[ed. Video of Midway Airport (Chicago) security line goes viral. What's even more depressing is how docile everyone appears to be. We've given up hope.]
Monday, May 16, 2016
TSA Are You F***ing Kidding Me?
[ed. Video of Midway Airport (Chicago) security line goes viral. What's even more depressing is how docile everyone appears to be. We've given up hope.]
The Cat Psychic
Last October, I came back from a month away and my cat wouldn’t speak to me. He refused to come in the house; if he saw me, he ran away. He’d always been a partly outdoor cat with an independent streak, so at first I wasn’t worried. Maybe he hadn’t liked the woman who sublet my house in my absence. Or he was punishing me for going away. Maybe he was just savoring the last weeks of a lingering Texas summer—the slow descent of twilight, the fat mice moving in the grass. But a few days passed, and then a week, and he continued to avoid me. Two weeks after I returned home, I spent an afternoon sitting very still, watching him sunning himself in my neighbor’s backyard. He looked healthy and self-satisfied, in fine feline form. But then he must’ve felt my eyes on him; he stood up and hopped easily over the fence, disappearing back into whatever secret space he was spending his time in.
I enlisted my friends to prowl the neighborhood with me, calling his name—as if he had ever been the kind of animal who came when called. I ventured as far as I dared into the thick brush beside the railroad tracks, trying to lure him with catnip. I bought insanely expensive wet food, organic and grain-free, the kind of cat food that comes garnished with herbs, and set it outside the front door. When that didn’t tempt him, I bought the cheap Dollar General stuff, ambiguous gray globs suspended in jelly. The message I was trying to send was: Whatever you want, buddy, as long as you come home. But he didn’t come home.
My neighbor saw him more than I did—he liked to show up at sunrise to watch her feed her chickens. They had reached a kind of truce, but as soon as I showed up, he’d dash off to one of his hiding places. One morning at the beginning of November the buzzards were gone—supposedly the sign of that the year’s first freeze is coming. That night, the weather turned. The wind sounded like an enemy trying to get into the house, and there was frost on the grass in the morning. My neighbor reassured me that Musa had come by to watch the chickens get fed and didn’t seem any worse for wear. The inaccessibility of his secret life drove me crazy. Where was he sleeping? What was he eating? Did he know he was breaking my heart?
In December, my friend Brandon came over one day to drop off a book; when he asked me how I was, I started crying and I couldn’t stop. I felt foolish, and also so, so sad. “Are you sure this is about the cat?” he asked. I could see his point, but I was pretty sure it was. I called my mom for a pep talk. “Maybe you just have to accept that he wants a different kind of life,” she said. I hung up on her, and didn’t even call back to apologize.
Two weeks before Christmas, I was explaining to a friend in town that if I seemed more distressed than usual, it was just because I was trying to accustom myself to the fact that my cat didn’t want to be my cat anymore. “No way,” she said. “Here’s what you do: You just call Dawn.” And then she gave me the cat psychic’s phone number.
On the surface, it’s ridiculous to say my cat stopped speaking to me, because, of course, he has never spoken to me—I’m not a shaman, and I don’t live in a Disney cartoon. But people who have pets will know what I mean; when you live with animals, you’re engaged in constant, low-level communication with them. (...)
When I looked her up online, Dawn proved to be much more than just a cat psychic. Her website included photographs of all kind of animals, from horses to small rodents. There were also links to her children’s books about a giant rabbit; according to her bio, she enjoyed fabric art, rollerblading, and spending time with animals.
On her website, Dawn was careful to denote where her abilities began and ended. She could communicate directly with animals via telepathy, helping her clients to “learn how [their animals] are feeling, what they need, and who they really are.” Initial phone consultations lasted forty minutes—“perfect for getting to know everything you have wondered about one animal friend”—and cost $65. I am not by nature a person who believes in psychics, although I’ve often wished I were. Compared to my friends who text with their shamans and go on desert vision quests, I’ve always felt boringly earth-bound, unreceptive to miracles. I had consulted a psychic once before, when I was twenty. She said I was an old soul, but it didn’t mean much to me; I had the feeling she told everyone that. But I was desperate, and therefore receptive. I reserved the next available slot.
I enlisted my friends to prowl the neighborhood with me, calling his name—as if he had ever been the kind of animal who came when called. I ventured as far as I dared into the thick brush beside the railroad tracks, trying to lure him with catnip. I bought insanely expensive wet food, organic and grain-free, the kind of cat food that comes garnished with herbs, and set it outside the front door. When that didn’t tempt him, I bought the cheap Dollar General stuff, ambiguous gray globs suspended in jelly. The message I was trying to send was: Whatever you want, buddy, as long as you come home. But he didn’t come home.My neighbor saw him more than I did—he liked to show up at sunrise to watch her feed her chickens. They had reached a kind of truce, but as soon as I showed up, he’d dash off to one of his hiding places. One morning at the beginning of November the buzzards were gone—supposedly the sign of that the year’s first freeze is coming. That night, the weather turned. The wind sounded like an enemy trying to get into the house, and there was frost on the grass in the morning. My neighbor reassured me that Musa had come by to watch the chickens get fed and didn’t seem any worse for wear. The inaccessibility of his secret life drove me crazy. Where was he sleeping? What was he eating? Did he know he was breaking my heart?
In December, my friend Brandon came over one day to drop off a book; when he asked me how I was, I started crying and I couldn’t stop. I felt foolish, and also so, so sad. “Are you sure this is about the cat?” he asked. I could see his point, but I was pretty sure it was. I called my mom for a pep talk. “Maybe you just have to accept that he wants a different kind of life,” she said. I hung up on her, and didn’t even call back to apologize.
Two weeks before Christmas, I was explaining to a friend in town that if I seemed more distressed than usual, it was just because I was trying to accustom myself to the fact that my cat didn’t want to be my cat anymore. “No way,” she said. “Here’s what you do: You just call Dawn.” And then she gave me the cat psychic’s phone number.
On the surface, it’s ridiculous to say my cat stopped speaking to me, because, of course, he has never spoken to me—I’m not a shaman, and I don’t live in a Disney cartoon. But people who have pets will know what I mean; when you live with animals, you’re engaged in constant, low-level communication with them. (...)
When I looked her up online, Dawn proved to be much more than just a cat psychic. Her website included photographs of all kind of animals, from horses to small rodents. There were also links to her children’s books about a giant rabbit; according to her bio, she enjoyed fabric art, rollerblading, and spending time with animals.
On her website, Dawn was careful to denote where her abilities began and ended. She could communicate directly with animals via telepathy, helping her clients to “learn how [their animals] are feeling, what they need, and who they really are.” Initial phone consultations lasted forty minutes—“perfect for getting to know everything you have wondered about one animal friend”—and cost $65. I am not by nature a person who believes in psychics, although I’ve often wished I were. Compared to my friends who text with their shamans and go on desert vision quests, I’ve always felt boringly earth-bound, unreceptive to miracles. I had consulted a psychic once before, when I was twenty. She said I was an old soul, but it didn’t mean much to me; I had the feeling she told everyone that. But I was desperate, and therefore receptive. I reserved the next available slot.
by Rachel Monroe, Hazlitt | Read more:
Image: Vaughn Pinpin
All the Terrible Things Hillary Clinton Has Done — In One Big List
I have a confession to make: I can’t keep up.
Am I supposed to hate Hillary Rodham Clinton because she’s too left-wing, or too right-wing? Because she’s too feminist, or not feminist enough? Because she’s too clever a politician, or too clumsy?
Am I supposed to be mad that she gave speeches to rich bankers, or that she charged them too much money?
I’m up here in New Hampshire watching her talk to a group of supporters, and I realized that I have been following this woman’s career for more than half my life. No, not just my adult life: the whole shebang. She came onto the national scene when I was a young man.
And for all that time, there has been a deafening chorus of critics telling me that she’s just the most wicked, evil, Machiavellian, nefarious individual in American history. She has “the soul of an East German border guard,” in the words of that nice Grover Norquist. She’s a “bitch,” in the words of that nice Newt Gingrich. She’s a “dragon lady.” She’s “Elena Ceaușescu.” She’s “the Lady Macbeth of Little Rock.”
Long before “Benghazi” and her email server, there was “Whitewater” and “the Rose Law Firm” and “Vince Foster.” For those of us following her, we were promised scandal after scandal after scandal. And if no actual evidence ever turned up, well, that just proved how deviously clever she was.
So today I’m performing a public service on behalf of all the voters. I went back and re-read all the criticisms and attacks and best-selling “exposés” leveled at Hillary Rodham Clinton over the past quarter-century. And I’ve compiled a list of all her High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Here they are:
Am I supposed to hate Hillary Rodham Clinton because she’s too left-wing, or too right-wing? Because she’s too feminist, or not feminist enough? Because she’s too clever a politician, or too clumsy?
Am I supposed to be mad that she gave speeches to rich bankers, or that she charged them too much money?
I’m up here in New Hampshire watching her talk to a group of supporters, and I realized that I have been following this woman’s career for more than half my life. No, not just my adult life: the whole shebang. She came onto the national scene when I was a young man.And for all that time, there has been a deafening chorus of critics telling me that she’s just the most wicked, evil, Machiavellian, nefarious individual in American history. She has “the soul of an East German border guard,” in the words of that nice Grover Norquist. She’s a “bitch,” in the words of that nice Newt Gingrich. She’s a “dragon lady.” She’s “Elena Ceaușescu.” She’s “the Lady Macbeth of Little Rock.”
Long before “Benghazi” and her email server, there was “Whitewater” and “the Rose Law Firm” and “Vince Foster.” For those of us following her, we were promised scandal after scandal after scandal. And if no actual evidence ever turned up, well, that just proved how deviously clever she was.
So today I’m performing a public service on behalf of all the voters. I went back and re-read all the criticisms and attacks and best-selling “exposés” leveled at Hillary Rodham Clinton over the past quarter-century. And I’ve compiled a list of all her High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Here they are:
by Brett Arends, Marketwatch | Read more:
Image: Getty Images/ Chip Somodevilla
The Complex Psychology of Why People Like Things
[ed. See also: The Harm in Blindly 'Going Gluten Free'.]
In the time of the Facebook thumbs up, what does it mean to “like” something? What is it that makes humans decide they prefer one thing over another, so that you click replay on one song all day and cover your ears whenever you hear another in public? And how do Netflix and Spotify and other recommendation engines seem to know your taste as well or better than you do sometimes?
What determines people’s preferences is a fuzzy, hard-to-pin-down process, but Tom Vanderbilt takes a stab at it in his new book, You May Also Like. He examines the broad collection of likes and dislikes that make up “taste,” and how they come to be. Sometimes, people just prefer the familiar. Sometimes they like what their friends like. Sometimes they pretend to like movies they never really watch or music they don’t actually listen to. A lot of the time, they can’t say why they like something, they just know that they do.
I spoke with Vanderbilt about how what we like is influenced by both culture and human nature, how being able to analyze things helps us like them more, and how the Internet changes the game. Below is a lightly edited and condensed transcript of our conversation.
Julie Beck: I'm going to start really broad. What’s the point of liking anything? Why do humans as a species have preferences for things in the first place?
Vanderbilt: Taste is just a way of filtering the world, of ordering information. I use Michael Pollan's phrase, [from] The Omnivore's Dilemma—when humans do have this capacity to eat everything, how do you decide? I felt like the sheer availability of cultural choices is similar. We all face this new kind of dilemma of how to figure out what we like when the entirety of recorded music, more or less, is available on your phone within seconds. What do I decide to even look for now that I have everything available to me?
Beck: Do you think food was the first thing that people developed and shaped preferences for?
Vanderbilt: I would think so, because we're talking about sheer survival here. And then the very minute you have more than one food available you suddenly have a choice. [Cornell behavioral scientist] Brian Wansink has this great statistic that nowadays in current society we face something like 200 food decisions a day.
I think in early society the public probably tapped into these social mechanisms that are hugely important in taste. Taste is just another form of social learning. You saw your neighbor consume something, you saw that he didn't die, so you decided that would be a pretty good thing to eat too. Then as society became more complex, you start to have prestige models of, well, not only did he like that food, he's the most important person in the village, so of course I should really check it out. More began to be attached to those choices than sheer functionality.
There’s no silver bullet theory for explaining anyone's taste. It's always a mixture of exposure, of culture, of a person's personality. And none of these are particularly static or fixed. The nice thing about tastes is that they are subject to change. We can kind of always be reinventing them and reinventing ourselves a little bit.
Beck: Sometimes the things that we say we like and the things that we actually like in our secret hearts don't match up. Is that a matter of lying to ourselves? I was thinking of Netflix specifically; you mentioned in the book that people never watch the foreign movies they say they're going to watch.
Vanderbilt: I think a lot of people are, in many ways, always striving for improvement. You want to eat the food that you think is best for you; you want to consume the culture that you think is best for you. That depends on who you are, of course.
Just to segue a little bit to the concept of the guilty pleasure—this is a very interesting and complicated dynamic. I do think it has been used culturally as kind of a cudgel to try to shape people's behavior and influence them and rein them in. You can find intimations going back to the emergence of the novel, for example, that the novel was a guilty pleasure enjoyed largely by women. I do think there has been this tendency to try to reign in guilty pleasure behavior when it comes to women. As a weird example here, if you go to a stock photo site like Shutterstock or something like that and type in the words “guilty pleasure,” what you will see is a page of women basically putting chocolate into their mouths.
So that's kind of the social aspect. And then for the personal aspect, maybe we're just reflecting that cultural anxiety and trying to be those people that we're supposed to be, those better people. The key to deceiving others is the ability to deceive yourself. That helps the lie. So I create these playlists and reading lists, and I orchestrate my bookshelves very carefully to have nothing but the finest tomes. How many of those I've actually read is another question.
Beck: I’m wondering how much of liking something is a feeling versus how much of it is thinking about the thing or intellectualizing the thing, or finding a language to describe the thing, like with wine connoisseurs.
Vanderbilt: Yeah, this is a question I grappled with. If you're a connoisseur of chocolate and you know the entire range of the world's chocolate available to you, does that lead to a greater pleasure or are you always sort of haunted by the notion that there might be something better out there? Whereas if a Hershey bar—and I'm being neutral about Hershey here—is the entirety of your chocolate knowledge, it's hard to see the chance for dissatisfaction there.
I'm not trying to argue that it's good to be a philistine or something. The more you can think about something, and the more tools you have to unpack it, you definitely open more ways into liking something. Obviously we should not just stop with our gut reaction and say “I don't like this.” If we did that, we would never get to a lot of the things we end up liking.
I think often we really are lacking the language, and the ways to frame it. If you look at films like Blade Runner or The Big Lebowski, when these films came out they were box office disasters. I think part of that was a categorization thing—not knowing how to think about it in the right way. Blade Runner didn't really match up with the existing tropes of science fiction, Big Lebowski was just kind of strange.
Beck: So it's easier to like things if we're able to fit them into some kind of label or category that we already understand and if it's too new, too different, than it's more baffling.
Vanderbilt: Absolutely. We like to sort things into categories to help us filter information more efficiently about the world. The example I like that's been used in talking about what's called categorical perception is: If you look at a rainbow, we read it as bands of color rather than this spectrum that smoothly evolves from one color to the next. Many things are the same way. In music we will discount things out of hand or be attracted to things because of the genre they fit in. But when you actually mathematically analyze that music, you might find something similar to that rainbow effect. You say, “This song by this artist, that's an R&B song.” Well if you actually put it on a map, it might be closer, musically, to rock than most of the other R&B songs, yet it gets classified within R&B. When we classify something I think all those things tend to [seem] more like one another than they really are.
In the time of the Facebook thumbs up, what does it mean to “like” something? What is it that makes humans decide they prefer one thing over another, so that you click replay on one song all day and cover your ears whenever you hear another in public? And how do Netflix and Spotify and other recommendation engines seem to know your taste as well or better than you do sometimes?
What determines people’s preferences is a fuzzy, hard-to-pin-down process, but Tom Vanderbilt takes a stab at it in his new book, You May Also Like. He examines the broad collection of likes and dislikes that make up “taste,” and how they come to be. Sometimes, people just prefer the familiar. Sometimes they like what their friends like. Sometimes they pretend to like movies they never really watch or music they don’t actually listen to. A lot of the time, they can’t say why they like something, they just know that they do.I spoke with Vanderbilt about how what we like is influenced by both culture and human nature, how being able to analyze things helps us like them more, and how the Internet changes the game. Below is a lightly edited and condensed transcript of our conversation.
Julie Beck: I'm going to start really broad. What’s the point of liking anything? Why do humans as a species have preferences for things in the first place?
Vanderbilt: Taste is just a way of filtering the world, of ordering information. I use Michael Pollan's phrase, [from] The Omnivore's Dilemma—when humans do have this capacity to eat everything, how do you decide? I felt like the sheer availability of cultural choices is similar. We all face this new kind of dilemma of how to figure out what we like when the entirety of recorded music, more or less, is available on your phone within seconds. What do I decide to even look for now that I have everything available to me?
Beck: Do you think food was the first thing that people developed and shaped preferences for?
Vanderbilt: I would think so, because we're talking about sheer survival here. And then the very minute you have more than one food available you suddenly have a choice. [Cornell behavioral scientist] Brian Wansink has this great statistic that nowadays in current society we face something like 200 food decisions a day.
I think in early society the public probably tapped into these social mechanisms that are hugely important in taste. Taste is just another form of social learning. You saw your neighbor consume something, you saw that he didn't die, so you decided that would be a pretty good thing to eat too. Then as society became more complex, you start to have prestige models of, well, not only did he like that food, he's the most important person in the village, so of course I should really check it out. More began to be attached to those choices than sheer functionality.
There’s no silver bullet theory for explaining anyone's taste. It's always a mixture of exposure, of culture, of a person's personality. And none of these are particularly static or fixed. The nice thing about tastes is that they are subject to change. We can kind of always be reinventing them and reinventing ourselves a little bit.
Beck: Sometimes the things that we say we like and the things that we actually like in our secret hearts don't match up. Is that a matter of lying to ourselves? I was thinking of Netflix specifically; you mentioned in the book that people never watch the foreign movies they say they're going to watch.
Vanderbilt: I think a lot of people are, in many ways, always striving for improvement. You want to eat the food that you think is best for you; you want to consume the culture that you think is best for you. That depends on who you are, of course.
Just to segue a little bit to the concept of the guilty pleasure—this is a very interesting and complicated dynamic. I do think it has been used culturally as kind of a cudgel to try to shape people's behavior and influence them and rein them in. You can find intimations going back to the emergence of the novel, for example, that the novel was a guilty pleasure enjoyed largely by women. I do think there has been this tendency to try to reign in guilty pleasure behavior when it comes to women. As a weird example here, if you go to a stock photo site like Shutterstock or something like that and type in the words “guilty pleasure,” what you will see is a page of women basically putting chocolate into their mouths.
So that's kind of the social aspect. And then for the personal aspect, maybe we're just reflecting that cultural anxiety and trying to be those people that we're supposed to be, those better people. The key to deceiving others is the ability to deceive yourself. That helps the lie. So I create these playlists and reading lists, and I orchestrate my bookshelves very carefully to have nothing but the finest tomes. How many of those I've actually read is another question.
Beck: I’m wondering how much of liking something is a feeling versus how much of it is thinking about the thing or intellectualizing the thing, or finding a language to describe the thing, like with wine connoisseurs.
Vanderbilt: Yeah, this is a question I grappled with. If you're a connoisseur of chocolate and you know the entire range of the world's chocolate available to you, does that lead to a greater pleasure or are you always sort of haunted by the notion that there might be something better out there? Whereas if a Hershey bar—and I'm being neutral about Hershey here—is the entirety of your chocolate knowledge, it's hard to see the chance for dissatisfaction there.
I'm not trying to argue that it's good to be a philistine or something. The more you can think about something, and the more tools you have to unpack it, you definitely open more ways into liking something. Obviously we should not just stop with our gut reaction and say “I don't like this.” If we did that, we would never get to a lot of the things we end up liking.
I think often we really are lacking the language, and the ways to frame it. If you look at films like Blade Runner or The Big Lebowski, when these films came out they were box office disasters. I think part of that was a categorization thing—not knowing how to think about it in the right way. Blade Runner didn't really match up with the existing tropes of science fiction, Big Lebowski was just kind of strange.
Beck: So it's easier to like things if we're able to fit them into some kind of label or category that we already understand and if it's too new, too different, than it's more baffling.
Vanderbilt: Absolutely. We like to sort things into categories to help us filter information more efficiently about the world. The example I like that's been used in talking about what's called categorical perception is: If you look at a rainbow, we read it as bands of color rather than this spectrum that smoothly evolves from one color to the next. Many things are the same way. In music we will discount things out of hand or be attracted to things because of the genre they fit in. But when you actually mathematically analyze that music, you might find something similar to that rainbow effect. You say, “This song by this artist, that's an R&B song.” Well if you actually put it on a map, it might be closer, musically, to rock than most of the other R&B songs, yet it gets classified within R&B. When we classify something I think all those things tend to [seem] more like one another than they really are.
by Julie Beck, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Lisa Maree Williams / Getty
Argentina On Two Steaks A Day
[ed. See also: Shuffleboard at McMurdo]
The classic beginner's mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon. That first steak has to get you through the afternoon and half the night, until the restaurants begin to open at ten; the first steak is what primes your system to digest large quantities of animal protein, and it's the first steak that buffers the sudden sugar rush of your afternoon ice cream cone. The midnight second steak might be more the glamorous one, standing as it does a good three inches off the plate, but all it has to do is get you up and out of the restaurant and into bed (for the love of God, don't forget to drink water).
The afternoon steak is the workhorse steak, the backbone of the day. It's the steak that gets you around the city, ensures a successful nap, steers you into the bar and (most importantly) gives you the mental clarity to choose the right cut of meat in the restaurant that night. Misorder the first steak and you will either find yourself losing steam by eight o'clock, when no restaurant is open, or scampering to find an awkward third bridge steak, to tide you over until dinner.
All you need to know about the quality of pasture in the pampas is that cows went feral in Argentina. You can still see them grazing pretty much anywhere there is a horizontal patch of grass, all now firmly back in the hand of man, but still with a happy grassy glint in their eye. This most docile, placid, and passive of large herbivores stepped off the boat, took one nibble at the pampas and made a run for it. It knew that it wanted to spend the rest of its life eating the pampas grass, without outside interference. And the settlers, once they caught some of the early escapees, began to feel the same way about the beef.
Eating steaks in Argentina feels like joining a cult. You find yourself leaning on friends to come visit, and writing YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND in all caps more often than feels comfortable. Argentine beef really is extraordinary. Almost all of this has to do with how the cows are raised. There are no factory feedlots in Argentina; the animals still eat pampas grass their whole lives, in open pasture, and not the chicken droppings and feathers mixed with corn that pass for animal feed in the United States. Since this is the way of life a cow was designed for, it is not necessary to pump the animal full of antibiotics. The meat is leaner, healthier and more flavorful than that of corn-fed cattle. It has fewer calories, contains less cholesterol, and tastes less mushy and waterlogged than American meat. And the cows spend their lives out grazing in the field, not locked into some small pen. You can taste the joy.
When the meat is cooked, it is roasted in thick pieces over open coals by obsessive meat chefs who have been cooking meat all their lives, for other people who have been eating meat all their lives, in a country that takes its meat extremely seriously. You are not likely to be disappointed.
Steaks here are ridiculous - not so much in diameter, since they rarely overhang the plate by more than an inch or two - but in thickness, having roughly the proportions of an American canned ham. But what the Argentines have really mastered is flavor. Strange cuts of meat that would be ground into flavorless paste up north come to your table here infused with a delicious texture and flavor, provided they are cooked right. And they are invariably cooked right. The waiters are solicitous about asking (in English) how you want your meat done, but if you let them make the call, you get a two-inch thick of meat that transitions seamlessly from carbon to bright pink and back.
As you would expect, there is a forbidding amount of terminology around beef-eating - bife de chorizo, asado de bife, churrascos, [...], lomo, vaco, bife de costilla, ojo de bife, various more exotic portions of the animal. However the basic principles are simple. Meat is prepared in two ways, either on a parrilla (charcoal grill) or an asador (a system of iron crucifixes circling an open fire). The crucifix shape is suggestive and amusing. An excellent essay on Argentine history by Martín Caparrós may give a clue to its origin:
As you might expect, vegetarians will have a somewhat rough time here. For most people in Argentina, a vegetarian is something you eat. One's diet will accordingly lean heavily on pastas, gnocchi, salads, and (for the less squeamish ) fish. Vegans will not survive in Argentina. However, even egg, milk and cheese-loving vegetarians should be careful not to get cocky. Two vegetarians have visited me here during my stay, and from both I had to listen to many glowing words about the quality of Argentine fries, unable due to my impeccable upbringing to ask what they thought it was that made the fries taste so wonderful, or why they looked so deliciously yellow. On even the most innocent box of crackers, in the slot where you would normally expect to find "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil", it reads simpy "beef tallow". The homemade cookies bought in the minimarket downstairs taste of steak.
It should be no surprise that the land of beef also has excellent milk and butter. The milk comes in plastic bags that would give any American marketing department a heart attack. They proudly advertise "GUARANTEED 100% BRUCELLOSIS AND HOOF-AND-MOUTH FREE". One brand even brags that its bacteria count *never* exceeds 100,000 per mL, and prints daily statistics to prove it (only 82,000 bacteria/mL on Monday! mmm!). Meanwhile, the butter here either has a different name than in the rest of Latin America ("manteca" usually means "lard" ), or else Argentine lard is the best I have ever tasted.
by Maciej Cegłowski, Idle Words | Read more:
The classic beginner's mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon. That first steak has to get you through the afternoon and half the night, until the restaurants begin to open at ten; the first steak is what primes your system to digest large quantities of animal protein, and it's the first steak that buffers the sudden sugar rush of your afternoon ice cream cone. The midnight second steak might be more the glamorous one, standing as it does a good three inches off the plate, but all it has to do is get you up and out of the restaurant and into bed (for the love of God, don't forget to drink water).
The afternoon steak is the workhorse steak, the backbone of the day. It's the steak that gets you around the city, ensures a successful nap, steers you into the bar and (most importantly) gives you the mental clarity to choose the right cut of meat in the restaurant that night. Misorder the first steak and you will either find yourself losing steam by eight o'clock, when no restaurant is open, or scampering to find an awkward third bridge steak, to tide you over until dinner.All you need to know about the quality of pasture in the pampas is that cows went feral in Argentina. You can still see them grazing pretty much anywhere there is a horizontal patch of grass, all now firmly back in the hand of man, but still with a happy grassy glint in their eye. This most docile, placid, and passive of large herbivores stepped off the boat, took one nibble at the pampas and made a run for it. It knew that it wanted to spend the rest of its life eating the pampas grass, without outside interference. And the settlers, once they caught some of the early escapees, began to feel the same way about the beef.
Eating steaks in Argentina feels like joining a cult. You find yourself leaning on friends to come visit, and writing YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND in all caps more often than feels comfortable. Argentine beef really is extraordinary. Almost all of this has to do with how the cows are raised. There are no factory feedlots in Argentina; the animals still eat pampas grass their whole lives, in open pasture, and not the chicken droppings and feathers mixed with corn that pass for animal feed in the United States. Since this is the way of life a cow was designed for, it is not necessary to pump the animal full of antibiotics. The meat is leaner, healthier and more flavorful than that of corn-fed cattle. It has fewer calories, contains less cholesterol, and tastes less mushy and waterlogged than American meat. And the cows spend their lives out grazing in the field, not locked into some small pen. You can taste the joy.
When the meat is cooked, it is roasted in thick pieces over open coals by obsessive meat chefs who have been cooking meat all their lives, for other people who have been eating meat all their lives, in a country that takes its meat extremely seriously. You are not likely to be disappointed.
Steaks here are ridiculous - not so much in diameter, since they rarely overhang the plate by more than an inch or two - but in thickness, having roughly the proportions of an American canned ham. But what the Argentines have really mastered is flavor. Strange cuts of meat that would be ground into flavorless paste up north come to your table here infused with a delicious texture and flavor, provided they are cooked right. And they are invariably cooked right. The waiters are solicitous about asking (in English) how you want your meat done, but if you let them make the call, you get a two-inch thick of meat that transitions seamlessly from carbon to bright pink and back.
As you would expect, there is a forbidding amount of terminology around beef-eating - bife de chorizo, asado de bife, churrascos, [...], lomo, vaco, bife de costilla, ojo de bife, various more exotic portions of the animal. However the basic principles are simple. Meat is prepared in two ways, either on a parrilla (charcoal grill) or an asador (a system of iron crucifixes circling an open fire). The crucifix shape is suggestive and amusing. An excellent essay on Argentine history by Martín Caparrós may give a clue to its origin:
Juan Díaz de Solís, a Sevillian and a gentleman, arrived in the Freshwater Sea in February of 1516, when none of this existed yet. He voyaged in three ships, as is fitting, and when some shameless natives made him a signal of welcome, he readily leaped onto the shore with his cross and his sword, only to land without further ceremony on the coals of a banquet: he was to be the main course.
His companions, who watched him slowly tranformed into a dish from the boat, then told the world of those who bury their dead that Argentine history had begun as an asado of their captain, skin and all.Surely Solís was wearing one of those crucifixes that shows Jesus actually hanging from the cross. It must have been a simple mistake on the part of the natives, who saw him as a friendly gift from the visitors on the boat, complete with a serving suggestion suspended around his neck. In any case, you will now see crucified lambs and calves in the front window of many a larger parrilla, roasting for hours in front of unfazed diners. (...)
As you might expect, vegetarians will have a somewhat rough time here. For most people in Argentina, a vegetarian is something you eat. One's diet will accordingly lean heavily on pastas, gnocchi, salads, and (for the less squeamish ) fish. Vegans will not survive in Argentina. However, even egg, milk and cheese-loving vegetarians should be careful not to get cocky. Two vegetarians have visited me here during my stay, and from both I had to listen to many glowing words about the quality of Argentine fries, unable due to my impeccable upbringing to ask what they thought it was that made the fries taste so wonderful, or why they looked so deliciously yellow. On even the most innocent box of crackers, in the slot where you would normally expect to find "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil", it reads simpy "beef tallow". The homemade cookies bought in the minimarket downstairs taste of steak.
It should be no surprise that the land of beef also has excellent milk and butter. The milk comes in plastic bags that would give any American marketing department a heart attack. They proudly advertise "GUARANTEED 100% BRUCELLOSIS AND HOOF-AND-MOUTH FREE". One brand even brags that its bacteria count *never* exceeds 100,000 per mL, and prints daily statistics to prove it (only 82,000 bacteria/mL on Monday! mmm!). Meanwhile, the butter here either has a different name than in the rest of Latin America ("manteca" usually means "lard" ), or else Argentine lard is the best I have ever tasted.
by Maciej Cegłowski, Idle Words | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Sunday, May 15, 2016
The Unbelievable Reality of the Impossible Hyperloop
The tube is out back, 11 feet in diameter, 60 feet long, the unfinished end spiraling into wide ribbons of steel—like a gigantic Pillsbury dough container with its seams gaping open. Behind the tube is a big blue tent known as the robot school, where autonomous welders wheel or crawl along, making the tubes airtight. The goal is to put tracks and electromagnets inside the tube and vacuum the air out. Ultimately, capsules will scream through the center of such a tube at 700 miles per hour on a cushion of air—a way to get from A to B faster and more efficiently than planes or trains. The first public tests of this concept, albeit on an open-air track, will take place in North Las Vegas this week (you can read about the results of that test here). They’re aiming to hit 400 miles per hour.
Entrepreneur Elon Musk introduced the world to the concept of a giant vacuum-tube transportation system, the Hyperloop, two and a half years ago. The basic idea is to build a partially evacuated tube, inside which capsules would float on a layer of air, pulling themselves along with a fan and getting extra propulsion from electromagnets in the tube’s walls. Musk talked of trips from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 35 minutes, with off ramps at each end loading and unloading pods with 28 seats every two minutes. Although the design was ambitious to the point of being outlandish, none of its components were fundamentally unproven, something often overlooked. But Musk was too busy revolutionizing the space industry (as CEO of his company SpaceX), the automotive industry (as CEO of his other company, Tesla Motors), and the energy industry (as chairman of his other other company, SolarCity), to devote any time to the Hyperloop. He released a 58-page outline of his implausible idea and left it to someone else to finish it off.
In a former ice factory by the paved-over Los Angeles River, a startup company called Hyperloop Technologies is trying, using $100 million from optimistic venture capitalists. Musk’s improbable and incomplete design and his unlikely plan to get it built are suddenly looking less unbelievable—maybe even conceivable. Maybe. “The thing about Hyperloop is that it does not exist until it actually exists,” Josh Giegel, vice president of design and analysis at Hyperloop Tech, tells me before we step into the backyard to look at the various elements of the Hyperloop that do exist. There's the tube, the robots, a length of track, and various pieces of the electromagnetic propulsion system. A couple of hundred miles away, 2,000 feet of track in the Nevada desert is being readied for a public test of the track and electromagnetic propulsion system. (...)
“We’re working in a time frame that shocks people, because we have to,” Lloyd continues. The Hyperloop does not exist until it exists, and politicians won’t believe in it either until it exists, he says. Lloyd went state to state looking for somewhere with a loose enough regulatory system that a test site could be built more or less immediately. Although many states boasted the necessary “regions of great flatness and straightness,” as Lloyd puts it, all clammed up at the thought of a big, heavy, fast test track. All except reliably business-friendly and regulation-free Nevada. “People we got here hate waiting to do things,” Giegel says. So North Las Vegas was it. Lloyd says he is closing in on a deal overseas for a larger test site that could turn into a full-scale production system. As well as much more track, it would have the capacity to try out hauling, loading, and unloading shipping containers, and integrating with existing transportation facilities, such as docks.
Indeed, although Musk emphasized transporting people, Hyperloop Tech’s vision is broader. Lloyd tells me to think of it as a network of tubes, exchange points, and off-ramps that can transport all kinds of things. It sounds a lot like the Internet, and not by accident. Lloyd joined Hyperloop Tech after retiring as president of networking equipment company Cisco, where he spent decades building Internet infrastructure through deals brokered with governments and businesses worldwide. He was convinced to join Hyperloop Tech by the company’s cofounder and chairman, investor Shervin Pishevar, most famous for making a large bet on Uber.
“Transportation is the new broadband,” says Pishevar. He sees Uber and Hyperloop as complementary. “You are taking atoms and bits and, for the first time in history, smashing them together,” he says. “I can take my phone out and move a car in Beijing if I wanted to. Hyperloop will do the same, but between cities.”
Entrepreneur Elon Musk introduced the world to the concept of a giant vacuum-tube transportation system, the Hyperloop, two and a half years ago. The basic idea is to build a partially evacuated tube, inside which capsules would float on a layer of air, pulling themselves along with a fan and getting extra propulsion from electromagnets in the tube’s walls. Musk talked of trips from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 35 minutes, with off ramps at each end loading and unloading pods with 28 seats every two minutes. Although the design was ambitious to the point of being outlandish, none of its components were fundamentally unproven, something often overlooked. But Musk was too busy revolutionizing the space industry (as CEO of his company SpaceX), the automotive industry (as CEO of his other company, Tesla Motors), and the energy industry (as chairman of his other other company, SolarCity), to devote any time to the Hyperloop. He released a 58-page outline of his implausible idea and left it to someone else to finish it off.In a former ice factory by the paved-over Los Angeles River, a startup company called Hyperloop Technologies is trying, using $100 million from optimistic venture capitalists. Musk’s improbable and incomplete design and his unlikely plan to get it built are suddenly looking less unbelievable—maybe even conceivable. Maybe. “The thing about Hyperloop is that it does not exist until it actually exists,” Josh Giegel, vice president of design and analysis at Hyperloop Tech, tells me before we step into the backyard to look at the various elements of the Hyperloop that do exist. There's the tube, the robots, a length of track, and various pieces of the electromagnetic propulsion system. A couple of hundred miles away, 2,000 feet of track in the Nevada desert is being readied for a public test of the track and electromagnetic propulsion system. (...)
“We’re working in a time frame that shocks people, because we have to,” Lloyd continues. The Hyperloop does not exist until it exists, and politicians won’t believe in it either until it exists, he says. Lloyd went state to state looking for somewhere with a loose enough regulatory system that a test site could be built more or less immediately. Although many states boasted the necessary “regions of great flatness and straightness,” as Lloyd puts it, all clammed up at the thought of a big, heavy, fast test track. All except reliably business-friendly and regulation-free Nevada. “People we got here hate waiting to do things,” Giegel says. So North Las Vegas was it. Lloyd says he is closing in on a deal overseas for a larger test site that could turn into a full-scale production system. As well as much more track, it would have the capacity to try out hauling, loading, and unloading shipping containers, and integrating with existing transportation facilities, such as docks.
Indeed, although Musk emphasized transporting people, Hyperloop Tech’s vision is broader. Lloyd tells me to think of it as a network of tubes, exchange points, and off-ramps that can transport all kinds of things. It sounds a lot like the Internet, and not by accident. Lloyd joined Hyperloop Tech after retiring as president of networking equipment company Cisco, where he spent decades building Internet infrastructure through deals brokered with governments and businesses worldwide. He was convinced to join Hyperloop Tech by the company’s cofounder and chairman, investor Shervin Pishevar, most famous for making a large bet on Uber.
“Transportation is the new broadband,” says Pishevar. He sees Uber and Hyperloop as complementary. “You are taking atoms and bits and, for the first time in history, smashing them together,” he says. “I can take my phone out and move a car in Beijing if I wanted to. Hyperloop will do the same, but between cities.”
by Ryan Bradley, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Image: Hyperloop Technologies
The Partnership Between Colleges and Helicopter Parents
A few days after dropping off her youngest child at college, Andrea got a phone call. The wounds in her daughter’s mouth from a recent wisdom-tooth surgery had gone septic. Andrea drove there immediately, located an oral surgeon in town, booked a room at the university hotel, and put her daughter to bed to recover. The next morning, Andrea went to her daughter’s classes, taking notes on her behalf. It was important to Andrea, a professor, and her husband, an MBA, that their daughter head into the first semester of college without missing a beat: A future dental career required four years of a stellar undergraduate academic record.
At the same time, another parent faced a different type of problem. Alexis had handpicked her daughter’s new university specifically for its Greek life, big-time sports, and array of not particularly challenging majors. She and her husband, a CFO of a major Fortune 500 company, were intent on giving their daughter the ideal social experience in college. But when she got there, she seemed not to hit her stride. Alexis blamed it on a working-class roommate who “didn’t ever want to go out [and] meet people”—and told her daughter, in no uncertain terms, to change roommates. Alexis also shipped bags of designer clothes to help her child fit in with affluent sorority members.
Both Andrea and Alexis are examples of “helicopter parents,” defined by their hovering and readiness with supplies, assistance, and guidance. Their interventions were costly—requiring time, financial reserves, social savvy, comfort with authority figures, and knowledge of higher education—though they had different purposes. While Andrea was a focused on her daughter’s human capital—the skills, credentials, and knowledge that often lead to career success and economic security—Alexis was invested in her daughter’s social and extracurricular activities, consumption, and sorority status. Her husband explicitly told their daughter to “marry rich” in the years after college.
I had the chance to observe these parents—and many others—from 2004 to 2009, when I followed 41 families as their children moved through a public flagship university. (As is typical practice in sociology research, the name of the university will remain anonymous—but it is representative of a typical experience for many public-university students across the U.S.) Parents of college students are rarely studied. However, many U.S. universities, particularly those lacking the deep pockets and extensive resources of elite privates, have come to rely on parents to fill numerous financial, advisory, and support functions.
My focus on parents of daughters was not incidental, as today the majority of college students are women; they enroll in and complete college at higher rates than men. The university these women attended has increasingly catered to out-of-state families who are willing to pay full tuition and board in exchange for a degree from a “name” school. And while the number of families I studied is small, I made up for it with depth of knowledge: All the students started college in same residence hall, where I observed them during their first year, after which I interviewed them every year for five years. As the women approached graduation, I also interviewed both their mothers and fathers.
Most—but not all—of the parents in my sample fell neatly into several categories. About two-fifths were “helicopter” parents like Andrea and Alexis, regarded in the media as among the most reviled figures of 21st-century parenting—pesky interlopers who test the patience of school officials, meddle with university affairs, and raise a generation of “coddled,” “entitled,” and “under-constructed” youth.
Yet intensive parenting is, in many ways, a logical response to the harsh risks facing young people during college and early adulthood. Increasing income inequality, high rates of young-adult unemployment, and a decline in stable and well-paying entry-level jobs loom threateningly in the foreground. Declines in state and federal support for higher education, coupled with rising administrative costs in a complex regulatory environment, have led to skyrocketing tuition. Additionally, the sheer diversity of academic and social options, particularly at large public universities, makes it easy for college students to make costly mistakes. Involved parents provide insurance against risk.
At the same time, another parent faced a different type of problem. Alexis had handpicked her daughter’s new university specifically for its Greek life, big-time sports, and array of not particularly challenging majors. She and her husband, a CFO of a major Fortune 500 company, were intent on giving their daughter the ideal social experience in college. But when she got there, she seemed not to hit her stride. Alexis blamed it on a working-class roommate who “didn’t ever want to go out [and] meet people”—and told her daughter, in no uncertain terms, to change roommates. Alexis also shipped bags of designer clothes to help her child fit in with affluent sorority members.Both Andrea and Alexis are examples of “helicopter parents,” defined by their hovering and readiness with supplies, assistance, and guidance. Their interventions were costly—requiring time, financial reserves, social savvy, comfort with authority figures, and knowledge of higher education—though they had different purposes. While Andrea was a focused on her daughter’s human capital—the skills, credentials, and knowledge that often lead to career success and economic security—Alexis was invested in her daughter’s social and extracurricular activities, consumption, and sorority status. Her husband explicitly told their daughter to “marry rich” in the years after college.
I had the chance to observe these parents—and many others—from 2004 to 2009, when I followed 41 families as their children moved through a public flagship university. (As is typical practice in sociology research, the name of the university will remain anonymous—but it is representative of a typical experience for many public-university students across the U.S.) Parents of college students are rarely studied. However, many U.S. universities, particularly those lacking the deep pockets and extensive resources of elite privates, have come to rely on parents to fill numerous financial, advisory, and support functions.
My focus on parents of daughters was not incidental, as today the majority of college students are women; they enroll in and complete college at higher rates than men. The university these women attended has increasingly catered to out-of-state families who are willing to pay full tuition and board in exchange for a degree from a “name” school. And while the number of families I studied is small, I made up for it with depth of knowledge: All the students started college in same residence hall, where I observed them during their first year, after which I interviewed them every year for five years. As the women approached graduation, I also interviewed both their mothers and fathers.
Most—but not all—of the parents in my sample fell neatly into several categories. About two-fifths were “helicopter” parents like Andrea and Alexis, regarded in the media as among the most reviled figures of 21st-century parenting—pesky interlopers who test the patience of school officials, meddle with university affairs, and raise a generation of “coddled,” “entitled,” and “under-constructed” youth.
Yet intensive parenting is, in many ways, a logical response to the harsh risks facing young people during college and early adulthood. Increasing income inequality, high rates of young-adult unemployment, and a decline in stable and well-paying entry-level jobs loom threateningly in the foreground. Declines in state and federal support for higher education, coupled with rising administrative costs in a complex regulatory environment, have led to skyrocketing tuition. Additionally, the sheer diversity of academic and social options, particularly at large public universities, makes it easy for college students to make costly mistakes. Involved parents provide insurance against risk.
by Laura Hamilton, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Chor Sokunthea / Reuters
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Obama’s Gorgeous Goodbye
In this twilight of his presidency, Barack Obama is unlikely to deliver much in the way of meaningful legislation.
But he’s giving us a pointed, powerful civics lesson.
Consider his speech to new graduates of Howard University last weekend. While it brimmed with the usual kudos for hard work, it also bristled with caveats about the mistakes that he sees some young people making.
He chided them for demonizing enemies and silencing opponents. He cautioned them against a sense of grievance too exaggerated and an outrage bereft of perspective. “If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, ‘young, gifted and black’ in America, you would choose right now,” he said. “To deny how far we’ve come would do a disservice to the cause of justice.”
He was by no means telling them to be satisfied, and he wasn’t talking only or even chiefly to them. He was talking to all of us — to America — and saying: enough. Enough with a kind of identity politics that can shove aside common purpose. Enough with a partisanship so caustic that it bleeds into hatred.
Enough with such deafening sound and blinding fury in our public debate. They make for entertainment, not enlightenment, and stand in the way of progress.
His remarks at Howard were an extension of those in his final State of the Union address in January and of those to the Illinois General Assembly in February, nine years to the day after he announced his history-making bid for the presidency. The Illinois speech, wise and gorgeous, received less attention than it deserved.
“We’ve got to build a better politics — one that’s less of a spectacle and more of a battle of ideas,” he said then. Otherwise, he warned, “Extreme voices fill the void.” This current presidential campaign has borne him out.
Obama detractors and skeptics probably hear in all of this a professorial haughtiness that has plagued him and alienated them before. And there’s legitimate disagreement about the degree to which he has been an agent as well as a casualty of the poisoned environment he rues. His administration’s actions haven’t always been as high-minded as his words.
But we should all listen to him nonetheless, for several reasons.
But he’s giving us a pointed, powerful civics lesson.
Consider his speech to new graduates of Howard University last weekend. While it brimmed with the usual kudos for hard work, it also bristled with caveats about the mistakes that he sees some young people making.
He chided them for demonizing enemies and silencing opponents. He cautioned them against a sense of grievance too exaggerated and an outrage bereft of perspective. “If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, ‘young, gifted and black’ in America, you would choose right now,” he said. “To deny how far we’ve come would do a disservice to the cause of justice.”He was by no means telling them to be satisfied, and he wasn’t talking only or even chiefly to them. He was talking to all of us — to America — and saying: enough. Enough with a kind of identity politics that can shove aside common purpose. Enough with a partisanship so caustic that it bleeds into hatred.
Enough with such deafening sound and blinding fury in our public debate. They make for entertainment, not enlightenment, and stand in the way of progress.
His remarks at Howard were an extension of those in his final State of the Union address in January and of those to the Illinois General Assembly in February, nine years to the day after he announced his history-making bid for the presidency. The Illinois speech, wise and gorgeous, received less attention than it deserved.
“We’ve got to build a better politics — one that’s less of a spectacle and more of a battle of ideas,” he said then. Otherwise, he warned, “Extreme voices fill the void.” This current presidential campaign has borne him out.
Obama detractors and skeptics probably hear in all of this a professorial haughtiness that has plagued him and alienated them before. And there’s legitimate disagreement about the degree to which he has been an agent as well as a casualty of the poisoned environment he rues. His administration’s actions haven’t always been as high-minded as his words.
But we should all listen to him nonetheless, for several reasons.
by Frank Bruni, NY Times | Read more:
Image: CBS News
My Secret Life as a High-Functioning Drug User
It’s Saturday night and I’m having dinner at a friend’s house. After dinner has been cleared, someone produces a small bag of cocaine and begins to cut it into lines at the table. I take a gram of cocaine and another of MDMA. I smoke some weed and drink three to four glasses of good red wine.
We dance. The 15 of us who have gathered – old friends, some of whom I’ve known since school – push aside the coffee table and twirl around the living room, holding hands, laughing and marvelling at how lucky we are to have these exact friends and to be exactly here, in this moment. “You lot are the best,” we say over and over.
I feel as though I’ve never been so happy, so lucky, so brilliant. I am the very best version of myself. I have a deep sense of compassion for every person in the room. I can reveal any part of myself, say anything, no matter how personal or banal.
At around 4am, high as kites and exhausted from dancing, we all sit down and play charades. “Film!” “Two words!” “Jumanji?” It’s not exactly Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.
At some point, I think around 9am, we call the dealer again. The prospect of the comedown, an achy, twitching sadness where you can’t stop thinking about a bad thing you said three-and-a‑half years ago, seems too awful to bear. Because he won’t come for anything less, we order another 2g of coke and another 2g of MDMA (total cost £180). At 2pm on Sunday, almost out of white powder and with the working week looming large on the horizon, we go home to nurse our heads. On Monday, we each crawl into work clutching triple-shot americanos and pretending to our colleagues that we’ve had quiet weekends.
Take that model, and repeat – sometimes as much as every weekend for a few months, sometimes as little as once a month – and you’ve got a pretty accurate picture of how I’ve spent my 20s. I’m now 28 and a writer on a national magazine. I grew up on the outskirts of a city in the north of England, but I’ve lived in London since 2011. I enjoy reading and going to the gym. I take drugs most weekends, but I wouldn’t call myself an addict, any more than someone who spends their weekend drinking gin and tonics and doing shots would call themselves an alcoholic.
But then, I do wonder. My own father died when I was 19 because of complications that arose from his chronic alcoholism. In the bad times, he would drink a bottle of vodka a day. He would steal and lie and get unspeakably angry. Other times, he would be lovely and affable and completely sober. I can’t help but wonder when the habit became an addiction for him. I’ve never allowed myself to linger too much on his memory, because in the end he wasn’t a nice man; but every so often, going past a mirror, I catch a glimpse and pause. I can see him in myself and think that maybe it’s time to stop, or slow down.
Perhaps I’m hiding behind excuses; in denial, on the steady downward spiral of someone not ready to admit they’ve got a problem. Of course I don’t think that’s the case – if it were, then almost every friend I have who is living in a major city in the UK has a serious problem.
Are we – me, my nearest and dearest – actually the happy, dancing-in-the-living-room, social users we see ourselves as? Or have we begun to push through that flimsy membrane?
One conversation from last week’s party has stuck with me. Bella, 29, is a financial consultant. We’ve known each other since meeting in halls at university. I was bemoaning the fact that we’d been too busy to go to an exhibition and now it was finished. “Well,” she laughed, “we’re not that busy. We just fill our time doing this.” She gestured to the line of coke I was fashioning with the edge of my gym membership card. “There’s no time for exhibitions when this is your hobby.”
I would truly hate to tot up all the midnight cash withdrawals I’ve made throughout my 20s, the time spent making shady deals late at night in the backs of cars with men you don’t really want to bump into after dark. In a heavy month, my drug spend can be around £400. That’s a quarter of my income. “But it’s great,” Bella continued. “Can you imagine me mountaineering or something? I’d rather be here, with you guys, having a good time.”
Bravado is easy when you’re high: you’re on top of the world, so of course it’s worth it. But what about after, on a Wednesday night, when work worries are made all the more worrisome by an unshakable anxiety, a feeling that lurks at the edges of your consciousness for a few days after a heavy session. “Did I actually say it was that great?” she laughs a few days later. “Yeah, I guess so. But it’s not something I’m overly proud of.”
Like me, Bella has gone through periods of less and more regular usage. I’ve never been able to ascribe a certain mental state to either – usually, I take more drugs when there are birthdays or other reasons to celebrate – but for Bella, who in the past has dealt with social anxiety through a combination of CBT and medication, it’s more obvious. “Whenever I’m most anxious, I tend to have heavier weekends, drugs-wise,” she says. “I don’t do it consciously, but looking back I can see the pattern. The fact is, taking some coke, or whatever else, makes me feel better, even if that’s short-lived. It’s fun. I feel my stresses fall away for a night. And it’s brought me much closer to all of my friends – closer than I thought I could be because of my anxiety. I’ve always found it hard to open up because I worry about what people will think of me. In the past, that might have made me seem standoffish, but spending time in these situations has been really liberating.”
But the relief can be short-term. “My comedowns are worse than most people’s, from what I can tell. I get a thought stuck in my head, usually something I’ve forgotten to do that’ll get me into trouble at work, and it’s really hard to get past it.”
After a few days, though, those feelings abate. “Friday rolls around and I’m ready to go again. It’s a running joke. Monday to Wednesday you tell yourself you won’t do it this weekend, Thursday you feel OK, Friday you’re back on form.”
Alcohol, she agrees, is the gateway drug, and two drinks – where you feel just tipsy enough to be reckless – the golden quantity. “After two drinks, I want to cut loose,” Bella explains. “In the way that others might crave a glass of wine to unwind, I want a line. Not every weekend, but usually when work has been stressful. It’s a guaranteed good time.”
Bella uses the same dealer every time. Like me, she met hers through friends. We each have a few numbers of reliable guys (it’s always men) whose product is of an OK quality. Bella’s dealer has branded loyalty cards, much like the ones you get at coffee shops. For every pick-up, she gets a stamp. She texts the amount, he drives to meet her wherever she is, and five stamps equal a free gram of cocaine; it’s an audacious but effective method of marketing. “When I’m out with a certain set of friends at the weekend, it feels almost inevitable that we’ll do it. Before I know it, one of us is popping outside to meet the dealer and the next few hours are brilliant.”
I wouldn’t call this an addiction – I’ve seen drug addiction. I grew up on an estate, and while I’d be loth to paint too predictable a picture of it (I had a nice childhood and have friends who still live there), drugs were everywhere. My mum still lives in the semi-detached I grew up in, and just last year her neighbour’s house was raided by police. The people living there were dealing heroin (“He always helped me bring in my shopping, though,” Mum said when I told her I was worried). And it was easy to spot the hollow-eyed, desperate-looking types who would hang around waiting for the dealer to let them in. I can’t relate to that kind of physical need. But then, my friends and I never thought we’d still be doing this within touching distance of 30. And instead of becoming firmer, our self-control has just become more slippery. The older we’ve got, the less we’re inclined to curb our appetites.
We dance. The 15 of us who have gathered – old friends, some of whom I’ve known since school – push aside the coffee table and twirl around the living room, holding hands, laughing and marvelling at how lucky we are to have these exact friends and to be exactly here, in this moment. “You lot are the best,” we say over and over.
I feel as though I’ve never been so happy, so lucky, so brilliant. I am the very best version of myself. I have a deep sense of compassion for every person in the room. I can reveal any part of myself, say anything, no matter how personal or banal.At around 4am, high as kites and exhausted from dancing, we all sit down and play charades. “Film!” “Two words!” “Jumanji?” It’s not exactly Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.
At some point, I think around 9am, we call the dealer again. The prospect of the comedown, an achy, twitching sadness where you can’t stop thinking about a bad thing you said three-and-a‑half years ago, seems too awful to bear. Because he won’t come for anything less, we order another 2g of coke and another 2g of MDMA (total cost £180). At 2pm on Sunday, almost out of white powder and with the working week looming large on the horizon, we go home to nurse our heads. On Monday, we each crawl into work clutching triple-shot americanos and pretending to our colleagues that we’ve had quiet weekends.
Take that model, and repeat – sometimes as much as every weekend for a few months, sometimes as little as once a month – and you’ve got a pretty accurate picture of how I’ve spent my 20s. I’m now 28 and a writer on a national magazine. I grew up on the outskirts of a city in the north of England, but I’ve lived in London since 2011. I enjoy reading and going to the gym. I take drugs most weekends, but I wouldn’t call myself an addict, any more than someone who spends their weekend drinking gin and tonics and doing shots would call themselves an alcoholic.
But then, I do wonder. My own father died when I was 19 because of complications that arose from his chronic alcoholism. In the bad times, he would drink a bottle of vodka a day. He would steal and lie and get unspeakably angry. Other times, he would be lovely and affable and completely sober. I can’t help but wonder when the habit became an addiction for him. I’ve never allowed myself to linger too much on his memory, because in the end he wasn’t a nice man; but every so often, going past a mirror, I catch a glimpse and pause. I can see him in myself and think that maybe it’s time to stop, or slow down.
Perhaps I’m hiding behind excuses; in denial, on the steady downward spiral of someone not ready to admit they’ve got a problem. Of course I don’t think that’s the case – if it were, then almost every friend I have who is living in a major city in the UK has a serious problem.
Are we – me, my nearest and dearest – actually the happy, dancing-in-the-living-room, social users we see ourselves as? Or have we begun to push through that flimsy membrane?
One conversation from last week’s party has stuck with me. Bella, 29, is a financial consultant. We’ve known each other since meeting in halls at university. I was bemoaning the fact that we’d been too busy to go to an exhibition and now it was finished. “Well,” she laughed, “we’re not that busy. We just fill our time doing this.” She gestured to the line of coke I was fashioning with the edge of my gym membership card. “There’s no time for exhibitions when this is your hobby.”
I would truly hate to tot up all the midnight cash withdrawals I’ve made throughout my 20s, the time spent making shady deals late at night in the backs of cars with men you don’t really want to bump into after dark. In a heavy month, my drug spend can be around £400. That’s a quarter of my income. “But it’s great,” Bella continued. “Can you imagine me mountaineering or something? I’d rather be here, with you guys, having a good time.”
Bravado is easy when you’re high: you’re on top of the world, so of course it’s worth it. But what about after, on a Wednesday night, when work worries are made all the more worrisome by an unshakable anxiety, a feeling that lurks at the edges of your consciousness for a few days after a heavy session. “Did I actually say it was that great?” she laughs a few days later. “Yeah, I guess so. But it’s not something I’m overly proud of.”
Like me, Bella has gone through periods of less and more regular usage. I’ve never been able to ascribe a certain mental state to either – usually, I take more drugs when there are birthdays or other reasons to celebrate – but for Bella, who in the past has dealt with social anxiety through a combination of CBT and medication, it’s more obvious. “Whenever I’m most anxious, I tend to have heavier weekends, drugs-wise,” she says. “I don’t do it consciously, but looking back I can see the pattern. The fact is, taking some coke, or whatever else, makes me feel better, even if that’s short-lived. It’s fun. I feel my stresses fall away for a night. And it’s brought me much closer to all of my friends – closer than I thought I could be because of my anxiety. I’ve always found it hard to open up because I worry about what people will think of me. In the past, that might have made me seem standoffish, but spending time in these situations has been really liberating.”
But the relief can be short-term. “My comedowns are worse than most people’s, from what I can tell. I get a thought stuck in my head, usually something I’ve forgotten to do that’ll get me into trouble at work, and it’s really hard to get past it.”
After a few days, though, those feelings abate. “Friday rolls around and I’m ready to go again. It’s a running joke. Monday to Wednesday you tell yourself you won’t do it this weekend, Thursday you feel OK, Friday you’re back on form.”
Alcohol, she agrees, is the gateway drug, and two drinks – where you feel just tipsy enough to be reckless – the golden quantity. “After two drinks, I want to cut loose,” Bella explains. “In the way that others might crave a glass of wine to unwind, I want a line. Not every weekend, but usually when work has been stressful. It’s a guaranteed good time.”
Bella uses the same dealer every time. Like me, she met hers through friends. We each have a few numbers of reliable guys (it’s always men) whose product is of an OK quality. Bella’s dealer has branded loyalty cards, much like the ones you get at coffee shops. For every pick-up, she gets a stamp. She texts the amount, he drives to meet her wherever she is, and five stamps equal a free gram of cocaine; it’s an audacious but effective method of marketing. “When I’m out with a certain set of friends at the weekend, it feels almost inevitable that we’ll do it. Before I know it, one of us is popping outside to meet the dealer and the next few hours are brilliant.”
I wouldn’t call this an addiction – I’ve seen drug addiction. I grew up on an estate, and while I’d be loth to paint too predictable a picture of it (I had a nice childhood and have friends who still live there), drugs were everywhere. My mum still lives in the semi-detached I grew up in, and just last year her neighbour’s house was raided by police. The people living there were dealing heroin (“He always helped me bring in my shopping, though,” Mum said when I told her I was worried). And it was easy to spot the hollow-eyed, desperate-looking types who would hang around waiting for the dealer to let them in. I can’t relate to that kind of physical need. But then, my friends and I never thought we’d still be doing this within touching distance of 30. And instead of becoming firmer, our self-control has just become more slippery. The older we’ve got, the less we’re inclined to curb our appetites.
by Anonymous, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Corey Bartle-Sanderson
Thursday, May 12, 2016
Baked Possum
Before entering the realm of food preparation, I’d like to make absolutely clear how much I love possums. They live the way I feel most of the time—a nomadic living fossil, a loner unable to tolerate company except during mating season. Fortunately for them that occurs every six months. Possum, opossum, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways!
You have opposable thumbs!
You are the only marsupial in the entire Western hemisphere!
You will eat darn near anything!
You have a prehensile tail!
You act in movies when the script calls for a rat!
You have over fifty teeth!
You are immune to rattlesnake venom and rabies!
Possums are the oldest surviving mammals in North America, having successfully defended themselves in the most absurd way possible. When scared, they bare their teeth in a hiss, self-induce a temporary comatose state, and emit a stench that smells like rotting meat. This response to attack has kept the species alive and unchanged for 75 million years.
The following recipe for Baked Possum is from More Than Moonshine, by Sidney Saylor Farr, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1983. The book is divided into nineteen sections with an extensive index. When her mother fell ill, Miss Sidney dropped out of school in seventh grade to take care of her nine younger siblings. She married at age fifteen and attained her high school degree through correspondence courses. She eventually wrote several books, worked as a librarian at Berea College, and edited Appalachian Heritage for fourteen years.
The primary ingredient for this recipe is of course American Opossum, which most folks know as roadkill. Possums are not available in stores or at organic farms. You can harvest a possum with a dog and a shotgun, but you run into the problem of breaking your tooth on a pellet lodged in the meat. Possums are inherently “free-range,” which means they are the ultimate scavengers, willing to eat all manner of garbage. Ideally you will trap a possum and keep it alive for a week, feeding it a steady diet of roughage to clean out its system. They’re not easy to trap. They like trees, and have the habit of changing dens every few days to foil predators. Experienced possum seekers carry a small mirror to hold beneath the animal’s nose to check for life. If the glass fogs, your possum is playing possum.
Before we begin preparing the possum for baking, I’d like to relate two highly personal stories about possums. One is quite sentimental and the second has a squeamish element, so I will lead with the sweet and kind.
by Chris Offutt, Oxford American | Read more:
Image: “Possum” (2009) by Allison Schulnik.
You have opposable thumbs!You are the only marsupial in the entire Western hemisphere!
You will eat darn near anything!
You have a prehensile tail!
You act in movies when the script calls for a rat!
You have over fifty teeth!
You are immune to rattlesnake venom and rabies!
Possums are the oldest surviving mammals in North America, having successfully defended themselves in the most absurd way possible. When scared, they bare their teeth in a hiss, self-induce a temporary comatose state, and emit a stench that smells like rotting meat. This response to attack has kept the species alive and unchanged for 75 million years.
The following recipe for Baked Possum is from More Than Moonshine, by Sidney Saylor Farr, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1983. The book is divided into nineteen sections with an extensive index. When her mother fell ill, Miss Sidney dropped out of school in seventh grade to take care of her nine younger siblings. She married at age fifteen and attained her high school degree through correspondence courses. She eventually wrote several books, worked as a librarian at Berea College, and edited Appalachian Heritage for fourteen years.
The primary ingredient for this recipe is of course American Opossum, which most folks know as roadkill. Possums are not available in stores or at organic farms. You can harvest a possum with a dog and a shotgun, but you run into the problem of breaking your tooth on a pellet lodged in the meat. Possums are inherently “free-range,” which means they are the ultimate scavengers, willing to eat all manner of garbage. Ideally you will trap a possum and keep it alive for a week, feeding it a steady diet of roughage to clean out its system. They’re not easy to trap. They like trees, and have the habit of changing dens every few days to foil predators. Experienced possum seekers carry a small mirror to hold beneath the animal’s nose to check for life. If the glass fogs, your possum is playing possum.
Before we begin preparing the possum for baking, I’d like to relate two highly personal stories about possums. One is quite sentimental and the second has a squeamish element, so I will lead with the sweet and kind.
by Chris Offutt, Oxford American | Read more:
Image: “Possum” (2009) by Allison Schulnik.
The World’s Smallest Ukelele
It’s playing for the mere millionaires being humiliated by billionaires in paradise.
Once upon a time, thousands of years ago, a surging mass of magma beneath the Pacific Ocean burst through the earth’s crust and began burping out a stream of lava, first underwater, then above, to form land. As the tectonic plate shifted, the eruption created a string of four islands—all of which are pretty nice, but the largest, known today as Hawaii’s Big Island, is as close to paradise as any human might deserve. On the beaches, the temperature hardly ever roams above the mid-80s F or below 70. It’s the tropics, yet it’s seldom muggy. And rain, when it comes, is like an afterthought—the gentlest of reminders of how achingly wonderful the island is the rest of the time.
But even in paradise, some spots are better than others. The island’s northwest shore is a gold coast made remote and exclusive by a border of long, flat fields of volcanic rock. Laurance Rockefeller opened the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel there in 1965. Then came the Hapuna, the Mauna Lani, the Orchid, and the Waikoloa. In his final years, Steve Jobs often hid out in Kona Village, a rustic, low-fi, Bali Ha’i-style hideaway best reached by private plane. Nearby is Kukio, a quiet homeowners’ community where KKR’s Paul Hazen, Sutter Hill Ventures’ David Anderson, and Silver Lake Partners’ David Roux became neighbors. And last to be built, nestled between Kukio and Kona Village, came the place that in many ways would outclass them all.
Hualalai, developed in 1996 by Japan’s Kajima Corp., is a pristine, manicured 865 acres on which are tucked a $1,000-a-night (for starters) Four Seasons hotel and a residential community of more than 300 homes and condominiums. The homeowners are served by their own private Hualalai Resort Club, and can also make use of the hotel’s phenomenal amenities. All in all, Hualalai has the scale to sustain two championship-caliber golf courses, seven bustling restaurants, five main swimming pools, and a snorkeling-friendly lagoon frequented by a spotted eagle ray and 4,000 other fish. The spa has an apothecary with compoundable herbal remedies and supplements made on-site. Along the links, golfers stop at “comfort stations” stocked with complimentary candy bars and bourbon. Poolside attendants offer chilled towels, sunglass cleaning, and Evian spritz service.
Michael Dell (net worth: $17.6 billion) liked Hualalai so much that in 2006 he bought the whole thing—hotel, resort, everything except the private homes. When his partner, Rockpoint Group, bowed out in 2014, Rob Walton ($33.7 billion) of the Walmart Stores family bought a minority stake. The most prominent homeowners include Citadel founder Ken Griffin ($5.6 billion), Starbucks Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz ($3 billion), brokerage pioneer Charles Schwab ($5.9 billion), KKR’s George Roberts ($4.6 billion), Oaktree Capital Management co-founder Bruce Karsh, GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons, Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle, and Warren Buffett’s sister Bertie. (Each of their places was purchased for or is currently appraised at $17 million to $23 million.) But no one who frequents Hualalai upstages the location. The shore has a shallow shelf stretching out almost a half-mile, making a friendly swim with a team of dolphins an almost daily possibility. And while some resorts to the north are caught in a wind tunnel between two volcanoes, Hualalai is in a calmer pocket. It’s like the clouds part for the place.
It was here, in the middle of all that, that one sunny day about five years ago a senior executive at a company you would definitely recognize wandered with his wife over to the Palm Grove Tranquility Pool—the one with a bar in the middle you can paddle up to—and saw that all the chaises longues were occupied on the pool deck. Then he walked a few feet to the beach and saw that the chairs there were taken, too. This man had been coming to Hualalai for years, first renting homes, then buying a four-bedroom house. He had done everything possible to be in a situation where the answer to every question would be yes. He had plunked down a $200,000 initiation fee and $40,000 a year in dues to join the Hualalai Resort Club. His three children had practically grown up at Hualalai, made friends there, and came back whenever they could. They loved the familial aloha spirit everyone talked about. Now, he was being told no.
As his wife started to cast about for a patch of grass on which to set up camp, the executive’s mind flooded. This was Hualalai, not South Beach. This wasn’t supposed to happen in paradise. (...)
Les Firestein is a Hollywood screenwriter who had brought his family to Hualalai as hotel guests for years. “It’s extravagant, but they deliver,” he says. “You know you’re going to have a perfect time.” Last summer a friend who owned a home there offered him free use of his place for a week. Firestein said yes. Then he quickly learned that if he wanted to do anything at the resort beyond hanging out at his friend’s house, he had to pay daily “unaccompanied guest” fees—$150 for adults and $75 each for his two children. The fee gave Firestein pause, but only briefly. “Right off the top, we’re paying $450 a day,” he says. “But then again, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s the Four Seasons. We’ll suck it up.’ ”
Firestein then learned that even after paying the fee, his family wasn’t entitled to the same access as hotel guests. “It was like there were two systems of privilege operating at the same time,” he says. He wasn’t permitted to reserve a table at any of the restaurants between 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. He had to show a guest ID card everywhere—“like, ‘Show me your papers,’ ” he says, still annoyed. (...)
He didn’t know it at the time, but he was encountering a new policy enacted by Hualalai Resorts, Dell’s management company on the ground. It has three prongs: First is the complex schedule of steep resort access fees based on the time of year and the relationship of the guest to the homeowner (sons and daughters are OK; nieces and nephews, friends, and renters have to pay). Next there’s a status hierarchy for making dinner reservations at any of the restaurants. Finally there’s the rule governing the use of the chaises longues by the pools, which the Firesteins encountered at its most cognitively dissonant moment, on a deserted pool deck in the rain.
The word “no” was getting an awful lot of use. And it was said to people who weren’t accustomed to hearing it.
by Robert Kolker, Bloomberg | Read more:
But even in paradise, some spots are better than others. The island’s northwest shore is a gold coast made remote and exclusive by a border of long, flat fields of volcanic rock. Laurance Rockefeller opened the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel there in 1965. Then came the Hapuna, the Mauna Lani, the Orchid, and the Waikoloa. In his final years, Steve Jobs often hid out in Kona Village, a rustic, low-fi, Bali Ha’i-style hideaway best reached by private plane. Nearby is Kukio, a quiet homeowners’ community where KKR’s Paul Hazen, Sutter Hill Ventures’ David Anderson, and Silver Lake Partners’ David Roux became neighbors. And last to be built, nestled between Kukio and Kona Village, came the place that in many ways would outclass them all.Hualalai, developed in 1996 by Japan’s Kajima Corp., is a pristine, manicured 865 acres on which are tucked a $1,000-a-night (for starters) Four Seasons hotel and a residential community of more than 300 homes and condominiums. The homeowners are served by their own private Hualalai Resort Club, and can also make use of the hotel’s phenomenal amenities. All in all, Hualalai has the scale to sustain two championship-caliber golf courses, seven bustling restaurants, five main swimming pools, and a snorkeling-friendly lagoon frequented by a spotted eagle ray and 4,000 other fish. The spa has an apothecary with compoundable herbal remedies and supplements made on-site. Along the links, golfers stop at “comfort stations” stocked with complimentary candy bars and bourbon. Poolside attendants offer chilled towels, sunglass cleaning, and Evian spritz service.
Michael Dell (net worth: $17.6 billion) liked Hualalai so much that in 2006 he bought the whole thing—hotel, resort, everything except the private homes. When his partner, Rockpoint Group, bowed out in 2014, Rob Walton ($33.7 billion) of the Walmart Stores family bought a minority stake. The most prominent homeowners include Citadel founder Ken Griffin ($5.6 billion), Starbucks Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz ($3 billion), brokerage pioneer Charles Schwab ($5.9 billion), KKR’s George Roberts ($4.6 billion), Oaktree Capital Management co-founder Bruce Karsh, GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons, Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle, and Warren Buffett’s sister Bertie. (Each of their places was purchased for or is currently appraised at $17 million to $23 million.) But no one who frequents Hualalai upstages the location. The shore has a shallow shelf stretching out almost a half-mile, making a friendly swim with a team of dolphins an almost daily possibility. And while some resorts to the north are caught in a wind tunnel between two volcanoes, Hualalai is in a calmer pocket. It’s like the clouds part for the place.
It was here, in the middle of all that, that one sunny day about five years ago a senior executive at a company you would definitely recognize wandered with his wife over to the Palm Grove Tranquility Pool—the one with a bar in the middle you can paddle up to—and saw that all the chaises longues were occupied on the pool deck. Then he walked a few feet to the beach and saw that the chairs there were taken, too. This man had been coming to Hualalai for years, first renting homes, then buying a four-bedroom house. He had done everything possible to be in a situation where the answer to every question would be yes. He had plunked down a $200,000 initiation fee and $40,000 a year in dues to join the Hualalai Resort Club. His three children had practically grown up at Hualalai, made friends there, and came back whenever they could. They loved the familial aloha spirit everyone talked about. Now, he was being told no.As his wife started to cast about for a patch of grass on which to set up camp, the executive’s mind flooded. This was Hualalai, not South Beach. This wasn’t supposed to happen in paradise. (...)
Les Firestein is a Hollywood screenwriter who had brought his family to Hualalai as hotel guests for years. “It’s extravagant, but they deliver,” he says. “You know you’re going to have a perfect time.” Last summer a friend who owned a home there offered him free use of his place for a week. Firestein said yes. Then he quickly learned that if he wanted to do anything at the resort beyond hanging out at his friend’s house, he had to pay daily “unaccompanied guest” fees—$150 for adults and $75 each for his two children. The fee gave Firestein pause, but only briefly. “Right off the top, we’re paying $450 a day,” he says. “But then again, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s the Four Seasons. We’ll suck it up.’ ”
Firestein then learned that even after paying the fee, his family wasn’t entitled to the same access as hotel guests. “It was like there were two systems of privilege operating at the same time,” he says. He wasn’t permitted to reserve a table at any of the restaurants between 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. He had to show a guest ID card everywhere—“like, ‘Show me your papers,’ ” he says, still annoyed. (...)
He didn’t know it at the time, but he was encountering a new policy enacted by Hualalai Resorts, Dell’s management company on the ground. It has three prongs: First is the complex schedule of steep resort access fees based on the time of year and the relationship of the guest to the homeowner (sons and daughters are OK; nieces and nephews, friends, and renters have to pay). Next there’s a status hierarchy for making dinner reservations at any of the restaurants. Finally there’s the rule governing the use of the chaises longues by the pools, which the Firesteins encountered at its most cognitively dissonant moment, on a deserted pool deck in the rain.
The word “no” was getting an awful lot of use. And it was said to people who weren’t accustomed to hearing it.
by Robert Kolker, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Don Riddle/Courtesy The Four Seasons
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
The Meaningful Disappearance of Germaine Greer
One great thing about the feminist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was its ability to make a scene. Take the unforgettable “Dialogue on Women’s Liberation,” a panel that took place in New York City in 1971 in which four female delegates were tapped to speak in a discussion moderated by Norman Mailer, who had just published the decidedly un-feminist The Prisoner of Sex. Billed as a dialogue, the result—documented in filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker’s Town Bloody Hall—more closely resembled a riot. The teeming crowd became unruly even before the event had started, with one heckler yelling out above the din, “Women’s lib betrays the poor! Norman Mailer betrays the poor!” The audience, which included Betty Friedan and a soft-spoken Susan Sontag, came to hear about the burgeoning revolution. They came to see Mailer publicly attack, and be attacked by, the women’s libbers about the politics of sex. But most of all, they came to see Germaine Greer.
She was something to be seen: clad in a black fur jacket and a glamorous floor-length sleeveless dress, the thirty-two-year-old Greer was six feet tall, angular verging on bony, and in possession of a thick crown of frizzed-out black hair. Her style on stage was less performance than poised seduction. Despite her languid manner, which noticeably awed the other panelists, Greer’s responses to both Mailer and the audience were so razor sharp it’s hard to believe they were delivered extempore. At one point, Greer chastens a man who inquires what he might expect of sex in the feminist age, what women are “asking for,” by responding without hesitation (and more than a little unkindly), “You might as well relax. Whatever it is they’re asking for, honey, it’s not for you.” Unabashed and wildly charismatic, Greer was the most important feminist in the world. Today, few remember her name.
(...)
The Female Eunuch, Greer’s first book and the central node of her career, came out in 1970. It was a sensation, selling out its print run in a matter of months and establishing Greer as a leading mind in women’s liberation and an international intellectual celebrity. More than other books that came out around its time, including Kate Millet’s 1969 text Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, also published in 1970, Eunuch was written to be read by women who were not intellectuals, and existed outside of the movement. According to Greer, feminism was, and had to be, for everyone. This was a book written to women and not just for women. Divided into cogent sections called “Gender,” “Curves,” “Hair,” “Sex,” and “The Wicked Womb,” it described the ways in which sexism was institutionalized in every woman’s life, from hair products to housewifery. Even when Greer’s ideas themselves were risky or rarefied, her colloquial, often-vulgar style of writing helped her to connect with common women. The book’s most often quoted line gives a good sense: “If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood—if it makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go.”
The strategy worked. Eunuch had tremendous reach, selling out its first two runs and eventually being translated into eleven languages. The book was discussed on late-night talk shows and in middle-class living rooms. It has never gone out of print. Gloria Steinem and Letty Pogrebin founded Ms. magazine the year after its release; following Greer’s lead, feminist activists were finding a way to popularize and disseminate their message into the mainstream.
While it touched on issues from consumerism to menstruation, Eunuch had a single argument at its core: gendered oppression is all-pervasive. It argued that women were systematically subjugated to the power and will of men and too fearful, polite, or unaware to retaliate and claim authority over their own lives. “What many women mistake for happiness is in fact resignation,” Greer told an Australian reporter the year Eunuch was published. More importantly, she made the case that this deeply inculcated sexism was the product not of fear but hostility. It was a loaded idea that would inform feminist, and eventually queer, theoretical discourse to come. In a now famous, blunt line from the book, she wrote, “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” This societal structure, according to Greer‘s text, repressed women sexually and severed them from their libidos—hence the title of the book, a premise initially derived from a chapter of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice entitled “Allegory of the Black Eunuch.” Divorced from their sexuality, women were not self- empowered, but rather submissive, demeaned, and, in some cases, enslaved. Lacking agency of their own, they had come not only to be hated by men but by themselves. “Out of her own and her man’s imagination,” Greer wrote, “she will continue to apologize and disguise her ... crippled and fearful self.” This idea, that power was tethered not only to making money and asserting physical dominance but ownership over one’s sexual desires, was novel. Just seven years prior in her book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan had written of the malaise of the American housewife as “the problem that has no name.” The Female Eunuch, as a title and an idea, claimed just the opposite. Greer’s words cut like a precise blade; reading them one recalls just why the sexual revolution was called a war.
It was a daring thesis for a daring time, and Greer met praise and backlash in equal measure. Both responses prompted her to become the public face of women’s liberation, a position she took on with gusto. Greer travelled around the world being photographed, giving lectures, granting interviews, and engaging in debates. Unlike other feminist radicals such as Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller, Sheila Jeffreys, or Mary Daly, she was fast becoming a household name, intent on delivering her message through literary and pop channels alike. Greer’s contemporary Gloria Steinem was perhaps the only other figure in the movement to become a public personality, appearing on the covers of Newsweek in 1971, McCall’s in 1972, and People in 1974. Greer undoubtedly courted media attention; to what extent she did so because she felt it necessary to act as the ambassador of her cause, as opposed to simply desiring personal fame in its own right, remains unclear.
Several months after her book was published, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation created a short documentary about Greer on her return trip to Melbourne, which was nationally televised. In a particularly powerful scene, a group of local teenage schoolgirls describe how the book helped refashion their sense of self-worth. One pig-tailed girl states, “They are conditioning us to take the place of an average housewife.” It is Greer’s text, she reports, that has opened her eyes to society’s attempts to “brainwash” her into submission. Greer herself is interviewed for the film while leaning against a brick wall and smoking a cigarette. Coolly self-assured, she appears custom-built to lead a modern women’s revolution.
by Carmen Winant, Cabinet | Read more:
Image: Carmen Winant
She was something to be seen: clad in a black fur jacket and a glamorous floor-length sleeveless dress, the thirty-two-year-old Greer was six feet tall, angular verging on bony, and in possession of a thick crown of frizzed-out black hair. Her style on stage was less performance than poised seduction. Despite her languid manner, which noticeably awed the other panelists, Greer’s responses to both Mailer and the audience were so razor sharp it’s hard to believe they were delivered extempore. At one point, Greer chastens a man who inquires what he might expect of sex in the feminist age, what women are “asking for,” by responding without hesitation (and more than a little unkindly), “You might as well relax. Whatever it is they’re asking for, honey, it’s not for you.” Unabashed and wildly charismatic, Greer was the most important feminist in the world. Today, few remember her name.
(...)The Female Eunuch, Greer’s first book and the central node of her career, came out in 1970. It was a sensation, selling out its print run in a matter of months and establishing Greer as a leading mind in women’s liberation and an international intellectual celebrity. More than other books that came out around its time, including Kate Millet’s 1969 text Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, also published in 1970, Eunuch was written to be read by women who were not intellectuals, and existed outside of the movement. According to Greer, feminism was, and had to be, for everyone. This was a book written to women and not just for women. Divided into cogent sections called “Gender,” “Curves,” “Hair,” “Sex,” and “The Wicked Womb,” it described the ways in which sexism was institutionalized in every woman’s life, from hair products to housewifery. Even when Greer’s ideas themselves were risky or rarefied, her colloquial, often-vulgar style of writing helped her to connect with common women. The book’s most often quoted line gives a good sense: “If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood—if it makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go.”
The strategy worked. Eunuch had tremendous reach, selling out its first two runs and eventually being translated into eleven languages. The book was discussed on late-night talk shows and in middle-class living rooms. It has never gone out of print. Gloria Steinem and Letty Pogrebin founded Ms. magazine the year after its release; following Greer’s lead, feminist activists were finding a way to popularize and disseminate their message into the mainstream.
While it touched on issues from consumerism to menstruation, Eunuch had a single argument at its core: gendered oppression is all-pervasive. It argued that women were systematically subjugated to the power and will of men and too fearful, polite, or unaware to retaliate and claim authority over their own lives. “What many women mistake for happiness is in fact resignation,” Greer told an Australian reporter the year Eunuch was published. More importantly, she made the case that this deeply inculcated sexism was the product not of fear but hostility. It was a loaded idea that would inform feminist, and eventually queer, theoretical discourse to come. In a now famous, blunt line from the book, she wrote, “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” This societal structure, according to Greer‘s text, repressed women sexually and severed them from their libidos—hence the title of the book, a premise initially derived from a chapter of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice entitled “Allegory of the Black Eunuch.” Divorced from their sexuality, women were not self- empowered, but rather submissive, demeaned, and, in some cases, enslaved. Lacking agency of their own, they had come not only to be hated by men but by themselves. “Out of her own and her man’s imagination,” Greer wrote, “she will continue to apologize and disguise her ... crippled and fearful self.” This idea, that power was tethered not only to making money and asserting physical dominance but ownership over one’s sexual desires, was novel. Just seven years prior in her book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan had written of the malaise of the American housewife as “the problem that has no name.” The Female Eunuch, as a title and an idea, claimed just the opposite. Greer’s words cut like a precise blade; reading them one recalls just why the sexual revolution was called a war.
It was a daring thesis for a daring time, and Greer met praise and backlash in equal measure. Both responses prompted her to become the public face of women’s liberation, a position she took on with gusto. Greer travelled around the world being photographed, giving lectures, granting interviews, and engaging in debates. Unlike other feminist radicals such as Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller, Sheila Jeffreys, or Mary Daly, she was fast becoming a household name, intent on delivering her message through literary and pop channels alike. Greer’s contemporary Gloria Steinem was perhaps the only other figure in the movement to become a public personality, appearing on the covers of Newsweek in 1971, McCall’s in 1972, and People in 1974. Greer undoubtedly courted media attention; to what extent she did so because she felt it necessary to act as the ambassador of her cause, as opposed to simply desiring personal fame in its own right, remains unclear.
Several months after her book was published, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation created a short documentary about Greer on her return trip to Melbourne, which was nationally televised. In a particularly powerful scene, a group of local teenage schoolgirls describe how the book helped refashion their sense of self-worth. One pig-tailed girl states, “They are conditioning us to take the place of an average housewife.” It is Greer’s text, she reports, that has opened her eyes to society’s attempts to “brainwash” her into submission. Greer herself is interviewed for the film while leaning against a brick wall and smoking a cigarette. Coolly self-assured, she appears custom-built to lead a modern women’s revolution.
by Carmen Winant, Cabinet | Read more:
Image: Carmen Winant
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