’s appeal is that customers always already seem to know they are supposed to shop there, that they belong.

This runs counter to current brand-management strategy. Whereas other brands are joining platforms like WhatsApp or sliding into consumers’ DMs to try to maximize engagement, Trader Joe’s privileges the IRL, restricting its brand to in-store experiences and refusing to participate in social media. (...)

Though Trader Joe’s lack of social-media presence can be disconcerting to some of the store’s most fervent fans, it retains its particular appeal by playing hard to get. Social-media messaging would only muddle the company’s effort to sell its massively popular corporate brand as a neighborhood secret.

From the start, in 1967, “Trader Joe” Coulombe devised his “low-priced gourmet-cum-health-food store” with an “unemployed PhD student” in mind as the ideal customer. As he explained in 1985 to the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, he foresaw that this would be a “growing category.” Coulombe anticipated that these savvy, well-educated types would be alienated by mainstream advertising techniques, particularly ones that targeted an ignorance or lack in the consumer with products that were supposed to somehow fix it. Trader Joe’s customers would be presumed to already fully know who they are and what they want — imported cheeses, organic foods, relatively healthy prepared meals, international delicacies, microbrews, California wines — they only lacked means. Selling two-buck chuck to the broke graduate student became emblematic of Trader Joe’s philosophy: good-enough wine at a bargain price for those wise enough to be in the know. If Trader Joe’s started advertising, seeming to put everyone in the know, the wine might not seem so drinkable all of a sudden.

Trader Joe’s rejection of social media extends this approach. If Trader Joe’s were to join social media and chat with consumers, would that not just create the feeling of a fake, forced relationship? The right sort of customer craving the right sort of authenticity doesn’t need to vicariously latch on to brands on social media to feel complete. They aren’t slaves to Facebook or Twitter either. They have a “real” relationship with Trader Joe’s, grounded in going to the store, being there, being present. Trader Joe’s will not tweet at you. The only way to be recognized by Trader Joe’s is to have the cheery cashiers remember your name, to riff on Seinfeld-isms with some bearded guy serving samples of kung pao chicken with a side of brown rice. At Trader Joe’s, it’s IRL or nothing.

by Alicia Eler, TNI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Coping With Humans

[ed. Watson's intelligence seems to be improving commercials, anyway.]

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

[ed. See also: Teen Girls And Social Media: A Story Of 'Secret Lives' And Misogyny]

Garden City, Long Island: It was the day of the night of Lily’s first date, and she was worried about the eyeliner she ordered arriving from Amazon on time. It wasn’t exactly her firstdate, she said—she had been on dates, of sorts, since seventh grade, but this was the first one where she “really liked” the boy. He was “really smart, really funny, really athletic, really tall,” she said, eating chips at the long wooden table in the kitchen of her home, an eight-bedroom house on a leafy street in Garden City. “And he’s been my friend for a while”—since the previous summer, when they went to science camp together at an Ivy League university (“It sounds really nerdy I know, and it is, but honestly it’s fun”)—“and I really like him and he really likes me so I think it’s . . . yeah.” She nervously re-arranged her hair.

Lily said she wanted the date to be “perfect,” so she really wanted this certain Lancôme eyeliner to come before she had to start getting ready to go out. “It goes on the best and you can make wings like Audrey Hepburn’s. I saw it on a beauty tutorial. I watch tons of them ’cause they give you really good information.”

She had ordered the eyeliner on Amazon the night before for next-day delivery. “My mom’s credit card is on there,” she said, “so we can just like get whatever we want. She never notices.”

The doorbell rang and some packages came—the UPS man had two: some squishy neon-colored balls for Lily’s younger sister, Olivia, 10, and Lily’s eyeliner. “Oh, thank you!” Lily told the UPS man, signing for it.

“Don’t tell Mom,” she told Olivia, the package under her arm. “Where is Mom?”

“She took Henry to the Apple store,” Olivia said, tearing open her box of squishy balls. Henry was her brother, age 12.

“Why?” Lily asked.

“To buy him a new iPhone,” Olivia said. “He broke his. He threw it at the wall when he got mad at the game he was playing. He threw it twice.”

Lily was glad Henry wouldn’t be in the house while she was getting ready to go on her date; he was always saying things to try and make her doubt herself, always comparing himself to her, saying he was better at sports, and she was “dumb” for caring about things like clothes and makeup. “Little brothers, you know?” She shrugged. “He’s a pain. He’s just jealous because I’m older and he’s immature. He has A.D.H.D.; he never wants to do his homework. And sometimes he smells.” Lily had A.D.H.D., too, she said, but the prescription drugs she took controlled it and she could concentrate. “And I’m just, like, very driven,” she added. She said she also suffered from anxiety and took medication for that.

She was one of the top students in her grade at a competitive Manhattan private school. She was also an athlete, good at many sports. “My whole family’s good at sports,” she said breezily. “That’s one of the reasons we moved out here to Garden City, so my brother could play soccer.”

Garden City is a village of some 22,000 people, about an hour’s drive from Manhattan, an affluent community with many beautiful churches, a place centered on raising kids, raising them to be successes. An estimated 99 percent of Garden City High School graduates go on to colleges, many of them high-ranking. The school district is known for its strength in sports; in the afternoons, the playing fields are dotted with kids in team uniforms, running up and down. “Garden City kids are sick at sports,” said Matt, a 17-year-old boy at Roosevelt Field, a mall in East Garden City, the 10th largest mall in America; it used to be an airfield.

“You work hard, you excel at sports,” Matt said, “you get into an Ivy League school, or even like an N.Y.U. or a Boston College, you make your parents look good, and they, like, pay you for your time. They see everything in terms of money so that’s how they show their love—through money.” “But a lot of kids who are fuck-ups get whatever they want, too,” his friend Roxanne, 16, observed.

During the financial crisis of 2008, The New York Times ran a story about how the residents of Garden City were coping; one resident, a wealth manager, told the paper, “Someone from Des Moines might not feel bad about well-off people like this losing their money, but people get used to an income level.” The number of Garden City residents who work in finance and real estate has been estimated at 20 percent.

Lily’s father was a lawyer who worked in Manhattan and her mother was a stay-at-home mom. As the oldest of five, Lily said she never felt she had her parents’ full attention; the littler kids took up so much of her mother’s time and “my dad is, like, never home.” Her mother did pay her attention, she said, but she was “always, like, managing me and making sure I’m doing everything right.” So now it was nice—“so nice,” she said—to have someone in her life like Josh, her date, who would just talk to her and listen to her, and tell her she was pretty, “Oh my God, like all the time.”

They hadn’t actually seen each other in person for about a year. After camp, they started gradually making contact through Facebook messaging, occasional texting, favoriting each other’s tweets and liking each other’s pictures on Instagram. “I just thought of him as a friend after camp until a month or two ago,” Lily said. And then something happened when they Skyped. “We just talked and talked for like four hours, and he really liked talking to me and I really liked talking to him so . . . yeah.” Again she nervously re-arranged her hair.

Ever since then, she said, she and Josh had been Skyping most nights for about an hour, and then for three- or four-hour stretches every weekend, only stopping “when we have to, like, go to the bathroom or take a shower.” Now they were texting all day, every day, even during school (“We just talk about whatever we’re doing, or we’ll say, like, Hey, what’s up, hi, bye”). He was the last person she talked to at night before she went to sleep and the first person she talked to in the morning, “when I open my eyes.” (...)

Now that she had the eyeliner, the next thing was to figure out what to wear. She searched in her closet and the heaps of clothes strewn everywhere in her room. Her room was messy, crammed with things: a bed, desk, a chair, clothes, books, shoes, discarded toys, and an elliptical exercise machine she used to “stay in shape.” “Sometimes when I’m stressed out I just go on it for like an hour and it takes the stress away.”

She began piecing together an outfit. “I have a pretty good fashion sense,” she said. “I modeled for like two years, but then I gave up because I fell down on the runway,” in a practice show, “and I didn’t like it anymore. I modeled from like 11 to 13—I was in a modeling agency. It was cool, it was fun, but it got to be too much, so I quit.” When I talked to Lily’s mother, later, she said that Lily “could be” a model, if she were only taller. “The lady at the agency would do our makeup and we would practice doing fake photo shoots and we would practice the catwalk in high heels,” said Lily. “It was fun to feel like everyone was watching you and it was cool to be able to say, like, I’m part of a modeling agency.”

I asked what had made her want to model. She thought a moment. “I guess I wanted to do it from seeing models on TV and in magazines—it was like, Oh, if I can be a model, girls will look up to me like I look up to these girls. Whenever I’d see models in magazines it was like, Wow, she’s really pretty and if I can be a model, girls will be like, Wow, she’s really pretty, too. I love America’s Next Top Model. It’s cool to watch what that life would be like. It’s such a glamorous life.” (...)

Lily said that she first started “dating” boys in seventh grade. “I had my first boyfriend then. I think I would have little crushes, like cute little crushes from fourth grade, but I wouldn’t go on dates. I don’t have serious relationships now because what’s the point, what’s the rush? You can be young and have your fun. But a lot of girls my age have serious boyfriends, serious dates. They’ll go to fancy restaurants together in the city, go to parties together. It’s crazy. They have, like, serious plans for the future, like what they’ll do when they go off to college or something, and I’m like, how can you even think of that at this moment?

“Girls in my school and girls on Long Island where I live,” she went on, “they do the same thing. There will be pictures on Facebook of girls my age out at these fancy places in fancy dresses, like they’re going to get married next week or something. They put pictures on social media—it’s a huge thing, boyfriends and social media. Girls that have boyfriends show them off on Facebook and Instagram. It’s not like they’re maliciously wanting people to think, Oh, look at my boyfriend, he’s so much hotter than your boyfriend, it’s just they want to show off what they’re doing, and the boys want to show off what they’re doing, too; so you’ll see all these photos on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, status updates 24/7—maybe to, like, even make people jealous.

“In seventh grade, that’s when it picks up,” she said. “They would have these little dances in seventh grade for private schools; I met my first boyfriend at one of those. It was cute, a little kiss on the cheek and stuff; sometimes we’d go out for ice cream. And seventh grade is when things really heat up on social media. That’s when boys start liking all your posts to get your attention. If a boy likes a lot of your posts, then he likes you. Especially if he likes your profile picture, ’cause that’s how you’re represented online—if he likes your profile picture that’s how you know.

“Social media is 95 percent of what happens in all relationships now,” she said. “How we talk is on social media. A lot of people don’t even meet; they just have boyfriends online. Girls meet their boyfriends online. That’s really scary to me; like I have a friend who just recently met a guy on social media—she never met him before in her life—and they were dating, and, like, that freaks me out because what if he were a serial killer or something? I mean, good for her for having a boyfriend at all, but I mean she never even really met this guy, she met him on iFunny—it’s this place where you share pictures and stuff, you make funny captions of pictures; they opened up a chat room and started to chat and Snapchat. It’s creepy to me to think, Well, what if he’s a rapist?”

by Nancy Jo Sales, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: NPR

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

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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)
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