Friday, April 15, 2016
Clinton Campaign Accuses Sanders of Trying to Win Nomination
The war of words between the two Democratic camps heated up over the weekend, as the Clinton campaign accused Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders of “blatantly attempting to win the Democratic nomination for President.”
Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the Clinton campaign spokesman Harland Dorrinson said that Sanders’s actions in the past few weeks “left little doubt as to what his true intentions are—namely, to be the Party’s nominee.”
“He’s been raising money, he’s been running in primaries, and, yes, he’s been winning caucuses,” the Clinton aide said. “It’s time for Bernie Sanders to come clean with the American people and admit what he’s really up to.”
“It’s deeply troubling that what appeared at first to be a purely symbolic candidacy has turned into something else entirely,” he said.
In an interview on CNN, Secretary Clinton said that she would not “take the bait” when she was asked whether she thought Sanders was trying to win the nomination, but she stopped short of disavowing the accusation.
Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the Clinton campaign spokesman Harland Dorrinson said that Sanders’s actions in the past few weeks “left little doubt as to what his true intentions are—namely, to be the Party’s nominee.”“He’s been raising money, he’s been running in primaries, and, yes, he’s been winning caucuses,” the Clinton aide said. “It’s time for Bernie Sanders to come clean with the American people and admit what he’s really up to.”
“It’s deeply troubling that what appeared at first to be a purely symbolic candidacy has turned into something else entirely,” he said.
In an interview on CNN, Secretary Clinton said that she would not “take the bait” when she was asked whether she thought Sanders was trying to win the nomination, but she stopped short of disavowing the accusation.
by Andy Borowitz, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Jabin Botsford/Washington Post/via Getty
When Dating Algorithms Can Watch You Blush
Let’s get the basics over with,” W said to M when they met on a 4-minute speed date. “What are you studying?”
“Uh, I’m studying econ and poli sci. How about you?”
“I’m journalism and English literature.”
“OK, cool.”
“Yeah.”
They talked about where they were from (she hailed from Iowa, he from New Jersey), life in a small town, and the transition to college. An eavesdropper would have been hard-pressed to detect a romantic spark in this banal back-and-forth. Yet when researchers, who had recorded the exchange, ran it through a language-analysis program, it revealed what W and M confirmed to be true: They were hitting it off.
The researchers weren’t interested in what the daters discussed, or even whether they seemed to share personality traits, backgrounds, or interests. Instead, they were searching for subtle similarities in how they structured their sentences—specifically, how often they used function words such as it, that, but, about, never, and lots. This synchronicity, known as “language style matching,” or LSM, happens unconsciously. But the researchers found it to be a good predictor of mutual affection: An analysis of conversations involving 80 speed daters showed that couples with high LSM scores were three times as likely as those with low scores to want to see each other again.
It’s not just speech patterns that can encode chemistry. Other studies suggest that when two people unknowingly coordinate nonverbal cues, such as hand gestures, eye gaze, and posture, they’re more apt to like and understand each other. These findings raise a tantalizing question: Could a computer know whom we’re falling for before we do?
Picture this: You’re home from work for the evening. You curl up on the couch, steel your nerves, maybe pour yourself a glass of wine, and open the dating app on your phone. Then for 30 minutes or so, you commit to a succession of brief video dates with other users who satisfy a basic set of criteria, such as gender, age, and location. Meanwhile, using speech- and image-recognition technologies, the app tracks both your and your dates’ words, gestures, expressions, even heartbeats.
Afterward, you rate your dates. And so does the app’s artificial intelligence, which can recognize signs of compatibility (or incompatibility) that you might have missed. At the end of the night, the app tells you which prospects are worth a second look. Over time, the AI might even learn (via follow-up experiments) which combination of signals predicts the happiest relationships, or the most enduring.
Welcome to the vision of Eli Finkel. A professor of psychology and management at Northwestern University and a co-author of the LSM study, Finkel is a prominent critic of popular dating sites such as eHarmony and Chemistry, which claim to possess a formula that can connect you with your soul mate. Finkel’s beef with these sites, he says, isn’t that they “use math to get you dates,” as OKCupid puts it. It’s that they go about it all wrong. As a result, Finkel argues, their matching algorithms likely foretell love no better than chance.
The problem, he explains, is that they rely on information about individuals who have never met—namely, self-reported personality traits and preferences. Decades of relationship research show that romantic success hinges more on how two people interact than on who they are or what they believe they want in a partner. Attraction, scientists tell us, is created and kindled in the glances we exchange, the laughs we share, and the other myriad ways our brains and bodies respond to one another.
Which is why, according to Finkel, we’ll never predict love simply by browsing photographs and curated profiles, or by answering questionnaires. “So the question is: Is there a new way to leverage the Internet to enhance matchmaking, so that when you get face to face with a person, the odds that you’ll be compatible with that person are higher than they would be otherwise?”
by Julia M. Klein, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Jesse Chan-Norris / Flickr
“Uh, I’m studying econ and poli sci. How about you?”
“I’m journalism and English literature.”“OK, cool.”
“Yeah.”
They talked about where they were from (she hailed from Iowa, he from New Jersey), life in a small town, and the transition to college. An eavesdropper would have been hard-pressed to detect a romantic spark in this banal back-and-forth. Yet when researchers, who had recorded the exchange, ran it through a language-analysis program, it revealed what W and M confirmed to be true: They were hitting it off.
The researchers weren’t interested in what the daters discussed, or even whether they seemed to share personality traits, backgrounds, or interests. Instead, they were searching for subtle similarities in how they structured their sentences—specifically, how often they used function words such as it, that, but, about, never, and lots. This synchronicity, known as “language style matching,” or LSM, happens unconsciously. But the researchers found it to be a good predictor of mutual affection: An analysis of conversations involving 80 speed daters showed that couples with high LSM scores were three times as likely as those with low scores to want to see each other again.
It’s not just speech patterns that can encode chemistry. Other studies suggest that when two people unknowingly coordinate nonverbal cues, such as hand gestures, eye gaze, and posture, they’re more apt to like and understand each other. These findings raise a tantalizing question: Could a computer know whom we’re falling for before we do?
Picture this: You’re home from work for the evening. You curl up on the couch, steel your nerves, maybe pour yourself a glass of wine, and open the dating app on your phone. Then for 30 minutes or so, you commit to a succession of brief video dates with other users who satisfy a basic set of criteria, such as gender, age, and location. Meanwhile, using speech- and image-recognition technologies, the app tracks both your and your dates’ words, gestures, expressions, even heartbeats.
Afterward, you rate your dates. And so does the app’s artificial intelligence, which can recognize signs of compatibility (or incompatibility) that you might have missed. At the end of the night, the app tells you which prospects are worth a second look. Over time, the AI might even learn (via follow-up experiments) which combination of signals predicts the happiest relationships, or the most enduring.
Welcome to the vision of Eli Finkel. A professor of psychology and management at Northwestern University and a co-author of the LSM study, Finkel is a prominent critic of popular dating sites such as eHarmony and Chemistry, which claim to possess a formula that can connect you with your soul mate. Finkel’s beef with these sites, he says, isn’t that they “use math to get you dates,” as OKCupid puts it. It’s that they go about it all wrong. As a result, Finkel argues, their matching algorithms likely foretell love no better than chance.
The problem, he explains, is that they rely on information about individuals who have never met—namely, self-reported personality traits and preferences. Decades of relationship research show that romantic success hinges more on how two people interact than on who they are or what they believe they want in a partner. Attraction, scientists tell us, is created and kindled in the glances we exchange, the laughs we share, and the other myriad ways our brains and bodies respond to one another.
Which is why, according to Finkel, we’ll never predict love simply by browsing photographs and curated profiles, or by answering questionnaires. “So the question is: Is there a new way to leverage the Internet to enhance matchmaking, so that when you get face to face with a person, the odds that you’ll be compatible with that person are higher than they would be otherwise?”
by Julia M. Klein, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Jesse Chan-Norris / Flickr
Clinton and Goldman: Why It Matters
[ed. See also: Why the Goldman Sachs Settlement Is a $5 Billion Sham]
The Clintons’ connections to Goldman Sachs can be traced back to their beginnings in national politics, in December 1991, when Robert Rubin, then co-chair co-senior partner of the bank, met Bill Clinton at a Manhattan dinner party and was so impressed by him that he signed on as an economic adviser to Clinton’s campaign for the 1992 Democratic nomination. According to a November 2015 survey of Clinton donors by The Washington Post, Rubin and other Goldman partners “mobilized their networks to raise money for the upstart candidate.”
As Bill Clinton’s secretary of the treasury from January 1995 until July 1999, Rubin was an architect of the financial deregulation that left financial derivatives such as Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) largely free of controls. This paved the way for the large-scale, unregulated speculation in financial derivatives by Wall Street banks beginning in the early 2000s. (Goldman itself continued to enjoy special access to Washington during the George W. Bush administration, with former Goldman chief executive Hank Paulson serving as Treasury Secretary from 2006 to 2009.)
These long-running ties with Goldman have paid off for the Clintons. According to a July 2014 analysis in the Wall Street Journal, from 1992 to the present Goldman has been the Clintons’ number one Wall Street contributor, based on speaking fees, charitable donations, and campaign contributions, the three pillars of what I’ve called the Clinton System. As early as 2000, Goldman was the second most generous funder—after Citigroup—of Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, with a contribution of $711,000. In the early 2000s, Bill Clinton was also a Goldman beneficiary, receiving $650,000 from Goldman for four speeches delivered between December 2004 and June 2005. (The transcripts of these speeches do not appear to be currently available.)
By the winter of 2006–2007, however, Goldman and its CEO Lloyd Blankfein were becoming deeply involved in the collapsing housing bubble—and engaging in the practices that have since resulted in years of investigations and lawsuits. Data gathered mostly from the Corporate Research Project, a public interest website, show that on thirteen occasions between 2009 and 2016, Goldman was penalized by US courts or government agencies for fraudulent or deceptive practices that were committed mostly between 2006 and 2009. Four of these penalties amounted to $300 million or more.
In July 2010 the Securities and Exchange Commission fined Goldman $550 million for the fraudulent marketing of its Abacus CDO; the bank had allowed its client John Paulson to stuff the CDO with toxic ingredients, mostly in the form of mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), and then to bet against the CDO when it was marketed by taking a short position. Paulson earned around $1 billion when the CDO lost value as it was designed to do. In August 2011 the Federal Housing Finance Agency sued Goldman for “negligent misrepresentation, securities laws violations and common fraud” in its dealings with the semi-public mortgage banks Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In August 2014 Goldman agreed as restitution to buy back $3.15 billion worth of securities it had sold to the two banks for $1.2 billion more than they were currently worth.
In July 2012 Goldman agreed to pay $25.6 million to settle a suit brought by the Public Employees Retirement System of Mississippi accusing the bank of defrauding investors in a 2006 offering of MBSs. In January 2013, the Federal Reserve announced that Goldman would pay $330 million to settle allegations of foreclosure abuse by its mortgage loan servicing operations. Finally, in January of this year, Goldman announced that it would pay $5 billion to settle multiple lawsuits brought by official agencies against the bank, mainly for fraudulent marketing of CDOs; the final terms of the settlement were released on April 11. (Through the availability of tax credits and allowances, Goldman may end up paying less.) Among the plaintiffs were the Department of Justice, the New York and Illinois Attorneys General, the National Credit Union Administration, and the Federal Home Loan Banks of Chicago and Seattle.
These are summary descriptions of Goldman transgressions, which do no more than point to a pattern of deceptive and often fraudulent trading in derivatives. To get a more detailed sense of what exactly the bank was doing with these trades, we have to look at Goldman’s own record of its behavior during the crash. This record, which is now in the public domain, provides a stark backdrop to Clinton’s recent dealings with Goldman. The story begins on December 14, 2006 when David Viniar, Chief Financial Officer at Goldman and thus number four in the Goldman hierarchy, convened a meeting on the thirtieth floor of Goldman’s Manhattan headquarters. This was the seat of power where, along with Viniar, the bank’s Big Three had their offices: CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and co-vice presidents Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelried.
At the meeting Viniar called for an in-depth review of Goldman’s holdings of mortgage backed securities because its “position in subprime mortgage related assets was too long, and its risk exposure was too great.” The next day Viniar emailed a subordinate about the deteriorating housing markets, its effect on mortgage-backed securities, and not only the risks but also the opportunities this opened up. In his email Viniar alerted his subordinates to the possibility that the bank could profit from the deterioration of its own assets: “My basic message was let’s be aggressive distributing things because there will be very good opportunities as the markets [go] into what is likely to be even greater distress and we want to be in a position to take advantage of them.”
By February 11, 2007, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein himself was urging Goldman’s mortgage department to get rid of deteriorating assets: “Could/should we have cleaned up these books before and are we doing enough right now to sell off cats and dogs in other books throughout the division”? But this was no easy task. In 2006 and 2007 Goldman created 120 complex financial derivatives, relying heavily on subprime mortgages grouped together in MBSs and CDOs with a total value of around $100 billion.
The problem was that the derivatives Goldman was busy creating were clogged with assets that were rapidly losing value. Faced with what it saw as a collapsing market, especially in MBSs, Goldman abandoned some derivatives that were still “under construction” while liquidating others that were fully formed, selling off their components in the markets. If this is all Goldman had done—anticipating where the market was going and unloading its bad assets—it would not have been the target of multiple lawsuits, and Blankfein might rightly be esteemed on Wall Street as the great survivor of the crash.
But Goldman also persisted with the creation of new CDOs and MBSs and continued marketing its existing ones so that they too could become part of new CDOs. Although the trading strategies involved in these maneuvers were sometimes highly complex, the motive underlying them was not. The bank’s executives believed that they could make more money by repackaging their collapsing assets into new CDOs and MBSs, which they could still market to clients as investment opportunities. Crucially, in doing this, Goldman was not simply acting as a “market maker,” an institutional trader that simply buys and sells securities at publicly posted prices. By marketing these new financial products, Goldman was also acting as underwriter and placement agent for them, and as such was subject to additional rules on fair disclosure.
On multiple occasions, as the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s 2011 lawsuit alleged, Goldman failed to disclose to its own clients how risky many of its derivatives were and that the bank itself was betting against them by taking the short position.
The Clintons’ connections to Goldman Sachs can be traced back to their beginnings in national politics, in December 1991, when Robert Rubin, then co-chair co-senior partner of the bank, met Bill Clinton at a Manhattan dinner party and was so impressed by him that he signed on as an economic adviser to Clinton’s campaign for the 1992 Democratic nomination. According to a November 2015 survey of Clinton donors by The Washington Post, Rubin and other Goldman partners “mobilized their networks to raise money for the upstart candidate.”
As Bill Clinton’s secretary of the treasury from January 1995 until July 1999, Rubin was an architect of the financial deregulation that left financial derivatives such as Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) largely free of controls. This paved the way for the large-scale, unregulated speculation in financial derivatives by Wall Street banks beginning in the early 2000s. (Goldman itself continued to enjoy special access to Washington during the George W. Bush administration, with former Goldman chief executive Hank Paulson serving as Treasury Secretary from 2006 to 2009.)These long-running ties with Goldman have paid off for the Clintons. According to a July 2014 analysis in the Wall Street Journal, from 1992 to the present Goldman has been the Clintons’ number one Wall Street contributor, based on speaking fees, charitable donations, and campaign contributions, the three pillars of what I’ve called the Clinton System. As early as 2000, Goldman was the second most generous funder—after Citigroup—of Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, with a contribution of $711,000. In the early 2000s, Bill Clinton was also a Goldman beneficiary, receiving $650,000 from Goldman for four speeches delivered between December 2004 and June 2005. (The transcripts of these speeches do not appear to be currently available.)
By the winter of 2006–2007, however, Goldman and its CEO Lloyd Blankfein were becoming deeply involved in the collapsing housing bubble—and engaging in the practices that have since resulted in years of investigations and lawsuits. Data gathered mostly from the Corporate Research Project, a public interest website, show that on thirteen occasions between 2009 and 2016, Goldman was penalized by US courts or government agencies for fraudulent or deceptive practices that were committed mostly between 2006 and 2009. Four of these penalties amounted to $300 million or more.
In July 2010 the Securities and Exchange Commission fined Goldman $550 million for the fraudulent marketing of its Abacus CDO; the bank had allowed its client John Paulson to stuff the CDO with toxic ingredients, mostly in the form of mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), and then to bet against the CDO when it was marketed by taking a short position. Paulson earned around $1 billion when the CDO lost value as it was designed to do. In August 2011 the Federal Housing Finance Agency sued Goldman for “negligent misrepresentation, securities laws violations and common fraud” in its dealings with the semi-public mortgage banks Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In August 2014 Goldman agreed as restitution to buy back $3.15 billion worth of securities it had sold to the two banks for $1.2 billion more than they were currently worth.
In July 2012 Goldman agreed to pay $25.6 million to settle a suit brought by the Public Employees Retirement System of Mississippi accusing the bank of defrauding investors in a 2006 offering of MBSs. In January 2013, the Federal Reserve announced that Goldman would pay $330 million to settle allegations of foreclosure abuse by its mortgage loan servicing operations. Finally, in January of this year, Goldman announced that it would pay $5 billion to settle multiple lawsuits brought by official agencies against the bank, mainly for fraudulent marketing of CDOs; the final terms of the settlement were released on April 11. (Through the availability of tax credits and allowances, Goldman may end up paying less.) Among the plaintiffs were the Department of Justice, the New York and Illinois Attorneys General, the National Credit Union Administration, and the Federal Home Loan Banks of Chicago and Seattle.
These are summary descriptions of Goldman transgressions, which do no more than point to a pattern of deceptive and often fraudulent trading in derivatives. To get a more detailed sense of what exactly the bank was doing with these trades, we have to look at Goldman’s own record of its behavior during the crash. This record, which is now in the public domain, provides a stark backdrop to Clinton’s recent dealings with Goldman. The story begins on December 14, 2006 when David Viniar, Chief Financial Officer at Goldman and thus number four in the Goldman hierarchy, convened a meeting on the thirtieth floor of Goldman’s Manhattan headquarters. This was the seat of power where, along with Viniar, the bank’s Big Three had their offices: CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and co-vice presidents Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelried.
At the meeting Viniar called for an in-depth review of Goldman’s holdings of mortgage backed securities because its “position in subprime mortgage related assets was too long, and its risk exposure was too great.” The next day Viniar emailed a subordinate about the deteriorating housing markets, its effect on mortgage-backed securities, and not only the risks but also the opportunities this opened up. In his email Viniar alerted his subordinates to the possibility that the bank could profit from the deterioration of its own assets: “My basic message was let’s be aggressive distributing things because there will be very good opportunities as the markets [go] into what is likely to be even greater distress and we want to be in a position to take advantage of them.”
By February 11, 2007, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein himself was urging Goldman’s mortgage department to get rid of deteriorating assets: “Could/should we have cleaned up these books before and are we doing enough right now to sell off cats and dogs in other books throughout the division”? But this was no easy task. In 2006 and 2007 Goldman created 120 complex financial derivatives, relying heavily on subprime mortgages grouped together in MBSs and CDOs with a total value of around $100 billion.
The problem was that the derivatives Goldman was busy creating were clogged with assets that were rapidly losing value. Faced with what it saw as a collapsing market, especially in MBSs, Goldman abandoned some derivatives that were still “under construction” while liquidating others that were fully formed, selling off their components in the markets. If this is all Goldman had done—anticipating where the market was going and unloading its bad assets—it would not have been the target of multiple lawsuits, and Blankfein might rightly be esteemed on Wall Street as the great survivor of the crash.
But Goldman also persisted with the creation of new CDOs and MBSs and continued marketing its existing ones so that they too could become part of new CDOs. Although the trading strategies involved in these maneuvers were sometimes highly complex, the motive underlying them was not. The bank’s executives believed that they could make more money by repackaging their collapsing assets into new CDOs and MBSs, which they could still market to clients as investment opportunities. Crucially, in doing this, Goldman was not simply acting as a “market maker,” an institutional trader that simply buys and sells securities at publicly posted prices. By marketing these new financial products, Goldman was also acting as underwriter and placement agent for them, and as such was subject to additional rules on fair disclosure.
On multiple occasions, as the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s 2011 lawsuit alleged, Goldman failed to disclose to its own clients how risky many of its derivatives were and that the bank itself was betting against them by taking the short position.
Thursday, April 14, 2016
Ugg: the Look That Refused to Die
In December of last year, Kitson, a small chain of boutiques on the west coast of America, announced it was going out of business. The first Kitson store had opened back in 2000 on Robinson Boulevard, just on the edge of Beverly Hills; it was the kind of shop where you could impulse-buy a cupcake-printed tote bag or, during a crucial Hollywood breakup, “Team Aniston” and “Team Jolie” T-shirts. The biggest tabloid stars of the early millennium – Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears – flocked to Kitson, and were often photographed by paparazzi as they walked out with the store’s signature baby blue shopping bags draped on their arms. Kitson was an ideal place to pick up the unofficial uniform of that era’s celebrity set: a candy-coloured Juicy Couture velour tracksuit and a pair of sheepskin-lined Ugg boots.
When Kitson, so emblematic of a certain pre-financial crisis excess, announced that it was closing its doors for good, it felt like the death knell to a ditzy and much-derided era. Many of the stars of that time – Lohan, for example – have lost their lustre, and leggings have replaced velour tracksuits as the modern woman’s errand-running outfit of choice. (The hot pink Juicy Couture sweats are now literally museum pieces: they will be on display at the V&A later this spring.) As a result, they have come to embody a particularly repellent cultural moment that everyone is glad to be over with. In 2012, while filming The Bling Ring – based on the true story of a gang of southern California teenagers who burgled the homes of celebrities (including Paris Hilton) in 2008 and 2009 – Emma Watson tweeted a picture of herself in character as Nicki, wearing a short-sleeved pink Juicy Couture tracksuit and a pair of Uggs. “Nicki likes Lip Gloss, Purses, Yoga, Pole Dancing, Uggs, Louboutins, Juice Cleanses, Iced coffee and Tattoos.”
Uggs are certainly ugly, or at least inelegant. They look like something Frankenstein’s monster would wear if he were an elf. The shapeless, unstructured boots, pulled on in a hurry, can make anyone look like a slob, which has made them the target of special scorn. For as long as Uggs have been popular, it hasn’t been hard to find someone furiously denouncing them. “Ugg boots are not sexy,” the Independent declared in 2003, “unless you’re Mrs Bigfoot on a lone mission across Antarctica to find Mr Bigfoot.” When wearing the boots, a writer at the online beauty magazine The Gloss complained, “there’s nothing to indicate that you don’t have square, hideous shoe boxes in place of human feet”. In 2015, one coffee shop on Brick Lane in east London even banned Ugg-wearers from its premises – calling the boots “slag wellies”.
And yet, over the years, plenty of odd and unflattering shoes – pool sliders, clogs, tall platforms – have met with the approval of the fashion establishment. The problem with Uggs wasn’t that they were ugly; it’s that they were common.
But a funny thing happened on the way to fashion’s graveyard of regrettable fads: the ubiquitous Ugg has not gone anywhere. Uggs have quietly lingered on since their heyday, unnoticed but omnipresent – once you start paying attention, you’ll be shocked to discover how many people are still wearing them. Walk down any high street and focus on footwear, and you will see an army of sheepskin boots coming at you. They are worn by mothers running errands in town and in the country, paired with denim cut-off shorts at rock festivals, worn by teenagers on Saturday shopping trips.
In the reception area at Ugg corporate headquarters in Southern California, there is a bound album filled with snapshots of celebrities wearing the company’s products. It is arranged in alphabetical order, with separate sections for women and men, and is the size of the September issue of a fashion magazine, or maybe a small phone book. Many of the photographs are from the brand’s peak cultural moment in the mid-2000s, including six different pictures of Blake Lively and four of Leighton Meester, wearing Uggs between takes on the set of Gossip Girl. But there are enough photos from the past few years to make it clear that Uggs remain a perennial off-duty uniform for the famous: Ariana Grande wearing classic boots at an airport, paired with a massive Louis Vuitton bag; Charlize Theron wearing the Cardy boot, whose knitted exterior is meant to resemble a buttoned cardigan; Emma Watson (again) shopping in a white pair; Rosie Huntington-Whiteley crossing the street wearing Coquettes (Ugg slippers shaped like a flat clog or a boot with the top sliced off, which can be worn indoors or out); Hugh Jackman and the designer Valentino (separately) wearing the Butte snow boot. Last winter, I spotted Grace Coddington, the revered creative director-at-large of American Vogue, striding into work in a pair of short black Ugg boots, paired with a Céline bag.
The message of all these images – and perhaps the secret of Ugg’s apparently unstoppable success – is that if there is a dividing line between public glamour and private style, it might be a pair of cosy shearling boots. They are undeniably comfortable – soft and squishy and warm, as if your feet were in the embrace of someone who really loves you. The look and feel telegraphs a message of “I’m worth it” but also “this is me, off-duty”. At £150 a pair, they are neither cheap nor entirely out of range. They reside in the overlap of a Venn diagram for casual and indulgent.
Somehow Uggs, the boots that so many people loved to hate, have managed to defy the cruel logic of the fashion cycle and carry on – whether you approve of them or not.
When Kitson, so emblematic of a certain pre-financial crisis excess, announced that it was closing its doors for good, it felt like the death knell to a ditzy and much-derided era. Many of the stars of that time – Lohan, for example – have lost their lustre, and leggings have replaced velour tracksuits as the modern woman’s errand-running outfit of choice. (The hot pink Juicy Couture sweats are now literally museum pieces: they will be on display at the V&A later this spring.) As a result, they have come to embody a particularly repellent cultural moment that everyone is glad to be over with. In 2012, while filming The Bling Ring – based on the true story of a gang of southern California teenagers who burgled the homes of celebrities (including Paris Hilton) in 2008 and 2009 – Emma Watson tweeted a picture of herself in character as Nicki, wearing a short-sleeved pink Juicy Couture tracksuit and a pair of Uggs. “Nicki likes Lip Gloss, Purses, Yoga, Pole Dancing, Uggs, Louboutins, Juice Cleanses, Iced coffee and Tattoos.”Uggs are certainly ugly, or at least inelegant. They look like something Frankenstein’s monster would wear if he were an elf. The shapeless, unstructured boots, pulled on in a hurry, can make anyone look like a slob, which has made them the target of special scorn. For as long as Uggs have been popular, it hasn’t been hard to find someone furiously denouncing them. “Ugg boots are not sexy,” the Independent declared in 2003, “unless you’re Mrs Bigfoot on a lone mission across Antarctica to find Mr Bigfoot.” When wearing the boots, a writer at the online beauty magazine The Gloss complained, “there’s nothing to indicate that you don’t have square, hideous shoe boxes in place of human feet”. In 2015, one coffee shop on Brick Lane in east London even banned Ugg-wearers from its premises – calling the boots “slag wellies”.
And yet, over the years, plenty of odd and unflattering shoes – pool sliders, clogs, tall platforms – have met with the approval of the fashion establishment. The problem with Uggs wasn’t that they were ugly; it’s that they were common.
But a funny thing happened on the way to fashion’s graveyard of regrettable fads: the ubiquitous Ugg has not gone anywhere. Uggs have quietly lingered on since their heyday, unnoticed but omnipresent – once you start paying attention, you’ll be shocked to discover how many people are still wearing them. Walk down any high street and focus on footwear, and you will see an army of sheepskin boots coming at you. They are worn by mothers running errands in town and in the country, paired with denim cut-off shorts at rock festivals, worn by teenagers on Saturday shopping trips.
In the reception area at Ugg corporate headquarters in Southern California, there is a bound album filled with snapshots of celebrities wearing the company’s products. It is arranged in alphabetical order, with separate sections for women and men, and is the size of the September issue of a fashion magazine, or maybe a small phone book. Many of the photographs are from the brand’s peak cultural moment in the mid-2000s, including six different pictures of Blake Lively and four of Leighton Meester, wearing Uggs between takes on the set of Gossip Girl. But there are enough photos from the past few years to make it clear that Uggs remain a perennial off-duty uniform for the famous: Ariana Grande wearing classic boots at an airport, paired with a massive Louis Vuitton bag; Charlize Theron wearing the Cardy boot, whose knitted exterior is meant to resemble a buttoned cardigan; Emma Watson (again) shopping in a white pair; Rosie Huntington-Whiteley crossing the street wearing Coquettes (Ugg slippers shaped like a flat clog or a boot with the top sliced off, which can be worn indoors or out); Hugh Jackman and the designer Valentino (separately) wearing the Butte snow boot. Last winter, I spotted Grace Coddington, the revered creative director-at-large of American Vogue, striding into work in a pair of short black Ugg boots, paired with a Céline bag.
The message of all these images – and perhaps the secret of Ugg’s apparently unstoppable success – is that if there is a dividing line between public glamour and private style, it might be a pair of cosy shearling boots. They are undeniably comfortable – soft and squishy and warm, as if your feet were in the embrace of someone who really loves you. The look and feel telegraphs a message of “I’m worth it” but also “this is me, off-duty”. At £150 a pair, they are neither cheap nor entirely out of range. They reside in the overlap of a Venn diagram for casual and indulgent.
Somehow Uggs, the boots that so many people loved to hate, have managed to defy the cruel logic of the fashion cycle and carry on – whether you approve of them or not.
Ugg has sold so many products – mostly footwear, but also clothing and home goods – that there are 3.7 items for every woman in America; 3.0 for every woman in the UK; 2.1 for Japan. (This doesn’t include the 2.5 million pairs of counterfeit Uggs have been seized since 2007.) After a brief dip earlier this decade – when the haters proclaimed the long-overdue death of the Ugg – sales are climbing again: in 2014-15, Ugg sales were up 12.6% on the previous year, to $1.49bn, according to the most recent earnings report from Deckers Brands, the California-based footwear company that has owned Ugg since 1995.
by Marisa Meltzer, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: The Guardian
The Food Industrial Complex
In 2011, during a debate over the nutritional guidelines for school lunches, Congress decided that pizza counts as a vegetable. And not for the first time.
The American government first proposed that an unhealthy food—if it contains trace amounts of a healthy ingredient—could count as a vegetable in 1981. Looking for ways to cut the school lunch budget, the Reagan Administration suggested that cafeterias include ingredients in condiments like pickle relish and ketchup toward nutritional requirements.
This was not good politics. Democrats and the press had a field day saying that Reagan had just classified ketchup as a vegetable. “This is one of the most ridiculous regulations I ever heard of,” Republican Senator John Heinz, owner of Heinz, told the press, “and I suppose I need not add that I know something about ketchup and relish."
The Reagan Administration dropped the proposal, but it soon became law anyway. When the Obama Administration directed the Department of Agriculture to revise school lunch policies in 2011, experts took aim at the rule that allowed the tiny amount of tomato paste in pizza sauce to count toward the vegetable requirements of each meal.
Any changes made by the Department of Agriculture could jeopardize huge contracts for companies that supply food for school children’s lunches, so the food industry responded with a $5.6 million lobbying campaign. According to Margo Wootan, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, two multibillion dollar companies spent the most: Schwan and ConAgra, which each had large contracts for pizzas and fries used in school lunches.
Before the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) could make any recommendations, Congress ensured that the push for healthier lunches did not hurt the manufacturers of unhealthy foods. Congress passed an agriculture appropriations bill that would deny the USDA funding to enforce any policies that prevented the potatoes in french fries or the tomato paste in pizza from counting as nutritional elements.
The press again enjoyed declaring that Congress had classified pizza as a vegetable. Cynics shrugged at yet another example of the government prioritizing the bottom line of businesses that manufacture sugary and salty processed foods over public health.
Yet the one-sided nature of the food industry’s lobbying is puzzling. Where were the broccoli, spinach, and carrot lobbies? Why didn’t a member of Congress take to the floor with a set of talking points provided by the leafy green vegetable lobby? Why can’t American farmers, who enjoy huge government subsidies, stand up to the processed food lobby?
Part of the answer lies in the economics of the food industry: the profit margins and scale of processed food makers gives them a heft that growers of healthy foods can’t match.
But it is also because “Big Ag” is not in the healthy food business. American farms with lobbying power don’t grow brussel sprouts; they grow grains used to make the high fructose corn syrup in Coke, the starches in processed foods, and the oil in deep fryers.
This is somewhat inevitable, but it is also a self-inflicted wound: the result of misguided government policy that subsidizes Big Macs and Big Gulps.
The Poor Margins of Broccoli Farmers
The words “food lobby” have become synonymous with unhealthy food.
In 2015, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, processed food manufacturers spent $32 million on lobbying while the fruit and vegetable industry spent a mere $3.7 million. Moreover, top fruit and vegetable contributors include the National Potato Council, which protects potato farmers’ interests in french fries, and a company that grows tomatoes for fast food chains.
To understand why the food lobby is dominated by companies pushing unhealthy foods, a good place to start is the huge imbalance between the amount of fruits and vegetables we should eat and the relative size of the fruits and vegetables market.
According to nutritional guidelines published by the USDA and the Harvard School of Public Health, fruits and vegetables should make up 50% of a healthy diet. But the financial value of the fruit and vegetable market is nowhere near 50% of the food industry. In 2015, American farmers earned under $50 billion in revenue from fruits and vegetables. In contrast, processed food manufacturers like ConAgra, General Mills, and Kellogg each make around $15 billion in yearly revenue.
The meat and carb heavy American diet partially explains these disparities. The Department of Agriculture estimates that Americans eat roughly 50% less fruits and vegetables and over 20% more grains and meat than recommended by its nutrition guidelines.
But it is the economics of the food industry that really explain why the food lobby pushes unhealthy fare.
Processed foods have high profit margins that fund advertising campaigns and lobbying budgets. The importance of branding also leads to consolidation that supports special interest lobbying.
by Alex Mayyasi, Pricenomics | Read more:
Image: Till Krech
The American government first proposed that an unhealthy food—if it contains trace amounts of a healthy ingredient—could count as a vegetable in 1981. Looking for ways to cut the school lunch budget, the Reagan Administration suggested that cafeterias include ingredients in condiments like pickle relish and ketchup toward nutritional requirements.
This was not good politics. Democrats and the press had a field day saying that Reagan had just classified ketchup as a vegetable. “This is one of the most ridiculous regulations I ever heard of,” Republican Senator John Heinz, owner of Heinz, told the press, “and I suppose I need not add that I know something about ketchup and relish."The Reagan Administration dropped the proposal, but it soon became law anyway. When the Obama Administration directed the Department of Agriculture to revise school lunch policies in 2011, experts took aim at the rule that allowed the tiny amount of tomato paste in pizza sauce to count toward the vegetable requirements of each meal.
Any changes made by the Department of Agriculture could jeopardize huge contracts for companies that supply food for school children’s lunches, so the food industry responded with a $5.6 million lobbying campaign. According to Margo Wootan, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, two multibillion dollar companies spent the most: Schwan and ConAgra, which each had large contracts for pizzas and fries used in school lunches.
Before the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) could make any recommendations, Congress ensured that the push for healthier lunches did not hurt the manufacturers of unhealthy foods. Congress passed an agriculture appropriations bill that would deny the USDA funding to enforce any policies that prevented the potatoes in french fries or the tomato paste in pizza from counting as nutritional elements.
The press again enjoyed declaring that Congress had classified pizza as a vegetable. Cynics shrugged at yet another example of the government prioritizing the bottom line of businesses that manufacture sugary and salty processed foods over public health.
Yet the one-sided nature of the food industry’s lobbying is puzzling. Where were the broccoli, spinach, and carrot lobbies? Why didn’t a member of Congress take to the floor with a set of talking points provided by the leafy green vegetable lobby? Why can’t American farmers, who enjoy huge government subsidies, stand up to the processed food lobby?
Part of the answer lies in the economics of the food industry: the profit margins and scale of processed food makers gives them a heft that growers of healthy foods can’t match.
But it is also because “Big Ag” is not in the healthy food business. American farms with lobbying power don’t grow brussel sprouts; they grow grains used to make the high fructose corn syrup in Coke, the starches in processed foods, and the oil in deep fryers.
This is somewhat inevitable, but it is also a self-inflicted wound: the result of misguided government policy that subsidizes Big Macs and Big Gulps.
The Poor Margins of Broccoli Farmers
The words “food lobby” have become synonymous with unhealthy food.
In 2015, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, processed food manufacturers spent $32 million on lobbying while the fruit and vegetable industry spent a mere $3.7 million. Moreover, top fruit and vegetable contributors include the National Potato Council, which protects potato farmers’ interests in french fries, and a company that grows tomatoes for fast food chains.
To understand why the food lobby is dominated by companies pushing unhealthy foods, a good place to start is the huge imbalance between the amount of fruits and vegetables we should eat and the relative size of the fruits and vegetables market.
According to nutritional guidelines published by the USDA and the Harvard School of Public Health, fruits and vegetables should make up 50% of a healthy diet. But the financial value of the fruit and vegetable market is nowhere near 50% of the food industry. In 2015, American farmers earned under $50 billion in revenue from fruits and vegetables. In contrast, processed food manufacturers like ConAgra, General Mills, and Kellogg each make around $15 billion in yearly revenue.
The meat and carb heavy American diet partially explains these disparities. The Department of Agriculture estimates that Americans eat roughly 50% less fruits and vegetables and over 20% more grains and meat than recommended by its nutrition guidelines.
But it is the economics of the food industry that really explain why the food lobby pushes unhealthy fare.
Processed foods have high profit margins that fund advertising campaigns and lobbying budgets. The importance of branding also leads to consolidation that supports special interest lobbying.
by Alex Mayyasi, Pricenomics | Read more:
Image: Till Krech
The Black Market in Academic Papers
A colleague of mine recently posted a plea on an open forum asking for someone with access to please send her a copy of a journal article. This colleague works at one of the premier research institutions in the EU which has an annual budget of over €100m, yet she had to ask her connections on Facebook for access to a scholarly article. Her university did not have access to this piece of literature that she needed to complete her research.
This story isn’t unique. Many academics have to seek other means for finding articles rather than pay the minimum US$30 that most publishers charge to access an article.
Instead, a black market of scholarly papers exists that those in the know can access as easily as using a hashtag on Twitter: #ICanHazPDF. This system relies on academics helping each other. I post a request for a paper and in ten minutes a response with an attachment may come back to me. The original tweet is then deleted.
Other disciplines have set up listservs and private sites with similar goals: those in need can ask those with access and online journal articles or books are provided free of charge. “There is a cool network of psychology students who have shared stuff by request for a couple of years, its called the European Federation of Psychology Students' Associations and we were all friends helping friends,” Aart Franken, a recent PhD graduate from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told me.
An affordability problem
As an academic who publishes within the traditional journal system, it’s worth looking at the normal scenario of scholarly publishing.
by Dana Ruggiero, The Conversation | Read more:
Image:Nomad_Soul/www.shutterstock.com
This story isn’t unique. Many academics have to seek other means for finding articles rather than pay the minimum US$30 that most publishers charge to access an article.Instead, a black market of scholarly papers exists that those in the know can access as easily as using a hashtag on Twitter: #ICanHazPDF. This system relies on academics helping each other. I post a request for a paper and in ten minutes a response with an attachment may come back to me. The original tweet is then deleted.
Other disciplines have set up listservs and private sites with similar goals: those in need can ask those with access and online journal articles or books are provided free of charge. “There is a cool network of psychology students who have shared stuff by request for a couple of years, its called the European Federation of Psychology Students' Associations and we were all friends helping friends,” Aart Franken, a recent PhD graduate from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told me.
Enter Sci-Hub
For the last few years, there has been a new player in town. Sci-Hub, a website developed in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan, is a repository for over 48m papers which continues to grow every day. Elbakyan has been called a modern-day Robin Hood by some.
The publishing company Elsevier is currently suing Sci-Hub and Elbakyan in New York for copyright infringement. After Elsevier won a temporary injunction against the site in January, it reopened with a new domain name. Alicia Wise, Elsevier’s director of universal access, said that for the company: “It’s as if somehow stealing content is justifiable if it’s seen as expensive … It’s not as if you’d walk into a grocery store and feel vindicated about stealing an organic chocolate bar as long as you left the Kit Kat bar on the shelf.”
But Sci-Hub has changed the way that many think of public access. Unlike previous systems, it keeps a copy of the requested paper on its server so that it doesn’t have to go looking for it when someone else asks. Now instead of asking a group of your peers or sending out a hopeful tweet, anyone can go to Sci-Hub and see whether the paper is there. Within 30 seconds the site loads a PDF version of the requested article that Sci-Hub has accessed from Libgen – a search engine for scientific articles and books, which allows free access to otherwise paywalled content – or skimmed from the publisher.
For the last few years, there has been a new player in town. Sci-Hub, a website developed in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan, is a repository for over 48m papers which continues to grow every day. Elbakyan has been called a modern-day Robin Hood by some.
The publishing company Elsevier is currently suing Sci-Hub and Elbakyan in New York for copyright infringement. After Elsevier won a temporary injunction against the site in January, it reopened with a new domain name. Alicia Wise, Elsevier’s director of universal access, said that for the company: “It’s as if somehow stealing content is justifiable if it’s seen as expensive … It’s not as if you’d walk into a grocery store and feel vindicated about stealing an organic chocolate bar as long as you left the Kit Kat bar on the shelf.”
But Sci-Hub has changed the way that many think of public access. Unlike previous systems, it keeps a copy of the requested paper on its server so that it doesn’t have to go looking for it when someone else asks. Now instead of asking a group of your peers or sending out a hopeful tweet, anyone can go to Sci-Hub and see whether the paper is there. Within 30 seconds the site loads a PDF version of the requested article that Sci-Hub has accessed from Libgen – a search engine for scientific articles and books, which allows free access to otherwise paywalled content – or skimmed from the publisher.
An affordability problem
As an academic who publishes within the traditional journal system, it’s worth looking at the normal scenario of scholarly publishing.
- An article is written and submitted to a journal.
- That article is accepted after revision and the author is asked to sign away copyright.
- The author is given the chance to publish “open access” which requires the author or the university to pay – in the case of Elsevier, between US$500 and US$5,000. Other publishers have similar policies.
- If the author cannot afford this fee, or their university refuses to pay it, or the grant that funded the research does not allow payment for publishing, the article is published closed and only those with subscriptions can access it. (Green open access, or the ability to self-archive the accepted version of the article in an institutional repository, is free of charge either immediately or after an embargo period depending on the publisher.)
Open access that requires authors to ‘buy’ the publication of their articles is wrought with problems, from silencing adjuncts and people without grants, to potentially influencing acceptance based on money rather than the quality of the research.The difference between academic publishing and other types of creative work is in who owns the rights and who gets paid. Simply put, the author does not get money once the article is published in the journal, the academic editors and peer reviewers are not paid for reviewing these articles. The publisher gives nothing and gets everything.
by Dana Ruggiero, The Conversation | Read more:
Image:Nomad_Soul/www.shutterstock.com
Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?
When Apple finishes its new $5 billion headquarters in Cupertino, California, the technorati will ooh and ahh over its otherworldly architecture, patting themselves on the back for yet another example of “innovation.” Countless employees, tech bloggers, and design fanatics are already lauding the “futuristic” building and its many “groundbreaking” features. But few are aware that Apple’s monumental project is already outdated, mimicking a half-century of stagnant suburban corporate campuses that isolated themselves—by design—from the communities their products were supposed to impact.
In the 1940s and ’50s, when American corporations first flirted with a move to the ‘burbs, CEOs realized that horizontal architecture immersed in a park-like buffer lent big business a sheen of wholesome goodness. The exodus was triggered, in part, by inroads the labor movement was making among blue-collar employees in cities. At the same time, the increasing diversity of urban populations meant it was getting harder and harder to maintain an all-white workforce. One by one, major companies headed out of town for greener pastures, luring desired employees into their gilded cages with the types of office perks familiar to any Googler.
Though these sprawling developments were initially hailed as innovative, America’s experiment with suburban, car-centric lifestyles eventually proved problematic, both for its exclusiveness and environmental drawbacks: Such communities intentionally prevented certain ethnic groups and lower-income people from moving there, while enforcing zoning rules that maximized driving. Today’s tech campuses, which the New York Times describes as “the triumph of privatized commons, of a verdant natural world sheltered for the few,” are no better, having done nothing to disrupt the isolated, anti-urban landscape favored by mid-century corporations.
Louise Mozingo, the Chair of UC Berkeley’s Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Department, detailed the origins of these corporate environments in her 2011 book, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes. From the 1930s designs for AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey to Google’s Silicon Valley campus today, Mozingo traced the evolution of suburbia’s “separatist geography.” In contrast with the city, Mozingo writes, “the suburbs were predictable, spacious, segregated, specialized, quiet, new, and easily traversed—a much more promising state of affairs to corporations bent on expansion.” It also didn’t hurt that many top executives often already lived in the affluent, low-density areas near where they wanted their offices built.
Like the expansive headquarters of many companies who fled dense downtowns, Apple’s new office falls into the architectural vein Mozingo dubs “pastoral capitalism,” after a landscaping trend made popular more than a century ago. In the mid-19th century, prominent figures like Frederick Law Olmsted promoted a specific vision of the natural environment adapted to modern life, beginning with urban parks and university campuses and eventually encompassing suburban residential neighborhoods.
“There was this whole academic discussion around what defined the picturesque, the beautiful, and the sublime,” Mozingo told me when we spoke recently. “Landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing had written extensively about it in American publications, but Olmsted went beyond that, and called his ideal park landscape ‘pastoral.’ He was well-read enough to understand that this combined elements of wild nature with agricultural nature.” (...)
The focus on amenities for office staff was also a way to prevent them from organizing, particularly the legions of low-paid female employees needed to maximize profits. “They were terrified that female clerical workers were going to unionize,” Mozingo says, “In the era before computing, companies ran on vast amounts of paper, and that paperwork was almost all done by women. That was one of the reasons they wanted to get out of downtown—if the secretaries unionized, they’d all be sunk.”
Even the shift to personal vehicles rather than public transit was hailed as a perk: Private cars were supposedly more reliable and allowed for more flexible work schedules, particularly in an era before highways were clogged with traffic. In actuality, this encouraged employees to extend their workday past the standard hours of nine-to-five, and helped isolated workers to ensure company loyalty. “This is something that Silicon Valley companies still do—they capture the employee for the entire day,” Mozingo says. “The descriptions were extremely explicit about this, about solidifying corporate culture, instilling loyalty, and minimizing happenstance meetings with people from other companies who might steal you. It’s about making the corporation your entire life.” (...)
Mozingo’s concept of a separatist landscape builds off the ideas of geographer Allan Pred, who describes how our daily path through the built environment is a major influence on our culture and values. “If you live in a typical suburban place,” Mozingo explains, “you get in your car and drive to work by yourself, then stay in your office for the entire day seeing only other colleagues, and then drive back home alone. You’re basically only interested in improving highways and your office building.” Even as big tech touts its green credentials, the offices for Apple, Facebook, Google, and their ilk are inundated with parking, discreetly hidden below ground like their savvy mid-century forebears, encouraging employees to continue their solo commutes.
Today, this segregation isn’t only aided by architecture—it’s also a function of the tech-enabled lifestyle, with its endless array of on-demand services and delivery apps that limit interactions with people of differing views and backgrounds (exposure that would likely serve to increase tolerance). A protective bubble of affluence also reduces the need for civic engagement: If you always rely on ride-hailing apps, why would you care if the sidewalk gets cleaned or repaired?
by Hunter Oatman-Stanford, Collector's Weekly | Read more:
In the 1940s and ’50s, when American corporations first flirted with a move to the ‘burbs, CEOs realized that horizontal architecture immersed in a park-like buffer lent big business a sheen of wholesome goodness. The exodus was triggered, in part, by inroads the labor movement was making among blue-collar employees in cities. At the same time, the increasing diversity of urban populations meant it was getting harder and harder to maintain an all-white workforce. One by one, major companies headed out of town for greener pastures, luring desired employees into their gilded cages with the types of office perks familiar to any Googler.Though these sprawling developments were initially hailed as innovative, America’s experiment with suburban, car-centric lifestyles eventually proved problematic, both for its exclusiveness and environmental drawbacks: Such communities intentionally prevented certain ethnic groups and lower-income people from moving there, while enforcing zoning rules that maximized driving. Today’s tech campuses, which the New York Times describes as “the triumph of privatized commons, of a verdant natural world sheltered for the few,” are no better, having done nothing to disrupt the isolated, anti-urban landscape favored by mid-century corporations.
Louise Mozingo, the Chair of UC Berkeley’s Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Department, detailed the origins of these corporate environments in her 2011 book, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes. From the 1930s designs for AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey to Google’s Silicon Valley campus today, Mozingo traced the evolution of suburbia’s “separatist geography.” In contrast with the city, Mozingo writes, “the suburbs were predictable, spacious, segregated, specialized, quiet, new, and easily traversed—a much more promising state of affairs to corporations bent on expansion.” It also didn’t hurt that many top executives often already lived in the affluent, low-density areas near where they wanted their offices built.
Like the expansive headquarters of many companies who fled dense downtowns, Apple’s new office falls into the architectural vein Mozingo dubs “pastoral capitalism,” after a landscaping trend made popular more than a century ago. In the mid-19th century, prominent figures like Frederick Law Olmsted promoted a specific vision of the natural environment adapted to modern life, beginning with urban parks and university campuses and eventually encompassing suburban residential neighborhoods.
“There was this whole academic discussion around what defined the picturesque, the beautiful, and the sublime,” Mozingo told me when we spoke recently. “Landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing had written extensively about it in American publications, but Olmsted went beyond that, and called his ideal park landscape ‘pastoral.’ He was well-read enough to understand that this combined elements of wild nature with agricultural nature.” (...)
The focus on amenities for office staff was also a way to prevent them from organizing, particularly the legions of low-paid female employees needed to maximize profits. “They were terrified that female clerical workers were going to unionize,” Mozingo says, “In the era before computing, companies ran on vast amounts of paper, and that paperwork was almost all done by women. That was one of the reasons they wanted to get out of downtown—if the secretaries unionized, they’d all be sunk.”
Even the shift to personal vehicles rather than public transit was hailed as a perk: Private cars were supposedly more reliable and allowed for more flexible work schedules, particularly in an era before highways were clogged with traffic. In actuality, this encouraged employees to extend their workday past the standard hours of nine-to-five, and helped isolated workers to ensure company loyalty. “This is something that Silicon Valley companies still do—they capture the employee for the entire day,” Mozingo says. “The descriptions were extremely explicit about this, about solidifying corporate culture, instilling loyalty, and minimizing happenstance meetings with people from other companies who might steal you. It’s about making the corporation your entire life.” (...)
Mozingo’s concept of a separatist landscape builds off the ideas of geographer Allan Pred, who describes how our daily path through the built environment is a major influence on our culture and values. “If you live in a typical suburban place,” Mozingo explains, “you get in your car and drive to work by yourself, then stay in your office for the entire day seeing only other colleagues, and then drive back home alone. You’re basically only interested in improving highways and your office building.” Even as big tech touts its green credentials, the offices for Apple, Facebook, Google, and their ilk are inundated with parking, discreetly hidden below ground like their savvy mid-century forebears, encouraging employees to continue their solo commutes.
Today, this segregation isn’t only aided by architecture—it’s also a function of the tech-enabled lifestyle, with its endless array of on-demand services and delivery apps that limit interactions with people of differing views and backgrounds (exposure that would likely serve to increase tolerance). A protective bubble of affluence also reduces the need for civic engagement: If you always rely on ride-hailing apps, why would you care if the sidewalk gets cleaned or repaired?
Image: Balthazar Korab
Car Trouble
In 2011 Don Foss, perhaps the richest used-car salesman in the history of the world, commissioned a half-hour film about himself and posted it to YouTube. The Don Foss Story opens with one of his TV ads from the 1970s, ads for which Foss hired an actor to portray him. (The real Foss, who is portly and balding, says he might have played himself "if I looked like Robert Redford.") At the ad's conclusion, we meet the film's narrator: "Today I'm going to guide you through the story of a truly remarkable man," he intones before lobbing the auto billionaire his first softball: "Don, your story pretty much epitomizes the great American Dream. I'm sure everybody wants to know how you did it."
What Foss did was practically invent the subprime car loan, a market that today exceeds $100 billion a year. First as a dealer, and later as the founder of an auto-financing company called Credit Acceptance, he was "really the first to see all the money to be made arranging the financing for cars that would otherwise end up in the crusher, and selling them in poor neighborhoods," says a longtime auto industry consultant.
The Don Foss Story casts things a bit differently. It includes a lot of talk about the nobility of extending credit to people no one else would lend to. If not for Credit Acceptance and its imitators, how would people make it to and from work, shuttle the kids to school, or take Mom to her dialysis appointments? By 1995, when the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story on this "corner of the lending world J.P. Morgan would not recognize," Foss' personal stake in Credit Acceptance was worth $550 million. The company's stock was trading at $21 a share then. Today the price hovers around $200.
Virtually all of this growth has taken place since 2008—not despite the Great Recession, but largely because of it. When millions of Americans lost homes to foreclosure and millions more lost their jobs, it created a vast new reservoir of customers with tarnished credit and little cash. The amount of money loaned to these subprime borrowers—who now account for nearly a quarter of all auto loans—has more than doubled since 2009, the New York Fed reports. And because car loans, like mortgages, can be bundled and peddled to Wall Street investors, subprime auto bonds have emerged as an attractive replacement for the disgraced subprime mortgage bonds. In 2009, auto financiers sold about $3 billion worth of subprime auto bonds through the securities markets. By 2014, that number was $22 billion.
While the subprime auto market is nowhere near large enough to bring down the economy, there are unmistakable parallels to the mortgage debacle. Delinquencies and repossessions are on the rise industry-wide, and there have been reports of falsified loan applications. At least eight banks have come under scrutiny for allegedly jacking up interest rates on black and Latino car buyers. Big players including Ally Financial and Fifth Third Bank (America's ninth-largest bank) recently paid out nearly $200 million to settle such accusations. "Auto loans are now the most troubled consumer financial product," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) noted last spring. "The market is now thick with loose underwriting standards, predatory and discriminatory lending practices, and increasing repossessions." (...)
Foss took Credit Acceptance public in 1992. It was around then that Ohio lawyer Ron Burdge, in the process of suing a used-car dealer, obtained a copy of Credit Acceptance's corporate manual and realized, with a mix of horror and awe, that "they had created this remarkable system for taking every last dime from their customers." Of Credit Acceptance's nearly 300 employees, roughly 200 were in collections, and the company pursued delinquent borrowers with machinelike efficiency. If that didn't work, a company lawyer would sue the customers for damages—including additional interest and legal fees—and then go after their wages in states that allowed it. "They brought everything to a totally new level," said Burdge, who used what he learned in subsequent lawsuits against the company.
Three years later, when a Wall Street Journal reporter arrived in Michigan to profile Foss and his business, it wasn't uncommon to find customers saddled with interest rates as high as 30 percent. Borrowers typically paid twice what the car had cost the dealer, the paper reported, and often those vehicles didn't outlast the loans that financed them. Eventually, Credit Acceptance and other subprime lenders would even start requiring borrowers to install starter kill switches that allowed the companies to incapacitate their vehicles from afar, "pretty much guaranteeing that the car loan is the first one people pay every month," a former Ford finance manager told me. Credit Acceptance now finances sales for thousands of used-car lots across the United States, and Foss' success has inspired any number of imitators: Capital One, Santander, and Wells Fargo are just a few of the big players that piled into the business of extending car loans to desperate people at borderline usurious rates. "The thing I didn't realize about going public is that you tell everybody how your business works," Foss cracked in one interview.
What Foss did was practically invent the subprime car loan, a market that today exceeds $100 billion a year. First as a dealer, and later as the founder of an auto-financing company called Credit Acceptance, he was "really the first to see all the money to be made arranging the financing for cars that would otherwise end up in the crusher, and selling them in poor neighborhoods," says a longtime auto industry consultant.The Don Foss Story casts things a bit differently. It includes a lot of talk about the nobility of extending credit to people no one else would lend to. If not for Credit Acceptance and its imitators, how would people make it to and from work, shuttle the kids to school, or take Mom to her dialysis appointments? By 1995, when the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story on this "corner of the lending world J.P. Morgan would not recognize," Foss' personal stake in Credit Acceptance was worth $550 million. The company's stock was trading at $21 a share then. Today the price hovers around $200.
Virtually all of this growth has taken place since 2008—not despite the Great Recession, but largely because of it. When millions of Americans lost homes to foreclosure and millions more lost their jobs, it created a vast new reservoir of customers with tarnished credit and little cash. The amount of money loaned to these subprime borrowers—who now account for nearly a quarter of all auto loans—has more than doubled since 2009, the New York Fed reports. And because car loans, like mortgages, can be bundled and peddled to Wall Street investors, subprime auto bonds have emerged as an attractive replacement for the disgraced subprime mortgage bonds. In 2009, auto financiers sold about $3 billion worth of subprime auto bonds through the securities markets. By 2014, that number was $22 billion.
While the subprime auto market is nowhere near large enough to bring down the economy, there are unmistakable parallels to the mortgage debacle. Delinquencies and repossessions are on the rise industry-wide, and there have been reports of falsified loan applications. At least eight banks have come under scrutiny for allegedly jacking up interest rates on black and Latino car buyers. Big players including Ally Financial and Fifth Third Bank (America's ninth-largest bank) recently paid out nearly $200 million to settle such accusations. "Auto loans are now the most troubled consumer financial product," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) noted last spring. "The market is now thick with loose underwriting standards, predatory and discriminatory lending practices, and increasing repossessions." (...)
Foss took Credit Acceptance public in 1992. It was around then that Ohio lawyer Ron Burdge, in the process of suing a used-car dealer, obtained a copy of Credit Acceptance's corporate manual and realized, with a mix of horror and awe, that "they had created this remarkable system for taking every last dime from their customers." Of Credit Acceptance's nearly 300 employees, roughly 200 were in collections, and the company pursued delinquent borrowers with machinelike efficiency. If that didn't work, a company lawyer would sue the customers for damages—including additional interest and legal fees—and then go after their wages in states that allowed it. "They brought everything to a totally new level," said Burdge, who used what he learned in subsequent lawsuits against the company.
Three years later, when a Wall Street Journal reporter arrived in Michigan to profile Foss and his business, it wasn't uncommon to find customers saddled with interest rates as high as 30 percent. Borrowers typically paid twice what the car had cost the dealer, the paper reported, and often those vehicles didn't outlast the loans that financed them. Eventually, Credit Acceptance and other subprime lenders would even start requiring borrowers to install starter kill switches that allowed the companies to incapacitate their vehicles from afar, "pretty much guaranteeing that the car loan is the first one people pay every month," a former Ford finance manager told me. Credit Acceptance now finances sales for thousands of used-car lots across the United States, and Foss' success has inspired any number of imitators: Capital One, Santander, and Wells Fargo are just a few of the big players that piled into the business of extending car loans to desperate people at borderline usurious rates. "The thing I didn't realize about going public is that you tell everybody how your business works," Foss cracked in one interview.
by Gary Rivlin, Mother Jones | Read more:
Image: Ross MacDonald
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
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
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,
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.
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
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
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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