How Blac Chyna Beat The Kardashians At Their Own Game

[ed. A handy guide/summary for those of us who've studiously avoided knowing anything about the Kardashians (except what can't be avoided on the tabloid covers at supermarket checkout lines). Now I can go happily into the future knowing ignorance truly is bliss. But, wait! What about Ciara, Future, and Russell Wilson?! Oh no...!]

Warriors’ Home Games Are a Show Befitting the Team

The third quarter ended, and the Warriors and the Thunder huddled to plot strategy for the fourth. Between them, seated at midcourt behind the scorer’s table, a man named Brett Yamaguchi had a game plan of his own.

“O.K.,” he said into the microphone attached to his headset. “Let’s drop.”

Hidden in the rafters of Oracle Arena, 12 workers on the catwalks began releasing 100 small parachutes, each holding a McDonald’s gift card. In a dark booth at suite level, someone clicked a computer to change the graphics on the video scoreboards to reflect the sponsor. Nearby, a man at a control board set the 66 moving spotlights in the ceiling in motion. Someone else triggered the nearly 20,000 light-up bracelets that had been given to fans to blink red and yellow. The in-house D.J. played the Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me.”

Most of the fans stood, looking and reaching skyward for the gifts as they slowly descended. A small digital clock on each basket, below the shot clock, counted down the seconds to the end of the timeout. The last parachute was caught, the fans still standing, just before the ball was inbounded to start the fourth quarter.

“There was still a lot of hope at that point,” Yamaguchi said later, minutes after Oklahoma City had upset Golden State, 108-102. Around him, fans shuffled quietly out of the arena and the dozen workers in the catwalks made their way down. They had stayed up there for the fourth quarter, intending to drop 50 pounds of confetti to celebrate a victory.

That is the way it usually ends. A Warriors game at Oracle Arena has been called the best show in sports, with Stephen Curry and his teammates leading a high-energy, high-scoring team working toward another N.B.A. championship.

But most of the show is not basketball. Game 1 lasted 2 hours 33 minutes. Basketball was played for 48 of those minutes. The other 105 minutes — 1:45 — was something else.

What Yamaguchi oversees each night, orchestrating every nonbasketball bit of entertainment from the moment the doors open hours before the game to the rooftop fireworks that send fans home after a victory, might be more complicated than anything Warriors Coach Steve Kerr draws up.

“The stars are on the court, and we know that,” said Yamaguchi, whose title is director of game experience. “It’s Steph Curry 1,000 percent. And we feed off that energy as much as we can. But there is a lot of time between that we try to keep the fans engaged.”

He has a full-time staff of three: the assistants Alicia Smith and Marco Nicola, and the dance team director Sabrina Ellison. But on game nights, Yamaguchi employs more than 100 others, from anthem singers to halftime acts, dancers to D.J.s, pyrotechnicians to scoreboard controllers, roving M.C.s to camera operators, T-shirt throwers to confetti droppers. They are the people who take over the show when the basketball players step away.

by John Branch, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jim Wilson

Google's Absurdly Hi-Res Camera Will Preserve Great Works of Art

via: 

via:

Disappearing Act

[ed. The dog keeps eating the reports.]

The CIA inspector general’s office — the spy agency’s internal watchdog — has acknowledged it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a mammoth Senate torture report at the same time lawyers for the Justice Department were assuring a federal judge that copies of the document were being preserved, Yahoo News has learned.

While another copy of the report exists elsewhere at the CIA, the erasure of the controversial document by the office charged with policing agency conduct has alarmed the U.S. senator who oversaw the torture investigation and reignited a behind-the-scenes battle over whether the full unabridged report should ever be released, according to multiple intelligence community sources familiar with the incident.

The deletion of the document has been portrayed by agency officials to Senate investigators as an “inadvertent” foul-up by the inspector general. In what one intelligence community source described as a series of errors straight “out of the Keystone Cops,” CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document, filled with thousands of secret files about the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation methods.

“It’s breathtaking that this could have happened, especially in the inspector general’s office — they’re the ones that are supposed to be providing accountability within the agency itself,” said Douglas Cox, a City University of New York School of Law professor who specializes in tracking the preservation of federal records. “It makes you wonder what was going on over there?”

The incident was privately disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department last summer, the sources said. But the destruction of a copy of the sensitive report has never been made public. Nor was it reported to the federal judge who, at the time, was overseeing a lawsuit seeking access to the still classified document under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a review of court files in the case.

A CIA spokesman, while not publicly commenting on the circumstances of the erasure, emphasized that another unopened computer disk with the full report has been, and still is, locked in a vault at agency headquarters. “I can assure you that the CIA has retained a copy,” wrote Dean Boyd, the agency’s chief of public affairs, in an email.

The 6,700-page report, the product of years of work by the Senate Intelligence Committee, contains meticulous details, including original CIA cables and memos, on the agency’s use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other aggressive interrogation methods at “black site” prisons overseas. A 500-page executive summary was released in December 2014 by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s outgoing chair. It concluded that the CIA’s interrogations were far more brutal than the agency had publicly acknowledged and produced often unreliable intelligence. The findings drew sharp dissents from Republicans on the panel and from four former CIA directors.

But the full three-volume report, which formed the basis for the executive summary, has never been released. In light of a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling last week that the document is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, there are new questions about whether it will ever be made public, or even be preserved.

After receiving inquiries from Yahoo News, Feinstein, now the vice chair of the committee,wrote CIA Director John Brennan last Friday night asking him to “immediately” provide a new copy of the full report to the inspector general’s office.

“Your prompt response will allay my concern that this was more than an ‘accident,’” Feinstein wrote, adding that the full report includes “extensive information directly related to the IG’s ongoing oversight of the CIA.” (CIA spokesman Boyd declined to comment.) (...)

Ironically in light of the inspector general’s actions, the intelligence committee’s investigation was triggered by the CIA’s admission in 2007 that it had destroyed another key piece of evidence — hours of videotapes of the waterboarding of two “high value” detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

According to a brief by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is seeking release of the full report under the Freedom of Information Act, the document “describes widespread and horrific human rights abuses by the CIA” and details the agency’s “evasions and misrepresentations” to Congress, the courts and the public.

To ensure the document was circulated widely within the government, and to preserve it for future declassification, Feinstein, in her closing days as chair, instructed that computer disks containing the full report be sent to the CIA and its inspector general, as well as the other U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Aides said Feinstein specifically included a separate copy for the CIA inspector general because she wanted the office to undertake a full review. Her goal, as she wrote at the time, was to ensure “that the system of detention and interrogation described in this report is never repeated.” (...)

But last August, a chagrined Christopher R. Sharpley, the CIA’s acting inspector general, alerted the Senate intelligence panel that his office’s copy of the report had vanished. According to sources familiar with Sharpley’s account, he explained it this way: When it received its disk, the inspector general’s office uploaded the contents onto its internal classified computer system and destroyed the disk in what Sharpley described as “the normal course of business.” Meanwhile someone in the IG office interpreted the Justice Department’s instructions not to open the file to mean it should be deleted from the server — so that both the original and the copy were gone.

At some point, it is not clear when, after being informed by CIA general counsel Caroline Krass that the Justice Department wanted all copies of the document preserved, officials in the inspector general’s office undertook a search to find its copy of the report. They discovered, “S***, we don’t have one,” said one of the sources briefed on Sharpley’s account.

by Michael Isikoff, Yahoo News | Read more:
Image: Senate TV/Reuters

How Typography Can Save Your Life

After decades of silently shouting at the top of its lungs, the National Weather Service recently announced that it’s going to stop publishing its forecasts and weather warnings in ALL CAPS. Beginning May 11, for the first time ever, we’ll start seeing mixed-case letters.

The weather service’s caps-lock habit didn’t happen entirely by choice. Old equipment left over from early weather service days of the late 1800s could only handle capital letters. Unfortunately, people have since learned to recognize those capital letters AS YELLING. It’s taken a long time for the weather service (and its customers) to update all their hardware and software, but now they’re finally ready to enter the 20th Century.

For type nerds everywhere, this is a triumphant typographic victory the likes of which we haven’t seen since Massimo Vignelli re-designed the New York City subway sign system. Ok, maybe that’s a stretch, but type choices are a big deal — and can, in fact, have life or death consequences.

In the case of the weather service’s all-caps type, it’s the font version of the boy who cried wolf. Using ALL CAPS for everything — from severe hurricanes to a slight chance of showers — means that EVERYTHING LOOKS THE SAME AND EVERYTHING LOOKS IMPORTANT. Once people realize that most of the time it’s not, they may become desensitized to warnings. When nothing stands out, people are likely to miss real emergencies.

Now that the weather service can use ALL CAPS sparingly — as a tool to highlight real danger — the public is more likely to pay attention.

“We realized we could still use ALL CAPS within products to add emphasis, such as ‘TORNADO WARNING. TAKE COVER NOW!’" said Art Thomas, the weather service meteorologist in charge of the project. “We hope that using all caps for emphasis will get people’s attention when it matters and encourage people to take action to protect their safety.”

A light touch on the caps-lock key is not just a good strategy for emphasizing the right things, but also just generally for making text easier to read. Because we see words as shapes, big rectangular blocks of all caps take us much longer to process. In an emergency, that extra time to decipher an urgent message may come at a cost.

Of course, if you’re trying to make something hard to read, then all caps is the perfect choice. Companies that set safety warnings in all caps may, intentionally or not, veil important information from consumers. (...)

Companies can (and do) claim that they are trying to “emphasize” the important stuff by putting it in all caps. This is actually the reason so many legal documents and contracts have sections that seem to be shouting. You can blame U.S. law for this one (specifically, the Uniform Commercial Code) which requires that certain sections of a contract be "conspicuous.”

Usually those guidelines apply to the parts of the contract that sound something like: “COMPANY X DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT WE’LL KEEP ANY OF OUR PROMISES AND EVERYTHING IS AT YOUR OWN RISK.” Makes sense that those sections should be hard to miss.

Except that in this case, making text “conspicuous,” also makes it harder to read. And that’s because of a historical quirk. Technically the law defines conspicuous as:

“(A) a heading in capitals equal to or greater in size than the surrounding text, or in contrasting type, font, or color to the surrounding text of the same or lesser size; and 

(B) language in the body of a record or display in larger type than the surrounding text, or in contrasting type, font, or color to the surrounding text of the same size, or set off from surrounding text of the same size by symbols or other marks that call attention to the language.”

So why do we use all caps instead of bold or italic or even highlighted? Because back when lawyers used typewriters, the only simple way to emphasize anything was to use ALL CAPS. And while today our fancy post-typewriter machines could certainly render the text in other “conspicuous” ways, tradition is hard to break. Just ask the weather service.

But let’s look beyond all caps, to perhaps the most famous place where typeface choices might save lives: on the road.

U.S. road signs have been set in a typeface called Highway Gothic since the 1950’s, and it was the dominant typeface in use until the early 2000’s. But it had problems. Whether people noticed it or not, it was hard to read in rainy weather, from a distance, and at night. When light hit the words, they appeared to blend together in a glowing, blurry mess, something known as halation. This may be annoying to an average person, but if you’re an elderly person driving at 70 miles an hour with bad vision, it can be deadly.

So highway engineers struggled to find a solution. They thought maybe making the letters 20 percent bigger would solve it, but bigger letters would require bigger signs and end up costing billions of dollars. So they turned to two designers: an environmental graphic designer and a type designer. Those designers created Clearview, a new typeface that was designed to take up the same space as Highway Gothic but be much easier to read.

One of the most important changes was widening the tiny shapes inside letters called counter spaces (like the hole inside the O or P). But the designers also adjusted the height of the ascenders in characters like b, d, f, h, as well as spacing between letters. And all these changes, taken together, seemed to work! After a bunch of tests in bad weather and different conditions, Clearview was found to improve drivers’ reading accuracy, reaction time, and recognition distance. Soon, highways across the country began to adopt Clearview.

However, they won’t for much longer. The Federal Highway Administration announced this year that it’s not going to require new signs to be in Clearview, due to “significant confusion and inconsistency in highway sign design, fabrication processes, and application.” The administration also cites some evidence that Clearview doesn’t improve nighttime legibility that much. And so it’s throwing in the towel on font innovation, saying it “does not intend to pursue further consideration, development, or support of an alternative letter style.”

But elsewhere, life-saving typefaces are still making notable appearances on the road — this time inside the car.

by Lena Groeger, Pro Publica |  Read more:

Images: Rob Weychert and National Weather Service

via:

via:

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.

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:

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.

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:

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

via:

Prince

via:

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.”

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.

by Laura Hamilton, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Chor Sokunthea / Reuters

[ed. Not a good day to be in the water.]
via:

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.

by Frank Bruni, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: CBS News