Robert Moran
via:
[ed. Interesting how technology integrated all four functions into one device and killed the beauty of component design in the process.]
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
How Technology Disrupted the Truth
Twenty-five years after the first website went online, it is clear that we are living through a period of dizzying transition. For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page: knowledge was primarily delivered in a fixed format, one that encouraged readers to believe in stable and settled truths.
Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.
What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth. This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.
Increasingly, what counts as a fact is merely a view that someone feels to be true – and technology has made it very easy for these “facts” to circulate with a speed and reach that was unimaginable in the Gutenberg era (or even a decade ago). (...)
In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true – as we often see in emergency situations, when news is breaking in real time. To pick one example among many, during the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, rumours quickly spread on social media that the Louvre and Pompidou Centre had been hit, and that François Hollande had suffered a stroke. Trusted news organisations are needed to debunk such tall tales.
Sometimes rumours like these spread out of panic, sometimes out of malice, and sometimes deliberate manipulation, in which a corporation or regime pays people to convey their message. Whatever the motive, falsehoods and facts now spread the same way, through what academics call an “information cascade”. As the legal scholar and online-harassment expert Danielle Citron describes it, “people forward on what others think, even if the information is false, misleading or incomplete, because they think they have learned something valuable.” This cycle repeats itself, and before you know it, the cascade has unstoppable momentum. You share a friend’s post on Facebook, perhaps to show kinship or agreement or that you’re “in the know”, and thus you increase the visibility of their post to others.
Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook’s news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want – which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. When Eli Pariser, the co-founder of Upworthy, coined the term “filter bubble” in 2011, he was talking about how the personalised web – and in particular Google’s personalised search function, which means that no two people’s Google searches are the same – means that we are less likely to be exposed to information that challenges us or broadens our worldview, and less likely to encounter facts that disprove false information that others have shared.
Pariser’s plea, at the time, was that those running social media platforms should ensure that “their algorithms prioritise countervailing views and news that’s important, not just the stuff that’s most popular or most self-validating”. But in less than five years, thanks to the incredible power of a few social platforms, the filter bubble that Pariser described has become much more extreme.
On the day after the EU referendum, in a Facebook post, the British internet activist and mySociety founder, Tom Steinberg, provided a vivid illustration of the power of the filter bubble – and the serious civic consequences for a world where information flows largely through social networks:
Facebook, which launched only in 2004, now has 1.6bn users worldwide. It has become the dominant way for people to find news on the internet – and in fact it is dominant in ways that would have been impossible to imagine in the newspaper era. As Emily Bell has written: “Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security.”
Bell, the director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University – and a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian – has outlined the seismic impact of social media for journalism. “Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years,” she wrote in March, “than perhaps at any time in the past 500.” The future of publishing is being put into the “hands of the few, who now control the destiny of the many”. News publishers have lost control over the distribution of their journalism, which for many readers is now “filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable”. This means that social media companies have become overwhelmingly powerful in determining what we read – and enormously profitable from the monetisation of other people’s work. As Bell notes: “There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect than there has ever been in the past.”
Publications curated by editors have in many cases been replaced by a stream of information chosen by friends, contacts and family, processed by secret algorithms. The old idea of a wide-open web – where hyperlinks from site to site created a non-hierarchical and decentralised network of information – has been largely supplanted by platforms designed to maximise your time within their walls, some of which (such as Instagram and Snapchat) do not allow outward links at all.
Many people, in fact, especially teenagers, now spend more and more of their time on closed chat apps, which allow users to create groups to share messages privately –perhaps because young people, who are most likely to have faced harassment online, are seeking more carefully protected social spaces. But the closed space of a chat app is an even more restrictive silo than the walled garden of Facebook or other social networks.
As the pioneering Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who was imprisoned in Tehran for six years for his online activity, wrote in the Guardian earlier this year, the “diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned” has given way to “the centralisation of information” inside a select few social networks – and the end result is “making us all less powerful in relation to government and corporations”.
Of course, Facebook does not decide what you read – at least not in the traditional sense of making decisions – and nor does it dictate what news organisations produce. But when one platform becomes the dominant source for accessing information, news organisations will often tailor their own work to the demands of this new medium. (The most visible evidence of Facebook’s influence on journalism is the panic that accompanies any change in the news feed algorithm that threatens to reduce the page views sent to publishers.)
In the last few years, many news organisations have steered themselves away from public-interest journalism and toward junk-food news, chasing page views in the vain hope of attracting clicks and advertising (or investment) – but like junk food, you hate yourself when you’ve gorged on it. The most extreme manifestation of this phenomenon has been the creation of fake news farms, which attract traffic with false reports that are designed to look like real news, and are therefore widely shared on social networks. But the same principle applies to news that is misleading or sensationally dishonest, even if it wasn’t created to deceive: the new measure of value for too many news organisations is virality rather than truth or quality.
by Katharine Viner, The Guardian | Read more:
Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.
What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth. This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.
Increasingly, what counts as a fact is merely a view that someone feels to be true – and technology has made it very easy for these “facts” to circulate with a speed and reach that was unimaginable in the Gutenberg era (or even a decade ago). (...)In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true – as we often see in emergency situations, when news is breaking in real time. To pick one example among many, during the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, rumours quickly spread on social media that the Louvre and Pompidou Centre had been hit, and that François Hollande had suffered a stroke. Trusted news organisations are needed to debunk such tall tales.
Sometimes rumours like these spread out of panic, sometimes out of malice, and sometimes deliberate manipulation, in which a corporation or regime pays people to convey their message. Whatever the motive, falsehoods and facts now spread the same way, through what academics call an “information cascade”. As the legal scholar and online-harassment expert Danielle Citron describes it, “people forward on what others think, even if the information is false, misleading or incomplete, because they think they have learned something valuable.” This cycle repeats itself, and before you know it, the cascade has unstoppable momentum. You share a friend’s post on Facebook, perhaps to show kinship or agreement or that you’re “in the know”, and thus you increase the visibility of their post to others.
Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook’s news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want – which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. When Eli Pariser, the co-founder of Upworthy, coined the term “filter bubble” in 2011, he was talking about how the personalised web – and in particular Google’s personalised search function, which means that no two people’s Google searches are the same – means that we are less likely to be exposed to information that challenges us or broadens our worldview, and less likely to encounter facts that disprove false information that others have shared.
Pariser’s plea, at the time, was that those running social media platforms should ensure that “their algorithms prioritise countervailing views and news that’s important, not just the stuff that’s most popular or most self-validating”. But in less than five years, thanks to the incredible power of a few social platforms, the filter bubble that Pariser described has become much more extreme.
On the day after the EU referendum, in a Facebook post, the British internet activist and mySociety founder, Tom Steinberg, provided a vivid illustration of the power of the filter bubble – and the serious civic consequences for a world where information flows largely through social networks:
I am actively searching through Facebook for people celebrating the Brexit leave victory, but the filter bubble is SO strong, and extends SO far into things like Facebook’s custom search that I can’t find anyone who is happy *despite the fact that over half the country is clearly jubilant today* and despite the fact that I’m *actively* looking to hear what they are saying.
This echo-chamber problem is now SO severe and SO chronic that I can only beg any friends I have who actually work for Facebook and other major social media and technology to urgently tell their leaders that to not act on this problem now is tantamount to actively supporting and funding the tearing apart of the fabric of our societies … We’re getting countries where one half just doesn’t know anything at all about the other.But asking technology companies to “do something” about the filter bubble presumes that this is a problem that can be easily fixed – rather than one baked into the very idea of social networks that are designed to give you what you and your friends want to see.
Facebook, which launched only in 2004, now has 1.6bn users worldwide. It has become the dominant way for people to find news on the internet – and in fact it is dominant in ways that would have been impossible to imagine in the newspaper era. As Emily Bell has written: “Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security.”
Bell, the director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University – and a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian – has outlined the seismic impact of social media for journalism. “Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years,” she wrote in March, “than perhaps at any time in the past 500.” The future of publishing is being put into the “hands of the few, who now control the destiny of the many”. News publishers have lost control over the distribution of their journalism, which for many readers is now “filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable”. This means that social media companies have become overwhelmingly powerful in determining what we read – and enormously profitable from the monetisation of other people’s work. As Bell notes: “There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect than there has ever been in the past.”
Publications curated by editors have in many cases been replaced by a stream of information chosen by friends, contacts and family, processed by secret algorithms. The old idea of a wide-open web – where hyperlinks from site to site created a non-hierarchical and decentralised network of information – has been largely supplanted by platforms designed to maximise your time within their walls, some of which (such as Instagram and Snapchat) do not allow outward links at all.
Many people, in fact, especially teenagers, now spend more and more of their time on closed chat apps, which allow users to create groups to share messages privately –perhaps because young people, who are most likely to have faced harassment online, are seeking more carefully protected social spaces. But the closed space of a chat app is an even more restrictive silo than the walled garden of Facebook or other social networks.
As the pioneering Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who was imprisoned in Tehran for six years for his online activity, wrote in the Guardian earlier this year, the “diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned” has given way to “the centralisation of information” inside a select few social networks – and the end result is “making us all less powerful in relation to government and corporations”.
Of course, Facebook does not decide what you read – at least not in the traditional sense of making decisions – and nor does it dictate what news organisations produce. But when one platform becomes the dominant source for accessing information, news organisations will often tailor their own work to the demands of this new medium. (The most visible evidence of Facebook’s influence on journalism is the panic that accompanies any change in the news feed algorithm that threatens to reduce the page views sent to publishers.)
In the last few years, many news organisations have steered themselves away from public-interest journalism and toward junk-food news, chasing page views in the vain hope of attracting clicks and advertising (or investment) – but like junk food, you hate yourself when you’ve gorged on it. The most extreme manifestation of this phenomenon has been the creation of fake news farms, which attract traffic with false reports that are designed to look like real news, and are therefore widely shared on social networks. But the same principle applies to news that is misleading or sensationally dishonest, even if it wasn’t created to deceive: the new measure of value for too many news organisations is virality rather than truth or quality.
by Katharine Viner, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: : Sébastien Thibault
The Space Station Is Becoming A Spy Satellite For Wildlife
In 1250, the prior of a Cistercian Abbey reputedly tied a note to a leg of a barn swallow, which read: “Oh swallow, where do you live in winter?” The next spring, he got a response: “In Asia, in the home of Petrus.”
This perhaps apocryphal story marks one of the first known instances of someone tagging an animal to track its movements. Thanks to many such endeavors, we now know that every year, barn swallows migrate between their breeding grounds in the northern hemisphere to wintering grounds throughout the tropics and the south. In 1912, one intrepid individual that was ringed in England turned up 7,500 miles away in South Africa.
But swallows are the exception rather than the rule. The journeys of most migratory animals, especially smaller species, are a mystery. Flocks, herds, and shoals are constantly crisscrossing the globe, but despite the intense surveillance of our planet, we often have no idea what paths they take. “They leave in one place and we don’t know what happens to them until they show up in another place,” says Meg Crofoot from the University of California, Davis.
This ignorance makes it hard to save threatened species: what works in one part of the world may be completely undone as animals travel to another. It also jeopardizes our own health. Where are the birds that harbor avian flu? Where do the bats that carry Ebola go? What about the red-billed quelea, a small finch that flocks in millions and devours crops with locust-like voraciousness?
Since the 1960s, scientists have tried to answer questions like these by tagging animals with radio transmitters. At first, they followed the signals with clunky hand-held antennae; later, they loaded receivers onto satellites, allowing them to track animals over long distances and rough terrain. But even after decades of innovation, satellite telemetry tags are still expensive, slow, and clunky. The smallest weighs around 10 grams and would overburden any animal lighter than 240 grams. That rules out three quarters of birds and mammals. There are much lighter data-loggers around but they’re light because they don’t transmit any data—so you have to recapture whatever animal you’ve tagged to find out where it has been.
Frustrated by these limitations, Martin Wiselski at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology devised the ICARUS Initiative (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space). His team has developed extremely light radio tags that can be fitted to even tiny animals, and they’re sending a dedicated receiver to the International Space Station next summer. Once it’s up, it will be able to map the whereabouts of hundreds, if not thousands of birds, bats, and other travelers, in real-time. “It will be the best ever possible sensing network of life on the planet,” says Wiselski.
He came up with the idea while talking to astronomer George Swenson, who helped to pioneer the use of radio telemetry for tracking wildlife, and who also helped to construct the radio telescope known as the Very Large Array. “We were sitting on some stairs in Panama, having beer, and looking over the canal,” says Wiselski. “I said there must be a way to receive these small transmitters from all over the globe. George said this is what we do all the time—build telescopes to look at small radio sources. We look up into the sky. You need to look at the ground.”
Still, Swenson predicted that it would take 15 years to get the system up and running. Wiselski told him he was being ridiculous. That was 15 years ago. (The Icarus myth, after all, is more about hubris than flight.) Getting funding was the hardest part. “We went to NASA,” says Wiselski. “They thought the project so unlikely that it was set in the same category as the space elevator.” (...)
Eager researchers are already lining up to use the tags. To begin with, between 40 and 50 teams will use ICARUS to study birds, bats, sea turtles, and more. All the data from this work will eventually be uploaded to MoveBank, a free online database for animal tracking studies. “It’s a big data project for life on the planet,” says Wiselski. (...)
By tracking animals, researchers may also be able to discover the secret pathways and hiding places of viruses and other pathogens. Consider Ebola: the identity and location of its wild reservoirs are still hotly debated, although it seems that certain bat species can harbor it. “We can take a blood sample and check if they have Ebola, put tags on them, let them go, recapture them and take another sample,” says Wiselski. “We can then say that bats that have been through this part of the Congo have seen Ebola.”
Beyond charting the movements of animals, Wiselski thinks that ICARUS could be a deterrent to those who would stop animals from moving altogether. If wildlife managers start tagging elephant ears or rhino horns, it might deter poachers from killing the animals and transporting their body parts, lest they in turn be tracked by overhead satellites. “We have request from people in Mongolia, because people are stealing the bones from the dinosaurs,” adds Wiselski.
This perhaps apocryphal story marks one of the first known instances of someone tagging an animal to track its movements. Thanks to many such endeavors, we now know that every year, barn swallows migrate between their breeding grounds in the northern hemisphere to wintering grounds throughout the tropics and the south. In 1912, one intrepid individual that was ringed in England turned up 7,500 miles away in South Africa.
But swallows are the exception rather than the rule. The journeys of most migratory animals, especially smaller species, are a mystery. Flocks, herds, and shoals are constantly crisscrossing the globe, but despite the intense surveillance of our planet, we often have no idea what paths they take. “They leave in one place and we don’t know what happens to them until they show up in another place,” says Meg Crofoot from the University of California, Davis.This ignorance makes it hard to save threatened species: what works in one part of the world may be completely undone as animals travel to another. It also jeopardizes our own health. Where are the birds that harbor avian flu? Where do the bats that carry Ebola go? What about the red-billed quelea, a small finch that flocks in millions and devours crops with locust-like voraciousness?
Since the 1960s, scientists have tried to answer questions like these by tagging animals with radio transmitters. At first, they followed the signals with clunky hand-held antennae; later, they loaded receivers onto satellites, allowing them to track animals over long distances and rough terrain. But even after decades of innovation, satellite telemetry tags are still expensive, slow, and clunky. The smallest weighs around 10 grams and would overburden any animal lighter than 240 grams. That rules out three quarters of birds and mammals. There are much lighter data-loggers around but they’re light because they don’t transmit any data—so you have to recapture whatever animal you’ve tagged to find out where it has been.
Frustrated by these limitations, Martin Wiselski at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology devised the ICARUS Initiative (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space). His team has developed extremely light radio tags that can be fitted to even tiny animals, and they’re sending a dedicated receiver to the International Space Station next summer. Once it’s up, it will be able to map the whereabouts of hundreds, if not thousands of birds, bats, and other travelers, in real-time. “It will be the best ever possible sensing network of life on the planet,” says Wiselski.
He came up with the idea while talking to astronomer George Swenson, who helped to pioneer the use of radio telemetry for tracking wildlife, and who also helped to construct the radio telescope known as the Very Large Array. “We were sitting on some stairs in Panama, having beer, and looking over the canal,” says Wiselski. “I said there must be a way to receive these small transmitters from all over the globe. George said this is what we do all the time—build telescopes to look at small radio sources. We look up into the sky. You need to look at the ground.”
Still, Swenson predicted that it would take 15 years to get the system up and running. Wiselski told him he was being ridiculous. That was 15 years ago. (The Icarus myth, after all, is more about hubris than flight.) Getting funding was the hardest part. “We went to NASA,” says Wiselski. “They thought the project so unlikely that it was set in the same category as the space elevator.” (...)
Eager researchers are already lining up to use the tags. To begin with, between 40 and 50 teams will use ICARUS to study birds, bats, sea turtles, and more. All the data from this work will eventually be uploaded to MoveBank, a free online database for animal tracking studies. “It’s a big data project for life on the planet,” says Wiselski. (...)
By tracking animals, researchers may also be able to discover the secret pathways and hiding places of viruses and other pathogens. Consider Ebola: the identity and location of its wild reservoirs are still hotly debated, although it seems that certain bat species can harbor it. “We can take a blood sample and check if they have Ebola, put tags on them, let them go, recapture them and take another sample,” says Wiselski. “We can then say that bats that have been through this part of the Congo have seen Ebola.”
Beyond charting the movements of animals, Wiselski thinks that ICARUS could be a deterrent to those who would stop animals from moving altogether. If wildlife managers start tagging elephant ears or rhino horns, it might deter poachers from killing the animals and transporting their body parts, lest they in turn be tracked by overhead satellites. “We have request from people in Mongolia, because people are stealing the bones from the dinosaurs,” adds Wiselski.
by Ed Yong, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Reuters
A New Way to Prevent Muscle Cramps
Could there finally be a way to prevent muscle cramps?
As long as people have played sports, unexpected muscle cramps have been an Achilles' heel for everyone from aspiring Olympians to weekend warriors.
For decades physicians and other experts in sports medicine have theorized that a cramp was the result of a muscle that was dehydrated, or starved of electrolytes, or suffering tears in its micro-fibers and cell membranes. These caused pain and spasms that could only be alleviated with water and electrolytes, conventional wisdom held.
Now, more experts are beginning to believe we may have been thinking wrongly about cramps all along. A shot of spicy liquid—think wasabi or hot chilies—may be a far more effective treatment than an energy drink or a banana. All it took was a Nobel Prize winner experiencing some untimely cramps while sea kayaking a decade ago for people to begin to understand that the causes of muscle cramps may not have much to do with muscles at all.
“The primary origin of the cramp is the nerve, not the muscle,” said Rod MacKinnon, the kayaker and Nobel Prize winning scientist who studies molecular neurobiology and biophysics at Rockefeller University and has led the new thinking on cramps. (...)
Exercise science isn’t generally an area that winners of the Nobel Prize in chemistry indulge in. Dr. MacKinnon won the Nobel after he and his colleagues provided the first atomic structures of the protein molecules that make electrical signals in living organisms.
Nevertheless, cramps were on Dr. MacKinnon’s mind. After perusing the existing research he and Dr. Bean hypothesized that they could modify the nervous system, including the motor neurons controlling muscle, by applying a strong sensory input and by stimulating receptors in the mouth and esophagus—which is how scientists describe ingesting pungent tasting foods. The pungent-taste overloads nerve receptors, producing a kind of numbing effect.
Or, as Dr. MacKinnon explains it, “The strong sensory input causes inhibition of the motor output.”
As long as people have played sports, unexpected muscle cramps have been an Achilles' heel for everyone from aspiring Olympians to weekend warriors.
For decades physicians and other experts in sports medicine have theorized that a cramp was the result of a muscle that was dehydrated, or starved of electrolytes, or suffering tears in its micro-fibers and cell membranes. These caused pain and spasms that could only be alleviated with water and electrolytes, conventional wisdom held.Now, more experts are beginning to believe we may have been thinking wrongly about cramps all along. A shot of spicy liquid—think wasabi or hot chilies—may be a far more effective treatment than an energy drink or a banana. All it took was a Nobel Prize winner experiencing some untimely cramps while sea kayaking a decade ago for people to begin to understand that the causes of muscle cramps may not have much to do with muscles at all.
“The primary origin of the cramp is the nerve, not the muscle,” said Rod MacKinnon, the kayaker and Nobel Prize winning scientist who studies molecular neurobiology and biophysics at Rockefeller University and has led the new thinking on cramps. (...)
Exercise science isn’t generally an area that winners of the Nobel Prize in chemistry indulge in. Dr. MacKinnon won the Nobel after he and his colleagues provided the first atomic structures of the protein molecules that make electrical signals in living organisms.
Nevertheless, cramps were on Dr. MacKinnon’s mind. After perusing the existing research he and Dr. Bean hypothesized that they could modify the nervous system, including the motor neurons controlling muscle, by applying a strong sensory input and by stimulating receptors in the mouth and esophagus—which is how scientists describe ingesting pungent tasting foods. The pungent-taste overloads nerve receptors, producing a kind of numbing effect.
Or, as Dr. MacKinnon explains it, “The strong sensory input causes inhibition of the motor output.”
by Matthew Futterman, WP | Read more:
Image: Bruce Bean
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
3QD
[ed. This, in a nutshell, is what Duck Soup is all about (except with more of an insouciant approach to cultural ephemera and dumb jokes). It's interesting that both sites started with a similar idea - posting thought-provoking and informative pieces without a lot of editorializing (letting the posts speak for themselves). I wasn't aware of 3QD before starting Duck Soup, but in the natural course of curation stumbled across it and found a kindred soul. I've even corresponded with Abbas on matters of copyright law; he was very gracious. So do yourself a favor and check out 3QD. You'll always find something interesting to read.]
On July 31st 2004, Abbas Raza began to curate the internet. On his first day, he posted links to the Cavafy poem, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, a New Scientist article on the possibilities of extra-terrestrial contact, ‘Is it Art, Or is it Arab Art?’, two obituaries of Francis Crick, a primer on how to avoid copyright litigation and a curious piece in theIndependent on Mike Tyson’s short-lived comeback. An undoubtedly dizzying range of subjects.
Almost twelve years later, on June 23, 2016, 3QuarksDaily, or 3QD for short, is still going strong. The latest contents include an analysis of the immigration concerns around Brexit, a book review of American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper, the ever entertaining Slavoj Žižek, an article titled ‘Should ethics professors observe higher standards of behaviour?’, and a Caravan feature on the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. While a majority of people might see this as a vertigo-inducing list of esoterica, to thousands of intellectual omnivores (including Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, David Byrne and Mohsin Hamid) who subscribe to the site, it’s a vantage point. They, like me, have become overawed by the vastness of the internet’s moving feast. One that is increasingly so filled with food that there’s no place to manoeuvre around the table. So we find ourselves malnourished while choking on delicacies. As Raza put it, the “overload is something of a cliché by now but that doesn’t make it any less real”.
The need for filters, aggregators and curators to navigate the web isn’t new. Arts and Letters Daily, the inspiration for 3QD, was founded by the late Denis Dutton way back in 1998. It in turn was inspired by the news aggregator, Drudge Report, which started in 1995. But each of these had their own niche (literary humanities and conservative politics respectively) while Raza envisioned something more all-embracing – which ironically turned out to be a niche of its own. His plan was to “collect only serious articles of intellectual interest from all over the web but never include merely amusing pieces, clickbait, or even the news of the day… to find and post deeper analysis… and explore the world of ideas… [to] cover all intellectual fields that might be of interest to a well-educated academic all-rounder without being afraid of difficult material… [and to] have an inclusive attitude about what is interesting and important and an international outlook, avoiding America-centrism in particular.”
In practice, this elaborate vision looks deceptively simple. According to Morgan Meis, one of the editors of 3QD, all you had to do was “get a few reasonably smart people together, have them create links to the sorts of things they would want to read across the web, on any given day. Voila! You’ve got an interesting website. Then, don’t fuck that simple formula up. Don’t get cute. Stay the course.”
As Raza figured, an editorial team of ‘reasonably smart people’, by dint of their own diverse interests, would automatically bestow the site with a broader perspective. Currently this team, apart from Raza and Meis, consists of Raza’s old friend, Robin Varghese, his two sisters, Azra and Sughra Raza, poetry editor, Jim Culleny and assistant editor, Zujaja Tauqeer.
The power of the curator
Varghese and Raza met at Columbia University in 1995 while they were both graduate students. Varghese, who posts much of the political content on 3QD, was pursuing a doctorate in political science while Raza had taken up philosophy after studying engineering as an undergraduate. Varghese still lives in New York and works in the development space while Raza currently lives with his wife in Brixen, a small town in the Italian Alps, where his major occupation, apart from running the website, is cooking elaborate North Indian and Pakistani style meals.
Azra, a practising oncologist and cancer researcher in New York, doesn’t seem like the kind of person who has the time to post one (or two) articles on science (or literature) every day for twelve years. She assures me that she’s missed around seven days during that time but I can’t be sure it wasn’t a ruse to seem less superhuman. Sughra, a radiologist and professor at Harvard Medical College, apart from posting articles, also links to images of visual art in a weekly column titled ‘Perceptions’.
As the only two people without South Asian heritage, Culleny and Meis bring valuable diversity to the team. Culleny has been, at various times, an art teacher, social worker, columnist, radio host, carpenter, designer, builder and grandfather. As well as a rockabilly and jazz musician and singer who arrived at poetry through songwriting. Meis, in contrast, tells me he’s never had a ‘real job’. He studied philosophy at graduate school like Raza but never sought a career in the field. After numerous adventures that included starting a successful arts collective in New York and living “in the middle of nowhere in Sri Lanka for a year doing very close to nothing”, he currently finds himself in the position of an award-winning critic of art and culture.
The site grew rapidly from its humble origins. Within the first seven months, it reached a thousand posts. Within three and a half years, it hit ten thousand. By their tenth anniversary, it was almost at thirty-five thousand. In that decade, they had only ever missed one day for reasons that, like most things on the internet, involved a cat. Over these years, the internet and the process of wrestling with it changed in small ways. The editors gradually withdrew more and more from commenting on what they were sharing. “We moved”, says Varghese, “in a direction opposite to blogging, meaning we moved towards some virtual self-abnegation in favour of just letting the piece speak for itself. So much of blogging was and is about the blogger’s take on things.” Today, a post contains nothing more than a headline, a block quote from the article, an image and a link to the original publication.
Yet this seemingly spartan layout belies the fact that curation is authorship, just not of the texts themselves. Maria Popova, whose blog ‘Brainpickings’ was made a part of the Library of Congress permanent archive as a resource for researchers of the future, has become an unofficial spokesperson for the community on this issue. “If information discovery plays such a central role in how we make sense of the world in this new media landscape,” she wrote in an essay for Neiman Lab, “then it is a form of creative labour in and of itself. And yet our current normative models for crediting this kind of labour are completely inadequate, if they exist at all.”
Today, information discovery comes in all shapes and sizes – from the New Yorker Minute that does a number on the New Yorker, to Amazon’s book recommendation behemoth. There isn’t a doubt that the latter is a remarkable feat of software engineering, as are the algorithms employed by Netflix, Spotify, Facebook and Google. Netizens depend on these wonders – relying on them to suck in chaos and spit out order.
Yet these same sites are also examples of total moral capitulation. Underlying the logic of many algorithms is the idea that to find what people want, we need only look for what similar people have wanted. Apart from engendering near total surveillance, a mechanism built around the urgency of giving people what they want ignores the importance (or even the existence) of a responsibility to give people what they might need. This isn’t a surprising stance for profit-driven corporations to take. However, as citizens who value democratic access to resources and knowledge, it’s dangerous to allow ourselves to become complacent with gatekeepers who don’t acknowledge their own roles as stewards or see their power as weighted by responsibility to the community. It’s the logic of giving people what they want that’s made virality the metric for deciding what makes the news and triggered the current race for the bottom that has marked the new culture wars.
On July 31st 2004, Abbas Raza began to curate the internet. On his first day, he posted links to the Cavafy poem, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, a New Scientist article on the possibilities of extra-terrestrial contact, ‘Is it Art, Or is it Arab Art?’, two obituaries of Francis Crick, a primer on how to avoid copyright litigation and a curious piece in theIndependent on Mike Tyson’s short-lived comeback. An undoubtedly dizzying range of subjects.
Almost twelve years later, on June 23, 2016, 3QuarksDaily, or 3QD for short, is still going strong. The latest contents include an analysis of the immigration concerns around Brexit, a book review of American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper, the ever entertaining Slavoj Žižek, an article titled ‘Should ethics professors observe higher standards of behaviour?’, and a Caravan feature on the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. While a majority of people might see this as a vertigo-inducing list of esoterica, to thousands of intellectual omnivores (including Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, David Byrne and Mohsin Hamid) who subscribe to the site, it’s a vantage point. They, like me, have become overawed by the vastness of the internet’s moving feast. One that is increasingly so filled with food that there’s no place to manoeuvre around the table. So we find ourselves malnourished while choking on delicacies. As Raza put it, the “overload is something of a cliché by now but that doesn’t make it any less real”.The need for filters, aggregators and curators to navigate the web isn’t new. Arts and Letters Daily, the inspiration for 3QD, was founded by the late Denis Dutton way back in 1998. It in turn was inspired by the news aggregator, Drudge Report, which started in 1995. But each of these had their own niche (literary humanities and conservative politics respectively) while Raza envisioned something more all-embracing – which ironically turned out to be a niche of its own. His plan was to “collect only serious articles of intellectual interest from all over the web but never include merely amusing pieces, clickbait, or even the news of the day… to find and post deeper analysis… and explore the world of ideas… [to] cover all intellectual fields that might be of interest to a well-educated academic all-rounder without being afraid of difficult material… [and to] have an inclusive attitude about what is interesting and important and an international outlook, avoiding America-centrism in particular.”
In practice, this elaborate vision looks deceptively simple. According to Morgan Meis, one of the editors of 3QD, all you had to do was “get a few reasonably smart people together, have them create links to the sorts of things they would want to read across the web, on any given day. Voila! You’ve got an interesting website. Then, don’t fuck that simple formula up. Don’t get cute. Stay the course.”
As Raza figured, an editorial team of ‘reasonably smart people’, by dint of their own diverse interests, would automatically bestow the site with a broader perspective. Currently this team, apart from Raza and Meis, consists of Raza’s old friend, Robin Varghese, his two sisters, Azra and Sughra Raza, poetry editor, Jim Culleny and assistant editor, Zujaja Tauqeer.
The power of the curator
Varghese and Raza met at Columbia University in 1995 while they were both graduate students. Varghese, who posts much of the political content on 3QD, was pursuing a doctorate in political science while Raza had taken up philosophy after studying engineering as an undergraduate. Varghese still lives in New York and works in the development space while Raza currently lives with his wife in Brixen, a small town in the Italian Alps, where his major occupation, apart from running the website, is cooking elaborate North Indian and Pakistani style meals.
Azra, a practising oncologist and cancer researcher in New York, doesn’t seem like the kind of person who has the time to post one (or two) articles on science (or literature) every day for twelve years. She assures me that she’s missed around seven days during that time but I can’t be sure it wasn’t a ruse to seem less superhuman. Sughra, a radiologist and professor at Harvard Medical College, apart from posting articles, also links to images of visual art in a weekly column titled ‘Perceptions’.
As the only two people without South Asian heritage, Culleny and Meis bring valuable diversity to the team. Culleny has been, at various times, an art teacher, social worker, columnist, radio host, carpenter, designer, builder and grandfather. As well as a rockabilly and jazz musician and singer who arrived at poetry through songwriting. Meis, in contrast, tells me he’s never had a ‘real job’. He studied philosophy at graduate school like Raza but never sought a career in the field. After numerous adventures that included starting a successful arts collective in New York and living “in the middle of nowhere in Sri Lanka for a year doing very close to nothing”, he currently finds himself in the position of an award-winning critic of art and culture.
The site grew rapidly from its humble origins. Within the first seven months, it reached a thousand posts. Within three and a half years, it hit ten thousand. By their tenth anniversary, it was almost at thirty-five thousand. In that decade, they had only ever missed one day for reasons that, like most things on the internet, involved a cat. Over these years, the internet and the process of wrestling with it changed in small ways. The editors gradually withdrew more and more from commenting on what they were sharing. “We moved”, says Varghese, “in a direction opposite to blogging, meaning we moved towards some virtual self-abnegation in favour of just letting the piece speak for itself. So much of blogging was and is about the blogger’s take on things.” Today, a post contains nothing more than a headline, a block quote from the article, an image and a link to the original publication.
Yet this seemingly spartan layout belies the fact that curation is authorship, just not of the texts themselves. Maria Popova, whose blog ‘Brainpickings’ was made a part of the Library of Congress permanent archive as a resource for researchers of the future, has become an unofficial spokesperson for the community on this issue. “If information discovery plays such a central role in how we make sense of the world in this new media landscape,” she wrote in an essay for Neiman Lab, “then it is a form of creative labour in and of itself. And yet our current normative models for crediting this kind of labour are completely inadequate, if they exist at all.”
Today, information discovery comes in all shapes and sizes – from the New Yorker Minute that does a number on the New Yorker, to Amazon’s book recommendation behemoth. There isn’t a doubt that the latter is a remarkable feat of software engineering, as are the algorithms employed by Netflix, Spotify, Facebook and Google. Netizens depend on these wonders – relying on them to suck in chaos and spit out order.
Yet these same sites are also examples of total moral capitulation. Underlying the logic of many algorithms is the idea that to find what people want, we need only look for what similar people have wanted. Apart from engendering near total surveillance, a mechanism built around the urgency of giving people what they want ignores the importance (or even the existence) of a responsibility to give people what they might need. This isn’t a surprising stance for profit-driven corporations to take. However, as citizens who value democratic access to resources and knowledge, it’s dangerous to allow ourselves to become complacent with gatekeepers who don’t acknowledge their own roles as stewards or see their power as weighted by responsibility to the community. It’s the logic of giving people what they want that’s made virality the metric for deciding what makes the news and triggered the current race for the bottom that has marked the new culture wars.
by Thomas Manuel, The Wire | Read more:
Image: 3 Quarks Daily
'Pokemon Go': Craze Sweeps the Nation and is Poised to Surpass Twitter
[ed. This seems disheartening (for a variety of reasons). See also: The Seventeen Remaining Pokemon Go Headlines.]
Days after its release, “Pokemon Go” has become a fast-moving phenomenon, drawing flash-mob-like crowds searching neighborhoods, parks and urban streets for imaginary characters on their smartphones.
The game, which trades on the nostalgia of the popular 1990s franchise and the thrill of exploring an augmented reality, is poised to surpass Twitter in daily active users on Android, according to data published by SimilarWeb, an information technology firm. And on the Google Play store, it’s ranked No. 1 above Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.
The craze has sent Nintendo’s stock screaming upward, adding $7.5 billion to the company’s market value.
Users play the game by wandering neighborhoods and other public places, trying to discover geo-located Pokemon characters, which show up as if in the real world on their smartphone cameras. Players sometimes congregate at local landmarks to join teams and compete with one another.
But already the game has posed risks and warnings that users may be drawn into danger.
Armed robbers in Missouri used the app to lure victims to isolated locations where they could be robbed, said police. Others have been injured chasing the imaginary characters on their smartphones, without paying attention to their real-life surroundings.
In Washington state, Duvall police posted a warning on Facebook after players had been found “creeping around the Duvall PD… in the dark, popping out of bushes.”
“Just use common sense,” the post said, suggesting users “make sure your presence is well known. … And remember to be polite.”
The Darwin Police Station in Australia also discovered people trying to find Pokemon characters at their building and warned players to be safe.
“It's also a good idea to look up, away from your phone and both ways before crossing the street. That Sandshrew isn't going anywhere fast,” police said, referring to the rabbit-like Pokemon character.
Washington’s Department of Transportation warned against “Pokemoning” while driving. "No Pokemoning from behind the wheel," the agency tweeted.
The game has led to some grisly discoveries as well. A quest to locate water-category Pokemon led a teen to discover a dead body in a river in Wyoming.
“I was walking towards the bridge along the shore when I saw something in the water,” 19-year-old Shayla Wiggins told KTVQ news. “I had to take a second look and I realized it was a body.”
She also admitted she probably never would have gone to that place if it weren’t for the game.
The “Pokemon Go” app is now installed on more Android phones than Tinder is and average users spend more than 43 minutes a day engaged with the app — that’s twice the amount of time users spend on Snapchat, SimilarWeb reported.
Days after its release, “Pokemon Go” has become a fast-moving phenomenon, drawing flash-mob-like crowds searching neighborhoods, parks and urban streets for imaginary characters on their smartphones.
The game, which trades on the nostalgia of the popular 1990s franchise and the thrill of exploring an augmented reality, is poised to surpass Twitter in daily active users on Android, according to data published by SimilarWeb, an information technology firm. And on the Google Play store, it’s ranked No. 1 above Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.
The craze has sent Nintendo’s stock screaming upward, adding $7.5 billion to the company’s market value.Users play the game by wandering neighborhoods and other public places, trying to discover geo-located Pokemon characters, which show up as if in the real world on their smartphone cameras. Players sometimes congregate at local landmarks to join teams and compete with one another.
But already the game has posed risks and warnings that users may be drawn into danger.
Armed robbers in Missouri used the app to lure victims to isolated locations where they could be robbed, said police. Others have been injured chasing the imaginary characters on their smartphones, without paying attention to their real-life surroundings.
In Washington state, Duvall police posted a warning on Facebook after players had been found “creeping around the Duvall PD… in the dark, popping out of bushes.”
“Just use common sense,” the post said, suggesting users “make sure your presence is well known. … And remember to be polite.”
The Darwin Police Station in Australia also discovered people trying to find Pokemon characters at their building and warned players to be safe.
“It's also a good idea to look up, away from your phone and both ways before crossing the street. That Sandshrew isn't going anywhere fast,” police said, referring to the rabbit-like Pokemon character.
Washington’s Department of Transportation warned against “Pokemoning” while driving. "No Pokemoning from behind the wheel," the agency tweeted.
The game has led to some grisly discoveries as well. A quest to locate water-category Pokemon led a teen to discover a dead body in a river in Wyoming.
“I was walking towards the bridge along the shore when I saw something in the water,” 19-year-old Shayla Wiggins told KTVQ news. “I had to take a second look and I realized it was a body.”
She also admitted she probably never would have gone to that place if it weren’t for the game.
The “Pokemon Go” app is now installed on more Android phones than Tinder is and average users spend more than 43 minutes a day engaged with the app — that’s twice the amount of time users spend on Snapchat, SimilarWeb reported.
by Erica Evans, LA Times | Read more:
Image: via:
The Coming Die-Off: Japan
The red-roofed temple at the top of the hill closed about a decade ago, and now Yoshihiro Shibata can’t even remember its name, though the 54-year-old dairy farmer has lived in this picturesque village all his life.
“The income of the temple depends on the number of residents, and there weren’t enough to keep a monk here,” he said, looking around the deserted grounds nestled amid the village’s lush landscape of tea plants and hydrangeas, bamboo and pine trees.
A few years after the temple shut its doors, the village tea-processing factory closed down and the elementary school too. Now, the remaining students are bused an hour away.
“When I was young, we had about 100 kids here, but now there are just five,” Shibata said.
The local Shinto shrine is barely hanging on. With only about 250 households left in Hara-izumi, which is technically part of nearby Kakegawa city, the village no longer has enough men to hoist up the traditional float and parade it around during the shrine’s annual festival.
“They just set it out there and it doesn’t move,” Shibata said. In a few more years, even that may not be possible. “We’re supposed to lose half our population in the next decade.”
All across Japan, aging villages such as Hara-izumi have been quietly hollowing out for years, even as urban areas have continued to grow modestly. But like a creaky wooden roller coaster that slows at the top of the climb before plunging into a terrifying, steep descent, Japan’s population crested around 2010 with 128 million people and has since lost about 900,000 residents, last year’s census confirmed.
Now, the country has begun a white-knuckle ride in which it will shed about one-third of its population — 40 million people — by 2060, experts predict. In 30 years, 39% of Japan’s population will be 65 or older.
If the United States experienced a similar population contraction, it would be like losing every single inhabitant of California, New York, Texas and Florida — more than 100 million people.
Though demographers have long anticipated the transformation Japan is now facing, the country only now seems to be sobering up to the epic metamorphosis at hand.
Police and firefighters are grappling with the safety hazards of a growing number of vacant buildings. Transportation authorities are discussing which roads and bus lines are worth maintaining and cutting those they can no longer justify. Aging small-business owners and farmers are having trouble finding successors to take over their enterprises. Each year, the nation is shuttering 500 schools.
“Now, in every area — land planning, urban planning, economic planning — every branch of government is trying to do what they can,” said Reiko Hayashi, a researcher at the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.
by Julie Makinen, LA Times | Read more:
Image:Julie Makinen / Los Angeles Times
“The income of the temple depends on the number of residents, and there weren’t enough to keep a monk here,” he said, looking around the deserted grounds nestled amid the village’s lush landscape of tea plants and hydrangeas, bamboo and pine trees.
A few years after the temple shut its doors, the village tea-processing factory closed down and the elementary school too. Now, the remaining students are bused an hour away.“When I was young, we had about 100 kids here, but now there are just five,” Shibata said.
The local Shinto shrine is barely hanging on. With only about 250 households left in Hara-izumi, which is technically part of nearby Kakegawa city, the village no longer has enough men to hoist up the traditional float and parade it around during the shrine’s annual festival.
“They just set it out there and it doesn’t move,” Shibata said. In a few more years, even that may not be possible. “We’re supposed to lose half our population in the next decade.”
All across Japan, aging villages such as Hara-izumi have been quietly hollowing out for years, even as urban areas have continued to grow modestly. But like a creaky wooden roller coaster that slows at the top of the climb before plunging into a terrifying, steep descent, Japan’s population crested around 2010 with 128 million people and has since lost about 900,000 residents, last year’s census confirmed.
Now, the country has begun a white-knuckle ride in which it will shed about one-third of its population — 40 million people — by 2060, experts predict. In 30 years, 39% of Japan’s population will be 65 or older.
If the United States experienced a similar population contraction, it would be like losing every single inhabitant of California, New York, Texas and Florida — more than 100 million people.
Though demographers have long anticipated the transformation Japan is now facing, the country only now seems to be sobering up to the epic metamorphosis at hand.
Police and firefighters are grappling with the safety hazards of a growing number of vacant buildings. Transportation authorities are discussing which roads and bus lines are worth maintaining and cutting those they can no longer justify. Aging small-business owners and farmers are having trouble finding successors to take over their enterprises. Each year, the nation is shuttering 500 schools.
“Now, in every area — land planning, urban planning, economic planning — every branch of government is trying to do what they can,” said Reiko Hayashi, a researcher at the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.
by Julie Makinen, LA Times | Read more:
Image:Julie Makinen / Los Angeles Times
Monday, July 11, 2016
Nobody Says I Love You Anymore
I’ve spent my life complaining and arguing and telling stories about the city I came from. Then I changed—but it did, too.
When I moved from Manhattan back to my hometown of Dallas last June, people asked the same question: “Why?”
I was accustomed to New Yorkers taking broad swipes at my home state, but I was surprised to get the question from people in Dallas, too.
“You’ve moved back!” an acquaintance said when I ran into him at a party. “I’m sorry about that.”
Perhaps his assumption was that I had flamed out in the Big Apple—and in a way, I had. I was bone-tired by the time I boarded that plane from LaGuardia with my orange cat. Six years of crowded subways and jackhammers and fourth-floor walkups had ground me down to a bitter nub. But I suspected my friend was not teasing me for escaping the big city; he was teasing me for drag-assing back to the place I came from. He was taking a swing at Dallas, which I recognized because, well, I used to do it all the time.
Growing up, I did not like Dallas. To be fair, I did not like growing up, period, and I suspect that whatever city in which my adolescence unfolded would have taken the blame. My family rented a sweet, shabby little home in a privileged section of town, known for its excellent school system and status cars, and my most vivid memory of being 11 and 12 is simply the feeling of not belonging. That’s as unique as braces and bad skin among this age group, but the fact that I could not afford a $300 Louis Vuitton handbag or that my parents drove a dented silver station wagon felt like the worst thing that had happened to anyone, ever.
Going to college in Austin sharpened my knives. Every great city has a nemesis, a place against which they define themselves—New York refuses to be Jersey, San Franciscans despise Los Angeles—and in Austin, a city so hell-bent on quirkiness that it elevated a cross-dressing homeless man to the status of cult hero, the general consensus is that Dallas blows. (“Keep Austin weird,” the slogan says, to which there is also a response T-shirt, “Keep Dallas lame.”) This was back in the early ’90s, when the fault lines between the two cities were far easier to demarcate. Austin was the town of “Slacker,” a bohemian paradise for pot smokers and amateur philosophers, and Dallas was the birthplace of the outdoor mall. I began to embrace torn jeans and a natural curl in my hair. I stopped waking at 7:30 a.m. to do my makeup before class. It was a rite of passage for a college girl at that time to crank Tori Amos and give Banana Republic the double-fisted flip-off, but I understood this shift in stark geographic terms: Dallas was conformity, Austin was freedom.
Those storylines were so cemented in my mind that it jarred me when anyone disrupted them. I was visiting New York in my mid-20s when I met an editor who worked for the most impressive newspaper there is. When I found out he once wrote in Dallas, I offered my condolences.
“Actually, I loved living there,” he said.
Oof. How could someone so smart be so dumb? “We’re going to have to agree to disagree,” I said. We left that conversation each feeling a little sorry for the other person.
At the time, I was traveling around the country in my Honda, enjoying the hit of admiration I got from strangers when I told them so. I had pried myself out of Austin, and was casting about for my next home, which I assumed would be a place like Portland or Oakland or Brooklyn. I never liked telling people I was from Dallas. They asked about the television show, or stared blankly and said something like, “Fun!” (Meanwhile, saying I lived in Austin elicited envy and cooing sounds. “That town is great!” people said, though they often had not been.) I had long phone conversations with my mom on the road, and she said, in that gentle voice reserved for mothers, “What about moving back to Dallas?”
No way. Absolutely not. What is the opposite of yes? That is my answer. A thousand-billion times no.
The knee-jerking was a little extreme. But when you construct your meaning from things outside of you—the cool job you have, the music and the movies you enjoy, the vintage brush of the funky corduroys you wear—then you are bound to live in cities on the Approved List, which Dallas certainly was not. If you had asked me what was so terrible about the place, I would have sneered that it was an image-based society. But the funny thing is that I was totally image-based at that time. I needed your admiration. I needed your approval. The image I wanted to project just had little to do with Mercedes-Benz and Neiman-Marcus and more to do with knowing the bands at SXSW.
But in a twist I did not see coming, I went to my 10-year high school reunion the following month, fell in love with a guy, and moved back to Dallas. So much for all that.
I complained about Dallas in those years, and it was a problem. No one wants to hear that the city they live in—the city they feel comfortable in and fairly thrive in and a city they have no desire to leave—is somehow inferior.
“I was thinking you might like San Francisco,” I said one night at dinner.
“Hmm.”
And that was pretty much the entire conversation. Well, there were tears (mine) and sighs (his) and dissatisfaction on both parts. I don’t feel proud that the subtext to many conversations he and I had during that time was that I wanted to get the hell out of Dallas. But in the two years I spent casting aspersions on the city, something unexpected happened: I came to really love it. At least, I really loved the people, who were funny and smart and bent in all the right ways, and loving the people in a city is a very, very short walk from loving the city itself. When my boyfriend and I broke up, and I decided to move to New York, no one was surprised. But I was taken aback by the pangs of remorse I felt leaving the cozy dive bars where I spent most nights and the ramshackle Tex-Mex restaurants where I’d nursed every hangover. I drove out of town in an old hatchback wearing one of those baby-Ts you buy at airport gift stores. It said “Dallas” in a cheesy, cursive font. It was so tacky. It was so fantastic.
It’s funny how living far away from a place can make you feel closer to it. Friends who moved to New York decorated their home in Texas kitsch we would have laughed at back home. Longhorn coat racks, cowboy hats on the mantelpiece. My keychain was a medallion in the shape of the state that doubled as a bottle opener, which is everything you need to know about me at this time. (...)
I never wanted to be one of “those people”—the ones who talk about New York all the time, who compare every single experience to Manhattan (like you care), who complain about the G train or the square footage of their studio apartment or tell war stories about the Whole Foods in Union Square. And I would like it on record that after moving back to Dallas, I was totally this person, and I know that, and I’m sorry.
When I moved from Manhattan back to my hometown of Dallas last June, people asked the same question: “Why?”
I was accustomed to New Yorkers taking broad swipes at my home state, but I was surprised to get the question from people in Dallas, too.“You’ve moved back!” an acquaintance said when I ran into him at a party. “I’m sorry about that.”
Perhaps his assumption was that I had flamed out in the Big Apple—and in a way, I had. I was bone-tired by the time I boarded that plane from LaGuardia with my orange cat. Six years of crowded subways and jackhammers and fourth-floor walkups had ground me down to a bitter nub. But I suspected my friend was not teasing me for escaping the big city; he was teasing me for drag-assing back to the place I came from. He was taking a swing at Dallas, which I recognized because, well, I used to do it all the time.
Growing up, I did not like Dallas. To be fair, I did not like growing up, period, and I suspect that whatever city in which my adolescence unfolded would have taken the blame. My family rented a sweet, shabby little home in a privileged section of town, known for its excellent school system and status cars, and my most vivid memory of being 11 and 12 is simply the feeling of not belonging. That’s as unique as braces and bad skin among this age group, but the fact that I could not afford a $300 Louis Vuitton handbag or that my parents drove a dented silver station wagon felt like the worst thing that had happened to anyone, ever.
Going to college in Austin sharpened my knives. Every great city has a nemesis, a place against which they define themselves—New York refuses to be Jersey, San Franciscans despise Los Angeles—and in Austin, a city so hell-bent on quirkiness that it elevated a cross-dressing homeless man to the status of cult hero, the general consensus is that Dallas blows. (“Keep Austin weird,” the slogan says, to which there is also a response T-shirt, “Keep Dallas lame.”) This was back in the early ’90s, when the fault lines between the two cities were far easier to demarcate. Austin was the town of “Slacker,” a bohemian paradise for pot smokers and amateur philosophers, and Dallas was the birthplace of the outdoor mall. I began to embrace torn jeans and a natural curl in my hair. I stopped waking at 7:30 a.m. to do my makeup before class. It was a rite of passage for a college girl at that time to crank Tori Amos and give Banana Republic the double-fisted flip-off, but I understood this shift in stark geographic terms: Dallas was conformity, Austin was freedom.
Those storylines were so cemented in my mind that it jarred me when anyone disrupted them. I was visiting New York in my mid-20s when I met an editor who worked for the most impressive newspaper there is. When I found out he once wrote in Dallas, I offered my condolences.
“Actually, I loved living there,” he said.
Oof. How could someone so smart be so dumb? “We’re going to have to agree to disagree,” I said. We left that conversation each feeling a little sorry for the other person.
At the time, I was traveling around the country in my Honda, enjoying the hit of admiration I got from strangers when I told them so. I had pried myself out of Austin, and was casting about for my next home, which I assumed would be a place like Portland or Oakland or Brooklyn. I never liked telling people I was from Dallas. They asked about the television show, or stared blankly and said something like, “Fun!” (Meanwhile, saying I lived in Austin elicited envy and cooing sounds. “That town is great!” people said, though they often had not been.) I had long phone conversations with my mom on the road, and she said, in that gentle voice reserved for mothers, “What about moving back to Dallas?”
No way. Absolutely not. What is the opposite of yes? That is my answer. A thousand-billion times no.
The knee-jerking was a little extreme. But when you construct your meaning from things outside of you—the cool job you have, the music and the movies you enjoy, the vintage brush of the funky corduroys you wear—then you are bound to live in cities on the Approved List, which Dallas certainly was not. If you had asked me what was so terrible about the place, I would have sneered that it was an image-based society. But the funny thing is that I was totally image-based at that time. I needed your admiration. I needed your approval. The image I wanted to project just had little to do with Mercedes-Benz and Neiman-Marcus and more to do with knowing the bands at SXSW.
But in a twist I did not see coming, I went to my 10-year high school reunion the following month, fell in love with a guy, and moved back to Dallas. So much for all that.
I complained about Dallas in those years, and it was a problem. No one wants to hear that the city they live in—the city they feel comfortable in and fairly thrive in and a city they have no desire to leave—is somehow inferior.
“I was thinking you might like San Francisco,” I said one night at dinner.
“Hmm.”
And that was pretty much the entire conversation. Well, there were tears (mine) and sighs (his) and dissatisfaction on both parts. I don’t feel proud that the subtext to many conversations he and I had during that time was that I wanted to get the hell out of Dallas. But in the two years I spent casting aspersions on the city, something unexpected happened: I came to really love it. At least, I really loved the people, who were funny and smart and bent in all the right ways, and loving the people in a city is a very, very short walk from loving the city itself. When my boyfriend and I broke up, and I decided to move to New York, no one was surprised. But I was taken aback by the pangs of remorse I felt leaving the cozy dive bars where I spent most nights and the ramshackle Tex-Mex restaurants where I’d nursed every hangover. I drove out of town in an old hatchback wearing one of those baby-Ts you buy at airport gift stores. It said “Dallas” in a cheesy, cursive font. It was so tacky. It was so fantastic.
It’s funny how living far away from a place can make you feel closer to it. Friends who moved to New York decorated their home in Texas kitsch we would have laughed at back home. Longhorn coat racks, cowboy hats on the mantelpiece. My keychain was a medallion in the shape of the state that doubled as a bottle opener, which is everything you need to know about me at this time. (...)
I never wanted to be one of “those people”—the ones who talk about New York all the time, who compare every single experience to Manhattan (like you care), who complain about the G train or the square footage of their studio apartment or tell war stories about the Whole Foods in Union Square. And I would like it on record that after moving back to Dallas, I was totally this person, and I know that, and I’m sorry.
by Sarah Hepola, TMN | Read more:
Image: Gwendolyn Zabicki, Billboards, 2011
Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless
Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we can achieve a meaningful existence by maintaining a positive outlook, following our bliss, and doing a few hamstring stretches as the planet burns. The more frightening the economic outlook and the more floodwaters rise, the more the public conversation is turning toward individual fulfillment as if in a desperate attempt to make us feel like we still have some control over our lives.
Coca-Cola encourages us to “choose happiness.” Politicians take time out from building careers in the debris of democracy to remind us of the importance of regular exercise. Lifestyle bloggers insist to hundreds of thousands of followers that freedom looks like a white woman practicing yoga alone on a beach. One such image (on the @selflovemantras Instagram) informs us that “the deeper the self love, the richer you are.” That’s a charming sentiment, but landlords are not currently collecting rent in self-love.
Can all this positive thinking be actively harmful? Carl Cederström and André Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, certainly think so, arguing that obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.” (...)
The wellbeing ideology is a symptom of a broader political disease. The rigors of both work and worklessness, the colonization of every public space by private money, the precarity of daily living, and the growing impossibility of building any sort of community maroon each of us in our lonely struggle to survive. We are supposed to believe that we can only work to improve our lives on that same individual level. Chris Maisano concludes that while “the appeal of individualistic and therapeutic approaches to the problems of our time is not difficult to apprehend . . . it is only through the creation of solidarities that rebuild confidence in our collective capacity to change the world that their grip can be broken.”
The isolating ideology of wellness works against this sort of social change in two important ways. First, it persuades all us that if we are sick, sad, and exhausted, the problem isn’t one of economics. There is no structural imbalance, according to this view—there is only individual maladaption, requiring an individual response. The lexis of abuse and gas-lighting is appropriate here: if you are miserable or angry because your life is a constant struggle against privation or prejudice, the problem is always and only with you. Society is not mad, or messed up: you are.
Secondly, it prevents us from even considering a broader, more collective reaction to the crises of work, poverty, and injustice. That’s the logic exposed by personal productivity gurus like Mark Fritz, who tells us, in The Truth About Getting Things Done, that:
Coca-Cola encourages us to “choose happiness.” Politicians take time out from building careers in the debris of democracy to remind us of the importance of regular exercise. Lifestyle bloggers insist to hundreds of thousands of followers that freedom looks like a white woman practicing yoga alone on a beach. One such image (on the @selflovemantras Instagram) informs us that “the deeper the self love, the richer you are.” That’s a charming sentiment, but landlords are not currently collecting rent in self-love.Can all this positive thinking be actively harmful? Carl Cederström and André Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, certainly think so, arguing that obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.” (...)
The wellbeing ideology is a symptom of a broader political disease. The rigors of both work and worklessness, the colonization of every public space by private money, the precarity of daily living, and the growing impossibility of building any sort of community maroon each of us in our lonely struggle to survive. We are supposed to believe that we can only work to improve our lives on that same individual level. Chris Maisano concludes that while “the appeal of individualistic and therapeutic approaches to the problems of our time is not difficult to apprehend . . . it is only through the creation of solidarities that rebuild confidence in our collective capacity to change the world that their grip can be broken.”
The isolating ideology of wellness works against this sort of social change in two important ways. First, it persuades all us that if we are sick, sad, and exhausted, the problem isn’t one of economics. There is no structural imbalance, according to this view—there is only individual maladaption, requiring an individual response. The lexis of abuse and gas-lighting is appropriate here: if you are miserable or angry because your life is a constant struggle against privation or prejudice, the problem is always and only with you. Society is not mad, or messed up: you are.
Secondly, it prevents us from even considering a broader, more collective reaction to the crises of work, poverty, and injustice. That’s the logic exposed by personal productivity gurus like Mark Fritz, who tells us, in The Truth About Getting Things Done, that:
The biggest barrier to achieving the success you have defined for your life is never anyone else or the circumstances you encounter. Your biggest barrier is almost always you. . . . Dr Maxwell Maltz, author of Psycho-Cybernetics [ETA: sounds legit to me!], put it best when he said, “Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you as soon as you can change your beliefs.This, of course, is a cyclopean lie—but it’s a seductive one nonetheless. It would be nice to believe that all it takes to change your life is to repeat some affirmations and buy a planner, just as it was once comforting for many of us to trust that the hardships of this plane of existence would be rewarded by an eternity of bliss in heaven. There is a reason that the rituals of wellbeing and self-care are followed with the precision of a cult (do this and you will be saved; do this and you will be safe): It is a practice of faith. It’s worth remembering that Marx’s description of religion as the opiate of the masses is often misinterpreted—opium, at the time when Marx was writing, was not just known as an addictive drug, but as a painkiller, a solace when the work of survival became unbearable.
by Laurie Penny, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Joanna Slodownik
Sunday, July 10, 2016
How Police See Us, and How They Train Us to See Them
The first image you see when you play the video is the face of a black woman. She is sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle. Then the camera turns to a black male in the driver’s seat, leaned over, eyes half-closed, T-shirt slick with blood.
The woman, Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds, is narrating the shooting of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, 32, in Falcon Heights, Minn. Her 4-year-old daughter is in the back seat. A police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, stands outside, pistol drawn and aimed through the driver’s-side window, yelling obscenities.
“The police,” the woman says calmly, “they killed my boyfriend. He’s licensed to carry. He was trying to get out his ID and his wallet out his pocket, and he let the officer know that he had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm.”
“Ma’am, keep your hands on the wheel!” the officer shrieks.
“I will, sir,” Reynolds reassures the officer. “No worries, I will.”
Castile is drawing his last breaths. Sickeningly, none of this feels jarring or unfamiliar. The true horror of the video is that there is a video at all, that Reynolds knows just what to do.
“I told him not to reach for it!” the officer shrieks.
“You told him to get his ID, sir,” Reynolds softly corrects. It isn’t until she’s handcuffed in the back of the police cruiser that she finally breaks down and sobs.
In a vacuum, it isn’t natural to pre-emptively shoot people to death, just as, in a vacuum, it isn’t natural to keep your gun trained on a person who has been rendered incapacitated and is bleeding out before you. This is specialized behavior, the sort expected from military forces entering unfamiliar war zones. Soldiers are trained to consider everyone and everything a potential threat, to neutralize any man, woman or child who could potentially cause them harm. The highest priorities are to protect themselves and to accomplish their mission, and that requires the trained dehumanization of the local population. In such an environment, the burden of not killing is lifted from the soldiers, and local people are tasked with the burden of not provoking death.
In a vacuum, the United States of America is not a war zone. Falcon Heights, Minn., is not a war zone. Dallas is not a war zone. The nation’s thruways are not war zones. In a vacuum, police officers shouldn’t kill the very citizens they swear to protect. But the police, especially officers who commute to patrol communities not their own, are — or can act very much like — an occupying force. You can see their training at work when an officer fires into a car with a 4-year-old child in it. You can see it when Reynolds is directed to get out of the car, lift her hands over her head and walk backward toward a group of officers: Her camera glimpses several guns aimed squarely at her back.
All of this is so routine, so imprinted through repetition, that despite Yanez’s panic, he was still drilled enough to keep his gun trained on a dying man. But Reynolds recognized a routine, too, and her actions showed how, just as in any war zone, the local population will eventually become trained as well.
“No worries.” Reynolds knows to de-escalate the situation by being reassuring, even encouraging, to the man who just shot her boyfriend. She knows that her boyfriend is likely to die. She knows to document everything, to give her own accounting of events, to create a record. She knows what will come next.
The woman, Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds, is narrating the shooting of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, 32, in Falcon Heights, Minn. Her 4-year-old daughter is in the back seat. A police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, stands outside, pistol drawn and aimed through the driver’s-side window, yelling obscenities.
“The police,” the woman says calmly, “they killed my boyfriend. He’s licensed to carry. He was trying to get out his ID and his wallet out his pocket, and he let the officer know that he had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm.”“Ma’am, keep your hands on the wheel!” the officer shrieks.
“I will, sir,” Reynolds reassures the officer. “No worries, I will.”
Castile is drawing his last breaths. Sickeningly, none of this feels jarring or unfamiliar. The true horror of the video is that there is a video at all, that Reynolds knows just what to do.
“I told him not to reach for it!” the officer shrieks.
“You told him to get his ID, sir,” Reynolds softly corrects. It isn’t until she’s handcuffed in the back of the police cruiser that she finally breaks down and sobs.
In a vacuum, it isn’t natural to pre-emptively shoot people to death, just as, in a vacuum, it isn’t natural to keep your gun trained on a person who has been rendered incapacitated and is bleeding out before you. This is specialized behavior, the sort expected from military forces entering unfamiliar war zones. Soldiers are trained to consider everyone and everything a potential threat, to neutralize any man, woman or child who could potentially cause them harm. The highest priorities are to protect themselves and to accomplish their mission, and that requires the trained dehumanization of the local population. In such an environment, the burden of not killing is lifted from the soldiers, and local people are tasked with the burden of not provoking death.
In a vacuum, the United States of America is not a war zone. Falcon Heights, Minn., is not a war zone. Dallas is not a war zone. The nation’s thruways are not war zones. In a vacuum, police officers shouldn’t kill the very citizens they swear to protect. But the police, especially officers who commute to patrol communities not their own, are — or can act very much like — an occupying force. You can see their training at work when an officer fires into a car with a 4-year-old child in it. You can see it when Reynolds is directed to get out of the car, lift her hands over her head and walk backward toward a group of officers: Her camera glimpses several guns aimed squarely at her back.
All of this is so routine, so imprinted through repetition, that despite Yanez’s panic, he was still drilled enough to keep his gun trained on a dying man. But Reynolds recognized a routine, too, and her actions showed how, just as in any war zone, the local population will eventually become trained as well.
“No worries.” Reynolds knows to de-escalate the situation by being reassuring, even encouraging, to the man who just shot her boyfriend. She knows that her boyfriend is likely to die. She knows to document everything, to give her own accounting of events, to create a record. She knows what will come next.
by Greg Howard, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Yana Paskova/Getty Images
What Media Companies Don’t Want You To Know About Ad Blockers
New York Times CEO Mark Thompson caused a minor stir a couple weeks ago when he gave a speech at an advertising conference declaring that “No one who refuses to contribute to the creation of high quality journalism has the right to consume it.” He went on to say that while the Times is “not there yet,” the company may soon prevent users with ad blockers from accessing its site.
But newspaper executives like Thompson often focus exclusively on the drawbacks of ad blockers, leaving a big part of the story untold. Thompson did not say one word in his keynote address about the significant security benefits of ad blockers, which is ironic, because his paper was one of several news organizations that served its users ransomware—a particularly vicious form of malware that encrypts the contents of your computer and forces you to pay the perpetrators a ransom in bitcoin to unlock it—through its ad networks just a few months ago. Several major news sites—including the Times, the BBC, and AOL—had their ad networks hijacked by criminal hackers who attempted to install ransomware on readers’ computers.
Advertising networks have served malware onto the computers of unwitting news readers over and over in the past couple years. Ads on Forbes, for example, attacked their readers in January, right after the magazine forced readers to disable ad-blocking software to view its popular annual “30 Under 30” feature. As Engadget reported, “visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information.” It wasn’t the first time this had happened at Forbes, either. And it’s not just in the US. A couple months ago, almost every major news site in the Netherlands served malware through its ads to its users.
You can bet this problem is only going to get worse. According to a 2015 study, malware served by advertising networks tripled between June 2015 and February 2015. So the longer people wait to install an ad blocker, the more vulnerable they become.
Even when malware infection is not a problem, advertisers’ pervasive tracking of users on news organization websites is really disturbing to any reader who cares about privacy. One Princeton study that looked at a million websites found that news sites were the most likely to feature trackers—even more than porn sites. The nonprofit research groupCitizen Lab surveyed the top 100 news sites last year and found that many had dozens of trackers running on their website, allowing advertisers to spy on visitors’ every move. Worse, most of the trackers were using unencrypted connections, which means malicious actors could more easily track users’ online movements, as well.
This isn’t just conjecture: The Washington Post revealed in 2013 that the NSA “is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using ‘cookies’ and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.”Edward Snowden himself recently said: “If the service provider is not working to protect the sanctity of the relationship between reader and publisher, you have not just a right but a duty to take every effort to protect yourself in response.”
by Trevor Timm, CJR | Read more:
But newspaper executives like Thompson often focus exclusively on the drawbacks of ad blockers, leaving a big part of the story untold. Thompson did not say one word in his keynote address about the significant security benefits of ad blockers, which is ironic, because his paper was one of several news organizations that served its users ransomware—a particularly vicious form of malware that encrypts the contents of your computer and forces you to pay the perpetrators a ransom in bitcoin to unlock it—through its ad networks just a few months ago. Several major news sites—including the Times, the BBC, and AOL—had their ad networks hijacked by criminal hackers who attempted to install ransomware on readers’ computers.
Advertising networks have served malware onto the computers of unwitting news readers over and over in the past couple years. Ads on Forbes, for example, attacked their readers in January, right after the magazine forced readers to disable ad-blocking software to view its popular annual “30 Under 30” feature. As Engadget reported, “visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information.” It wasn’t the first time this had happened at Forbes, either. And it’s not just in the US. A couple months ago, almost every major news site in the Netherlands served malware through its ads to its users. You can bet this problem is only going to get worse. According to a 2015 study, malware served by advertising networks tripled between June 2015 and February 2015. So the longer people wait to install an ad blocker, the more vulnerable they become.
Even when malware infection is not a problem, advertisers’ pervasive tracking of users on news organization websites is really disturbing to any reader who cares about privacy. One Princeton study that looked at a million websites found that news sites were the most likely to feature trackers—even more than porn sites. The nonprofit research groupCitizen Lab surveyed the top 100 news sites last year and found that many had dozens of trackers running on their website, allowing advertisers to spy on visitors’ every move. Worse, most of the trackers were using unencrypted connections, which means malicious actors could more easily track users’ online movements, as well.
This isn’t just conjecture: The Washington Post revealed in 2013 that the NSA “is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using ‘cookies’ and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.”Edward Snowden himself recently said: “If the service provider is not working to protect the sanctity of the relationship between reader and publisher, you have not just a right but a duty to take every effort to protect yourself in response.”
by Trevor Timm, CJR | Read more:
Image: Citizen Lab
Topgolf: New Approach to the Driving Range
The creators of a new kind of driving range are betting that loud music, tons of booze, and an addictive point system will make golf cool again
On a warm, clear Sunday afternoon last April, Atlanta Hawks swing man Kent Bazemore stepped up to a turf-covered platform brandishing a five-iron. With Pitbull blaring in the background, Bazemore set his feet and purposefully unwound his six-foot-five frame to send a perfect shot downrange. “Best ball of the day,” he said, stepping back to admire the arc as it dropped, nearly 200 yards away, into a 15-foot-wide, spider-web-shaped target. As groups of golfers on either side of him plowed through pitchers of beer, a nearby screen flashed congratulations and awarded Bazemore nine points.
Clearly, this is not your grandfather’s good walk spoiled—it’s the Midtown Atlanta site of Topgolf, which has 23 locations across the country. The company transported the driving range into a three-story building, ditched the dress code, and added free-flowing drinks, hundreds of TVs, and pounding music.
Topgolf was invented in 2000 in England by twin brothers Steve and Dave Jolliffe, who were bored stiff with the usual bucket-of-balls approach to perfecting their golf swing. So they created an experience that was more like a video game. They equipped the balls with electronic tags, similar to a marathoner’s timing chip, and devised a point system based on shot distance and accuracy. When the ball hits one of the targets on the 215-yard range, sensors scan it and the score is added to a running tally.
The company opened its first U.S. location in Virginia in 2005 and has since brought on investors including Callaway. Topgolf has done something that traditional golf, as Topgolf employees call it, has struggled to do: attract new players, particularly young ones. This year’s Tiger-less Masters saw an 11 percent decline in final-round TV viewership, and according to the National Golf Foundation, course closures have outpaced openings for eight years running. Despite the ascendance of fresh faces like Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy, the game is especially unpopular with young people—participation by those between 18 and 30 has declined 35 percent since 2006.
Of the 13 million people expected to visit Topgolf this year, more than two-thirds are under 35, according to company statistics. Half have never played before. The other half aren’t your typical white country clubbers, either. Though the company doesn’t track such data, the visitors I saw were more racially diverse and included more women than the local links. It’s not hard to see why: with greens fees at some courses reaching well over $100 per person for 18 holes, traditional golf is expensive and stuffy. Topgolf costs between $20 and $40 an hour for your entire group, and on Fridays and Saturdays the place is usually packed late into the night. (It’s open until 2 A.M. on weekends.)
On a warm, clear Sunday afternoon last April, Atlanta Hawks swing man Kent Bazemore stepped up to a turf-covered platform brandishing a five-iron. With Pitbull blaring in the background, Bazemore set his feet and purposefully unwound his six-foot-five frame to send a perfect shot downrange. “Best ball of the day,” he said, stepping back to admire the arc as it dropped, nearly 200 yards away, into a 15-foot-wide, spider-web-shaped target. As groups of golfers on either side of him plowed through pitchers of beer, a nearby screen flashed congratulations and awarded Bazemore nine points.
Clearly, this is not your grandfather’s good walk spoiled—it’s the Midtown Atlanta site of Topgolf, which has 23 locations across the country. The company transported the driving range into a three-story building, ditched the dress code, and added free-flowing drinks, hundreds of TVs, and pounding music.Topgolf was invented in 2000 in England by twin brothers Steve and Dave Jolliffe, who were bored stiff with the usual bucket-of-balls approach to perfecting their golf swing. So they created an experience that was more like a video game. They equipped the balls with electronic tags, similar to a marathoner’s timing chip, and devised a point system based on shot distance and accuracy. When the ball hits one of the targets on the 215-yard range, sensors scan it and the score is added to a running tally.
The company opened its first U.S. location in Virginia in 2005 and has since brought on investors including Callaway. Topgolf has done something that traditional golf, as Topgolf employees call it, has struggled to do: attract new players, particularly young ones. This year’s Tiger-less Masters saw an 11 percent decline in final-round TV viewership, and according to the National Golf Foundation, course closures have outpaced openings for eight years running. Despite the ascendance of fresh faces like Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy, the game is especially unpopular with young people—participation by those between 18 and 30 has declined 35 percent since 2006.
Of the 13 million people expected to visit Topgolf this year, more than two-thirds are under 35, according to company statistics. Half have never played before. The other half aren’t your typical white country clubbers, either. Though the company doesn’t track such data, the visitors I saw were more racially diverse and included more women than the local links. It’s not hard to see why: with greens fees at some courses reaching well over $100 per person for 18 holes, traditional golf is expensive and stuffy. Topgolf costs between $20 and $40 an hour for your entire group, and on Fridays and Saturdays the place is usually packed late into the night. (It’s open until 2 A.M. on weekends.)
by Chris Cohen, Outside | Read more:
Image: Melissa Golden
Friday, July 8, 2016
Would Donald Trump Quit if He Wins the Election? He Doesn’t Rule It Out
[ed. Remember folks, you heard it here first: The Greatest Politician to Never Hold Public Office]
The traditional goal of a presidential nominee is to win the presidency and then serve as president.
Donald J. Trump is not a traditional candidate for president.
Presented in a recent interview with a scenario, floating around the political ether, in which the presumptive Republican nominee proves all the naysayers wrong, beats Hillary Clinton and wins the presidency, only to forgo the office as the ultimate walk-off winner, Mr. Trump flashed a mischievous smile.
“I’ll let you know how I feel about it after it happens,” he said minutes before leaving his Trump Tower office to fly to a campaign rally in New Hampshire.
It is, of course, entirely possible that Mr. Trump is playing coy to earn more news coverage. But the notion of the intensely competitive Mr. Trump’s being more interested in winning the presidency than serving as president is not exactly a foreign concept to close observers of this presidential race.
Early in the contest, his rivals, Republican operatives and many reporters questioned the seriousness of his candidacy. His knack for creating controversy out of thin air (this week’s edition: the Star of David Twitter post) and his inclination toward self-destructive comments did not instill confidence in a political culture that values on-message discipline in its candidates.
Those doubts dissipated after Mr. Trump vanquished his Republican opponents and locked up the nomination.
“I’ve actually done very well,” Mr. Trump said. “We beat 18 people, right?”
But as the race has turned toward the general election and a majority of polls have shown Mr. Trump trailing Mrs. Clinton, speculation has again crept into political conversations in Washington, New York and elsewhere that Mr. Trump will seek an exit strategy before the election to avoid a humiliating loss.
Now he is refusing to rule out an even more dramatic departure, one that would let him avoid the grueling job of governing, return to his business and enjoy his now-permanent status as a news media celebrity.
The traditional goal of a presidential nominee is to win the presidency and then serve as president.
Donald J. Trump is not a traditional candidate for president.
Presented in a recent interview with a scenario, floating around the political ether, in which the presumptive Republican nominee proves all the naysayers wrong, beats Hillary Clinton and wins the presidency, only to forgo the office as the ultimate walk-off winner, Mr. Trump flashed a mischievous smile.
“I’ll let you know how I feel about it after it happens,” he said minutes before leaving his Trump Tower office to fly to a campaign rally in New Hampshire.It is, of course, entirely possible that Mr. Trump is playing coy to earn more news coverage. But the notion of the intensely competitive Mr. Trump’s being more interested in winning the presidency than serving as president is not exactly a foreign concept to close observers of this presidential race.
Early in the contest, his rivals, Republican operatives and many reporters questioned the seriousness of his candidacy. His knack for creating controversy out of thin air (this week’s edition: the Star of David Twitter post) and his inclination toward self-destructive comments did not instill confidence in a political culture that values on-message discipline in its candidates.
Those doubts dissipated after Mr. Trump vanquished his Republican opponents and locked up the nomination.
“I’ve actually done very well,” Mr. Trump said. “We beat 18 people, right?”
But as the race has turned toward the general election and a majority of polls have shown Mr. Trump trailing Mrs. Clinton, speculation has again crept into political conversations in Washington, New York and elsewhere that Mr. Trump will seek an exit strategy before the election to avoid a humiliating loss.
Now he is refusing to rule out an even more dramatic departure, one that would let him avoid the grueling job of governing, return to his business and enjoy his now-permanent status as a news media celebrity.
by Jason Horowitz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ty Wright for The New York Times
Thursday, July 7, 2016
My Little Free Library War
Saturday mornings unsettle me. Especially when the weather’s good. There’s a lively farmers’ market just down the street from us, with a bluegrass band, homemade donuts and vegan tamales. It’s great, if you’re into that sort of thing.
But it means floods of the worst kind of foot traffic. Graying gardeners and aging hippies; Bernie-or-Bust types; millennial parents, tatted and pierced, shepherding toddlers with names like Arya — damn near every one of whom stops to check out my Little Free Library.
And after paying $18 for an heirloom tomato and a pair of zucchini, you can’t blame a person for grabbing a free book. Indeed, this kind of neighborly interaction was exactly what my wife Heidi was hoping for when she got me the library for Hanukkah. Heidi’s the sunny and optimistic type, yin to my cranky yang, which made her an easy mark for the Little Free Library Foundation and its stated mission of promoting “the love of reading and to build a sense of community.”
She and the kids did it up right, painting ours lilac to match the color of our Victorian house. The library makes a striking contrast with the verdant green that blankets our block in the spring. But idyllic as that sounds, when the marketeers, wagons in tow, stop to fiddle with the latch and peer inside, all I feel is dread.
Little Free Library originated in Hudson, Wisconsin, in 2009, when Todd Bol built a wooden box with a glass door, modeled on a one-room schoolhouse, in honor of his mother’s career as an educator. He nailed the box to a post in his front yard and stuffed it with books. The idea spread and in 2012 Little Free Library incorporated as a non-profit. By January of 2016, there were at least 36,000 Little Free Libraries across the globe.
They seem particularly popular in our town, Oak Park, a progressive suburb just west of Chicago. We’re a bookish community with a thriving independent bookstore, a showpiece library and a proud literary heritage that includes Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jane Hamilton and Ernest Hemingway.
It’s easy to see why Heidi imagined a Little Free Library would be a great gift for me. I’ve always enjoyed checking out other people’s books. Partly this is a party survival strategy. My misanthropy is such that at social gatherings I like to take a respite from small talk to peruse people’s bookshelves and CD cases, which gives me an excuse to turn my back on literally everybody. Sadly Spotify and Kindle have eliminated most of these analog escape hatches. But I’m still genuinely interested in what other people read. So the idea of curating my own selection was immensely appealing. I’m a history teacher and I dabble as a children’s literature critic, so, if I’m being honest, I flatter myself on my taste in books.
Heidi is even more of a book snob than I am. She’s from the librophile equivalent of old money — her late, beloved father Bill was an antiquarian and her childhood home brims with 18th century atlases and first editions of U.S. Grant’s memoirs. So we both turned up our noses at the castoff books that came bundled and shrink-wrapped with our purchase (an oddly eclectic group which included “Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images” and a set of Disney princess-themed board books). As Heidi put it, in what proved to be a wildly optimistic sentiment, “We’re better than that.”
Since our book collection had long outgrown our shelf space, it was easy to find the first offerings for our library. Our bookshelves, end tables and nightstands were stacked with medium-brow novels, chapter books that our kids had outgrown and, my guilty pleasure, Nordic-noir fiction.
I quickly took to the daily ritual of inventorying our stock to see what had gone into circulation. It was fun to see what sorts of title moved and which got passed over. But as the stacks on the nightstand shrank, a realization dawned on me. We were gonna run out of books. The math was daunting. Even before the spring strolling season had begun, we were losing two to three books a day. With warmer weather and the farmers’ market ahead of us, we could expect to bleed a thousand books a year.
Little Free Library has a seductive marketing slogan that’s carved into the top of every unit: “Take a Book; Return a Book.” Such a simple equation. And such wishful thinking. Take? Oh, absolutely. People are, in fact, really good at that part. For example there was the young mom who lifted her toddler up to the box, watching uncritically as he scooped up “Imaginary Homelands,” Salman Rushdie’s collection of criticism and essays. Which I’m sure he enjoyed.
When it comes to returning, people mean well. For example, I don’t doubt the sincerity of that young mom when she told her greedy little urchin, “We have to remember to come back soon and give them some books.” The problem is that, to borrow my favorite report card phrase, remembering, for most people, “remains an area of growth.” It’s not that I blame my (mooching) neighbors. Indeed, I, myself, seldom return books to the public library on time. And they fine you if you don’t. But since I don’t punish people (unless you count silent, withering judgment), I’ve got no leverage. The truth is laziness is just part of human nature. It’s what separates us from the beavers.
But the lesson was clear. I wasn’t running a library. Libraries are built around the idea of circulation. And circulation implies a circle. What I had, aside from the contributions of a few kind neighbors on my block, was a one-way street of literary handouts. So it wasn’t long before I concluded that if I was going to stay in business, I had to reduce the outgoing volume.
Luckily I had an ace in the hole.
But it means floods of the worst kind of foot traffic. Graying gardeners and aging hippies; Bernie-or-Bust types; millennial parents, tatted and pierced, shepherding toddlers with names like Arya — damn near every one of whom stops to check out my Little Free Library.
And after paying $18 for an heirloom tomato and a pair of zucchini, you can’t blame a person for grabbing a free book. Indeed, this kind of neighborly interaction was exactly what my wife Heidi was hoping for when she got me the library for Hanukkah. Heidi’s the sunny and optimistic type, yin to my cranky yang, which made her an easy mark for the Little Free Library Foundation and its stated mission of promoting “the love of reading and to build a sense of community.”She and the kids did it up right, painting ours lilac to match the color of our Victorian house. The library makes a striking contrast with the verdant green that blankets our block in the spring. But idyllic as that sounds, when the marketeers, wagons in tow, stop to fiddle with the latch and peer inside, all I feel is dread.
Little Free Library originated in Hudson, Wisconsin, in 2009, when Todd Bol built a wooden box with a glass door, modeled on a one-room schoolhouse, in honor of his mother’s career as an educator. He nailed the box to a post in his front yard and stuffed it with books. The idea spread and in 2012 Little Free Library incorporated as a non-profit. By January of 2016, there were at least 36,000 Little Free Libraries across the globe.
They seem particularly popular in our town, Oak Park, a progressive suburb just west of Chicago. We’re a bookish community with a thriving independent bookstore, a showpiece library and a proud literary heritage that includes Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jane Hamilton and Ernest Hemingway.
It’s easy to see why Heidi imagined a Little Free Library would be a great gift for me. I’ve always enjoyed checking out other people’s books. Partly this is a party survival strategy. My misanthropy is such that at social gatherings I like to take a respite from small talk to peruse people’s bookshelves and CD cases, which gives me an excuse to turn my back on literally everybody. Sadly Spotify and Kindle have eliminated most of these analog escape hatches. But I’m still genuinely interested in what other people read. So the idea of curating my own selection was immensely appealing. I’m a history teacher and I dabble as a children’s literature critic, so, if I’m being honest, I flatter myself on my taste in books.
Heidi is even more of a book snob than I am. She’s from the librophile equivalent of old money — her late, beloved father Bill was an antiquarian and her childhood home brims with 18th century atlases and first editions of U.S. Grant’s memoirs. So we both turned up our noses at the castoff books that came bundled and shrink-wrapped with our purchase (an oddly eclectic group which included “Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images” and a set of Disney princess-themed board books). As Heidi put it, in what proved to be a wildly optimistic sentiment, “We’re better than that.”
Since our book collection had long outgrown our shelf space, it was easy to find the first offerings for our library. Our bookshelves, end tables and nightstands were stacked with medium-brow novels, chapter books that our kids had outgrown and, my guilty pleasure, Nordic-noir fiction.
I quickly took to the daily ritual of inventorying our stock to see what had gone into circulation. It was fun to see what sorts of title moved and which got passed over. But as the stacks on the nightstand shrank, a realization dawned on me. We were gonna run out of books. The math was daunting. Even before the spring strolling season had begun, we were losing two to three books a day. With warmer weather and the farmers’ market ahead of us, we could expect to bleed a thousand books a year.
Little Free Library has a seductive marketing slogan that’s carved into the top of every unit: “Take a Book; Return a Book.” Such a simple equation. And such wishful thinking. Take? Oh, absolutely. People are, in fact, really good at that part. For example there was the young mom who lifted her toddler up to the box, watching uncritically as he scooped up “Imaginary Homelands,” Salman Rushdie’s collection of criticism and essays. Which I’m sure he enjoyed.
When it comes to returning, people mean well. For example, I don’t doubt the sincerity of that young mom when she told her greedy little urchin, “We have to remember to come back soon and give them some books.” The problem is that, to borrow my favorite report card phrase, remembering, for most people, “remains an area of growth.” It’s not that I blame my (mooching) neighbors. Indeed, I, myself, seldom return books to the public library on time. And they fine you if you don’t. But since I don’t punish people (unless you count silent, withering judgment), I’ve got no leverage. The truth is laziness is just part of human nature. It’s what separates us from the beavers.
But the lesson was clear. I wasn’t running a library. Libraries are built around the idea of circulation. And circulation implies a circle. What I had, aside from the contributions of a few kind neighbors on my block, was a one-way street of literary handouts. So it wasn’t long before I concluded that if I was going to stay in business, I had to reduce the outgoing volume.
Luckily I had an ace in the hole.
by Dan Greenstone, Salon | Read more:
Image: Jim Mone/AP
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)