Fraying at the Edges

It began with what she saw in the bathroom mirror. On a dull morning, Geri Taylor padded into the shiny bathroom of her Manhattan apartment. She casually checked her reflection in the mirror, doing her daily inventory. Immediately, she stiffened with fright.

Huh? What?

She didn’t recognize herself.

She gazed saucer-eyed at her image, thinking: Oh, is this what I look like? No, that’s not me. Who’s that in my mirror?

This was in late 2012. She was 69, in her early months getting familiar with retirement. For some time she had experienced the sensation of clouds coming over her, mantling thought. There had been a few hiccups at her job. She had been a nurse who climbed the rungs to health care executive. Once, she was leading a staff meeting when she had no idea what she was talking about, her mind like a stalled engine that wouldn’t turn over.

“Fortunately I was the boss and I just said, ‘Enough of that; Sally, tell me what you’re up to,’” she would say of the episode.

Certain mundane tasks stumped her. She told her husband, Jim Taylor, that the blind in the bedroom was broken. He showed her she was pulling the wrong cord. Kept happening. Finally, nothing else working, he scribbled on the adjacent wall which cord was which.

Then there was the day she got off the subway at 14th Street and Seventh Avenue unable to figure out why she was there.

So, yes, she had had inklings that something was going wrong with her mind. She held tight to these thoughts. She even hid her suspicions from Mr. Taylor, who chalked up her thinning memory to the infirmities of age. “I thought she was getting like me,” he said. “I had been forgetful for 10 years.”

But to not recognize her own face! To Ms. Taylor, this was the “drop-dead moment” when she had to accept a terrible truth. She wasn’t just seeing the twitches of aging but the early fumes of the disease.

She had no further issues with mirrors, but there was no ignoring that something important had happened. She confided her fears to her husband and made an appointment with a neurologist. “Before then I thought I could fake it,” she would explain. “This convinced me I had to come clean.”

In November 2012, she saw the neurologist who was treating her migraines. He listened to her symptoms, took blood, gave her the Mini Mental State Examination, a standard cognitive test made up of a set of unremarkable questions and commands. (For instance, she was asked to count backward from 100 in intervals of seven; she had to say the phrase: “No ifs, ands or buts”; she was told to pick up a piece of paper, fold it in half and place it on the floor beside her.)

He told her three common words, said he was going to ask her them in a little bit. He emphasized this by pointing a finger at his head — remember those words. That simple. Yet when he called for them, she knew only one: beach. In her mind, she would go on to associate it with the doctor, thinking of him as Dr. Beach.

He gave a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment, a common precursor to Alzheimer’s disease. The first label put on what she had. Even then, she understood it was the footfall of what would come. Alzheimer’s had struck her father, a paternal aunt and a cousin. She long suspected it would eventually find her.

Every 67 seconds, with monotonous cruelty, Alzheimer’s takes up residence in another American. Degenerative and incurable, it is democratic in its reach. People live with it about eight to 10 years on average, though some people last for 20 years. More than five million Americans are believed to have it, two-thirds of them women, and now Ms. Taylor would join them.

The disease, with its thundering implications, moves in worsening stages to its ungraspable end. That is the familiar face of Alzheimer’s, the withered person with the scrambled mind marooned in a nursing home, memories sealed away, aspirations for the future discontinued. But there is also the beginning, the waiting period.

That was Geri Taylor. Waiting.

Right now, she remained energized, in control of her life, the silent attack on her brain not yet in full force. But what about next week? Next month? Next year? The disease would be there then. And the year after. And forever. It has no easy parts. It nicks away at you, its progress messy and unpredictable.

“The beginning is like purgatory,” she said one day. “It’s kind of a grace period. You’re waiting for something. Something you don’t want to come. It’s like a before-hell purgatory.”

by N.R. Kleinfield, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Michael Kirby Smith

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13, Right Now

She slides into the car, and even before she buckles her seat belt, her phone is alight in her hands. A 13-year-old girl after a day of eighth grade.

She says hello. Her au pair asks, “Ready to go?”

She doesn’t respond, her thumb on Instagram. A Barbara Walters meme is on the screen. She scrolls, and another meme appears. Then another meme, and she closes the app. She opens BuzzFeed. There’s a story about Florida Gov. Rick Scott, which she scrolls past to get to a story about Janet Jackson, then “28 Things You’ll Understand If You’re Both British and American.” She closes it. She opens Instagram. She opens the NBA app. She shuts the screen off. She turns it back on. She opens Spotify. Opens Fitbit. She has 7,427 steps. Opens Instagram again. Opens Snapchat. She watches a sparkly rainbow flow from her friend’s mouth. She watches a YouTube star make pouty faces at the camera. She watches a tutorial on nail art. She feels the bump of the driveway and looks up. They’re home. Twelve minutes have passed.

Katherine Pommerening’s iPhone is the place where all of her friends are always hanging out. So it’s the place where she is, too. She’s on it after it rings to wake her up in the mornings. She’s on it at school, when she can sneak it. She’s on it while her 8-year-old sister, Lila, is building crafts out of beads. She sets it down to play basketball, to skateboard, to watch PG-13 comedies and sometimes to eat dinner, but when she picks it back up, she might have 64 unread messages.

Now she’s on it in the living room of her big house in McLean, Va., while she explains what it’s like to be a 13-year-old today.

“Over 100 likes is good, for me. And comments. You just comment to make a joke or tag someone.”

The best thing is the little notification box, which means someone liked, tagged or followed her on Instagram. She has 604 followers. There are only 25 photos on her page because she deletes most of what she posts. The ones that don’t get enough likes, don’t have good enough lighting or don’t show the coolest moments in her life must be deleted.

“I decide the pictures that look good,” she says. “Ones with my friends, ones that are a really nice-looking picture.”

Somewhere, maybe at this very moment, neurologists are trying to figure out what all this screen time is doing to the still-forming brains of people Katherine’s age, members of what’s known as Generation Z. Educators are trying to teach them that not all answers are Googleable. Counselors are prying them out of Internet addictions. Parents are trying to catch up by friending their kids on Facebook. (P.S. Facebook is obsolete.) Sociologists, advertisers, stock market analysts – everyone wants to know what happens when the generation born glued to screens has to look up and interact with the world.

Right now, Katherine is still looking down.

“See this girl,” she says, “she gets so many likes on her pictures because she’s posted over nine pictures saying, ‘Like all my pictures for a tbh, comment when done.’ So everyone will like her pictures, and she’ll just give them a simple tbh.”

A tbh is a compliment. It stands for “to be heard” or “to be honest.”

Katherine tosses her long brown hair behind her shoulder and ignores her black lab, Lucy, who is barking to be let out.

“It kind of, almost, promotes you as a good person. If someone says, ‘tbh you’re nice and pretty,’ that kind of, like, validates you in the comments. Then people can look at it and say ‘Oh, she’s nice and pretty.’ ”

by Jessica Contrera, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Victoria Milko

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The NFL’s Brewing Information War

When every important decision-maker in the NFL shuffled into a hotel conference room in Boca Raton, Florida, in March for the league’s annual meeting, the scene was initially predictable: Most of the head coaches wore golf shirts, and most everyone had found a way to make the meetings double as a family vacation. The atmosphere was festive, and the pools were full of league titans. It did not appear to be the setting for the opening salvo of a war over the future of the NFL, but that’s what it became.

The meeting shifted toward discussing whether coaches should be allowed to watch game film on the sidelines during contests, a practice never before allowed. According to multiple people who were in the room at the time, Ron Rivera, the head coach of the defending NFC champion Carolina Panthers, stood up and asked what the point of coaching was if, after preparing all week, video would be readily available on the sidelines anyway.

“Where does it end?” Rivera said this week in an interview with The Ringer. “Can you get text messages or go out there with an iPhone and figure out where to go? What are we creating? I know there are millennial players, but this is still a game created 100 years ago.”

Rivera’s stance was among the most notable scenes during a spring in which it became increasingly clear that technology’s role in football has created a divide. On one side, there are coaches who have an old-school view of the craft; on the other are the coaches, executives, and owners who anticipate the sport undergoing the same sort of data revolution that most industries experienced long ago.

The NFL could have the technological capabilities to make a sideline look like a Blade Runner reboot. But it already has a mountain of data — it’s just that the mountain is largely inaccessible. In an effort to facilitate progress, league officials in Boca Raton pitched the NFL’s latest data technology: a system that would allow franchises to view player-tracking data for all 32 teams. If implemented, the technology would enable clubs to monitor every movement on the field for the first time, yielding raw data on player performance. For example: A team concerned about a slow cornerback could actually find out how much slower he is than Antonio Brown, who, according to data shared on a 2015 Thursday Night Football broadcast, posted a maximum speed of 21.8 mph during the season.

The proposal for teams to have access to all raw player-tracking data did not make it past the league’s Competition Committee, a group of team executives, owners, and coaches, according to an NFL official. Certain coaches griped about what might happen if other teams or the public had access to this data, and the committee told team representatives that it was too much, too soon, preventing the matter from reaching the teams for a vote at the March meeting.

“In other industries it is crazy to think you are going to limit innovation just to protect the people who aren’t ready,” said Brian Kopp, president of North America for Catapult Sports, which says it has deals with 19 NFL teams to provide practice data, but not game data. “Let’s make it all equally competitive, which is: You don’t figure it out, you start losing and you lose your job.”

Rivera, who’s coached the Panthers since 2011 and serves on a subcommittee of the NFL Competition Committee, said that introducing too much technology could “take the essence” out of the sport.

“I want to get beat on the field. I don’t want to get beat because someone used a tool or technology — that is not coaching at that point,” Rivera said. “I work all week, I’m preparing and kicking your ass. All of the sudden you see a piece of live video and you figure out, ‘Oh crap, that’s what he’s doing.’ And how fair is that?”

Two seasons ago, some NFL players began wearing two tiny chips in their shoulder pads during games. The program expanded to all players this past season, when Zebra Technologies, the company that produces the chips, also outfitted every stadium with receivers that decipher all movements on the field, measuring everything from player speed to how open a pass-catcher manages to get on a given play.

If you’re suddenly worried that you’re the only one missing out on crucial pieces of football analysis, rest assured, you’re not: Aside from a few nuggets sprinkled into television broadcasts, fans don’t have access to most league-wide data. More alarmingly, teams don’t have access to any league-wide data during the season, and, according to league officials, didn’t even get their own data from the 2015 season until three weeks ago.

Though football enthusiasts often praise the NFL for being forward-thinking, it has actually lagged behind other professional leagues amid an otherwise widespread analytics revolution, with a player-tracking section on NBA.com and MLB allowing the public to access its PITCHf/x data for research and modeling purposes. While NFL teams have hired analysts for front-office roles and external parties have created websites aimed at tracking advanced statistics for fans and media, when league employees actually started to pitch head coaches on “Next Gen” statistics and technological advancements about four years ago, they were stunned at the reception.

by Kevin Clark, The Ringer |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Facial Recognition Will Soon End Your Anonymity

Nearly 250 million video surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the world, and chances are you’ve been seen by several of them today. Most people barely notice their presence anymore — on the streets, inside stores, and even within our homes. We accept the fact that we are constantly being recorded because we expect this to have virtually no impact on our lives. But this balance may soon be upended by advancements in facial recognition technology.

Soon anybody with a high-resolution camera and the right software will be able to determine your identity. That’s because several technologies are converging to make this accessible. Recognition algorithms have become far more accurate, the devices we carry can process huge amounts of data, and there’s massive databases of faces now available on social media that are tied to our real names. As facial recognition enters the mainstream, it will have serious implications for your privacy.

A new app called FindFace, recently released in Russia, gives us a glimpse into what this future might look like. Made by two 20-something entrepreneurs, FindFace allows anybody to snap a photo of a passerby and discover their real name — already with 70% reliability. The app allows people to upload photos and compare faces to user profiles from the popular social network Vkontakte, returning a result in a matter of seconds. According to an interview in the Guardian, the founders claim to already have 500,000 users and have processed over 3 million searches in the two months since they’ve launched.

What’s particularly unsettling are the use cases they advocate: identifying strangers to send them dating requests, helping government security agencies to determine the identities of dissenters, and allowing retailers to bombard you with advertisements based on what you look at in stores.

While there are reasons to be skeptical of their claims, FindFace is already being deployed in questionable ways. Some users have tried to identify fellow riders on the subway, while others are using the app to reveal the real names of porn actresses against their will. Powerful facial recognition technology is now in the hands of consumers to use how they please.

It’s not just Russians who have to worry about the implications of ubiquitous facial recognition. Whenever a technology becomes cheap and powerful, it begins to show up in the unlikeliest of places.

by Tarun Wadhwa, MarketWatch | Read more:
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A Fishy Business

The story of the world’s best fish sauce begins, like so many others, with a son who just wanted to make his mother happy. Cuong Pham and his parents came to the United States from Saigon as refugees in 1979. They settled in northern California, where Cuong eventually became an engineer, spending 16 years with Apple. His mother, however, could never find the fish sauce (nuoc mam in Vietnamese) she remembered from Vietnam. Cuong’s family owned a fish-sauce factory; his uncle would bring his mother 20-litre cans of specially selected, just-for-family nuoc mam. In America she had to settle for commercial fish sauce, often the saltier Thai variety – designed, in the words of Andrea Nguyen, a cookbook author and proprietor of the indispensable Viet World Kitchen website, “for the lusty highs and lows of Thai food, [not] the rolling hills and valleys of Viet food”). So Cuong did what any son would do: he started his own fish-sauce company.

Fish sauce – the liquid produced from anchovies salted and left to ferment in the heat for months – has long repelled most Western palates. That is starting to change. It adds a savoury depth to soups and stocks that salt alone cannot provide. If soy sauce is a single trumpet played at full blast, fish sauce is a dozen bowed double-basses; and Cuong’s fish sauce is without parallel. And while he may have made it for expats like his mother, chefs across the Pacific and in Europe have grown to love it. (...)

It forms the chief protein source for millions, and is as central to the diverse cuisines of mainland South-East Asia as olive oil is to southern Italian and Levantine food. It goes by different names: nam pla in Thailand, tuk trey in Cambodia and patis in the Philippines. A similar condiment called garum featured in ancient Roman cuisine, and indeed south-west Italy still produces small amounts of colatura di alici, an anchovy liquid similar to nuoc mam. In other parts of South-East Asia, notably Myanmar and Cambodia, people eat fermented-fish pastes, which tend to be more assertive – often used as a central ingredient rather than a flavouring. These products wring value from abundant, tiny fish too small to eat on their own; like pickling, fish sauces preserve a bountiful harvest’s nutrition.

Fish sauce can repel first-timers: it often has an intensely fishy odour, especially in the cheaper varieties, with a rubbishy edge. But its flavour rounds and mellows with cooking. Eventually it becomes addictive, essential: I’m about as Vietnamese as a bagel, and I can’t imagine my kitchen without it. You can build a marinade for nearly any grilled thing – meat, fish or vegetable – around its umami sturdiness. Greens stir-fried with garlic, nuoc mam and a squeeze of lime or splash of white wine make a happy light lunch, served over steamed rice. Mix it with lime juice, sugar, water and perhaps some sliced chillies or chopped garlic, and it becomes nuoc cham, a dip that makes everything taste better (it pairs especially, if unconventionally, well with soft, watery fruits such as pineapple and strawberry).

by Jon Fasman, 1843/The Economist |  Read more:

Image: Quinn Ryan Mattingly 

$4.5 Billion to Zero

Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos: From $4.5 Billion To Nothing

Image:  Glen Davis/Forbes

[ed. You think you had a rough day...?!]

Art Deco Ronson Rondette Table Lighter
via:

Let Them Drown

... climate change isn’t just about things getting hotter and wetter: under our current economic and political model, it’s about things getting meaner and uglier.

Edward Said was no tree-hugger. Descended from traders, artisans and professionals, he once described himself as ‘an extreme case of an urban Palestinian whose relationship to the land is basically metaphorical’. In After the Last Sky, his meditation on the photographs of Jean Mohr, he explored the most intimate aspects of Palestinian lives, from hospitality to sports to home décor. The tiniest detail – the placing of a picture frame, the defiant posture of a child – provoked a torrent of insight from Said. Yet when confronted with images of Palestinian farmers – tending their flocks, working the fields – the specificity suddenly evaporated. Which crops were being cultivated? What was the state of the soil? The availability of water? Nothing was forthcoming. ‘I continue to perceive a population of poor, suffering, occasionally colourful peasants, unchanging and collective,’ Said confessed. This perception was ‘mythic’, he acknowledged – yet it remained.

If farming was another world for Said, those who devoted their lives to matters like air and water pollution appear to have inhabited another planet. Speaking to his colleague Rob Nixon, he once described environmentalism as ‘the indulgence of spoiled tree-huggers who lack a proper cause’. But the environmental challenges of the Middle East are impossible to ignore for anyone immersed, as Said was, in its geopolitics. This is a region intensely vulnerable to heat and water stress, to sea-level rise and to desertification. A recent paper in Nature Climate Change predicts that, unless we radically lower emissions and lower them fast, large parts of the Middle East will likely ‘experience temperature levels that are intolerable to humans’ by the end of this century. And that’s about as blunt as climate scientists get. Yet environmental issues in the region still tend to be treated as afterthoughts, or luxury causes. The reason is not ignorance, or indifference. It’s just bandwidth. Climate change is a grave threat but the most frightening impacts are in the medium term. And in the short term, there are always far more pressing threats to contend with: military occupation, air assault, systemic discrimination, embargo. Nothing can compete with that – nor should it attempt to try.

There are other reasons why environmentalism might have looked like a bourgeois playground to Said. The Israeli state has long coated its nation-building project in a green veneer – it was a key part of the Zionist ‘back to the land’ pioneer ethos. And in this context trees, specifically, have been among the most potent weapons of land grabbing and occupation. It’s not only the countless olive and pistachio trees that have been uprooted to make way for settlements and Israeli-only roads. It’s also the sprawling pine and eucalyptus forests that have been planted over those orchards, as well as over Palestinian villages, most notoriously by the Jewish National Fund, which, under its slogan ‘Turning the Desert Green’, boasts of having planted 250 million trees in Israel since 1901, many of them non-native to the region. In publicity materials, the JNF bills itself as just another green NGO, concerned with forest and water management, parks and recreation. It also happens to be the largest private landowner in the state of Israel, and despite a number of complicated legal challenges, it still refuses to lease or sell land to non-Jews.

I grew up in a Jewish community where every occasion – births and deaths, Mother’s Day, bar mitzvahs – was marked with the proud purchase of a JNF tree in the person’s honour. It wasn’t until adulthood that I began to understand that those feel-good faraway conifers, certificates for which papered the walls of my Montreal elementary school, were not benign – not just something to plant and later hug. In fact these trees are among the most glaring symbols of Israel’s system of official discrimination – the one that must be dismantled if peaceful co-existence is to become possible.

The JNF is an extreme and recent example of what some call ‘green colonialism’. But the phenomenon is hardly new, nor is it unique to Israel. There is a long and painful history in the Americas of beautiful pieces of wilderness being turned into conservation parks – and then that designation being used to prevent Indigenous people from accessing their ancestral territories to hunt and fish, or simply to live. It has happened again and again. A contemporary version of this phenomenon is the carbon offset. Indigenous people from Brazil to Uganda are finding that some of the most aggressive land grabbing is being done by conservation organisations. A forest is suddenly rebranded a carbon offset and is put off-limits to its traditional inhabitants. As a result, the carbon offset market has created a whole new class of ‘green’ human rights abuses, with farmers and Indigenous people being physically attacked by park rangers or private security when they try to access these lands. Said’s comment about tree-huggers should be seen in this context.

And there is more. In the last year of Said’s life, Israel’s so-called ‘separation barrier’ was going up, seizing huge swathes of the West Bank, cutting Palestinian workers off from their jobs, farmers from their fields, patients from hospitals – and brutally dividing families. There was no shortage of reasons to oppose the wall on human rights grounds. Yet at the time, some of the loudest dissenting voices among Israeli Jews were not focused on any of that. Yehudit Naot, Israel’s then environment minister, was more worried about a report informing her that ‘The separation fence … is harmful to the landscape, the flora and fauna, the ecological corridors and the drainage of the creeks.’ ‘I certainly don’t want to stop or delay the building of the fence,’ she said, but ‘I am disturbed by the environmental damage involved.’ As the Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti later observed, Naot’s ‘ministry and the National Parks Protection Authority mounted diligent rescue efforts to save an affected reserve of irises by moving it to an alternative reserve. They’ve also created tiny passages [through the wall] for animals.’

Perhaps this puts the cynicism about the green movement in context. People do tend to get cynical when their lives are treated as less important than flowers and reptiles. And yet there is so much of Said’s intellectual legacy that both illuminates and clarifies the underlying causes of the global ecological crisis, so much that points to ways we might respond that are far more inclusive than current campaign models: ways that don’t ask suffering people to shelve their concerns about war, poverty and systemic racism and first ‘save the world’ – but instead demonstrate how all these crises are interconnected, and how the solutions could be too. In short, Said may have had no time for tree-huggers, but tree-huggers must urgently make time for Said – and for a great many other anti-imperialist, postcolonial thinkers – because without that knowledge, there is no way to understand how we ended up in this dangerous place, or to grasp the transformations required to get us out. So what follows are some thoughts – by no means complete – about what we can learn from reading Said in a warming world.

by Naomi Klein, LRB |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Alone in the Wilderness

[ed. I amost stayed in Dick Proenneke's cabin once (at least I think it was his).

One weekend my father in law flew us out in his floatplane to fish for lake trout at the confluence of Upper and Lower Twin Lakes in Lake Clark National Preserve, one of the most stunningly beautiful parks in Alaska. The lakes themselves were crystal blue-green and so placid he had to drop rocks out the window on approach (rocks that he kept stashed just for this kind of occasion) to create ripples and enough depth perception to land safely on the mirrored, glassy surface. Once we were down and unloaded he left us there with our camping gear (but no food or water) and took off again to fly back to Kenai to pick up the rest of family, who were waiting with the other supplies we'd need to camp for several days. Unfortunately, the weather soon turned bad and we ended up cold and miserable in a steady driving rain, roasting freshly caught lake trout on alder sticks over a fizzling fire. After several hours of misery, we kept desperately hoping to hear the low drone of a plane coming in from the distance, but no luck. That's when we went exploring for shelter in the surrounding woods (minus any firearms for bears) and found Dick's cabin. We figured if worse came to worse, at least there'd be that. Finally, late in the day, the little PA-14 came humming over the horizon and we were saved from a cold and hungry night (and having to break into Dick's cabin).

But there's more...

It seemed like we were saved, but what we didn't know was how little fuel the PA-14 had left after trying to fly to Kenai and back (and getting socked in, trying over and over to get through dense, low lying clouds). After taking off from Twin Lakes and buzzing along for half an hour we were lulled into sleep by the steady drone of the engine... when suddenly everything went silent. We were in the middle of Lake Clark Pass (one of the most trecherous Passes in Alaska) and out of fuel. I watched my father in law switch tanks and try to restart the engine. It coughed back to life. We  flew on a little longer, weaving down a narrow canyon, searching out possible landing sites along the rocky Chilikadrotna River below (there were none). Then the engine went dead again. This time he switched the radio to an emergency frequency and waggled the wings back and forth (where the fuel tanks are located) so any remaining gas would run down into the engine. Miraculously, after several tries, the engine caught again (on fumes), and, with a few minutes left, we were able to get through the Pass and out over Cook Inlet where Kalgin Island (several miles away) lay in the distance. The engine gave one last gasp and finally died for good, but by now we were high enough over the ocean that we could glide the remaining distance and land on the island's only lake. Once we touched down, my father in law opened the pilot's door, got out on the floats and paddled us the rest of the way to shore. He disappeared into the woods without a word and we didn't dare ask where he was going - he wasn't saying much by then - but twenty minutes later he emerging with two five-gallon containers of Av-gas that he'd stashed some years earlier for just such an occasion. We poured them into the fuel tanks and were off again, finally making it home. We even beat the rest of the family who, still driving back from Kenai, arrived a couple hours later. What a trip. Long story short, I never did get to see the inside of Dick Proenneke's cabin (although, I wish I had). But the fishing was great!]

by markk

The Term 'Oriental' is Outdated, Not Racist

[ed. I agree with the author.]

It is now politically incorrect to use the word “Oriental,” and the admonition has the force of law: President Obama recently signed a bill prohibiting use of the term in all federal documents. Rep. Grace Meng, the New York congresswoman who sponsored the legislation, exulted that “at long last this insulting and outdated term will be gone for good.”

As an Oriental, I am bemused. Apparently Asians are supposed to feel demeaned if someone refers to us as Orientals. But good luck finding a single Asian American who has ever had the word spat at them in anger. Most Asian Americans have had racist epithets hurled at them at one time or another: Chink, slant eye, gook, Nip, zipperhead. But Oriental isn’t in the canon.

And why should it be? Literally, it means of the Orient or of the East, as opposed to of the Occident or of the West. Last I checked, geographic origin is not a slur. If it were, it would be wrong to label people from Mississippi as Southerners.

Of course I understand that some insults have benign origins. “Jap,” for example, is simply a shortening of the word Japanese, but that one stings. As 127,000 Japanese Americans were carted off to internment camps during World War II, they were repeatedly referred to by their fellow citizens and the media as Japs. It was meant as an insult and understood as such. Clearly context is important.

The problem with “Oriental,” San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jeff Yang told NPR, is that “When you think about it, the term … feels freighted with luggage. You know, it’s a term which you can’t think of without having that sort of the smell of incense and the sound of a gong kind of in your head.” In other words it makes Asians sound exotic because it was in circulation at a time when exoticizing stereotypes were prevalent.

Erika Lee, director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota and author of “The Making of Asian America: A History,” offered a similar explanation to NBC News: “In the U.S., the term ‘Oriental’ has been used to reinforce the idea that Asians were/are forever foreign and could never become American. These ideas helped to justify immigration exclusion, racial discrimination and violence, political disfranchisement and segregation.” Lee also claimed that continued use of the term “perpetuates inequality, disrespect, discrimination and stereotypes towards Asian Americans.”

I don’t see it that way; I see self-righteous, fragile egos eager to find offense where none is intended. A wave of anti-Oriental discrimination is not sweeping the country. Besides, the term has been steadily falling out of circulation since the 1950s, and it’s mainly used today by older Asians and the proprietors of hundreds if not thousands of restaurants, hotels, shops and organizations with Oriental in their name. The well-intentioned meddlers will create trouble for exactly the population they want to defend.

My profession, Oriental medicine, is among those on the receiving end of the identity-politics outbreak. A funny thing I noticed is that my Caucasian (dare I say Occidental?) colleagues, not my Asian colleagues, are most eager to remove Oriental from public discourse. I suppose they’re busy shouldering their burden of guilt. Margaret Cho said it best: “White people like to tell Asians how to feel about race because they’re too scared to tell black people.”

by Jayne Tsuchiyama, LA Times | Read more:
Image: Jeff Christensen /AP

Paul Simon

Paul Simon returns with the exquisite 'Stranger to Stranger'

Steph Curry and the Warrior's Astonishing Season

[ed. Curry is like a young Tiger Woods. Totally dominating (and a beauty to watch).]

A perfectly executed jump shot is among the most beautiful things in all of sports. Dunks are more ostentatiously athletic, but they end in a staccato thud, a brute pounding of the basket. Like baseball swings, tennis shots, and tackles in football, dunks have the quality of abrupt endings, of momentous and violent collisions between moving objects and determined people. A jump shot, by contrast, is all flow. An athlete takes one or two steps, pauses to gather his body, and then leaps—straight up, if he’s doing things correctly. As he rises, he holds the ball in the palm of one hand while the other gently cradles it from behind. The shooting arm is bent at a ninety-degree angle, its upper half parallel to the floor. The shooting elbow travels upward on a narrow path within inches of the torso, to insure an efficient and steady glide; the other arm folds over, framing the face of the shooter. Then the shooting arm uncoils, exploding into a rigid staff: the ball is launched upward, at an angle, usually, between forty and sixty degrees relative to the shooter’s body. At the top of the player’s leap, before letting the ball go, his shooting hand offers its final adjustments by flicking quickly forward and letting the ball roll backward off the fingertips, insuring that it spins in the opposite direction from which it’s travelling. The backspin works to insure that whatever the ball grazes—the backboard, a piece of the rim—will have minimal effect on its path. When all of this is done just so, the ball drops noiselessly into the woven nylon net, rippling the ropes as little as possible on its way through. By then, a confident shooter will already be on his way down the floor, perhaps with a hand raised in triumph as thousands of people scream and high-five strangers. A perfect shot is swift and noiseless and, when delivered at the right time, can end an opponent’s chances. This is why the man who has lately become its most storied practitioner has been called the Baby-Faced Assassin.

That killer, Stephen Curry, of the Golden State Warriors, has the most precise and stunning jump shot in the history of the National Basketball Association. Unlike other shooters, who pause with the ball at hip height to gather and set themselves, his is a single-motion shot: he enters a deep knee bend and cocks his hands to shoot in one swift, upward-flinging movement. He can charge down the floor at top speed, then halt completely and fire a shot in less than a second. And that shot is far more likely to go in than one taken by nearly anyone else. His form is precise, his jumps are generally upright, and his shooting forearm is never more than five degrees from vertical. His follow-through is textbook. Curry executes perfection faster than anyone else in professional basketball.

In March, I made my way to Oracle Arena, in Oakland, where I live, to see him do this in person. The Warriors’ home court sits beside one of the least attractive freeways in one of the least attractive parts of the city. The 880, which stretches from downtown Oakland to the rival tech hub San Jose, is narrow and crowded, marked with potholes, jammed with smoke-spewing semis, and hemmed in by graffiti-covered walls on one side and crumbling office parks on the other. The arena rises from an area of forgotten roads and weed-covered lots. (...)

Inside the arena, nearly twenty thousand fans were giddy. Sellouts were common at Oracle even during the team’s lean years; on this night, thousands arrived early just to watch Curry perform his increasingly legendary warmup routine. He started with a series of dribble drills and layups. As fans amassed in the lower seats, he began flinging mid-range jumpers, nailing shot after shot. Soon he was working beyond the three-point arc, a team assistant feeding him balls that he sent, almost without fail, through the hoop. Then he started in on his proprietary material: shots launched from well beyond the arc, far outside any region where reasonable players are comfortable. The crowd yelled for each make, groaned at each miss. Curry was either unaware of our presence or teasing us by pretending to be. By the time he reached half-court, it had become sheer performance, a circus act. With each shot taken from the mid-court logo, you could hear people inhaling breaths that weren’t let out until the ball landed.

Then Curry prepared for his final trick. A security guard cleared out the hallway that leads to the home locker room, barking at wayward reporters and the occasional oblivious visitor who happened to wander through with a hot dog and an all-access pass. Curry set up halfway down the tunnel, nearly fifty feet from the basket, directly to one side of it. He could no longer be seen from the stands. Suddenly a ball flew from the tunnel as though shot by a cannon; it bounced off the front rim, and the crowd let out a moan. The security guard, clearly relishing his role, bounced another ball down the hallway. It, too, was thrown into the air, this time sailing through the hoop, hitting nothing but net. The arena erupted. Curry shot three more from the tunnel, making one. The guard announced that the show was over and handed Curry a marker with which the point guard signed hats, posters, and jerseys for kids who had been granted special access. He waved to the crowd and ran down the hallway at full speed, disappearing into the locker room. The game hadn’t even begun, and everyone present had already been thoroughly entertained.

by Carvell Wallace , New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Andrew Berstein

How PreCheck Made Airport Security Lines Longer

[ed. How about just going back to what we had before - metal detectors and x-rays for carry on baggage? Put that bloated TSA budget to better use by employing more Sky Marshals in the air? (Probably because that would mean fewer seats for the airlines to charge).]  

The three main explanations making the rounds for why airport security waits have gotten out of control in the U.S. this spring have been:

1. Lots more people are flying.
2. Budget cutbacks have forced the Transportation Security Administration to make do with fewer screeners.
3. The TSA is a bungling bureaucracy.

There is surely something to all three of these, and it’s easy to find statistical evidence for the first two. After a long recession-induced slump, the number of U.S. air travelers set a monthly record of 75.6 million last July (the previous high was in July 2007), according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and passenger traffic may break that record again this summer. Meanwhile, the number of security screeners, measured once a year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fell from 47,200 in 2012 to 41,820 in May 2015.

Still -- in part because growth in air travel, tight federal budgets and bureaucratic bungling all seem somewhat inevitable at this point -- it's important to look for other causes of the security-line bottleneck. And yes, people have been looking, and finding.

Bloomberg View’s editorial board argues today, for example, that the TSA’s list of items that are prohibited on planes is a big part of the problem. The list is outdated and largely nonsensical, yet ninnies in Congress object to any proposed change. It’s a classic case of “security theater” trumping actual security.

Another angle, pushed this month by Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and Democratic Senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal, is that the fees airlines charge for checked baggage are causing travelers to bring more, bigger carry-ons that slow security checks. My initial thought was that these bag charges couldn't be the problem because they've been around for years. But it turns out that American became the first legacy carrier to impose a fee for checking even one bag in May 2008, just as air travel was beginning a steep decline. Now that passenger numbers are finally setting new records again, it's not unreasonable to think that the baggage charges are at least part of the security-line problem.

Finally, there’s what I think may be the most interesting culprit of all: A seemingly good idea for reducing security waits that at this point is probably making them longer. This would be TSA PreCheck, the streamlined screening program (you can keep your shoes and light jacket on and your laptop and toiletries in your luggage, and usually get to go through a metal detector instead of a full-body scanner) that was rolled out in 2011 and expanded in 2013 as what then-TSA chief John Pistole called the “happy lane.” As Bloomberg’s Alan Levin and Jeff Plungis reported Thursday:

For the small portion of travelers now in the program that provides access to short lines, it may fit John Pistole’s description. But for passengers who don’t participate, it has contributed to security screening delays and growing tensions at airports because far fewer people signed up than the agency projected.

Devoting staff and machines to PreCheck screening lanes with hardly anybody going through them means taking them away from general screening lanes with lots of people going through them. Some airport TSA managers have reacted to the crush of traffic this spring by shutting down PreCheck lanes, which is understandable but leaves no one happy. I experienced this early one Saturday morning this month at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Those of us with the telltale checkmark on our boarding passes got to stand in a separate, shorter line to get our IDs checked, but were then put in the same security screening line as everybody else. When we finally got close to the machines, I told a TSA worker that I had PreCheck and asked if I needed to take my laptop out or my shoes off. Laptop comes out but shoes can stay on, she said, then allowed me to cut in front of several people and go through the metal detector instead of the scanner -- without ever looking at my boarding pass to verify that I was in fact PreChecked. Now that's security!

by Justin Fox, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Paul J. Richards

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The Complete List of 'OK, Google' Commands

With Google Now, you can use voice commands to create reminders, get help with trivia questions, and, yes, even find out "what does the fox say?"

And, with today's update from Google, the voice assistant's reponse will sound more natural than ever. (Though, of all the voice assistants, Google Now was already the most natural-sounding one.)

If you can't get enough of talking to your phone (or your AndroidWear watch), we put together a long list of OK, Google commands to help you get more done with just your voice.

OK, Google

There are two ways to say a command.

• With newer Android devices, just say "OK Google," followed by a question or task. For example, if I wanted to know the weather, I could say "OK Google, what's the weather like today?" and a few seconds later Google Now would provide the forecast.
• Tap on the microphone button in the Google search bar, and skip the "OK, Google" portion of the conversation. If the search bar isn't on a home screen, swipe right from the primary home screen to see Google Now.

If "OK, Google" isn't working for you, make sure that feature is enabled. Head to the Google Now app, go to Menu > Settings > Voice > "OK Google" detection.

The (almost) complete list of Google commands

We searched high and low for a complete list of "OK Google" commands, but came up short. So we put one together ourselves. Below is a list of commands we have verified work on Android. Odds are it's not entirely complete, since Google did not share one with us -- we asked.

If you know of a command missing from our list, please leave a comment and we will be sure to included it.

The basics

• Open [app name]. Example: "Open Gmail."
• Go to [website]. Ex.: "Go to CNET.com."
• Call [contact name]. Ex.: "Call Mom."
• Text or Send text to [contact name]. Ex.: "Text Wife I'm running late."
• Email or Send email. Ex.: "Email Wife subject Hi message I'm running late, sorry." You can also add CC and BCC recipients.
• Show me my last messages. This will present a list of recent messages, and read them to you, giving you a chance to reply.
• Create a calendar event or Schedule an appointment. Ex.: "Create appointment Go on a walk tomorrow at 10 a.m."
• Set an alarm for [specific time, or amount of time]. Ex.: "Set alarm for 10 a.m." Or "Set alarm for 20 minutes from now."
• Set a timer for [X] minutes.
• Note to self [contents of note].
• Start a list for [list name].
• Send Hangout message to [contact name].
• Remind me to [do a task]. Ex.: "Remind me to get dog food at Target," will create a location-based reminder. "Remind me to take out the trash tomorrow morning," will give you a time-based reminder.
• Show me my pictures from [location]. Ex.: "Show me my pictures from San Francisco."
• Show me my calendar.
• When's my next meeting?
• Where is my next meeting?
• Post to Twitter.
• Post to Google+
• Show me [app category] apps. Ex.: "Show me gaming apps."
• Start a run.
• Show me emails from [contact name].

by Jason Cipriani, CNET |  Read more:

Image: James Martin

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All the Songs Are Now Yours

This is a new world. Cloud streaming represents a bigger revolution than the one brought in by CDs or MP3s, which made music merely cheaper to buy and easier to carry around. Just five years ago, if you wanted to listen legally to a specific song, you bought it (on CD, on MP3), which, assuming finite resources, meant you had to choose which song to buy, which in turn meant you didn’t buy other songs you had considered buying. Then, a person with $10 to spend could have purchased five or six songs, or, if he was an antiquarian, an album. Now, with $10, that same person can subscribe to a streaming service for a month and hear all five or six songs he would have purchased with that money, plus 20 million or so others.

Spotify estimates that fully four million of the songs it carries have never been streamed, not even once. There is a vast musical frontier waiting to be explored, but it is already mapped: using various search methods, you could find every bluegrass song ever written with the word “banana” in it, or every Finnish death metal album, or Billy Bragg and Wilco’s recording of the Woody Guthrie lyric “Walt Whitman’s Niece,” or a gospel group called Walt Whitman and the Soul Children of Chicago, or Whitman himself, reading “America” on an album called 100 Great Poems: Classic Poets and Beatnik Freaks.

Freed from the anguish of choosing, music listeners can discover all kinds of weird, nettlesome, unpleasant, sublime, sweet, or perplexing musical paths. These paths branch off constantly, so that by the end of a night that started with the Specials, you’re listening to Górecki’s Miserere, not by throwing a dart, but by following the quite specific imperatives of each moment’s needs, each instant’s curiosities. It is like an open-format video game, where you make the world by advancing through it.

None of these lines of affinity or innuendo exists until a single person’s mind makes them, and to look back upon the path that any given night at home has taken you (a queue shows you the songs you’ve played; you can back it up and replay those songs in order, if you like) is to learn something about your own intuitions as they reveal themselves musically. Spotify will give you data about what songs or artists you’ve listened to the most. It is always a surprise; in 2015, my top song was “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” as sung by Blossom Dearie, my top album was Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, and my top artist was Bach. The person who made those choices is not a person I’m conscious of being.

This is one of the most amazing things about streaming music. Not that you can listen to Albanian bluegrass or child yodelers from Maine, but that you can recreate your past with a level of detail never before possible. Or, taking it a step further: you can recover experiences from your past, passions, insights, shames you’d forgotten. I’m forty-four; everything I heard before I was twelve or so forms a kind of musical preconscious that was only occasionally accessible, in flashes and glimpses, before streaming came along. It is as though a box of photographs was discovered of my childhood. Not just the events these photographs capture, but the entire ambient world of the past, its ashtrays and TVtrays, the color of the carpet, my mother’s favorite sweater: all of it comes back, foreground and background, when you rediscover the music that was on when you were a child.

The brutal winnowing of the past, selecting perhaps two dozen pop songs a year, a few albums—this vast oversimplification, this canceling of all that the culture deems tangential or unimportant—is now itself a thing of the past. Kids growing up in this environment are having a genuinely new human experience: nothing in the past is lost, which means temporal sequence itself—where the newest things are closest and most vivid, while the oldest things dwell in the dark backward and abysm of time—gets lost. Everything exists on one plane, so it is harder than before to know exactly where we stand in time.

Every Song Ever is a brilliant guide to listening to music in this new environment, where concentration must become aware of itself as its criteria shift abruptly from genre to genre, composer to composer, culture to culture. Ratliff proposes a “language” that will allow such lateral moves between unlike compositions. It is, as he writes, “not specifically musical,” referring, instead, to “generalized human activity”:

Therefore, perhaps not “melody,” “harmony,” “rhythm,” “sonata form,” “oratorio.” Perhaps, instead, repetition, or speed, or slowness, or density, or discrepancy, or stubbornness, or sadness. Intentionally, these are not musical terms per se…. Music and life are inseparable. Music is part of our physical and intellectual formation…. We build an autobiography and a self-image with music, and we know, even as we’re building them, that they’re going to change.

It is part of the astonishment of our current era that a statement that might once have seemed an empty, Music 101 platitude—“music and life are inseparable”—is now an acute observation with important technical ramifications. It is now possible for a person to synchronize the outside world to music, to make the world a manifestation of the music she chooses to hear. A record of those choices, viewed years after the fact, suggests the fine-grained emotional and imaginative lives we live while apparently doing nothing, or nothing of note. Play the songs you heard on February 2, 2013, in the order in which you played them, and you can recreate not just the emotions but the suspense and surprise of emotion as it changes in time.

by Dan Chiasson, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Miguel Rio Branco/Magnum Photos

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

[ed. This is a more recent formulation of an earlier article posted here.]

It's one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.

Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself.

What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of misery, that accountant’s demand. The prestige of instinct is the traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason.

But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.

We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.

Finally, we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing glitter across the sea, chatting about aspects of our souls no one ever seemed to have grasped before, with the prospect of dinner in a risotto place a little later. We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage.

Indeed, marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house, with a long commute and maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.

The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.

by Alain de Botton, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Marion Fayolle