Wednesday, July 6, 2016
Modern China is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre
The first thing I should do, of course, is explain what I mean by “chaohuan,” which we are rendering in English as “ultra-unreal.” The literal meaning of “chaohuan” is “surpassing the unreal” or “surpassing the imaginary.” It is a word that a friend and I made up about a year ago during a conversation about contemporary Chinese reality. Not long after, I used the word in remarks I made at a conference in Hainan province. The conference was organized by the Institute of Literature at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and recently the institute’s journal, the influential Literary Review, published an article that uses our coinage in its title. The word “ultra-unreal” is young; it’s a newborn baby. I confidently submit, however, that it is going to live a long, healthy life. China’s been pregnant with the word for at least 30 years. Maybe 50 years. Maybe even 100 years.
So, what has happened in China over the last 100 years? Well, let’s leave aside the more distant past and limit ourselves to just the last decade, during which much of Chinese reality has seemed like a hallucination. Some of the things that have actually happened have surpassed novels and movies in their inventiveness. Let me give a few minor examples that reveal something of the current Chinese reality.
There is a major anti-corruption campaign underway in China as I speak, and all the examples I am about to give were made public by the official Chinese media. In China, corrupt officials like to keep huge amounts of cash in their homes. In the past, investigators might find a stash of one million or ten million, but these days such an amount would be nothing. Early in 2015, a department head at the National Development and Reform Commission was investigated for corruption. In his apartment they found more cash than they could count by hand. They got currency-counting machines so they could zip right through the counting, but they burned out four of the machines before they got a final tally, which was more than 200 million Renminbi, which is about 31 million US dollars.
Second example. Guo Boxiong is a retired general in the People’s Liberation Army. When Guo was investigated for corruption, they found so much cash in his home that they couldn’t even try to count it with a currency-counting machine. They had to weigh it by the ton. They needed a truck to haul it all away.
Guo was a very high-ranking military official, but my next example of somebody amassing enough ill-gotten cash to fill a truck involves a man who was just a low-ranking, very ordinary government official. When this guy was on the run he pretended to be a farmer going to market with a truck load of vegetables. When inspectors pulled back the canvas cover over the back of his truck, they didn’t find cabbage, they found millions in cash. All this cash comes out of the collection plate that is passed among the congregation of ordinary people who come to worship at the altar of power. The glint from all the gold paid in bribes sheds some light on China’s very peculiar reality.
There is nothing you can’t accomplish if you hold power. A deputy chief justice in the Hebei provincial supreme court met a sudden, unfortunate end in a traffic accident. Four women came forward to argue over his corpse. All four were legally married to the late deputy chief justice; he had secured for himself four different marriage licenses, all perfectly legal. This had been going on for many years, but not one of the four women knew of the others’ existence. How had he managed to keep the fact that he had four wives a secret? I write fiction, and I tell you truthfully, I can’t imagine how this could be done. This man was one of the top judicial officers in a provincial supreme court, but he treated the law like a joke.
When events occur that exceed our imagination, the world can start to seem unreal. The most shocking tale is, of course, that of Wang Lijun. In 2012, Wang Lijun was the vice-mayor of Chongqing and head of the city’s public security bureau. He ran into trouble with his colleague Bo Xilai, the secretary of the Chongqing branch of the Chinese Communist Party. Wang was a man of considerable power, but when he was on the run, he decided that the safest place for him in all of China was in the city of Chengdu in the consulate of the United States. What does it tell us when the director of the public security bureau in one of the most important municipalities in China decides that the safest place for him is inside a foreign consulate? And his decision did, in fact, save his life. Rumor has it that by the time Wang reached the US consulate in Chengdu, armed police from Chongqing had already followed him there and were preparing to storm the consulate and seize him. Wang reportedly had information that would incriminate Bo Xilai, and therefore the Chongqing armed police wanted to stop Wang and protect Bo. But the Sichuan provincial armed police, which was doing the bidding of the Party Central Committee, had also arrived in Chengdu. These entirely separate detachments of armed police were in a very tense standoff that seemed ready to become violent at any moment. Finally, the Sichuan provincial armed police escorted Wang Lijun away from the consulate. It turns out the Party Central Committee was after Bo Xilai, and it wanted Wang Lijun because he could incriminate Bo. Eventually Wang did testify against Bo. Wang was sentenced to 15 years in prison whereas Bo got life. This all really happened. It is not from a novel. It is not from a movie. But it is wilder than any movie.
These examples I’ve mentioned might seem to have nothing to do with ordinary folk, who are just spectators to these goings on, but there is actually a very close connection between these stories about the abuse of power and ordinary people. As you all know, in China food safety is a matter of urgent concern for ordinary people. There are toxins in our rice; there are toxins in our vegetables; there are toxins in our pork. There are toxins in our baby formula. Restaurants cut costs by recovering and reusing cooking oil that has been used and thrown out, and this oil has toxins in it too. Air pollution is out of control; everybody knows about the smog in Beijing. China faces a mountain of such difficulties, an Everest of difficulties, and they are the direct result of the misuse or abuse of power. Yet, despite these difficulties, China has been rising. Over the past 30 years the speed of development in China and the scale of China’s accomplishments have been every bit as extraordinary as the magnitude of the problems China faces. A few years ago China’s GDP surpassed that of Japan to become the second highest in the world, and many people say that before too long China’s GDP will surpass that of the United States, becoming first in the world. No one even remembers when China passed Great Britain, France, or Italy, and when China passed Germany it made only a faint impression. Before we really knew what was happening, China became the world leader in high-speed rail, the world leader in highway construction, the world leader in number of cars on the road, and the world leader in cell phone usage. China now has the world’s largest economy. All this is “ultra-unreal” too. Everything is happening in China at great speed, and this speed brings with it all sorts of problems. This is a phenomenon captured in a very old Chinese saying in the Daodejing: “Good fortune is that wherein disaster lurks. Disaster is that whereon good fortune depends.”* (...)
There are several points that distinguish China’s “ultra-unreal” from the “magical real” of Latin America. First, the history is different. Chinese civilization has an unbroken history of five thousand years. There is no other civilization like it on the planet. This in itself is “ultra-unreal.” At the heart of China’s civilization has always been someone with absolute power. In China, the way in which rulers come to power and wield power ensures that their power reaches everywhere and encompasses everything. In “The Eye of Power,” Foucault discusses the mechanisms by which power surveils and controls. His reference to the “eye” of power is apt. In Chinese history huge eyes of power appear again and again. In some sense, Chinese history is a monster covered with multiple eyes of power. Latin American “magic realism” is concerned with the eye of power too, of course, but it is a much smaller eye.
Second, the sense of time is different. China has changed from being a country that moved too slowly into a country that moves too fast—so fast it’s as if China has escaped gravity. Whether it is the economy, fashion, popular culture, entertainment, or sports, in just thirty years China has gone through what took several hundred years in the West. In a very short time, China has made extraordinary achievements. It is as if time in China has been compressed. This compression not only folds into the current moment a few hundred years of Western history but also several thousand years of Chinese history. Because time is going too fast, China’s cities are now strange things. They all look exactly alike, as if they were a series of exact computer copies. The transformation of China’s villages is equally astounding. Thirty years ago a lot of China’s villages looked pretty much just like they did in antiquity. These days in many of China’s villages there are only old folks and children. Or villages have become ghost towns, which are a little spooky to visit.
So, what has happened in China over the last 100 years? Well, let’s leave aside the more distant past and limit ourselves to just the last decade, during which much of Chinese reality has seemed like a hallucination. Some of the things that have actually happened have surpassed novels and movies in their inventiveness. Let me give a few minor examples that reveal something of the current Chinese reality.
There is a major anti-corruption campaign underway in China as I speak, and all the examples I am about to give were made public by the official Chinese media. In China, corrupt officials like to keep huge amounts of cash in their homes. In the past, investigators might find a stash of one million or ten million, but these days such an amount would be nothing. Early in 2015, a department head at the National Development and Reform Commission was investigated for corruption. In his apartment they found more cash than they could count by hand. They got currency-counting machines so they could zip right through the counting, but they burned out four of the machines before they got a final tally, which was more than 200 million Renminbi, which is about 31 million US dollars.Second example. Guo Boxiong is a retired general in the People’s Liberation Army. When Guo was investigated for corruption, they found so much cash in his home that they couldn’t even try to count it with a currency-counting machine. They had to weigh it by the ton. They needed a truck to haul it all away.
Guo was a very high-ranking military official, but my next example of somebody amassing enough ill-gotten cash to fill a truck involves a man who was just a low-ranking, very ordinary government official. When this guy was on the run he pretended to be a farmer going to market with a truck load of vegetables. When inspectors pulled back the canvas cover over the back of his truck, they didn’t find cabbage, they found millions in cash. All this cash comes out of the collection plate that is passed among the congregation of ordinary people who come to worship at the altar of power. The glint from all the gold paid in bribes sheds some light on China’s very peculiar reality.
There is nothing you can’t accomplish if you hold power. A deputy chief justice in the Hebei provincial supreme court met a sudden, unfortunate end in a traffic accident. Four women came forward to argue over his corpse. All four were legally married to the late deputy chief justice; he had secured for himself four different marriage licenses, all perfectly legal. This had been going on for many years, but not one of the four women knew of the others’ existence. How had he managed to keep the fact that he had four wives a secret? I write fiction, and I tell you truthfully, I can’t imagine how this could be done. This man was one of the top judicial officers in a provincial supreme court, but he treated the law like a joke.
When events occur that exceed our imagination, the world can start to seem unreal. The most shocking tale is, of course, that of Wang Lijun. In 2012, Wang Lijun was the vice-mayor of Chongqing and head of the city’s public security bureau. He ran into trouble with his colleague Bo Xilai, the secretary of the Chongqing branch of the Chinese Communist Party. Wang was a man of considerable power, but when he was on the run, he decided that the safest place for him in all of China was in the city of Chengdu in the consulate of the United States. What does it tell us when the director of the public security bureau in one of the most important municipalities in China decides that the safest place for him is inside a foreign consulate? And his decision did, in fact, save his life. Rumor has it that by the time Wang reached the US consulate in Chengdu, armed police from Chongqing had already followed him there and were preparing to storm the consulate and seize him. Wang reportedly had information that would incriminate Bo Xilai, and therefore the Chongqing armed police wanted to stop Wang and protect Bo. But the Sichuan provincial armed police, which was doing the bidding of the Party Central Committee, had also arrived in Chengdu. These entirely separate detachments of armed police were in a very tense standoff that seemed ready to become violent at any moment. Finally, the Sichuan provincial armed police escorted Wang Lijun away from the consulate. It turns out the Party Central Committee was after Bo Xilai, and it wanted Wang Lijun because he could incriminate Bo. Eventually Wang did testify against Bo. Wang was sentenced to 15 years in prison whereas Bo got life. This all really happened. It is not from a novel. It is not from a movie. But it is wilder than any movie.
These examples I’ve mentioned might seem to have nothing to do with ordinary folk, who are just spectators to these goings on, but there is actually a very close connection between these stories about the abuse of power and ordinary people. As you all know, in China food safety is a matter of urgent concern for ordinary people. There are toxins in our rice; there are toxins in our vegetables; there are toxins in our pork. There are toxins in our baby formula. Restaurants cut costs by recovering and reusing cooking oil that has been used and thrown out, and this oil has toxins in it too. Air pollution is out of control; everybody knows about the smog in Beijing. China faces a mountain of such difficulties, an Everest of difficulties, and they are the direct result of the misuse or abuse of power. Yet, despite these difficulties, China has been rising. Over the past 30 years the speed of development in China and the scale of China’s accomplishments have been every bit as extraordinary as the magnitude of the problems China faces. A few years ago China’s GDP surpassed that of Japan to become the second highest in the world, and many people say that before too long China’s GDP will surpass that of the United States, becoming first in the world. No one even remembers when China passed Great Britain, France, or Italy, and when China passed Germany it made only a faint impression. Before we really knew what was happening, China became the world leader in high-speed rail, the world leader in highway construction, the world leader in number of cars on the road, and the world leader in cell phone usage. China now has the world’s largest economy. All this is “ultra-unreal” too. Everything is happening in China at great speed, and this speed brings with it all sorts of problems. This is a phenomenon captured in a very old Chinese saying in the Daodejing: “Good fortune is that wherein disaster lurks. Disaster is that whereon good fortune depends.”* (...)
There are several points that distinguish China’s “ultra-unreal” from the “magical real” of Latin America. First, the history is different. Chinese civilization has an unbroken history of five thousand years. There is no other civilization like it on the planet. This in itself is “ultra-unreal.” At the heart of China’s civilization has always been someone with absolute power. In China, the way in which rulers come to power and wield power ensures that their power reaches everywhere and encompasses everything. In “The Eye of Power,” Foucault discusses the mechanisms by which power surveils and controls. His reference to the “eye” of power is apt. In Chinese history huge eyes of power appear again and again. In some sense, Chinese history is a monster covered with multiple eyes of power. Latin American “magic realism” is concerned with the eye of power too, of course, but it is a much smaller eye.
Second, the sense of time is different. China has changed from being a country that moved too slowly into a country that moves too fast—so fast it’s as if China has escaped gravity. Whether it is the economy, fashion, popular culture, entertainment, or sports, in just thirty years China has gone through what took several hundred years in the West. In a very short time, China has made extraordinary achievements. It is as if time in China has been compressed. This compression not only folds into the current moment a few hundred years of Western history but also several thousand years of Chinese history. Because time is going too fast, China’s cities are now strange things. They all look exactly alike, as if they were a series of exact computer copies. The transformation of China’s villages is equally astounding. Thirty years ago a lot of China’s villages looked pretty much just like they did in antiquity. These days in many of China’s villages there are only old folks and children. Or villages have become ghost towns, which are a little spooky to visit.
by Ning Ken, Literary Hub | Read more:
Image: via:
Dear Bill Cunningham
[ed. See also: Bill Cunningham’s Proustian Eye]
At an auction in December 2010, I acquired a double-breasted men’s mink stroller coat owned by Edward Gorey. It was an unlikely purchase: I hadn’t intended to bid on anything, had never been to a proper auction before, and had very little money to my name.
I was there to write something about the once-in-a-lifetime auction of Gorey’s personal hoard of fur coats—twenty-one in all. I was a Gorey fan, not, outside a first edition or two, a collector. But that morning, I had deposited a meager paycheck from adjunct professing, and I began to feel the emergence of a dream. I could own the coat. Why couldn’t I at least try? I could at least pretend to be that person who wins precious objects at auction.
Things had been rough for me that week. My bathroom pipes had burst and flooded my apartment, and my husband, my dog, and I had been living in a windowless, airless, basement hotel room of the Holiday Inn on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn with the sound of the building’s central-air ducts constantly humming. Just days before, I had been walking my dog at nine on a Monday night and accidentally stumbled into an attempted break-in and rape. I had a gun in my face and my life threatened. I was told I would be killed.
The auction, the idea of writing about it, was meant to be an escape—a day-killer when the days were too long, from teaching and hotel living, and I was trying to recover my nerves. The auction was a small, strange room of unpredictability. There weren’t more than a dozen souls registered to bid; it was also live online. The room was sparse, some cases for the books, hangers and racks for the coats, and chairs for bidders. It felt a good deal less rich than I’d imagined, which only fueled the idea I might have a chance to win. And I did win, I won the last coat, due to a fluke, two coats had been switched and they had to redo the bidding, and by then, the room had taken pity on me and my paddle. So began my relationship with the magical acquisition.
It was a strange thing to have. It didn’t change my luck for long—I’ve always had tremendous bad luck—but it did change my attitude. The coat became a doorway to friendships, to stories, to further dreams. I took it to the ballet with a friend, I took it to parties, I took it to dinners. I probably have more than thirty photographs of distinguished writers wearing the Gorey fur—a few more and it could be a book. A couple times, I received e-mails telling me it changed a life to have put it on. I wondered if I could learn more about it.
I looked extensively online for a picture of Edward Gorey wearing my coat. I looked through books about Gorey for a picture of him in the coat. I looked for the style of coat in his surreal illustrations of the Victorians and Edwardians, perhaps as evidence he’d used it as a model. And it was during this time I began to dream another idea—silly, really—that I would write to Bill Cunningham, the late street-style photographer and New York Times fashion reporter. He would, I decided, unlock the mysteries of my fur. In my daydreams, Cunningham had a file in one of his many cabinets—a file comprising thousands of photos of Edward Gorey, who was known, before he moved mostly to Cape Cod, to stroll around New York City in his fur coats, jeans, and white Converse. Certainly, I thought, Cunningham in his obsessed thoroughness had caught view of Gorey many times. Perhaps he could verify that Gorey wore this particular fur.
There’s something similar and sad about Gorey and Cunningham, something that drew me to them. They were both men who, as many now speculate, were either closeted gay men, repressed, or asexual. They both lived alone. They were both Yankee New Englanders who didn’t fit the mold. They both ignored contemporary fashion and wore something nearly like a uniform: Cunningham had his French janitor’s blue jacket; Gorey, his jeans, white sneaks, and furs. Both were singularly obsessed with the worlds they helped to define. Cunningham was the Nancy Drew of both women’s and men’s fashion, solving the mystery of its twists and turns: he uncovered the narrative through-line, and therefore something about the time and the era and people and the streets. Gorey, in his illustrations and books, invented a world that’s both familiar and not, an uneasy upending of traditional values, propriety, and order. They were both prolific.
It was more than a year later, in July 2012, when I finally wrote to Bill, sending a notecard and a copy of the piece I wrote for the Daily about the acquisition of my new coat. I asked if he had any photographs of Gorey in his archives. I knew Cunningham’s memory was incredible, if not outright eidetic—he recalled clothes from decades past and could always identify which designers had ripped off other designers, and when.
A week later, I received his reply, written on a single piece of white printer paper, underneath a full-color five-by-seven image of a woman in ballet shoes jumping on the shore in front of a cloud-filled sky, wearing pink velvet and beads that float above her head and surround her like a jellyfish. Cunningham wrote in an elderly, unsteady hand, his script full of misspellings and missing words and an aversion to periods. The beauty of the letter, its flaws, makes me tear up nearly every time I read it.
At an auction in December 2010, I acquired a double-breasted men’s mink stroller coat owned by Edward Gorey. It was an unlikely purchase: I hadn’t intended to bid on anything, had never been to a proper auction before, and had very little money to my name.
I was there to write something about the once-in-a-lifetime auction of Gorey’s personal hoard of fur coats—twenty-one in all. I was a Gorey fan, not, outside a first edition or two, a collector. But that morning, I had deposited a meager paycheck from adjunct professing, and I began to feel the emergence of a dream. I could own the coat. Why couldn’t I at least try? I could at least pretend to be that person who wins precious objects at auction.
Things had been rough for me that week. My bathroom pipes had burst and flooded my apartment, and my husband, my dog, and I had been living in a windowless, airless, basement hotel room of the Holiday Inn on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn with the sound of the building’s central-air ducts constantly humming. Just days before, I had been walking my dog at nine on a Monday night and accidentally stumbled into an attempted break-in and rape. I had a gun in my face and my life threatened. I was told I would be killed.The auction, the idea of writing about it, was meant to be an escape—a day-killer when the days were too long, from teaching and hotel living, and I was trying to recover my nerves. The auction was a small, strange room of unpredictability. There weren’t more than a dozen souls registered to bid; it was also live online. The room was sparse, some cases for the books, hangers and racks for the coats, and chairs for bidders. It felt a good deal less rich than I’d imagined, which only fueled the idea I might have a chance to win. And I did win, I won the last coat, due to a fluke, two coats had been switched and they had to redo the bidding, and by then, the room had taken pity on me and my paddle. So began my relationship with the magical acquisition.
It was a strange thing to have. It didn’t change my luck for long—I’ve always had tremendous bad luck—but it did change my attitude. The coat became a doorway to friendships, to stories, to further dreams. I took it to the ballet with a friend, I took it to parties, I took it to dinners. I probably have more than thirty photographs of distinguished writers wearing the Gorey fur—a few more and it could be a book. A couple times, I received e-mails telling me it changed a life to have put it on. I wondered if I could learn more about it.
I looked extensively online for a picture of Edward Gorey wearing my coat. I looked through books about Gorey for a picture of him in the coat. I looked for the style of coat in his surreal illustrations of the Victorians and Edwardians, perhaps as evidence he’d used it as a model. And it was during this time I began to dream another idea—silly, really—that I would write to Bill Cunningham, the late street-style photographer and New York Times fashion reporter. He would, I decided, unlock the mysteries of my fur. In my daydreams, Cunningham had a file in one of his many cabinets—a file comprising thousands of photos of Edward Gorey, who was known, before he moved mostly to Cape Cod, to stroll around New York City in his fur coats, jeans, and white Converse. Certainly, I thought, Cunningham in his obsessed thoroughness had caught view of Gorey many times. Perhaps he could verify that Gorey wore this particular fur.
There’s something similar and sad about Gorey and Cunningham, something that drew me to them. They were both men who, as many now speculate, were either closeted gay men, repressed, or asexual. They both lived alone. They were both Yankee New Englanders who didn’t fit the mold. They both ignored contemporary fashion and wore something nearly like a uniform: Cunningham had his French janitor’s blue jacket; Gorey, his jeans, white sneaks, and furs. Both were singularly obsessed with the worlds they helped to define. Cunningham was the Nancy Drew of both women’s and men’s fashion, solving the mystery of its twists and turns: he uncovered the narrative through-line, and therefore something about the time and the era and people and the streets. Gorey, in his illustrations and books, invented a world that’s both familiar and not, an uneasy upending of traditional values, propriety, and order. They were both prolific.
It was more than a year later, in July 2012, when I finally wrote to Bill, sending a notecard and a copy of the piece I wrote for the Daily about the acquisition of my new coat. I asked if he had any photographs of Gorey in his archives. I knew Cunningham’s memory was incredible, if not outright eidetic—he recalled clothes from decades past and could always identify which designers had ripped off other designers, and when.
A week later, I received his reply, written on a single piece of white printer paper, underneath a full-color five-by-seven image of a woman in ballet shoes jumping on the shore in front of a cloud-filled sky, wearing pink velvet and beads that float above her head and surround her like a jellyfish. Cunningham wrote in an elderly, unsteady hand, his script full of misspellings and missing words and an aversion to periods. The beauty of the letter, its flaws, makes me tear up nearly every time I read it.
by A.N. Devers, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited
A Lap Around Indy
[ed. See also: The Guide for Indy 500 Virgins (don't be that guy)]
For one weekend every year, the corner of Georgetown Road and West 25th seems like the center of the universe, the perfect place for Tate to tell people about a world far beyond our own. Or try to tell them, for no one stops to have a conversation with him, not on the afternoon before the Indianapolis 500.
“I wouldn’t be here if y’all came to church,” Tate explains to no one in particular. He’s armed with a portable microphone and a street preacher’s shield of self-righteousness, holding his phone out before him as if he were trying to cast out a demon dispatched from the Verizon call center. This is how I find him, and it takes me a moment to realize what he’s doing: videotaping hecklers on the other side of a temporary fence. One of them is wearing a shirt with an arrow on it pointing up to his face, holding a sign that reads He wants to see boobies.
I can’t blame the goons, not entirely, not even the one with the bullhorn who attempts to trump Tate’s appeals by invocations that begin, If you believe in drink….This is Indy after all, and the corner of the Coke Lot is a perfect place to party and preach.
If the assumed association is not unwarranted, the Coke Lot is innocently named for the Coca Cola Bottling Plant that sits to the west of the open field. By the time the race starts, it is surrounded on three sides by thousands of cars, trucks, RVs, campers, and tents, a transient city dotted with the flags of state schools, sports teams, and, inevitably, the Stars and Bars. American flags, too. Lots of them. Patriotic displays are not in short supply at Indy. On race day, the crowd of more than 350,000 will be treated to God Bless America, America the Beautiful, the National Anthem, a tribute to Pearl Harbor veterans, a fly-over from two World War Two fighter planes, a subsequent fly-over by four jets, an enormous flag pulled behind a car that drives fast enough to keep it flapping around the 2 ½ mile track, an annual launch of innumerable red-white-and-blue balloons, and, my own favorite, the temporary release of a bald eagle. From where I was sitting, high atop the final turn, we strained unsuccessfully to see the chevron of wings but had to settle for the facsimile thereof on one of the four jumbotrons before us.
These tributes to Manifest Destiny are earnest and essentially staid, but the informal celebrations on the eve of the race have a temper and tang to them epitomized by one shirt I saw on Georgetown Road, the main drag at Indy. “Back to Back” it said on top, “World War Champs” on the bottom, with Old Glory in between.
Flags at Indy are worn as much as they are waved. A group of young men in matching red, white, and blue tanktops, all wearing sunglasses, popped up like a roving gang of post-teen patriots in search of Spring Break. Nearby, a rival gang broke into an impromptu chant of USA! USA! when a comely lass with a stars and stripes crop top sauntered by, chaperoned, alas, by her parents. In a 2014 article from the Indianapolis Star, helpfully titled “14 ways to survive the hedonism of the Coke lot,” the author appoints “Beware roaming packs of hooligans” as the pole sitter, with “Sex is unavoidable” coming in at number 11, ostensibly with an eye toward those handsome hooligans who are not above coupling. “When you have lost interest in watching people push over portable toilets with a sleeping sinner inside,” it commends, “take a stroll through the lot around 3 a.m.—you’ll be surprised at what you find.”
While I was asleep by that time, I can attest that the art of catcalling seemed to degenerate throughout the day. In the afternoon, it was still refined by good humor and clever gambit. I came across a troop of men dressed in clerical shirts, tab collars, and khaki shorts. But for the fact they all appeared middle-aged, watching their gamesome attempts to find converts among the co-eds made for a guilty pleasure. As night fell, however, such efforts began to shed ingenuity for brute efficiency, cleverness for candor. Long past midnight, they’d ceased to be passably menacing and, instead, were merely pathetic. “Come hang with us,” a young stumblebum cried out to a gaggle of girls so plaintively he might have been on the verge of tears.
It needn’t be said, but like Georgetown, seduction at Indy is a two way street. Just a stone’s throw from the corner contretemps of Tate and the unbelievers, a blue and white barber’s chair had been set up. A lady with a microphone beckoned, “You want to ride the chair,” and young women came forward, one-by-one, and mounted the chair, which was already reclined, as if for a shave. Instead of a razor, the would-be barber wielded two bottles, pouring them at once into an open mouth before the chair was spun to calls of encouragement, which grew whenever the passenger lifted her top. The episode concluded when the chair stopped and a girl staggered forth soon to be crowned, amid cheering, with a lei.
If it defies easy classification, the event appeared to be an advertisement for something called The Indy Blue Crew. The name is not, as I assumed, a subversive appropriation of the Blue Laws that are still in effect across Indiana, but instead describes a tailgating club that is attached to the Indianapolis Colts and occasionally colonizes other events in The Hoosier State. Notwithstanding one woman’s reaction to the spectacle—“I don’t like that”—the largest single-day sporting event in the world is a fine place to spread the good word of some group or, for that matter, turn a buck or two.
For one weekend every year, the corner of Georgetown Road and West 25th seems like the center of the universe, the perfect place for Tate to tell people about a world far beyond our own. Or try to tell them, for no one stops to have a conversation with him, not on the afternoon before the Indianapolis 500.
“I wouldn’t be here if y’all came to church,” Tate explains to no one in particular. He’s armed with a portable microphone and a street preacher’s shield of self-righteousness, holding his phone out before him as if he were trying to cast out a demon dispatched from the Verizon call center. This is how I find him, and it takes me a moment to realize what he’s doing: videotaping hecklers on the other side of a temporary fence. One of them is wearing a shirt with an arrow on it pointing up to his face, holding a sign that reads He wants to see boobies.
I can’t blame the goons, not entirely, not even the one with the bullhorn who attempts to trump Tate’s appeals by invocations that begin, If you believe in drink….This is Indy after all, and the corner of the Coke Lot is a perfect place to party and preach.If the assumed association is not unwarranted, the Coke Lot is innocently named for the Coca Cola Bottling Plant that sits to the west of the open field. By the time the race starts, it is surrounded on three sides by thousands of cars, trucks, RVs, campers, and tents, a transient city dotted with the flags of state schools, sports teams, and, inevitably, the Stars and Bars. American flags, too. Lots of them. Patriotic displays are not in short supply at Indy. On race day, the crowd of more than 350,000 will be treated to God Bless America, America the Beautiful, the National Anthem, a tribute to Pearl Harbor veterans, a fly-over from two World War Two fighter planes, a subsequent fly-over by four jets, an enormous flag pulled behind a car that drives fast enough to keep it flapping around the 2 ½ mile track, an annual launch of innumerable red-white-and-blue balloons, and, my own favorite, the temporary release of a bald eagle. From where I was sitting, high atop the final turn, we strained unsuccessfully to see the chevron of wings but had to settle for the facsimile thereof on one of the four jumbotrons before us.
These tributes to Manifest Destiny are earnest and essentially staid, but the informal celebrations on the eve of the race have a temper and tang to them epitomized by one shirt I saw on Georgetown Road, the main drag at Indy. “Back to Back” it said on top, “World War Champs” on the bottom, with Old Glory in between.
Flags at Indy are worn as much as they are waved. A group of young men in matching red, white, and blue tanktops, all wearing sunglasses, popped up like a roving gang of post-teen patriots in search of Spring Break. Nearby, a rival gang broke into an impromptu chant of USA! USA! when a comely lass with a stars and stripes crop top sauntered by, chaperoned, alas, by her parents. In a 2014 article from the Indianapolis Star, helpfully titled “14 ways to survive the hedonism of the Coke lot,” the author appoints “Beware roaming packs of hooligans” as the pole sitter, with “Sex is unavoidable” coming in at number 11, ostensibly with an eye toward those handsome hooligans who are not above coupling. “When you have lost interest in watching people push over portable toilets with a sleeping sinner inside,” it commends, “take a stroll through the lot around 3 a.m.—you’ll be surprised at what you find.”
While I was asleep by that time, I can attest that the art of catcalling seemed to degenerate throughout the day. In the afternoon, it was still refined by good humor and clever gambit. I came across a troop of men dressed in clerical shirts, tab collars, and khaki shorts. But for the fact they all appeared middle-aged, watching their gamesome attempts to find converts among the co-eds made for a guilty pleasure. As night fell, however, such efforts began to shed ingenuity for brute efficiency, cleverness for candor. Long past midnight, they’d ceased to be passably menacing and, instead, were merely pathetic. “Come hang with us,” a young stumblebum cried out to a gaggle of girls so plaintively he might have been on the verge of tears.
It needn’t be said, but like Georgetown, seduction at Indy is a two way street. Just a stone’s throw from the corner contretemps of Tate and the unbelievers, a blue and white barber’s chair had been set up. A lady with a microphone beckoned, “You want to ride the chair,” and young women came forward, one-by-one, and mounted the chair, which was already reclined, as if for a shave. Instead of a razor, the would-be barber wielded two bottles, pouring them at once into an open mouth before the chair was spun to calls of encouragement, which grew whenever the passenger lifted her top. The episode concluded when the chair stopped and a girl staggered forth soon to be crowned, amid cheering, with a lei.
If it defies easy classification, the event appeared to be an advertisement for something called The Indy Blue Crew. The name is not, as I assumed, a subversive appropriation of the Blue Laws that are still in effect across Indiana, but instead describes a tailgating club that is attached to the Indianapolis Colts and occasionally colonizes other events in The Hoosier State. Notwithstanding one woman’s reaction to the spectacle—“I don’t like that”—the largest single-day sporting event in the world is a fine place to spread the good word of some group or, for that matter, turn a buck or two.
by John Paul Rollert, Harper's | Read more:
Image: TJ Foreman
New Payday Options for Making Ends Meet
For decades, most American companies have paid their workers once every week or two, minimizing the administrative costs of frequent paydays and maximizing the interest the companies earn by keeping the money in the bank.
And for equally long, workers have complained about the unfairness of waiting for their paychecks.
But now, thanks in part to the gig economy, a small but growing number of employers and start-ups are testing ways to give employees faster access to their wages. A variety of options — some involving payroll cards, and others using A.T.M.s and other methods — have recently hit the market, permitting people to take home their pay as soon as they have earned it.
On one hand, this could be good news for people who live from paycheck to paycheck. If the trend catches on, it could reduce the demand for products like payday loans, which workers use when they run short of money, but which charge very high interest rates. On the other hand, the services that are providing on-demand wages charge fees every time a worker uses them, so there is a trade-off.
From the employer’s perspective, instant payment for a day’s work has the potential to motivate employees to work longer hours — after all, instant financial gratification is a powerful productivity incentive.
In the ride-sharing market, same-day earnings payouts moved rapidly from an experiment to an industry standard. In November, Lyft began offering its drivers the option of cashing out immediately instead of waiting for their weekly payday. More than a third of them have used the feature, which costs 50 cents a transfer, and Lyft has paid out $200 million, executives say.
Uber started testing a similar system in March, pushing drivers’ earnings to a prepaid debit card from GoBank. Last month, it made the option available to nearly all of its 450,000 active drivers in the United States.
Start-ups are also circling. DailyPay, a New York company that lets on-demand workers collect their earnings faster for fees of $1 to $1.50 a day, has enrolled thousands of drivers and delivery people.
“I’ve been surprised at how fast it caught on,” said Harry Campbell, a driver who writes about the industry on his blog, the Rideshare Guy. “It became a competitive advantage. Once Lyft had it, and it was really popular, Uber had to have it too.”
But gig services are a niche part of the job market. Fast cash has long been a perk for waiters, bartenders and other tipped workers. Most Americans draw their paychecks from companies with more rigid financial systems. In that market, there has been little incentive for change — until recently.
Even among those with steady jobs, financial insecurity is pervasive, and some employers are starting to look at how they can help. Giving raises is expensive. Giving people quicker access to their accrued earnings doesn’t have to be.
Eight months ago, Goodwill of Silicon Valley began testing a system that lets its workers use an A.T.M. near the company’s cafeteria to withdraw up to half of the wages that they have already earned from their next paycheck, to a limit of $500. It was an instant hit. More than half of Goodwill’s 300 eligible employees have used it at least once.
Michael Fox, the company’s chief executive, said he was initially skeptical but became a convert when he saw what a big difference the option made for some workers.
“When you have people living on the edge, very small things can cause a rapid acceleration into very bad conditions,” he said. “If you’re just $60 or $90 short, and can’t make a rent payment or buy medicine, it spirals. One little thing creates a huge disaster.”
Goodwill is using technology from PayActiv, a start-up in San Jose, Calif., that uses employers’ wage and hours information to estimate their employees’ earnings. For a fee of $5 per transaction — of which Goodwill pays half as a courtesy to its workers — PayActiv advances the cash. On payday, it recoups the money directly from the employer.
PayActiv’s founder, Safwan Shah, talks with a missionary zeal about the potential impact. “The biggest bank in this country is the bank of the employer, and two to three weeks of salary for most people is stuck there,” he said. “This is a corporate responsibility issue.”
Getting employers to view it that way, though, is an extremely hard sell. Frank Dombroski knows. He has been making the pitch for five years and is only just starting to see signs of momentum.
Mr. Dombroski’s company, FlexWage, of Mountainside, N.J., also advances employees part of their earned but unpaid wages, but unlike PayActiv, it doesn’t use its own money to fund the transactions — it pulls cash directly from employers’ coffers. That is the most financially sustainable approach, he says, but it appeals to only the most highly motivated employers.
“I would be lying if I didn’t say it’s been a struggle, but we kind of knew that going in,” he said.
He thinks the tide is starting to turn. A new partnership with ADP, a big provider of payroll services, has helped FlexWage get on the radar of bigger businesses. The company says it is finalizing deals with two employers that would double the 8,000 people currently using its system.
“There’s been so much attention to the high cost of short-term lending, like bank overdraft fees and payday loans, that employers understand a lot more clearly now the dire need,” Mr. Dombroski said. “We don’t have to convince them that there’s a problem any longer. Now we need to convince them there’s a solution.”
And for equally long, workers have complained about the unfairness of waiting for their paychecks.
But now, thanks in part to the gig economy, a small but growing number of employers and start-ups are testing ways to give employees faster access to their wages. A variety of options — some involving payroll cards, and others using A.T.M.s and other methods — have recently hit the market, permitting people to take home their pay as soon as they have earned it.
On one hand, this could be good news for people who live from paycheck to paycheck. If the trend catches on, it could reduce the demand for products like payday loans, which workers use when they run short of money, but which charge very high interest rates. On the other hand, the services that are providing on-demand wages charge fees every time a worker uses them, so there is a trade-off.From the employer’s perspective, instant payment for a day’s work has the potential to motivate employees to work longer hours — after all, instant financial gratification is a powerful productivity incentive.
In the ride-sharing market, same-day earnings payouts moved rapidly from an experiment to an industry standard. In November, Lyft began offering its drivers the option of cashing out immediately instead of waiting for their weekly payday. More than a third of them have used the feature, which costs 50 cents a transfer, and Lyft has paid out $200 million, executives say.
Uber started testing a similar system in March, pushing drivers’ earnings to a prepaid debit card from GoBank. Last month, it made the option available to nearly all of its 450,000 active drivers in the United States.
Start-ups are also circling. DailyPay, a New York company that lets on-demand workers collect their earnings faster for fees of $1 to $1.50 a day, has enrolled thousands of drivers and delivery people.
“I’ve been surprised at how fast it caught on,” said Harry Campbell, a driver who writes about the industry on his blog, the Rideshare Guy. “It became a competitive advantage. Once Lyft had it, and it was really popular, Uber had to have it too.”
But gig services are a niche part of the job market. Fast cash has long been a perk for waiters, bartenders and other tipped workers. Most Americans draw their paychecks from companies with more rigid financial systems. In that market, there has been little incentive for change — until recently.
Even among those with steady jobs, financial insecurity is pervasive, and some employers are starting to look at how they can help. Giving raises is expensive. Giving people quicker access to their accrued earnings doesn’t have to be.
Eight months ago, Goodwill of Silicon Valley began testing a system that lets its workers use an A.T.M. near the company’s cafeteria to withdraw up to half of the wages that they have already earned from their next paycheck, to a limit of $500. It was an instant hit. More than half of Goodwill’s 300 eligible employees have used it at least once.
Michael Fox, the company’s chief executive, said he was initially skeptical but became a convert when he saw what a big difference the option made for some workers.
“When you have people living on the edge, very small things can cause a rapid acceleration into very bad conditions,” he said. “If you’re just $60 or $90 short, and can’t make a rent payment or buy medicine, it spirals. One little thing creates a huge disaster.”
Goodwill is using technology from PayActiv, a start-up in San Jose, Calif., that uses employers’ wage and hours information to estimate their employees’ earnings. For a fee of $5 per transaction — of which Goodwill pays half as a courtesy to its workers — PayActiv advances the cash. On payday, it recoups the money directly from the employer.
PayActiv’s founder, Safwan Shah, talks with a missionary zeal about the potential impact. “The biggest bank in this country is the bank of the employer, and two to three weeks of salary for most people is stuck there,” he said. “This is a corporate responsibility issue.”
Getting employers to view it that way, though, is an extremely hard sell. Frank Dombroski knows. He has been making the pitch for five years and is only just starting to see signs of momentum.
Mr. Dombroski’s company, FlexWage, of Mountainside, N.J., also advances employees part of their earned but unpaid wages, but unlike PayActiv, it doesn’t use its own money to fund the transactions — it pulls cash directly from employers’ coffers. That is the most financially sustainable approach, he says, but it appeals to only the most highly motivated employers.
“I would be lying if I didn’t say it’s been a struggle, but we kind of knew that going in,” he said.
He thinks the tide is starting to turn. A new partnership with ADP, a big provider of payroll services, has helped FlexWage get on the radar of bigger businesses. The company says it is finalizing deals with two employers that would double the 8,000 people currently using its system.
“There’s been so much attention to the high cost of short-term lending, like bank overdraft fees and payday loans, that employers understand a lot more clearly now the dire need,” Mr. Dombroski said. “We don’t have to convince them that there’s a problem any longer. Now we need to convince them there’s a solution.”
by Stacy Cowley, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Andrew Burton for The New York Times
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
All the Greedy Young Abigail Fishers and Me
[ed. Follow-up to an earlier post: A Colorblind Constitution: What Abigail Fisher’s Affirmative Action Case Is Really About]
Years ago, I helped Abigail Fishers get into college in Texas. That was my job: I “tutored” entitled teenagers through the application process. Specifically, and ominously for my later life, I taught them to write a convincing personal essay—a task that generally requires identifying some insight, usually gained over some period of growth. And growth often depends on hardship, a thing that none of these 18-year-olds had experienced in a structural sense over the course of their white young lives. Because of the significant disconnect involved in this premise, I always ended up rewriting their essays in the end.
My students were white, and without exception. Their parents were paying me $450 per session, and this was Houston; of course they were white. The means were the essays, and the end was the assurance that the benefits of whiteness would continue to vest themselves even as Texas demographics and UT admissions practices began to put their lovely families in a bind.
Texas parents—as ability permits, and like parents throughout the country—pay good money to live in good school zones. These schools are “good” in a double and mutually reinforcing sense: they are academically vibrant, supportive, and competitive; they also draw from a wealthy population, which means most of the students are white. As Abigail Fisher’s case, a.k.a. Becky With the Bad Grades v. UT Austin, reminded us: the top 7 percent (formerly 10 percent) at all Texas high schools get admitted to UT’s flagship campus automatically. This means that a second-rate student at a first-rate school, a.k.a. an Abigail Fisher, does not automatically get in. This means that a portion of white kids don’t get the educational success those property taxes were supposed to pay for. The 10 percent policy is implicit discrimination against “good schools,” the party line goes.
Most of the UT student body gets in through the Top 10 rule. The rest—approximately 8 percent, the year Fisher applied—are admitted through a holistic evaluation process, which takes into account things like extracurriculars, leadership, personal essays (thus the $450), and race. This is the part of UT admissions policy that Fisher’s case was challenging. Note that it was easier for her (or the anti-affirmative-action zealot who bankrolled her) to take a margin of UT admissions to the Supreme Court than to envision a version of justice in which she had, along with 92 percent of admitted students, straight-up earned her way in.
Because UT Austin is a terrific place—the rare kind of school that radiates both capaciousness and prestige—it is the top choice for many Texas high school students, and its unique admissions policy carries a lot of weight. It is discussed ad nauseam during application season; however, the reasoning behind this policy—behind the 10 percent rule, behind affirmative action—is not. I figured that part out only after I left the state and saw how much about my previous surroundings had been determined by the fact that rich white people can still game the system simply by living—that they are still reaping the benefits of centuries of preferential access to everything that sets a person up for success.
Today, certain measures have been enacted to level the playing field. But, as the Abigails among us can’t seem to admit, the mere existence of these measures does not mean that the need for them has expired. White people remain uniquely able, in a monetary sense, to game the system. For a summer, at $150 an hour, I was paid to help.
And I did. The kids were sweet, and I knew how to elicit and identify whatever topic would make their voice speed up when they talked about it. We wrote about canoes capsizing at summer camp, about football injuries, about girlfriends freezing us out at youth group. For the most part, they got in where they wanted, and I worked a leisurely three hours a day, helping them cheat.
I’ve had a lot of relatively demeaning jobs in my life. I never thought I deserved better than any of them—first because I didn’t, and second, because a sense of entitlement means nothing without capital to back it up. I’ve waitressed in short shorts and cowboy boots. I’ve street-canvassed for recycling. When I was 16, I was paid minimum wage to participate in a reality TV show in Puerto Rico that included challenges like eating mayonnaise on camera with my hands tied behind my back.
This job—writing college essays for Abigail Fishers—was the only job I have ever been truly ashamed of, and I am so ashamed of it now that it hurts. I did it, too, for a particularly embarrassing reason: because it paid so well that I could keep my earning hours to a minimum, and for four months spend most of my time writing fiction so I could get into an MFA program. Once I did get in, my boyfriend started looking at me reproachfully when he came home from work and saw me sending invoices. “Stop doing this,” he said flatly, in the late afternoon one day.
The first time Abigail Fisher filed a Supreme Court case because she didn’t get into college, she was 18 and reaching. She had a 3.59 GPA, an 1180 SAT score. She had not cracked her high school’s top 10 percent, and so, by the book, she did not qualify for guaranteed admission to UT. But she deserved admission nonetheless, she believed, and primarily—it appears—because she wanted it. She had “dreamt of going to UT ever since the second grade,” she said, in a 2012 video. Her dad had gone there, and so had her sister, and so had “tons” of friends and family. “It was a tradition I wanted to continue,” she said. For Fisher, basic competence and a powerful sense of unexamined entitlement was admissions criteria enough.
Fisher’s temperament—this exact sort of greedy placidity—made her an ideal figurehead for Edward Blum, the University of Texas graduate (’73, hook ’em!) who is bankrolling her case. Blum, who is white, runs an organization called the Project on Fair Representation, which takes on the noble work of arranging legal representation to fight race-based policies aimed at combating inequity. Blum took the underlying, incorrect instinct that is latent in people like Fisher and turned it into the basis of a court case: Fisher went from a tautological belief (“I deserve to be admitted because I deserve to be admitted”) to a frankly insane one—that she deserved admission because she’d been discriminated against, and specifically, discriminated against for being white.
by Jia Tolentino, Jezebel | Read more:
Image: Jim Cooke
Years ago, I helped Abigail Fishers get into college in Texas. That was my job: I “tutored” entitled teenagers through the application process. Specifically, and ominously for my later life, I taught them to write a convincing personal essay—a task that generally requires identifying some insight, usually gained over some period of growth. And growth often depends on hardship, a thing that none of these 18-year-olds had experienced in a structural sense over the course of their white young lives. Because of the significant disconnect involved in this premise, I always ended up rewriting their essays in the end.
My students were white, and without exception. Their parents were paying me $450 per session, and this was Houston; of course they were white. The means were the essays, and the end was the assurance that the benefits of whiteness would continue to vest themselves even as Texas demographics and UT admissions practices began to put their lovely families in a bind.
Texas parents—as ability permits, and like parents throughout the country—pay good money to live in good school zones. These schools are “good” in a double and mutually reinforcing sense: they are academically vibrant, supportive, and competitive; they also draw from a wealthy population, which means most of the students are white. As Abigail Fisher’s case, a.k.a. Becky With the Bad Grades v. UT Austin, reminded us: the top 7 percent (formerly 10 percent) at all Texas high schools get admitted to UT’s flagship campus automatically. This means that a second-rate student at a first-rate school, a.k.a. an Abigail Fisher, does not automatically get in. This means that a portion of white kids don’t get the educational success those property taxes were supposed to pay for. The 10 percent policy is implicit discrimination against “good schools,” the party line goes.Most of the UT student body gets in through the Top 10 rule. The rest—approximately 8 percent, the year Fisher applied—are admitted through a holistic evaluation process, which takes into account things like extracurriculars, leadership, personal essays (thus the $450), and race. This is the part of UT admissions policy that Fisher’s case was challenging. Note that it was easier for her (or the anti-affirmative-action zealot who bankrolled her) to take a margin of UT admissions to the Supreme Court than to envision a version of justice in which she had, along with 92 percent of admitted students, straight-up earned her way in.
Because UT Austin is a terrific place—the rare kind of school that radiates both capaciousness and prestige—it is the top choice for many Texas high school students, and its unique admissions policy carries a lot of weight. It is discussed ad nauseam during application season; however, the reasoning behind this policy—behind the 10 percent rule, behind affirmative action—is not. I figured that part out only after I left the state and saw how much about my previous surroundings had been determined by the fact that rich white people can still game the system simply by living—that they are still reaping the benefits of centuries of preferential access to everything that sets a person up for success.
Today, certain measures have been enacted to level the playing field. But, as the Abigails among us can’t seem to admit, the mere existence of these measures does not mean that the need for them has expired. White people remain uniquely able, in a monetary sense, to game the system. For a summer, at $150 an hour, I was paid to help.
And I did. The kids were sweet, and I knew how to elicit and identify whatever topic would make their voice speed up when they talked about it. We wrote about canoes capsizing at summer camp, about football injuries, about girlfriends freezing us out at youth group. For the most part, they got in where they wanted, and I worked a leisurely three hours a day, helping them cheat.
I’ve had a lot of relatively demeaning jobs in my life. I never thought I deserved better than any of them—first because I didn’t, and second, because a sense of entitlement means nothing without capital to back it up. I’ve waitressed in short shorts and cowboy boots. I’ve street-canvassed for recycling. When I was 16, I was paid minimum wage to participate in a reality TV show in Puerto Rico that included challenges like eating mayonnaise on camera with my hands tied behind my back.
This job—writing college essays for Abigail Fishers—was the only job I have ever been truly ashamed of, and I am so ashamed of it now that it hurts. I did it, too, for a particularly embarrassing reason: because it paid so well that I could keep my earning hours to a minimum, and for four months spend most of my time writing fiction so I could get into an MFA program. Once I did get in, my boyfriend started looking at me reproachfully when he came home from work and saw me sending invoices. “Stop doing this,” he said flatly, in the late afternoon one day.
The first time Abigail Fisher filed a Supreme Court case because she didn’t get into college, she was 18 and reaching. She had a 3.59 GPA, an 1180 SAT score. She had not cracked her high school’s top 10 percent, and so, by the book, she did not qualify for guaranteed admission to UT. But she deserved admission nonetheless, she believed, and primarily—it appears—because she wanted it. She had “dreamt of going to UT ever since the second grade,” she said, in a 2012 video. Her dad had gone there, and so had her sister, and so had “tons” of friends and family. “It was a tradition I wanted to continue,” she said. For Fisher, basic competence and a powerful sense of unexamined entitlement was admissions criteria enough.
Fisher’s temperament—this exact sort of greedy placidity—made her an ideal figurehead for Edward Blum, the University of Texas graduate (’73, hook ’em!) who is bankrolling her case. Blum, who is white, runs an organization called the Project on Fair Representation, which takes on the noble work of arranging legal representation to fight race-based policies aimed at combating inequity. Blum took the underlying, incorrect instinct that is latent in people like Fisher and turned it into the basis of a court case: Fisher went from a tautological belief (“I deserve to be admitted because I deserve to be admitted”) to a frankly insane one—that she deserved admission because she’d been discriminated against, and specifically, discriminated against for being white.
by Jia Tolentino, Jezebel | Read more:
Image: Jim Cooke
Synthetic Spider Silk Could Be the Biggest Technological Advance in Clothing Since Nylon
Spider silk’s qualities are nearly mythical. Its tensile strength is comparable to steel’s. Yet it is lighter, and can be as stretchy as a rubber band. Those traits in combination make it tougher than Kevlar. To give you an idea: If the spider webs that shoot from Spider Man’s wrists were real spider silk, the superhero could genuinely have pulled the runaway train to a halt in that dramatic scene in Spider Man 2.
So it’s no surprise that the race is on to create a synthetic version.
After years of hype and false starts, including one now-bankrupt effort that involved genetically modified goats producing it in their milk, a few companies think they’ve figured it out. The two leading the pack are Spiber, a Japanese company, and a California-based startup called Bolt Threads. Bolt Threads believes it has the edge, and that spider silk is only the beginning of what it can do.
A real spider generates silk in specialized glands in its abdomen, and creates the silk strands using a spinning organ called a spinneret. Some spiders produce up to seven types of silk, each with its own purpose and attributes.
But unlike silkworm silk, which silkworms produce to make their cocoons (the stuff used for diaphanous dresses and smart neckties), spider silk can’t be farmed in large quantities because spiders are cannibals, and will eat one another in close quarters.
Bolt Threads doesn’t use spiders to make its silk. The principal ingredients are genetically modified yeast, water, and sugar. The raw silk is produced through fermentation, much like brewing beer, except instead of the yeast turning the sugar into alcohol, they turn it into the raw stuff of spider silk. Bolt Threads spins that into threads using a method similar to the wet-spinning process used to create cellulose-based fibers such as Lyocell. Levin says it’s molecularly the same as natural spider silk, except for a few deliberate variations that only a chemical biologist would recognize.
Synthetic spider silk could be used for everything from automobile parts to medical devices to performance outdoor gear, which is the area that’s attracting some of the most attention thus far. Bolt Threads recently announced a $50 million round of funding, as well as a new partnership with the outdoor brand Patagonia, which demonstrates a major vote of confidence in its technology.
Neither Bolt Threads nor Patagonia will give details on what products they’re working on just yet, but Matt Dwyer, Patagonia’s director of material innovation, promises when something does come out, it will be “awesome.”
“We think they’ve cracked the code,” he says. “For them to have come up with this capability… is just the kind of stuff that blows your mind.”
So it’s no surprise that the race is on to create a synthetic version.After years of hype and false starts, including one now-bankrupt effort that involved genetically modified goats producing it in their milk, a few companies think they’ve figured it out. The two leading the pack are Spiber, a Japanese company, and a California-based startup called Bolt Threads. Bolt Threads believes it has the edge, and that spider silk is only the beginning of what it can do.
A real spider generates silk in specialized glands in its abdomen, and creates the silk strands using a spinning organ called a spinneret. Some spiders produce up to seven types of silk, each with its own purpose and attributes.
But unlike silkworm silk, which silkworms produce to make their cocoons (the stuff used for diaphanous dresses and smart neckties), spider silk can’t be farmed in large quantities because spiders are cannibals, and will eat one another in close quarters.
Bolt Threads doesn’t use spiders to make its silk. The principal ingredients are genetically modified yeast, water, and sugar. The raw silk is produced through fermentation, much like brewing beer, except instead of the yeast turning the sugar into alcohol, they turn it into the raw stuff of spider silk. Bolt Threads spins that into threads using a method similar to the wet-spinning process used to create cellulose-based fibers such as Lyocell. Levin says it’s molecularly the same as natural spider silk, except for a few deliberate variations that only a chemical biologist would recognize.
Synthetic spider silk could be used for everything from automobile parts to medical devices to performance outdoor gear, which is the area that’s attracting some of the most attention thus far. Bolt Threads recently announced a $50 million round of funding, as well as a new partnership with the outdoor brand Patagonia, which demonstrates a major vote of confidence in its technology.
Neither Bolt Threads nor Patagonia will give details on what products they’re working on just yet, but Matt Dwyer, Patagonia’s director of material innovation, promises when something does come out, it will be “awesome.”
“We think they’ve cracked the code,” he says. “For them to have come up with this capability… is just the kind of stuff that blows your mind.”
by Marc Bain, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Bolt Threads
To Know a Town, Know Its Fish Market
Bobby was the first person I met in Korea. He sold flounder and baby octopus at the fish market. In Dubai, my first acquaintance was the immigrant cook who made me a breakfast of South Indian fish curry. If you want to understand daily life in an alien place — to meet the people who give a city its rhythms — go straight to the fish market.
As a food and travel writer, the first thing I do whenever I arrive in a new place is hit the fish market. In a world where entire countries have altered their streets and customs to attract moneyed tourists, fish markets — and the people who work there, hauling carcasses in the wee hours — remain relatively authentic. No other single site offers such a thorough orientation to a people, an economy, and a culture. Except for a few of the biggest (Tokyo’s Tsukiji or Seattle’s Pike Place), these aren’t marketed as tourist attractions. Yet for travelers looking to taste local delicacies — Hawaiian limpets called opihi, Seattle’s famous salmon, or baby octopus in Korea still wriggling around on the plate — seafood markets offer a no-frills place to find not only the food, but the life of a city.
Fish markets rarely compete with palaces or parks in the mind of the average tourist — you’re unlikely to frame a photograph of mollusks the way you’d frame a photo of Westminster Abbey; you’re unlikely to Instagram your fish congee for breakfast at Tekka Market in Singapore the way one might a croissant in a Paris café. Yet these markets are still visual feasts. These are the scenes that remain in my mind after travel: Stall after stall of iridescent stock in Negombo or simply laid on a tarp in Passikudah (both in Sri Lanka); silver fish stacked over sparkling ice in Seoul, South Korea; countless crabs, climbing upward, claws akimbo, in Dubai’s Deira Fish Souk.
Everywhere in the world, fish markets fill up before dawn with working-class people hustling to make a living through a fragile and expensive commodity. Fish markets are both a reflection of the values and economy of a place, and a microcosm of the city itself.
Take Noryangjin, Seoul’s largest fish market, where tuna auctions wrap by 6:30 a.m. and workers hustle to pack up the fish that’s been sold. Tables overflow with large carcasses, sorted by type, down the center of the room.
Like the rest of Seoul, Noryangjin teems with people and fast-moving hand-carts that brush by brisk walkers. I met Bobby there along a series of stalls where smaller tanks showcase live fish. Bobby overheard me speaking in English and came over to talk. This was common in Korea, to find offers of help and hospitality proffered from within the chaos of the street. The same people who jumble against you as you’re packed into the a Seoul subway car will stop everything on the street and offer directions if you so much as glance at a map.
After years living abroad — in Texas, of all places — Bobby returned to his home country of Korea, where he now ran this two-square-foot fish stall. “What kind of fish do you want?” he asked, offering to translate for other vendors if he didn’t have it. The kitchens that line Noryangjin’s outer aisles are BYOF: bring your own fish. I bought a flounder and a baby octopus, and he followed me to the restaurant behind his stall to translate my preparation requests to the chef.
Fish markets serve the best breakfasts. While I waited for my platter of sashimi, fish head-and-skeleton soup, and still-twitching raw baby octopus, I surveyed the room. A table of 20-somethings all dove from their seats to catch their friend as she swayed with drunkenness. A young couple, too, seemed to be soaking up booze. A table of men still wearing waterproof overalls from their night shift gathered over what was, for them, dinner. They seemed excited to see a visitor in the market and fed me bites of their food, including abalone — which tastes like an oyster, except more so: chewier, saltier, sweeter, and just a bit buttery. I was, possibly, the only person starting their day, rather than ending it.
by Naomi Tomky, Pacific Standard | Read more:
Image:Dan Kitwood /Getty Images
As a food and travel writer, the first thing I do whenever I arrive in a new place is hit the fish market. In a world where entire countries have altered their streets and customs to attract moneyed tourists, fish markets — and the people who work there, hauling carcasses in the wee hours — remain relatively authentic. No other single site offers such a thorough orientation to a people, an economy, and a culture. Except for a few of the biggest (Tokyo’s Tsukiji or Seattle’s Pike Place), these aren’t marketed as tourist attractions. Yet for travelers looking to taste local delicacies — Hawaiian limpets called opihi, Seattle’s famous salmon, or baby octopus in Korea still wriggling around on the plate — seafood markets offer a no-frills place to find not only the food, but the life of a city.
Fish markets rarely compete with palaces or parks in the mind of the average tourist — you’re unlikely to frame a photograph of mollusks the way you’d frame a photo of Westminster Abbey; you’re unlikely to Instagram your fish congee for breakfast at Tekka Market in Singapore the way one might a croissant in a Paris café. Yet these markets are still visual feasts. These are the scenes that remain in my mind after travel: Stall after stall of iridescent stock in Negombo or simply laid on a tarp in Passikudah (both in Sri Lanka); silver fish stacked over sparkling ice in Seoul, South Korea; countless crabs, climbing upward, claws akimbo, in Dubai’s Deira Fish Souk.Everywhere in the world, fish markets fill up before dawn with working-class people hustling to make a living through a fragile and expensive commodity. Fish markets are both a reflection of the values and economy of a place, and a microcosm of the city itself.
Take Noryangjin, Seoul’s largest fish market, where tuna auctions wrap by 6:30 a.m. and workers hustle to pack up the fish that’s been sold. Tables overflow with large carcasses, sorted by type, down the center of the room.
Like the rest of Seoul, Noryangjin teems with people and fast-moving hand-carts that brush by brisk walkers. I met Bobby there along a series of stalls where smaller tanks showcase live fish. Bobby overheard me speaking in English and came over to talk. This was common in Korea, to find offers of help and hospitality proffered from within the chaos of the street. The same people who jumble against you as you’re packed into the a Seoul subway car will stop everything on the street and offer directions if you so much as glance at a map.
After years living abroad — in Texas, of all places — Bobby returned to his home country of Korea, where he now ran this two-square-foot fish stall. “What kind of fish do you want?” he asked, offering to translate for other vendors if he didn’t have it. The kitchens that line Noryangjin’s outer aisles are BYOF: bring your own fish. I bought a flounder and a baby octopus, and he followed me to the restaurant behind his stall to translate my preparation requests to the chef.
Fish markets serve the best breakfasts. While I waited for my platter of sashimi, fish head-and-skeleton soup, and still-twitching raw baby octopus, I surveyed the room. A table of 20-somethings all dove from their seats to catch their friend as she swayed with drunkenness. A young couple, too, seemed to be soaking up booze. A table of men still wearing waterproof overalls from their night shift gathered over what was, for them, dinner. They seemed excited to see a visitor in the market and fed me bites of their food, including abalone — which tastes like an oyster, except more so: chewier, saltier, sweeter, and just a bit buttery. I was, possibly, the only person starting their day, rather than ending it.
by Naomi Tomky, Pacific Standard | Read more:
Image:Dan Kitwood /Getty Images
Balmuda, the $230 Toaster From Japan
It's a plain little oven, but what comes out is both mundane and magical: perfectly toasted bread.
Balmuda, a small appliance maker based in Tokyo's suburbs, has taken an ordinary kitchen appliance—the toaster—and turned it into a high-tech gadget. Using steam and carefully calibrated heat cycles, it transforms store-bought bread into something that smells, tastes and feels like it popped out of a baker's oven.
The toaster costs 24,000 yen ($230), or almost five times the price of a regular device in Japan (the smaller appliances with doors and trays are the norm here, rather than the pop-up variety). With at least a three-month wait in stores, the gadget has become a quiet hit, even though the manufacturer hasn't bought ads or aired any commercials since it debuted in June—an unusual glimmer of innovation in a country that once wooed consumers with Walkmans, digital cameras and flat-panel TVs.
It was at a company picnic on a rainy day, warming bread on a grill, that company founder Gen Terao and his band of product designers accidentally made great toast. After the showers stopped, they tried to reproduce it in a parking lot and realized that water was the key. Thousands of slices later, they figured out that steam traps moisture inside the bread while it's being warmed at a low temperature. The heat is cranked up just at the end, giving it a respectable crust.
"The best results are with croissants," said Mark Oda, who works on web and media content in Tokyo and was among the first to buy Balmuda's toaster. "I can never go back to 5,000-yen toasters."
by Reed Stevenson, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Akio Kon/Bloomber
Balmuda, a small appliance maker based in Tokyo's suburbs, has taken an ordinary kitchen appliance—the toaster—and turned it into a high-tech gadget. Using steam and carefully calibrated heat cycles, it transforms store-bought bread into something that smells, tastes and feels like it popped out of a baker's oven.
The toaster costs 24,000 yen ($230), or almost five times the price of a regular device in Japan (the smaller appliances with doors and trays are the norm here, rather than the pop-up variety). With at least a three-month wait in stores, the gadget has become a quiet hit, even though the manufacturer hasn't bought ads or aired any commercials since it debuted in June—an unusual glimmer of innovation in a country that once wooed consumers with Walkmans, digital cameras and flat-panel TVs.It was at a company picnic on a rainy day, warming bread on a grill, that company founder Gen Terao and his band of product designers accidentally made great toast. After the showers stopped, they tried to reproduce it in a parking lot and realized that water was the key. Thousands of slices later, they figured out that steam traps moisture inside the bread while it's being warmed at a low temperature. The heat is cranked up just at the end, giving it a respectable crust.
"The best results are with croissants," said Mark Oda, who works on web and media content in Tokyo and was among the first to buy Balmuda's toaster. "I can never go back to 5,000-yen toasters."
by Reed Stevenson, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Akio Kon/Bloomber
Consciousness: The Mind Messing With the Mind
A paper in The British Medical Journal in December reported that cognitive behavioral therapy — a means of coaxing people into changing the way they think — is as effective as Prozac or Zoloft in treating major depression.
In ways no one understands, talk therapy reaches down into the biological plumbing and affects the flow of neurotransmitters in the brain. Other studies have found similar results for “mindfulness” — Buddhist-inspired meditation in which one’s thoughts are allowed to drift gently through the head like clouds reflected in still mountain water.
Findings like these have become so commonplace that it’s easy to forget their strange implications.
Depression can be treated in two radically different ways: by altering the brain with chemicals, or by altering the mind by talking to a therapist. But we still can’t explain how mind arises from matter or how, in turn, mind acts on the brain.
This longstanding conundrum — the mind-body problem — was succinctly described by the philosopher David Chalmers at a recent symposium at The New York Academy of Sciences. “The scientific and philosophical consensus is that there is no nonphysical soul or ego, or at least no evidence for that,” he said.
Descartes’s notion of dualism — mind and body as separate things — has long receded from science. The challenge now is to explain how the inner world of consciousness arises from the flesh of the brain.
Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes.
The result is an illusion. Instead of neurons and synapses, we sense a ghostly presence — a self — inside the head. But it’s all just data processing.
“The machine mistakenly thinks it has magic inside it,” Dr. Graziano said. And it calls the magic consciousness.
It’s not the existence of this inner voice he finds mysterious. “The phenomenon to explain,” he said, “is why the brain, as a machine, insists it has this property that is nonphysical.”
The discussion, broadcast online, reminded me of Tom Stoppard’s newest play, “The Hard Problem,” in which a troubled young psychology researcher named Hilary suffers a severe case of the very affliction Dr. Graziano described. Surely there is more to the brain than biology, she insists to her boyfriend, a hard-core materialist named Spike. There must be “mind stuff that doesn’t show up in a scan.”
Mr. Stoppard borrowed his title from a paper by Dr. Chalmers. The “easy problem” is explaining, at least in principle, how thinking, memory, attention and so forth are just neurological computing. But for the hard problem — why all of these processes feel like something — “there is nothing like a consensus theory or even a consensus guess,” Dr. Chalmers said at the symposium.
Or, as Hilary puts it in the play, “Every theory proposed for the problem of consciousness has the same degree of demonstrability as divine intervention.” There is a gap in the explanation where suddenly a miracle seems to occur.
In ways no one understands, talk therapy reaches down into the biological plumbing and affects the flow of neurotransmitters in the brain. Other studies have found similar results for “mindfulness” — Buddhist-inspired meditation in which one’s thoughts are allowed to drift gently through the head like clouds reflected in still mountain water.
Findings like these have become so commonplace that it’s easy to forget their strange implications.Depression can be treated in two radically different ways: by altering the brain with chemicals, or by altering the mind by talking to a therapist. But we still can’t explain how mind arises from matter or how, in turn, mind acts on the brain.
This longstanding conundrum — the mind-body problem — was succinctly described by the philosopher David Chalmers at a recent symposium at The New York Academy of Sciences. “The scientific and philosophical consensus is that there is no nonphysical soul or ego, or at least no evidence for that,” he said.
Descartes’s notion of dualism — mind and body as separate things — has long receded from science. The challenge now is to explain how the inner world of consciousness arises from the flesh of the brain.
Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes.
The result is an illusion. Instead of neurons and synapses, we sense a ghostly presence — a self — inside the head. But it’s all just data processing.
“The machine mistakenly thinks it has magic inside it,” Dr. Graziano said. And it calls the magic consciousness.
It’s not the existence of this inner voice he finds mysterious. “The phenomenon to explain,” he said, “is why the brain, as a machine, insists it has this property that is nonphysical.”
The discussion, broadcast online, reminded me of Tom Stoppard’s newest play, “The Hard Problem,” in which a troubled young psychology researcher named Hilary suffers a severe case of the very affliction Dr. Graziano described. Surely there is more to the brain than biology, she insists to her boyfriend, a hard-core materialist named Spike. There must be “mind stuff that doesn’t show up in a scan.”
Mr. Stoppard borrowed his title from a paper by Dr. Chalmers. The “easy problem” is explaining, at least in principle, how thinking, memory, attention and so forth are just neurological computing. But for the hard problem — why all of these processes feel like something — “there is nothing like a consensus theory or even a consensus guess,” Dr. Chalmers said at the symposium.
Or, as Hilary puts it in the play, “Every theory proposed for the problem of consciousness has the same degree of demonstrability as divine intervention.” There is a gap in the explanation where suddenly a miracle seems to occur.
by George Johnson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Chris Silas Neal
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