Monday, August 8, 2016
Breaking Baccalaureate
This past spring, I attended a championship story slam with a student I have advised and whom I know well. This student is a gifted writer and a funny, self-deprecating storyteller. I could easily claim that I thought attending the slam might give her insight about a research project I was advising her on. But the truth is that I simply thought she would enjoy the slam and might find an outlet for her own storytelling. The issue of engaging with a student outside of formal class time is, of course, a tricky one these days, especially if the professor is a male and the student a female. I will address the potential pitfalls as well huge opportunities of engaging with students outside of class in another essay.
So there we were the other night — my student and I — sitting in a small club with about 75 people in the audience, at another story slam. This time I had challenged her to sign up to speak, and she agreed as long as I did the same. About an hour into the story slam, my student’s name was called. She smiled and made her way to the front of the stage. I looked on nervously as she told a funny story about her confusion regarding the men she likes. Her voice was strong and confident, and the audience laughed at the right moments.
When she made her way back to her seat, I stood and clapped and congratulated her. “You were great,” I said. She sat down and seemed pleased, still riding the tail end of a performer’s high. Then came the judges’ ratings: They were far lower than I thought she deserved, lower than the ratings of many of the speakers who preceded her. I was worried. My student can be harshly critical of her writing until it is fully polished. Having encouraged her to speak in front of the crowd in the first place, I didn’t want her to turn overly self-critical or feel dejected by the ratings. And so for the rest of that night, I was clear about my teacher mission: I wanted to celebrate her courage for stepping up to the microphone.
In his recent book, Helping Children Succeed, Paul Tough writes about the startling conclusion of a massive study of teacher effectiveness. According to Northwestern University economist C. Kirabo Jackson, who tracked the performance of 500,000 students in North Carolina over seven years from ninth grade on, there emerged from the data set two categories of highly effective teachers. In the first category were the teachers who consistently raised student test scores. These are the teachers who win awards and receive high evaluations and sometimes bonuses.
But it is the second category of excellent teachers that fascinates me. I’ll call this second group of teachers “nurturers,” though you might also see them as inspirers or motivators. These teachers don’t raise standardized test scores. Rather, their achievements show up as better student attendance, fewer suspensions, higher on-time grade progression, and higher GPAs.
Lest you think that the nurturers are the easy teachers who artificially cheer on students and hand out inflated grades, consider this: The GPAs of students improved not simply while in a nurturer’s class, but also in subsequent classes and in subsequent years as well.
Indeed, when Jackson added up four measures the nurturers excelled at — school attendance, on time grade progression, suspensions and discipline, and overall GPA — he found these measures to be, in Tough’s words “a better predictor than a student’s test scores of whether a student would attend college, a better predictor of adult wages and a better predictor of future arrests.”
Of course, many inspiring, motivating, nurturing teachers (and the students they influenced) have long intuited that their good work produced results beyond what was seen on standardized test scores. Ironically, it has taken the arrival of big data to highlight the magnitude of what they accomplish. The term frequently used to describe what students develop working with these nurturing teachers is “non-cognitive skills.” These are skills or traits such as persistence, ability to get along with others, ability to finish a task, ability to show up on time, and ability to manage and recover from failure.
Long before I heard of Jackson’s study, I had become convinced that cultivating non-cognitive skills was one of the best steps I could take to help my students with their academic (cognitive) work and help them long-term in their lives. The first-year students I mostly teach, around ages 18 and 19, often don’t know how to work through a bad day or a bad week or how to talk to a professor when they blow a deadline or miss an assignment. I have long noticed that if a student misses a class, there’s a good chance they will miss another class. The student then feels guilty and too embarrassed to contact me. In short order, the student falls so far behind on assignments that catching up seems overwhelming and impossible. And so they skip class again.
The irony of course is that if a student simply comes to class and pulls me aside to explain what is going on in their life, I can help them prioritize what to catch up on and provide words of support. To minimize this problem — the missed class, leading to more missed classes, leading to failure — I now insist that students come to class even if they are unprepared, no penalty attached. But when you’re not prepared, I tell my students, you must approach me before the start of class and tell me so.
Knowing at the start of class that a particular student hasn’t completed a reading allows me to avoid embarrassing that student by calling on them to answer a question related to the assignment. Sometimes I can even take a few seconds to fill in background information so that the student can participate in the class discussion.
I insist that my students come to class when they are not prepared because they can still gain a lot from the class. They will feel connected to the course and to me, and they won’t feel so paralyzed by guilt. They are also much more likely, in my experience, to catch up. Since I’ve started this policy, I would say my attendance has increased, but to be fair, I’ve improved in other ways as a teacher, so I can’t chalk up the improved attendance solely to this no-guilt policy about being unprepared. There’s been no decline in the number of students who come to class fully prepared. The requirement that they tell me in person when they are behind is apparently enough to discourage people from abusing that option.
I’ve made other changes that are designed to lure my students out of the binary, good/bad, perfectionist framework that a number of them seem to bring to college from high school. I used to yell at students who were sleeping in my class. These days if I see a student sleeping, I will calmly ask them to take a walk to get some fresh air or I might suggest they get some coffee. The first time I responded to a sleeping student by suggesting coffee and a walk, the student bolted upright. “No, I’m good,” he said. He no doubt sensed a trap. Why would I suggest he get coffee unless it was part of some devious scheme? I told the student there was no penalty for stepping out for a few minutes, but he wouldn’t move.
Finally, I pulled out my wallet, handed the student a few bills, and told him to getme a cup of coffee and to get one for himself if he wanted. It was only after I specified two creams and one sugar that the student relaxed and realized I was not plotting a scheme. Invariably, the times I’ve sent sleepy students out for a walk or for coffee, they have returned within minutes, awake, in a better mood, and able to participate in the class.
My goal in taking this less harsh approach to students is not to be nice. Being “nice” without clear boundaries and limits is a recipe for chaos and student dissatisfaction. My goal is to model for young people how to think maturely, precisely, and creatively about problems they face inside and outside of class. How can I expect them to engage in imaginative thinking on an assignment if I don’t cultivate imaginative thinking on the practical problems they face in class? Yelling at sleeping students, as I did in the old days, didn’t show students how to handle sleepiness. Yelling only made them feel bad, and the result at best was a student who fought to keep their eyes open. Spending all your energy to keep your eyes open leaves little energy for listening, learning, and engaging in the class.
So there we were the other night — my student and I — sitting in a small club with about 75 people in the audience, at another story slam. This time I had challenged her to sign up to speak, and she agreed as long as I did the same. About an hour into the story slam, my student’s name was called. She smiled and made her way to the front of the stage. I looked on nervously as she told a funny story about her confusion regarding the men she likes. Her voice was strong and confident, and the audience laughed at the right moments.
When she made her way back to her seat, I stood and clapped and congratulated her. “You were great,” I said. She sat down and seemed pleased, still riding the tail end of a performer’s high. Then came the judges’ ratings: They were far lower than I thought she deserved, lower than the ratings of many of the speakers who preceded her. I was worried. My student can be harshly critical of her writing until it is fully polished. Having encouraged her to speak in front of the crowd in the first place, I didn’t want her to turn overly self-critical or feel dejected by the ratings. And so for the rest of that night, I was clear about my teacher mission: I wanted to celebrate her courage for stepping up to the microphone.In his recent book, Helping Children Succeed, Paul Tough writes about the startling conclusion of a massive study of teacher effectiveness. According to Northwestern University economist C. Kirabo Jackson, who tracked the performance of 500,000 students in North Carolina over seven years from ninth grade on, there emerged from the data set two categories of highly effective teachers. In the first category were the teachers who consistently raised student test scores. These are the teachers who win awards and receive high evaluations and sometimes bonuses.
But it is the second category of excellent teachers that fascinates me. I’ll call this second group of teachers “nurturers,” though you might also see them as inspirers or motivators. These teachers don’t raise standardized test scores. Rather, their achievements show up as better student attendance, fewer suspensions, higher on-time grade progression, and higher GPAs.
Lest you think that the nurturers are the easy teachers who artificially cheer on students and hand out inflated grades, consider this: The GPAs of students improved not simply while in a nurturer’s class, but also in subsequent classes and in subsequent years as well.
Indeed, when Jackson added up four measures the nurturers excelled at — school attendance, on time grade progression, suspensions and discipline, and overall GPA — he found these measures to be, in Tough’s words “a better predictor than a student’s test scores of whether a student would attend college, a better predictor of adult wages and a better predictor of future arrests.”
Of course, many inspiring, motivating, nurturing teachers (and the students they influenced) have long intuited that their good work produced results beyond what was seen on standardized test scores. Ironically, it has taken the arrival of big data to highlight the magnitude of what they accomplish. The term frequently used to describe what students develop working with these nurturing teachers is “non-cognitive skills.” These are skills or traits such as persistence, ability to get along with others, ability to finish a task, ability to show up on time, and ability to manage and recover from failure.
Long before I heard of Jackson’s study, I had become convinced that cultivating non-cognitive skills was one of the best steps I could take to help my students with their academic (cognitive) work and help them long-term in their lives. The first-year students I mostly teach, around ages 18 and 19, often don’t know how to work through a bad day or a bad week or how to talk to a professor when they blow a deadline or miss an assignment. I have long noticed that if a student misses a class, there’s a good chance they will miss another class. The student then feels guilty and too embarrassed to contact me. In short order, the student falls so far behind on assignments that catching up seems overwhelming and impossible. And so they skip class again.
The irony of course is that if a student simply comes to class and pulls me aside to explain what is going on in their life, I can help them prioritize what to catch up on and provide words of support. To minimize this problem — the missed class, leading to more missed classes, leading to failure — I now insist that students come to class even if they are unprepared, no penalty attached. But when you’re not prepared, I tell my students, you must approach me before the start of class and tell me so.
Knowing at the start of class that a particular student hasn’t completed a reading allows me to avoid embarrassing that student by calling on them to answer a question related to the assignment. Sometimes I can even take a few seconds to fill in background information so that the student can participate in the class discussion.
I insist that my students come to class when they are not prepared because they can still gain a lot from the class. They will feel connected to the course and to me, and they won’t feel so paralyzed by guilt. They are also much more likely, in my experience, to catch up. Since I’ve started this policy, I would say my attendance has increased, but to be fair, I’ve improved in other ways as a teacher, so I can’t chalk up the improved attendance solely to this no-guilt policy about being unprepared. There’s been no decline in the number of students who come to class fully prepared. The requirement that they tell me in person when they are behind is apparently enough to discourage people from abusing that option.
I’ve made other changes that are designed to lure my students out of the binary, good/bad, perfectionist framework that a number of them seem to bring to college from high school. I used to yell at students who were sleeping in my class. These days if I see a student sleeping, I will calmly ask them to take a walk to get some fresh air or I might suggest they get some coffee. The first time I responded to a sleeping student by suggesting coffee and a walk, the student bolted upright. “No, I’m good,” he said. He no doubt sensed a trap. Why would I suggest he get coffee unless it was part of some devious scheme? I told the student there was no penalty for stepping out for a few minutes, but he wouldn’t move.
Finally, I pulled out my wallet, handed the student a few bills, and told him to getme a cup of coffee and to get one for himself if he wanted. It was only after I specified two creams and one sugar that the student relaxed and realized I was not plotting a scheme. Invariably, the times I’ve sent sleepy students out for a walk or for coffee, they have returned within minutes, awake, in a better mood, and able to participate in the class.
My goal in taking this less harsh approach to students is not to be nice. Being “nice” without clear boundaries and limits is a recipe for chaos and student dissatisfaction. My goal is to model for young people how to think maturely, precisely, and creatively about problems they face inside and outside of class. How can I expect them to engage in imaginative thinking on an assignment if I don’t cultivate imaginative thinking on the practical problems they face in class? Yelling at sleeping students, as I did in the old days, didn’t show students how to handle sleepiness. Yelling only made them feel bad, and the result at best was a student who fought to keep their eyes open. Spending all your energy to keep your eyes open leaves little energy for listening, learning, and engaging in the class.
by Robert Anthony Watts, TSS | Read more:
Image: uncredited
My Love-Hate Relationship with Medium
[ed. The last paragraph in this article is exactly why I hardly visit Medium anymore. Who wants to wade through a bunch of self-indulgent, self-promoting, whiny posts, about - whatever - searching for something of value? And that goes for so many other 'hot' media sites these days: BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Daily Beast, Vox, Slate, Salon, Tech Crunch, Fast Company, Jezebel, Vice, Vulture, Fusion, Thought Catalog (is that still around?) etc. ... the list goes on and on. Echo chambers mostly, selling click bait and navel gazing, with objectives like those articulated below. At least in the old days publishers and editors acted as effective gate-keepers to quality journalism (because it mattered and markets responded accordingly). These days, not so much.]
By day, I am a wireless industry analyst and consultant. By night and on weekends, besides being an exercise and outdoors enthusiast, I write running guides. A few years ago, I self-published three books on running in the Boston area. In late 2015, I started a new project called Great Runs, which is a guide to the best places to go running in the world’s major cities and destinations. It’s geared toward travelers who run and runners who travel. This time, I decided to develop the content online, but I wanted more than a traditional blogging platform. A colleague recommended Medium, the online publishing platform started in 2013 by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.
This has been a love-hate relationship from the get-go. By turns liberating and also maddening. I decided to focus a column on Medium because of its potential as a next-generation instrument for writers and readers: Ease of use, democratization and social journalism. But Medium also embodies a lot of what’s wrong with the web.
So here’s what’s fantastic. Medium is essentially a Version 2.0 blogging platform, allowing anyone from amateurs to professionals to corporations to post a story. Within five minutes, I was signed up and writing. The site is easy to use and visually elegant. Medium has kept things very simple, with limited formatting options. It’s easy to insert images, and they align and look beautiful. Content is auto-saved nearly constantly. I’ve hired some freelancers to develop content, and it’s easy to add them to Medium and edit their work. Write a piece, press "publish" and ba-bang, it’s out there for everyone to see. Social media sharing tools are well-integrated.
Authors are also interested in community, so the main Medium site has a list of tabs including Editor’s Picks, topics of the day and "For You," which seems to choose articles based primarily on folks I follow on Twitter, LinkedIn contacts and perhaps some relationship to tags in my stories (running, fitness, travel, etc.).
So, in many ways, Medium has been great. I’ve got more than 50 city guides up on the platform, and the responsive Great Runs "site" looks great on PCs, tablets and phones. I didn’t have to get a publisher or hire a web/WordPress/app developer.
And now for the downside. First beef: Discovery. Despite some pretty good content and a well-defined target market, getting my stuff discovered on Medium is hard. Really hard. The whole idea of a blog or "social journalism," as I think Ev calls it, is to build an audience. Yes, your Medium content is easily shared with your Twitter followers or your Facebook friends. So it’s great for Luluemon, which already has a huge social media presence. It now has more than 10,000 "followers" on Medium, and tons of folks recommending its content. For brands, established authors, and the companies who are seemingly flocking to Medium, it’s great. Because they already have an audience. (...)
My second major beef is monetization. As a side note, I am curious how Medium itself plans to make money. But as an author on Medium, there is presently no way to make any money from content. Blog sites, WordPress sites and so on all have some opportunity to run ads, host sponsors or sell content. But on Medium, nothing. Not even the ability to direct one’s Medium audience to a site where content could potentially be monetized in some way. (...)
In the end, some of Medium’s greatest benefits are also its biggest liabilities. Anyone can write on Medium. Which means anyone can write on Medium. There needs to be some delineation between the individual who wants to just post the occasional story on Medium and the individual/brand who want to use Medium for at least semi-professional or business purposes.
By day, I am a wireless industry analyst and consultant. By night and on weekends, besides being an exercise and outdoors enthusiast, I write running guides. A few years ago, I self-published three books on running in the Boston area. In late 2015, I started a new project called Great Runs, which is a guide to the best places to go running in the world’s major cities and destinations. It’s geared toward travelers who run and runners who travel. This time, I decided to develop the content online, but I wanted more than a traditional blogging platform. A colleague recommended Medium, the online publishing platform started in 2013 by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.
This has been a love-hate relationship from the get-go. By turns liberating and also maddening. I decided to focus a column on Medium because of its potential as a next-generation instrument for writers and readers: Ease of use, democratization and social journalism. But Medium also embodies a lot of what’s wrong with the web.So here’s what’s fantastic. Medium is essentially a Version 2.0 blogging platform, allowing anyone from amateurs to professionals to corporations to post a story. Within five minutes, I was signed up and writing. The site is easy to use and visually elegant. Medium has kept things very simple, with limited formatting options. It’s easy to insert images, and they align and look beautiful. Content is auto-saved nearly constantly. I’ve hired some freelancers to develop content, and it’s easy to add them to Medium and edit their work. Write a piece, press "publish" and ba-bang, it’s out there for everyone to see. Social media sharing tools are well-integrated.
Authors are also interested in community, so the main Medium site has a list of tabs including Editor’s Picks, topics of the day and "For You," which seems to choose articles based primarily on folks I follow on Twitter, LinkedIn contacts and perhaps some relationship to tags in my stories (running, fitness, travel, etc.).
So, in many ways, Medium has been great. I’ve got more than 50 city guides up on the platform, and the responsive Great Runs "site" looks great on PCs, tablets and phones. I didn’t have to get a publisher or hire a web/WordPress/app developer.
And now for the downside. First beef: Discovery. Despite some pretty good content and a well-defined target market, getting my stuff discovered on Medium is hard. Really hard. The whole idea of a blog or "social journalism," as I think Ev calls it, is to build an audience. Yes, your Medium content is easily shared with your Twitter followers or your Facebook friends. So it’s great for Luluemon, which already has a huge social media presence. It now has more than 10,000 "followers" on Medium, and tons of folks recommending its content. For brands, established authors, and the companies who are seemingly flocking to Medium, it’s great. Because they already have an audience. (...)
My second major beef is monetization. As a side note, I am curious how Medium itself plans to make money. But as an author on Medium, there is presently no way to make any money from content. Blog sites, WordPress sites and so on all have some opportunity to run ads, host sponsors or sell content. But on Medium, nothing. Not even the ability to direct one’s Medium audience to a site where content could potentially be monetized in some way. (...)
In the end, some of Medium’s greatest benefits are also its biggest liabilities. Anyone can write on Medium. Which means anyone can write on Medium. There needs to be some delineation between the individual who wants to just post the occasional story on Medium and the individual/brand who want to use Medium for at least semi-professional or business purposes.
by Mark Lowenstein, Recode | Read more:
Image: Lam L. / Yelp
How To Know If You’re Ready To Do A Tweetstorm
1. Is what I have to say important?
2. Is it worth the time it will take for me to type it out?
3. Do its contents reflect an actual desire to impart knowledge on my part or is it just an obvious cry for attention?
4. Will what I share bring anything new to the conversation or am I just saying the same things everyone else has said before, but I am convinced they are more important because they are coming from me?
5. In a world which is already drowning in words that have no more meaning than a desire for acknowledgment on the part of the people who put them out there, will the torrent of verbiage I am about to inflict just add to the toxic landfill of the Internet?
6. Am I sure my opinion is so worthwhile that other people want to sit through a continuous short-burst monologue of it?
7. Twenty minutes after I post it and the likes and replies start trailing off will I feel empty at first and then increasingly embarrassed by the sheer narcissism it took to offer up my vapid and poorly-processed attempts at instruction? Will my cheeks burn with shame?
8. Who do I think I am? Why do I feel so alone? Am I about to cry?
by Alex Balk, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Zooey
Sunday, August 7, 2016
Man and Superman
In athletic competitions, what qualifies as a sporting chance?
Toward the end of “The Sports Gene” (Penguin/Current), David Epstein makes his way to a remote corner of Finland to visit a man named Eero Mäntyranta. Mäntyranta lives in a small house next to a lake, among the pine and spruce trees north of the Arctic Circle. He is in his seventies. There is a statue of him in the nearby village. “Everything about him has a certain width to it,” Epstein writes. “The bulbous nose in the middle of a softly rounded face. His thick fingers, broad jaw, and a barrel chest covered by a red knit sweater with a stern-faced reindeer across the middle. He is a remarkable-looking man.” What’s most remarkable is the color of his face. It is a “shade of cardinal, mottled in places with purple,” and evocative of “the hue of the red paint that comes from this region’s iron-rich soil.”
Mäntyranta carries a rare genetic mutation. His DNA has an anomaly that causes his bone marrow to overproduce red blood cells. That accounts for the color of his skin, and also for his extraordinary career as a competitive cross-country skier. In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles—a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles. Mäntyranta, by virtue of his unique physiology, had something like sixty-five per cent more red blood cells than the normal adult male. In the 1960, 1964, and 1968 Winter Olympic Games, he won a total of seven medals—three golds, two silvers, and two bronzes—and in the same period he also won two world-championship victories in the thirty-kilometre race. In the 1964 Olympics, he beat his closest competitor in the fifteen-kilometre race by forty seconds, a margin of victory, Epstein says, “never equaled in that event at the Olympics before or since.”
In “The Sports Gene,” there are countless tales like this, examples of all the ways that the greatest athletes are different from the rest of us. They respond more effectively to training. The shape of their bodies is optimized for certain kinds of athletic activities. They carry genes that put them far ahead of ordinary athletes.
Epstein tells the story of Donald Thomas, who on the seventh high jump of his life cleared 7’ 3.25″—practically a world-class height. The next year, after a grand total of eight months of training, Thomas won the world championships. How did he do it? He was blessed, among other things, with unusually long legs and a strikingly long Achilles tendon—ten and a quarter inches in length—which acted as a kind of spring, catapulting him high into the air when he planted his foot for a jump. (Kangaroos have long tendons as well, Epstein tells us, which is what gives them their special hop.)
Why do so many of the world’s best distance runners come from Kenya and Ethiopia? The answer, Epstein explains, begins with weight. A runner needs not just to be skinny but—more specifically—to have skinny calves and ankles, because every extra pound carried on your extremities costs more than a pound carried on your torso. That’s why shaving even a few ounces off a pair of running shoes can have a significant effect. Runners from the Kalenjin tribe, in Kenya—where the majority of the country’s best runners come from—turn out to be skinny in exactly this way. Epstein cites a study comparing Kalenjins with Danes; the Kalenjins were shorter and had longer legs, and their lower legs were nearly a pound lighter. That translates to eight per cent less energy consumed per kilometre. (For evidence of the peculiar Kalenjin lower leg, look up pictures of the great Kenyan miler Asbel Kiprop, a tall and elegant man who runs on what appear to be two ebony-colored pencils.) According to Epstein, there’s an evolutionary explanation for all this: hot and dry environments favor very thin, long-limbed frames, which are easy to cool, just as cold climates favor thick, squat bodies, which are better at conserving heat.
Distance runners also get a big advantage from living at high altitudes, where the body is typically forced to compensate for the lack of oxygen by producing extra red blood cells. Not too high up, mind you. In the Andes, for example, the air is too rarefied for the kind of workouts necessary to be a world-class runner. The optimal range is six to nine thousand feet. The best runners in Ethiopia and Kenya come from the ridges of the Rift Valley, which, Epstein writes, are “plumb in the sweet spot.” When Kenyans compete against Europeans or North Americans, the Kenyans come to the track with an enormous head start.
What we are watching when we watch élite sports, then, is a contest among wildly disparate groups of people, who approach the starting line with an uneven set of genetic endowments and natural advantages. There will be Donald Thomases who barely have to train, and there will be Eero Mäntyrantas, who carry around in their blood, by dumb genetic luck, the ability to finish forty seconds ahead of their competitors. Élite sports supply, as Epstein puts it, a “splendid stage for the fantastic menagerie that is human biological diversity.” The menagerie is what makes sports fascinating. But it has also burdened high-level competition with a contradiction. We want sports to be fair and we take elaborate measures to make sure that no one competitor has an advantage over any other. But how can a fantastic menagerie ever be a contest among equals?
During the First World War, the U.S. Army noticed a puzzling pattern among the young men drafted into military service. Soldiers from some parts of the country had a high incidence of goitre—a lump on their neck caused by the swelling of the thyroid gland. Thousands of recruits could not button the collar of their uniform. The average I.Q. of draftees, we now suspect, also varied according to the same pattern. Soldiers from coastal regions seemed more “normal” than soldiers from other parts of the country.
The culprit turned out to be a lack of iodine. Iodine is an essential micronutrient. Without it, the human brain does not develop normally and the thyroid begins to enlarge. And in certain parts of the United States in those years there wasn’t enough iodine in the local diet. As the economists James Feyrer, Dimitra Politi, and David Weil write, in a recent paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research:
The story is not dissimilar from Epstein’s account of Kenyan distance runners, in whom accidents of climate and geography combine to create dramatic differences in abilities. In the early years of the twentieth century, the physiological development of American children was an example of the “fantastic menagerie that is human biological diversity.”
In this case, of course, we didn’t like the fantastic menagerie. In 1924, the Morton Salt Company, at the urging of public-health officials, began adding iodine to its salt, and initiated an advertising campaign touting its benefits. That practice has been applied successfully in many developing countries in the world: iodine supplementation has raised I.Q. scores by as much as thirteen points—an extraordinary increase. The iodized salt in your cupboard is an intervention in the natural order of things. When a student from the iodine-poor mountains of Idaho was called upon to compete against a student from iodine-rich coastal Maine, we thought of it as our moral obligation to redress their natural inequality. The reason debates over élite performance have become so contentious in recent years, however, is that in the world of sport there is little of that clarity. What if those two students were competing in a race? Should we still be able to give the naturally disadvantaged one the equivalent of iodine? We can’t decide.
Epstein tells us that baseball players have, as a group, remarkable eyesight. The ophthalmologist Louis Rosenbaum tested close to four hundred major- and minor-league baseball players over four years and found an average visual acuity of about 20/13; that is, the typical professional baseball player can see at twenty feet what the rest of us can see at thirteen feet. When Rosenbaum looked at the Los Angeles Dodgers, he found that half had 20/10 vision and a small number fell below 20/9, “flirting with the theoretical limit of the human eye,” as Epstein points out. The ability to consistently hit a baseball thrown at speeds approaching a hundred miles an hour, with a baffling array of spins and curves, requires the kind of eyesight commonly found in only a tiny fraction of the general population.
Eyesight can be improved—in some cases dramatically—through laser surgery or implantable lenses. Should a promising young baseball player cursed with normal vision be allowed to get that kind of corrective surgery? In this instance, Major League Baseball says yes. Major League Baseball also permits pitchers to replace the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow of their throwing arm with a tendon taken from a cadaver or elsewhere in the athlete’s body. Tendon-replacement surgery is similar to laser surgery: it turns the athlete into an improved version of his natural self.
But when it comes to drugs Major League Baseball—like most sports—draws the line. An athlete cannot use a drug to become an improved version of his natural self, even if the drug is used in doses that are not harmful, and is something that—like testosterone—is no more than a copy of a naturally occurring hormone, available by prescription to anyone, virtually anywhere in the world.
Baseball is in the middle of one of its periodic doping scandals, centering on one of the game’s best players, Alex Rodriguez. Rodriguez is among the most disliked players of his generation. He tried to recover from injury and extend his career through illicit means. (He has appealed his recent suspension, which was based on these allegations.) It is hard to think about Rodriguez, however, and not think about Tommy John, who, in 1974, was the first player to trade in his ulnar collateral ligament for an improved version. John used modern medicine to recover from injury and extend his career. He won a hundred and sixty-four games after his transformation, far more than he did before science intervened. He had one of the longest careers in baseball history, retiring at the age of forty-six. His bionic arm enabled him to win at least twenty games a season, the benchmark of pitching excellence. People loved Tommy John. Maybe Alex Rodriguez looks at Tommy John—and at the fact that at least a third of current major-league pitchers have had the same surgery—and is genuinely baffled about why baseball has drawn a bright moral line between the performance-enhancing products of modern endocrinology and those offered by orthopedics.
The other great doping pariah is Lance Armstrong. He apparently removed large quantities of his own blood and then re-infused himself before competition, in order to boost the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in his system. Armstrong wanted to be like Eero Mäntyranta. He wanted to match, through his own efforts, what some very lucky people already do naturally and legally. Before we condemn him, though, shouldn’t we have to come up with a good reason that one man is allowed to have lots of red blood cells and another man is not?
Toward the end of “The Sports Gene” (Penguin/Current), David Epstein makes his way to a remote corner of Finland to visit a man named Eero Mäntyranta. Mäntyranta lives in a small house next to a lake, among the pine and spruce trees north of the Arctic Circle. He is in his seventies. There is a statue of him in the nearby village. “Everything about him has a certain width to it,” Epstein writes. “The bulbous nose in the middle of a softly rounded face. His thick fingers, broad jaw, and a barrel chest covered by a red knit sweater with a stern-faced reindeer across the middle. He is a remarkable-looking man.” What’s most remarkable is the color of his face. It is a “shade of cardinal, mottled in places with purple,” and evocative of “the hue of the red paint that comes from this region’s iron-rich soil.”
Mäntyranta carries a rare genetic mutation. His DNA has an anomaly that causes his bone marrow to overproduce red blood cells. That accounts for the color of his skin, and also for his extraordinary career as a competitive cross-country skier. In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles—a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles. Mäntyranta, by virtue of his unique physiology, had something like sixty-five per cent more red blood cells than the normal adult male. In the 1960, 1964, and 1968 Winter Olympic Games, he won a total of seven medals—three golds, two silvers, and two bronzes—and in the same period he also won two world-championship victories in the thirty-kilometre race. In the 1964 Olympics, he beat his closest competitor in the fifteen-kilometre race by forty seconds, a margin of victory, Epstein says, “never equaled in that event at the Olympics before or since.”In “The Sports Gene,” there are countless tales like this, examples of all the ways that the greatest athletes are different from the rest of us. They respond more effectively to training. The shape of their bodies is optimized for certain kinds of athletic activities. They carry genes that put them far ahead of ordinary athletes.
Epstein tells the story of Donald Thomas, who on the seventh high jump of his life cleared 7’ 3.25″—practically a world-class height. The next year, after a grand total of eight months of training, Thomas won the world championships. How did he do it? He was blessed, among other things, with unusually long legs and a strikingly long Achilles tendon—ten and a quarter inches in length—which acted as a kind of spring, catapulting him high into the air when he planted his foot for a jump. (Kangaroos have long tendons as well, Epstein tells us, which is what gives them their special hop.)
Why do so many of the world’s best distance runners come from Kenya and Ethiopia? The answer, Epstein explains, begins with weight. A runner needs not just to be skinny but—more specifically—to have skinny calves and ankles, because every extra pound carried on your extremities costs more than a pound carried on your torso. That’s why shaving even a few ounces off a pair of running shoes can have a significant effect. Runners from the Kalenjin tribe, in Kenya—where the majority of the country’s best runners come from—turn out to be skinny in exactly this way. Epstein cites a study comparing Kalenjins with Danes; the Kalenjins were shorter and had longer legs, and their lower legs were nearly a pound lighter. That translates to eight per cent less energy consumed per kilometre. (For evidence of the peculiar Kalenjin lower leg, look up pictures of the great Kenyan miler Asbel Kiprop, a tall and elegant man who runs on what appear to be two ebony-colored pencils.) According to Epstein, there’s an evolutionary explanation for all this: hot and dry environments favor very thin, long-limbed frames, which are easy to cool, just as cold climates favor thick, squat bodies, which are better at conserving heat.
Distance runners also get a big advantage from living at high altitudes, where the body is typically forced to compensate for the lack of oxygen by producing extra red blood cells. Not too high up, mind you. In the Andes, for example, the air is too rarefied for the kind of workouts necessary to be a world-class runner. The optimal range is six to nine thousand feet. The best runners in Ethiopia and Kenya come from the ridges of the Rift Valley, which, Epstein writes, are “plumb in the sweet spot.” When Kenyans compete against Europeans or North Americans, the Kenyans come to the track with an enormous head start.
What we are watching when we watch élite sports, then, is a contest among wildly disparate groups of people, who approach the starting line with an uneven set of genetic endowments and natural advantages. There will be Donald Thomases who barely have to train, and there will be Eero Mäntyrantas, who carry around in their blood, by dumb genetic luck, the ability to finish forty seconds ahead of their competitors. Élite sports supply, as Epstein puts it, a “splendid stage for the fantastic menagerie that is human biological diversity.” The menagerie is what makes sports fascinating. But it has also burdened high-level competition with a contradiction. We want sports to be fair and we take elaborate measures to make sure that no one competitor has an advantage over any other. But how can a fantastic menagerie ever be a contest among equals?
During the First World War, the U.S. Army noticed a puzzling pattern among the young men drafted into military service. Soldiers from some parts of the country had a high incidence of goitre—a lump on their neck caused by the swelling of the thyroid gland. Thousands of recruits could not button the collar of their uniform. The average I.Q. of draftees, we now suspect, also varied according to the same pattern. Soldiers from coastal regions seemed more “normal” than soldiers from other parts of the country.
The culprit turned out to be a lack of iodine. Iodine is an essential micronutrient. Without it, the human brain does not develop normally and the thyroid begins to enlarge. And in certain parts of the United States in those years there wasn’t enough iodine in the local diet. As the economists James Feyrer, Dimitra Politi, and David Weil write, in a recent paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research:
Ocean water is rich in iodine, which is why endemic goiter is not observed in coastal areas. From the ocean, iodine is transferred to the soil by rain. This process, however, only reaches the upper layers of soil, and it can take thousands of years to complete. Heavy rainfall can cause soil erosion, in which case the iodine-rich upper layers of soil are washed away. The last glacial period had the same effect: iodine-rich soil was substituted by iodine-poor soil from crystalline rocks. This explains the prevalence of endemic goiter in regions that were marked by intense glaciation, such as Switzerland and the Great Lakes region.After the First World War, the U.S. War Department published a report called “Defects Found in Drafted Men,” which detailed how the incidence of goitre varied from state to state, with rates forty to fifty times as high in places like Idaho, Michigan, and Montana as in coastal areas.
The story is not dissimilar from Epstein’s account of Kenyan distance runners, in whom accidents of climate and geography combine to create dramatic differences in abilities. In the early years of the twentieth century, the physiological development of American children was an example of the “fantastic menagerie that is human biological diversity.”
In this case, of course, we didn’t like the fantastic menagerie. In 1924, the Morton Salt Company, at the urging of public-health officials, began adding iodine to its salt, and initiated an advertising campaign touting its benefits. That practice has been applied successfully in many developing countries in the world: iodine supplementation has raised I.Q. scores by as much as thirteen points—an extraordinary increase. The iodized salt in your cupboard is an intervention in the natural order of things. When a student from the iodine-poor mountains of Idaho was called upon to compete against a student from iodine-rich coastal Maine, we thought of it as our moral obligation to redress their natural inequality. The reason debates over élite performance have become so contentious in recent years, however, is that in the world of sport there is little of that clarity. What if those two students were competing in a race? Should we still be able to give the naturally disadvantaged one the equivalent of iodine? We can’t decide.
Epstein tells us that baseball players have, as a group, remarkable eyesight. The ophthalmologist Louis Rosenbaum tested close to four hundred major- and minor-league baseball players over four years and found an average visual acuity of about 20/13; that is, the typical professional baseball player can see at twenty feet what the rest of us can see at thirteen feet. When Rosenbaum looked at the Los Angeles Dodgers, he found that half had 20/10 vision and a small number fell below 20/9, “flirting with the theoretical limit of the human eye,” as Epstein points out. The ability to consistently hit a baseball thrown at speeds approaching a hundred miles an hour, with a baffling array of spins and curves, requires the kind of eyesight commonly found in only a tiny fraction of the general population.
Eyesight can be improved—in some cases dramatically—through laser surgery or implantable lenses. Should a promising young baseball player cursed with normal vision be allowed to get that kind of corrective surgery? In this instance, Major League Baseball says yes. Major League Baseball also permits pitchers to replace the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow of their throwing arm with a tendon taken from a cadaver or elsewhere in the athlete’s body. Tendon-replacement surgery is similar to laser surgery: it turns the athlete into an improved version of his natural self.
But when it comes to drugs Major League Baseball—like most sports—draws the line. An athlete cannot use a drug to become an improved version of his natural self, even if the drug is used in doses that are not harmful, and is something that—like testosterone—is no more than a copy of a naturally occurring hormone, available by prescription to anyone, virtually anywhere in the world.
Baseball is in the middle of one of its periodic doping scandals, centering on one of the game’s best players, Alex Rodriguez. Rodriguez is among the most disliked players of his generation. He tried to recover from injury and extend his career through illicit means. (He has appealed his recent suspension, which was based on these allegations.) It is hard to think about Rodriguez, however, and not think about Tommy John, who, in 1974, was the first player to trade in his ulnar collateral ligament for an improved version. John used modern medicine to recover from injury and extend his career. He won a hundred and sixty-four games after his transformation, far more than he did before science intervened. He had one of the longest careers in baseball history, retiring at the age of forty-six. His bionic arm enabled him to win at least twenty games a season, the benchmark of pitching excellence. People loved Tommy John. Maybe Alex Rodriguez looks at Tommy John—and at the fact that at least a third of current major-league pitchers have had the same surgery—and is genuinely baffled about why baseball has drawn a bright moral line between the performance-enhancing products of modern endocrinology and those offered by orthopedics.
The other great doping pariah is Lance Armstrong. He apparently removed large quantities of his own blood and then re-infused himself before competition, in order to boost the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in his system. Armstrong wanted to be like Eero Mäntyranta. He wanted to match, through his own efforts, what some very lucky people already do naturally and legally. Before we condemn him, though, shouldn’t we have to come up with a good reason that one man is allowed to have lots of red blood cells and another man is not?
by Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Barry Blitt
Middle-Aged Malaise
There’s a moment in Jay McInerney’s new novel, “Bright, Precious Days” (Knopf), when one of its principals, a book editor in his early fifties, comes to feel that he is a failure: “How was it that after working so hard and by many measures succeeding and even excelling in his chosen field, he couldn’t afford to save this house that meant so much to his family? Their neighbors seemed to manage, thousands of people no smarter than he was—less so, most of them—except perhaps in their understanding of the mechanics of acquisition.”
“Bright, Precious Days” forms a trilogy that began with “Brightness Falls” (1992), McInerney’s most accomplished and ambitious novel, and continued with “The Good Life” (2006). The three books revolve around Russell and Corrine Calloway, an attractive couple whose lives appear to be very nearly charmed. But the Calloways are restless types who have the misfortune of living on a certain “skinny island” where affluent professionals like them feel comparatively poor. In “Brightness Falls,” Russell became caught up in the leveraged buyout frenzy of the nineteen-eighties and recklessly attempted to buy the publishing company where he worked. “The Good Life” picked up the Calloways’ story fourteen years later, around the time of 9/11, when Corrine became involved with a man she met while volunteering at Ground Zero.
The new book, like its predecessors, is set against a major historical event—in this case, the financial crisis of 2008. The Calloways are still together. Russell now heads a small, independent publishing house with a focus on literary fiction. He yearns to make the company more profitable, but his big move in that direction backfires, humiliatingly. In the course of the novel, Russell, once brash and exuberant, is brought so low that, when Corrine spots him unexpectedly one day, she is thrown by “his slumped comportment, his slack demeanor, even by the gray in his hair. . . . He looked like one of those exhausted souls she saw every day on the subway, men she imagined stuck in jobs they hated, going home to wives they didn’t love.”
The final touch in this portrait of middle-aged malaise comes when Russell takes part in a ceremonial softball game in the Hamptons. A natural athlete, he sees the media-saturated event as a chance to redeem himself before the glitterati, if only for the duration of the game. But Russell plays badly, flubbing a key catch and allowing two decisive runs. When Corrine tries to cheer him up, Russell tells her not to bother:
Russell’s crisis of confidence coincides with Corrine’s renewed involvement with her attentive—and rich—love interest from “The Good Life.” (Though Russell has been guilty in the earlier books of his own indiscretions, he has grown too tired, or dejected, to bother with infidelity.) The contrast between these two story lines, and the picture that emerges of a marriage that seems both more stable and lonelier than it has ever been, is quietly affecting. The secret romantic longings and professional disappointments of people like the Calloways, who spend summers in the Hamptons and live in a Tribeca loft (albeit a rent-stabilized one), might seem too frivolous to be placed at the foreground of a novel, let alone three. But McInerney rejects satire’s self-protective distancing as surely as he resists its flattening effect on characterization; in tone, “Bright, Precious Days” is mellow, earnest, almost elegiac. It is intelligent, and knowing in its depiction of certain segments of New York (especially the world of publishing), but, unlike his best-known novels, it’s rarely dazzling.
That an author famous for slick, stylish evocation of drug-addled youth has evolved into a restrained, almost sombre chronicler of professional-class ennui may seem surprising. “Bright, Precious Days” is a far cry from “Bright Lights, Big City,” the novel that made McInerney an instant celebrity in 1984, at the age of twenty-nine. But, underneath the glamour and flash of his subject matter, he has always been a more committed psychological novelist than his reputation suggests.
Even “Bright Lights,” that most giddily evocative of eighties novels, isn’t really a period piece. It’s a highly disciplined work of fiction that happens to capture its period. That’s why it has aged better than the Brat Pack titles it’s typically associated with. Unlike some of those books, “Bright Lights” relies far less on the timeliness of its material than on the energy of its prose:
The real drama of “Bright Lights” is not sociological. The narrator, however blitzed, thinks of himself as being, really, “the kind of guy who wakes up early on Sunday morning and steps out to cop the Times and croissants. Who might take a cue from the Arts and Leisure section and decide to check out an exhibition—costumes of the Hapsburg Court at the Met, say, or Japanese lacquerware of the Muromachi period at the Asia Society.” The disconnect between the narrator’s life and his almost comically staid vision of it is at the heart of the book. Why, McInerney earnestly wants to know, has this man lost his upper-middle-class bearings—why is he at a trashy night club in the middle of the night, chatting up a woman whose “voice is like the New Jersey State Anthem played through an electric shaver,” instead of living wholesomely and finding a nice girl (an editorial assistant, maybe, or a graduate student at an Ivy League school) to take to those exhibitions he imagines himself attending?
If this buttoned-up vision of the good life isn’t entirely convincing, neither is the answer McInerney offers—that the narrator is reeling from a family tragedy he hasn’t properly dealt with. The oversimplicity of this diagnosis wasn’t lost on McInerney, who has spent most of his career returning to the same questions, growing increasingly sophisticated in his attempts to understand the allure of self-destruction and the compromises required to support a sustainable degree of happiness for ambitious, intelligent (and relatively affluent) people.
by Adelle Waldman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Goodreads
“Bright, Precious Days” forms a trilogy that began with “Brightness Falls” (1992), McInerney’s most accomplished and ambitious novel, and continued with “The Good Life” (2006). The three books revolve around Russell and Corrine Calloway, an attractive couple whose lives appear to be very nearly charmed. But the Calloways are restless types who have the misfortune of living on a certain “skinny island” where affluent professionals like them feel comparatively poor. In “Brightness Falls,” Russell became caught up in the leveraged buyout frenzy of the nineteen-eighties and recklessly attempted to buy the publishing company where he worked. “The Good Life” picked up the Calloways’ story fourteen years later, around the time of 9/11, when Corrine became involved with a man she met while volunteering at Ground Zero.The new book, like its predecessors, is set against a major historical event—in this case, the financial crisis of 2008. The Calloways are still together. Russell now heads a small, independent publishing house with a focus on literary fiction. He yearns to make the company more profitable, but his big move in that direction backfires, humiliatingly. In the course of the novel, Russell, once brash and exuberant, is brought so low that, when Corrine spots him unexpectedly one day, she is thrown by “his slumped comportment, his slack demeanor, even by the gray in his hair. . . . He looked like one of those exhausted souls she saw every day on the subway, men she imagined stuck in jobs they hated, going home to wives they didn’t love.”
The final touch in this portrait of middle-aged malaise comes when Russell takes part in a ceremonial softball game in the Hamptons. A natural athlete, he sees the media-saturated event as a chance to redeem himself before the glitterati, if only for the duration of the game. But Russell plays badly, flubbing a key catch and allowing two decisive runs. When Corrine tries to cheer him up, Russell tells her not to bother:
“That was possibly the most mortifying moment of my adult life,” he added.
“Oh, come on, it’s just a game.”
“No, it’s not. It’s never just a game.”Nobody has a more exquisite appreciation than McInerney of the morbid, hypervigilant sensitivity we tend to harbor about our place in the world, especially when we’re feeling down.
Russell’s crisis of confidence coincides with Corrine’s renewed involvement with her attentive—and rich—love interest from “The Good Life.” (Though Russell has been guilty in the earlier books of his own indiscretions, he has grown too tired, or dejected, to bother with infidelity.) The contrast between these two story lines, and the picture that emerges of a marriage that seems both more stable and lonelier than it has ever been, is quietly affecting. The secret romantic longings and professional disappointments of people like the Calloways, who spend summers in the Hamptons and live in a Tribeca loft (albeit a rent-stabilized one), might seem too frivolous to be placed at the foreground of a novel, let alone three. But McInerney rejects satire’s self-protective distancing as surely as he resists its flattening effect on characterization; in tone, “Bright, Precious Days” is mellow, earnest, almost elegiac. It is intelligent, and knowing in its depiction of certain segments of New York (especially the world of publishing), but, unlike his best-known novels, it’s rarely dazzling.
That an author famous for slick, stylish evocation of drug-addled youth has evolved into a restrained, almost sombre chronicler of professional-class ennui may seem surprising. “Bright, Precious Days” is a far cry from “Bright Lights, Big City,” the novel that made McInerney an instant celebrity in 1984, at the age of twenty-nine. But, underneath the glamour and flash of his subject matter, he has always been a more committed psychological novelist than his reputation suggests.
Even “Bright Lights,” that most giddily evocative of eighties novels, isn’t really a period piece. It’s a highly disciplined work of fiction that happens to capture its period. That’s why it has aged better than the Brat Pack titles it’s typically associated with. Unlike some of those books, “Bright Lights” relies far less on the timeliness of its material than on the energy of its prose:
The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two a.m. changes to six a.m. . . . Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush. Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long walk through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed.McInerney maintains this brisk, moody comedy for the next hundred and eighty pages, as his unnamed narrator unravels in a bender.
The real drama of “Bright Lights” is not sociological. The narrator, however blitzed, thinks of himself as being, really, “the kind of guy who wakes up early on Sunday morning and steps out to cop the Times and croissants. Who might take a cue from the Arts and Leisure section and decide to check out an exhibition—costumes of the Hapsburg Court at the Met, say, or Japanese lacquerware of the Muromachi period at the Asia Society.” The disconnect between the narrator’s life and his almost comically staid vision of it is at the heart of the book. Why, McInerney earnestly wants to know, has this man lost his upper-middle-class bearings—why is he at a trashy night club in the middle of the night, chatting up a woman whose “voice is like the New Jersey State Anthem played through an electric shaver,” instead of living wholesomely and finding a nice girl (an editorial assistant, maybe, or a graduate student at an Ivy League school) to take to those exhibitions he imagines himself attending?
If this buttoned-up vision of the good life isn’t entirely convincing, neither is the answer McInerney offers—that the narrator is reeling from a family tragedy he hasn’t properly dealt with. The oversimplicity of this diagnosis wasn’t lost on McInerney, who has spent most of his career returning to the same questions, growing increasingly sophisticated in his attempts to understand the allure of self-destruction and the compromises required to support a sustainable degree of happiness for ambitious, intelligent (and relatively affluent) people.
by Adelle Waldman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Goodreads
Smart Drugs Made Me Dumber
[ed. For more on nootropics, see also: Nootropics Survey Results]
Why can’t an overworked, overstimulated, pharmaceutically-obsessed society just come up with the perfect chemical supplement to make us smarter, faster, and more engaged in today’s accelerated world? One without the self-destructive trade-offs like crashing hard, addiction, or eating your neighbor’s face?
Well, according to such cognitive boost energy junkies as stock marketeers, Silicon Valley wizards, and that CEO dude who advocates putting butter in your coffee to amplify caffeine’s effects, we have. Modafinil, a well-documented object of lust for the life hacking set, is a nootropic (smart drug) regularly prescribed for narcolepsy or “shift work disorder” that has been hailed as delivering intense focus, enhancing memory, and even seeming to actually increasing intelligence. Much like, say, Adderall, but without the drag of being pharmaceutical grade meth. Never mind that both have been shown to exacerbate sociopathic tendencies—a small price to pay for (temporarily) being your best self, right? Besides, it’s supposed to be lonely at the top.
A few years ago Modafinil became available in a generic form, meaning that suddenly Cephalon, the pharmaceutical juggernaut behind it, was about to lose their corner on the market. So what did they do? They introduced Armodafinil, aka the brand named Nuvigil. Newer, better, faster, stronger, and longer lasting, just like you will be when you take it.
But is it really better? Do any of these things really work? Would choking down an oblong white horse pill really thrust me across the DMZ of normal people and smack into genius territory? There’s only one way to find out—obviously I was gonna have to take some.
A little about me:
I just turned 41, and, honestly, it hurts a little. Turning 30 was fine, and 40 just slipped by, but 41… You’re forced to acknowledge you’ve somehow flipped over to the backside of life. Stereotypes about getting older—losing your keys, forgetting things, assorted aches and pains, a disconnect with what the kids are into these days—stop being stereotypes and start revealing themselves as small, bitter truths.
Working, as I do, in an industry dominated by hyper-intelligent workaholic twentysomethings makes these aging effects even more stark; there are times I’ll think the day’s winding down and be looking for a cozy place to nap while co-workers are just getting fired up. Luckily we live in an age when there are all manner of handy supplementals to jump-start the increasingly shrinking gelatinous bag of neurons sloshing around inside our skulls, and I’m not shy about doubling down on recommended dosages if that’s what I need to get ’er done.
But I also hate the inevitable spiral of despair and exhaustion that comes with mega-doses of external energy, and, as I get older, the consequences have become harder and harder to bear. Lately there are days when even the inside of my bones are tired, weighing me down as though filled with lead weights soaked in mononucleosis and apathy. Have you ever been so lethargic, texting is the physical equivalent of summiting Everest without oxygen? Welcome to my Wednesday.
Also, before we continue, it should be noted that neither The Daily Beast nor the author recommend dosing yourself with quasi-legal substances in the pursuit of performance or pleasure. I’m only doing so because A) journalism and B) how can these hipster smart drugs really be any worse than a few dozen Chicken McNuggets or gulping down enough THC to turn Maureen Dowd into the Mad Hatter? I’m a professional, after all.
Turns out that in today’s world it’s beyond easy to get your sweaty paws on a sample blister pack of Armodafinil pills. I didn’t even have to order them quasi-legally from a Canadian pill mill. Thus it was with a shrug, a smile, and a glass of cold-brew coffee to get it all going I tossed back 250 milligrams—the maximum recommended dosage—and set out to start a regular, but soon to be extraordinary, day.
I have to admit I was excited at the prospect of Nuvigil being the ultimate cure-all to arrest my slow devolution back to primordial ooze. Would it help me once again harness the full power of my once at least moderate mental acuity? Had some genius alchemists finally delivered on their promise of better living through chemistry, enough to bridge the gap between my sputtering middle-aged brain and the can’t-come-soon-enough onset of the Singularity?
Sadly, it appears not.
One hour after popping that first pill, and the cold brew coffee was beginning to wear off.
Which is normal. What’s immediately suspicious, however, is the total lack of energy coming up behind it. Had I taken Adderall, the creeping doldrums of caffeine depletion would have been chased away by a central nervous system kickstart so acute it’d immediately send you running to deposit any dead weight in the nearest toilet, a joyful evacuation heralding the forthcoming clean and clear mental state. Yet here I sat, waiting patiently, and… Nothing.
I gave it another fifteen minutes before tossing back the second 250 mg tablet dry, choking it down like a dope fiend discovering a forgotten Oxy in the desert. Stymied, I paced around my home office, tapping out a few short emails and growing more and more impatient. Where was my superhuman computing power? I checked the expiration date on the blister pack—there were years before they went bad. I was in the midst of Googling “too dumb for smart drugs” when things got weird.
First, my stomach flip-flopped. Almost like having gas, but without the bloating. Actually, it was more like I was suddenly aware of my stomach, like I could feel with it the same as I do my hands or feet. The feeling radiated outward, an intensity that made my whole body hold its breath in anticipation, every pore and follicle puckering inward. It was similar to eating super-strong MDMA, the big buildup before the epic meltdown.
“Here we go,” I thought, clenching and unclenching my fists and chewing on my top lip, fantasizing about all of the brilliance I was about to unleash upon the world.
Amphetamines, such as Adderall, work by increasing monoamine and other neurotransmitters in the brain, most notably dopamine and norepinephrine. This causes that laser-like focus, as well as the intense, euphoric highs. Conversely, the way that Armodafinil and Modafinil work on the human physiology is a mystery. Scientists literally have no idea why they do what they do. Yet it’s approved by the good ol’ FDA, and many of our nation’s best and brightest shovel these pills down their gullets like a technicolor sugary cereal on a Saturday morning—possibly even including President Obama himself.
My breaths are coming in short, deep gasps, and I’m suddenly aware of all the hair on my body growing, pushing inexorably outward from my dermis. Jaw clenched, I sit down on the couch and try to distract myself from the intense oversensitivity by flipping through social media, but it doesn’t help. I can’t seem to lock my attention on to anything—it’s like sudden onset ADHD mixed with binge eating a pound of Sour Patch Kids. Yet even through the discomfort, I’m excited. It’s happening! Soon, I’ll be amongst the Mensa crowd, if only for a little while. My body temperature increases, hot from the inside, my ears venting heat like twin chimneys.
And then, as quickly as it all came on, it’s gone.
Why can’t an overworked, overstimulated, pharmaceutically-obsessed society just come up with the perfect chemical supplement to make us smarter, faster, and more engaged in today’s accelerated world? One without the self-destructive trade-offs like crashing hard, addiction, or eating your neighbor’s face?
Well, according to such cognitive boost energy junkies as stock marketeers, Silicon Valley wizards, and that CEO dude who advocates putting butter in your coffee to amplify caffeine’s effects, we have. Modafinil, a well-documented object of lust for the life hacking set, is a nootropic (smart drug) regularly prescribed for narcolepsy or “shift work disorder” that has been hailed as delivering intense focus, enhancing memory, and even seeming to actually increasing intelligence. Much like, say, Adderall, but without the drag of being pharmaceutical grade meth. Never mind that both have been shown to exacerbate sociopathic tendencies—a small price to pay for (temporarily) being your best self, right? Besides, it’s supposed to be lonely at the top.A few years ago Modafinil became available in a generic form, meaning that suddenly Cephalon, the pharmaceutical juggernaut behind it, was about to lose their corner on the market. So what did they do? They introduced Armodafinil, aka the brand named Nuvigil. Newer, better, faster, stronger, and longer lasting, just like you will be when you take it.
But is it really better? Do any of these things really work? Would choking down an oblong white horse pill really thrust me across the DMZ of normal people and smack into genius territory? There’s only one way to find out—obviously I was gonna have to take some.
A little about me:
I just turned 41, and, honestly, it hurts a little. Turning 30 was fine, and 40 just slipped by, but 41… You’re forced to acknowledge you’ve somehow flipped over to the backside of life. Stereotypes about getting older—losing your keys, forgetting things, assorted aches and pains, a disconnect with what the kids are into these days—stop being stereotypes and start revealing themselves as small, bitter truths.
Working, as I do, in an industry dominated by hyper-intelligent workaholic twentysomethings makes these aging effects even more stark; there are times I’ll think the day’s winding down and be looking for a cozy place to nap while co-workers are just getting fired up. Luckily we live in an age when there are all manner of handy supplementals to jump-start the increasingly shrinking gelatinous bag of neurons sloshing around inside our skulls, and I’m not shy about doubling down on recommended dosages if that’s what I need to get ’er done.
But I also hate the inevitable spiral of despair and exhaustion that comes with mega-doses of external energy, and, as I get older, the consequences have become harder and harder to bear. Lately there are days when even the inside of my bones are tired, weighing me down as though filled with lead weights soaked in mononucleosis and apathy. Have you ever been so lethargic, texting is the physical equivalent of summiting Everest without oxygen? Welcome to my Wednesday.
Also, before we continue, it should be noted that neither The Daily Beast nor the author recommend dosing yourself with quasi-legal substances in the pursuit of performance or pleasure. I’m only doing so because A) journalism and B) how can these hipster smart drugs really be any worse than a few dozen Chicken McNuggets or gulping down enough THC to turn Maureen Dowd into the Mad Hatter? I’m a professional, after all.
Turns out that in today’s world it’s beyond easy to get your sweaty paws on a sample blister pack of Armodafinil pills. I didn’t even have to order them quasi-legally from a Canadian pill mill. Thus it was with a shrug, a smile, and a glass of cold-brew coffee to get it all going I tossed back 250 milligrams—the maximum recommended dosage—and set out to start a regular, but soon to be extraordinary, day.
I have to admit I was excited at the prospect of Nuvigil being the ultimate cure-all to arrest my slow devolution back to primordial ooze. Would it help me once again harness the full power of my once at least moderate mental acuity? Had some genius alchemists finally delivered on their promise of better living through chemistry, enough to bridge the gap between my sputtering middle-aged brain and the can’t-come-soon-enough onset of the Singularity?
Sadly, it appears not.
One hour after popping that first pill, and the cold brew coffee was beginning to wear off.
Which is normal. What’s immediately suspicious, however, is the total lack of energy coming up behind it. Had I taken Adderall, the creeping doldrums of caffeine depletion would have been chased away by a central nervous system kickstart so acute it’d immediately send you running to deposit any dead weight in the nearest toilet, a joyful evacuation heralding the forthcoming clean and clear mental state. Yet here I sat, waiting patiently, and… Nothing.
I gave it another fifteen minutes before tossing back the second 250 mg tablet dry, choking it down like a dope fiend discovering a forgotten Oxy in the desert. Stymied, I paced around my home office, tapping out a few short emails and growing more and more impatient. Where was my superhuman computing power? I checked the expiration date on the blister pack—there were years before they went bad. I was in the midst of Googling “too dumb for smart drugs” when things got weird.
First, my stomach flip-flopped. Almost like having gas, but without the bloating. Actually, it was more like I was suddenly aware of my stomach, like I could feel with it the same as I do my hands or feet. The feeling radiated outward, an intensity that made my whole body hold its breath in anticipation, every pore and follicle puckering inward. It was similar to eating super-strong MDMA, the big buildup before the epic meltdown.
“Here we go,” I thought, clenching and unclenching my fists and chewing on my top lip, fantasizing about all of the brilliance I was about to unleash upon the world.
Amphetamines, such as Adderall, work by increasing monoamine and other neurotransmitters in the brain, most notably dopamine and norepinephrine. This causes that laser-like focus, as well as the intense, euphoric highs. Conversely, the way that Armodafinil and Modafinil work on the human physiology is a mystery. Scientists literally have no idea why they do what they do. Yet it’s approved by the good ol’ FDA, and many of our nation’s best and brightest shovel these pills down their gullets like a technicolor sugary cereal on a Saturday morning—possibly even including President Obama himself.
My breaths are coming in short, deep gasps, and I’m suddenly aware of all the hair on my body growing, pushing inexorably outward from my dermis. Jaw clenched, I sit down on the couch and try to distract myself from the intense oversensitivity by flipping through social media, but it doesn’t help. I can’t seem to lock my attention on to anything—it’s like sudden onset ADHD mixed with binge eating a pound of Sour Patch Kids. Yet even through the discomfort, I’m excited. It’s happening! Soon, I’ll be amongst the Mensa crowd, if only for a little while. My body temperature increases, hot from the inside, my ears venting heat like twin chimneys.
And then, as quickly as it all came on, it’s gone.
by James Joiner, The Daily Beast | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
Saturday, August 6, 2016
How an Archive of the Internet Could Change History
A few years ago, the Brooklyn Museum put on a Keith Haring exhibition, with a focus on his early career. There were videos of Haring at work, feverishly painting his way across an enormous scroll, and a room filled with drawings he illegally chalked in subway stations. But most stunning, at least to me, were Haring’s notebooks. They were displayed under clear cubes, their well-worn sheets pinned open for visitors to study.
The notebooks were sublimely surreal, filled with dogs crawling beneath bulbous U.F.O.s and penises ejaculating alongside concave cylinders that looked like nuclear cooling towers. By the time I first encountered Haring’s work as a teenager, his artistic legacy had been reduced to catchy imagery of colorful, blocky bodies hugging and dancing on T-shirts. But the notebooks showed what nagged at the artist, what motivated him. I saw someone so suspicious of government surveillance that he often wrote in secret code, someone obsessed with the subversive power of gay sex and someone working to merge his skepticism of capitalism with a deep-rooted desire for fame and commercial appeal.
I left with an urgent curiosity about what sort of artifacts we would display a few decades from now, for future generations to discover. Our contemporary analogues to the personal notebook now live on the web — communal, crowdsourced and shared online in real time. Some of the most interesting and vital work I come across exists only in pixels. Tumblr, for example, contains endless warrens of critical theory about trans identity politics and expression, one of the few havens on the web where that sort of discourse exists. Many of the short videos on Vine feel as though they belong to an ever-evolving, completely new genre of modern folk art. Some of the most clever commentary on pop culture and politics is thriving deep in hashtags on Twitter. Social media is as essential to understanding the preoccupations and temperature of our time as Haring’s notebooks were for his. But preserving materials from the internet is much harder than sealing them under glass.
Building an archive has always required asking a couple of simple but thorny questions: What will we save and how? Whose stories are the most important and why? In theory, the internet already functions as a kind of archive: Any document, video or photo can in principle remain there indefinitely, available to be viewed by anyone with a connection. But in reality, things disappear constantly. Search engines like Google continually trawl for pages to organize and index for retrieval, but they can’t catch everything. And as the web evolves, it becomes harder to preserve. It is estimated that 75 percent of all websites are inactive, and domains are abandoned every day. Links can rot when sites disappear, images vanish when servers go offline and fluctuations in economic tides and social trends can wipe out entire ecosystems. (Look up a blog post from a decade ago and see how many of the images, media or links still work.) Tumblr and even Twitter may eventually end up ancient internet history because of their financial instability.
There are scattered efforts to preserve digital history. Rhizome, an arts nonprofit group, built a tool called Webrecorder to save parts of today’s internet for future generations. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has archived hundreds of billions of web pages. But there’s still a low-grade urgency to save our social media for posterity — and it’s particularly urgent in cases in which social media itself had a profound influence on historic events. (...)
Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians. Such an abundance presents a logistical challenge (the total number of tweets ever written is nearing half a trillion) as well as an ethical one (will people get to opt out of having ephemeral thoughts entered into the historical record?). But this plethora of new media and materials may function as a totally new type of archive: a multidimensional ledger of events that academics, scholars, researchers and the general public can parse to generate a more prismatic recollection of history. (...)
The internet is pushing us — in good ways and in bad — to realize that the official version of events shouldn’t always be trusted or accepted without question. And historians are constantly updating the record by looking for primary sources that were overlooked in earlier eras, often from marginalized figures. These days, such omissions will still happen, but we can catch them faster. Oversights that would have taken decades to correct are now resolved in weeks, even hours. We now get a kaleidoscopic view of events as they unfold, often in real time, on our screens and devices. History is not neutral or synonymous with truth, but the internet affords us a newfound vantage on the totality of passing time — the profound implications of which we are just now beginning to grasp.
[ed. From the comments section: MMonck:]
We’ve long known that this is how human history works — an unimaginable number of small stories, compressed into one big one. But maybe now we finally have the ability to record and capture them all, and history can become something else entirely: not a handful of voices, but a cacophony."
Great summation. I largely agree. However, I can't disagree more with the point, "...capture them all".
I had my Twitter and Facebook accounts deleted a couple of years ago. Does this make me, and the millions of others that have done the same thing, like the dead trees that never made a sound when they fell because no one heard their falling?
Is the Internet, especially the narcissist infested Twitter, the true sources of history? The cacophony that makes up history is way beyond the Internet...in personal files, notebooks and photos (electronic and non-) not "shared" and "liked" on the Internet.
As a former technology and Internet use researcher, what makes up the content of the Internet, even today, is a such an incredibly skewed point of view, I fear for anyone a hundred years from now drawing any conclusions about the totality of the human voice and experience based on the Internet.
The notebooks were sublimely surreal, filled with dogs crawling beneath bulbous U.F.O.s and penises ejaculating alongside concave cylinders that looked like nuclear cooling towers. By the time I first encountered Haring’s work as a teenager, his artistic legacy had been reduced to catchy imagery of colorful, blocky bodies hugging and dancing on T-shirts. But the notebooks showed what nagged at the artist, what motivated him. I saw someone so suspicious of government surveillance that he often wrote in secret code, someone obsessed with the subversive power of gay sex and someone working to merge his skepticism of capitalism with a deep-rooted desire for fame and commercial appeal.
I left with an urgent curiosity about what sort of artifacts we would display a few decades from now, for future generations to discover. Our contemporary analogues to the personal notebook now live on the web — communal, crowdsourced and shared online in real time. Some of the most interesting and vital work I come across exists only in pixels. Tumblr, for example, contains endless warrens of critical theory about trans identity politics and expression, one of the few havens on the web where that sort of discourse exists. Many of the short videos on Vine feel as though they belong to an ever-evolving, completely new genre of modern folk art. Some of the most clever commentary on pop culture and politics is thriving deep in hashtags on Twitter. Social media is as essential to understanding the preoccupations and temperature of our time as Haring’s notebooks were for his. But preserving materials from the internet is much harder than sealing them under glass.Building an archive has always required asking a couple of simple but thorny questions: What will we save and how? Whose stories are the most important and why? In theory, the internet already functions as a kind of archive: Any document, video or photo can in principle remain there indefinitely, available to be viewed by anyone with a connection. But in reality, things disappear constantly. Search engines like Google continually trawl for pages to organize and index for retrieval, but they can’t catch everything. And as the web evolves, it becomes harder to preserve. It is estimated that 75 percent of all websites are inactive, and domains are abandoned every day. Links can rot when sites disappear, images vanish when servers go offline and fluctuations in economic tides and social trends can wipe out entire ecosystems. (Look up a blog post from a decade ago and see how many of the images, media or links still work.) Tumblr and even Twitter may eventually end up ancient internet history because of their financial instability.
There are scattered efforts to preserve digital history. Rhizome, an arts nonprofit group, built a tool called Webrecorder to save parts of today’s internet for future generations. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has archived hundreds of billions of web pages. But there’s still a low-grade urgency to save our social media for posterity — and it’s particularly urgent in cases in which social media itself had a profound influence on historic events. (...)
Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians. Such an abundance presents a logistical challenge (the total number of tweets ever written is nearing half a trillion) as well as an ethical one (will people get to opt out of having ephemeral thoughts entered into the historical record?). But this plethora of new media and materials may function as a totally new type of archive: a multidimensional ledger of events that academics, scholars, researchers and the general public can parse to generate a more prismatic recollection of history. (...)
The internet is pushing us — in good ways and in bad — to realize that the official version of events shouldn’t always be trusted or accepted without question. And historians are constantly updating the record by looking for primary sources that were overlooked in earlier eras, often from marginalized figures. These days, such omissions will still happen, but we can catch them faster. Oversights that would have taken decades to correct are now resolved in weeks, even hours. We now get a kaleidoscopic view of events as they unfold, often in real time, on our screens and devices. History is not neutral or synonymous with truth, but the internet affords us a newfound vantage on the totality of passing time — the profound implications of which we are just now beginning to grasp.
by Jenna Wortham, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Adam Ferriss[ed. From the comments section: MMonck:]
We’ve long known that this is how human history works — an unimaginable number of small stories, compressed into one big one. But maybe now we finally have the ability to record and capture them all, and history can become something else entirely: not a handful of voices, but a cacophony."
Great summation. I largely agree. However, I can't disagree more with the point, "...capture them all".
I had my Twitter and Facebook accounts deleted a couple of years ago. Does this make me, and the millions of others that have done the same thing, like the dead trees that never made a sound when they fell because no one heard their falling?
Is the Internet, especially the narcissist infested Twitter, the true sources of history? The cacophony that makes up history is way beyond the Internet...in personal files, notebooks and photos (electronic and non-) not "shared" and "liked" on the Internet.
As a former technology and Internet use researcher, what makes up the content of the Internet, even today, is a such an incredibly skewed point of view, I fear for anyone a hundred years from now drawing any conclusions about the totality of the human voice and experience based on the Internet.
Massive Attack, feat. Young Fathers
[ed. Definitley not for the squeamish. But Rosamond Pike (Gone Girl) is amazing.]
Friday, August 5, 2016
Brazil: The New Frontier?
Of all the things golf has going for it, one thing it doesn't have is an Olympic heritage. Golf was included in the half-assed 1900 Games in France (historians call them the farcical Olympics), but just barely. There was a stroke-play event with all of 12 competitors, several of whom didn't realize that it was connected to something called the Olympics. There was also a full-handicap event won by a vacationing American from St. Louis named Albert Lambert. Wealthier than he was skilled, Lambert was nonetheless so delighted with his medal that, when St. Louis was awarded the 1904 Games, he managed to get golf included. Lambert's two claims to actual fame are that his company (later Warner-Lambert) invented Listerine and that he was the main sponsor of Charles Lindbergh's trans-Atlantic flight. He gave enough money to the effort that the St. Louis airport was eventually named for him. The golf on display at the St. Louis Olympics was not exactly international in scope, competed as it was by 74 Americans and three Canadians. One of the Canadians won, George Lyon.
Similarly, of all the things golf has going for it, it doesn't have much of a foothold in this year's Olympic host country, where the sport returns to competition. Brazil has roughly 200 million people, and its land mass is the fifth-largest on Earth. On such a massive canvas, there are only about 110 courses and 20,000 people who play. In Rio de Janeiro, host city and home to 6.5 million people, there are perhaps a few more than 1,000 families who belong to one of two private clubs.
People here are poor. The average annual income in Rio is approximately R$20,000 (about $6,000 in U.S. dollars). Steeply discounted memberships in Rio's two private clubs go for more than that. But it's also cultural. To understand Rio, one regular visitor said, you have to understand the beaches. This reporting trip began on what turned out to be a four-day weekend. My guide, Eduardo, had no idea what the holiday might be—his area of specialization is golf, and he had only recently resigned from Rio 2016's golf staff. Besides, he said, "Brazil has too many holidays." It turned out to be Dia de Tiradentes, which marks the hanging of an 18th-century revolutionary for advocating independence from Portugal.
In any case, walk Ipanema Beach on such a weekend. For four days and most of the nights, the entire beachfront is packed. Soccer and beach tennis are played every few yards. Watch the beach volleyball and realize what a weak facsimile the Olympic version is. These two-person sides feature rallies that last for a minute—and they're not using their hands. They tee the ball up on a mound of sand to kick it off and then use their heads, chests, knees, feet, occasionally backs or butts—to keep rallies alive. It's extraordinary. The people of Rio live for the beach. They live on the beach. Every kind of business is there on the sand—from alcoholic beverages to vendors selling corn on the cob to freaking massage. It's a complete and self-sustaining universe, and it's just as alive on the beaches of Copacabana and Barra da Tijuca and São Conrado.
Golf doesn't enter the public imagination. Most people know what it is, but it's not covered in the newspapers and it's not broadcast on television. It's nearly invisible.
And into these contexts, Gil Hanse has designed and built (with the help of his superintendent Neil Cleverly) an ambitious course intended not only to host the best in the world as they compete for gold, silver and bronze, but to become what Rio 2016 touts as the first public golf course in the country, a new beginning for golf and a bet on its future.
If golf does have a future in Brazil, it might be right here, on what is actually the country's first, and for now, only public course. The Associacão Golfe Publico de Japeri is about 70 minutes by car from the Barra da Tijuca section of Rio, site of the Olympic course. And believe me when I say "by car," which is the only way to get from Rio to Japeri unless you want a three-hour trip by bus, train and foot.
But Japeri is even farther than the mileage. When Eduardo told his mother the night before where we were going, she asked us not to. Japeri, a city of about 100,000 people, is notoriously violent and is last in the state of Rio de Janeiro's human-development rankings.
On our way to Japeri, Google Maps failed us, which was particularly disconcerting because we were nearly out of gas. (Eduardo had underestimated the distance.) But then, suddenly, just a few hundred yards off a new and desolate highway, there it was: a concrete bunker with a metal roof. Baked-dirt parking lot for maybe five or six cars. Fairways burned white by the ongoing drought. The range—the left half of which doubles as the fairway for the first hole—looks like an open, arid field. Which is exactly what these hundred acres were—a farm fallen into arrears on the outskirts of town—until about 15 years ago, when Jair Medeiros, a caddie from Gavea Golf and Country Club in Rio, along with a dozen other caddies, started bringing used clubs and balls back home and knocking them around.
One day, Jair approached the mayor about turning the tract into an actual golf course. The mayor was amenable, so Jair enlisted the support of Vicky Whyte, a Gavea member who's also the first female South American member of the R&A. It was her idea to seek funding for the enterprise by making it more than a golf course, a bastion of hope in a distressed place.
Whyte, with her son Michael, applied for a grant from the R&A and secured a sponsorship from Nationwide Insurance to build a course. The sponsorship was insufficient to fund 18 holes, so Whyte commissioned Brazilian architect Ricardo Pradez to build nine. "The construction process was slow," Whyte says. "Very little earth-moving and shaping was done. We went with the lie of the land. We did, however, build two lakes for drainage and irrigation purposes. Money was always a problem."
The course opened in 2005. Jair is now in charge and employs most of those original caddies from Gavea to maintain the facility.
The golf course is modest. Well, modest is generous. There is little irrigation—only the greens get water—so the course is as hard as rock. When the new highway came through, it stole three holes. Jair and his staff, with equipment on loan from the mayor, built replacement holes with the help of Fabio Silva, the agronomist at Gavea. Michael Whyte will tell you that the course forces you to use every club in your bag—the signature hole is a winding, downhill par 4 to a natural island green. But it's by no means a gimme that, were the flagsticks removed, most people would readily identify this place as a golf course. But, given what goes on at the academy (more on that in a bit), that's almost beside the point.
In The Stadium
We're in another metal-roofed building. This time, it's the construction offices of the Olympic course, and we're talking to the only person in the world who holds the title of "Superintendent, Olympic Golf Course." It's right there, stitched on the breast of his dark-green shirt and matching cap.
This is the day before our trip to Japeri, and when Cleverly hears that we're heading there, says, "You're gonna see one extreme to another when you look at that facility, because it's still golf in some shape or form. But to transition to that from this is a huge, huge thing."
Cleverly is wiry, wired and intense. His bearing is military, which is how he spent his time before his career in golf. He's burned brown, not a natural shade for an Englishman. He was hired to take an inhospitable and inadequate piece of land (it's only about 100 acres) in a country where there is little inborn interest in the sport and, with an absolute dearth of experienced workers, help Gil Hanse build a world-class golf course. It is especially punishing to take on an Olympics during a crushing recession and only two years after hosting a World Cup. On this day, Cleverly was 104 days away from the beginning of the Games. When his course will then be trod upon by caddies and players and beat to hell by 15,000 ticket holders per day, and none of it, not one square inch of it, has ever really been tested. Well, unless you count the single rehearsal event, in which a couple dozen Brazilian pros played in front of a few hundred spectators and, even then, the roping was all screwed up and players got touchy when the crowd jostled them. One hundred and four days, and he still doesn't have enough mowers. He's also waiting for someone at the organizing committee to approve and organize the logistics to bring several dozen volunteer superintendents from around the world who are willing to pay their expenses and donate their time and labor to get the course into the pristine shape that the only course ever built for Olympic golf deserves.
It has been a challenge, and it's going to continue to be one. But when you're out on the course with Cleverly, and he shows you the green complex at No. 7, the way the rhythm of it is set up by the false front on the left side of the green, which falls gently toward the center, where it's joined by the razor edge of the bunker face, which rises to create an almost musical symmetry—his love of this course and all the pain it has caused him is right there in his eyes, even though he deflects any credit from himself and pronounces Gil Hanse "an artist."
When you ask Cleverly what this course's future is, it's a loaded question because, though he has worked on 11 other courses, this is the one by which the world will judge him. More than that, he's deeply concerned whether this course is an opportunity Brazil is capable of taking advantage of, or, like so many former Olympic facilities, it will fall into disuse. "The only answer I can give you would be the 'if' scenario," Cleverly says. "If there would be a street-level golfing commodity, I'd say that this golf course would be the most played on a regular basis. But because I feel now, having been here for the last three years, and realizing that unless things change from a street level—the price of equipment, the price of a round, the mentality of people ... from what I've learned in my time here, it's really hard for people to live normal lives in this country. So there has to be some kind of format where they can exhibit the golf course to juniors or schoolchildren. Bring them to the driving range, show them how to play golf, and if you get a percentage of those that are interested, then maybe there will be the roots of something in Brazil. It's easy to talk a good game and to say that you have some kind of a plan, but whether they step up and do it is another matter."
Similarly, of all the things golf has going for it, it doesn't have much of a foothold in this year's Olympic host country, where the sport returns to competition. Brazil has roughly 200 million people, and its land mass is the fifth-largest on Earth. On such a massive canvas, there are only about 110 courses and 20,000 people who play. In Rio de Janeiro, host city and home to 6.5 million people, there are perhaps a few more than 1,000 families who belong to one of two private clubs.People here are poor. The average annual income in Rio is approximately R$20,000 (about $6,000 in U.S. dollars). Steeply discounted memberships in Rio's two private clubs go for more than that. But it's also cultural. To understand Rio, one regular visitor said, you have to understand the beaches. This reporting trip began on what turned out to be a four-day weekend. My guide, Eduardo, had no idea what the holiday might be—his area of specialization is golf, and he had only recently resigned from Rio 2016's golf staff. Besides, he said, "Brazil has too many holidays." It turned out to be Dia de Tiradentes, which marks the hanging of an 18th-century revolutionary for advocating independence from Portugal.
In any case, walk Ipanema Beach on such a weekend. For four days and most of the nights, the entire beachfront is packed. Soccer and beach tennis are played every few yards. Watch the beach volleyball and realize what a weak facsimile the Olympic version is. These two-person sides feature rallies that last for a minute—and they're not using their hands. They tee the ball up on a mound of sand to kick it off and then use their heads, chests, knees, feet, occasionally backs or butts—to keep rallies alive. It's extraordinary. The people of Rio live for the beach. They live on the beach. Every kind of business is there on the sand—from alcoholic beverages to vendors selling corn on the cob to freaking massage. It's a complete and self-sustaining universe, and it's just as alive on the beaches of Copacabana and Barra da Tijuca and São Conrado.
Golf doesn't enter the public imagination. Most people know what it is, but it's not covered in the newspapers and it's not broadcast on television. It's nearly invisible.
And into these contexts, Gil Hanse has designed and built (with the help of his superintendent Neil Cleverly) an ambitious course intended not only to host the best in the world as they compete for gold, silver and bronze, but to become what Rio 2016 touts as the first public golf course in the country, a new beginning for golf and a bet on its future.
Off The Grid
If golf does have a future in Brazil, it might be right here, on what is actually the country's first, and for now, only public course. The Associacão Golfe Publico de Japeri is about 70 minutes by car from the Barra da Tijuca section of Rio, site of the Olympic course. And believe me when I say "by car," which is the only way to get from Rio to Japeri unless you want a three-hour trip by bus, train and foot.
But Japeri is even farther than the mileage. When Eduardo told his mother the night before where we were going, she asked us not to. Japeri, a city of about 100,000 people, is notoriously violent and is last in the state of Rio de Janeiro's human-development rankings.
On our way to Japeri, Google Maps failed us, which was particularly disconcerting because we were nearly out of gas. (Eduardo had underestimated the distance.) But then, suddenly, just a few hundred yards off a new and desolate highway, there it was: a concrete bunker with a metal roof. Baked-dirt parking lot for maybe five or six cars. Fairways burned white by the ongoing drought. The range—the left half of which doubles as the fairway for the first hole—looks like an open, arid field. Which is exactly what these hundred acres were—a farm fallen into arrears on the outskirts of town—until about 15 years ago, when Jair Medeiros, a caddie from Gavea Golf and Country Club in Rio, along with a dozen other caddies, started bringing used clubs and balls back home and knocking them around.One day, Jair approached the mayor about turning the tract into an actual golf course. The mayor was amenable, so Jair enlisted the support of Vicky Whyte, a Gavea member who's also the first female South American member of the R&A. It was her idea to seek funding for the enterprise by making it more than a golf course, a bastion of hope in a distressed place.
Whyte, with her son Michael, applied for a grant from the R&A and secured a sponsorship from Nationwide Insurance to build a course. The sponsorship was insufficient to fund 18 holes, so Whyte commissioned Brazilian architect Ricardo Pradez to build nine. "The construction process was slow," Whyte says. "Very little earth-moving and shaping was done. We went with the lie of the land. We did, however, build two lakes for drainage and irrigation purposes. Money was always a problem."
The course opened in 2005. Jair is now in charge and employs most of those original caddies from Gavea to maintain the facility.
The golf course is modest. Well, modest is generous. There is little irrigation—only the greens get water—so the course is as hard as rock. When the new highway came through, it stole three holes. Jair and his staff, with equipment on loan from the mayor, built replacement holes with the help of Fabio Silva, the agronomist at Gavea. Michael Whyte will tell you that the course forces you to use every club in your bag—the signature hole is a winding, downhill par 4 to a natural island green. But it's by no means a gimme that, were the flagsticks removed, most people would readily identify this place as a golf course. But, given what goes on at the academy (more on that in a bit), that's almost beside the point.
In The Stadium
We're in another metal-roofed building. This time, it's the construction offices of the Olympic course, and we're talking to the only person in the world who holds the title of "Superintendent, Olympic Golf Course." It's right there, stitched on the breast of his dark-green shirt and matching cap.
This is the day before our trip to Japeri, and when Cleverly hears that we're heading there, says, "You're gonna see one extreme to another when you look at that facility, because it's still golf in some shape or form. But to transition to that from this is a huge, huge thing."
Cleverly is wiry, wired and intense. His bearing is military, which is how he spent his time before his career in golf. He's burned brown, not a natural shade for an Englishman. He was hired to take an inhospitable and inadequate piece of land (it's only about 100 acres) in a country where there is little inborn interest in the sport and, with an absolute dearth of experienced workers, help Gil Hanse build a world-class golf course. It is especially punishing to take on an Olympics during a crushing recession and only two years after hosting a World Cup. On this day, Cleverly was 104 days away from the beginning of the Games. When his course will then be trod upon by caddies and players and beat to hell by 15,000 ticket holders per day, and none of it, not one square inch of it, has ever really been tested. Well, unless you count the single rehearsal event, in which a couple dozen Brazilian pros played in front of a few hundred spectators and, even then, the roping was all screwed up and players got touchy when the crowd jostled them. One hundred and four days, and he still doesn't have enough mowers. He's also waiting for someone at the organizing committee to approve and organize the logistics to bring several dozen volunteer superintendents from around the world who are willing to pay their expenses and donate their time and labor to get the course into the pristine shape that the only course ever built for Olympic golf deserves.
It has been a challenge, and it's going to continue to be one. But when you're out on the course with Cleverly, and he shows you the green complex at No. 7, the way the rhythm of it is set up by the false front on the left side of the green, which falls gently toward the center, where it's joined by the razor edge of the bunker face, which rises to create an almost musical symmetry—his love of this course and all the pain it has caused him is right there in his eyes, even though he deflects any credit from himself and pronounces Gil Hanse "an artist."
When you ask Cleverly what this course's future is, it's a loaded question because, though he has worked on 11 other courses, this is the one by which the world will judge him. More than that, he's deeply concerned whether this course is an opportunity Brazil is capable of taking advantage of, or, like so many former Olympic facilities, it will fall into disuse. "The only answer I can give you would be the 'if' scenario," Cleverly says. "If there would be a street-level golfing commodity, I'd say that this golf course would be the most played on a regular basis. But because I feel now, having been here for the last three years, and realizing that unless things change from a street level—the price of equipment, the price of a round, the mentality of people ... from what I've learned in my time here, it's really hard for people to live normal lives in this country. So there has to be some kind of format where they can exhibit the golf course to juniors or schoolchildren. Bring them to the driving range, show them how to play golf, and if you get a percentage of those that are interested, then maybe there will be the roots of something in Brazil. It's easy to talk a good game and to say that you have some kind of a plan, but whether they step up and do it is another matter."
by David Granger, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Dom Furore
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:
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.
- Millennials: 41%
- Gen X: 25%
- Baby Boomers: 17%
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.
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
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
Thursday, August 4, 2016
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