Wednesday, May 11, 2016
The Science of Tattoo Removal Cream Just Left the World of Wishful Thinking
Tattoos are supposed to be permanent — that’s kind of their whole thing. But maybe not for long. A Canadian Ph.D. student has invented a topical cream that he says can cheaply and easily remove unwanted tattoos. He’s just sold the idea to a pharmaceutical company that specializes in dermatology for an unnamed amount (but enough to make a Ph.D. student giddy). Alec Falkenham says his product can remove tattoos cheaply, quickly, and painlessly. If he’s right, his innovation will destroy the laser tattoo removal market and overhaul our cultural relationship to inked skin.
There are many (unregulated) tattoo removal creams on the market today, and they’re basically all crap. They target the top layer of skin with abrasion and chemicals, which is mostly useless because your tattoo ink sits within the deeper layers of skin. If they manage to fade the tattoo at all, it’s likely because of the increased immune response in the area as your body fights the damage being done to your outer layer of skin. Ouch.
To understand why tattoos are so difficult to remove, you need to understand how they get there in the first place. Needles filled with ink pierce your skin many thousands of times, injecting the pigment into your skin. Your body instantly reacts to this assault, and sends out its repair agents to heal your wound. Ironically, it’s actually this immune response that allows the tattoo to become permanent.
Special white blood cells, called macrophages, come into the area to clean up the debris. After gobbling up the pigment, some of these cells make it back to your lymph nodes, where the junk is processed and expelled. But some of these cells get stuck, still full of ink, in the gel-like matrix under the top layer of skin. Because the pigment has been consumed by your cells, your body no longer considers it a foreign object and stops fighting to get rid of it. So it just hangs out there, visibly flooding your inner skin with color.
The best technology humans have previously come up with to disrupt the permanence of the tattoo is the laser. Lasers work by targeting pigments at a specific frequency, which blasts them into smaller pieces, making it easier for your immune system to digest them naturally. Laser tattoo removal has gotten a lot better over the years, but it’s still pretty hard to do. Different colors of pigment have to be targeted separately, and some are harder to remove than others. A single session of laser removal can cost $100 or more, and it usually takes several sessions, sometimes 10 or more, over many months to get rid of the tattoo completely. Even then, some scarring or discoloration will often remain.
Falkenham’s product is different. It’s a chemical compound that he had been studying in his research on healing heart tissue, until he wondered what it might do to a tattoo. The active ingredient, called bisphosphonate liposomal, penetrates the skin and selectively targets macrophages, leaving other cells in the area unharmed. When these cells die, other macrophages come in to clean up the debris and replace the dead cells, ultimately removing the tattoo ink. The product has only been tested on pigs and mice so far, but Falkenham told CBC News that he’s seen complete tattoo removal in a week. He told Buzzfeed that he expects treatment of a three-inch-square area to cost about $4.50.
by Jacqueline Ronson, Inverse | Read more:
There are many (unregulated) tattoo removal creams on the market today, and they’re basically all crap. They target the top layer of skin with abrasion and chemicals, which is mostly useless because your tattoo ink sits within the deeper layers of skin. If they manage to fade the tattoo at all, it’s likely because of the increased immune response in the area as your body fights the damage being done to your outer layer of skin. Ouch.To understand why tattoos are so difficult to remove, you need to understand how they get there in the first place. Needles filled with ink pierce your skin many thousands of times, injecting the pigment into your skin. Your body instantly reacts to this assault, and sends out its repair agents to heal your wound. Ironically, it’s actually this immune response that allows the tattoo to become permanent.
Special white blood cells, called macrophages, come into the area to clean up the debris. After gobbling up the pigment, some of these cells make it back to your lymph nodes, where the junk is processed and expelled. But some of these cells get stuck, still full of ink, in the gel-like matrix under the top layer of skin. Because the pigment has been consumed by your cells, your body no longer considers it a foreign object and stops fighting to get rid of it. So it just hangs out there, visibly flooding your inner skin with color.
The best technology humans have previously come up with to disrupt the permanence of the tattoo is the laser. Lasers work by targeting pigments at a specific frequency, which blasts them into smaller pieces, making it easier for your immune system to digest them naturally. Laser tattoo removal has gotten a lot better over the years, but it’s still pretty hard to do. Different colors of pigment have to be targeted separately, and some are harder to remove than others. A single session of laser removal can cost $100 or more, and it usually takes several sessions, sometimes 10 or more, over many months to get rid of the tattoo completely. Even then, some scarring or discoloration will often remain.
Falkenham’s product is different. It’s a chemical compound that he had been studying in his research on healing heart tissue, until he wondered what it might do to a tattoo. The active ingredient, called bisphosphonate liposomal, penetrates the skin and selectively targets macrophages, leaving other cells in the area unharmed. When these cells die, other macrophages come in to clean up the debris and replace the dead cells, ultimately removing the tattoo ink. The product has only been tested on pigs and mice so far, but Falkenham told CBC News that he’s seen complete tattoo removal in a week. He told Buzzfeed that he expects treatment of a three-inch-square area to cost about $4.50.
by Jacqueline Ronson, Inverse | Read more:
Image: via:
Typing in the Sky
Making the connection is the difficult part—a long, vertical line of smoke and then twisting off into a new direction and across the atmosphere.
That’s how you draw letters in the sky with an airplane, and there are only five people on the planet skilled enough to make it their full-time job.
Greg Stinis learned how to pilot one of those planes before he learned how to drive a car. Not surprising for the son of a man who invented a new way to write sentences in the sky, whose plane hangs in a national museum.
“My dad would take my mom when she was pregnant with me, and that’s how it started,” he said. “I’ve always been in the air.”
Today, the 75-year-old still makes his living flying those curves and angles, leaving billowy white smoke trails that spell messages to people far below. Each letter is an optical illusion obstacle course. An ‘S’ looks like a straight line from the cockpit of his plane, and if the letters aren’t drawn at different altitudes—like on a staircase—his wingtips risk brushing against freshly placed smoke.
“I’ve been doing it for years and years and years, and still there’s a learning curve,” Stinis said. “You can’t see what you’re writing in the sky, everything is upside down and backwards.”
It’s his craft—a calling and his birthright. He was taught by his father, Andy. In turn, Greg is passing the skill down to his own son, Stephen.
Andy fundamentally changed the business in 1964, when he patented a new form of skywriting that allowed the family business to grow exponentially. It takes more than two minutes and a great deal of skill to draw a single letter with a single aircraft, so Andy invented skytyping, which involves five planes flying in steady formation, and a computer system programmed to belch smoke puffs, to create letters in under four seconds.
Each letter stands as tall as the Empire State Building and each message stretches five miles across. In 1979, the family started Skytypers Inc. Today, Greg and Stephen, 41, own and run the business.
The family now finds itself staring down another moment of change, this one ushered by new technologies that promise to reshape the next generation of skytyping—potentially at the cost of the art of single-plane skywriting. That will be a weighty decision for the youngest Stinis.
by Erik Olsen, Quartz | Read more:
That’s how you draw letters in the sky with an airplane, and there are only five people on the planet skilled enough to make it their full-time job.
Greg Stinis learned how to pilot one of those planes before he learned how to drive a car. Not surprising for the son of a man who invented a new way to write sentences in the sky, whose plane hangs in a national museum.“My dad would take my mom when she was pregnant with me, and that’s how it started,” he said. “I’ve always been in the air.”
Today, the 75-year-old still makes his living flying those curves and angles, leaving billowy white smoke trails that spell messages to people far below. Each letter is an optical illusion obstacle course. An ‘S’ looks like a straight line from the cockpit of his plane, and if the letters aren’t drawn at different altitudes—like on a staircase—his wingtips risk brushing against freshly placed smoke.
“I’ve been doing it for years and years and years, and still there’s a learning curve,” Stinis said. “You can’t see what you’re writing in the sky, everything is upside down and backwards.”
It’s his craft—a calling and his birthright. He was taught by his father, Andy. In turn, Greg is passing the skill down to his own son, Stephen.
Andy fundamentally changed the business in 1964, when he patented a new form of skywriting that allowed the family business to grow exponentially. It takes more than two minutes and a great deal of skill to draw a single letter with a single aircraft, so Andy invented skytyping, which involves five planes flying in steady formation, and a computer system programmed to belch smoke puffs, to create letters in under four seconds.
Each letter stands as tall as the Empire State Building and each message stretches five miles across. In 1979, the family started Skytypers Inc. Today, Greg and Stephen, 41, own and run the business.
The family now finds itself staring down another moment of change, this one ushered by new technologies that promise to reshape the next generation of skytyping—potentially at the cost of the art of single-plane skywriting. That will be a weighty decision for the youngest Stinis.
by Erik Olsen, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Skytypers Inc.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Book Review: The Art of the Deal
Many of my friends recommend Robert Cialdini’s Influence, a book about how to be persuasive and successful. I read a most of the way through, and it was okay, but I didn’t have it in me to finish the whole thing. It’s not that being persuasive and successful doesn’t sound pretty neat. It’s just that I wasn’t sure the book could deliver the goods.
Robert Cialdini’s Wikipedia page says “He is best known for his book Influence“. Since its publication, he seems to have spent his time directing an institute to spread awareness of techniques for success and persuasion. At the risk of being a little too cynical – a guy knows the secrets of success, so he uses them to…write a book about the secrets of success? If I knew the secrets of success, you could bet I’d be doing much more interesting things with them. All the best people recommend Cialdini, and his research credentials are impeccable, but I can’t help wondering: if he’s so smart, why isn’t he God-Emperor?
Donald Trump is also not God-Emperor, but he’s at least sort of on the short-list for the position. I knew that Trump wrote his own book on success and persuasion back in 1988 – Trump: The Art of the Deal – and I wondered if it might not be the anti-Cialdini.
Trump is no psychology expert, but he’s sure done well persuading people in real life. After a few months of attributing his victories to blind luck, most people have accepted Scott Adams’ hypothesis that he’s really a “master persuader”. Salon, Daily Caller, Bill Maher, and the Economist all use the word “genius”. The less you respect Trump’s substance – and I respect it very little – the more you’re forced to admire whatever combination of charisma, persuasion, and showmanship he uses to succeed without having any. If this guy has written a book on how to be persuasive and successful, that’s a book I want to read.
The downside of buying a book by a master manipulator is that sometimes you learn you were manipulated into buying the book.
Trump: The Art Of The Deal is 365 pages of some of the biggest print I have ever seen. The cover has a quote from the New York Times – “Trump makes one believe for a moment in the American dream again” – which some poor reviewer is probably desperately wishing he could take back right now.
Although the blurb says that he “fully reveals the deal-maker’s art” and that it is “an unprecedented education in the practice of deal-making” and “the ultimate read for anyone interested in achieving money and success” – only seventeen pages of very large print are anything resembling business advice. The rest of it is a weirdly deal-focused autobiography that doesn’t mention marrying his wife or having children, but devotes a lovingly detailed twenty-four pages to the time he renovated the Commodore Hotel.
But first, those seventeen pages. I am pleased to report that Donald Trump is well-abreast of modern science – he tells his readers looking for advice about how to make it big that deal-making is probably just genetic.
Either you’ve got the deal gene or you don’t:
Is there anything at all worth reading in these seventeen pages? Oh yes. But not for the reason I expected. (...)
I started the book with the question: what exactly do real estate developers do? They don’t design buildings; they hire an architect for that part. They don’t construct the buildings; they hire a construction company for that part. They don’t manage the buildings; they hire a management company for that part. They’re not even the capitalist who funds the whole thing; they get a loan from a bank for that. So what do they do? Why don’t you or I take out a $100 million loan from a bank, hire a company to build a $100 million skyscraper, and then rent it out for somewhat more than $100 million and become rich?
As best I can tell, the developer’s job is coordination. This often means blatant lies. The usual process goes like this: the bank would be happy to lend you the money as long as you have guaranteed renters. The renters would be happy to sign up as long as you show them a design. The architect would be happy to design the building as long as you tell them what the government’s allowing. The government would be happy to give you your permit as long as you have a construction company lined up. And the construction company would be happy to sign on with you as long as you have the money from the bank in your pocket. Or some kind of complicated multi-step catch-22 like that. The solution – or at least Trump’s solution – is to tell everybody that all the other players have agreed and the deal is completely done except for their signature. The trick is to lie to the right people in the right order, so that by the time somebody checks to see whether they’ve been conned, you actually do have the signatures you told them that you had. The whole thing sounds very stressful.
Robert Cialdini’s Wikipedia page says “He is best known for his book Influence“. Since its publication, he seems to have spent his time directing an institute to spread awareness of techniques for success and persuasion. At the risk of being a little too cynical – a guy knows the secrets of success, so he uses them to…write a book about the secrets of success? If I knew the secrets of success, you could bet I’d be doing much more interesting things with them. All the best people recommend Cialdini, and his research credentials are impeccable, but I can’t help wondering: if he’s so smart, why isn’t he God-Emperor?
Donald Trump is also not God-Emperor, but he’s at least sort of on the short-list for the position. I knew that Trump wrote his own book on success and persuasion back in 1988 – Trump: The Art of the Deal – and I wondered if it might not be the anti-Cialdini.
Trump is no psychology expert, but he’s sure done well persuading people in real life. After a few months of attributing his victories to blind luck, most people have accepted Scott Adams’ hypothesis that he’s really a “master persuader”. Salon, Daily Caller, Bill Maher, and the Economist all use the word “genius”. The less you respect Trump’s substance – and I respect it very little – the more you’re forced to admire whatever combination of charisma, persuasion, and showmanship he uses to succeed without having any. If this guy has written a book on how to be persuasive and successful, that’s a book I want to read.
The downside of buying a book by a master manipulator is that sometimes you learn you were manipulated into buying the book.
Trump: The Art Of The Deal is 365 pages of some of the biggest print I have ever seen. The cover has a quote from the New York Times – “Trump makes one believe for a moment in the American dream again” – which some poor reviewer is probably desperately wishing he could take back right now.
Although the blurb says that he “fully reveals the deal-maker’s art” and that it is “an unprecedented education in the practice of deal-making” and “the ultimate read for anyone interested in achieving money and success” – only seventeen pages of very large print are anything resembling business advice. The rest of it is a weirdly deal-focused autobiography that doesn’t mention marrying his wife or having children, but devotes a lovingly detailed twenty-four pages to the time he renovated the Commodore Hotel.
But first, those seventeen pages. I am pleased to report that Donald Trump is well-abreast of modern science – he tells his readers looking for advice about how to make it big that deal-making is probably just genetic.
Either you’ve got the deal gene or you don’t:
More than anything else, I think deal-making is an ability you’re born with. It’s in the genes…unlike the real estate evangelists you see all over television these days, I can’t promise you that by following the precepts I’m about to offer you’ll become a millionaire overnight. Unfortunately, life rarely works that way, and most people who try to get rich quick end up going broke instead.This is a weirdly humble and self-aware Trump. It might be that the book medium suits him well; more likely he just has a really good ghost-writer. Unfortunately, he has much to be humble about. His advice, while not bad, is vague and not too useful. For example, his first rule is “think big”. But his second rule is “protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself”, which he explains as:
It’s been said that I believe in the power of positive thinking. In fact, I believe in the power of negative thinking. I happen to be very conservative in business. I always go into the deal anticipating the worst. If you plan for the worst – if you can live with the worst – the good will take care of itself.So – take a lot of risks, but also be very cautious. Okay. I’m not saying his advice is literally contradictory – it makes sense that you can have big plans but also be very careful about them. I just don’t get the feeling that his advice is too helpful in narrowing down your plans.
Is there anything at all worth reading in these seventeen pages? Oh yes. But not for the reason I expected. (...)
I started the book with the question: what exactly do real estate developers do? They don’t design buildings; they hire an architect for that part. They don’t construct the buildings; they hire a construction company for that part. They don’t manage the buildings; they hire a management company for that part. They’re not even the capitalist who funds the whole thing; they get a loan from a bank for that. So what do they do? Why don’t you or I take out a $100 million loan from a bank, hire a company to build a $100 million skyscraper, and then rent it out for somewhat more than $100 million and become rich?
As best I can tell, the developer’s job is coordination. This often means blatant lies. The usual process goes like this: the bank would be happy to lend you the money as long as you have guaranteed renters. The renters would be happy to sign up as long as you show them a design. The architect would be happy to design the building as long as you tell them what the government’s allowing. The government would be happy to give you your permit as long as you have a construction company lined up. And the construction company would be happy to sign on with you as long as you have the money from the bank in your pocket. Or some kind of complicated multi-step catch-22 like that. The solution – or at least Trump’s solution – is to tell everybody that all the other players have agreed and the deal is completely done except for their signature. The trick is to lie to the right people in the right order, so that by the time somebody checks to see whether they’ve been conned, you actually do have the signatures you told them that you had. The whole thing sounds very stressful.
by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex | Read more:
Image: Twitter
Ways to Be Pretentious
[ed. Not much of a Patti Smith fan but loved her memoir Just Kids.]
The woman who cuts my hair – forty-something, old enough to remember punk but a neo-hippy these days – recently mentioned she’d been to see Patti Smith, who was touring her 1975 album, Horses, for its 40th anniversary. ‘Patti, yeah! Went to see her at the Roundhouse. Paid £30, which I didn’t think was too bad … Didn’t stay that long, though’ – snip, snip – ‘Went up the front and had a proper look, up close and personal’ – snip, snip – ‘And then I left early.’ This is fitting for a performer it’s almost de rigueur to call ‘iconic’. The price of entrance is paid to receive the benison of her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music.
Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is her glorious debut, Horses. I’ve known many people who dearly love Horses, but I can’t recall a single person ever declaring a passion for any of the other work, intermittent poetry and photography included. (If you type ‘patti smith lyrics’ into Google, five of the eight most popular songs are on Horses, and one is ‘Because the Night’.) For a while now, Smith has been the sort of feel-good, feels-real celeb who gets invited to ‘guest edit’ Vogue when the Dalai Lama is resting. But it’s hard to know how much anyone likes any of her post-Horses work, or what ‘popular’ really signifies in her case. Smith isn’t Bruce Springsteen or Beyoncé popular; but neither is she some divisive figure out on the blasted perimeter, like Scott Walker. Devoted fans prize her as one of our culture’s great ungovernable Outsiders. This fan club includes the grandees of the French establishment, who in 2005 named her a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, making Smith about as much of an insider as it’s possible for an outsider to be. ‘Outside of society/That’s where I wanna be!’ she once bawled, in the lamentably titled ‘Rock’n’Roll Nigger’. This kind of earnestly meaningless rallying cry may be forgivable in the very young (or very stoned); Smith was 31 when it was recorded. ‘I’m pretty much unmanageable at this point,’ she claimed in a 2002 New Yorker profile. The same profile went on to detail a full itinerary of gigs and poetry readings, a big new official retrospective CD, new books, the continuing sales of Horses etc.
Horses is one of a handful of punk-era albums that people still listen to, and find stirringly polyvalent. It’s difficult now to capture just how wild and singular it felt when it came out. Smith crumbled scores of unspoken barriers just by being herself: spiky, garrulous, unguarded. The Robert Mapplethorpe portrait on the album cover – a deceptively simple monochrome shot – dared each viewer to find his or her own take on its sibylline RSVP: this is who I am, take it or leave it. If you were a young woman looking for a sympathetic figure to embody various inchoate feelings, the choice at the time was almost non-existent. Smith was a tiny echo from the future. White shirt, dark hair; white background, dark eyes; tiny white equine jewel, dark tie; hands in a cagy gunfighter’s arch over her wide-open heart: this hauntingly simple image anticipated so much to come in fashion, and helped launch a whole new pared-back aesthetic. Watch any BBC4 repeat of Top of the Pops from the mid to late 1970s and it seems inconceivable that the Smith of Mapplethorpe’s photo belongs to the same blithe, peppy era. She seems more real than the crinkly tinfoil stars of the time, but also a thousand times more fantastic. Think of all those 1970s prog rock sleeves and their multicoloured worlds of sauciness and sorcery – then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. (...)
The woman who cuts my hair – forty-something, old enough to remember punk but a neo-hippy these days – recently mentioned she’d been to see Patti Smith, who was touring her 1975 album, Horses, for its 40th anniversary. ‘Patti, yeah! Went to see her at the Roundhouse. Paid £30, which I didn’t think was too bad … Didn’t stay that long, though’ – snip, snip – ‘Went up the front and had a proper look, up close and personal’ – snip, snip – ‘And then I left early.’ This is fitting for a performer it’s almost de rigueur to call ‘iconic’. The price of entrance is paid to receive the benison of her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music.
Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is her glorious debut, Horses. I’ve known many people who dearly love Horses, but I can’t recall a single person ever declaring a passion for any of the other work, intermittent poetry and photography included. (If you type ‘patti smith lyrics’ into Google, five of the eight most popular songs are on Horses, and one is ‘Because the Night’.) For a while now, Smith has been the sort of feel-good, feels-real celeb who gets invited to ‘guest edit’ Vogue when the Dalai Lama is resting. But it’s hard to know how much anyone likes any of her post-Horses work, or what ‘popular’ really signifies in her case. Smith isn’t Bruce Springsteen or Beyoncé popular; but neither is she some divisive figure out on the blasted perimeter, like Scott Walker. Devoted fans prize her as one of our culture’s great ungovernable Outsiders. This fan club includes the grandees of the French establishment, who in 2005 named her a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, making Smith about as much of an insider as it’s possible for an outsider to be. ‘Outside of society/That’s where I wanna be!’ she once bawled, in the lamentably titled ‘Rock’n’Roll Nigger’. This kind of earnestly meaningless rallying cry may be forgivable in the very young (or very stoned); Smith was 31 when it was recorded. ‘I’m pretty much unmanageable at this point,’ she claimed in a 2002 New Yorker profile. The same profile went on to detail a full itinerary of gigs and poetry readings, a big new official retrospective CD, new books, the continuing sales of Horses etc.
Horses is one of a handful of punk-era albums that people still listen to, and find stirringly polyvalent. It’s difficult now to capture just how wild and singular it felt when it came out. Smith crumbled scores of unspoken barriers just by being herself: spiky, garrulous, unguarded. The Robert Mapplethorpe portrait on the album cover – a deceptively simple monochrome shot – dared each viewer to find his or her own take on its sibylline RSVP: this is who I am, take it or leave it. If you were a young woman looking for a sympathetic figure to embody various inchoate feelings, the choice at the time was almost non-existent. Smith was a tiny echo from the future. White shirt, dark hair; white background, dark eyes; tiny white equine jewel, dark tie; hands in a cagy gunfighter’s arch over her wide-open heart: this hauntingly simple image anticipated so much to come in fashion, and helped launch a whole new pared-back aesthetic. Watch any BBC4 repeat of Top of the Pops from the mid to late 1970s and it seems inconceivable that the Smith of Mapplethorpe’s photo belongs to the same blithe, peppy era. She seems more real than the crinkly tinfoil stars of the time, but also a thousand times more fantastic. Think of all those 1970s prog rock sleeves and their multicoloured worlds of sauciness and sorcery – then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. (...)
For its awed young audience, Horses was a noisy firework inauguration; for Smith, it pretty much announced the end of an era. She had developed her work from the end of the 1960s and through the 1970s inside a small protective circle of New York friends: no pressure, no deadlines, all the time to rewrite in the world. She could experiment with how much to reveal, what to mythologise, how far to dare, how loud or quiet to read, what to hold back. One of the reasons Smith sounds so confident on her debut is that she had been working on it for years. The unforgettable intro of the opening song, ‘Gloria’ (‘Jesus died/for somebody’s sins/but not mine’), began life as a long, barely punctuated text from 1970 originally titled ‘Oath’, and later ‘In Excelsis Deo’, as she confirms in Collected Lyrics 1970-2015. If these spooky proclamations don’t sound like your average 1970s rock song it’s partly because they didn’t start out as rock songs. They started out as poems, or as the kind of avant-garde-lite poetry in vogue at the time. No capital letters, ‘w/’ instead of ‘with’ and ‘thru’ instead of ‘through’: Emily Dickinson via Charles Bukowski; Artaud and Bataille laced with American me-first and can-do. (...)
In 1980, she married another rock’n’roll lifer, MC5 guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, and together they took a long time-out from the music business. They settled just outside Detroit and had two children. They released one album together, 1988’s Dream of Life. Her new book, M Train, makes this time sound like the period when life and dream merged for her, indissolubly. You get the impression her slightly more grounded partner brought her back to her senses, showing her that ordinary back-garden life could be a source of alchemical gold, too. Then, in 1994, Fred Smith had a massive heart attack and died, aged just 45; her brother Todd died unexpectedly soon afterwards. Robert Mapplethorpe had died in 1989, after complications arising from HIV/Aids; Richard Sohl, the pianist in the Patti Smith Band, had died of a heart attack aged 37, in 1990. Anyone might have been floored by such a cruel turn of events, and friends encouraged Smith to return to music as a way of coping. Grief became entwined with songwriting. She wrote about Kurt Cobain in ‘About a Boy’, and elsewhere referenced the deaths of two of her mentors, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The sleeve of Gung Ho (2000) was the first not to feature her own portrait, replacing it with an old snapshot of her late father. She seemed to be securing some kind of future by assessing her past (a not uncommon manoeuvre in middle age, even among non-artists). When Just Kids, the memoir devoted to her life-changing relationship with Mapplethorpe, came out in 2010, many readers, myself included, were pleasantly surprised by a new turn in her writing: there was far less straining for wild ‘poetic’ effect, and far more delight in the joys of everyday life.
For the most part, M Train continues in this vein. It reads like the work of someone who has learned to trust her instincts, telling us what she genuinely takes pleasure in rather than what she thinks she ought to be seen referencing. Even if some traces of the old googly-eyed boho persona remain, she seems to have realised she is not duty bound to put on a grand show of seamy decadence when that is not really (or not always) who she is. (She also seems to have found a good, old-fashioned, no-nonsense editor; neither M Train nor Just Kids has the longueurs of many other rock memoirs.) It’s no use pretending your life is all Verlaine and Rimbaud when you’ve mostly been raising a family in suburban Michigan. Once her diaristic poem-texts let us in on her ‘urge to shit voltaire style’; now we get Our Lady of the Cat Litter Tray. (...)
The spell-casting mood of M Train demands that Smith fly off on a moment’s whim, spurred on by nothing more than a lovely line in a new book she’s picked up: she realises she loves Writer A, who either lives or is now buried in City B, decides she has to be there NOW, and before you know it she’s graveside again, the Intercity angel of death in dark Helmut Lang pants and Ann Demeulemeester cloak. It’s all so smooth and hassle-free it could be a 1980s edition of the old BBC Holiday programme. While Smith certainly wouldn’t give Mariah Carey anything to worry about in the diva stakes, she is still a well-known rock star, and this is definitely not global travel as most of us experience it. In the late 1970s, Smith’s path crossed with another mysterious traveller, Bruce Chatwin, who was part of the same moneyed, arty, cross-continental gay set as Mapplethorpe and his patron/lover Sam Wagstaff. There are things in M Train that niggle at me in the same way Chatwin’s work often did: the feeling that for all their much vaunted ‘realism’ these treks occurred in a rather privileged sphere. There’s always a rich pal to provide a bed, a dinner table, a handy castle to stay at for the season; there’s always someone in the background to make sure the plane tickets arrive; fresh figs on the bedside table. Special people, living by special rules. Like Chatwin, Smith is also a bit of a consumer fetishist: the simplest things have to have a special aura or signature – or, let’s get real, a high-toned brand name. It has to be a certain Moleskine notebook. The pencil has to be Conté. The ink has to be from a little shop no one knows in the backstreets of Florence. (Full disclosure: like many writers, I too work with a special favourite pen – it’s a freebie from my wife’s West London dentist’s.)
In 1980, she married another rock’n’roll lifer, MC5 guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, and together they took a long time-out from the music business. They settled just outside Detroit and had two children. They released one album together, 1988’s Dream of Life. Her new book, M Train, makes this time sound like the period when life and dream merged for her, indissolubly. You get the impression her slightly more grounded partner brought her back to her senses, showing her that ordinary back-garden life could be a source of alchemical gold, too. Then, in 1994, Fred Smith had a massive heart attack and died, aged just 45; her brother Todd died unexpectedly soon afterwards. Robert Mapplethorpe had died in 1989, after complications arising from HIV/Aids; Richard Sohl, the pianist in the Patti Smith Band, had died of a heart attack aged 37, in 1990. Anyone might have been floored by such a cruel turn of events, and friends encouraged Smith to return to music as a way of coping. Grief became entwined with songwriting. She wrote about Kurt Cobain in ‘About a Boy’, and elsewhere referenced the deaths of two of her mentors, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The sleeve of Gung Ho (2000) was the first not to feature her own portrait, replacing it with an old snapshot of her late father. She seemed to be securing some kind of future by assessing her past (a not uncommon manoeuvre in middle age, even among non-artists). When Just Kids, the memoir devoted to her life-changing relationship with Mapplethorpe, came out in 2010, many readers, myself included, were pleasantly surprised by a new turn in her writing: there was far less straining for wild ‘poetic’ effect, and far more delight in the joys of everyday life.
For the most part, M Train continues in this vein. It reads like the work of someone who has learned to trust her instincts, telling us what she genuinely takes pleasure in rather than what she thinks she ought to be seen referencing. Even if some traces of the old googly-eyed boho persona remain, she seems to have realised she is not duty bound to put on a grand show of seamy decadence when that is not really (or not always) who she is. (She also seems to have found a good, old-fashioned, no-nonsense editor; neither M Train nor Just Kids has the longueurs of many other rock memoirs.) It’s no use pretending your life is all Verlaine and Rimbaud when you’ve mostly been raising a family in suburban Michigan. Once her diaristic poem-texts let us in on her ‘urge to shit voltaire style’; now we get Our Lady of the Cat Litter Tray. (...)
The spell-casting mood of M Train demands that Smith fly off on a moment’s whim, spurred on by nothing more than a lovely line in a new book she’s picked up: she realises she loves Writer A, who either lives or is now buried in City B, decides she has to be there NOW, and before you know it she’s graveside again, the Intercity angel of death in dark Helmut Lang pants and Ann Demeulemeester cloak. It’s all so smooth and hassle-free it could be a 1980s edition of the old BBC Holiday programme. While Smith certainly wouldn’t give Mariah Carey anything to worry about in the diva stakes, she is still a well-known rock star, and this is definitely not global travel as most of us experience it. In the late 1970s, Smith’s path crossed with another mysterious traveller, Bruce Chatwin, who was part of the same moneyed, arty, cross-continental gay set as Mapplethorpe and his patron/lover Sam Wagstaff. There are things in M Train that niggle at me in the same way Chatwin’s work often did: the feeling that for all their much vaunted ‘realism’ these treks occurred in a rather privileged sphere. There’s always a rich pal to provide a bed, a dinner table, a handy castle to stay at for the season; there’s always someone in the background to make sure the plane tickets arrive; fresh figs on the bedside table. Special people, living by special rules. Like Chatwin, Smith is also a bit of a consumer fetishist: the simplest things have to have a special aura or signature – or, let’s get real, a high-toned brand name. It has to be a certain Moleskine notebook. The pencil has to be Conté. The ink has to be from a little shop no one knows in the backstreets of Florence. (Full disclosure: like many writers, I too work with a special favourite pen – it’s a freebie from my wife’s West London dentist’s.)
by Ian Penman, LRB | Read more:
Image: Robert Mapplethorpe in front of his cover for Patti Smith’s Horses, 1975 ca
Monday, May 9, 2016
Kimchi Fried Rice, Korean Comfort Food
I had a problem with kimchi fried rice: Its name says garlic and chile and sour, yeasty ferments that will lay waste to your taste buds, but the usual reality is chewy grains and a hum of warmth. It’s like sidling up to a fireplace when you feel like being a smokejumper. But Grace Lee, a music marketer by day and kimchi-maker by night and weekend, set me straight on kimchi fried rice. In her version, the fire and tang of kimchi are mellowed out with butter, and the rice is scented with sesame oil and topped with a soft-fried egg. “It just tastes happy,” she said, and I finally understood the dish. It’s not tame — it’s food designed for comforting, continual spoon-to-mouth consumption. For Koreans who grew up making and eating it, there is no confusion about what it is supposed to be.
“It’s everyday comfort food for us; it’s what you make for your kids when they come home from school,” Lee said. I saw how kimchi fried rice becomes a companion for life, a taste that does not change. (...)
Ingredients
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
½ small onion, medium dice
1 cup roughly chopped kimchi (6 ounces)
2 tablespoons kimchi juice, or to taste
½ cup small-dice Spam, ham or leftover cooked meat
2 cups cooked, cooled rice(preferably short-grain)
2 teaspoons soy sauce, or to taste
1 teaspoon sesame oil, or to taste
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
2 eggs
Salt to taste
Crumbled or slivered nori (roasted seaweed) for garnish
Sesame seeds for garnish
3 tablespoons unsalted butter½ small onion, medium dice
1 cup roughly chopped kimchi (6 ounces)
2 tablespoons kimchi juice, or to taste
½ cup small-dice Spam, ham or leftover cooked meat
2 cups cooked, cooled rice(preferably short-grain)
2 teaspoons soy sauce, or to taste
1 teaspoon sesame oil, or to taste
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
2 eggs
Salt to taste
Crumbled or slivered nori (roasted seaweed) for garnish
Sesame seeds for garnish
Preparation
In a nonstick sauté pan or well-seasoned cast-iron skillet, melt butter over medium-low heat, and add onions. Cook, stirring, until the onions start to sizzle, about 2 minutes. Add kimchi and kimchi juice, and stir until it comes to a boil, about 3 minutes. Add Spam, and cook until sauce is nearly dried out, about 5 minutes.
Break up the rice in the pan with a spatula, and stir it to incorporate. Turn heat to medium. Cook, stirring, until the rice has absorbed the sauce and is very hot, about 5 minutes. Stir in soy sauce and sesame oil.
Taste, and adjust with more soy sauce, sesame oil or kimchi juice. Turn heat down slightly, but let the rice continue to cook, untouched, to lightly brown while you cook the eggs.
Place a small nonstick sauté pan over medium heat, and add the vegetable oil. When it is hot, add eggs, season with salt and fry to your desired doneness. Serve rice topped with fried eggs, nori and a sprinkle of sesame seeds.
by Francis Lam, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Davide Luciano for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Gozde Eker.
The End of a Mobile Wave
The mobile phone industry has had two waves - first voice and SMS and then the smartphone. The voice wave has taken it from zero to 5 billion people on earth with a mobile phone, and now close to 2 billion mobile phones are sold every year. In parallel, starting 9 years ago, the smartphone wave converted a larger and larger percentage of those phone sales to smartphones.
And since smartphones could be sold for higher average prices than feature phones, revenue grew even faster than unit sales. This was a great multiplier for the right companies - smartphones were a growing percentage of growing phone sales at growing prices.
All of this is now reaching an end - the wave is almost over.
By 2020 there'll be 6bn adults on earth and more than 5bn people with phones, and the last billion are necessarily the slowest and hardest to reach. Phone sales are a function of the install base and the replacement rate - the install base hasn’t got much more growth and the replacement rate is also starting to lengthen (or at least not shorten). So phone sales will slow. Then, most phone sales now are already smartphones (as seen in the chart above), so the conversion of phone sales to smartphone sales also hasn’t got much further to grow. The smartphone install base does have a lot of room to grow, but that's a function of replacement at close to existing volumes, and even that will be largely done in a few more years. Hence: smartphone sales growth is slowing down.
On one level this is just classic saturation - no industry can grow forever. But what happens next?
At the level of the consumer internet, it’s been clear for some time that Apple and Google won the platform war and that the important questions have moved up the stack - how far can Google and Facebook capture attention and intent, what other interaction models will emerge, how far Android and iOS can shape interaction and consumer behaviour, and so on.
For the hardware companies themselves, though (and that includes Apple), when you’re selling to everyone on earth (something the tech industry has never really done before), what do you do next? TV, once thought of as the next phase after PCs, turned to be an accessory to smartphones, and so are watches and (to some extent) even tablets. VR and AR are some time away with unclear market size, though I think AR could in principle be the next ecosystem after the smartphone.
The obvious next market is cars, which in aggregate are much larger in revenue terms, and where a large part of the supply chain will be fundamentally remade by the shift to electric and (in due course) to autonomy. Cars are a Big Deal for the tech industry.
But it’s also interesting to think about the phone market itself, which isn’t going away any time soon (though AR may affect that in the next decade).
I spent some time chatting to Condor at MWC this spring. It's a subsidiary of an Algerian family-owned conglomerate, which began in the cement business and expanded into white goods - fridges and washing machines - and then televisions ('brown goods'). It built a nation-wide network of 150 stores to support that business. Then it got into the phone business, and last year it sold 3m phones, of which 2.8m were Android smartphones. The best-selling model retails for $80. It expects to reach sales of $1bn this year, and has around a third of the Algerian market.
Condor is possible because mobile phone technology became something that you could buy off the shelf - if you can make a TV, you can make a mobile phone or a smartphone, without needing deep understanding of how cellular technology works anymore, or writing your own OS. In parallel, the manufacturing base of the industry moved from factories you own yourselves to outsourced contracting. So, you can make phones, or get someone else to make them for you, or some combination of the two, with much lower barriers to entry. And if you come from the cement business, your idea of a great margin looks rather different to Sony's.
However, there's a big difference between making a phone and selling it. It’s all very well to put it in a shipping container in Shenzhen, but what happens after that? A lot of Apple's sales growth since 2007 has actually been about expanding distribution through mobile operators (which sell far more iPhones than Apple retail does), with the really big additions being Verizon Wireless and China Mobile. Indeed, the fact that it has now signed up all the operators that matter is one reason sales growth has slowed. In parallel, distribution was a big part of the Samsung story. It has effectively cloned Nokia: it offers every technology, frequency and specification, at every price point, for every operator, through every sales channel, and spends billions of dollars on sales and distribution to support that, of which a very large part will be sales commissions.
That is, with the tech available off the shelf, the barrier to entry has moved from the creation and manufacture of the phones themselves to sales, distribution, marketing and support, and a lot of the innovation in the handset business now is around how to address that. Which part of the value chain do you start from and try to leverage, and which parts you outsource? Someone has to make it, someone has to import it, someone has to put into shops, or market it for online sales, and (especially in developed markets) someone has to provide support if you smash the screen. But all of those are being disassembled and reassembled in different combinations.
Hence, at one end of the spectrum are Chinese companies that are just looking for distribution deals overseas, and will sell you a few thousand or tens of thousand with the brand of your choice printed on the back, and what happens after the shipping container (or suitcase) leaves Shenzhen is up to you. The next step along are those trying to create a brand of their own, often in parallel with selling phones under other people's brands. So I've met several companies that have a slick new consumer brand of their own with nicely designed handsets and a decent Android skin, and are thinking about how to take that abroad - what that sales and distribution might look like, and where it should be. One interesting illustration of this is Wiko, which has a double-digit share of the French market and is expanding in south-east Asia. The back of the phone says ‘Designed in France, Assembled in China’, but in fact Wiko seems to be majority owned by a Chinese company, Shenzhen Tinno Mobile Technology Company Ltd.
Sitting right next to Wiko are ever more companies starting from the other end - building brand, distribution and marketing locally, adding some design, and outsourcing the manufacturing. Wiley Fox in the UK comes from people with a background in mobile operators, selling a premium design at a mid-range price with a lightly skinned version of Android. BQ in Spain originates in ereaders, amongst other things. Blu in Latin America has built a huge business on distribution. And of course Google sells its own ’Nexus’ line, using a rarely-encountered custom build of Android and adding a small amount of marketing and distribution.
As the price for a good Android experience moves from $600 to $150 or $250, these companies can increasingly pass up operator subsidies, with burdens of inventory etc. that this imposes, and move straight to selling unsubsidised and online. The poster-child for this model is of course Xiaomi, which has pioneered an online-only flash sales model, backed by an attempt to build a passionate community around the brand and software experience. This has worked well in China but it's not clear how well it can be made to work elsewhere, and whether it can be built once and scaled globally or whether you need to do it one country at a time from scratch.
Then, coming from the other end of the spectrum, mobile operators are increasing buying in a selection of low-end smartphones than they sell (generally unsubsidised on prepay) under their own brand. Sometimes these have operator apps preloaded (if they've not given up on that yet), sometimes not. One could argue that the value being added here is really only distribution, and so one might see other companies with distribution getting into this, such as mass-market retailers. Some of these have already experimented with Android tablets, with mixed results (as of course they did with MVNOs).
This is all rather like the PC clone market of the 1980s - hundreds of undifferentiated companies fighting it out to sell commodity computers built with commodity components running a commodity operating system (though those companies mainly made the PCs themselves, where many phone brands do not). That world in due course led to companies like Dell - people who embraced the volume, low-margin commodity model and found an angle of their own. We’re starting to see equivalent model-creation now.
And since smartphones could be sold for higher average prices than feature phones, revenue grew even faster than unit sales. This was a great multiplier for the right companies - smartphones were a growing percentage of growing phone sales at growing prices.
All of this is now reaching an end - the wave is almost over.
By 2020 there'll be 6bn adults on earth and more than 5bn people with phones, and the last billion are necessarily the slowest and hardest to reach. Phone sales are a function of the install base and the replacement rate - the install base hasn’t got much more growth and the replacement rate is also starting to lengthen (or at least not shorten). So phone sales will slow. Then, most phone sales now are already smartphones (as seen in the chart above), so the conversion of phone sales to smartphone sales also hasn’t got much further to grow. The smartphone install base does have a lot of room to grow, but that's a function of replacement at close to existing volumes, and even that will be largely done in a few more years. Hence: smartphone sales growth is slowing down.
On one level this is just classic saturation - no industry can grow forever. But what happens next?
At the level of the consumer internet, it’s been clear for some time that Apple and Google won the platform war and that the important questions have moved up the stack - how far can Google and Facebook capture attention and intent, what other interaction models will emerge, how far Android and iOS can shape interaction and consumer behaviour, and so on.
For the hardware companies themselves, though (and that includes Apple), when you’re selling to everyone on earth (something the tech industry has never really done before), what do you do next? TV, once thought of as the next phase after PCs, turned to be an accessory to smartphones, and so are watches and (to some extent) even tablets. VR and AR are some time away with unclear market size, though I think AR could in principle be the next ecosystem after the smartphone.
The obvious next market is cars, which in aggregate are much larger in revenue terms, and where a large part of the supply chain will be fundamentally remade by the shift to electric and (in due course) to autonomy. Cars are a Big Deal for the tech industry.
But it’s also interesting to think about the phone market itself, which isn’t going away any time soon (though AR may affect that in the next decade).
I spent some time chatting to Condor at MWC this spring. It's a subsidiary of an Algerian family-owned conglomerate, which began in the cement business and expanded into white goods - fridges and washing machines - and then televisions ('brown goods'). It built a nation-wide network of 150 stores to support that business. Then it got into the phone business, and last year it sold 3m phones, of which 2.8m were Android smartphones. The best-selling model retails for $80. It expects to reach sales of $1bn this year, and has around a third of the Algerian market.
Condor is possible because mobile phone technology became something that you could buy off the shelf - if you can make a TV, you can make a mobile phone or a smartphone, without needing deep understanding of how cellular technology works anymore, or writing your own OS. In parallel, the manufacturing base of the industry moved from factories you own yourselves to outsourced contracting. So, you can make phones, or get someone else to make them for you, or some combination of the two, with much lower barriers to entry. And if you come from the cement business, your idea of a great margin looks rather different to Sony's.
However, there's a big difference between making a phone and selling it. It’s all very well to put it in a shipping container in Shenzhen, but what happens after that? A lot of Apple's sales growth since 2007 has actually been about expanding distribution through mobile operators (which sell far more iPhones than Apple retail does), with the really big additions being Verizon Wireless and China Mobile. Indeed, the fact that it has now signed up all the operators that matter is one reason sales growth has slowed. In parallel, distribution was a big part of the Samsung story. It has effectively cloned Nokia: it offers every technology, frequency and specification, at every price point, for every operator, through every sales channel, and spends billions of dollars on sales and distribution to support that, of which a very large part will be sales commissions.
That is, with the tech available off the shelf, the barrier to entry has moved from the creation and manufacture of the phones themselves to sales, distribution, marketing and support, and a lot of the innovation in the handset business now is around how to address that. Which part of the value chain do you start from and try to leverage, and which parts you outsource? Someone has to make it, someone has to import it, someone has to put into shops, or market it for online sales, and (especially in developed markets) someone has to provide support if you smash the screen. But all of those are being disassembled and reassembled in different combinations.
Hence, at one end of the spectrum are Chinese companies that are just looking for distribution deals overseas, and will sell you a few thousand or tens of thousand with the brand of your choice printed on the back, and what happens after the shipping container (or suitcase) leaves Shenzhen is up to you. The next step along are those trying to create a brand of their own, often in parallel with selling phones under other people's brands. So I've met several companies that have a slick new consumer brand of their own with nicely designed handsets and a decent Android skin, and are thinking about how to take that abroad - what that sales and distribution might look like, and where it should be. One interesting illustration of this is Wiko, which has a double-digit share of the French market and is expanding in south-east Asia. The back of the phone says ‘Designed in France, Assembled in China’, but in fact Wiko seems to be majority owned by a Chinese company, Shenzhen Tinno Mobile Technology Company Ltd.
Sitting right next to Wiko are ever more companies starting from the other end - building brand, distribution and marketing locally, adding some design, and outsourcing the manufacturing. Wiley Fox in the UK comes from people with a background in mobile operators, selling a premium design at a mid-range price with a lightly skinned version of Android. BQ in Spain originates in ereaders, amongst other things. Blu in Latin America has built a huge business on distribution. And of course Google sells its own ’Nexus’ line, using a rarely-encountered custom build of Android and adding a small amount of marketing and distribution.
As the price for a good Android experience moves from $600 to $150 or $250, these companies can increasingly pass up operator subsidies, with burdens of inventory etc. that this imposes, and move straight to selling unsubsidised and online. The poster-child for this model is of course Xiaomi, which has pioneered an online-only flash sales model, backed by an attempt to build a passionate community around the brand and software experience. This has worked well in China but it's not clear how well it can be made to work elsewhere, and whether it can be built once and scaled globally or whether you need to do it one country at a time from scratch.
Then, coming from the other end of the spectrum, mobile operators are increasing buying in a selection of low-end smartphones than they sell (generally unsubsidised on prepay) under their own brand. Sometimes these have operator apps preloaded (if they've not given up on that yet), sometimes not. One could argue that the value being added here is really only distribution, and so one might see other companies with distribution getting into this, such as mass-market retailers. Some of these have already experimented with Android tablets, with mixed results (as of course they did with MVNOs).
This is all rather like the PC clone market of the 1980s - hundreds of undifferentiated companies fighting it out to sell commodity computers built with commodity components running a commodity operating system (though those companies mainly made the PCs themselves, where many phone brands do not). That world in due course led to companies like Dell - people who embraced the volume, low-margin commodity model and found an angle of their own. We’re starting to see equivalent model-creation now.
by Benedict Evans | Read more:
Images: Andreessen Horowitz
When Men Wanted to Be Virile
For the past few weeks, I’ve had a book on my desk called “A History of Virility.” It’s a seven-hundred-page scholarly anthology, published by Columbia University Press and translated from the French by Keith Cohen, chronicling how Western masculinity has been transformed, successively, by Ancient Greece and Rome, encounters with barbarians, the medieval court, the Enlightenment, colonialism, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of childhood, mechanized warfare, Fascism, the labor movement, feminism, gay liberation, and so on. The book is the size of a telephone directory; its cover features a glowering, Brando-like Adonis in a tank top. It is, in short, a source of amusement to all who pass by, many of whom point to the word “virility” and say, “Ew.”
There’s no denying that “virility” is, nowadays, a strange and icky word, redolent of romance novels, nineteenth-century boarding schools, militarism, and misogyny. For most of history, though—as the book’s editors, Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and George Vigarello, point out—it was normal to praise exemplary men as “virile.” In fact, only in the past century has the word “virility” been displaced by the more anodyne “masculinity” and “manliness.” This has left us with a tautology, since we must now describe male identity as “masculine.” It’s also created a mystery and a question. The mystery: What did “virility” mean in the first place? The question: Is there anything about it worth salvaging?
“A History of Virility” begins in the Greco-Roman world. It was the Ancient Greeks, the scholar Maurice Sartre writes, who developed the concept of andreia, or “maleness.” Andreia usually expressed itself through manly brawn or audacity on the battlefield, but it had other applications. Audacious women could possess andreia—Herodotus, for example, attributed it to Artemisa, the Amazon warrior-queen—and it could have a civic aspect, in the form of andreia politiké, or political courage. The Spartans didn’t just train their young men to fight; they taught them andreia politiké by quizzing them about current events. If a young Spartan couldn’t give a concise and spirited answer to a question like “Who is an excellent citizen and why?,” he’d face corporal punishment.
In Ancient Rome, virilitas, a more ambitious version of andreia politiké, migrated to the center of male identity. Manly sexuality was fundamental to Roman virility: the classicist Jean-Paul Thuillier notes that the word virilitas could refer quite simply to the “male organs.” (In Latin, vir can also mean just “man” or “husband.”) And yet virilitas wasn’t just about size. To possess Roman virility, the editors write, was to radiate not just sexual power but “virtue, accomplishment.” The virile man wasn’t just sexually “assertive,” “powerfully built,” and “procreative,” but also intellectually and emotionally “levelheaded, vigorous yet deliberate, courageous yet restrained”:
From our modern point of view, the strangest aspect of virilitas was that it was contrasted with manliness. Manliness and virility were separate, and even opposed, ways of being. Compared to virilitas, mere or “basic” manliness was a little contemptible. It was undisciplined and, worse, unearned, since, while men are born masculine, they must achieve virility through competition and struggle. Though this distinction now goes unspoken, it can still feel natural to us: watching the film “Gladiator,” for example, we readily recognize that Russell Crowe’s quiet, temperate, and deadly Maximus represents the virile ideal, whereas Joaquin Phoenix’s Emperor Commodus is too undisciplined to have true virilitas. Commodus is strong, sexy, intelligent, and undeniably masculine—and yet his passions control him and lead him in idiosyncratic and undesirable directions. He’s a familiar figure: a man who represents the dangers of manliness without virility.
Virility, in short, unfolded within a tortured moral universe. There’s a sense in which, in the ancient world, manliness was the virile man’s original sin. A man might be taught to be virile; he might establish his virility through “accumulated proofs” (sexual power, career success, a tempered disposition, a honed intellect); and yet virility, the editors write, remained “an especially harsh tradition” in which “perfections tend[ed] always to be threatened.” There was something perverse about the cult of virility. Even as virile men were exalted, it was assumed that each had a fatal flaw—a sexual, physical, or temperamental weakness—which observers knew would be uncovered. Virility wasn’t just a quality or a character trait. It was a drama.
There’s no denying that “virility” is, nowadays, a strange and icky word, redolent of romance novels, nineteenth-century boarding schools, militarism, and misogyny. For most of history, though—as the book’s editors, Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and George Vigarello, point out—it was normal to praise exemplary men as “virile.” In fact, only in the past century has the word “virility” been displaced by the more anodyne “masculinity” and “manliness.” This has left us with a tautology, since we must now describe male identity as “masculine.” It’s also created a mystery and a question. The mystery: What did “virility” mean in the first place? The question: Is there anything about it worth salvaging?“A History of Virility” begins in the Greco-Roman world. It was the Ancient Greeks, the scholar Maurice Sartre writes, who developed the concept of andreia, or “maleness.” Andreia usually expressed itself through manly brawn or audacity on the battlefield, but it had other applications. Audacious women could possess andreia—Herodotus, for example, attributed it to Artemisa, the Amazon warrior-queen—and it could have a civic aspect, in the form of andreia politiké, or political courage. The Spartans didn’t just train their young men to fight; they taught them andreia politiké by quizzing them about current events. If a young Spartan couldn’t give a concise and spirited answer to a question like “Who is an excellent citizen and why?,” he’d face corporal punishment.
In Ancient Rome, virilitas, a more ambitious version of andreia politiké, migrated to the center of male identity. Manly sexuality was fundamental to Roman virility: the classicist Jean-Paul Thuillier notes that the word virilitas could refer quite simply to the “male organs.” (In Latin, vir can also mean just “man” or “husband.”) And yet virilitas wasn’t just about size. To possess Roman virility, the editors write, was to radiate not just sexual power but “virtue, accomplishment.” The virile man wasn’t just sexually “assertive,” “powerfully built,” and “procreative,” but also intellectually and emotionally “levelheaded, vigorous yet deliberate, courageous yet restrained”:
The virile is not simply what is manly; it is more: an ideal of power and virtue, self-assurance and maturity, certitude and domination . . . . courage and “greatness” accompanied by strength and vigor.The Romans made virility more complex and demanding. The main challenge for Greek men who aspired to andreia had been insufficient brawniness: Maurice Sartre quotes a cutting description of an almost virile young man named Theagenes, who impressed with his “broad chest and shoulders,” but was ridiculed for, among other things, the “blond fuzz” on his cheeks. But Roman virilitas was even harder to achieve. A man with virilitas had to be tall, muscled, handsome, tanned, and well-endowed. (Roman men spent a lot of time naked at the baths.) He also had to be clever, energetic, confident, and politically engaged. But the defining quality of virilitas was self-control.Virilitas was an ethic of moderation, in which strong or “vigorous” powers were kept deliberately reined in, in the manner of a standing army. If a man became too aggressive, too emotional, or too brawny—too manly—his virilitas could be lost. For this reason, being a ladies’ man could compromise one’s virility. (“For the ancient Romans,” Thuillier writes, “giving in too often to the charms of women is in itself slightly effeminate.”) To be sexually powerful, you had to be in control of your desires.
From our modern point of view, the strangest aspect of virilitas was that it was contrasted with manliness. Manliness and virility were separate, and even opposed, ways of being. Compared to virilitas, mere or “basic” manliness was a little contemptible. It was undisciplined and, worse, unearned, since, while men are born masculine, they must achieve virility through competition and struggle. Though this distinction now goes unspoken, it can still feel natural to us: watching the film “Gladiator,” for example, we readily recognize that Russell Crowe’s quiet, temperate, and deadly Maximus represents the virile ideal, whereas Joaquin Phoenix’s Emperor Commodus is too undisciplined to have true virilitas. Commodus is strong, sexy, intelligent, and undeniably masculine—and yet his passions control him and lead him in idiosyncratic and undesirable directions. He’s a familiar figure: a man who represents the dangers of manliness without virility.
Virility, in short, unfolded within a tortured moral universe. There’s a sense in which, in the ancient world, manliness was the virile man’s original sin. A man might be taught to be virile; he might establish his virility through “accumulated proofs” (sexual power, career success, a tempered disposition, a honed intellect); and yet virility, the editors write, remained “an especially harsh tradition” in which “perfections tend[ed] always to be threatened.” There was something perverse about the cult of virility. Even as virile men were exalted, it was assumed that each had a fatal flaw—a sexual, physical, or temperamental weakness—which observers knew would be uncovered. Virility wasn’t just a quality or a character trait. It was a drama.
by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Dreamworks/AF Archive/Alarmy
Sunday, May 8, 2016
You Have to Have a Strategy
"You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want. And if you don’t get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. And that will lead to more cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair. And that's never been the source of our progress. That's how we cheat ourselves of progress.
You have to go through life with more than just a passion for change – you have to have strategy. Not just awareness, but action. Not just hashtags, but votes. Change requires more than righteous anger. To bring about structural change, lasting change, awareness is not enough. It requires changes in law, changes in customs."
Drug Shoot-up Rooms Get Serious Look
[ed. It's about time we stopped judging people for their addictions and actually started helping them.]
An alarming 47,000 American overdose deaths in 2014 - 60 percent from heroin and related painkillers like fentanyl - has pushed elected leaders from coast to coast to consider what was once unthinkable: government-sanctioned sites where users can shoot up under the supervision of a doctor or nurse who can administer an antidote if necessary."Things are getting out of control. We have to find things we can do for people who are addicted now," said New York state Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, who is working on legislation to allow supervised injection sites that would also include space for treatment services. "The idea shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. I don't see anyone else coming up with anything new and innovative."
Critics of the war on drugs have long talked about the need for a new approach to addiction, but the idea of allowing supervised injection sites is now coming from state lawmakers in New York, Maryland and California, along with city officials in Seattle, San Francisco and Ithaca, New York, who note that syringe exchanges were once controversial but now operate in 33 states.
While such sites have operated for years in places such as Canada, the Netherlands and Australia, they face significant legal and political challenges in the U.S., including criticism that they are tantamount to waving a white flag at an epidemic that should be fought with prevention and treatment.
"It's a dangerous idea," said John Walters, drug czar under President George W. Bush. "It's advocated by people who seem to think that the way we should help sick people is by keeping them sick, but comfortably sick."
But proponents argue such sites are not so radical outside the U.S., pointing to examples where they offer not only a place to shoot up, but also health care, counseling and even treatment beds. In many cases, the users are there to shoot up heroin or dangerous opioids like fentanyl, though some take painkillers in pill form.
At Sydney's Medically Supervised Injecting Centre, more than 5,900 people have overdosed since it opened in 2001. No one has died. It's the same at Insite in Vancouver, British Columbia. About 20 overdoses happen there every week, but the facility, which is jointly operated by a local nonprofit and the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, has yet to record a death.
"A big fat zero," said Insite site coordinator Darwin Fisher.
Sydney's facility is tucked between a hostel and a Chinese restaurant in Kings Cross, the city's red-light district. Aside from the security guard posted just inside the front door, it looks like a typical health clinic.
At least two staffers, including a registered nurse, monitor the injection room. They are not allowed to administer drugs, though sterile needles are provided. If a patient overdoses, the nurse delivers the antidote Narcan, which quickly reverses the overdose.
After users get their fix, they head to a second room with a decidedly warmer feel. Colored Christmas lights hang from the ceiling; books and magazines line the shelves. Clients can relax with a cup of coffee or tea or talk to staff. Some stay for 15 minutes; others spend hours. They exit through a back door to protect their privacy.
by David Klepper, AP | Read more:
Image: Peter Dejong
Saturday, May 7, 2016
Panama Papers Source Offers Documents To Governments, Hints At More To Come
In a statement issued to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the so-called “John Doe” behind the biggest information leak in history cites the need for better whistleblower protection and has hinted at even more revelations to come.
Titled “The Revolution Will Be Digitized” the 1800-word statement gives justification for the leak, saying that “income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time” and says that government authorities need to do more to address it.
Süddeutsche Zeitung has authenticated that the statement came from the Panama Papers source. The statement in full:
The Revolution Will Be Digitized
John Doe
Income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time. It affects all of us, the world over. The debate over its sudden acceleration has raged for years, with politicians, academics and activists alike helpless to stop its steady growth despite countless speeches, statistical analyses, a few meagre protests, and the occasional documentary. Still, questions remain: why? And why now?
The Panama Papers provide a compelling answer to these questions: massive, pervasive corruption. And it’s not a coincidence that the answer comes from a law firm. More than just a cog in the machine of “wealth management,” Mossack Fonseca used its influence to write and bend laws worldwide to favour the interests of criminals over a period of decades. In the case of the island of Niue, the firm essentially ran a tax haven from start to finish. Ramón Fonseca and Jürgen Mossack would have us believe that their firm’s shell companies, sometimes called “special purpose vehicles,” are just like cars. But used car salesmen don’t write laws. And the only “special purpose” of the vehicles they produced was too often fraud, on a grand scale.
Shell companies are often associated with the crime of tax evasion, but the Panama Papers show beyond a shadow of a doubt that although shell companies are not illegal by definition, they are used to carry out a wide array of serious crimes that go beyond evading taxes. I decided to expose Mossack Fonseca because I thought its founders, employees and clients should have to answer for their roles in these crimes, only some of which have come to light thus far. It will take years, possibly decades, for the full extent of the firm’s sordid acts to become known.
In the meantime, a new global debate has started, which is encouraging. Unlike the polite rhetoric of yesteryear that carefully omitted any suggestion of wrongdoing by the elite, this debate focuses directly on what matters.
In that regard, I have a few thoughts.
For the record, I do not work for any government or intelligence agency, directly or as a contractor, and I never have. My viewpoint is entirely my own, as was my decision to share the documents with Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), not for any specific political purpose, but simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described.
The prevailing media narrative thus far has focused on the scandal of what is legal and allowed in this system. What is allowed is indeed scandalous and must be changed. But we must not lose sight of another important fact: the law firm, its founders, and employees actually did knowingly violate myriad laws worldwide, repeatedly. Publicly they plead ignorance, but the documents show detailed knowledge and deliberate wrongdoing. At the very least we already know that Mossack personally perjured himself before a federal court in Nevada, and we also know that his information technology staff attempted to cover up the underlying lies. They should all be prosecuted accordingly with no special treatment.
In the end, thousands of prosecutions could stem from the Panama Papers, if only law enforcement could access and evaluate the actual documents. ICIJ and its partner publications have rightly stated that they will not provide them to law enforcement agencies. I, however, would be willing to cooperate with law enforcement to the extent that I am able.
That being said, I have watched as one after another, whistleblowers and activists in the United States and Europe have had their lives destroyed by the circumstances they find themselves in after shining a light on obvious wrongdoing. Edward Snowden is stranded in Moscow, exiled due to the Obama administration’s decision to prosecute him under the Espionage Act. For his revelations about the NSA, he deserves a hero’s welcome and a substantial prize, not banishment. Bradley Birkenfeld was awarded millions for his information concerning Swiss bank UBS—and was still given a prison sentence by the Justice Department. Antoine Deltour is presently on trial for providing journalists with information about how Luxembourg granted secret “sweetheart” tax deals to multi-national corporations, effectively stealing billions in tax revenues from its neighbour countries. And there are plenty more examples.
Legitimate whistleblowers who expose unquestionable wrongdoing, whether insiders or outsiders, deserve immunity from government retribution, full stop. Until governments codify legal protections for whistleblowers into law, enforcement agencies will simply have to depend on their own resources or on-going global media coverage for documents.
In the meantime, I call on the European Commission, the British Parliament, the United States Congress, and all nations to take swift action not only to protect whistleblowers, but to put an end to the global abuse of corporate registers. In the European Union, every member state’s corporate register should be freely accessible, with detailed data plainly available on ultimate beneficial owners. The United Kingdom can be proud of its domestic initiatives thus far, but it still has a vital role to play by ending financial secrecy on its various island territories, which are unquestionably the cornerstone of institutional corruption worldwide. And the United States can clearly no longer trust its fifty states to make sound decisions about their own corporate data. It is long past time for Congress to step in and force transparency by setting standards for disclosure and public access.
And while it’s one thing to extol the virtues of government transparency at summits and in sound bites, it’s quite another to actually implement it. It is an open secret that in the United States, elected representatives spend the majority of their time fundraising. Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes relative to any other segment of the population. These unsavoury political practices have come full circle and they are irreconcilable. Reform of America’s broken campaign finance system cannot wait.
John Doe
Income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time. It affects all of us, the world over. The debate over its sudden acceleration has raged for years, with politicians, academics and activists alike helpless to stop its steady growth despite countless speeches, statistical analyses, a few meagre protests, and the occasional documentary. Still, questions remain: why? And why now?
The Panama Papers provide a compelling answer to these questions: massive, pervasive corruption. And it’s not a coincidence that the answer comes from a law firm. More than just a cog in the machine of “wealth management,” Mossack Fonseca used its influence to write and bend laws worldwide to favour the interests of criminals over a period of decades. In the case of the island of Niue, the firm essentially ran a tax haven from start to finish. Ramón Fonseca and Jürgen Mossack would have us believe that their firm’s shell companies, sometimes called “special purpose vehicles,” are just like cars. But used car salesmen don’t write laws. And the only “special purpose” of the vehicles they produced was too often fraud, on a grand scale.
Shell companies are often associated with the crime of tax evasion, but the Panama Papers show beyond a shadow of a doubt that although shell companies are not illegal by definition, they are used to carry out a wide array of serious crimes that go beyond evading taxes. I decided to expose Mossack Fonseca because I thought its founders, employees and clients should have to answer for their roles in these crimes, only some of which have come to light thus far. It will take years, possibly decades, for the full extent of the firm’s sordid acts to become known.
In the meantime, a new global debate has started, which is encouraging. Unlike the polite rhetoric of yesteryear that carefully omitted any suggestion of wrongdoing by the elite, this debate focuses directly on what matters.
In that regard, I have a few thoughts.
For the record, I do not work for any government or intelligence agency, directly or as a contractor, and I never have. My viewpoint is entirely my own, as was my decision to share the documents with Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), not for any specific political purpose, but simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described.
The prevailing media narrative thus far has focused on the scandal of what is legal and allowed in this system. What is allowed is indeed scandalous and must be changed. But we must not lose sight of another important fact: the law firm, its founders, and employees actually did knowingly violate myriad laws worldwide, repeatedly. Publicly they plead ignorance, but the documents show detailed knowledge and deliberate wrongdoing. At the very least we already know that Mossack personally perjured himself before a federal court in Nevada, and we also know that his information technology staff attempted to cover up the underlying lies. They should all be prosecuted accordingly with no special treatment.
In the end, thousands of prosecutions could stem from the Panama Papers, if only law enforcement could access and evaluate the actual documents. ICIJ and its partner publications have rightly stated that they will not provide them to law enforcement agencies. I, however, would be willing to cooperate with law enforcement to the extent that I am able.
That being said, I have watched as one after another, whistleblowers and activists in the United States and Europe have had their lives destroyed by the circumstances they find themselves in after shining a light on obvious wrongdoing. Edward Snowden is stranded in Moscow, exiled due to the Obama administration’s decision to prosecute him under the Espionage Act. For his revelations about the NSA, he deserves a hero’s welcome and a substantial prize, not banishment. Bradley Birkenfeld was awarded millions for his information concerning Swiss bank UBS—and was still given a prison sentence by the Justice Department. Antoine Deltour is presently on trial for providing journalists with information about how Luxembourg granted secret “sweetheart” tax deals to multi-national corporations, effectively stealing billions in tax revenues from its neighbour countries. And there are plenty more examples.
Legitimate whistleblowers who expose unquestionable wrongdoing, whether insiders or outsiders, deserve immunity from government retribution, full stop. Until governments codify legal protections for whistleblowers into law, enforcement agencies will simply have to depend on their own resources or on-going global media coverage for documents.
In the meantime, I call on the European Commission, the British Parliament, the United States Congress, and all nations to take swift action not only to protect whistleblowers, but to put an end to the global abuse of corporate registers. In the European Union, every member state’s corporate register should be freely accessible, with detailed data plainly available on ultimate beneficial owners. The United Kingdom can be proud of its domestic initiatives thus far, but it still has a vital role to play by ending financial secrecy on its various island territories, which are unquestionably the cornerstone of institutional corruption worldwide. And the United States can clearly no longer trust its fifty states to make sound decisions about their own corporate data. It is long past time for Congress to step in and force transparency by setting standards for disclosure and public access.
And while it’s one thing to extol the virtues of government transparency at summits and in sound bites, it’s quite another to actually implement it. It is an open secret that in the United States, elected representatives spend the majority of their time fundraising. Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes relative to any other segment of the population. These unsavoury political practices have come full circle and they are irreconcilable. Reform of America’s broken campaign finance system cannot wait.
by John Doe, ICIJ | Read more:
Image: uncredited
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