If You Are What You Eat, America Is Allrecipes

In 2009, Cook’s Illustrated founder Christopher Kimball wrote a eulogy for Gourmet, the glossy Condé Nast magazine that was being shuttered after nearly seven decades. The publication had been a home for people who valued culinary expertise, wrote Kimball—a place with “respect for those who had earned the chops, as it were, who had a lifetime of good breeding and experience in order to stand at the cultural helm.” In its place, Kimball saw a food culture overrun by “a million instant pundits” promoting slapdash, amateur fare. “Google ‘broccoli casserole’ and make the first recipe you find,” he wrote. “I guarantee it will be disappointing.”

The first Google result for broccoli casserole (at least when I checked the other week, though the algorithm seems to change daily) is a dish by a home cook named Stacy M. Polcyn. “Awesome Broccoli-Cheese Casserole” calls for one can of condensed cream of mushroom soup; one cup of mayonnaise; three packages of frozen broccoli; 8 ounces of cheddar cheese; an egg; a quarter cup of chopped onion; then salt, pepper, and paprika to taste. Mix everything together, bake at 350. The dish has been given hundreds of five-star ratings from people who leave comments suggesting tweaks (“I added 1 teaspoon garlic salt”) and expressing their enthusiasm (“All I have to say is YUM!”). It is, of course, from Allrecipes.com.

In the world of online recipe aggregators, Allrecipes is distinctly unglamorous.While rival website Epicurious culls recipes from Bon Appétit and the now-defunct Gourmet, Allrecipes takes crowdsourced creations from home cooks and then writes them up in standardized form. In the era of the ornate food description, Allrecipes favors a house style shorn of ostentation. The site uses “stir” or “cook” instead of “sauté” (“because that’s a French word,” explains Esmee Williams, Allrecipes’ vice president of consumer and brand strategy). Sugar cookies are “easy.” Pancakes are “old fashioned.” Many, many dishes are “creamy.”

And at a time when readers of aspirational food websites are used to images of impossibly perfect dishes—each microgreen artfully placed by some tweezer-wielding stylist—Allrecipes offers amateur snaps of amateur meals. The site is awash with close-ups of sludgy-looking soups; photos of stuffed peppers that look like they’ve been captured in the harsh, unforgiving light of a public washroom; and shot after shot documenting the myriad ways that melted cheese can congeal. It is all, Kimball and his ilk would agree, extremely disappointing. It’s also perhaps the most accurate, democratic snapshot of American culinary desires.

Allrecipes is the most popular English-language food website in the world. According to ComScore, last December the site got almost 50 million visits, the biggest month by any food site ever. Thanks to its mastery of search engine optimization, the site’s recipes constantly appear near the top of Google search results. If you look for “lasagna recipes,” as I did the other day, you’ll immediately find “World’s Best Lasagna,” a recipe that has been one of the website’s most popular dishes for 15 years. The recipe (which makes a perfectly tasty lasagna) was viewed more than 6 million times last year alone and has received more than 11,000 five-star ratings. In an era of celebrity chefs and recipe-kit delivery services developed by experts, a pasta dish by a Dallas dad who describes his heritage as “entirely Anglo-Saxon” is quite possibly America’s most-cooked meal. (...)

The gap between the food we cook and the food we talk about has never been larger. Culturally, it’s the same gap that exists between The Americans—the brainy FX spy show that seems to have nearly as many internet recappers as viewers—and shows like the immensely popular and rarely discussed NCIS. Breathless blog posts about the latest food trends can feel like certain corners of music criticism, pre-poptimism, when writers would obsess over the latest postrock band that was using really interesting time signatures while ignoring the vast majority of music people listened to on the radio. The food at Allrecipes is the massively popular, not-worth-talking-about mainstream.

So, what are the meals that people are actually cooking in 2016? A look at the website’s “hall of fame”—recipes that have been highly rated thousands of times—offers a glimpse of the contemporary American palate.

by Nicholas Hune-Brown, Slate | Read more:
Image:artpustovit/Thinkstock

Burning Man for the 1%

[ed. Nope. Not an Onion parody. Wish it was.]

A red Ferrari with the top down swerved past on the winding dirt road, heading to what looked like a small Mars encampment. Helicopters landed on the side of the road and greeters darted across. At a farmers’ market with overflowing baskets full of raspberries, watermelons, and focaccia, I asked for a mango, and the farmer started cutting it in half for me: “That’ll be $7.”

This weekend, outside Las Vegas, a group of Burning Man veterans put on a festival called Further Future, now in its second year. Across 49 acres of Native American land over three days, with around 5,000 attendees, the event was the epitome of a new trend of so-called “transformational festivals” that are drawing technologists for what’s billed as a mix of fun and education. While tickets started at $350, many attendees opted for upgrades to fully staffed accommodation and fine dining.

While Burning Man’s hidden luxury camps on the edge of town are criticized by old time Burners who value labor on the desert, Further Future is a splinter group that’s unapologetic about wanting a good, hard-labor-free time. “Unabashed luxury”, the website reads. Burners are judged for using Wi-Fi or having private chefs; Further Future advertises its connectivity and personal festival assistant service. Nobu hosted a $250-a-seat dinner on the first night of the festival. Partiers included Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet; Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman; and top Facebook executive Stan Chudnovsky.

“It’s the Burning Man 1%,” said Charles, a documentary filmmaker with spikes pierced through his ears and a brainwave meditation startup. “It’s curated.”

Eric Schmidt was backstage leaning against a tower of palettes and wearing an ornate top hat and a vest made of mirrors. He said he was at Further Future mostly because these were his friends.

“It’s well documented that I go to Burning Man. The future’s driven by people with an alternative world view. You never know where you’ll find ideas. ”

This was the cream of the Burning Man crop, he said.

“This is a high percentage of San Francisco entrepreneurs, and they tend to be winners. It’s a curated, self-selected group of adults who have jobs,” Schmidt said. “You can tell by the percentage of trailers.” (...)

Party planners at Burning Man are careful to hide their luxury dwellings behind large walls dressed as art projects, but Further Future had no such pretension. Behind a chain-link fence was the VIP neighborhood with airstreams ($5,000) and Lunar Palaces ($7,500) – 200 sq ft, 9ft high, custom-made luxury domes with wooden flooring and furnished to sleep four. These included something called an entourage concierge – “a personal, dedicated lifestyle manager and assistant ready to help you with any requirements or desires you may have. No request is ever unattainable.” The lifestyle assistant, who makes sure you have the soap you like, will work with you on everything “from the green juice you enjoy every morning to the old-fashioned cocktail you sip on in the evenings”.

In a shipping container converted to control room, I found Russell Ward, the general show runner and publicist who’s the mastermind behind the most popular “transformational festivals”.

“This is top-league networking and business folks are all here in the guise of having fun. It’s designed around the music, but it’s about the business,” Ward said. “A ton of business will get done here. Entrepreneurs will get funded, investors will find their trajectories, service companies will meet and mix it up.”

Before running the tech world’s hot new trend, Ward had an online gaming hedge fund. “The problem was it got hairy. It’s a dodgy industry,” he said. “We weren’t doing anything illegal, but we got raided by the government, and I got spooked. So I had to decide where to plant my next seed, and I found this knack for festivals.” (...)

In the Wellness Tent, there’s a fitness class with people jumping up and down in unison. Nearby, one woman advertises psychiatric services as “tools and technology broken down for busy professionals”. Another advertises “smudgie aura cleansing”. To the side of the main wellness stage, a man is getting a transfusion in his arm from a bright yellow bag of fluid (a liter of saline and vitamins called Push IV). The patient reclines, half asleep, until someone accidentally knocks the bag over, jolting the needle in his arm.

An espresso line stretches 45 minutes long for lavender lattes.

During a wellness panel on “Adventure Travel: Journey As Wellness”, someone asks the instructor Fabian Piorkowski about privilege.

“We’re so privileged to come to these spiritual places – Further Future, Tulum – but not everyone can,” the audience member says, asking Piorkowski how he should reconcile that.

“It’s all about balance. We are the ones meant to be the air, not the earth,” Piorkowski said. “So you have this group who can travel. The purpose can never be to enable everyone to travel because that would create imbalance.”

by Nellie Bowles, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Tomas Loewy

via:

The Secret Culprit in the Theranos Mess

Over the past few years, when media outlets reached out to Theranos about whether its wunderkind founder, Elizabeth Holmes, would have time to sit for an interview, her P.R. team generally responded with two questions: What time and where? Holmes was a star. She bounced between TV networks like a politician giving a stump speech. She sat across from tech bloggers, reporters, and TV cameras who slurped up her delectable story—that she had come up with Theranos, her blood-testing company, as a Stanford freshman who was fearful of needles—and they largely regurgitated it, sometimes beat for beat. Yet in April of 2015, when John Carreyrou, an investigative reporter with The Wall Street Journal, reached out for an interview with Holmes, he said he got a very different response.

After two months of being stonewalled by the Theranos P.R. team, Carreyrou told me an entourage of lawyers arrived at the Journal’s Midtown Manhattan offices at one P.M. on June 23. The pack confidently sauntered past editors and reporters in the fifth-floor newsroom and was led by David Boies, the superstar lawyer who has taken on Bill Gates, the U.S. government, and represented Al Gore in the 2000 Florida recount case. Four other attorneys and a Theranos representative accompanied him. Before anything was said, the lawyers placed two audio recorders at either end of the long oval wood table, and recalcitrantly sat across from Carreyrou, his editor, and a Journal lawyer. Then they hit record.

Almost immediately, one person present told me, Boies and his team threatened legal action against the paper, accusing it of being in possession of “proprietary information” and “trade secrets.” The Theranos legal team then did their best to discredit dozens of independent sources whom Carreyrou had interviewed. The legal team roared, they showed teeth, they tried to intimidate. After a very tense five hours, the person told me that Boies and his platoon exited the newsroom, leaving behind the very serious specter of a lawsuit. (A spokesperson for both Boies and Theranos declined to comment. But one person close to the company said that Boies had been dispatched because Theranos executives had learned that the Journal possessed sensitive internal documents.)

For four months after that meeting, Carreyrou continued to try to secure an interview with Holmes, and for four months he was continuously threatened. Finally, in October, the Journal published its now-famous article suggesting that the Theranos narrative was all wrong—that the company’s technology was faulty, that it relied on other companies’ machinery to run many of its tests, and that some of those tests yielded inaccurate results. In fact, as Carreyrou reported, the company was hawking a tale that was too good to be true.

In the months since, the plot has only thickened for Theranos. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found serious deficiencies in the company’s Newark, California, lab. Theranos is under federal investigation by the S.E.C. and U.S. Attorney’s Office. Regulators have proposed banning Holmes from her company for two years.

There are a lot of directions in which to point fingers. There is Holmes, of course, who seemed to have repeatedly misrepresented her company. There are also the people who funded her, those who praised her, and the largely older, all-white, and entirely male board of directors, few of whom have any real experience in the medical field, that supposedly oversaw her.

But if you peel back all of the layers of this tale, at the center you will find one of the more insidious culprits: the Silicon Valley tech press. They embraced Holmes and her start-up with a surprising paucity of questions about the technology she had supposedly developed. They praised her as “the next Steve Jobs,” over and over (the black turtleneck didn’t hurt), until it was no longer a question, but seemingly a fact. At TechCrunch Disrupt, blogger Jon Shieberhad his blood drawn onstage as he interviewed her. There were no tough questions about whether Theranos’s technology actually worked; just praise. When it seemed that the tech press had vetted Holmes, she subsequently went mainstream. She got her New Yorkerprofile, and her face appeared on the cover of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, among others. (Holmes appeared on Vanity Fair’s New Establishment list and spoke at its 2015 New Establishment Summit.)

But it was a passage in that New Yorker profile, written by Ken Auletta, that led Carreyrou to start questioning the validity of the company. In the piece, Auletta acerbically noted that the technology behind Theranos was “treated as a state secret, and Holmes’s description of the process was comically vague.” She told him, for instance, that one process occurred when “a chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel.”

Carreyrou, a two-time Pulitzer winner, read that passage and (as you probably just did) essentially scratched his head. Soon after, he got a tip from a source who noted, he told me, that “the coverage that the company was getting belied some serious issues” with what was really going on inside Theranos.

So why did Holmes and Theranos get such a break? Was she an anomaly who somehow pulled one over on the tech press in Silicon Valley? Not even close.

by Nick Bilton, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Carlos Chavarria/The New York Times/Redux

via:

Inside the Secret Meeting Where Wall Street Tested Digital Cash

On a recent Monday in April, more than 100 executives from some of the world’s largest financial institutions gathered for a private meeting at the Times Square office of Nasdaq Inc. They weren’t there to just talk about blockchain, the new technology some predict will transform finance, but to build and experiment with the software.

By the end of the day, they had seen something revolutionary: U.S. dollars transformed into pure digital assets, able to be used to execute and settle a trade instantly. That’s the promise of a blockchain, where the cumbersome and error-prone system that takes days to move money across town or around the world is replaced with almost instant certainty. The event was created by Chain, one of many startups trying to rewire the financial industry, with representatives from Nasdaq, Citigroup Inc., Visa Inc., Fidelity, Fiserv Inc., Pfizer Inc. and others in the room.

The event -- announced in a statement this Monday -- marked a key moment in the evolution of blockchain, notable both for what was achieved, as well as how many firms were involved. The technology’s potential has captivated Wall Street executives because it offers a way to free up billions of dollars by speeding transactions that currently can take days, tying up capital. But a huge piece of that puzzle is transforming cash into a digital form. And while some firms have conducted experiments, the Chain event showed a large number of them are now looking jointly at a potential solution.

“We created a digital dollar” to show the group at Nasdaq an instant debit and credit on a blockchain, said Marc West, chief technology officer at Fiserv, a transaction and payments company with more than 13,000 clients across the financial industry. “This is the first time the money has moved.”

Quietly Building

Chain is already known in some Wall Street circles for its project to help Nasdaq shift trading of non-public company shares onto a blockchain. But for the most part, it has kept relatively quiet compared with other fintech ventures.

The San Francisco-based company also used the April 11 meeting to introduce its customers and investors to Chain Open Standard, an open-source blockchain platform that the venture has been designing for more than a year, said Adam Ludwin, the company’s chief executive officer. What Chain has done is engineer the complicated elements needed for a blockchain to work, so that its customers can build custom solutions on top of that to solve business problems, he said.

“We’ve been quietly building with a whole bunch of folks for a few years,” he said. “Blockchains are networks, so we think collaboration is important, but what’s even more important than collaboration at the beginning is getting the model right.” The event was kept secret so executives could freely share nascent ideas and take risks. “The more press, the less quality of the dialogue and problem-solving,” he said.

The most common blockchain is the one supporting the digital currency bitcoin, which has been active since 2009. Financial firms have been reluctant to embrace bitcoin, however, as its anonymous users could entangle banks in violations of anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer regulations. Digital U.S. dollars, or any other fiat currency, on the other hand, doesn’t pose those risks.

‘Mainframe Era’

Nasdaq and Citigroup partnered to explore how they can work together, said Brad Peterson, the exchange-owner’s chief information officer. He said blockchain also could be used for reference data -- how specific stocks or bonds are identified across all markets, for example.

Wall Street was one of the earliest beneficiaries of computers replacing office systems. Now 30 years later, those legacy systems can be a hindrance to further technological evolution, he said.

“That’s the great opportunity -- how to unlock that ability to work your way out from under the mainframe era,” he said.

While cash in a bank account moves electronically all the time today, there’s a distinction between that system and what it means to say money is digital. Electronic payments are really just messages that cash needs to move from one account to another, and this reconciliation is what adds time to the payments process. For customers, moving money between accounts can take days as banks wait for confirmations. Digital dollars, however, are pre-loaded into a system like a blockchain. From there, they can be swapped immediately for an asset.

“Instead of a record or message being moved, it’s the actual asset,” Ludwin said. “The payment and the settlement become the same thing.”

by Matthew Leising, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Scott Eells

via:

[ed. Is there any other piece of complex technology that's so routinely lost, abandoned, thrown away or abused?]
via: 

Weeding the Worst Library Books

Last summer, in Berkeley, California, librarians pulled roughly forty thousand books off the shelves of the public library and carted them away. The library’s director, Jeff Scott, announced that his staff had “deaccessioned” texts that weren’t regularly checked out. But the protesters who gathered on the library’s front steps to decry what became known as “Librarygate” preferred a different term: “purged.” “Put a tourniquet on the hemorrhage,” one of the protesters’ signs declared. “Don’t pulp our fiction,” another read.

In response, Scott attempted to put his policy in perspective. His predecessor had removed fifty thousand books in a single year, he explained. And many of the deaccessioned books would be donated to a nonprofit—not pulped. Furthermore, after new acquisitions, the collection was actually expected to grow by eighteen thousand books, to a total of nearly half a million. But none of these facts stirred up much sympathy in Berkeley. A thousand people signed a petition demanding that Scott step down—and, in the end, he did.

Public libraries serve practical purposes, but they also symbolize our collective access to information, so it’s understandable that many Berkeley residents reacted strongly to seeing books discarded. What’s more, Scott’s critics ultimately contended that he had not been forthcoming about how many books were being removed, or about his process for deciding which books would go. Still, it’s standard practice—and often a necessity—to remove books from library collections. Librarians call it “weeding,” and the choice of words is important: a library that “hemorrhages” books loses its lifeblood; a librarian who “weeds” is helping the collection thrive. The key question, for librarians who prefer to avoid scandal, is which books are weeds.

Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner, two Michigan librarians, have answered that question in multiple ways. They’ve written a book called “Making a Collection Count: A Holistic Approach to Library Collection Management,” which proposes best practices for analyzing library data and adapting to space constraints. But they are better known for calling attention to the matter with a blog: Awful Library Books.

Kelly and Hibner created the site in 2009. Each week, they highlight books that seem to them so self-evidently ridiculous that weeding is the only possible recourse. They often feature books with outlandish titles, like “Little Corpuscle,” a children’s book starring a dancing red blood cell; “Enlarging Is Thrilling,” a how-to about—you guessed it—film photography; and “God, the Rod, and Your Child’s Bod: The Art of Loving Correction for Christian Parents.”

Sometimes it’s the subject matter that seems absurd. Of “Wax in Our World,” a nonfiction book for young adults, Kelly said, “Who came into a publisher’s office and said, ‘You know, the kids really need a book about wax’?”

by Daniel A. Gross, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Awfullibrarybooks.net

Make More Music

[ed. My God. Someday learning anything in its elemental form will be obsolete.]

It's music-making time again! This week, we've got another set of crowdfunded devices that unlock new and unexpected ways to play with sound and create new tunes.

Dualo

The Dualo is all about making it easy to create music, but that hasn't stopped it from being an interesting device by several professional standards. Its core functions are the two banks of buttons that are set up to group harmonious notes nearby (so pressing any local set of buttons is likely to produce a pleasing combination) and which can be switched between 52 different synthesized instruments, and a 7-track on-the-fly looper that lets you layer these sounds on top of each other as you play. What's notable and rare among these kinds of instruments is that the Dualo is a self-contained, standalone device — it doesn't require an associated app or a computer, though it can also double as a MIDI input device in larger digital music workflows.

AirJamz

AirJamz is really more of a toy than anything else, but it sure does look like a fun toy. It's a wrist-mounted motion sensor that interfaces wirelessly with a mobile app to produce sound from that age-old pastime of playing air guitar. Your miming strums are converted into actual guitar sounds, though it's a little unclear just how much control over those sounds the system really provides. Nevertheless, it looks like fun — and, again, is MIDI compatible, opening up all sorts of possibilities. With the ability to run four sensor units in tandem, AirJamz might find the most adoption as a party game.

XTH Sense

The XTH Sense is the most ambitious and different of this week's projects: a bio-sensor based music creation device. Like the AirJamz, it straps to your wrist and detects movement — but it doesn't stop there. The unit includes a bioacoustic microphone that listens for pulse, blood flow and muscle movement, and a thermometer to track body temperature, and performs some algorithmic wizardry to combine all these variables into a shifting signal that controls other devices. Music creation is one of its flagship applications, but not the only one: it also has potential as a virtual reality device, a gaming controller and more, not to mention it could be used simply as a bio-sensor for those who want to access that data. Like our other devices this week, the XTH Sense has full MIDI compatibility, and even comes with pre-made plugins for a bunch of popular music production software packages — plus, it's compatible with the Arduino IDE, and comes with a flexible API for building custom apps.

by Lean Beadon, Tech Dirt |  Read more:

Image: via:

Pop Goes the Digital Media Bubble

You don't always hear the bubble burst. Often, it's more a gradual escaping of air, signaled by nothing more than the occasional queasy feeling you bat away: One house for sale on the block, oh well. Two, three—maybe just a robust market? Five, six, seven—and suddenly everyone's underwater and the sheriff is at your door.

That's kind of how it's feeling in the digital media business. For a few years now, investors have been pouring money into online news with the kind of fervor that once fueled the minimansion boom. But in the past year, the boarded-up windows have started showing up: The Guardian, which bet heavily on expanding its digital presence in the United States, announced it needed to cut costs by 20 percent. The tech news site Gigaom shut down suddenly, with its founder warning that "it is a very dangerous time" to be in digital media. Mobile-first Circa put itself on "indefinite hiatus." Al Jazeera America, once hailed as the hottest thing in bringing together cable news and digital publishing, shut down and laid off hundreds of journalists.

Pop.

And it's been getting worse. As the New York Times' John Herrman put it, "in recent weeks, what had been a simmering worry among publishers has turned into borderline panic." Mashable, which had made a big investment in news and current affairs, laid off dozens of journalists and pivoted to a new, video-heavy strategy. Investor darling BuzzFeed fought reports that it had slashed earnings projections by nearly 50 percent. Salon laid off a string of veteran staffers. Yahoo put its core business, including its news and search features, up for sale.

Pop. Pop.

Here's the thing: It was not hard to see this coming. For years now, smooth-talking guys (yes, mostly guys) with PowerPoint decks have offered up one magic formula after another to save the business of news. Citizen journalism—all the reporting done by users, for free, with newsrooms simply curating it all. "Brand You"—each journo out there on her own, drawing legions of followers to her personal output. (Even Andrew Sullivan couldn't make that work.) Viral headlines—every news shop Upworthy-ing its way into the Facebook swarm. Aggregation, curation, explainer journalism, explainer video, branded content, text bots, video, branded video, branded virtual reality video…each fueling the hope that here, at last, was the way to make news profitable again. A whole class of future-of-news pundits made a living pontificating about how "legacy media" were getting their lunch eaten by digital-native startups. (...)

What keeps them from making money now is that online advertising pays pennies. (Actually, a penny per reader is pretty good these days—CPM, or "cost per thousand" ads, is often far less than half that.) And there are a ton of people competing for those fractions of a penny—including Google and Facebook, which collectively pulled in a whopping 85 percent of new ad spending in the first quarter of this year. The only way to make ends meet in that environment is to turn up the fire hose of fast and cheap content or rent your pages out to native advertising (sorry, branded content).

Look at it this way: A reporter doing even modestly original work might produce five stories a week (and that's not allowing for anything more than a few phone calls and a couple of rounds of editing per piece). If each of those stories gets, on average, 50,000 readers, and each of those page views generates $0.01 (again, a very generous rate), you'll end up grossing $2,500 a week, or $130,000 a year, with which you'll have to pay the reporter and her editor, their benefits, web tech, sales and ops staff, taxes, insurance, electricity, rent, laptops, phones…

And this calculus assumes a brutal pace of hour-by-hour filing and publishing, with journalists constantly looking over their shoulder at the traffic numbers.... The math just doesn't work.

by Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, Mother Jones |  Read more:

Image: via:

via:

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the Rocks,
Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow Rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing Madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of Roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty Lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and Ivy buds,
With Coral clasps and Amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

The Shepherds’ Swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me, and be my love.

~ Phlip Marlowe

---------------

“Come bowl with me this evening dear
And we will kill twelve cans of beer:
We’ll join the others on the team
And eat three quarts of peach ice-cream.
And in between each frame we bowl
We’ll eat a burger on a roll,
A dozen hot dogs, sacks of fries
A meatball and two apple pies;
Come bowl with me, you really should --
The exercise will do us good.”

~Mad Magazine
Image: The Big Lebowski

When the Powerful Cry ‘Bully’

Last month, Bruce Springsteen canceled a concert in Greensboro, N.C., to protest a new state law that, among other things, requires people to use the bathrooms of the biological sex reflected on their birth certificates. Springsteen released a statement saying he wanted to “show solidarity” with those waging a “fight against prejudice and bigotry” against trans people. In response, United States Representative Mark Walker, a Republican who supports the bill, told The Hollywood Reporter that Springsteen’s boycott was “a bully tactic,” thereby joining a growing chorus of people who seem to have mixed up their Davids and Goliaths.

A few days later, a (white) North Charleston, S.C., police chief refused to attend a community meeting on the one-year anniversary of the death of Walter Scott because of what he called the “bullying tactics” of its (black) members at previous meetings. Last September, Kylie Jenner, a reality star worth millions, claimed that she was being cyberbullied by commenters on socialmedia. In 2009, the blogger Heather Armstrong tweeted that no one should buy a Maytag washer because of what she called the company’s inadequate response to her broken appliance, and onlookers on Twitter accused her of bullying Whirlpool, the company’s $19 billion parent corporation.

In the old days, bullies were tough guys who picked on wimpy guys, a predictable, archetypal clash that inevitably led to a heroic outcome. Picture the brute kicking sand in the face of the scrawny wimp in the Charles Atlas comic-book ads, inspiring our hero to pump up his muscles and seek revenge. Picture Bluto, Popeye’s hulking nemesis, imperiling Olive Oyl time and again so our favorite sailor man could eat his spinach and save the day. For decades, Western culture treated bullying as an expected rite of passage that tested a man’s mettle, an unpleasant but surmountable obstacle on the path to glory.

As a result, bullying has long been a rich source of comedy, with even its insults and injuries mined for laughs, all the better to set up that final, triumphant scene in which the bully gets his comeuppance. The 1989 cult hit “Heathers” took this final act of vengeance to an extreme: A merciless group of high-school girls harasses their peers until the characters played by Winona Ryder and Christian Slater murder them one by one, then blow up the entire school.

That dark scene foreshadowed the radical transformation of our view of bullying that came 11 years later, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, two seniors at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., armed with pipe bombs and a small arsenal of firearms, killed 13 people and then themselves. The media painted a dramatic portrait of bullying culture gone wild at the high school, with an imagined “trench coat mafia” of angry, alienated geeks seeking their revenge against popular jocks who’d tormented them for years. But in the 2009 book “Columbine,” Dave Cullen, who reported from the scene that day and studied the event for the next 10 years, asserted that the trench-coat mafia was marginal, and Harris and Klebold had nothing to do with it. According to Cullen, Harris, the lead perpetrator, had many friends, was popular with girls and was rarely bullied. He was just a psychopath.

A fundamental misunderstanding of the event remains in place 17 years later, but this misreading nonetheless helped to incite a seismic — but necessary — shift in the common wisdom on bullying. It came to be acknowledged as a serious threat to the emotional and physical health of its victims. And then, with the advent of social media came the rise of “cyberbullying,” harassment that felt at once private and public, ephemeral yet deeply personal.

The roots of the word “bully” never foretold such a gloomy outcome. In the 16th century, “bully” was originally a term of endearment, arising from the Dutch word boel, or “lover,” and broeder, or “brother.” The word evolved into a greeting for a male friend, and from there into a term meaning “worthy” or “jolly.” This positive connotation lived on into 19th-century congratulatory slang — “Bully for you!” — but back in the mid-17th century, an alternate usage, meaning “harasser of the weak,” had already caught on.

Today this meaning is utterly dominant, and antibullying slogans, campaigns and organizations make up a fundamental piece of education culture. My 9-year-old daughter is currently serving as an antibullying “ambassador” at her school, one of a gaggle of fourth-graders charged with (gently) confronting their peers on any and all bullying behavior. According to my daughter, such offenses range from “being mean” and “hurting someone’s feelings” to “teasing.” The linguistic creep evident here has often struck me as troubling, especially as a relatively laughable bully archetype has been supplanted by the specter of mass murder and suicide.

by Heather Havrilesky, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Matt Dorfman

via:

Zero Hedge, Wall Street's Renegade Blog

[ed. I usually check Zero Hedge at least once a day. Here's their response.]

Colin Lokey, also known as "Tyler Durden," is breaking the first rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club. He’s also breaking the second rule of Fight Club. (See the first rule.)

After more than a year writing for the financial website Zero Hedge under the nom de doom of the cult classic’s anarchic hero, Lokey’s going public. In doing so, he’s answering a question that has bedeviled Wall Street since the site sprang up seven years ago: Just who is Tyler Durden, anyway?

The answer, it turns out, is three people. Following an acrimonious departure this month, in which two-thirds of the trio traded allegations of hypocrisy and mental instability, Lokey, 32, decided to unmask himself and his fellow Durdens.

Lokey said the other two men are Daniel Ivandjiiski, 37, the Bulgarian-born former analyst long reputed to be behind the site, and Tim Backshall, 45, a well-known credit derivatives strategist. (Bloomberg LP competes with Zero Hedge in providing financial news and information.)

In a telephone interview, Ivandjiiski confirmed that the men had been the only Tyler Durdens on the payroll since Lokey came aboard last year, but he criticized his former colleague's decision to come forward.

He called Lokey's parting gift a case of sour grapes. Backshall, meanwhile, declined to comment, referring questions to Ivandjiiski. A political science graduate with an MBA and a Southern twang, Lokey said he had a checkered past before joining Zero Hedge. Earlier this month, overwork landed him in a hospital because he felt a panic attack coming on, he said.

“Ultimately we wish Colin all the best, he’s clearly a troubled individual in many ways, and we are frankly disappointed that he’s decided to take his displeasure with the company in such a public manner,” Ivandjiiski said. (...)

Since being founded in the depths of the financial crisis, Zero Hedge has grown from a blog to an Internet powerhouse. Often distrustful of the “establishment” and almost always bearish, it's known for a pessimistic world view. Posts entitled “Stocks Are In a Far More Precarious State Than Was Ever Truly Believed Possible” and “America's Entitled (And Doomed) Upper Middle Class” are not uncommon.

The site’s ethos is perhaps best summed up by the tagline at the top of its homepage, also borrowed from Fight Club: “On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” A paean to populism, the 1999 film is filled with loathing for consumerism and the financial system. Brad Pitt portrays Tyler Durden as hell-bent on bringing down the corrupt system of the global elite—an attitude often reflected in Zero Hedge’s content.

by Tracy Alloway and Luke Kawa, Bloomberg |  Read more:
Image: Brad Pitt, Fight Club. 20th Century Fox Film Corp./Everett Collection

Colorado Weighs Replacing Obama’s Health Policy With Universal Coverage

For years, voters in this swing state have rejected tax increases and efforts to expand government. But now they are flirting with a radical transformation: whether to abandon President Obama’s health care policy and instead create a new, taxpayer-financed public health system that guarantees coverage for everyone.

The estimated $38-billion-a-year proposal, which will go before Colorado voters in November, will test whether people have an appetite for a new system that goes further than the Affordable Care Act. That question is also in play in the Democratic presidential primaries.

The state-level effort, which supporters here call the ColoradoCare plan, would do away with deductibles. It would allow patients to choose doctors and specialists without distinguishing between those “in network” and those “out of network.” It would largely be paid for with a tax increase on workers and businesses, and cover everyone in the state. Supporters say most people would end up saving money.

Insurance groups, chambers of commerce and conservatives have already lined up in opposition. They say the plan’s details are vague, its size and cost galling. The proposed health system would have a budget bigger than that of Colorado’s entire state government. A new 10 percent tax on payroll and incomes to pay for the system would push Colorado’s tax rates to some of the highest in the nation.

The proposal’s chance of success is dubious. Colorado has a mixed record when it comes to ballot measures, though it has passed some notable ones over the years, including marijuana legalization and the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, an anti-tax, anti-spending constitutional amendment.

But the proposal had enough support to garner 100,000 signatures, which put it on the ballot. It has also worried insurers, and some in the medical community and the business community, enough for them to organize in opposition, even enlisting a Democratic former governor to help in their campaign.

In this season of political discontent, the notion of dismantling the health insurance system has tapped an aquifer of frustration from voters. People say that even after the Affordable Care Act, they still pay too much in premiums, plus thousands in deductibles, and still have to worry about being bankrupted by a disabling car crash or an extended hospital stay.

“I think insurance is one of the biggest jokes and crooks,” said Brandon Barta, 38, of Denver. He said his father, Dixon, who worked at a gas station, never received aggressive enough treatment for his prostate cancer. He died last May at the age of 64.

“He was overlooked,” Mr. Barta said.

Mr. Barta said he was intrigued by the idea of a universal health plan that covered maternity care, checkups, emergency room visits and hospital stays, all the way through end-of-life care. Like millions of Americans, he has health insurance tied to his work. His coverage lapsed recently when he switched jobs to start working for a golf entertainment complex, and he is still waiting for his new plan to kick in.

Still, he has questions about how universal coverage would work and how much it would cost taxpayers like him.

The answers: If a majority of voters say yes, the system would start running in 2019, and essentially be a start-up health cooperative bigger than companies like Nike and American Express, according to the Colorado Health Institute, an independent policy group. A 21-person elected board would set the benefits and budgets. The system would be financed by payroll taxes of 3.3 percent for workers and 6.7 percent for employers. It would impose a 10 percent tax on investment income, people who are self-employed and some small-business income.

In the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, echoing many moderate Democratic leaders here, has said that she wants to keep and improve the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Obama’s signature legislative legacy. But her opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, who won Colorado’s Democratic caucuses last month by nearly 20 points, has advocated abandoning the health law for a “Medicare for all” approach. His proposal is similar to the ColoradoCare plan.

The campaign over the Colorado initiative has had the unusual effect of putting conservative critics in the position of defending Mr. Obama’s health plan against an assault from the left. At the same time, it is energizing progressives, who say the Affordable Care Act was a giveaway to the insurance industry that, even with an estimated 20 million people newly insured, has left too many others without coverage.

by Jack Healy, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Theo Stroomer

Endurance Acting

Acting is not an endurance test, though you wouldn't know it from the yearly crop of Best Actor nominees. A win for Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Revenant" would only ratify the tendency to see acting greatness in terms of transformation and misery. In this value system, viewer remarks along the lines of, "I barely recognized him" and "My god, look at how much weight he lost!" and "Was that really him falling off that cliff?" take the place of more nuanced evaluations of the actor's art. Acting becomes a stoic's routine, a form of monk-like self-flagellation to prove devotion to one's craft. Lose that weight. Eat that flesh. Take the punch to the face. Are you man enough?

It's the most extreme possible variant of the tendency to mistake Most Acting for Best Acting. It's common wisdom now to say that, if you want get an Oscar nomination, especially as Best Actor, it helps to play somebody terminally ill, or struggling with a chronic condition ("Shine"), the loss of mobility ("Born on the Fourth of July," "My Left Foot," "The Theory of Everything") or a deformity ("The Elephant Man," "The English Patient") or wear lots of makeup to look more like a famous historical figure ("Lincoln"), and so on. And it's true. If you want that little gold man, you've got to pay some kind of physical price.

The acting-as-punishment routine takes this mentality to its lowest depth. Right now Leonardo DiCaprio is the front-runner in the Best Actor race for his performance in the survival epic "The Revenant," in which he plays an 1830s trapper seeking revenge against a colleague who betrayed him and left him for dead in the wilderness. During the course of the film—which we've repeatedly been told was shot under very difficult weather conditions and in harsh terrain; filmmaker suffering is part of this narrative now, too—Leo wades and swims in icy water, crawls across hard tundra while dragging an injured leg behind him, eats raw bison liver, sucks the marrow out of the vertebrae of an animal skeleton, etc., in the name of survival, but also in the name of Art. "Just about every awards body has drunk the 'Revenant' Kool-Aid, buying into DiCaprio’s endless boasting about how super-hard the movie was to make," wrote Matt Prigge, who agrees with me that Leo should not get an Oscar because it would reinforce poor messages.

Seen through this lens, DiCaprio's performance becomes a physical manifestation of his desire to win an Oscar (and his fans' desire to see him get one, finally, 22 years after his first nomination for "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?"). It also seems of a piece with other Oscar nominations in recent decades that are mainly about proving one's devotion to the art of acting by suffering before or during production (and some acclaimed weight-loss performances that did not get nominations, such as Christian Bale's in "The Machinist").

Robert DeNiro probably started it all when he ate his way across Europe to put on extra weight so that he could play the older, fatter version of boxer Jake LaMotta in "Raging Bull." He did variations of this later in his career, putting on weight again to play Al Capone in "The Untouchables" and becoming pumped and ripped to play Max Cady in Martin Scorsese's remake of "Cape Fear" (Best Actor nomination). Matthew McConaughey's Best Actor win for "Dallas Buyer's Club" was at least partly a byproduct of how shocking and impressive it was to see him drop all that weight to play an AIDS sufferer. Tom Hanks got an Oscar nomination for "Cast Away," which shut down production for a year so that Hanks could lose 70 pounds to play a man who'd been stranded on a desert island. He had previously won two Best Actor Oscars, for playing, respectively, a Candide-like simpleton who had polio as a child ("Forrest Gump") and a man dying of AIDS while fighting for his rights in court ("Philadelphia").

Pauline Kael was first to call out this acting-as-endurance test idea, writing of "Raging Bull" way back in 1981, “What DeNiro does in this picture isn’t acting, exactly. I’m not sure what it is. DeNiro seems to have emptied himself out to become the part he’s playing and then not got enough material to refill himself with; his [Jake] LaMotta is a swollen puppet with only bits and pieces of a character inside, and some religious, semi-abstract concepts of guilt.” I love DeNiro in that movie, but he definitely validated some wrongheaded tendencies, as did the academy which rewarded him as much for his athlete's focus on enduring pain as for his imagination as a performer. Every year, one or more critics writes a piece complaining about this kind of thing. It's been going on for decades now. Nothing ever changes.

by Matt Zoller Seitz, MZS | Read more:
Image: The Revenant

Not All Practice Makes Perfect

In just our fourth session together, Steve was already beginning to sound discouraged. It was Thursday of the first week of an experiment that I had expected to last for two or three months, but from what Steve was telling me, it might not make much sense to go on. “There appears to be a limit for me somewhere around eight or nine digits,” he told me, his words captured by the tape recorder that ran throughout each of our sessions. “With nine digits especially, it’s very difficult to get regardless of what pattern I use—you know, my own kind of strategies. It really doesn’t matter what I use—it seems very difficult to get.”

Steve, an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was teaching at the time, had been hired to come in several times a week and work on a simple task: memorizing strings of numbers. I would read him a series of digits at a rate of about one per second—“Seven ... four ... zero ... one ... one ... nine ...” and so on—and Steve would try to remember them all and repeat them back to me once I was done. One goal was simply to see how much Steve could improve with practice. Now, after four of the hour-long sessions, he could reliably recall seven-digit strings—the length of a local phone number—and he usually got the eight-digit strings right, but nine digits was hit or miss, and he had never managed to remember a 10-digit string at all. And at this point, given his frustrating experience over the first few sessions, he was pretty sure that he wasn’t going to get any better.

What Steve didn’t know—but I did—was that pretty much all of psychological science at the time indicated that he was right. Decades of research had shown that there is a strict limit to the number of items that a person can retain in short-term memory, which is the type of memory the brain uses to hold on to small amounts of information for a brief period of time. If a friend gives you his address, it is your short-term memory that holds on to it just long enough to write it down. Or if you’re multiplying a couple of two-digit numbers in your head, your short-term memory is where you keep track of all the intermediate pieces: “Let’s see: 14 times 27 ... First, 4 times 7 is 28, so keep the 8 and carry the 2, then 4 times 2 is 8 ...” and so on. And there’s a reason it’s called “short-term.” You’re not going to remember that address or those intermediate numbers five minutes later unless you spend the time repeating them to yourself over and over again—and thus transfer them into your long-term memory.

The problem with short-term memory—and the problem that Steve was coming face-to-face with—is that the brain has strict limits on how many items it can hold in short-term memory at once. For some it is six items, for others it may be seven or eight, but the limit is generally about seven items—enough to hold on to a local phone number but not a Social Security number. Long-term memory doesn’t have the same limitations—in fact, no one has ever found the upper limits of long-term memory—but it takes much longer to deploy. Given enough time to work on it, you can memorize dozens or even hundreds of phone numbers, but the test I was giving Steve was designed to present digits so fast that he was forced to use only his short-term memory. I was reading the digits at a rate of one per second—too fast for him to transfer the digits into his long-term memory—so it was no surprise that he was running into a wall at numbers that were about eight or nine digits long. (...)

The subject we had recruited was Steve Faloon, who was about as typical a Carnegie Mellon undergraduate as we could have hoped to find. He was a psychology major who was interested in early childhood development. He had just finished his junior year. His scores on achievement tests were similar to those of other Carnegie Mellon students, while his grades were somewhat higher than average. Tall and thin with thick, dark-blond hair, he was friendly, outgoing, and enthusiastic. And he was a serious runner.

On the first day that Steve showed up for the memory work, his performance was dead-on average. He could usually remember seven digits and sometimes eight but no more. It was the same sort of performance you would expect from any random person picked off the street. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday he was a little better—an average of just under nine digits—but still no better than normal. Steve said he thought that the main difference from the first day was that he knew what to expect from the memory test and thus was more comfortable. It was at the end of that Thursday’s session that Steve explained to me why he thought he was unlikely to get any better.

Then on Friday something happened that would change everything. Steve found a way to break through. The training sessions went like this: I would start with a random five-digit string, and if Steve got it right (which he always did), I would go to six digits. If he got that right, we’d go to seven digits, and so on, increasing the length of the string by one each time he got it right. If he got it wrong, I would drop the length of the string by two and go again. In this way Steve was constantly challenged, but not too much. He was given strings of digits that were right at the boundary between what he could and couldn’t do.

And on that Friday, Steve moved the boundary. Up to that point he had remembered a nine-digit string correctly only a handful of times, and he had never remembered a 10-digit string correctly, so he had never even had a chance to try strings of 11 digits or longer. But he began that fifth session on a roll. He got the first three tries—five, six, and seven digits—right without a problem, missed the fourth one, then got back on track: six digits, right; seven digits, right; eight digits, right; nine digits, right. Then I read out a 10-digit number—5718866610—and he nailed that one as well. He missed the next string with 11 digits, but after he got another nine digits and another 10 digits right, I read him a second 11-digit string—90756629867—and this time he repeated the whole thing back to me without a hitch. It was two digits more than he had ever gotten right before, and although an additional two digits may not seem particularly impressive, it was actually a major accomplishment because the past several days had established that Steve had a “natural” ceiling—the number of digits he could comfortably hold in his short-term memory—of only eight or nine. He had found a way to push through that ceiling.

That was the beginning of what was to be the most surprising two years of my career. From this point on, Steve slowly but steadily improved his ability to remember strings of digits. By the 60th session he was able to consistently remember 20 digits—far more than Bill and I had imagined he ever could. After a little more than 100 sessions, he was up to 40, which was more than anyone, even professional mnemonists, had ever achieved, and still he kept going. He worked with me for more than 200 training sessions, and by the end he had reached 82 digits—82! If you think about that for a moment, you’ll realize just how incredible this memory ability truly is. Here are 82 random digits:

0326443449602221328209301020391832373927788917267653245037746120179094345510355530

Imagine hearing all of those read out to you at one per second and being able to remember them all. This is what Steve Faloon taught himself to do over the two years of our experiment—all without even knowing it was possible, just by continuing to work on it week after week. (...)

Since that time I have devoted my career to understanding exactly how practice works to create new and expanded capabilities, with a particular focus on those people who have used practice to become among the best in the world at what they do. And after several decades of studying these best of the best—these “expert performers,” to use the technical term—I have found that no matter what field you study, music or sports or chess or something else, the most effective types of practice all follow the same set of general principles.

There is no obvious reason why this should be the case. Why should the teaching techniques used to turn aspiring musicians into concert pianists have anything to do with the training that a dancer must go through to become a prima ballerina or the study that a chess player must undertake to become a grandmaster? The answer is that the most effective and most powerful types of practice in any field work by harnessing the adaptability of the human body and brain to create, step by step, the ability to do things that were previously not possible. If you wish to develop a truly effective training method for anything—creating world-class gymnasts, for instance, or even something like teaching doctors to perform laparoscopic surgery—that method will need to take into account what works and what doesn’t in driving changes in the body and brain. Thus, all truly effective practice techniques work in essentially the same way.

These insights are all relatively new and weren’t available to all the teachers, coaches, and performers who produced the incredible improvements in performance that have occurred over the past century. Instead, these advances were all accomplished through trial and error, with the people involved having essentially no idea why a particular training method might be effective. Furthermore, the practitioners in the various fields built their bodies of knowledge in isolation, with no sense that all of this was interconnected—that the ice-skater who was working on a triple axel was following the same set of general principles as, say, the pianist working to perfect a Mozart sonata. So imagine what might be possible with efforts that are inspired and directed by a clear scientific understanding of the best ways to build expertise. And imagine what might be possible if we applied the techniques that have proved to be so effective in sports and music and chess to all the different types of learning that people do, from the education of schoolchildren to the training of doctors, engineers, pilots, businesspeople, and workers of every sort. I believe that the dramatic improvements we have seen in those few fields over the past hundred years are achievable in pretty much every field if we apply the lessons that can be learned from studying the principles of effective practice.

There are various sorts of practice that can be effective to one degree or another, but one particular form—which I named “deliberate practice” back in the early 1990s—is the gold standard. It is the most effective and powerful form of practice that we know of, and applying the principles of deliberate practice is the best way to design practice methods in any area. But before we delve into the details of deliberate practice, it will be best if we spend a little time understanding some more basic types of practice—the sorts of practice that most people have already experienced in one way or another.

by Anders Ericcson and Robert Pool, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Cultura RM Exclusive/Phil Fisk

Could Facebook Swing the Election?

After Mark Zuckerberg publicly denounced Donald Trump (not by name, for some reason, but very clearly), Gizmodo reported that Facebook employees asked on an internal message board whether Facebook has a responsibility to try to stop a Trump presidency. The question, verbatim, was: “What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?”

Zuckerberg didn’t answer — publicly, at least. But there was a larger, and frankly scarier, question lurking behind the question of Facebook’s political responsibilities: Could Facebook help prevent President Trump? Not through lobbying or donations or political action committees, but simply by exploiting the enormous reach and power of its core products? Could Facebook, a private corporation with over a billion active users, swing an election just by adjusting its News Feed?

“The way that you present information on Facebook or other social-media sites can have subtle but meaningful effects on people’s moods, their attitudes,” says Paul Brewer, a professor in the communications department of the University of Delaware who has studied Facebook’s political effects. Facebook knows this better than anyone; a study, released in 2014, was conducted to see whether changing the emotional content of users’ News Feeds would affect their mood. (The answer: yes.)

The first thing Facebook would have to do, if it wanted to swing an election, would be to suss out exactly who to target. “In politics, on some things, it’s very hard to change people’s minds,” says Brewer. “You’re not gonna change people from a Trump supporter to a Bernie supporter.” Trying to change the minds of those who are already vocally committed to one candidate is, basically, not worth the effort. So Facebook would, like any campaign, want to encourage turnout among the supporters of its preferred candidate, persuade the small number of genuinely uncommitted likely voters, and target apathetic voters who could be convinced to get out to the polls.

Facebook, understandably, keeps close to its chest exactly what conclusions it can draw about users based on their behavior on the social network. But the company almost certainly has the data to determine what your politics are; it has itself trumpeted the correlations between “liked” Facebook pages and political affiliation. It’s unclear whether apathy, as such, would be as easy to identify, but if you consider that third-party researchers have used public Facebook data to create algorithms that can predict personality traits to a high degree of accuracy, it seems likely that it would be fairly easy for the company to deduce your level of political engagement.

Assuming Facebook has successfully identified a persuadable voter, the next step would be the persuasion.

by Dan Nosowitz, NY Magazine, Select/All | Read more:
Image: Getty