The Worst ETFs You Can Own

Bloomberg’s resident ETF expert, Eric Balchunas, shared some interesting stats today on the habits of millennial investors. Their use of ETFs has exploded in recent years, up nearly 60% over the last year. Also, a greater percentage of millennials use ETFs than older generations:

• Millennials: 41%
• Gen X: 25%
• Baby Boomers: 17%

While millennials seem more accepting of ETFs than other generations, they’re not using them solely for long-term investment purposes. According to TD Ameritrade, one of the most heavily traded securities by millennials is also an ETF (technically an ETN):

UWTI utilizes leverage to allow investors to try to earn 3x the upward price move in oil. Millennials trading this thing is like driving a truck full or nitroglycerine through a match factory. This year alone it’s down over 50%. It also has over $1 billion in assets.

And if 3x long the price of crude oil doesn’t do it for you, you can always try your hand at the 3x short oil ETN (DWTI) by making a leveraged short trade on the price of oil. That fund is down almost 45% this year. It has nearly $500 million.

So while the price of oil is up marginally this year, both of these ETFs have gotten slaughtered.

It’s worth pointing out that these are trading, not investing vehicles, but I’m sure with that many assets that there have been plenty of investors who have lost money in this space. The reason these types of funds are so dangerous for long-term investors is because they offer a point-to-point trading opportunity. The leverage is reset on a daily basis, so you’re not getting a truly leveraged 3x bet over the long-term price of oil, but the price on any given day. It’s also very expensive to rebalance and roll these futures contracts so often.

But that’s just the 3x ETNs. Surely you could do better betting on the price of oil without the use of leverage. Well…

The United States Oil ETF (USO) has almost $3 billion in assets. It does a terrible job tracking the price of oil as you can see from the annual return numbers:

(...) Again, this is a trading vehicle that I’m sure many investors have mistakenly assumed they could use as an investment vehicle to play oil as a long-term investment theme. Very few investors in these funds have any idea about the complex cost structure involved in the futures that are being used to track the underlying prices. It can be very expensive to roll into the new contracts and it’s also easy for other investors to front run their trades because of the periodic rebalancing schedule. USO can closely track the price of oil in the short-term but as a long term investment it’s not going to get the job done.

Again, I’m sure the majority of these assets are being used by hedge funds and other short-term traders (at least I hope that’s the case). The turnover in these funds are all off the charts. But I’m also pretty sure there have been plenty of investors who assumed they were following a well-reasoned investment thesis into oil or volatility and an ETF was the easy way to play that hunch.

The whole reason you own ETFs as an investor is to gain exposure to a specific asset class, strategy, sector or investment type at a low-cost in a tax-efficient, liquid fund structure. ETFs are one of the most efficient ways to diversify at a low cost. But their convenience is a double-edged sword that can easily lead to huge losses for those who don’t understand what they’re getting themselves into.

by Ben Carlson, The Big Picture |  Read more:

Image: TD Ameritrade

China, Not Silicon Valley, Is Cutting Edge in Mobile Tech

Snapchat and Kik, the messaging services, use bar codes that look like drunken checkerboards to connect people and share information with a snap of their smartphone cameras. Facebook is working on adding the ability to hail rides and make payments within its Messenger app. Facebook and Twitter have begun live-streaming video.

All of these developments have something in common: The technology was first popularized in China.

WeChat and Alipay, two Chinese apps, have long used the bar-codelike symbols — called QR codes — to let people pay for purchases and transfer money. Both let users hail a taxi or order a pizza without switching to another app. The video-streaming service YY.com has for years made online stars of young Chinese people posing, chatting and singing in front of video cameras at home.

Silicon Valley has long been the world’s tech capital: It birthed social networking and iPhones and spread those tech products across the globe. The rap on China has been that it always followed in the Valley’s footsteps as government censorship abetted the rise of local versions of Google, YouTube and Twitter.

But China’s tech industry — particularly its mobile businesses — has in some ways pulled ahead of the United States. Some Western tech companies, even the behemoths, are turning to Chinese firms for ideas.

“We just see China as further ahead,” said Ted Livingston, the founder of Kik, which is headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario.

The shift suggests that China could have a greater say in the global tech industry’s direction. Already in China, more people use their mobile devices to pay their bills, order services, watch videos and find dates than anywhere else in the world. Mobile payments in the country last year surpassed those in the United States. By some estimates, loans from a new breed of informal online banks called peer-to-peer lenders did too.

China’s largest internet companies are the only ones in the world that rival America’s in scale. The purchase this week of Uber China by Didi Chuxing after a protracted competition shows that at least domestically, Chinese players can take on the most sophisticated and largest start-ups coming out of America.

The future of online payments and engagements can be found at Liu Zheng’s noodle shop in central Beijing. Liu Xiu’e, 60, and her neighbor, Zhang Lixin, 55, read about the noodle shop on WeChat. Then they ordered and paid for their lunches and took and posted selfies of themselves outside the restaurant, all using the same app.

Liu Zheng, who is not related to Liu Xiu’e, said the automated ordering and payments meant he could cut down on wages for waiters. “In the future, we will only need one waiter to help in the restaurant and one to help with seating,” Mr. Liu said.

Industry leaders point to a number of areas where China jumped first. Before the online dating app Tinder, people in China used an app called Momo to flirt with nearby singles. Before the Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos discussed using drones to deliver products, Chinese media reported that a local delivery company, S.F. Express, was experimenting with the idea. WeChat offered speedier in-app news articles long before Facebook, developed a walkie-talkie function before WhatsApp, and made major use of QR codes well before Snapchat.

Before Venmo became the app for millennials to transfer money in the United States, both young and old in China were investing, reimbursing each other, paying bills,and buying products from stores with smartphone-based digital wallets.

“Quite frankly, the trope that China copies the U.S. hasn’t been true for years, and in mobile it’s the opposite: The U.S. often copies China,” said Ben Thompson, the founder of the tech research firm Stratechery. “For the Facebook Messenger app, for example, the best way to understand their road map is to look at WeChat.” (...)

China still lags in important areas. Its most powerful, high-end servers and supercomputers often rely in part on American technology. Virtual-reality start-ups trail foreign counterparts, and Google has a jump on Baidu in driverless car technology. Many of China’s products also lack the polish of their American counterparts.

The biggest advantage for China’s tech industry, according to many analysts, is that it was able to fill a vacuum after the country essentially created much of its economy from scratch following the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1976. Unlike in the United States, where banks and retailers already have strong holds on customers, China’s state-run lenders are inefficient, and retailers never expanded broadly enough to serve a fast-growing middle class.

by Paul Mozer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: An Rong Xu

How to Listen When You Disagree: A Lesson From the Republican National Convention
Urban Confessional, A Free Listening Project

[ed. Nice idea.]

Crowding Out the Locals

There are plenty of ways to make a bad impression in foreign countries. Martin, a 24-year-old from California, has chosen one of the most proven approaches. The fun-loving member of the United States military is drinking his way through Europe this summer. He has nothing but rave reviews about his trip so far.

He's partied in the streets of Barcelona, in a vacation apartment on the island of Ibiza and on a party boat. He is leaving for Prague tomorrow morning to party some more, but before then he plans to party his way through Berlin as part of a guided pub crawl. He's wearing shoes with flashing lights and has already had four beers and two shots of tequila to get himself into the mood.

The excursion, billed on the Internet as the Original Berlin Pub Crawl, consists of guided drinking in three pubs and one club. The pub crawl starts every evening at 10 p.m. at a hostel near Alexanderplatz. Participants receive a free shot of hard liquor for every beer or cocktail they drink, and in the second bar the local guides pour peppermint schnapps directly from the bottle into their mouths. The organizer, an Irish businessman based in Berlin, offers similar tours in 12 other European cities.

The group is relatively small on this Monday -- small meaning 80 people. On weekends, the group can consist of up to 200 people. They include underage Britons who drink cheap vodka while traveling from one pub to the next; Americans thrilled by the fact that drinking alcohol in the streets is allowed in Europe; and three tattooed Germans from the state of Saxony involved a burping contest. When an older woman walks by in the Alexanderplatz subway station, one of them shouts "pussy" and "nice ass" at her. People of the world, come to Berlin to go binge-drinking.

'It's a Nightmare!'

The group is in top form in the subway. They all crowd into the same car, where they begin hopping around and caterwauling, until the car begins to sway. "Olé, olé, olé, olé" is their most harmless chant. Soccer fans are angels compared to these people. It is events like these that cement Berlin's reputation as a party town -- and simultaneously damage the city's image. "This is precisely the sort of recreational activity that we don't want," says Berlin tourism chief Burkhard Kieker. "It's a nightmare."

Tourists are conquerors who disguise themselves as friends, which often makes them difficult to deal with, no matter how much money they spend. Ever since short trips to nearby or faraway cities have become a national pastime, city dwellers around the globe have complained about the growing inhospitality of their cities. They feel overwhelmed and stretched too thin.

The business of city trips is flourishing, from Asia to South America. In Europe, the number of booked trips to cities grew by almost 40 percent from 2005 to 2014. German cities like Munich have seen even larger increases in visitors. Even companies like coffee retailer Tchibo and grocery discounter Aldi have gotten into the travel business.

The hype is fueled by companies like Airbnb, which provide additional lodgings in an already overheated market. The number of available places to stay is especially high in Paris, where there are already half as many vacation apartments as hotel rooms.

Desolate Downtowns

Things are moving -- for travelers, the travel industry and providers of lodgings. But local residents are groaning, especially in densely populated Europe, where attractions are often concentrated in an area of a few square kilometers, in cities like Barcelona, Prague and Salzburg. Tourist destinations perceive the crowds of tourists as an affliction. Residents are fleeing, and businesses like bakeries and grocery stores are disappearing along with them, replaced by souvenir shops and currency exchanges. Downtown neighborhoods are becoming desolate.

The conditions German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger warned against in his treatise "A Theory of Tourism" almost 60 years ago are becoming reality. Enzensberger argued that travelers, through their mere presence, threaten or destroy what they are actually seeking: originality and local color.

To echo what the porcupine said to the wheezing hare in the fable, Enzensberger wrote, "tourism anticipates its refutation." In fact, this dialectic is the "engine of its development." The visitor sets out on a search for new thrills and attractions, and when he reaches his destination, he immediately deprives it of its mystique. This is why he is constantly searching for unknown destinations and sensations.

Venice is an example of a city that has lost its magic. Since 1980, the population has shrunk from 120,000 to only 60,000. In return, 80,000 individual and cruise-ship tourists visit the city of canals and lagoons every day. Venice, the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper recently wrote, has been largely "mummified" and mutated into a "walkable postcard landscape."

Loss of Identity

To protect their city from a similar fate, residents of European cities are rebelling. At the forefront are the people of Barcelona, whose tourism boom began with the 1992 Olympic Games. The capital of the Catalonia region reinvented itself for the global event. City planners and architects built futuristic buildings and created a long, sandy beach that turned the fishing community of Barceloneta into a playground.

Restaurants on the boardwalk display neon-lit signs of mussels and chicken over rice. But beyond the beach, in the narrow streets of Barceloneta, residents protest against the crowds of tourists by hanging the district's flag from their windows, an image of a sailboat and a lighthouse on a blue-and-yellow background, along with banners with slogans like: "No Tourist Apartments!" There have been repeated demonstrations over the years, starting in 2014, when three naked Italians strolled into a supermarket, presumably tourists staying in vacation apartments.

But there is hope, and it is fueled by people like Ada Colau. The 42-year-old developed a reputation as an activist and figurehead of the squatter community. She was elected mayor of Barcelona more than a year ago. Mass tourism is her biggest issue. Colau has promised citizens to recapture the city for them.

by Dinah Deckstein and Alexander Kühn, Der Spiegel | Read more:
Image: Gunnar Knechtel 

May 28th by -floralanatomy- collage on Flickr
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Ohno Bakufu, Flying Fish, 1938.
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Snowflake Justice Warriors and Political Correctness

"In an appreciation of the hot young singer Sky Ferreira that the LA Weekly posted a week ago, the writer Art Tavana wrote, quote:

"Sky Ferreira has a name that reads like a turbo-charged Italian sports car, or the kindred spirit to second-generation Italian-American pop star Madonna, the most ambitious woman to ever wear a pink cone bra. Both Sky and Madonna have similar breasts in both cup size and ability to cause a shitstorm.

"When Ferreira dropped her debut, Night Time, My Time, three years ago, the bare-breasted album cover nearly broke the internet. Misogynists claimed it was a desperate attempt to sell records; feminists saw it as the calculated move of a defiant young woman. A third unnamed group, that included me, couldn't help but reminisce on the past, on Madonna's defiantly atomic boobs - the two knockers that altered the course of human history.

In the now-infamous photo, taken by the Argentinian filmmaker Gaspar Noé, Ferreira looks like a dirtier Madonna: square jaw, strong eyebrows, lulled green eyes, crucifix, bleach-blonde hair, translucently pale skin and killer tits. America's already established that Ferreira looks a lot like Madonna, but we almost never have the audacity to admit that her looks offer the most appeal to the American consumer. To pretend looks don't matter in pop music is ridiculous. Looks matter, they always will." Unquote.

Tavana goes on to write how Ferreira has moved past this idea. Quote: "She's too nasty to be anyone's schoolgirl fantasy. She looks like an unvarnished Madonna styled by Maripol, with the vaguely mystical presence of Nico and the faux-punkness of a Sex Pistols groupie. In other words, Sky Ferreira is the most deliberately pimped-out example of a modern pop star. She's not a mindless product like Britney, or a depressed indie pop singer like Lorde, but she's also not bitter or punk, like Meredith Graves, or a feminist superhero like Grimes. She's the pop star who's so personally cool that her record label, Capital, doesn't need to hire a team to mold her." Unquote.

Tavana goes on to praise Ferreira as a fashion icon, an accomplished actress; he talks about how she's hated by the elitist snobs in the indie scene, and decried by feminists when she refused to condemn the notorious and accused misogynist photographer-pornographer Terry Richardson, and most importantly that she will never let her past history of sexual abuse define her. Compare Ferreira's 2014 Facebook post about this to the 12-page letter the recent Stanford rape victim penned, and you will see two very different takes by young women who have suffered sexual abuse and who are the same age.

Tavana goes on to write about how pop stars profit off their beauty and the sexual allure that attracts fans, and I remember clearly many guys in my high school who were not particularly interested in new wave, but when Blondie came around they were all drooling over Deborah Harry, and they started ignoring the Eagles and Foreigner and became fans, and the same with Patty Smyth and Scandal, as well as Suzanna Hoffs and the Bangles...it went on and on.

But this 'looks-ism' goes back to Elvis and the Beatles, with cute mop-tops John and Paul and Ringo and George, sold by their adorableness at first. Throw in Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison and Sting and every single boy band that ever existed and...it's still not the same. Because our gender differences about looking and appropriating is not a narrative about equality and inclusivity. Women get looked at and appropriated a lot more than vica versa, granted, but I think in this era driven by the dreaded idea of 'inclusivity for everyone no matter what', beauty seems threatening - a separator, a divider - instead of just a natural thing, the natural thing being people who are admired and desired for their looks, individuals stepping away from the herd and being worshipped for their physical beauty. For many of us, this is a reminder of our own physical inadequacies in the face of what our culture defines as sexy, beautiful, hot - be it straight or gay - and yes, little snowflakes, boys will be boys.

To pretend that looks or that hotness, whether you're a guy or a girl, shouldn't make you popular, is one of those sad politically correct stances that make you question the validity, the reality of politically correct thinking, and a few journalistic reactions to the LA Weekly piece. This ode to Sky Ferreira may not have been that well written, but it is clearly written honestly by, yes, most definitely a man, who is, yes, most definitely looking at a woman he desires, and writing about that desire. What's wrong with that? Even if it overshadows what he thinks about her music, so what if he's honest about objectifying her?

Oh, clearly you didn't think the little snowflake justice warriors everywhere, from the LAist to Flavorwire to Jezebel to Teen Vogue to Vulture, were going to let this innocuous piece go unnoticed without having a hissy fit? Oh yes, most deliciously, the little snowflakes got so pissed off and were just sooo unbelievably offended by this piece, that they had to denounce it. Oh, little snowflakes, when did you all become grandmothers and society matrons, clutching your pearls in horror at someone who has an opinion about something, a way of expressing themselves that's not the mirror image of yours, you snivelling little weak-ass narcissists? The high moral tone from social justice warriors is always out of scale with what they are indignant about. When did this hideous and probably nerve-wracking way of living begin transforming you into the authoritarian language police, with your strict set of little rules and manufactured outrage, demanding apologies from every sandwich or salad you didn't like?

Teen Vogue, of course, found the use of "boobs" and "knockers" as yes, "misogynistic", and started a very tired complaint about 'the male gaze' - that's g-a-z-e, listeners. When I hear self-proclaimed feminists complaining about the male gaze yet again and hoping that it will - what, go away? be rerouted, contained? - I'm thinking, are these women so deluded that they are bordering on insanity, or have they just not gotten laid in the last four years? The writer piping up in Teen Vogue about the insensitive misogyny of the Ferreira piece, and how women need to be respected and not judged by their looks - and yes, the irony is delicious coming from Teen Vogue - seemed so childish along with all the idiots tweeting out their hate, that Tavana quote-unquote "reduced a woman's art to whether you want to fuck her or not, you're trash", is indicative of the moment we are in.

And there is the suggestion that maybe Tavana knew exactly what he was doing, inciting feminist hysteria, seeing if SJWs would take the bait - they always do - and I kept thinking, what if all I wanna do is bang Nick Jonas? And I could probably write a 1500 word ode to him, talking about his sexy chest and his ass without really liking his music at all; is that gonna be a diss on Nick? Or, if a woman wants to write about how she really hates Drake's music, but finds him so physically sexy and desirable that she's lusting for it from him? Where would that put her? Would either of those cases raise an eyebrow? No.

by Bret Easton Ellis and Christopher Hooton, The Independent | Read more:
Image: Sky Ferreira

Nike Exiting Golf Club Business

[ed. Wow. All of a sudden I think I might save my old beat up Nike golf balls and sell them on Ebay 10 years from now. If Ebay doesn't exit the auction business, that is.]

Nike, the most valuable sports brand in the world, is stepping out of the golf equipment business.

A company press release indicated that Nike “will transition out of equipment—including clubs, balls and bags” to focus on footwear and apparel.

“We’re committed to being the undisputed leader in golf footwear and apparel,” said Trevor Edwards, president of Nike Brand in a company press release. Sources said layoffs were announced this afternoon. Several calls to Nike officials this afternoon were not returned, and the status of Nike's club design headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, called The Oven, was unknown.

Nike, which reported flat to down annual sales in its overall golf business the last two years at just north of $700 million in annual sales (which includes shoes and apparel), has been in the golf business since 1984, but only introduced its first clubs in 2002 with the Pro Combo set of irons. Its sales in 2013 and 2014 were nearly $800 million.

Today's announcement comes just a few days after the company's 2016 line of clubs was extraordinarily reduced in price. That included $400 Vapor Fly drivers reduced to $150 and $250 Vapor Fly fairway woods to $100.

The company has struggled to become a leading player in the equipment business, with market shares in woods and irons that were routinely one-tenth those of leaders Callaway and TaylorMade.

The company was known for non-traditional equipment designs over the years, including the cavity back Slingshot irons, square drivers named Sumo that reached the USGA’s limit for moment of inertia and golf balls called Mojo that were marketed in a psychedelic box. The company had groundbreaking equipment technologies, including sole channels and cavities in its metalwoods, shorter-shafted but larger headed hybrids that were like mini-fairway woods and golf balls that utilized a lightweight, ultra-resilient polymer resin material in their cores called RZN while the majority of the industry’s golf balls feature cores made exclusively of polybutadiene rubber.

Said one current Nike staff player, "I really love their equipment, but I'll tell you this: In all the pro-ams I've played, I've never once seen one of my partners using a Nike club."

There is no indication what will happen to Nike’s present tour staff, which in addition to Tiger Woods includes world No. 4 Rory McIlroy and 14 new players signed this year. That roster includes big hitting burgeoning stars Brooks Koepka and Tony Finau.

Playing this week at the Travelers Championship, Finau was one of several Nike players who got the news late Wednesday afternoon.

“I just heard in the last hour so it’s still a little bit of a shock, to say the least,” said Finau, who signed with Nike in January. “I love the equipment I’m playing now, and it’s a real process to get through to make a change like that. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to mean for contracts, but it’s pretty likely that this time next year I won’t be playing Nike clubs.”

But Finau said he understands the way the industry works. “I totally understand it from their perspective,” he said. “They’re killing it in apparel. They’re killing it in footwear. It’s just business.”

by Mike Stachura, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Getty

Javier Mayoral
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Slim Aarons
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Eduardo Kobra, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo: Diego Azubel
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‘How’s Amanda?’

She had already made it through one last night alone under the freeway bridge, through the vomiting and shakes of withdrawal, through cravings so intense she’d scraped a bathroom floor searching for leftover traces of heroin. It had now been 12 days since the last time Amanda Wendler used a drug of any kind, her longest stretch in years. “Clear-eyed and sober,” read a report from one drug counselor, and so Amanda, 31, had moved back in with her mother to begin the stage of recovery she feared most.

“Is this everything I have?” she asked, standing with her mother in the garage of their two-bedroom condominium, taking inventory of her things. There were a few garbage bags filled with clothes. There was a banged-up dresser she had put into storage before moving into her first abandoned house.

“Where’s my good makeup?” Amanda asked.

“Maybe you pawned it with the jewelry,” said her mother, Libby Alexander.

“What about all of my shoes?”

“Oh, God. Are you serious?” Libby said. “Do you even know how many pairs of shoes you’ve lost or sold?”

Amanda lit a cigarette and sat in a plastic chair wedged between the cat food and the recycling bins in the garage, the only place where she was allowed to smoke. This was the ninth time she had managed to go at least a week without using. She had spent a full decade trying and failing to get clean, and a therapist had asked her once to make a list of her triggers for relapse. “Boredom, loneliness, anxiety, regret, shame, seeing how I haven’t gone up at all in my life when the drugs aren’t there,” she had written.

She had no job, no high school diploma, no car and no money beyond what her mother gave her for Mountain Dew and cigarettes. A few days earlier, a dentist had pulled all 28 of her teeth, which had decayed from years of neglect. It had been a week since she’d seen her 9-year-old twin sons, who lived in a nearby suburb with their father, and lately the most frequent text messages coming into her phone were from a dealer hoping to lure her back with free samples: “Got testers,” he had just written. “Get at me. They’re going fast.”

In the addicted America of 2016, there are so many ways to take measure of the pain, longing and despair that are said to be driving a historic opiate epidemic: Another 350 people starting on heroin every day, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; another 4,105 emergency-room visits; another 79 people dead. Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of injury-related death in the United States — worse than guns, car crashes or suicides. Heroin abuse has quadrupled in the past decade. Most addicts are introduced to heroin through prescription pain pills, and doctors now write more than 200 million opiate prescriptions each year.

But the fact that matters most for a chronic user is what it takes for just one addict to get clean. The relapse rate for heroin has been reported in various studies to be as high as 97 percent. The average active user dies of an overdose in about 10 years, and Amanda’s opiate addiction was going on year 11.

She believed her only chance to stay sober was to take away the possibility of feeling high, so she had decided to pursue one of the newest treatments for heroin. It was a monthly shot of a drug called naltrexone, which blocks the effects of opiates on the brain and makes getting high impossible. But the shot came with dangerous side effects if she still had opiates in her system. Doctors had told her that first she needed to pass a drug test, which required staying clean for at least two weeks, which meant her appointment for the shot was still four days away.

“Soon you can breathe. You can start getting your life back,” Libby said. “That’s all just days away.”

“Days are forever,” Amanda said. “Do you even know how hard it is to go for one minute?”

She had been trying to occupy herself with coloring books and cellphone games, anything to keep her hands busy. Now she picked up a hand-held mirror and began reapplying her makeup for the second time that morning, even though she hadn’t left the house in a few days. She had worked as a model in high school, but now her gums were swollen and her arms were bruised with needle marks. She tugged down her sleeves and put away the mirror. Shame was a trigger. Regret was a trigger. She grabbed her phone and looked at the dealer’s latest text message. She wondered if her mother was still locking her car keys in a safe. She wondered if she could find a ride into Southwest Detroit for one last $10 bag: the euphoria when the drug entered her bloodstream, the full-body tingling that moved in from her hands to her chest, erasing pain, erasing fear, erasing sadness, erasing anxiety and feelings of failure until finally the tingling stopped and the only thing left to feel was blissful numbness, just hours of nothing.

One minute — she could make it one minute. She watched a video on her cellphone. She sorted her nail polish and lit another cigarette. Libby came back into the garage, setting off the burglar alarm she had installed a few years earlier, after Amanda had helped a boyfriend steal $5,000 worth of guitars from Libby’s husband.

“I hate that sound,” Amanda said. “It brings everything back. It’s a trigger.”

“I’m sorry,” Libby said. “It’s our reality.”

“Yeah, I know,” Amanda said. “And reality’s a trigger.”

by Eli Saslow, WP |  Read more:

Image: Bonnie Jo Mount

Chill Out: Air-Chilled Chicken

For Ariane Daguin, the daughter of French restaurateurs and founder of high-end meat purveyor D’Artagnan, her first bites of American chicken were nothing short of terrible.

“I didn’t understand,” she says, the memory of disgust still audible in her voice decades later. “It tasted like fish sometimes. Other times it was tasteless.” A big part of the reason, she soon discovered, was because of the way the chickens were cooled after slaughtering: with a dunk in a cold water and chlorine bath.

“It’s probably part of the reason I started the company,” Daguin says.

After a bird is killed, de-feathered, and eviscerated, its body temperature needs to be brought down quickly to stop and prevent the spread of pathogens such as salmonella. In the U.S. this is usually done by submerging the chickens in tanks of ice water, often treated with antimicrobial agents like chlorine or hydrogen peroxide. But in Daguin’s native France and the rest of the European Union, doing such a thing to a chicken was nearly sacrilege. The chicken will absorb some of that water, and whatever else is in it—say, chemicals or bacteria—diluting its natural flavor and changing the texture.

This is why D’Artagnan and a growing number of other higher-end chicken purveyors, such as Bell & Evans and Pitman Family Farms (aka Mary’s Chicken), use a different method to cool their chickens: air chilling.

Instead of immersing the carcasses in cold water, they blast them with cold air. Suspended by their feet on rails, the chickens pass through or sit in cold chambers for as long as three hours to reach the required 40F. (In evaporative air chilling, a cold water mist is also applied.) This method takes longer—90 to 150 minutes, compared with immersion’s 50—and requires more space because of the single-file layout. But it also uses significantly less water: Air chilling saves at least half a gallon of water per bird, coming out to a 4.5 billion-gallon savings if all of the country’s 9 billion birds were processed that way, according to a 2008 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Currently an air-chilled chicken is more expensive, but it’s also tastier, since the meat hasn’t been bulked up with water.

Any home chef who’s attempted to make pan-roasted chicken has likely encountered the consequences of water immersion firsthand. That liquid in the pan is not the chicken’s natural juices; it’s the chlorine bath the bird soaked in at the processing facility. Raw chicken at the supermarket may contain as much as 12 percent retained water, according to the USDA, which also notes that the amount must, by law, be declared on the label.

by Deena Shanker, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: J Kenji López-Alt

Milton Glaser Still Hearts New York

Milton Glaser still loves New York, but these days, he said, it sometimes worries him. Mr. Glaser, 87, created one of the most potent designs of the last century: I ♥ NY, a rallying symbol for New York when the city and state were in crisis in 1977. On a recent afternoon, he puzzled over what design he would create for the New York of 2016.

This city, he said, is in a different crisis, brought on by its own success.

“That’s an enormous problem,” he said, seated in the canary-colored conference room of his design studio on East 32nd Street, where he has worked since 1965. Childish shrieks from the schoolyard next door rippled through the office. Scattered around the room were some of his recent designs, including bottles of Trump Vodka and a poster proclaiming, “To Vote Is to Exist.”

“You can’t have this much development, and the consequential eviction of hundreds of thousands of people who will have no place to live,” Mr. Glaser said. “There’s some fundamental misjudgment about the balance between ordinary people and people who make enormous amounts of money. The idea of apartments for $50 million. What? On what basis?”

If he were to design a successor to the I ♥ NY logo today, he said, “What you would want is more of a sense of fairness in the city, whatever that means.”

“I can’t be glib about this,” he continued, “because the problem is too enormous and difficult to deal with.”

New York is, famously, a town of transience, with newcomers arriving constantly, either making their mark or coming a cropper, then leaving for jobs overseas, or back home, or the sun of California. The human tides are as regular as the cycles of boom and bust and boom.

But there are also the lions who didn’t leave, who put their imprint on the battered city of the 1970s and remain part of the metropolis that emerged from it. New York is filled with them: Felix G. Rohatyn and Gloria Steinem, Charles B. Rangel and Robert M. Morgenthau, Diane von Furstenberg and Grandmaster Flash, Harry Belafonte and Larry Kramer. When others left, they kept on keeping on.

Milton Glaser’s 87-year love affair with New York is a fable of the city itself, beginning in one era of economic and ethnic division, the 1930s in the South Bronx, and arriving now in another one, with different fault lines and promises. Along the way, his I ♥ NY logo, first drawn on a scrap of paper in the back of taxi, has declared that love in a nearly universal language, understood in every corner of the planet.

“It’s freakish,” Mr. Glaser said. “Also, it’s something I wish people would forget, because I’ve done other things.”

During a visit to his studio, where the front door bears the motto “Art Is Work,” Mr. Glaser smiled when asked why he kept working. Upstairs, he and Clay Felker started New York magazine in 1968; on another floor, he once had 30-odd workers designing displays for Grand Union supermarkets.

“You really want an answer?” he said. “It’s the greatest source of pleasure in my life. I am so thrilled by making something that didn’t exist before. There’s nothing, nothing even close. I never go to the theater, I never go to concerts, I no longer go to movies. I don’t do anything except work. It’s like magic.

“I also think there’s an opportunity to do good. Not in a moralistic sense, but to feel that you’re a part of something larger than yourself. But that’s not really why I do it. I do it because it is so pleasurable for me. I derive this deep, deep satisfaction that nothing else, including sex, has ever given me. It’s the reason I’m here, is to do the work. And I’m so happy that I can still do it well.”

by John Leland, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Nicole Bengiveno and Milton Glaser

Jamie xx

[ed. Interesting videography.]

via:

On Political Fiction

In May of this year, more than 450 American novelists, poets and literary critics signed an “Open Letter to the American People” opposing Donald Trump’s candidacy for president. The letter, initially posted on the literary website Lit Hub, takes the form of a list:

Because we believe that any democracy worthy of the name rests on pluralism, welcomes principled disagreement, and achieves consensus through reasoned debate; 

Because American history, despite periods of nativism and bigotry, has from the first been a grand experiment in bringing people of different backgrounds together, not pitting them against one another; 

Because the history of dictatorship is the history of manipulation and division, demagoguery and lies; ...

Because neither wealth nor celebrity qualifies anyone to speak for the United States …

Following a few more bullet points, the letter concludes by stating that Trump “appeals to the basest and most violent elements in society,” and that his candidacy therefore demands an “immediate and forceful response” from each one of us. The letter is meant, presumably, to constitute such a response.

About a week after the letter was posted, the novelist Aleksandar Hemon published a response, also on Lit Hub, explaining why he had declined to sign, despite his opposition to Trump. He began by addressing the letter’s contradictory approach to the democratic process. The letter’s authors imply that Trump is trying to become president based on his “wealth” and “celebrity”; in fact, Hemon pointed out, if one believes in the legitimacy of our democratic system, then the only way Trump or anyone else can become president is to win the most votes. The letter’s authors are surely right that “the history of dictatorship is the history of manipulation and division, demagoguery and lies,” but, as Hemon put it, “Trump is presently abiding by the rules of democratic election … Horrifying as that may seem, that’s how the system works—the election is the job interview.”

Hemon has a point. Voters—that is, actual Americans—do seem to be quite horrifying to many of the letter’s signatories, despite their intimation that they are defending the will of the people against a demagogic interloper: on the @WritersOnTrump Twitter handle, Dave Eggers is quoted as saying he is embarrassed that Trump has “garnered any votes at all,” while Jane Smiley insists that no “sane people” could possibly be supporting him.

Hemon, though, had a second, and larger, charge to level at the letter’s signatories, one that struck less at the content of the letter than at what it was being advanced in place of. Citing a decade’s worth of Pulitzer nominees, Hemon alleged that it was hard to recall a novel that addressed the facts of American life, and of American “decline,” in the past fifteen years. If our poets and novelists really believe that our political situation calls for a forceful response, Hemon asked, shouldn’t they be writing poems and novels about it, as opposed to open letters?

Hemon is right that the American novel appears to be undergoing a phase of retrenchment. With Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth edging into their senescence, the field will soon be clear of the writers we have long counted on for big, ambitious explorations of American history and society.

Perhaps in reaction to the previous generation’s often panoramic ambitions, the novelists poised to take their place—they are named Dave, and Jennifer, and (most often) Jonathan—are more commonly concerned with the individual’s estrangement from American history and society, and sometimes with his estrangement from himself. Even when one of these novelists does try, as Hemon advises, to “forcefully address the iniquities of the post-9 /11 era: the lies, the crimes, the torture, the financial collapse,” the result can be uninspiring, as in the case of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), which attempted to chronicle the lies and crimes of the Bush years and yet ended up merely registering, at an earsplitting decibel, the insular complaints of its liberal readership. A more characteristic example of this generation’s approach to politics can be found in the much-acclaimed 10:04 (2014), by the Brooklyn-based poet and novelist Ben Lerner, which includes a protracted sequence where the narrator (also a Brooklyn-based poet and novelist) cooks dinner for an Occupy Wall Street protester, all the while worrying about whether he should feel bad that, rather than going with the protester to Zuccotti Park that night, he’s going to see a play.

The detached sensibility of these novels discourages engagement with the larger forces that shape our democracy; more importantly, they appear largely insensible to the voices currently driving our most energetic political conversations. American fiction has been “haunted” since its inception, as Toni Morrison has put it, by its exclusion of African-Americans, and the scarcity of compelling black characters in contemporary literary fiction is even more conspicuous given the recent emphasis on the importance of black lives in our politics. But we can also speak today of a second haunting exclusion, of which the open letter provides a textbook example, namely that of those often referred to as the “aggrieved” white working class.

If these are the people actually voting for Trump, as nearly every op-ed published since January has insisted, then it is conspicuous that they appear in the open letter only by implication—as, presumably, the “base and violent” social elements to whom the would-be dictator stands accused of appealing. The authors are not wrong that much that is base and violent has appeared in this year’s presidential campaigns; what is strange is just their implication that such elements have ever been alien or marginal to our politics. The same idea seems to be behind their assertion that, notwithstanding some brief interludes of intolerance, American history should be thought of as a “grand experiment in bringing people together, not pitting them against one another.”

Maybe the America the letter’s signatories live in is essentially, as opposed to aspirationally, a tolerant, pluralist place, full of enlightened citizens who settle their differences via “principled disagreement.” That would certainly account for the letter’s failure to recognize Trump’s success as an accomplishment of our democracy, as opposed to a subversion of it. And it might also offer an explanation, beyond disinterest or distraction, for why a compelling political novel about the post-9 /11 era has not materialized. For this novel would have to expose not, in the first place, any “lies,” “crimes” or “iniquities,” but rather the increasingly prevalent illusion that it is possible to wall ourselves off from the America that disappoints, frightens or disgusts us.

by The Editors, The Point |  Read more:

Image: via:

Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night

[ed. I'd never heard of Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night until today (talk about an insane euphemistic construction), so of course didn't know about Shirō Ishii and Unit 731. All wars are horrendous and frequently expose unknown depths of human depravity. The fact that immunity was granted by the U.S. after WWII to facilitate our own biological weapons program is equally saddening/maddening (but not surprising).]

Sue Howells
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When Your Dinner Guest Orders a $700 Bottle of Wine: An Etiquette Guide

[ed. I have this problem all the time. You can't enjoy a nice dinner for under $3000 these days.]

A high priced restaurant experience, complete with a wine hijacking, wasn’t a topic I expected to discuss during a routine dental checkup and cleaning last month. But that’s exactly what my dentist, David Silverstrom, wanted to talk about when I sat down in his chair.

Dr. Silverstrom and a colleague had recently invited a third dentist to dinner, and it quickly turned into a pretty pricey affair. Their guest, a self-declared wine expert, ordered three bottles of Napa Cabernet for a total of over $1,000—and let them pick up the check. Had I ever heard of such a thing? Dr. Silverstrom wanted to know. I most certainly had.

A few weeks earlier, some friends told a similar tale. The couple, who prefer to remain nameless, had been invited to spend the weekend with friends who own a beach house, and on the last night, as a thank you, they took their hosts to dinner. At the restaurant, the hosts’ 20-something son ordered some very expensive wine, turning my friends’ little sojourn into anything but a “free” weekend at the beach.

Although most wine drinkers comport themselves with a certain degree of decorum, shameless business associates or greedy “friends” holding their hosts fiscal hostage by ordering a pricey Burgundy or Bordeaux is nothing new. I’ve never experienced it myself—my being a wine journalist probably keeps people from trying to pull such tricks—but I’ve often been on the receiving end of other less costly but no less disgraceful examples of bad wine etiquette.

Take, for instance, the person who brings a particular bottle to a party or orders a special wine at dinner, only to repeatedly fill up his or her glass without pouring it for, or offering it to, anyone else. Witnessing such antics, I sometimes find myself having to almost wrest the bottle away from the sticky-fingered offender. This sort of behavior is the opposite of a gracious host or true wine lover, who always serves others first. Wine is for sharing, not hoarding, after all.

A slightly more passive version of the example above is the act of maximizing the amount of wine in one’s glass. When the waiter approaches the table to refill the wine glasses, a certain sort of drinker will immediately down the contents of his glass, thereby ensuring that he will get the largest share of the wine.

My friend Paul Sullivan, author of “The Thin Green Line: The Money Secrets of the Super Wealthy,” admits that he has done a bit of speedy wine swallowing himself. But he insists that he only does so when a guest orders an expensive wine on his tab, as a way of getting a little something back.

Paul has an even more effective bait-and-switch strategy for dealing with piggish guests: If they pick an absurdly expensive wine from the restaurant wine list, Paul says something like, “That’s a fascinating choice, but I don’t know if it will go with what we’re having” and promptly summons the sommelier. After telling the sommelier the name of the wine his guests have chosen, he points to a more moderately priced selection on the list, making sure his guests can’t see what he’s doing, and asks if there is “something over here that’s more interesting.” A good sommelier always catches on, said Paul, and “suggests” the new wine in his preferred price point.

by Lettie Teague, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: Rafa Alverez