How Should We Live in a Diverse Society?

‘Can Europe be the same with different people in it?’ So asked the American writer Christopher Caldwell in his book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, published a few years ago. It is a question that has been asked with increasing urgency in recent years as the question of immigration, and in particular of Islamic immigration, has taken centre stage.

At the heart of this question lies the dilemma of how Western societies should respond to the influx of peoples with different traditions, backgrounds and beliefs. What should be the boundaries of tolerance in such societies? Should immigrants be made to assimilate to Western customs and norms or is integration a two-way street? Such questions have bedeviled politicians and policy-makers for the past half-century. They have also tied liberals in knots.

The conundrums about diversity have been exacerbated by the two issues that now dominate contemporary European political discourse – the migration crisis and the problem of terrorism. How we discuss these issues, and how we relate the one to the other, will shape the character of European societies over the net period.

by Kenan Malik, Pandemonium | Read more:
Image: Aman Badhwar, Connections

On the Heartbreaking Difficulty of Getting Rid of Books

[ed. When I decluttered a few years ago (over 90 percent of my stuff), books were the hardest things to let go... not clothes, or kitchenware, recreational equipment, art, cds, old ratty furniture... Books. 20+ boxes of them.] 

Like a lot of avid readers, I enjoyed Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up but bristled when it came to the section about books. The gist of her now-famous method is this: go through all your possessions by category, touch everything, keep only that which “sparks joy,” and watch as your world is transformed. It seems simple enough, but Kondo gives minimalism the hard sell when it comes to books, urging readers to ditch as many of them as they can. You may think that a book sparks joy, she argues, but you’re probably wrong and should get rid of it, especially if you haven’t read it yet.

Paring down one’s wardrobe is one thing, but what kind of degenerate only wants to own 30 books (or fewer) at a time on purpose? What sort of psychopath rips out pages from their favorite books and throws away the rest so they can, as Kondo puts it, “keep only the words they like?” For those of us for whom even the word “book” sparks joy, this constitutes a serious disconnect. Still, as the weather gets warmer, many readers will tackle their spring cleaning with The Life-Changing Magic in hand.

I wondered, can Kondo’s Spartan methods be adapted for someone who feels about books the way the National Rifle Association feels about guns, invoking the phrase “cold dead hands”? I decided to give it a try. (...)

The most interesting aspect of the KonMari Method is the way in which it acknowledges the emotional lives of things. Whether that life is inherent or something that we project doesn’t really matter. She bypasses New Age-y concepts like “good vibes” and “energy flow” and jumps right to the chase: the objects you possess have feelings, so deal with it. It may seem silly at first to thank an old sweater for a job well done before getting rid of it, but actually doing so can feel oddly poignant. Kondo’s background in Shintoism is important in this respect. In Shinto cosmology, our physical reality co-exists with an invisible world of animistic spirits. Her worldview is in line with the Japanese aesthetic known in the West as wabi sabi, which explores the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things versus the pleasure we get from the freedom from things.

The aim of KonMari is to more fully appreciate what you have by letting go of that which no longer serves you. The difficulty comes in telling which is which. Much of what we don’t need tends to blend in with its surroundings, like a camouflaging octopus on a reef, effectively invisible until we grab hold of it or get right up in its face. By handling everything, we cause this hidden dead weight to startle, blanche, and show itself. Kondo even recommends clapping one’s hands over the objects to “wake them up.”

I went through my books one by one. Kondo says you shouldn’t open the books, but I broke that rule—not to read them, but to see what I might have long-ago stashed inside.

There was a surprising amount of stuff between the pages—letters, tickets, photographs, receipts. I found my New Year’s Eve resolutions for 1998; a slip of paper acknowledging my plea of GUILTY to a speeding ticket and instructing me to pay $125 to the town of Athens, New York; a hospital bill for $564; a Xeroxed page from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself with the stanza circled that begins I have said that the soul is not more than the body; the muted floral wrapper for fig apricot soap, still fragrant; the boarding pass for a flight from New York to Stockholm; a yellow hall pass from my California high school.

It occurred to me that part of the reason why tackling the “books” stage of the Full Kondo seems so daunting is that to many of us our books don’t really belong in the category she has assigned. They are not impersonal units of knowledge, interchangeable and replaceable, but rather receptacles for the moments of our lives, whose pages have sopped up morning hopes and late-night sorrows, carried in honeymoon suitcases or clutched to broken hearts. They are mementos, which she cautions readers not to even attempt to contemplate getting rid of until the very last.

by Summer Brennan, Literary Hub | Read more:
Image: uncredited

The Secret Rules of the Internet

Julie Mora-Blanco remembers the day, in the summer of 2006, when the reality of her new job sunk in. A recent grad of California State University, Chico, Mora-Blanco had majored in art, minored in women’s studies, and spent much of her free time making sculptures from found objects and blown-glass. Struggling to make rent and working a post-production job at Current TV, she’d jumped at the chance to work at an internet startup called YouTube. Maybe, she figured, she could pull in enough money to pursue her lifelong dream: to become a hair stylist.

It was a warm, sunny morning, and she was sitting at her desk in the company’s office, located above a pizza shop in San Mateo, an idyllic and affluent suburb of San Francisco. Mora-Blanco was one of 60-odd twenty-somethings who’d come to work at the still-unprofitable website.

Mora-Blanco’s team — 10 people in total — was dubbed The SQUAD (Safety, Quality, and User Advocacy Department). They worked in teams of four to six, some doing day shifts and some night, reviewing videos around the clock. Their job? To protect YouTube’s fledgling brand by scrubbing the site of offensive or malicious content that had been flagged by users, or, as Mora-Blanco puts it, "to keep us from becoming a shock site." The founders wanted YouTube to be something new, something better — "a place for everyone" — and not another eBaum’s World, which had already become a repository for explicit pornography and gratuitous violence.

Mora-Blanco sat next to Misty Ewing-Davis, who, having been on the job a few months, counted as an old hand. On the table before them was a single piece of paper, folded in half to show a bullet-point list of instructions: Remove videos of animal abuse. Remove videos showing blood. Remove visible nudity. Remove pornography. Mora-Blanco recalls her teammates were a "mish-mash" of men and women; gay and straight; slightly tipped toward white, but also Indian, African-American, and Filipino. Most of them were friends, friends of friends, or family. They talked and made jokes, trying to make sense of the rules. "You have to find humor," she remembers. "Otherwise it’s just painful."

Videos arrived on their screens in a never-ending queue. After watching a couple seconds apiece, SQUAD members clicked one of four buttons that appeared in the upper right hand corner of their screens: "Approve" — let the video stand; "Racy" — mark video as 18-plus; "Reject" — remove video without penalty; "Strike" — remove video with a penalty to the account. Click, click, click. But that day Mora-Blanco came across something that stopped her in her tracks.

"Oh, God," she said.

Mora-Blanco won’t describe what she saw that morning. For everyone’s sake, she says, she won’t conjure the staggeringly violent images which, she recalls, involved a toddler and a dimly lit hotel room.

Ewing-Davis calmly walked Mora-Blanco through her next steps: hit "Strike," suspend the user, and forward the person’s account details and the video to the SQUAD team’s supervisor. From there, the information would travel to the CyberTipline, a reporting system launched by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in 1998. Footage of child exploitation was the only black-and-white zone of the job, with protocols outlined and explicitly enforced by law since the late 1990s.

The video disappeared from Mora-Blanco’s screen. The next one appeared.

Ewing-Davis said, "Let’s go for a walk."

Okay. This is what you’re doing, Mora-Blanco remembers thinking as they paced up and down the street. You’re going to be seeing bad stuff.

Almost a decade later, the video and the child in it still haunt her. "In the back of my head, of all the images, I still see that one," she said when we spoke recently. "I really didn’t have a job description to review or a full understanding of what I’d be doing. I was a young 25-year-old and just excited to be getting paid more money. I got to bring a computer home!" Mora-Blanco’s voice caught as she paused to collect herself. "I haven’t talked about this in a long time."

Mora-Blanco is one of more than a dozen current and former employees and contractors of major internet platforms from YouTube to Facebook who spoke to us candidly about the dawn of content moderation. Many of these individuals are going public with their experiences for the first time. Their stories reveal how the boundaries of free speech were drawn during a period of explosive growth for a high-stakes public domain, one that did not exist for most of human history. As law professor Jeffrey Rosen first said many years ago of Facebook, these platforms have "more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president."

by Catherine Buni & Soraya Chemaly, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Eric Petersen

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IBM Is Now Letting Anyone Play With Its Quantum Computer

Quantum computing is computing at its most esoteric. It’s an experimental, enormously complex, sometimes downright confusing technology that’s typically the domain of hardcore academics and organizations like Google and NASA. But that might be changing.

Today, IBM unveiled an online service that lets anyone use the five-qubit quantum computer its researchers have erected at a research lab in Yorktown Heights, New York. You can access the machine over the Internet via a simple software interface—or at least it’s simple if you understand the basics of quantum computing. This new service is hardly something the everyday consumer will use, but it’s a big deal for the many researchers now working to build a practical quantum computer—a computer that moves beyond just 1s and 0s to become exponentially more powerful than today’s machines. In that sense, IBM is indeed striving to bring quantum computing to the world at large. (...)

Meet the Qubit

Today’s computers store data in extremely small transistors. Each transistor can hold a single “bit” of information: a 1 or a 0. But about thirty years ago, scientists proposed a machine that could go beyond that binary, a machine that could store data in a system that obeys the seemingly magical principles of quantum mechanics. Instead of just a 1 or a 0, a “qubit” could store both at the same time, thanks to what’s called the superposition principle.

By extension, two qubits could hold four values simultaneously: 00, 01, 10, and 11. And if you keep adding qubits, you could, in theory, build a machine far more powerful than any that exists today. “These are things you can’t explain with regular logic,” says Jerry Chow, the former Yale researcher who helps oversee IBM’s quantum computing work. “Quantum computing and quantum algorithms are all about: how do you harness that?”

But that kind of ultra-powerful machine doesn’t yet exist. Qubits, you see, are slippery things. If you try to observe the state of a quantum system, it “decoheres,” falling into one state or the other. It no longer holds both a 0 and a 1. It holds only a O or a 1, like the classical computers of today. To build a true quantum computer, researchers must harness the probability that a qubit will decohere into one state versus the other.
The Same Result Each Time

There are many ways of doing this, and though none has truly cracked the problem, some are quite promising. IBM has built a quantum computer that operates by dropping superconducting circuits into an enormous sub-zero refrigerator, and it spans five qubits. But now, in sharing this machine with the world at large, the company hopes to accelerate its progress, aiming to extend its power to 50 or possibly 100 qubits.

According to David Cory, a professor with the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing, this sort of online quantum computer—a quantum cloud service, if you will—is pretty much unprecedented. Building such a service, he explains, is far more difficult than you might expect. “It’s not a simple thing to do,” he says. “Quantum systems are really quite delicate.”

by Cade Metz, Wired |  Read more:

Image: IBM

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Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in United States

Nightmare stories of nurses giving potent drugs meant for one patient to another and surgeons removing the wrong body parts have dominated recent headlines about medical care. Lest you assume those cases are the exceptions, a new study by patient safety researchers provides some context.

Their analysis, published in the BMJ on Tuesday, shows that "medical errors" in hospitals and other health care facilities are incredibly common and may now be the third leading cause of death in the United States -- claiming 251,000 lives every year, more than respiratory disease, accidents, stroke and Alzheimer's.

Martin Makary, a professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who led the research, said in an interview that the category includes everything from bad doctors to more systemic issues such as communication breakdowns when patients are handed off from one department to another.

"It boils down to people dying from the care that they receive rather than the disease for which they are seeing care," Makary said.

The issue of patient safety has been a hot topic in recent years, but it wasn't always that way. In 1999, an Institute of Medicine report calling preventable medical errors an "epidemic" shocked the medical establishment and led to significant debate about what could be done.

The IOM, based on one study, estimated deaths because of medical errors as high as 98,000 a year. Makary's research involves a more comprehensive analysis of four large studies, including ones by the Health and Human Services Department's Office of the Inspector General and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that took place between 2000 to 2008. His calculation of 251,000 deaths equates to nearly 700 deaths a day -- about 9.5 percent of all deaths annually in the United States.

Makary said he and co-author Michael Daniel, also from Johns Hopkins, conducted the analysis to shed more light on a problem that many hospitals and health care facilities try to avoid talking about.

Though all providers extol patient safety and highlight the various safety committees and protocols they have in place, few provide the public with specifics on actual cases of harm due to mistakes. Moreover, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn't require reporting of errors in the data it collects about deaths through billing codes, making it hard to see what's going on at the national level.

The CDC should update its vital statistics reporting requirements so that physicians must report whether there was any error that led to a preventable death, Makary said.

"We all know how common it is," he said. "We also know how infrequently it’s openly discussed."

by Ariana Eunjung Cha, WP | Read more:
Image: iStock

Bosch Mania

[ed. Do check out this hi-res tool to explore The Garden of Earthly Delights.]

This year is shaping up to be downright Boschian. We are speaking here of Hieronymus Bosch, the painter. 2016 happens to mark the five-hundred-year anniversary of Bosch’s death. So, Bosch’s home and eponymous town, Den Bosch (or, more correctly but much harder to say, ‘s-Hertogenbosch), has assembled the largest retrospective of Bosch’s work ever to be exhibited. The exhibit (Jheronimus Bosch – Visions of a Genius) is at the Noordbrabants Museum through May 8th. Such is public demand to see the show that this normally sedate regional museum has extended its opening hours until past midnight. And Bosch mania will not end there. The Prado in Madrid, for example, is hosting its own blockbuster Bosch exhibit beginning at the end of May and running into September. The crowds at the Noordbrabants Museum and the activity in the global press suggests that Bosch is more relevant, more interesting to the public mind than ever. Bosch mania is set to peak at the same time as the heat of the Northern summer, with festival events scheduled throughout the summer.

This extraordinary level of interest is generated by the simple fact that whosoever sees the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch does not soon, it is safe to say, forget them. That’s because they are fantastic works of art. There’s so much going on in a typical Bosch painting (more on that later) that the eye cannot but dart around, taking in the strange imagery. For that reason, Bosch’s work was popular from the very beginning—that beginning being the 15th century, when Bosch was alive and painting away in the lands of Northern Europe we now call The Netherlands. Throughout the ensuing years, Bosch’s star waxed and waned, but his work never passed out of public consciousness completely. Then, in the early part of the 20th century, he was “rediscovered” in full force. The 20th century public loved the outrageous scenarios to be found in Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, artists especially. Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Leonora Carrington explicitly referenced Bosch in their own work, just to name a few.

A Hard Nut to Crack

But Bosch’s work has always caused trouble for interpreters and critics. Bosch painted weird things. Weird things are hard to interpret and understand. Critics and scholars like to understand. Ergo, Bosch is a problem. Most critics these days tend to agree that Bosch’s paintings were created primarily out of the religiously pious desire to illustrate biblical truths. Some interpreters reject even this basic assumption, as, for example, Ellen Handler Spitz did in her recent article for The New Republic, titled, tellingly, “The Impious Delights of Hieronymus Bosch.” For those (the majority) who do think of Bosch as more or less a religious painter, the specific imagery and symbolism in the paintings is still nearly impossible to pin down. Bosch’s piety was not like other men’s piety. It took on a unique expression.

Let’s take Bosch’s most famous painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. (The painting can be viewed in wonderful high-res detail here). The work was painted in oil on oak panels that were meant to be part of a church altar display (as were nearly all paintings painted at the time). The central panel is a flurry of activity, color, shape, form. A couple of pink structures (castles?) buttress a lake or river, in the center of which is a building composed of a sphere emerging from the water and a multi-pronged tower emanating from the sphere. This could be the landscape in a Dr. Seuss book.

The goings-on amongst the humans and animals thronging the areas beneath the castles are challenging to describe, let alone understand. One man is upside down in the water. His legs are sticking up and spread out. Between his legs can be found the stem and fruit of a huge, unidentifiable plant. The spindly branches of another, smaller plant sprout from the fruit of the larger plant. Out of that sprouting emerges a tropical bird. Perhaps it is an egret. What is the purpose of this water gymnastics with unusual fruit? Very hard to say. Much of the imagery and symbolism seems to be Bosch’s own. Why, for instance, is there a man carrying a huge mussel shell on his back, out of which poke the legs of a couple we can assume to be engaged in some sort of amorous pursuit? Probably, that specific image will never be definitively decoded. Perhaps it came to Bosch in a dream.

So queerly idiosyncratic are the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch that art critics and historians have been known to stretch long and hard for an explanation. For a period during the middle of the 20th century, it was en vogue to imply that Bosch was heavy into drugs. Other interpreters suggested that he was essentially mad, or at least caught up with the wild ideas of one late-medieval cult or another. (...)

The common theme to all these wildly divergent speculations is the feeling that the images in Bosch’s paintings were so unprecedented that they must come from the mind of someone who stood apart, a radical of sorts, an outsider for sure. This feeling is heightened by a glance at the work of Bosch’s contemporaries. It can be startling to realize that Hieronymus Bosch lived during almost exactly the same period as Leonardo da Vinci (1452- 1519). We’re smack in the midst of the High Renaissance here. And da Vinci, for all his unusual qualities, never painted anything like The Garden of Earthly Delights. Indeed, most of da Vinci’s paintings, for all their innovations in form and technique, take up orthodox and well-worn subject matter in orthodox and well-worn ways. The Last Supper, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne—even The Mona Lisa is a more or less straightforward portrait, due respect paid to her mysterious smile.

Not so with Bosch. Even when Bosch did paint more traditional scenes, like a crucifixion, he rarely played it straight. He painted one crucifixion scene that doesn’t even portray Christ. It shows a woman on the cross, probably Saint Julia of Corsica. The right and left panels of the triptych teem with typical Boschian imagery. There are howling demons, sunken ships, blighted hellscapes, odd creatures, ladders to nowhere, fantastical buildings.

by Morgan Meis, The Easel |  Read more:

Image: Hieronymus Bosch

The Life of a Blog Editor

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

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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

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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

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

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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:

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