Stuck Waiting at Airport Security? Blame This Company and TSA

The Transportation Security Administration would have us believe that those outrageous waits at airport checkpoints that made headlines recently were caused by a screener shortage or a surge in passengers. But there’s another reason for the crushing lines: a private contractor.

MorphoTrustUSA, in charge of scaling up the agency’s PreCheck fast-track lanes at airports around the country, is suing the federal government, a move that could prevent relief for millions of angry travelers.

Tens of thousands of travelers have missed their flights in recent months as wait times at checkpoints exceeded two hours at busy hubs in places like Chicago and Seattle. And there’s another pressing reason to fix the problem: big crowds at airports are potential targets for terrorists as recent attacks in Brussels, and now, Istanbul, have shown.

While Congress quickly gave TSA money to bring in reinforcements after lines spilled out of terminals, the fix that has the best chance of succeeding in the long run, experts say, is to get PreCheck enrollment into high gear.

MorphoTrust already has a contract with the TSA to bring millions of new members into PreCheck so they can keep their shoes on and their laptops stored as they whisk through security. But TSA believes that burden is too much for one company to handle and it’s been trying since 2013 to bring in more private sector vendors to join the effort to boost enrollments from 3 million today to 25 million by 2019, when 50 percent of all fliers would get the express treatment.

According to those familiar with the bidding process thus far, the aim is to make it as easy to sign up for PreCheck as it is to purchase a product online, while maintaining the integrity of the vetting process.

But since January, MorphoTrust has been fighting back.

First, the company filed what’s known as a “bid protest” that basically stopped TSA from issuing awards to more companies. When that protest was overruled by the TSA and the Government Accountability Office, MorphoTrust sued the government in federal claims court. While the legal process drags on, TSA is effectively blocked from issuing the new contracts and reaping the benefits this could bring.

“It is frankly bizarre,” said Robert Poole, director of transportation policy for the Reason Foundation, who has followed TSA since its inception after the 9/11 attacks. “It would be tragic for air travelers if this gets held up for another year or two.” (...)

A Delay Two Decades in the Making

The story dates back to the beginnings of TSA in 2001, when Congress mandated that the nascent agency establish a “trusted passenger” program to give low-risk travelers expedited treatment so screeners could focus their attention on fliers who might merit more scrutiny. For more than a decade TSA struggled with how to meet that goal, rolling out a series of failed schemes; they ranged from the comically ineffectual (“Black Diamond” lanes for “expert” travelers, dreamed up by a TSA chief who liked to ski) to the downright creepy, with a far-fetched plan to tap credit rating firms for personal information to establish a vast database onall passengers (who would be given “threat scores” for a good measure).

Finally, TSA in 2011 came up with PreCheck, which it believed would be less controversial since it was voluntary. The idea would be to give fliers who submitted to a background check and fingerprinting a sort of “screening lite” at airports that, like EZ Pass lanes at toll plazas, would make everything move more efficiently.

TSA didn’t have the resources to jumpstart the plan so it selected MorphoTrust to set up a network of enrollment services; after all, the company was working under contract with TSA, performing vetting services for things like a transportation worker ID program. Morpho’s role has been mainly a passive one: collecting the application forms and obtaining fingerprints, which are passed on to the TSA, so the data can be run through the FBI’s criminal background check apparatus.

TSA made its first blunder with PreCheck at inception by announcing a goal of having 25 percent of all air travelers using the speedy lanes by the end of 2013. It soon became clear that wasn’t going to happen: after an initial surge of interest, PreCheck enrollment proceeded at a desultory pace. Maybe it was the required in-person appearance at a TSA-approved center, or the $85 fee for five-year membership, but whatever the reason, sign-ups fell below expectations.

“This disastrous enrollment process is producing a chokepoint” that’s depriving millions of travelers of the benefits of PreCheck, said Kevin Mitchell, who heads the Business Travel Coalition. He added that these express security lanes produce on average three times the passenger throughput as regular security lines.

But TSA instead saw another way to reach that 25 percent goal: reel in passengers who were not part of PreCheck, but who popped up as low-risk in the routine assessments TSA gives to all passengers before flight time. (That’s under something called Secure Flight, which is why you provide your date of birth and exact legal name when you book a flight.) The number of people using the lines exploded by 300 percent.

“It was a fiasco,” Poole said, with clueless passengers clogging the lanes and slowing things down for everyone. And when an infamous 1970s terrorist, Sara Jane Olsen, was waved into a PreCheck lane by a screener (over objections from another TSA agent who recognized the former fugitive) this one too bit the dust.

by Barbara Peterson, Daily Beast |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Scotty Moore (December, 1931 – June, 2016)

The passing of original Elvis Presley guitarist Scotty Moore this week, despite living to the ripe old age of 84, nevertheless sent shockwaves across the rock ‘n’ roll community already still mourning the deaths of several of its heroes this year.

The loss of Moore, who continued to produce, record and perform right up until before he fell ill with symptoms not exactly revealed at press time, sent a special kind of jolt through the hearts of music fans the world over, because his guitar playing has served as one of the key building blocks of the modern rock infrastructure since that fateful day after the Fourth of July in 1954 when he cut his first session with Elvis at Sun Records with producer Sam Phillips.

The King may have given rock music its swagger in the mid-’50s, but Moore gave the young genre its sense of danger with his sharp, piercing variation of the Chet Atkins style that influenced him on such priceless early Presley cuts as “That’s All Right”, “Mystery Train”, “Long Tall Sally” and that indelible walking riff on “Jailhouse Rock”.

Elvis and his swinging hips might have made millions of teenage girls swoon in the ’50s, but just as many fell in love with the pure rawness and simplicity of Moore’s guitar playing, including some of the most renowned guitar players of the last 60 years: Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, George Harrison, Ron Wood, Rick Nielsen, Mark Knopfler, Alvin Lee, Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Ramone, the list goes on forever.

“All I wanted to do in the world was to be able to play and sound like that,” Richards once famously stated. “Everyone else wanted to be Elvis; I wanted to be Scotty.”

Listen to the reckless abandon he uses to back Presley in his second performance at the Louisiana Hayride on August 20, 1955, and you will clearly recognize what Keef and countless others heard on the outset, that unbridled purity that made Moore’s tiny little amp sound like Neil Young’s great wall of Fenders. The strings on his Gibson ES-295 were lightning in a bottle, the spark that ignited the biggest youth movement in American history.

by Ron Hart, Observer Culture |  Read more:

Image: Scotty Moore

AI, Apple and Google

In the last couple of years, magic started happening in AI. Techniques started working, or started working much better, and new techniques have appeared, especially around machine learning ('ML'), and when those were applied to some long-standing and important use cases we started getting dramatically better results. For example, the error rates for image recognition, speech recognition and natural language processing have collapsed to close to human rates, at least on some measurements.

So you can say to your phone: 'show me pictures of my dog at the beach' and a speech recognition system turns the audio into text, natural language processing takes the text, works out that this is a photo query and hands it off to your photo app, and your photo app, which has used ML systems to tag your photos with ‘dog’ and 'beach’, runs a database query and shows you the tagged images. Magic.

There are really two things going on here - you’re using voice to fill in a dialogue box for a query, and that dialogue box can run queries that might not have been possible before. Both of these are enabled by machine learning, but they’re built quite separately, and indeed the most interesting part is not the voice but the query. In fact, the important structural change behind being able to ask for ‘Pictures with dogs at the beach’ is not that the computer can find it but that the computer has worked out, itself, how to find it. You give it a million pictures labelled ‘this has a dog in it’ and a million labelled ‘this doesn’t have a dog’ and it works out how to work out what a dog looks like. Now, try that with ‘customers in this data set who were about to churn’, or ‘this network had a security breach’, or ‘stories that people read and shared a lot’. Then try it without labels ('unsupervised' rather than 'supervised' learning).

Today you would spend hours or weeks in data analysis tools looking for the right criteria to find these, and you’d need people doing that work - sorting and resorting that Excel table and eyeballing for the weird result, metaphorically speaking, but with a million rows and a thousand columns. Machine learning offers the promise that a lot of very large and very boring analyses of data can be automated - not just running the search, but working out what the search should be to find the result you want.

That is, the eye-catching demos of speech interfaces or image recognition are just the most visible demos of the underlying techniques, but those have much broader applications - you can also apply them to a keyboard, a music recommendation system, a network security model or a self-driving car. Maybe.

This is clearly a fundamental change for Google. Narrowly, image and speech recognition mean that it will be able to understand questions better and index audio, images and video better. But more importantly, it will answer questions better, and answer questions that it could never really answer before at all. Hence, aswe saw at Google IO, the company is being recentred on these techniques. And of course, all of these techniques will be used in different ways to varying degrees for different use cases, just as AlphaGo uses a range of different techniques. The thing that gets the attention is ‘Google Assistant - a front-end using voice and analysis of your behaviour to try both to capture questions better and address some questions before they’re asked. But that's just the tip of the spear - the real change is in the quality of understanding of the corpus of data that Google has gathered, and in the kind of queries that Google will be able to answer in all sorts of different products. That's really just at the very beginning right now.

The same applies in different ways to Microsoft, which (having missed mobile entirely) is creating cloud-based tools to allow developers to build their own applications on these techniques, and for Facebook (what is the newsfeed if not a machine learning application?), and indeed for IBM. Anyone who handles lots of data for money, or helps other people do it, will change, and there will be a whole bunch of new companies created around this.

On the other hand, while we have magic we do not have HAL 9000 - we do not have a system that is close to human intelligence (so-called 'general AI'). Nor really do we have a good theory as to what that would mean - whether human intelligence is the sum of techniques and ideas we already have, but more, or whether there is something else. Rather, we have a bunch of tools that need to be built and linked together. I can ask Google or Siri to show me pictures of my dog on a beach because Google and Apple have linked together tools to do that, but I can't ask it to book me a restaurant unless they've added an API integration with Opentable. This is the fundamental challenge for Siri, Google Assistant or any chat bot (as I discussed here) - what can you ask?

This takes us to a whole class of jokes often made about what does and does not count as AI in the first place:

• "Is that AI or just a bunch of IF statements?"
• "Every time we figure out a piece of it [AI], it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation
• "AI is whatever isn't been done yet"

These jokes reflect two issues. The first is that it's not totally apparent that human intelligence itself is actually more than 'a bunch of IF statements', of a few different kinds and at very large scale, at least at a conceptual level. But the second is that this movement from magic to banality is a feature of all technology and all computing, and doesn't mean that it's not working but that it is. That is, technology is in a sense anything that hasn't been working for very long. We don't call electricity technology, nor a washing machine a robot, and you could replace "is that AI or just computation?" with "is that technology or just engineering?"

I think a foundational point here is Eric Raymond's rule that a computer should 'never ask the user for any information that it can autodetect, copy, or deduce' - especially, here, deduce. One way to see the whole development of computing over the past 50 years is as removing questions that a computer needed to ask, and adding new questions that it could ask. Lots of those things didn't necessarily look like questions as they're presented to the user, but they were, and computers don't ask them anymore:

• Where do you want to save this file?
• Do you want to defragment your hard disk?
• What interrupt should your sound card use?
• Do you want to quit this application?
• Which photos do you want to delete to save space?
• Which of these 10 search criteria do you want to fill in to run a web search?
• What's the PIN for your phone?
• What kind of memory do you want to run this program in?
• What's the right way to spell that word?
• What number is this page?
• Which of your friends' updates do you want to see? 

It strikes me sometimes, as a reader of very old science fiction, that scifi did indeed mostly miss computing, but it talked a lot about 'automatic'. If you look at that list, none of the items really look like 'AI' (though some might well use it in future), but a lot of them are 'automatic'. And that's what any 'AI' short of HAL 9000 really is - the automatic pilot, the automatic spell checker, the automatic hardware configuration, the automatic image search or voice recogniser, the automatic restaurant-booker or cab-caller... They're all clerical work your computer doesn't make you do anymore, because it gained the intelligence, artificially, to do them for you.

This takes me to Apple.

Apple has been making computers that ask you fewer questions since 1984, and people have been complaining about that for just as long - one user's question is another user's free choice (something you can see clearly in the contrasts between iOS and Android today). Steve Jobs once said that the interface for iDVD should just have one button: ‘BURN’. It launched Data Detectors in 1997 - a framework that tried to look at text and extract structured data in a helpful way - appointments, phone numbers or addresses. Today you'd use AI techniques to get there, so was that AI? Or a 'bunch of IF statements'? Is there a canonical list of algorithm that count as AI? Does it matter? To a user who can tap on a number to dial instead of copy & pasting, is that a meaningful question?

by Benedict Evans |  Read more:

Image: via:

Clark Little
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Everything You Know About Surviving Rip Currents Is Wrong (Maybe)

Conventional wisdom says that Jamie MacMahan was doing everything right when, about a decade ago, he found himself caught in a rip current while swimming off the coast of Monterey, California. Rips flow seaward, out to deep water, so beach access signs across the country advise swimmers to paddle parallel to the beach to escape them. The savage, dread-inducing flows kill more beachgoers each year than any other threat and MacMahan, a professor of oceanography and a strong swimmer, was following the “swim parallel” gospel, paddling steadily. But as he thrashed in the cold Pacific, the rip refused to relent. “I thought, ‘That’s interesting,’” MacMahan says.

MacMahan, it’s important to note, had done this to himself. A rip current expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, he had volunteered to subject himself to the rip for a safety video the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization was filming. With plenty of experience, he wasn’t in serious danger. “But as I was swimming parallel to the shore, left and right, I noticed that it was easier to swim one direction more than the other,” MacMahan says. The safety guidelines he was promoting—the life-saving advice we tell the millions of Americans who flock to the beach each summer—he thought, could be wrong.

In the last five years, MacMahan’s research has upended the field of rip current studies. Since that initial experience in Monterey, he’s used GPS devices to meticulously track nearshore currents in the U.S., England, and France, and has jumped into rips around the world. Rips can form on any beach, MacMahan says, and swimmers usually don’t know a rip’s present until they’re in its clutches. Panicked victims often try to swim directly back to shore—against the powerful offshore flow. Swimmers familiar with rips might try swimming parallel to escape. But MacMahan’s research suggests doing the unthinkable: giving in and going with the flow.

Eighty to 90 percent of rips MacMahan has studied flow in huge circles, from the shallows, out through the breakers and back again, every few minutes. A swimmer stuck in a circulating rip has no way of knowing which way the current is flowing. That means that by swimming parallel to the shore—something signs at nearly every popular beach in the country advise—the swimmer has a 50/50 chance of paddling against the deadly current.

“If you can relax—and it’s a long time, for maybe three minutes—you’re generally going to float back to the beach,” MacMahan says.

It’s a radically simple finding—one that challenges our primordial instincts and everything we think we know about beach safety. The discovery, which MacMahan published in Marine Geology in 2010 and calls rip current “circulation,” is still contentious six years later. His peer-reviewed findings have dramatically changed the way Australia tells its citizens how to survive this menace. But at home, MacMahan’s work is considerably more controversial and his research has opened a gaping divide in the sleepy rip current field.

“The reaction to Jamie’s findings has polarized the community,” says Rob Brander, a prominent rip researcher. For some leaders in the field, MacMahan’s recommendation to simply float through a rip current is, at best, an idea to be ignored and dismissed; at worst, though, the advice is potentially deadly.

by David Ferry, Outside |  Read more:

Image: Todd Quackenbush/Unsplash

Jean-Luc Godard, Prénom Carmen, 1983
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Teen Created a Robot Lawyer App That Just Overturned 160,000 Parking Tickets

[ed. I can't vouch for this or its creator's true intentions (see below), but anything that's basically altruistic in our get rich quick, profit-driven world should get some kind of recognition.]

Got a bullshit parking ticket? Now you can appeal it in less than a minute. The new chatbot tool, DoNotPay, uses previously successful appeal letters to draw up a customized template, allowing users to avoid courts, legal fees, stress, and having to use a lawyer.

So far, the free app has overturned 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York. With a success rate of 64%, DoNotPay has appealed $4 million in parking fines in just two cities in only nine months of operation. In 2014, New York City collected $546 million in revenue from parking tickets.

Stanford freshman Joshua Bowder created the app after spending an exorbitant amount of time crafting his own appeals for parking tickets. He read thousands of pages of documents related to parking tickets released under the Freedom of Information Act and consulted a traffic lawyer. Then, using PHP and Javascript, he created a conversation algorithm that aggregates keywords, pronouns, and word order. Like many chatbots, Browder’s app becomes more intelligent each time it is used.

DoNotPay is not commercial and Josh plans to keep it that way. In an interview with Anti-Media, Josh said he was driven by a sense of social justice and a desire to help vulnerable people who are exploited by policing-for-profit schemes. Josh also wants to use technology like artificial intelligence for humanitarian purposes.

He finds it “irritating and disappointing” that bots are usually created for vapid commercial uses. In reality, he says, algorithmic intelligence and chatbots are a “humanitarian goldmine.”

DoNotPay also assists with delayed or canceled flights, payment-protection insurance (PPI) claims, and even legally disclosing an HIV-positive health status.

Josh describes his creation as “the first robot lawyer.” People are describing him as the “Robin Hood of the Internet.”

“If it is one day possible for any citizen to get the same standard of legal representation as a billionaire,” Browder says,“how can that not be a good thing?”

by Jake Anderson, Anti-Media |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Government Under Review

Like many good arguments, this one started over a stiff drink. An Earl Grey MarTEAni, to be precise.

In January 2010, Nathalie Louissaint, a New York City health inspector, visited Pegu Club, an upscale cocktail bar. She watched as the bartender mixed the signature tea-infused drink. Borrowing a technique from the nineteenth century, the bartender added raw egg whites, which give the drink a silky body and an alluring layer of foam. Louissaint decided that the raw egg warning on the menu was insufficient and cited the bar for a health code violation.

The citation outraged many. Paul Clarke, a Seattle-based food writer, was perplexed by the department’s rigid position on raw eggs, writing on the website Serious Eats, “Does this mean the health department will begin targeting restaurants that serve raw eggs in a Caesar salad?” Others decried the health department’s seeming mandate to use pasteurized eggs, but those, said Pegu Club owner Audrey Sanders, “impart this really funky wet-diaper nose.” One bartender, who insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisal, told the New York Times, “If they make it illegal to serve egg-white drinks, that would be Hurricane Katrina for us.” In response to the uproar, the health department overruled the inspector.

This confusion is no outlier. Nationwide, implementation of health codes varies dramatically across inspectors and health departments. In Seattle, two inspectors observed Caesar salad dressing prepared with raw (unpasteurized) eggs in the same restaurant, but disagreed about whether to cite a violation. Contrary to New York City health department guidelines, New York State’s website doesn’t mention menu warnings, instead admonishing, “Consider using commercially pasteurized eggs in recipes that use eggs or consider removing the item from your menu.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) document that 80 percent of restaurants nonetheless use unpasteurized eggs.

When it comes down to it, the marTEAni fight is not so much about eggs as it is an endemic challenge across government. From airport security checkpoints and routine traffic stops to home construction permits, citizens and government interact frequently through individual officials. At times, the decisions of these frontline government officials can seem disturbingly arbitrary.

A bar can always take a drink off its menu, but sometimes the arbitrariness can have more serious impact. In 2013 the Administrative Conference of the United States reported that administrative law judges grant Social Security Disability claims at rates ranging from 4 percent to 98 percent. In asylum adjudication, New York immigration judges vary in their grant rates from 6 percent to 91 percent when cases are assigned irrespective of merits, leading to a denunciation of the process as “refugee roulette.” A study of Illinois child-welfare case managers found substantial differences in decisions to place children in foster care based on allegations of abuse or neglect. It is no wonder that scholars assail the child-welfare system as a form of institutional “chaos, oppression, and tragic ineffectiveness.” In nuclear safety, violation-detection rates can vary from less than 10 percent to more than 60 percent depending on the inspector. The regulatory requirements are so complex that one nuclear official conceded, “Nondetection is endemic.”

Inconsistency breeds mistrust. A city analyst in New York described the city’s restaurant inspection system as “arbitrary” and concluded, “If we can’t trust the Health Department to provide real scientific data . . . then we can’t trust any agency.” Businesses feel this too. An owner of a fast-food chain with many locations across Washington state observed sharp differences in how individual restaurants were scored and how the same restaurant was scored over time, despite his chain’s uniform food-safety protocol: “We always thought we were doing a great job in putting safety first; but it turns out in many, if not most, cases, inspectors were either not being as thorough as they could have been or were only verbally coaching” rather than writing violations. One Virginia bartender, responding to the Pegu Club episode, said, “I’m not 100 percent sure what the law is.” At a staff meeting in King County, Washington, health inspectors expressed similar misgivings. They hoped for better consistency in order to build “credibility and trust.”

The pervasiveness of these challenges leads some to point fingers, some to throw up their hands, and others to bemoan government altogether. If you are on the right, blame public sector unions, civil service protections, or listless bureaucrats. If you are on the left, blame underfunding, deregulation, or the lack of federal oversight. Governments generally cannot resolve these underlying ideological battles, but they must find ways to address the consistency of frontline decision making nonetheless. The question is, how?

The Peer Review Experiment

One possible solution is peer review. If frontline government officials could review and deliberate over each other’s work, the quality and consistency of decision making might improve. While isolated examples of such peer review exist, we have regrettably little systematic evidence of peer review’s effectiveness in the public sector. The reason is understandable. Due to perceived costs, logistics, and ethical and political concerns, rigorous experiments can be difficult to design and implement when it comes to regulation.

Beginning in 2014, we designed a randomized, controlled trial to test the effectiveness of peer review with the food safety staff of King County, where Seattle is located. Half of the inspection staff was randomly assigned to engage in peer review. For sixteen weeks, these inspectors spent one day per week with a randomly selected fellow inspector, taking turns conducting inspections and independently scoring health code violations. We then used information from these peer inspections to identify and train for violations that cause the most confusion.

The results were remarkable.We discovered that, when observing identical conditions in restaurants, health inspectors disagreed nearly 60 percent of the time.

by Daniel E. Ho and Becky Elias, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image: Even More Bureaucrats (1993) by Synnøve Anker Aurdal / photo by Bosc d'Anjou

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Amazon Has Swallowed Downtown Seattle

Walk down Seventh Avenue in downtown Seattle and you can't miss them: three gigantic spheres resembling melted-together Milk Duds rising in the shadow of Amazon’s new 500-foot-tall office tower. The architectural oddity has already become a tourist attraction and social media phenomenon. Passersby snap photographs and watch construction crews attach glass panes to the steel frames. Images stream through Instagram and Twitter.

When they open in 2018, the 100-foot-tall orbs—Amazon calls them Biospheres—will host more than 300 plant species from around the world, creating what the company sees as the workplace of the future. Amazonians will be able to break from their daily labors to walk amid the greenery along suspension bridges and climb into meeting spaces resembling bird nests perched in mature trees, where the company expects them to brainstorm—and perhaps even invent the next billion-dollar opportunity.

Amazon's new headquarters was designed to project a forward-thinking company eager to help employees be more productive, creative and happy by providing a connection to nature. But the most trend-setting and appealing feature of the new complex is most likely its location: plopped between glass and steel high-rises on a busy street in downtown Seattle where food trucks are abundant, apartments are within walking distance and Happy Hour greets employees at quitting time.

Over the years, founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos has made clear his disdain for the free lunches, massages and other perks commonplace in the suburban enclaves of Google, Apple and Facebook. His big advantage in the amenities arms race is a commitment to preserving an urban campus, no matter how big his company gets.

Other tech companies are following his lead by squeezing new offices into cities where millennials prefer to live. LinkedIn consolidated staff scattered around San Francisco into a 26-story tower in March. Salesforce.com will be the anchor tenant in a 61-story skyscraper a few miles away that will be the city's tallest upon completion in 2018. Uber has plans for a new headquarters in San Francisco's Mission Bay. Industrial-age leviathans are doing it, too. General Electric is shifting from suburban Connecticut to Boston, while McDonald's is moving from Oak Brook, Illinois, to Chicago.

Amazon's is the most ambitious gambit of them all. When its spheres and three surrounding towers are completed, the company will have 10 million square feet of office space in Seattle, more than 15 percent of the city's inventory, on a campus that occupies more than 10 square blocks. That will provide space for Amazon to more than double in size, to 50,000 Seattle workers in the next decade. "How big can Amazon get and stay in Seattle—that’s what they’re trying to find out," says Glenn Kelman, founder and CEO of online real estate company Redfin. "Can you create a massive company in the middle of a city?"

Amazon's commitment to Seattle began long before the spheres were conceived. In 2010, the company moved to South Lake Union from leased space it was outgrowing in an old medical building. Amazon leased retail space on the ground floor of its office buildings to hand-picked bars, restaurants and coffee shops, speeding the neighborhood's transformation from a hodgepodge of car dealerships and second-hand stores into a vibrant business district where people could work, live and hang out.

Veteran fine-dining restaurateur Tom Douglas was among the businesses lured by a growing concentration of well-paid tech workers. His survey of Amazon workers indicated they wanted cheap burgers and beer, which encouraged him to break from his traditional model and open the Brave Horse Tavern with a wide assortment of local brews, pub fare and long tables for family-style seating. "I'm sure glad we did that survey, because we might not have gone with this concept otherwise," Douglas said. "At the time, none of us realized how big and fast Amazon would grow." The economic ripples from Amazon have since pushed beyond burger joints and cafes. Yellow cranes mark the skyline where new office towers, hotels and luxury apartments are rising.

Just six years after relocating, Amazon has outgrown South Lake Union and is marching toward the city's urban core. The spheres, designed by architecture firm NBBJ, are Amazon's boldest statement yet in the first project it's building from the ground up.

They were inspired by Amazon research indicating that a key thing missing from typical work environments is a link to the natural world, said John Schoettler, the company's global real estate director. The challenge was creating an environment conducive to plants without being hot and muggy like a greenhouse; the spheres had to be comfortable for humans.

A staff horticulturist scoured the globe for species that can thrive in a cool, dry environment. Many of the plants are endangered species, meaning that the spheres double as a conservation project. Schoettler said the design was chosen to be an architectural focal point in the city, similar to the iconic Space Needle. "We wanted to create a place employees would be proud of and proud to bring their families," he said.

Inevitably, the company's growing presence is making it a scapegoat for common urban woes such as traffic jams and rising rents. New, luxury, one-bedroom apartments packed with amenities that appeal to young urban tech workers fetch upwards of $4,000 a month, putting them out of reach of the Starbucks barista.

To some long-time Seattleites, the new South Lake Union feels sterile, like an open-air mall. Wide sidewalks are devoid of cigarette butts and shattered beer bottles. Street people banging bongos and strumming acoustic guitars with mangy dogs in tow, a common sight in Seattle’s retail and financial districts, are conspicuously absent. South Lake Union has become "a dormitory for Amazon and now Facebook and Google," said Jeff Reifman, a tech consultant.

by Spence Soper and Peter Robison, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Photographer: David Ryder/Bloomberg

Coming Soon: Gut Bacteria That Actually Cure Your Disease

Everybody's talking about gut bacteria.

Pick a disease or disorder, and somebody, somewhere, has said that a probiotic supplement—an over-the-counter, unregulated pill usually filled with a single strain of friendly gut bacteria—might cure it, whether it’s cancer, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or a yeast infection.

But there’s very little evidence that probiotic supplements do any good. “There’s a lot of promise here but not a lot of proof yet,” said Cliff McDonald, associate director for science at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion.

That promise has built a $34 billion market as of last year, according to a new report from BCC Research, $6 billion of which was in supplements. The biggest share of the probiotics market was in food and beverages, at $24.8 billion.

Seres Therapeutics, a microbiome-based biopharmaceutical company in Cambridge, Mass., is developing a pill, subject to a rigorous approval process under the Food and Drug Administration, to tackle recurrent Clostridium difficile. (The digestive system's microbiome is the community of healthy gut bacteria that normally reside in the body.) Half a million people a year are infected with C. diff in the U.S., the CDC estimates, with 29,000 annual deaths related to the diarrheic bacterium. More than 65 percent of C. diff infections involve exposure in a health-care facility, according to a 2015 study, creating more than $4.8 billion in excess health-care costs at acute-care facilities alone.

Seres aims to put the science behind a proven treatment of recurrent C. diff, fecal transplants, in a pill, which wouldn't require a colonoscopy. Like probiotic supplements, it’s a gut bacteria product. Unlike the supplements, by the time it’s available it will have gone through the FDA wringer. It will contain about 50 strains of bacteria proven effective in treating C. diff and will require a doctor's prescription.

Recurrent C. diff is an obvious entry point for Seres, said Chief Executive Officer Roger Pomerantz. “We asked, what is the lowest-hanging fruit?” But it’s hardly the end. The company has built a microbiome library of 14,000 strains of human bacteria it hopes will help it treat a range of diseases, eventually without needing feces at all.

Seres has embarked on the research with some pretty lofty goals, including finding treatments for obesity, liver disease, and cancer. It has partnerships with Massachusetts General Hospital, the Mayo Clinic, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and other respected medical institutions.

“We will figure out exactly what’s wrong with the microbiome, design a drug, and then pull the organisms out with our library, never touching a human donation,” Pomerantz said.

For nearly two thousand years, doctors have looked to this unlikeliest of places for medicine. One of the earliest documented applications is from the fourth-century Chinese medical doctor Ge Hong, whose “yellow soup” recipe to treat diarrhea included a healthy person’s dried or fermented feces. Sixteen hundred years later, in 1958, patients infected with C. diff received the first known human fecal transplants.

Today the effectiveness of fecal transplants (formally known as fecal microbiota transplants) to treat recurrent C. diff is supported by a long list of studies, with researchers attributing the results to the restoration of the microbiome. OpenBiome, a nonprofit stool bank, shipped 1,828 treatments in 2014, a number that ballooned to 7,140 treatments in 2015 and looks to be eclipsed this year, with 4,323 treatments shipped to its clinical partners through May 31. And these numbers don’t take into account the transplants performed through directed fecal donations.

Seres's lead product candidate, SER-109, will treat recurrent C. diff with four capsules taken orally instead of with transplants. While fecal matter is the raw material for the pills, the final product consists only of the spores necessary to treat the infection, which will have been extracted and purified.

by Deena Shanker, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Dr. Kari Lounatmaa/Getty Images

Manolo Millares (Spanish, 1926-1972), Cuadro III, 1959.
via:

via:

The Undermining of American Charity

Most Americans have never heard of donor-advised funds and would be surprised to learn that, measured in donated dollars, the second-most-popular “charity” in 2015 (just behind the United Way) was not the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, or Harvard or other universities. It was Fidelity Charitable, an organization created and serviced by Fidelity Investments for the purpose of holding charitable donations. Fidelity Charitable acts as a middleman, attracting its customers’ charitable donations and managing them in separate client accounts. Money in such donor-advised funds is invested and held until the clients give instructions (“advise”) about distributions to operating charities.

Because of a 1991 IRS ruling obtained by Fidelity (and similar rulings obtained by other commercially sponsored DAFs), clients get the same tax benefits when they transfer property to their donor-advised funds that they would get by making outright contributions to a museum, soup kitchen, university, or any other federally recognized charity. But no deadline is imposed for the eventual distribution of these funds to an operating charity. If a donor fails to distribute the account during her lifetime, she can pass on the privilege of making distributions to her children or grandchildren or anyone else she chooses. The effect of these rules is that assets that have been given the tax benefits of charitable donations can be held in a DAF for decades or even centuries, all the while earning management fees for the financial institutions managing the funds, and producing no social value.

Although Fidelity was the first financial institution to create this type of charitable middleman, Schwab and Vanguard soon thereafter created Schwab Charitable and Vanguard Charitable—and together these organizations have all made it to The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual top ten charities in overall donations (squeezing out more traditional charities like the American Cancer Society). Goldman Sachs, T. Rowe Price, Raymond James, and many others have also created donor-advised funds, making charitable giving a growing part of the financial world’s business model for attracting and servicing its clientele.

This business plan has been highly successful. Many billions of dollars have been drawn into the orbit of charitable middlemen, and there is no end to their growth in sight. According to the National Philanthropic Trust, annual contributions to DAFs hit an all-time high of $19.66 billion in 2014. The increase in contributions, combined with a rising stock market, “drove total donor-advised fund assets above $70 billion for the first time.” The leader, Fidelity Charitable, has had particularly strong growth and it is widely expected that in 2016 it will surpass the United Way and receive more donations than any other charity in the country.

One of the most surprising aspects of the rise of DAFs is that donors participate in this $70 billion industry without any legal protections regarding their control over the distribution of the assets held in DAFs. When donors open donor-advised fund accounts they do so because they expect to have continuing control over their donations. This expectation is reinforced by marketing materials that allude to control. For example, one leading DAF sponsor, National Philanthropic Trust, describes DAFs as follows:

An easy way to think about a donor-advised fund is like a charitable savings account: a donor contributes to the fund as frequently as they like and then recommends grants to their favorite charity when they are ready.

Despite such references to control, legal agreements between donors and DAF sponsors in fact provide that the donor cedes all legal control over donated funds. Although a donor is given the right to make recommendations (sometimes referred to as “advisory privileges”), this is not much of a “right.” DAF sponsors are legally allowed to ignore donors’ advice about the disposition of their DAF funds.

For most donors, this will have little practical effect; donors will advise and the DAFsponsor will follow the donor’s advice. This is because the business model of commercial DAF sponsors is to profit from the fees they secure and not from appropriating donor funds. However, not all donors have been so lucky. In one case, aDAF sponsor went bankrupt and the donated funds were seized to pay its creditors. In another case, the DAF sponsor used donated funds to pay its employees large salaries, hold a celebrity golf tournament, and reimburse the cost of litigation when a dissatisfied donor sued. In both cases, courts ruled against the donors and upheld the rights of the fund sponsor to exert full legal control over DAF funds.

The larger question raised by this arrangement is, why would donors and DAFsponsors enter into legal agreements that fail to reflect their expectations? Who benefits? Who is harmed?

by Lewis B. Cullman and Ray Madoff, NYRB | Read more:
Image: New York City, 1977; by Susan Meiselas

For Some at Wimbledon, Nike’s Dress Just Doesn’t Do It

For the female tennis players wearing Nike at Wimbledon, one style did not fit all.

Instead of the typical outfits Nike offers most players who are paid to wear its apparel, the company issued a loosely hanging, short dress. It was white, in accordance with Wimbledon’s dress code. But it was not exactly ideal for competitive tennis, according to several players. Wardrobe changes have ensued.

“When I was serving, it was coming up, and I felt like the dress was just everywhere,” Rebecca Peterson of Sweden said. “In general, it’s quite simple, the dress, but it was flying everywhere.”

Peterson played with a long-sleeved shirt over her dress to hold the dress somewhat in place.

Katie Boulter improvised by tying a headband around her waist to serve as a belt, which held the fabric somewhat more in place. Lucie Hradecka wore leggings underneath the dress, effectively turning it into a shirt.

Hradecka’s coach, Jiri Fencl, said Hradecka had felt cold in the cool English summer with only the light dress on, and had expressed some concerns about playing in the dress instead of her normal, more form-fitting competition apparel, especially given her two-handed groundstrokes and the crouching she does in doubles.

“That was the first dress she ever tried on in practice,” Fencl said. “She saw it was very short and that it flies, so she was trying it. Sometimes, with two hands you can grab the dress if it flies a lot. I think every player was like, ‘Hmm, that’s short.’ She was worried about it in doubles, too, because when you get up from I-formation, you can grab it.”

This was not what Nike had in mind. In a news release distributed before the tournament, the company touted the dress: “NikeCourt female team athletes will compete in the one-piece NikeCourt Premier Slam Dress, which represents a departure from the skirt-top combinations worn in previous Grand Slams.” The release said: “Despite the traditional aesthetic, the dress features modern design elements such as power pleats and racerback construction, which work in tandem to enable the athlete’s movement.”

But once put to the test during qualifying last week, the dress quickly proved problematic. It was largely shapeless, with long fabric hanging freely in the front and back. It most resembled the “babydoll” style, developed in 1942 by the New York designer Sylvia Pedlar to cope with wartime fabric shortages — and is more commonly associated with lingerie and sleepwear than athletic performance.

by Ben Rothenberg,  NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Cal Sport Media, via Associated Press

The Weird Redemption of SF’s Most Reviled Tech Bro

[ed. Pretty much confirms everything you've read or heard about Silicon Valley's approach (or cluelessness) to solving large social issues. See also: The Moral Economy of Tech]

In the hours before Greg Gopman lost control of his image — going from “killing it” to the city’s most reviled tech bro — he was munching on a Show Dog on Market Street. Maple sausage, egg, grilled onions: his fave go-to in San Francisco, his fave city in the world. It was December 10, 2013, and he gazed out the window of the gourmet sausage shop, flanked by the startups that had recently accepted a city tax break to open on a stretch of hustlers, homeless people, and payday loan shops. Nowhere were the city’s two polarized income brackets — sleek tech wealth and a shambling underclass — in closer contact.

Gopman belonged squarely in the first group, as the 29-year-old founder and outgoing CEO of AngelHack, a hackathon host and startup incubator that hooked up young developers with connections and, sometimes, money. Gopman had already had some brush-ups with the homeless. When he first moved across the country in 2011 to San Francisco as “such a nobody,” he’d actually sought them out. One of his initial startup ideas had the working name Herobi (a play on “Be a hero”), inciting people to pay forward good deeds. Gopman would post photos on Facebook of cash he’d tucked in homeless people’s cups, hoping it would catch on. (“I learned people don’t actually get inspired by you posting good acts on Facebook. It looks pretty bad.”) He’d also doled out leftover pastries from AngelHack’s early hackathons to folks on the street.

Yet as he now passed the homeless on his daily walk to the office, a growing sense of #WTF set in. One morning, a bedraggled lady had kicked him in the shin. Another time, a guy had flashed him a fistful of heroin needles, which really grossed him out. That day at Show Dogs, he spotted a guy whose pants were falling down past his bare buttocks.

Gopman got out his iPhone, opened Facebook, and started to type.

Maybe it was inevitable that in 2013, as San Francisco was mired in Peak Backlash against its influx of highly paid newcomers, a techie would take the fall.

Decades of NIMBY housing policy in a cramped city meant there was no room for the tens of thousands of incoming tech employees unless someone with less money was kicked out. Protestors circled a Google bus. They stood in front of Twitter carrying a coffin labeled “Affordable Housing.” In another two months, a dude in a dive bar would famously rip a pair of Google Glasses off a woman’s face.

Gopman had dismissed the headlines as the work of a few zealots, and wasn’t thinking about potential opposition as he typed out his thoughts. After all, his instincts had transformed him, in just two years, from an ambitious 27-year-old dude who’d driven out from Miami Beach into a minor Silicon Valley kingmaker — an anointer of princelings. In South Florida he had been itching to bust through the glass ceiling he’d reached: paying himself more than $100K while selling repaired cellphones on eBay. In San Francisco he’d built up AngelHack from a DIY event at Adobe’s headquarters to a global hackathon juggernaut with himself as its public face, enough of a pulpit for him to have Mark Cuban in his contacts and many thankful founders who credited him with their lucky break. In a TEDx talk just a few months earlier, Gopman had said, “Nice guys finish first. The startup world is small.”

Right there in the hot dog joint Gopman hit publish on his Facebook post:

That evening, friends came over to his Soma Grand 15th floor pad to welcome him back to town. Drinking. Smoking. Gopman checked his phone, and saw that his post had set off a comment war on Facebook. Some responders quipped that tech bros like him were ruining the city. Other tech people shared his grievances. His profile was public — he used it as a self-promotional tool — and Gopman had never gotten so much traction on a post. He’d always wanted to be a thought leader, and here he was, leading a raucous debate. “I was like fuck yeah!”

So Gopman typed out a new boozy message, going even deeper than the last:

“The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, the lower part of society keep to themselves. They sell small trinkets, beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way. They realize it’s a privilege to be in the civilized part of town and view themselves as guests. And that’s okay.

In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city…You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us. It’s a burden and a liability having them so close to us. Believe me, if they added the smallest iota of value I’d consider thinking different, but the crazy toothless lady who kicks everyone that gets too close to her cardboard box hasn’t made anyone’s life better in a while.”

Gopman went to bed, happy with the attention. The next morning, a text message pinged.

Dude, you got Valleywagged. And it’s bad.

Valleywag licked its lips: “Happy Holidays: Startup CEO Complains San Francisco Is Full of Human Trash.” A photo showed Gopman at his most duck-face douchebag, modeling a hackathon’s giveaway sunglasses. The cyber pile-on began in the story comments and spilled onto social media. Some folks took the opportunity to announce that Gopman had always struck them as arrogant. “Silicon Valley groupie.” “Pretentious Florida party boy.” “Eugenicist.” The Huffington Post’s headline joined the metastasizing media coverage: “AngelHack CEO’s Attack On Homeless May Be Biggest Social Media Blunder Of 2013.”

Bevan Dufty, the city’s homeless czar at the time, had his own view of Gopman’s post. “What would we call it?” he muses. “‘Bromlessness.’ They’re like the bros and they’re just aimless and concerned about homelessness — affecting them.” He chuckles.

For San Francisco, Gopman’s rant was the delicious schadenfreude that the city was thirsting for: the unwitting techie who wandered into this class opera, shooting off his mouth to reveal a slimy, elitist core.

Gopman hovered over his laptop. “Pure. Adrenaline. Terror,” he now recalls. “I’m like going through and deleting and reading shit. It was the worst fucking moment of my life.” Gopman dashed off an apology. A media friend gave it some tweaks: it came across sounding corporate and hollow. Gopman wondered where the bottom was.(...)

The day after Gopman got Valleywagged, a city bureaucrat from the mayor’s office emailed him, wanting to talk about how to “leverage the potential of the tech community for good in our city.” A PR company asked him to face off with a homeless-helping reverend at a church: “a chance to build some bridges in a city that’s under some pressure right now, and, a chance for you to help shape your story/message as well.” Gopman interpreted all these offers to mean: save your skin, and hook us up with your rich contacts.

A Facebook DM from a city economic development worker named Ellyn Parker (unsanctioned by City Hall, she says) struck him as more sincere. They met on the roof of Soma Grand while Parker explained the web of nonprofits and city departments that spends $241 million a year on the city’s more than 6,000 homeless residents, a population count that has stayed nearly unchanged for 25 years. “He was in education and humbling mode,” Parker says. She suggested that maybe he could create a database to track each homeless person as they get services from various entities. Maybe he could help a nonprofit that was getting evicted.

Gopman may well have been the lightning rod that took the highest-volt hazing of all the tech victors of San Francisco’s boom. But he wasn’t going to follow anyone else’s idea on how to dig his way out. Gopman decided he had to go Full Gopman: some amalgam of save-the-world hubris and save-my-ass savvy, and an indefatigable belief in the startup mentality curing all.

by Lauren Smiley, Backchannel |  Read more:

Image: Molly Matalon and uncredited

Zephy

[ed. Uncanny resemblance.]
Images: George Booth and markk

Dame Fortune

It is not difficult to be wise occasionally and by chance,
but it is difficult to be wise assiduously and by choice.
—Joseph Joubert

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

__Cormac McCarthy

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins posts the odds on the chance encounter and then fertile union of sperm and egg in my mother’s womb at a number outnumbering the sand grains of Arabia. Long odds, but longer still because “the lottery starts before we are conceived. Your parents had to meet, and the conception of each was as improbable as your own.” Work back the thread of lucky breaks through all the antecedents animal, vegetable, and mineral that are the sum of mankind’s time on earth, and wherefrom consciousness and pulse if not at the hand of the bountiful blind woman, Dame Fortune?

The incalculable run of luck I’m unable to comprehend as a number; I hear it as a sound. Thirty-five years ago in a labor room at New York Hospital, the sonogram of my wife’s belly picking up the heartbeat of my youngest child on final approach to the light of the sun. He’d come a long way. Atoms wandering in the abyss, then in the womb for the nine months during which a human embryo ascends through a sequence touching on over 3 billion years of evolutionary change, up from the shore of a prehistoric sea, traveling as amphibian, fish, bird, reptile, lettuce leaf, and mammal to a room with a view of the Queensboro Bridge. I heard the sound then, hear it now, as the chance at a lifetime shaped from the dust of a star.

Albert Einstein didn’t wish to believe that God “plays dice with the world,” but the equations posted on the blackboards of twentieth-century physics—among them Einstein’s own proof of wave-particle duality, Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Max Planck’s quantum mechanics—suggest that chance is a force of nature as fundamental as gravity. So does the consensus of opinion in this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. Except for sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin, who believed there is no such thing as fortune and chance, that “all events are governed by the secret counsel of God,” the witnesses called to testify on the pages that follow regard Dame Fortune as a presence to be reckoned with, visible to the eye of history, glimpsed across the bridges of memory and metaphor in the words of the occasionally wise.

Heisenberg conceived of all facts as momentary perceptions of probability; so did Titus Lucretius Carus, the Roman poet who in the first century BC composed the 7,400 lines of lyric but unrhymed verse On the Nature of Things infused with the thought of Greek philosopher Epicurus, who in the third century BC taught that the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else. No afterlife, no divine retribution or reward, nothing other than a vast turmoil of creation and destruction, the elementary particles of matter (“the celestial seeds of things”) constantly in motion, colliding and combining in the inexhaustible wonder of everything that exists—sun and moon, the wind and the rain, “bright wheat and lush trees, and the human race, and the species of beasts.” (...)

At the age of eighty-one I still can’t say whether the vessel of my life is on or off course, but I do know that its design was none of my own doing. Born in San Francisco of sound mind and body to loving parents in a neighborhood under the protection of money, I understood before I was ten that I’d been dealt favorable cards; I also knew that the playing of them was another game of chance. The realization I count as a stroke of fortune (the happiest of the lot) because when and if I can bear it in mind it allows me to live in the freedom of the present and hold at bay the fear of death.

Looking for a how or where or why I came up with the idea, I see my grandfather at a card table constituted as he was in 1943, a Falstaffian figure then in his sixties, white-haired, round-bellied, and boisterous, fond of quoting the wise fools in Shakespeare’s forests. A captain of infantry in World War I, Roger D. Lapham had gone missing in the battle of Château-Thierry, after five days given up for lost and presumed dead, his family so notified and his personal effects shipped home to New York. Six weeks later he was found in a barn drinking calvados with the French peasant who had dragged him, unconscious and half-buried in mud, from the womb of a shell hole. Grandfather’s leg being broken, he was unable to walk, but he had emerged from the shadow of the valley of death believing it was better to be lucky than good. Before the war he conducted himself in the manner of a sober, self-denying Calvinist; he returned from France as a practicing pagan, reckless in pursuit of pleasure, ardent in his passion for gambling. At the bridge table he liked to bid his hand without looking at his cards, and between the ages of eight and ten I was often drawn into the game as his partner because nobody else in the family would play with him unless favorably situated as his opponent. His trusting to luck the family deemed immoral; I thought it deserved a medal.

by Lewis H. Lapham, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: The Finding of Moses, by Paolo Veronese

photo: markk

Fashioning Cast-Iron Pans for Today’s Cooks

American cooks have frequent affairs with spiralizers, dry fryers and other shiny new toys. But they also have a deep, lasting relationship with one of the oldest cooking tools in the kitchen: the cast-iron skillet.

“There aren’t many things in modern life that are passed down through generations and remain both beautiful and useful,” said Ronni Lundy, a historian of the food and agriculture of Appalachia, where cooking in a well-seasoned heirloom skillet is a touchstone of heritage.

It’s true that my grandmother’s china is gathering dust. Your great-grandfather’s gold watch (admit it) lies unused in a drawer. But my parents’ 50-year-old cast-iron pans, with their glassine black cooking surfaces, are the inheritance I crave.

“I have two that are just coming along now,” Ms. Lundy said in the nurturing tone usually reserved for children, sourdough starters and rosebushes.

Well-seasoned cast-iron pans are the new broken-in jeans: proof of both good taste and hard use. In just the last five years, three new companies promising to make improved cast-iron skillets with a combination of traditional handwork and modern technology have begun production.

And cast-iron collecting has taken off. Buyers seek rare skillets like the Erie Spider, the Griswold Slant and the Wapak Chickenfoot; an elusive Sidney No. 8 is listed on eBay for $1,500.

With cast iron’s mystique comes mystery. The responsibility of seasoning a pan can be daunting; the idea of a pan that is never washed with soap can be alarming.

But it is worth overcoming these obstacles because a well-used, well-seasoned cast-iron skillet is truly an all-purpose pan: nonstick enough to cook eggs, hot enough to sear anything and completely functional for roasting, stewing, simmering and baking.

“You can caramelize a crust in cast iron in a way that would never happen in a sheet pan,” said Charlotte Druckman, who has just written a book on cast-iron baking.

The nonstick surface of a cast-iron pan is achieved with natural ingredients like flaxseed oil, lard and time, not with synthetic coatings like Teflon or Thermolon.

For all these reasons, even cooks without a tradition of cooking in cast iron now want to start one. Finex in Portland, Ore., Borough Furnace in Syracuse and the not-yet-settled Field Company all got initial funding on Kickstarter from hundreds of small backers, who eventually receive pans in return for their sponsorship.

The Field Company, run by Chris and Stephen Muscarella (neither of whom is trained in metallurgy, casting or cooking), raised more than $1.6 million; their first pans will ship soon from a foundry they adapted in the Midwest. Finex is making 200 skillets a day and barely keeping up with demand from the United States and abroad, according to Mike Whitehead, a founder.

The Finex 10-inch skillet sells for $165; the Borough Furnace equivalent for $280; the Field skillet for about $100.

Why would anyone pay nearly $300 for a modern “artisanal” cast-iron skillet when a perfectly functional equivalent, made in South Pittsburg, Tenn., by the venerable Lodge company, costs $16 at Walmart?

The answer lies in the craftsmanship of the past. The cast-iron pots — skillets, spiders (which sit in the embers of a fire) and Dutch ovens — made in the United States from the 18th century through the first half of the 20th, were different from today’s: lighter, thinner and with a smoother cooking surface.

The Muscarella brothers grew up cooking with their mother’s old cast-iron pans — far from being collectors’ items, rusty skillets used to be offered two for a quarter at barn sales — and wondered why the pans they bought when they went out on their own were so comparatively unwieldy.

To find out why, “we went down a rabbit hole,” said Chris Muscarella, and came out determined to produce new pans in the old style. Modern all-machine casting, he said, cannot produce pans that are as thin and smooth.

by Julia Moskin, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Cole Wilson