The Fight for the Future of NPR

One day in May 2015, Eric Nuzum stood before a gathering of influential NPR trustees and board members, and showed them a photograph of a young woman with shoulder-length brown hair. “This is Lara,” Nuzum’s slide read. “Lara is the future of NPR.”

At the time, Nuzum was NPR’s head of programming. The presentation, which he delivered at a meeting of the NPR Foundation, was meant to drive home his most closely held belief about public radio: that young people have different habits, expectations, and aesthetic inclinations than the millions of loyal listeners NPR has been serving since its birth in 1971. “Lara” was a stand-in for an audience that NPR was failing to attract—according to one analysis, the median age of NPR’s radio audience has steadily climbed from roughly 45 years old two decades ago to 54 last year—and one it would need to reach in order to guarantee its survival.

What Nuzum didn’t say during his presentation was that, one day earlier, he had decided to end his decade-long career at NPR and sign a contract with the Amazon-owned audiobook company Audible. Nuzum’s job there would be to develop a slate of original programming that would give Audible a stake in the tantalizing new market for audio storytelling. Although the NPR Foundation people didn’t know it yet, the man who was warning them about needing to win over Lara had just been stolen away by a corporate audio giant.

Today, Nuzum belongs to a club you could call the NPR apostates—onetime servants of public radio who parted ways with the organization and entered the private sector amid frustrations over how NPR and its member stations were approaching the future of the industry. In addition to Nuzum—whose Audible project launched in beta last week—other prominent members include Alex Blumberg, who founded the podcasting startup Gimlet Media, and Adam Davidson, who is an investor in Gimlet and an adviser to a new digital audio unit at the New York Times.

The work these defectors are doing outside of NPR—and the ways in which it promises to destabilize their old employer—has, in recent weeks, become the subject of intense and emotional debate in the world of public radio. The tumult was touched off in late March, when an NPR executive announced that the network’s own digital offerings—most importantly, its marquee iPhone app, NPR One—were not to be promoted during shows airing on terrestrial radio.

The ban was widely viewed as proof that NPR is less interested in reaching young listeners than in placating the managers of local member stations, who pay handsome fees to broadcast NPR shows and tend to react with suspicion when NPR promotes its efforts to distribute those shows digitally. After the gag order was made public, dozens of public radio and podcasting people set about picking at an old scab—discussing, spiritedly, in multiple forums, whether the antiquated economic arrangements that govern NPR’s relationships with its member stations are holding it back from innovation.

The debate also raised an even thornier and as-yet-unanswered question: What is the value of NPR’s core journalistic offerings—the brief, sober dispatches that air every day on its flagship shows Morning Edition and All Things Considered—in an age when its terrestrial audience is growing older and younger listeners seem to prefer addictive, irreverent, and entertaining podcasts over the news?

The critics say NPR has been standing with its toes in the ocean for too long, curbing its digital ambitions in order to appease legacy radio stations. As its competitors dash into the waves, the question of whether NPR can ever catch up, and what will become of it if it doesn’t, has become increasingly urgent. Can the people who are running NPR make radio for Lara? Or has she already tuned them out for good?

To understand NPR’s predicament, it’s crucial to first understand what NPR is and what NPR is not. In some ways, the second part is easier. NPR is not a radio station, and it is not responsible for every show in which polite voices speak in a restrained, earnest manner about the issues of the day; other players that traffic in such fare include American Public Media, which produces Marketplace, and Public Radio International, which co-produces The Takeaway. NPR is not involved in the making of This American Life, a program that was launched by member station WBEZ in Chicago and has been operating independently since 2014. Nor did NPR createSerial, the blockbuster podcast that debuted a little less than two years ago and convinced many people that there is money to be made in the medium of podcasting.

So what is NPR? In short, it’s a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., that produces and distributes an assortment of popular radio shows to federally funded local stations all across the country. Some of these stations are tiny and depend entirely on programming they have licensed from outside entities. Others, such as New York’s WNYC or Boston’s WBUR, are powerhouses that produce nationally syndicated shows of their own, like WNYC’s Radiolab and WBUR’s On Point With Tom Ashbrook.

What does this have to do with whether or not NPR will still be making journalism that people want to listen to in 50 years? The answer lies in NPR’s flagship news programs: Morning Edition, which typically airs on member stations from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. ET, and All Things Considered, which comes on at 4 p.m. and continues through drive time. The two programs, which are known inside NPR as “the newsmagazines,” are the biggest shows NPR produces, both in terms of revenue and audience. Broadcast on approximately 900 radio stations across the country, they reach an estimated weekly audience of more than 25 million people.

Between the licensing fees that member stations pay to air the shows and the sponsorship revenue they attract, Morning Edition and All Things Considered are responsible for bringing in a bigger slice of NPR’s annual budget than any other source of funding. Member stations—which have controlled a majority of NPR’s board seats since the early 1980s—have strongly opposed the idea of making the shows available as on-demand podcasts, fearing a loss of listeners and revenue. According to critics like Davidson and Nuzum, limitations like these have prevented NPR from making a bigger impact in the digital space.

by Leon Neyfakh, Slate | Read more:
Image: NPR

The Privilege of Clutter

[ed. I "decluttered" four years ago and couldn't be happier. There's a sense of unburdened freedom (some would say freedom to buy more stuff - but not me). Possessions can own you as much as you own them. See also: The Privilege of Clutter, Cont'd]

At every wedding I’ve been to this past year, the event space has been decorated with family portraits—black-and-white photos of grandmothers and grandfathers, pictures of parents with giant smiles and ‘70s hairstyles. Meanwhile, the bride and groom wear family relics and heirlooms: jewelry passed from mother to daughter, cufflinks and ties passed from father to son.

As a child I used to cry when looking at those kinds of photos and mementos. But it wasn’t until this past summer when I was planning my own wedding that I understood just why these kinds of items inspired so many complicated feelings. When my now-husband asked if we wanted to make a slideshow of our family photos for our own wedding, I realized we barely had any. Both my grandmother and grandfather emigrated from Poland to Cuba in the years preceding the Holocaust: my grandmother by boat with her mother in 1930 when she was 8 years old, and my grandfather in 1937, at the age of 18. They fell in love with each other and the country that took them in, even as they grieved the family members who didn’t make it out alive.

After Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, their lives changed once more. Their small store was closed for periods of time by the government (the boards covering their storefront were frequently graffitied with threatening swastikas, a sign that they may not have entirely escaped the frightening environment they tried to leave in Europe). As the revolution began, material comforts began to disappear. Eventually, their business and home were both shut down by the Cuban government and, in 1968, my grandparents, mother, and aunt came to the U.S., leaving everything but a few pieces of clothing behind.

In the U.S,. my grandparents and mother responded to the trauma they’d experienced by holding on to things. My grandfather was a collector who was prone to hoarding. He’d often find random trinkets on the street and bring them home, and he kept everything, from books to receipts to costume jewelry. My grandmother and my mother were more practical, saving and storing canned foods, socks, and pantyhose. In my home, we didn’t throw out food or plastic bags, or clothing that was out of style but that still fit us. We saved everything.

Today, when my mother comes to visit she still brings bags full of useful items, from Goya beans to cans of tuna fish and coffee: things she knows will last us for months and months. It doesn’t matter if I tell her we just went to the store, or that we have plenty of food, or that I don’t need any more socks or underwear. A full pantry, a house stocked with usable objects, is the ultimate expression of love.

As a girl growing up in the U.S., I was often exhausted by this proliferation of items—by what seemed to me to be an old-world expression of maternal love. Like many who are privileged enough to not have to worry about having basic things, I tend to idolize the opposite—the empty spaces of yoga studios, the delightful feeling of sorting through a pile of stuff that I can discard. I’m not alone in appreciating the lightness and freedom of a minimalist lifestyle. The KonMari method, a popular practical philosophy for de-cluttering your home, has tapped into a major cultural zeitgeist.

Since the Japanese “professional organizer” Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was released in 2014, it’s become a New York Times bestseller and sold over 3 million copies. Kondo’s tips on de-cluttering have been featured everywhere from The Today Show to Real Simple to The Guardian, and have inspired the follow-ups Spark Joy, an illustrated guide to tidying things up even more, and Life-Changing Magic, a journal where you can ruminate on the pleasures of owning only your most cherished personal belongings.It doesn’t matter if I tell her we just went to the store. A full pantry, a house stocked with usable objects, is the ultimate expression of love.

At its heart, the KonMari method is a quest for purity. To Kondo, living your life surrounded by unnecessary items is “undisciplined,” while a well-tidied house filled with only the barest essentials is the ultimate sign of personal fulfillment. Kondo’s method involves going through all the things you own to determine whether or not they inspire feelings of joy. If something doesn’t immediately provoke a sense of happiness and contentment, you should get rid of it.

Kondo seems suspicious of the idea that our relationship with items might change over time. She instructs her readers to get rid of books we never finished, and clothes we only wore once or twice. She warns us not to give our precious things to our family and friends, unless they expressly ask for them. She’s especially skeptical of items that have sentimental value. In her first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo says,

Just as the word implies, mementos are reminders of a time when these items gave us joy. The thought of disposing them sparks the fear that we’ll lose those precious memories along with them. But you don’t need to worry. Truly precious memories will never vanish even if you discard the objects associated with them … No matter how wonderful things used to be, we cannot live in the past. The joy and excitement we feel in the here and now are most important.

Throughout Spark Joy, Kondo includes adorable minimalist drawings of happily organized bathrooms, kitchens and closets. Sometimes she even includes drawings of anthropomorphized forest animals lovingly placing items into drawers using the KonMari method.

Kondo is unfailingly earnest in her assertion that the first step to having a joyful life is through mindful consideration of your possessions. Emotions throughout both of her books are presented as being as simple as her drawings. You either feel pure love for an object or you let it go. But beneath some of the self-help-inspired platitudes about how personally enriched you’ll feel after you’ve discarded items you don’t need, there’s an underlying tone of judgment about the emotional wellbeing of those who submit to living in clutter. Those who live in KonMari homes are presented as being more disciplined: invulnerable to the throes of nostalgia, impervious to the temptation of looking back at something that provokes mixed feelings.

Though an article on Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness website Goop claims that American culture is the embodiment of excess, it’s pretty clear to me why the KonMari Method has caught on in the U.S. A recurring emphasis on self-improvement and an obsession with restriction can be found in everything from diet trends (where we learn to cut calories in order to be smaller and less encumbered by literal weight), to the consumer culture fixation with replacing old things that no longer provide joy with new, “improved” things that will.

For affluent Americans who’ve never wanted for anything, Kondo sells an elegant fantasy of paring back and scaling down at a time when simplicity is a hot trend. The tiny-house movement, for example, urges consumers to eschew McMansion- style houses for the adorably twee simplicity of a 250-square-foot home.If our life is made from the objects we collect over time, then surely our very sense of who we are is dependent upon the things we carry.

Of course, in order to feel comfortable throwing out all your old socks and handbags, you have to feel pretty confident that you can easily get new ones. Embracing a minimalist lifestyle is an act of trust. For a refugee, that trust has not yet been earned. The idea that going through items cheerfully evaluating whether or not objects inspire happiness is fraught for a family like mine, for whom cherished items have historically been taken away. For my grandparents, the question wasn’t whether an item sparked joy, but whether it was necessary for their survival. In America, that obsession transformed into a love for all items, whether or not they were valuable in a financial or emotional sense. If our life is made from the objects we collect over time, then surely our very sense of who we are is dependent upon the things we carry.

by Arielle Bernstein, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Picsfive / inchic / Skoda / Shutterstock / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

Helmut Newton

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3 Glasses Later

Things can get a bit fuzzy after a few glasses of wine, but Brazilian photographer Marcos Alberti has found a way to clearly conserve and catalog the merrymaking effects of the adored alcoholic beverage. In his latest series called 3 Glasses Later, which began as a joking experiment, Alberti invited friends to his apartment for happy hour and snapped their portraits just as they arrived, when their faces still reflected “the fatigue after working all day long, and from also facing rush hour traffic to get here.” He then captured the way their moods and mannerisms shifted after one, two, and three glasses of wine.

by Leah Pellegrini, My Modern Met | Read more:
Images: Marcos Alberti

[ed. Two looks to be the sweet spot. Reminds me of this quote, often misattributed to Dorothy Parker: I wish I could drink like a lady. “Two or three,” at the most. But two, and I’m under the table—And three, I'm under the host.]

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Save Comcast!

Cable TV is a welcome addition in the homes of millions of Americans, and for more than 75 years, it's been a force for radical transformation of the opportunities available to creators, performers, and audiences alike.

But these may be the last days of the cable system.

Oh, not this cable system. This cable system is fine. But for anyone who wants to invent a new cable system, to ascend to the daring heights of cable providers, the way is being blocked. Having climbed from scrappy pirates to fleet-commanding admirals, the executives of the cable world want to pull up the ladder after themselves -- and they're being given a critical assist by the World Wide Web Consortium, which once stood for open standards, competition and innovation on the Web.

Imagine you wanted to start a business that intercepted the most expensive, high-production-value video content in the country and retransmitted it on your own wires, charging your customers for the privilege and not sending a dime back to the broadcasters or production studios.

Sounds like piracy?

It's the cable industry, at its inception in 1948. Back then, cable was called "Community Antenna TV," and it was pioneered by scrappy, daring entrepreneurs who erected titanic broadcast receiver antennas with the height to tune in distant TV signals that were too faint for their customers' set-top rabbit-ears. These companies ran physical cables from the antennas to their customers' homes, providing them with TV service -- for a fee.

The broadcasters squawked, called it piracy, but the cable operators stuck to their guns, and successfully lobbied Congress to set a compulsory licensing scheme that let them retransmit any signals they could tune, at a fixed fee, without having to negotiate with broadcasters.

Cable began as an industry founded on the principle that it was better to beg forgiveness than get permission -- especially permission from an incumbent broadcast industry that wanted no part of any new, "disruptive" business models that might upset its apple cart.

Today, Comcast is one of a handful of entertainment companies, incumbent browser vendors, and companies that make products that restrict your access to your own computer who've successfully co-opted the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the world's leading maker of standards for the open Web, into standardizing a system that will prevent anyone from ever doing to today's cable operators what they did to broadcasters a generation ago.

The W3C's Encrypted Media Extensions system is specifically designed to prevent anyone from making use of copyrighted works without permission, even if those uses are allowed by law. With EME, companies get to decide which software can access the videos they send out, and what features that software is allowed to have.

Normally, when a company tries to prevent something you want to do, something the law allows, then other companies -- like those cable pioneers -- step up to sell you what the competition refuses to offer.

But EME is designed to allow companies to invoke a notorious law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which contains a clause (section 1201) that lets companies sue the competition for breaking their locks, even if those locks were preventing us from doing something the law allowed. Once a technology is squeezed into the DMCA zone, companies get to write their own laws, imposing restrictions on our use of their products and services, and invoking the power of the courts to enforce them.

This problem goes beyond the USA. The US Trade Representative is patient zero in a global epidemic of these laws, enacted by other countries' governments as a condition of trading with the USA.

When the W3C announced that it was going to do this work, we asked them not to. We told them that standardizing a system designed to stop new, innovative companies was a betrayal of the trust that the Web's users put in them, the hard-won trust that treats the W3C as an honest broker of an open Web.

They turned us down.

We've put a new proposal to them as a compromise: enact a binding legal agreement between W3C members that requires them not to invoke the DMCA to shut down the competition. This isn't as good as not making EME in the first place, but it's in keeping with the W3C's existing policies: the W3C already makes its members promise not to use their patents to attack new technologies.

We understand why Comcast doesn't want new companies to give it the same treatment it gave to the old guard when it was getting started. We just don't understand why the W3C is willing to help it accomplish this dubious goal. A gathering of all the major players in the industry to agree on a course of conduct that locks out new competitors for no valid reason would be illegal, a form of anti-competitive collusion. The W3C's EME project doesn't just give moral support to the idea of designing computers to control their owners -- it gives cover to the companies who get to choose the winners and losers on the Web forever after.

The W3C once stood for the open Web. After decades of using its power to make companies agree to clear the barriers that prevented innovation, now they're helping them create those barriers. It's a shame.

It's shameful.

The W3C is supposed to stand for a Web where users control their own devices. They're supposed to listen to users, not just the companies that profit from them.

Please share this post. The W3C still has it in its power to make EME's architects sign a nonaggression pact that protects the browsers, projects and tools that don't yet exist, that don't have a seat at the table with the companies that are trying to prevent them from ever getting started. With enough public pressure, we can convince them to do the right thing.

by Cory Doctorow, EFF |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

How the Very Rich Use Art to Get Richer

“Whether we like it or not, art is used for tax avoidance and evasion,” said NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini last year. “Plenty of people are using it for money laundering.”

It hardly comes as much of a surprise that amid the high-profile scandals and tales of political corruption in the Panama Papers, art is something of a constant: Mossack Fonseca was constantly helping to shuffle billions of dollars’ worth of art in and out of shell companies based in tax havens around the world.

ICIJ reporter Jake Bernstein has details on some of the more high-profile art-world scandals where Mossack Fonseca has been involved, although multi-million-dollar paintings turn up in other stories, too. Russian oligarch Dmitri Rybolovlev, for instance, incorporated a company called Xitrans Finance Ltd in the British Virgin Islands, to own paintings by Picasso, Modigliani, Van Gogh, Monet, Degas and Rothko. When he split from his wife Elena, he used Xitrans to move the art out of Switzerland – and, not coincidentally, out of the jurisdiction of the Swiss divorce courts.

If Mossack Fonseca’s main job was to keep assets and their ownership secret, then it was tailor-made for servicing the international art world, where dynastic fortunes can be made on the basis of nothing more than knowing who owns what.

Consider the man who sold Rybolovlev most of those paintings. Yves Bouvier is connected to five different Mossack Fonseca companies (Rybolovlev is comparatively modest, with a mere two), and would mark up the paintings he was selling by astonishing amounts. As Sam Knight has reported for The New Yorker, Bouvier started off by buying a Gauguin for $9.5 million and then selling it for $11.3 million, but soon got more ambitious. He bought a Picasso for $4.8 million and then flipped it to Rybolovlev for $34.4 million. He sold the oligarch a Klimt masterpiece for $183 million, including a $60 million profit for himself. There was also a Rothko that he bought for $80 million and sold for $189 million.

By those standards, the deal that caused the end of his relationship with Rybolovlev had a relatively low markup: Bouvier bought a Modigliani from Steve Cohen for $93.5 million, and then sold it to the Russian for $118 million. Add it all up, and Rybolovlev’s lawyers estimate that Bouvier overcharged his client by the hilariously specific, yet eye-poppingly enormous, sum of $1,049,465,009. Call it a nice round billion. (Rybolovlev declined the ICIJ’s request for a comment. A representative for Bouvier told ICIJ’s Bernstein that “his client used offshore companies for well-established legal purposes.” Mossack Fonseca has not yet commented on its involvement in art holdings, but has responded at length to the Panama Papers.)

Whether they were legal or not, those kind of markups could never be found in a transparent market. When everybody has the same information at the same time – in the stock market, for instance – dealers can get away with only the tiniest markups between where they’re buying and where they’re selling. In other areas where you’re selling unique and illiquid assets, like real estate, the markups are bigger, but still not enormous: The intermediary will normally end up collecting somewhere in the 2 to 3 percent range.

In the art world, by contrast, the most transparent companies of all – the auction houses – typically charge sellers about 12 percent, and buyers about 20 percent, for a total commission of more than 30 percent. And in private transactions, the slice taken by the middleman can be bigger still – even when prices get up into the $100 million range, as can be seen with the Bouvier-Rybolovlev transactions.

Such huge transaction costs are possible only because the art world runs on secrecy. There are some legitimate reasons for keeping things close to the chest – if you have a $100 million painting above your sofa, you might not want the whole world to know that fact. Still, on its face, it doesn’t make sense that so many of the world’s collectors keep the art they own a secret.

Knight reports that Bouvier specialized in “setting up offshore companies — Diva, Blancaflor, Eagle Overseas — to enable galleries to buy specific works and mask the identity of other investors in a transaction,” which is a great way to ensure that the buyers and sellers at the end of often long and complex chains are unaware of each others’ identities. The buyer doesn’t know how much the seller is receiving; the seller doesn’t know how much the buyer is paying, and neither one has any easy way of finding out. (Bouvier was finally rumbled only when Rybolovlev bumped into Cohen’s art advisor at a lunch in St. Barts and flat-out asked how much Cohen had sold his Modigliani for. Which is not the way the art world normally works.)

by Felix Salmon, Fusion |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Is Coachella Still Cool?

[ed. See also: From crop tops to Jimmy Choos: How Coachella became a fashion marketing hotbed]

It was the Coachella announcement that generated a million eye-rolls.

“Soar through the desert sky with UberCHOPPER this festival season,” trumpeted the Uber press release. “Reserve your UberCHOPPER powered by BLADE…in Los Angeles and Orange County, and we’ll get in touch to sort out all of your travel details. There’s no traffic 1,000 feet in the air – you and 5 friends will land in style.”

The price for these convenient helicopter rides? $4170.

With a six-person limit, that breaks down to $695 per person.

Attending the desert festival is already a pricey proposition, with general admission weekend passes starting at $375.

Add lodging, food and everything else required for the long weekend, and the price tag is considerable, to say the least.

Over the years, the Coachella music festival in Indio, California, has continually grown and evolved well beyond its humble beginnings back in 1999.

With each passing April, new amenities, upgrades, and peripheral activities have turned the annual event into something far beyond “just” a music festival.

While the festival itself thrives, so has the industry around it.

With a captive audience of hundreds of thousands of people squarely in the heart of the desirable demographic of 18-34 year olds, brands and sponsors ranging from Lacoste to McDonald’s flock to the desert to take advantage.

There are now enough parties, fashion shows, pop-up shops, industry events, and more surrounding Coachella that for some, the festival itself is an afterthought at best.

Instead of looking forward to seeing artists performing at Coachella, there are people who make the desert trek just for the scene it inspires. (...)

While the residual effects of Coachella’s exponential growth and expansion have made it (arguably, of course) America’s premier and most talked-about music festival, it also comes with a downside.

Between the helicopter shuttles, celebrity-packed VIP parties, branded fashion lines, and onslaught of industry initiatives, it’s been argued that the event itself has morphed into a music festival for the one-percent.

The buzz has inspired many critics and disgruntled former fans to all ask the same question: Is Coachella still cool?

by Scott T. Sterling, Smashd |  Read more:

Image: CN Live

Experimenting With Nootropics

There are a few kinds of people that stumble into the nootropic community. I ended up there about five years ago because I like drugs and I wanted better ones. I’d been reading about weird drugs on the Internet since I was 15, back when we bought Salvia divinorum at the tacky head shop near the mall and fell down laughing and tried to get high on an amped-up kava kava homebrew.

I’ve generally experimented with nearly every upper and downer out there, across a pretty broad spectrum of legality. But what began as escapism when I was tethered to a Texan teenage wasteland later blossomed into something less bleak and more life-affirming, intellectual even. If perception is reality and we can actually retune the five senses—and do so safely and scientifically—well, that’s something indeed. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

“I think nootropics appeal generally to folks with an armchair (or professional) interest in psychology, neurology, biology, and other facets of brain science, [who] feel comfortable occupying the role of both experimenter and subject,” an avid nootropics user with a degree in biochemistry tells me. “Nootropics may appeal greatly to those who have already rejected society’s blanket judgment that ‘drugs are bad.’”

Much like dive bars, virtual haunts all have their own cast of characters. On LongeCity, “the premier forum about extending the human lifespan”—and, more pertinently, extending human consciousness—one figure inspired a sort of messiah-like reverence: Isochroma. Isochroma had used the forums for years, often among the first to try newly synthesized drugs. He wrote with a mania that approached psychosis, but always coherently and with a strange, breathless elegance. He was a mega-doser—one of the brave few who’d take massive, unheard-of dosages of a substance to see what lay at its outer edges. Fascinated, I devoured his posts. That’s how I began to learn about nootropics.

In a handful of spartan, text-based Web forums like LongeCity, geeks with a wild streak convene with recovering addicts and mind-expanding, hippie types in pursuit of experiential knowledge—the kind mainstream science can’t or won’t provide. The result is a strange intellectual compound: virtual symposiums where bold souls ingest chemicals that science barely has a name for—and then they blog about it.

The class of drugs known as “nootropics” span a broad, heterogeneous swath of psychoactive substances. Many things that could be called nootropics are legal, often because the law either doesn’t know about it or just doesn’t know what to do with it yet. You can buy some nootropics, sometimes marketed as “smart drugs,” at Whole Foods next to the Vitamin D supplements. Others only pop up for sale online in limited quantities, straight from being synthesized and never before tested on humans.

“The biggest unknown factor remains long-term effects,” the psychonaut with the biochem background explains. “Where online forums and ‘amateur’ sources of information are light years ahead of official research and regulation for the vast majority of these substances, the recency of most of them makes long-term information simply unavailable anywhere.”

Naturally, here on the crowdsourced cutting edge of brain science, that’s part of the appeal. “Beyond the actual experimentation with nootropics, the research and investigation into some of the more esoteric corners of what we know (and don’t yet know) about how our brains work is a fascinating exercise unto itself.” (...)

Unlike many of Big Pharma’s greatest hits, some nootropics are heralded as “neuroprotective”—ideally capable of improving indices of cognitive function over time, not just in dangerous spurts. “I would recommend piracetam as a mental stimulant along with choline,” a user responds in the same thread. “Other safe stimulants are rhodiola rosea, st john’s wort and perhaps ginseng.” On this forum and many others, users look out for one another. Many threads emphasize the importance of diet and exercise. Some even dismiss caffeine as too dangerous, though green tea is generally well liked for its active ingredient, the amino acid L-theanine. Don’t want to drink tea? Buy 100 grams of bulk L-theanine powder on Amazon for $20.

The craziest part about all of this is that all of these faceless nootropics enthusiasts might be on to something. The most popular forums function like a fast-action thesis review: Users throw out potential chemical combos, known as “stacks,” and even hypothetical molecular compounds, often citing obscure but surprisingly solid scientific research. Then, it’s time for the peer review. It’s not uncommon for users to note their own backgrounds in biology, psychiatry, and other related fields, sprinkling their posts with complex molecular diagrams and neuroscience shorthand.

by Taylor Hatmaker, The Kernel |  Read more:

Image: Max Fleishman

20,000 Lesbians In the Desert

[ed. Congrats to Lydia Ko for winning the ANA Inspiration/Kraft-Nabisco/Dinah Shore tournament this year.]

Every year at the end of March, 20,000 lesbians from around the world fly into the Californian desert for five days of debauchery, and I’m one of them. It’s my second time at the Dinah, also known as the largest girl festival in the world. I’m staying at the Hilton in Palm Springs, which is hosting the famous Dinah pool parties, and the hotel feels like a homosexual harem.

It’s a surreal experience: for a few days the world is turned upside down, the minority is suddenly the majority. Everywhere you look, lesbians are smiling, drinking, dancing, kissing. There are a few men around – staff working the event and guys who have been dragged along by lesbian friends – but they are hard to spot. It’s basically entirely queer women in attendance.

The party is named after the Dinah Shore golf tournament, started in 1972 by the eponymous entertainer. Dinah Shore wasn’t a lesbian (she’d be doing somersaults in her grave if she knew what her moniker was attached to now), but golf seems to attract a lot of lesbians. A sapphic scene sprouted up around the golf tournament, and the Dinah was born. It’s now in its 26th year.

Today, nobody is here for the golf. No one is here for the DJs, comedians or YouTube stars performing either. They’re here for the girls. Butch, femme, old, young, gold stars, bi, black, white, hardcore, normcore – the Dinah attracts a diverse group. There’s a sense of liberation and a tacit understanding that what happens in Dinah stays in Dinah (unless it ends up on Facebook).

“Flashing is normal,” Charlotte, 24, told me. “I get flashed at a lot.” Random girls pulling you into their hotel rooms are also pretty standard. One year, there was a minor earthquake in Palm Springs. Debbie, a Dinah veteran who has attended every event since 1991, recalls that half the water splashed out of the pool. Most of the girls were too drunk to realize or care.

The feeling of permissiveness is compounded by the desert scenery: it looks like there has been some sort of gaypocalypse, and all the straight men and women have died out.

I can’t lie, it’s nice being in a predominantly female space for a few days. There’s a feeling of comfortable camaraderie; a sense of suddenly being a first-class citizen. But I feel like that comes more from the queerness rather than the femaleness. No one at the Dinah wishes a plague on all men. Despite the stereotype of the man-hating dyke, most lesbians really like men (we need them around to ensure we don’t get too distracted). The Dinah isn’t about separatism; it’s about celebration.

by Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Steven T Photography

The 1% Hide Their Money Offshore – Then Use It To Corrupt Our Democracy

[ed. Of course everyone knows this, the question is what can/will be done to fix it when the 1 percent control everything.]

Over the past 72 hours, you have seen our political establishment operating at a level of panic rarely equalled in postwar history. Britain’s prime minister has had yanked out of him some of his most intimate financial details. Complete strangers now know much he’s inherited so far from his mum and dad, and the offshore investments from which he’s profited. Yesterday he even took the unprecedented step of revealing the taxes he’d paid over the past six years. Leaders of other parties have responded by summarily publishing their own HMRC returns. In contemporary Britain, where one’s extramarital affairs are more readily discussed in public than one’s tax affairs, this is jaw-dropping stuff.

And it will not stop here. Whatever the lazy shorthand being used by some commentators, David Cameron has not released his tax returns, but merely a summary certified by an accountants’ firm. That halfway house will hardly be enough. If Jeremy Corbyn, other senior politicians and the press keep up this level of attack, then within days more details of the prime minister’s finances will emerge. Nor will the flacks of Downing Street be able to maintain their lockdown on disclosing how many cabinet members have offshore interests: the ministers themselves will break ranks. Indeed, a few are already beginning to do so.

But the risk is that all this will descend into a morass of semi-titillating detail: a string of revelations about who gave what to whom, and whether he or she then declared it to the Revenue. The story will become about “handling” and “narrative” and individual culpability. That will be entertaining for those who like to point fingers, perplexing for those too busy to engage in the detail – and miss the wider truth revealed by the leak which forced all this into public discussion.

Because at root, the Panama Papers are not about tax. They’re not even about money. What the Panama Papers really depict is the corruption of our democracy.

Following on from LuxLeaks, the Panama Papers confirm that the super-rich have effectively exited the economic system the rest of us have to live in. Thirty years of runaway incomes for those at the top, and the full armoury of expensive financial sophistication, mean they no longer play by the same rules the rest of us have to follow. Tax havens are simply one reflection of that reality. Discussion of offshore centres can get bogged down in technicalities, but the best definition I’ve found comes from expert Nicholas Shaxson who sums them up as: “You take your money elsewhere, to another country, in order to escape the rules and laws of the society in which you operate.” In so doing, you rob your own society of cash for hospitals, schools, roads…

by Aditya Chakrabortty, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Paramount Pictures

The Masters 2016

[ed. What a disappointing Masters. It seemed no one brought their A-game this year (except Danny Willett, at least for one round). Kudos to Danny, but it was Jordan's tournament to lose, and he did - spectacularly. It's a cruel game sometimes (or all the time if you play like me.]

Willett Wins the Masters After Shocking Spieth Collapse

Chris Dunn
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David Horton
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Robert Crumb Hates You

With this generation of overfed, spoiled-brat writers, every long, arduous journey into uncharted territories is called a Heart of Darkness—GPS and lack of war notwithstanding. The man that I’m looking for in the bowels of France is thankfully deprived of any irony. Robert Crumb has been living in a godforsaken medieval village, where cars are banned and spotty Wi-Fi has only been recently discovered. This true American has been locked up in self-exile—in an unlocked house—for the last 20 years.

There’s a direct line of salt-of-the-earth, irony-free, all-American icons, passing from the painters Thomas Hart Benton and Reginald Marsh, the musicians Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, all the way to Crumb. America, for them, wasn’t its flag, but its dirt. They eluded political and religious affiliations and labels: Guthrie liked the K.K.K. in his youth and Dylan became an evangelical Christian, for instance, yet they all fought against the oppressive American conformist machine. The Kennedys slept with Marilyn Monroe; Crumb did Janis Joplin’s friend Pattycakes.

“Can I smoke?” I asked Robert Crumb, sure that he would say no in his studio, where we spoke off and on for more than three days.

“Yes, I don’t care,” he said.

There’s an extraordinary Crumb comic, 1988’s Memories Are Made of This, that made a lasting impression on anyone who read it. He takes a long bus ride under the rain to go to this attractive woman’s house. She is his type: stocky with big, fat calves. She doesn’t really seem interested at first, but she gets drunk and he ends up having destroying sex with her from behind. He then looks at us and tells us that from now on, no woman will want him because he copped to this story. The drawing is precise, sharp, simple, straight to the point—until it reaches the sex part, and all hell breaks loose. The eyes are popping, the tongues are erupting and the orgasm transforms the woman into a Cubist bull.

“That story is an extremely unromantic view of love and sex,” Mr. Crumb said. “Any normal, intelligent, college-type woman would find this story disgusting, would say look at how he’s portraying this woman. She gets drunk and then puts out, this guy is a creep, that’s just hateful to women. It’s very unromantic; they want romance. Some writers have a talent for seducing women through their work, you read their stuff and you know they are seducing women. It’s an art. Some men know how to talk to women and I just don’t have that.”

“Writers like Martin Amis or Christopher Hitchens are like that, you can tell that their writing is meant to bed women. They used to hit on everything that moves,” I told him.

“My publisher told me that women don’t buy my stuff,” Mr. Crumb said. “When I do book signings and I spot an attractive woman on the line I know she’s gonna ask me to sign the book for her husband or boyfriend, who is a big fan of my work. I tell you, it’s almost 100 percent predictable!”

“I know many women who like your work. Some women don’t care about romance; they know that the guy who gives them flowers, carries their shit and holds doors will end up cheating on them.”

“Yes, in private those are the guys who say the worst things about women,” Mr. Crumb said.

“I was in a restaurant with this very attractive woman once and I could tell I was losing her,” I said. “I was so intimidated, insecure and meek. I was broke but invited her to Nobu, just that in itself was ridiculous. I decided to flip the script and go for broke. I was getting weaker by the moment, she was sensing my weakness and probably saw me as this almost effeminate guy.”

“Yes, you were castrating yourself,” Mr. Crumb said.

“Exactly. I knew she would never see me again anyway, so when she came back from the bathroom I told her: you have the most beautiful ass, I would love to eat it—and it worked. In one of your comics, you say that women will always go for the most obnoxious guy.”

“They will protest and say, ‘I hate that kind of offensive, arrogant male,’ ” Mr. Crumb said. “Many women will tell you that what they really like in a man is a sense of humor. The two funniest men I know with the best sense of humor are these bitter, self-deprecating Jewish guys, with a very negative, ironic sense of humor. They are total losers with women. Women see the self-deprecating part—you point out a weakness about yourself; they might laugh, but they perceive the weakness. Even if it’s hard to generalize, if you make a joke about yourself that you are awkward or a failure, that’s what sticks in their mind.”

I responded, “I once asked a gorgeous guy if he had ever been rejected, and he told me, ‘All my life.’ He said what women don’t realize is that by the time we find one who says yes, we bring to her the 50 nos we got before, with all the angst, bitterness that comes with it, the prior rejections that destroyed our self esteem.”

“I have tried to talk to women about that very issue of male domination, power and feminism many times before to no avail. They don’t wanna hear about it. One rejection and that’s it for me. That just kills me,” said Mr. Crumb. “I couldn’t take all those nos so I don’t do anything. I’m just paralyzed. Women expect men to take the initiative, to be forceful, assertive; they expect to be courted and seduced. In spite of feminism, women still want to be the object of attraction, and the male’s confidence in courting her is a test that he must pass in order to win her.”

“So, before you became famous, how did you get laid?”

“I didn’t.”

by Jacques Hyzagi, Observer | Read more:
Image:Brill Ullstein/ Getty Images

The Remains of the Day

"I was very consciously trying to write for an international audience,"Kazuo Ishiguro says of The Remains of the Day in his Paris Review interview ("The Art of Fiction," No. 196). "One of the ways I thought I could do this was to take a myth of England that was known internationally – in this case, the English butler."  (...)

The surface of The Remains of the Day is almost perfectly still. Stevens, a butler well past his prime, is on a week's motoring holiday in the West Country. He tootles around, taking in the sights and encountering a series of green-and-pleasant country folk who seem to have escaped from one of those English films of the 1950s in which the lower orders doff their caps and behave with respect towards a gent with properly creased trousers and flattened vowels. (...)

Nothing much happens. The high point of Mr Stevens's little outing is his visit to Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, the great house to which Stevens is still attached as "part of the package", even though ownership has passed from Lord Darlington to a jovial American named Farraday who has a disconcerting tendency to banter. Stevens hopes to persuade Miss Kenton to return to the hall. His hopes come to nothing. He makes his way home. Tiny events; but why, then, is the ageing manservant to be found, near the end of his holiday, weeping before a complete stranger on the pier at Weymouth? Why, when the stranger tells him that he ought to put his feet up and enjoy the evening of his life, is it so hard for Stevens to accept such sensible, if banal, advice? What has blighted the remains of his day?

Just below the understatement of the novel's surface is a turbulence as immense as it is slow; for The Remains of the Day is in fact a brilliant subversion of the fictional modes from which it seems at first to descend. Death, change, pain and evil invade the innocent Wodehouse-world. (In Wodehouse, even the Oswald Mosley-like Roderick Spode of the Black Shorts movement, as close to an evil character as that author ever created, is rendered comically pathetic by "swanking about," as Bertie says, "in footer bags.") The time-hallowed bonds between master and servant, and the codes by which both live, are no longer dependable absolutes but rather sources of ruinous self-deceptions; even the happy yokels Stevens meets on his travels turn out to stand for the post-war values of democracy and individual and collective rights which have turned Stevens and his kind into tragicomic anachronisms. "You can't have dignity if you're a slave," the butler is informed in a Devon cottage, but for Stevens, dignity has always meant the subjugation of the self to the job, and of his destiny to his master's. What then is our true relationship to power? Are we its servants or its possessors? It is the rare achievement of Ishiguro's novel to pose big questions – what is Englishness? What is greatness? What is dignity? – with a delicacy and humour that do not obscure the tough-mindedness beneath.

The real story here is that of a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life. Stevens is much preoccupied by "greatness", which, for him, means something very like restraint. The greatness of the British landscape lies, he believes, in its lack of the "unseemly demonstrativeness" of African and American scenery. It was his father, also a butler, who epitomised this idea of greatness; yet it was just this notion which stood between father and son, breeding deep resentments and an inarticulacy of the emotions that destroyed their love.

In Stevens's view, greatness in a butler "has to do crucially with the butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits". This is linked to Englishness. Continentals and Celts do not make good butlers because of their tendency to "run about screaming" at the slightest provocation. Yet it is Stevens's longing for this kind of "greatness" that has wrecked his one chance of finding romantic love. Hiding within his rôle, he long ago drove Miss Kenton away into the arms of another man. "Why, why, why do you always have to pretend?" she asks him in despair, revealing his greatness to be a mask, a cowardice, a lie.

Stevens's greatest defeat is the consequence of his most profound conviction - that his master is working for the good of humanity, and that his own glory lies in serving him. But Lord Darlington is, and is finally disgraced as, a Nazi collaborator and dupe. Stevens, a cut-price St Peter, denies him at least twice, but feels forever tainted by his master's fall. Darlington, like Stevens, is destroyed by a personal code of ethics. His disapproval of the ungentlemanly harshness towards the Germans of the Treaty of Versailles is what propels him towards his collaborationist doom. Ideals, Ishiguro shows us, can corrupt as thoroughly as cynicism.

by Salman Rushdie, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Remains of the Day
[ed. Repost.  See also: Never Let Me Go.]

Morphine