Playing Outside the Box

“Jazz isn’t dead,’’ Frank Zappa once said, “it just smells funny.” If he were around today, Zappa might point to the music of a London-based trio, The Comet Is Coming, with its curious scent. At the Montreal International Jazz Festival earlier this month, the fiery saxophone of Shabaka Hutchings, Dan Leavers’s pulsating synthesiser and Maxwell Hallett’s arresting percussion dazzled an audience with its mash-up of jazz and cosmic sounds. Halfway through the show, some entranced listeners rose from their seats and danced to a tune perfect for a rave. The trio calls its music “apocalyptic space funk”. More important, Mr Leavers adds, is the group’s goal: like a comet it “travels through distant galaxies exploring musical concepts”.

Jazz is evolving with the help of a new breed of musicians who are creating an innovative sound that challenges convention and defies categorisation. After originating from the streets and clubs of New Orleans in the late 1800s, the art form produced subgenres such as Dixieland, Afro-Cuban jazz, swing and bebop. Along the way, some purists scolded experimenters for straying from well-established categories. But rebels have always emerged to create new strains of improvised music.

Today’s nonconformists and mavericks, though well grounded in jazz’s history and repertoire, also incorporate elements of hip-hop, rock or classical music into their works. YouTube and streaming services such as Spotify can often wield more influence than radio in shaping a musician’s exposure to music. Original and unique voices now abound. Vijay Iyer, a pianist and composer who was DownBeat magazine’s top jazz artist of 2012, 2015 and 2016, shines in acoustic jazz settings but also excels at electronic music and collaborates with string quartets, film-makers and poets. Makaya McCraven, an experimental Chicago-based drummer, makes some recordings by stitching together pieces of past live performances. Snarky Puppy, a quirky Grammy award-winning instrumental ensemble, incorporates funk and electronica into the jazz in its music.

While New York and New Orleans remain established centres for jazz, new voices can emerge from just about anywhere. Maurin Auxéméry, a programmer for the Montreal festival, says that London has emerged as a hotbed for edgy jazz artists such as The Comet Is Coming. ADHD, a band from Iceland, found fans in faraway places by weaving rock influences into its compositions featuring saxophone, organ and guitar. Tokyo Chutei Iki from Japan created a buzz beyond Asia with its restless ten-person (or sometimes more) baritone saxophone-only group. Some occasionally wander into the audience while playing.

Other jazz musicians such as Michael League, the bandleader of Snarky Puppy, and Robert Glasper, a pianist, believe that the current movement is giving jazz a shot in the arm. “If you don’t want jazz to change, you are putting a pillow over its face, and it’s going to die,” says Mr Glasper, whose acclaimed recording, “Black Radio” became a marker for its genre-defying blend of jazz, rhythm-and-blues and rock. (...)

Meanwhile, some music experts wonder if jazz can survive: it represents only about 1.2% of recorded and streamed albums sold (compared with the 26.8% for rock and 22.6% for hip-hop and rhythm and blues combined), according to the 2016 Nielsen Music US Mid-Year Report. Yet audience exposure for jazz artists may be a better measure of its staying power.

by The Economist |  Read more:

Image: The Comet Is Coming/YouTube. See also: Snarky Puppy

What is Copyleft?

If you've spent much time in open source projects, you have probably seen the term "copyleft" used. While the term is quite commonly used, many people don't understand it. Software licensing is the subject of at least as much heated debate as text editors or packaging formats. An expert understanding of copyleft would fill many books, but this article can be a starting point on your road to copyleft enlightenment.

What is copyright?

Before we can understand copyleft, we must first introduce the concept of copyright. Copyleft is not a separate legal framework from copyright; copyleft exists within the rules of copyright. So what is copyright?

The exact definition varies based on jurisdiction, but the essence is this: the author of a work has a limited monopoly on the copying (hence the term "copyright"), performance, etc. of the work. In the United States, the Constitution explicitly tasks Congress for creating copyright laws in order to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."

Unlike in the past, copyright attaches to a work immediately -- no registration is required. By default, all rights are reserved. That means no one can republish, perform, or modify a work without permission from the author. This permission is a "license" and may come with certain conditions attached.

For a more thorough introduction to copyright, Coursera's Copyright for Educators & Librarians is an excellent resource.

What is copyleft?

Bear with me, but there's one more step to take before we discuss what copyleft is. First, let's examine what open source means. All open source licenses, by the Open Source Inititative's definition must, among other things, allow distribution in source form. Anyone who receives open source software has the right to inspect and modify the code.

Where copyleft licenses differ from so-called "permissive" licenses is that copyleft licenses require these same rights to be included in any derivative works. I prefer to think of the distinction in this way: permissive licenses provide the maximum freedom to the immediate downstream developers (including the ability to use the open source code in a closed source project), whereas copyleft licenses provide the maximum freedom through to the end users.

The GNU Project gives this simple definition of copyleft: "the rule that when redistributing the program, you cannot add restrictions to deny other people the central freedoms [of free software]." This can be considered the canonical definition, since the GNU General Public License (GPL) in its various versions remains the most widely-used copyleft license.

Copyleft in software

While the GPL family are the most popular copyleft licenses, they are by no means the only ones. The Mozilla Public License and the Eclipse Public License are also very popular. Many other copyleft licenses exist with smaller adoption footprints.

As explained in the previous section, a copyleft license means downstream projects cannot add additional restrictions on the use of the software. This is best illustrated with an example. If I wrote MyCoolProgram and distributed it under a copyleft license, you would have the freedom to use and modify it. You could distribute versions with your changes, but you'd have to give your users the same freedoms I gave you. If I had licensed it under a permissive license, you'd be free to incorporate it into a closed software project that you do not provide the source to.

But just as important as what you must do with MyCoolProgram is what you don't have to do. You don't have to use the exact same license I did, so long as the terms are compatible (generally downstream projects use the same license for simplicity's sake). You don't have to contribute your changes back to me, but it's generally considered good form, especially when the changes are bug fixes.

by Ben Cotton, opensource.com |  Read more:

Image: opensource.com

McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture?

Sometimes people ask, why is xyz house bad? Asking this question does not imply that the asker has bad taste or no taste whatsoever - it means that they are simply not educated in basic architectural concepts. In this post, I will introduce basic architectural concepts and explain why not all suburban/exurban/residential houses are McMansions, as well as what makes a McMansion especially hideous.

Disclaimer: These same principles do not always apply to Modernist or even canonically Postmodern architecture. These principles are for the classical or traditional architecture most residential homes are modeled after. 

Design Principle #1: Masses & Voids

The mass is the largest portion of a building. Individual masses become interesting when they are combined together to form a façade. The arrangement of these shapes to create weight is called massing. As the pieces are combined, they are divided into categories: primary and secondary masses (1).

The primary mass is the largest shape in the building block. The secondary masses are the additional shapes that form the façade of a building.

Windows, doors, or other openings are called voids. Voids allow creation of negative space that allow for breaks within masses. Placing voids that allow for natural breaks in the mass create balance and rhythm across the building’s elevation.

 

The secondary masses should never compete with the primary mass.
For example: an oversized projected entry or portico (secondary mass) will overwhelm the house (primary mass) behind it. 

The McMansion has no concept of mass.
McMansions often have so many secondary masses that the primary mass is reduced to a role of filling in gaps between the secondary masses. An example:

Another issue with McMansions and mass is the use of too many voids. Some McMansions are so guilty of this they resemble swiss cheese in appearance. In the below example, the masses are so pockmarked with voids, they give the façade an overall appearance of emptiness.

by Worst of McMansions |  Read more:

Images: Zillow

Not much.
via:

via:

Zero K: The Usual Terror

Last February The New Yorker magazine published “Sine Cosine Tangent” by Don DeLillo, a short story narrated by a boy suspended between divorced parents – his reliable mother, mildly eccentric Madeleine, who is a “firm balance” between him and his “little felonies of self-perception”, and his absent, famous father, Ross Lockhart, a high-finance mogul who peers at his son from the cover of Newsweek and whose feeling for his boy is perhaps best defined by the pun of their family name. Negotiating a stumbling path between his parents, Jeff Lockhart develops oblique strategies to extract meaning from his confusion: he cultivates a fake limp, invents names for his mother’s lovers, and sees himself in certain unusual words, such as “Bessarabian” or “penetralia”.

A familiar DeLillo scenario, quirky, phlegmatic, insightful. But what struck me about the story was how rooted it is in ordinary moments. DeLillo’s usual aesthetic is one of masterful disengagement, where the day-to-day certainties of language, setting, and behaviour are framed and fragmented so skilfully that the usual pleasures of character and narrative give way to an eerie sense that surfaces, selves – even history itself – are unreliable constructs hiding a deep terror that may or may not envelope a spiritual answer to “the old despotic traditions”. The traditions of “Sine Cosine Tangent” are offbeat, to be sure, but the shapelessness of Jeff’s adolescence feels less like the unplumbed disquiet of DeLillo’s standard first person voice and more like a naturalistic representation of the “indirection and drift” we have all struggled through at that age. Here, I thought, was an interesting, late-life swerve from one of America’s most accomplished writers.

I should have known better. A few months later, on its day of publication, I started reading DeLillo’s latest novel, Zero K.  (...)

The book’s swing between Manhattan’s fragile intimacies (the smell of other people’s houses, Jeff eating muggy stew in cereal bowls, Madeleine watching birds land on the rail of their small balcony) and the desert world of uninhabited Kazakhstan, where the main action takes place, creates an emotional rhythm that turns those ordinary moments into powerful emblems of love recognised and death accepted. Those moments feel like antidotes to the familiar DeLillo coldness and offer evidence, alongside the powerful narrative and linguistic brilliance, that at nearly eighty years of age the master is still at the top of his game, willing to explore new dimensions to his favourite themes of technology-driven alienation, the erosion of language and the fear of death.

Not that there isn’t plenty of chill in Zero K. The title refers to zero on the Kelvin scale, the coldest temperature theoretically possible, as well as the deepest level of the Kazakhstan compound known as the Convergence, the novel’s principal setting and a facility where the dead are frozen cryogenically in anticipation of a future date when resuscitation becomes medically feasible. Of course, the title also echoes the name of The Trial’s hapless protagonist, and the book’s austere setting and uninflected contemplation of nightmare remind us of DeLillo’s debt to the stark parables of Kafka. Quintessentially American as he is, DeLillo has roots in European modernism. As he said in a Paris Review interview in 1993,

There was a time when the inner world of the novelist – Kafka’s private vision and maybe Beckett’s – eventually folded into the three-dimensional world we were all living in. These men wrote a kind of world narrative … Today, the world has become a book – more precisely a news story or television show or piece of film footage. And the world narrative is being written by men who orchestrate disastrous events, by military leaders, totalitarian leaders, terrorists, men dazed by power. World news is the novel people want to read. It carries the tragic narrative that used to belong to the novel.

Zero K’s world narrative begins with Jeff arriving at the Convergence to say goodbye to his stepmother, Artis Martineau. Dying of MS, Artis is readying herself for the sub-zero state that she believes will lead to her liberation from death. This is the first step in her pact with Ross, a major investor in the facility, who waits with her and plans on joining her in a frozen pod when his own time comes. We are far from Manhattan and from anywhere else, inside a bleak, sandblasted vision of global alienation, a place run by a technocratic cult that prepares its members for the future not just by preserving their bodies but also seeing them on their way with a “brain edit” that, its founders claim, will take them beyond “the narrative of what we refer to as history” and into a brave new post-apocalyptic world with no violence and a new language.

Incredible science fiction … except that a version of such a facility already exists – the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, incorporated in California in 1972, now located in Arizona, which, according to its website, “saves lives by using temperatures so cold that a person beyond help by today’s medicine might be preserved for decades or centuries until a future medical technology can restore that person to full health”. (Potential customers include Simon Cowell and Paris Hilton – raising the question: who would want to be reborn in an ahistorical future among such company?)

The irony pleases, but the Convergence is not satire. DeLillo has a great feel for the absurdities of contemporary life, but like Kafka he is more interested in using grotesque landscapes to reveal disturbing psychological truths. The Convergence is indeed chilling. Seen through Jeff’s eyes, the facility, “located on the far margins of plausibility”, is totalitarian and fake, full of false art and false religion, spooky mannequins that mimic desert saints, artificial gardens, and video screens that run silent movies of natural disaster: “Temples flooded, homes pitching down hillsides … water rising in city streets, cars and drivers going under”. Jeff’s shock and incredulity make the Convergence seem both entirely believable and out of this world. His attempts to talk his father out of sending Artis into this “controlled future” are indirect but moving. He is our link to the ordinary moments of love and memory, moments made significant by the acceptance of the pain and finality of death.

The emotional and rhetorical weight of Zero K is comparable to the intensity of three novels published in the eighties that established DeLillo’s reputation and which form the core of his oeuvre: White Noise, The Names, and Libra. Along with his 1997 masterpiece Underworld, these fictions are the finest work of a great artist who stands on the edge of American culture yet identifies and explores as well as anyone the forces of power and influence that define mainstream American life and undermine our persistent assumption of the autonomy of the individual. This exploration is both contemporary and prescient.

“Haven’t you felt it?” a character asks in Zero K.

The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed? All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room that are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you feel steeped in some horrific digital panic that’s everywhere and nowhere?

This description of powerlessness, with its hints of apocalypse, captures perfectly the paranoia implicit in the invasive reach of twenty-first-century technologies.

by Kevin Stevens, Dublin Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Joyce Ravid / Scribner via:

The Tyranny of Other People’s Vacation Photos

[ed. I'm not on social media (having been subjected to the 'Facebook experience' for a few months and quickly terminating my account) so I can't tell if articles like this accurately reflect our culture or not. Even our grandparents were guilty of holding family and friends hostage to vacation films and photos. See also: For Teenage Girls, Swimsuit Season Never Ends.]

Chief among my favorite Facebook memories is the time that a high-powered journalist of my acquaintance breezily informed us all that he was at the Grill Room of the Four Seasons with Ted Danson, tucking into some sea urchin. To which one friend responded, “That’s funny, because I’m at the Midtown tunnel with Rhea Perlman, eating shawarma.”

While some frequent users of social media are merely fabulous, others savvily buff their fabulousness to a dazzling gleam, becoming fahvolous. At no point in the year is this more evident than in August and early September, when Facebook and Instagram swell with the plump, juicy, sun-ripened harvest of summer: vacation photos.

What prompts the excessive posting of these pictures?

William Haynes, a 22-year-old comedian who hosts the SourceFed show “People Be Like,” said: “I like how my generation is all about sharing. What’s the point of having a vacation unless you can tell people about it immediately? If you can get a few Instagram photos out of it, you’ve made your money back.”

Indeed, the motivation behind many fahvolous vacation photos would seem to be a rationalization of large expenditures for the purpose of recreation: a $6,000 beach rental ought to bring you $6,000 worth of pleasure, and maybe posting a photo will get the dopamine flowing.

But one can detect other motives, too: a tone-deaf attempt at self-branding, a neurotic attempt to thank your host, a need for constant scrutiny.

Noxious selfie sticks now seem like nothing compared to the sophisticated camera filters that can turn an average-looking strawberry patch into a brooding welter of Caravaggio-esque chiaroscuro.

Some people even hire professional photographers to take their vacation snaps for them. In the future, it may be unsurprising at a lakeside picnic to hear a camera-wielding nephew turn to his Aunt Marjorie and ask: “What’s your day rate?”

Equally jarring, some Instagram and Facebook users seem to want us to know that their summer is more inherently summery than ours: more barefoot, more glistening, more sarong-driven.

These folks are biting into the fresh fig of life, and this biting produces carefree laughter. My natural habitat is an oceanside bonfire where a Viggo Mortensen look-alike strums a weathered guitar! All backyards are enlivened by a spray of 8-year-old girls in sundresses! Everything I eat in August is cooked on a stick!

While it’s fairly easy to categorize the photographically incontinent under the headlines Narcissistic and Insecure, or some combination thereof, the photo-posting folks may not have the same clarity about themselves. “People often don’t know that they’re the culprit,” said Marla Vannucci, a clinical psychologist who is an associate professor at Adler University.

“I have a client who really wants Likes, so he posts a lot of photos,” Dr. Vannucci said. “When people don’t respond to them, he feels very alone. So he posts more. It’s a cycle like any interpersonal cycle in which we’re doing something that people hate but we’re doing it to try to make people like us. With that type of client, I try to find out what the motivation for posting is: What are the feelings around it? What is he looking for? Then I try to help him find other outlets.”

For those on the receiving end of such founts of images, the critical factors are frequency and tone. On the frequency front, young Mr. Haynes had a good suggestion: “I think you get three photos per location.” If you can’t remember whether you already posted a picture of that covered bridge, you are in danger of overestimating other people’s interest in covered bridges.

The question of tone is more nuanced. In 2014, the software company CyberLink sponsored a poll of 2,268 adults in the United States, “with the hypothesis,” the company’s senior vice president for global marketing, Richard Carriere, told me, “that some people have a tendency to post photos on social media just to gloat and annoy their friends and colleagues.”

The study found that one in seven who own a smartphone and who use social media would unfollow or block someone who posts what they perceive as boastful vacation pictures. Moreover, one in four will attempt to share a photo within one hour of arriving at their destination — which makes many of us want to summon from deep within us the turban-wearing drama teacher who gets two syllables out of “Breeeeathe.”

The top reasons that those sampled said they would Like or Favorite a picture were: if it showed friends and family sharing a special moment (63 percent), they look happy (58 percent) or they look genuine and natural (48 percent). I expressed surprise to Mr. Carriere that the poll didn’t break down the specifics of bothersome photos.

I said, “I’m going to guess that the most troublesome one would be a vacation photo in which your ex is dating someone who’s essentially you, but 15 years younger, and it’s a picture of the two of them in the tiny fishing village in Portugal that you turned your ex on to in the first place.”

Mr. Carriere said, “I would definitely unfriend my ex for that.”

by Henry Alford, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Molly Walsh

Man Swims 2,000 Miles Down the Yukon River

[ed. This is insane.]

A few days ago, at the end of a summerlong journey in which he navigated nearly the entire Yukon River without a boat, Denis Morin was overcome by all he was and all he had been through.

The French-Canadian traveled the river from Whitehorse, Yukon, to the mouth in Alaska by riverboard. The bright blue board is a little more than half his height in length, and looks something like a boogie board with sides. He kicked and sometimes stroked for almost 2,000 miles. He encountered big rain and hail, headwinds and whitecaps, two grizzly bears and an errant salmon.

And he did it alone.

Morin, 54, calls himself a swimmer. More precisely, he is a riverboarder, an athlete in an emerging sport of swimming aided by a floatation board and fins. Thousands of people around the world do it, said Morin, who is part of the World Riverboarding Association. Most are thrill-seekers in whitewater with extra protective gear. The Yukon was for distance.

After 75 days and almost 2,000 miles, on Tuesday he rose out of a slough at his destination: the Southwest Alaska fishing village of Emmonak, near the Bering Sea at one of the Yukon's mouths.

There, local salmon roe man Jim Friedman heard that a stranger had just arrived. He went to the dock by the fish plant to see if the man needed help.

"Where's your canoe?" Friedman asked.

Don't have one, Morin answered.

"Where's your kayak then?"

Morin didn't have one of those, either.

"Then how'd ya get here?" Friedman wondered.

"I swam," Morin told him.

by Lisa Demer, Alaska Dispatch |  Read more:

Image: Denis Morin

The Long Thanatopsis

In 30 years, the assisted suicides of people won’t be met by the furor that followed the death of Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old woman with terminal brain cancer who ended her own life with a fatal dose of barbiturates on Nov. 1.

In 30 years, the media won’t bother with stories like Gillian Bennett, an 85-year-old Canadian woman who took her own life in August using alcohol and barbiturates because she had decided not to live any longer with dementia. Upon her death, a website, deadatnoon.com, went live with an essay justifying her choice and arguing for assisted suicide. In 30 years, an explanatory website will be as unnecessary as a newspaper story, because this form of dying will be just another one of the ways that we die.

This shift will be part of the lasting legacy of the 76 million baby boomers who make up about 25 percent of the American population and who will be aging and dying in the next 20 years. A century from now, the historians of the future will not credit them as much for their boisterous 1960s counterculture as for the gray twinkle and fade in the early 21st century that forever altered the way America dies.

For a middle-aged Gen X-er like me to play in the thanatopsis sandbox like this is bittersweet. (“Thanatopsis” is a meditation on death, from William Cullen Bryant’s 1817 poem.) Of course, it’s untoward to point to anyone’s death, no matter how inescapable it is. The main source of the bitterness, though, is acknowledging that the cultural hegemony of the baby boomers will always overshadow me. Better than I know the contours of my historical experience, I know theirs: born into postwar prosperity, the hedonism and idealism, its psychological aftermath, and the nostalgias (The Big Chill, A Prairie Home Companion). I envied their generational mindset, the self-identity of a group that was formed in the same historical crucible, so as a senior in college in 1989, I pitched an article on “my generation” to a national magazine. Very kindly but firmly the editor, a baby boomer, refused it on the grounds that generational forms of thinking were now outré, even as he admitted getting his start in journalism by publishing a “my generation” piece in 1974. This epitomizes to me how sorry a creature the Gen X-er could be: weaned on someone else’s cultural themes, always too late to the party. (Fortunately Richard Linklater and Douglas Coupland were more persistent than I was.)

All this is blunted by knowing that when (and, let’s be honest, if) I become an elderly Gen X-er, many of the sharp edges of old age will have been blasted smooth by the massive demographic cohort that has preceded me. That’s the sweet part of the bittersweetness.

It’s impossible for me to predict everything that will occur, but it seems clear that every kitchen gadget will be available in ergonomic designs for weaker, arthritic hands. Every building will have been fitted with hearing loops in each room, so my hearing aids will work better. The bathrooms will all be ADA-compliant, fitted with wide doors and handles, and all street crossings will have curb cuts. No homes, offices, or shops will have raised thresholds at doorways, so my robot health aides will able to glide over them, along with my solar-powered wheelchair. If I can afford it, my transitional housing will be designed to maximize my psychological and emotional wellbeing. The clinics, rehab centers, hospitals, and nursing homes will seem like brisk hotels, perhaps even like resorts, not like institutions. Safe, effective, and cheap therapies and drugs to improve the workings of my brain and body will be easily accessible and widely accepted. We will be able to take, and perhaps self-administer, human growth hormone. Medical marijuana will be federally recognized.

By then, the good death will be just another lifestyle choice. Philosophers of inequality will argue that dying well should not be enjoyed only by the upper income tiers, and the policy question of the day will be whether or not dying well is a public good. Should prisoners receive funding from the state in order to pursue dying with dignity? Will people living in homeless shelters be able to receive the psychiatric clearance that’s needed for state-sanctioned death? State laws about burials and funerals will also change, such as the requirement (in some states) that only licensed, registered funeral directors may make arrangements and preparations for burial or cremation; embalming bodies will become increasingly rare, and funerary practices with low environmental impact, such as “green cremation,” will be niche at first, even luxury, then will become more widely available. Already there are do-it-yourself funerary books, magazines, and night courses. Soon there will be coffee shop meet-ups and death parties. (Things are moving so fast that I discover this already exists, too.)

by Michael Erard, TMN | Read more:
Image: Colin Chillag, Grandma-Grandpa, 2012

[ed. Bad breakups, Episode #37...]
via:

This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult

Forget telephoto lenses and fake mustaches: The most important tools for America’s 35,000 private investigators are database subscription services. For more than a decade, professional snoops have been able to search troves of public and nonpublic records—known addresses, DMV records, photographs of a person’s car—and condense them into comprehensive reports costing as little as $10. Now they can combine that information with the kinds of things marketers know about you, such as which politicians you donate to, what you spend on groceries, and whether it’s weird that you ate in last night, to create a portrait of your life and predict your behavior.

IDI, a year-old company in the so-called data-fusion business, is the first to centralize and weaponize all that information for its customers. The Boca Raton, Fla., company’s database service, idiCORE, combines public records with purchasing, demographic, and behavioral data. Chief Executive Officer Derek Dubner says the system isn’t waiting for requests from clients—it’s already built a profile on every American adult, including young people who wouldn’t be swept up in conventional databases, which only index transactions. “We have data on that 21-year-old who’s living at home with mom and dad,” he says.

Dubner declined to provide a demo of idiCORE or furnish the company’s report on me. But he says these personal profiles include all known addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses; every piece of property ever bought or sold, plus related mortgages; past and present vehicles owned; criminal citations, from speeding tickets on up; voter registration; hunting permits; and names and phone numbers of neighbors. The reports also include photos of cars taken by private companies using automated license plate readers—billions of snapshots tagged with GPS coordinates and time stamps to help PIs surveil people or bust alibis.

IDI also runs two coupon websites, allamericansavings.com and samplesandsavings.com, that collect purchasing and behavioral data. When I signed up for the latter, I was asked for my e-mail address, birthday, and home address, information that could easily link me with my idiCORE profile. The site also asked if I suffered from arthritis, asthma, diabetes, or depression, ostensibly to help tailor its discounts.

Users and industry analysts say the addition of purchasing and behavioral data to conventional data fusion outmatches rival systems in terms of capabilities—and creepiness. “The cloud never forgets, and imperfect pictures of you composed from your data profile are carefully filled in over time,” says Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a consulting firm. “We’re like bugs in amber, completely trapped in the web of our own data.” (...)

Besides pitching its databases to big-name PIs (Kroll, Control Risks), law firms, debt collectors, and government agencies, IDI says it’s also targeting consumer marketers. The 200-employee company had revenue of about $40 million in its most recent quarter and says 2,800 users signed up for idiCORE in the first month after its May release. It declined to provide more recent figures. The company’s data sets are growing, too. In December, Frost helped underwrite IDI’s $100 million acquisition of marketing profiler Fluent, which says it has 120 million profiles of U.S. consumers. In June, IDI bought ad platform Q Interactive for a reported $21 million in stock.

IDI may need Frost’s deep pockets for a while. The PI industry’s three favorite databases are owned by TransUnion and media giants Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters. “There’s no shortage,” says Chuck McLaughlin, chairman of the board of the World Association of Detectives, which has about 1,000 members. “The longer you’re in business, the more data you have, the better results.” He uses TLO and Tracers Information Specialists.

by David Gauvey Herbert and Olga Kharif, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image:Mustafa Hacalaki/Getty Images

Erasing the Pop-Culture Scholar, One Click at a Time

Academics in the humanities — but particularly those who specialize in film, television, and comics — have come to view the pop-culture thinkpiece with dread. Invariably some new essay on, say, taste and television is published to great fanfare, at least from other writers of pop-culture thinkpieces. They proceed to treat as "new" or "innovative" some idea or trend that we in academe been writing about for years.

Decades of scholarship are erased by a single, viral essay that is presumed to be the first observation of some "new" phenomenon. Mainstream journalists don’t realize that the subjects they’re writing about, the patterns and shifts they’re noting for the first time, likely have numerous journal articles and possibly even full monographs devoted to them.

If it were just a question of crediting the work of scholars, most of us would lick our wounds and slink away. But it’s not just that. What pains us more than the absent citation is the unsupported claim, the anachronistic parallel, the apocryphal anecdote.

In other words, these thinkpieces almost always get it wrong. The writers, like many a college student, simply haven’t done the reading.

In the college classroom, students’ initial evaluation of art is often based (understandably) on ignorance. They misread, misinterpret, and misunderstand because they simply don’t know what they don’t know. For example, the first time students see Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film, Breathless, they often assume his jump cuts are sloppy editing mistakes, rather than a conscious strategy on the part of the director to subvert the polished style of the 1950s French "Cinema of Quality." In the classroom that is called a "teachable moment." Mistakes and misunderstandings offer professors platforms for engaging students in productive but also corrective discussions.

The internet is not a classroom — however much we like to think it is. When writers for major news magazines misread, misunderstand, and mistake their objects of study, they are not synonymous with students and that situation is rarely a teachable moment. That’s because readers have been conditioned to expect that their news sources present them with accurate information.

But that is often not the case in the current online publishing landscape where speed, not accuracy, is valued, and clicks are king. The new culture of immediacy — based on anecdotal knowledge, individual experience, and the occasional nod toward what can be found in a quick Google search — is the lifeblood of this cultural moment.

We didn’t write this to knock anyone’s hustle; to the contrary, this essay is a request for reciprocity. We just want mainstream journalists to be aware: The thoughts and ideas that the news media spotlight as "original" aren’t actually all that original. Someone likely wrote something about that idea/era/film/TV show/music before, and it’s up to you to find out what’s been said and assimilate that knowledge with your initial argument. That write-up you’re planning on antiheroes, reality-television history, or the networks’ exploitation of black audiences? It has a scholarly antecedent just waiting to expand your knowledge of the subject.

In a recent article for The Chronicle, Noah Berlatsky offers a spirited defense of ignorance on the internet. Though Berlatsky is himself a dedicated pop-culture scholar, having published a monograph on Wonder Woman with a respected university press, he warns his fellow pop-culture scholars about getting too territorial: "The enshrinement of hard-won expertise — the insistence that value consists in being able to tell right from wrong — is exactly the mind-set that makes work in the humanities so easy to denigrate."

Instead, Berlatsky asks that we celebrate the fact that there are so many people on the internet excitedly writing about art, whether or not what they are writing is factually or historically sound. "Art’s value isn’t in objective expertise," he writes, "but in its ability to confound subjectivity and objectivity, to scramble the barriers between how one person thinks, how that other person thinks, and how everybody thinks. In art, a misinterpretation may be wrong, but it is always an opportunity."

In other words, if you truly love art and want more people to love it too, then it is necessary to welcome critics of all skill levels into the tent. Popular culture is the culture of the populace, after all. Therefore, everyone’s opinions on popular culture have value, right?

Not necessarily.

by Amanda Ann Klein and Kristen Warner, Chronicle of Higher Education | Read more:
Image: James Yang

An Oral History of Tin Cup: One of Golf's Most Iconic Movies Ever Made

Few movies get golf right. Fewer still add to the game's lexicon. (We all know what it means to "pull a Tin Cup" or to "let the big dog eat.") Twenty years after the film's release, the stars of Tin Cup -- Costner! Russo! Cheech! -- take us back to '96 and the making of the most authentic golf movie ever. And yeah, that 18th hole meltdown? It still hurts. "Another ball, Romeo..."

During the final round of the 1993 Masters, Chip Beck etched his name in the annals of golf infamy with his second shot on the par-5 15th hole. Beck trailed Bernhard Langer by three strokes with three holes to play, but rather than go for the green in two, he laid up, inciting the outrage of forehead-slapping second-guessers watching at home. Ron Shelton, the director of such brilliantly offbeat sports movies as Bull Durham and White Men Can't Jump, was one of those armchair critics. When Beck made his fateful decision, Shelton immediately called his golfing buddy, screenwriter John Norville. The two men had kicked around ideas for a golf movie over the course of several years and even more adult beverages, but they could never find a way into the story. Beck gave them what they were looking for. What if the hero of the movie was the anti-Beck, a guy constitutionally incapable of laying up, a guy who went for it all the time, even when—especially when—he shouldn't? That was the moment Tin Cup was born.

Released on August 16, 1996, Shelton and Norville's long-gestating labor of love may be the most thrilling (and accurate) movie ever made about golf. The romantic comedy stars Kevin Costner as Roy "Tin Cup" McAvoy, a washed-up pro drinking his days away at a Texas driving range; Don Johnson as David Simms, his smarmy, play-it-safe college rival who's become a Tour star; Rene Russo as Dr. Molly Griswold, the daffy shrink who comes between them; and Cheech Marin as Romeo, Roy's loyal sidekick and caddie. There are cameos by dozens of Tour pros, too, among them Fred Couples and Johnny Miller. But the film is most famous for its excruciating climax, when Roy self-destructs on the 72nd hole of the U.S. Open. To commemorate Tin Cup's 20th anniversary, GOLF tracked down the cast and crew for a no-holes-barred look back at an evergreen fairway classic.

Ron Shelton (director, co-writer): Our original idea involved a golf hustler at a driving range in West Texas, a guy with a bit of Lee Trevino's background. But we didn't nail it down until the '93 Masters. I was watching at home in Ojai, and John was at home in Oregon. When Chip Beck laid up, we immediately called each other and said, That's the key to our guy: He won't lay up!

John Norville (co-writer): Ron's thinking all along was that we shouldn't write a golf story for golfers. We needed to write a golf story for women who don't play golf—or even get golf. The question became, Who's our character? Well, Ron's family is from West Texas, and there's this great tradition of Texas players who have a whiskey bottle and a revolver in their bag. It's the kind of place where a guy can get lost.

Shelton: We had to overcome the perception of golf as a rich man's sport, because I don't think it is a rich man's sport, it's a blue-collar sport. One of the glorious parts of the game is that golfers will wait in line at five a.m. at a public course to shoot 103. The Chip Beck thing was just the light bulb that went off for us. Our hero's strength and his fatal flaw is that he's more afraid of winning than losing. He'd rather be the big fish in the littlest of ponds than risk winning on the big stage.

Gary Foster (producer): Norville invited me up to Ojai one day to play golf with Ron. We called him "Ballwash Ron" because if he hit a drive off the fairway and over by the ball washer, he'd still find a way to make par. This must have been 1994. Afterward, over drinks, we decided Ron would direct, John would write, and I would produce. Then they went to Warner Bros., because that's where Ron had a deal. It just so happened that Kevin Costner had a deal there, too.

Shelton: When we started writing it, we didn't have an actor in mind for Roy, but about 20 pages into it John and I looked at each other and said, "It's Costner." So I called Kevin, who I'd worked with on Bull Durham, and he said, "I'm taking some time off." I said, "Just read it before you say no." So he did. A few days later, we met for breakfast, and he said, "Damn it. You're right. I gotta do this."

Kevin Costner (Roy McAvoy): "Champagne Johnny" Norville and I had gone fishing together, and I knew he was working on something about golf with Ron. But I didn't think about it too much because I didn't really play golf—maybe once a year with my father-in-law. On the first tee, I tended to hit three or four balls, all to the right, and I wasn't too f---ing impressive. Plus, I wasn't working at the time. I'd just done Waterworld and had gone through a divorce, and my heart was pretty much on the ground. But I knew working with Ron again would be the best therapy, because he basically hands you something you can't fail with.

Shelton: Once we had Kevin, we had to start thinking about the other roles, like Molly. In all sports movies, the woman's role is critical. You want to get the golfer and the person who thinks it's the stupidest sport ever. You want both audiences. There were actresses on our list who refused to audition, but Rene Russo was like, "Sure!" And she was perfect. Not just attractive and smart—she's very appealing when she gets flustered, and I thought I could make something out of that. You could easily believe that she got involved with the wrong guy, and can't figure out how to get uninvolved with him in order to get with the right guy, who happens to be kind of a mess.

Rene Russo (Dr. Molly Griswold): I didn't know anything about golf. And I remember being really intimidated because it was such a good role. And I went in, and there was Mr. Charm, Kevin Costner. I was so nervous, because it was the first film that I majorly wanted. We read together, and Kevin's so good I just fell into it.

Costner: Ron casts broads, and I say "broads" as a term of endearment—a girl who can hang with guys and make everybody feel like they have a chance, even when they don't.

Shelton: For the part of Roy's caddie, Romeo, I must have auditioned every Latino actor there was—even stars from Mexico City. Cheech Marin was the first to walk in the door, and after dozens of other actors I just couldn't get him out of my mind. The character he plays is sort of the moral center of this wacky universe. He's the truth teller, he's got the heart. And the thought of Cheech being the moral center of a universe appealed to me.

Cheech Marin (Romeo): It wasn't like, Oh, we gotta get Cheech for this! I auditioned and months went by. I'd given up hope. This was a big, fat, A-list movie, and it was my chance to run with the big dogs. I mean, I'm half joking. Cheech and Chong was bigger than a lot of movie stars, but I wanted to compete in that race.

Shelton: For the part of David Simms, we needed someone with swagger and who could swing a golf club. Alec Baldwin was going to do it, but his wife at the time, Kim Basinger, was expecting. So he called me up and said, "I'm sorry, I can't do it." Then someone suggested Don Johnson. He could really play, which was crucial because we were about to start shooting.

Marin: We were waiting on the set, and every day there was scuttlebutt about who they were going to get for the Simms part. Then all of a sudden it's Don Johnson, and it was like, Oh, this is going to be f---ing perfect! Don and I were friends going back to when we were both young actors in Hollywood, way before Miami Vice.

Don Johnson (David Simms): I think it really came down to who could go toe to toe with Kevin and be believable, and who could play golf. I'm not sure that I qualify in either one of those categories, but I'm an actor, and I can pretend really well. At that time, my game was a lot better than it is now. I was an 8 or 9 handicap. I played some ProAms with guys like Payne Stewart. (...)

Shelton: We needed to get some professional golfers in the movie to give it a flavor of authenticity. So we started calling, and their agents wanted $50,000 for an appearance, like it was a corporate outing. We were like, "No, we're offering them $600." And they all said no way. Then McCord had a great idea.

McCord: I called the players' wives and said, "How'd you like to have dinner with Kevin Costner and Don Johnson? The catch is, your husband is going to have to be on a movie set for a day." We rented a big room in Tucson and let Kevin and Don loose on the girls. I told them, "Be Hollywood, and bulls--- with these women; make them tell their husbands they have to do this movie." In the end, we got 35 players, four U.S. Open winners—and they got SAG minimum!

Corey Pavin: I was the reigning U.S. Open champion when we shot the film, and I still get a residual check every six or eight months, for $1.80 or something.

by Chris Nashawaty, Golf | Read more:
Image: Warner Bros.

Western Industrial, Charles Sheeler
via:

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis

[ed. See also: In ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ a Tough Love Analysis of the Poor Who Back Trump]

I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan. The book is an American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. With the possible exception of Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, for Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016. You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance. His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.

This interview I just did with Vance in two parts (the final question I asked after Trump’s convention speech) shows why.

RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of years ago tells me that she’s never seen poverty and hopelessness like what’s common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of the state, and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy” tells me why. Explain it to people who haven’t yet read your book.

J.D. VANCE: The simple answer is that these people–my people–are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time.  Donald Trump at least tries.

What many don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by.  Heroin addiction is rampant.  In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes.  The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a “stepdad” only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on.  And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.

The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades.  From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank (more on that below).  Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.

From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth.  Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth (and I believe there are many), the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis.  More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.

Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears.  He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas.  His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground.  He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.

The last point I’ll make about Trump is this: these people, his voters, are proud.  A big chunk of the white working class has deep roots in Appalachia, and the Scots-Irish honor culture is alive and well.  We were taught to raise our fists to anyone who insulted our mother.  I probably got in a half dozen fights when I was six years old.  Unsurprisingly, southern, rural whites enlist in the military at a disproportionate rate.  Can you imagine the humiliation these people feel at the successive failures of Bush/Obama foreign policy?  My military service is the thing I’m most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can’t help but tell myself: I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory.  No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.

I’m not a hillbilly, nor do I descend from hillbilly stock, strictly speaking. But I do come from poor rural white people in the South. I have spent most of my life and career living among professional class urbanite, most of them on the East Coast, and the barely-banked contempt they — the professional-class whites, I mean — have for poor white people is visceral, and obvious to me. Yet it is invisible to them. Why is that? And what does it have to do with our politics today? 

I know exactly what you mean.  My grandma (Mamaw) recognized this instinctively.  She said that most people were probably prejudiced, but they had to be secretive about it.  “We”–meaning hillbillies–“are the only group of people you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon.”  During my final year at Yale Law, I took a small class with a professor I really admired (and still do).  I was the only veteran in the class, and when this came up somehow in conversation, a young woman looked at me and said, “I can’t believe you were in the Marines.  You just seem so nice.  I thought that people in the military had to act a certain way.”  It was incredibly insulting, and it was my first real introduction to the idea that this institution that was so important among my neighbors was looked down upon in such a personal way. To this lady, to be in the military meant that you had to be some sort of barbarian.  I bit my tongue, but it’s one of those comments I’ll never forget.

The “why” is really difficult, but I have a few thoughts.  The first is that humans appear to have some need to look down on someone; there’s just a basic tribalistic impulse in all of us.  And if you’re an elite white professional, working class whites are an easy target: you don’t have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe.  By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe.  So your own prejudice is never revealed for what it is.

A lot of it is pure disconnect–many elites just don’t know a member of the white working class. A professor once told me that Yale Law shouldn’t accept students who attended state universities for their undergraduate studies.  (A bit of background: Yale Law takes well over half of its student body from very elite private schools.)  “We don’t do remedial education here,” he said.  Keep in mind that this guy was very progressive and cared a lot about income inequality and opportunity.  But he just didn’t realize that for a kid like me, Ohio State was my only chance–the one opportunity I had to do well in a good school.  If you removed that path from my life, there was nothing else to give me a shot at Yale.  When I explained that to him, he was actually really receptive.  He may have even changed his mind.

What does it mean for our politics?  To me, this condescension is a big part of Trump’s appeal.  He’s the one politician who actively fights elite sensibilities, whether they’re good or bad.  I remember when Hillary Clinton casually talked about putting coal miners out of work, or when Obama years ago discussed working class whites clinging to their guns and religion.  Each time someone talks like this, I’m reminded of Mamaw’s feeling that hillbillies are the one group you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon.  The people back home carry that condescension like a badge of honor, but it also hurts, and they’ve been looking for someone for a while who will declare war on the condescenders.  If nothing else, Trump does that.

This is where, to me, there’s a lot of ignorance around “Teflon Don.”  No one seems to understand why conventional blunders do nothing to Trump.  But in a lot of ways, what elites see as blunders people back home see as someone who–finally–conducts themselves in a relatable way.  He shoots from the hip; he’s not constantly afraid of offending someone; he’ll get angry about politics; he’ll call someone a liar or a fraud.  This is how a lot of people in the white working class actually talk about politics, and even many elites recognize how refreshing and entertaining it can be!  So it’s not really a blunder as much as it is a rich, privileged Wharton grad connecting to people back home through style and tone.  Viewed like this, all the talk about “political correctness” isn’t about any specific substantive point, as much as it is a way of expanding the scope of acceptable behavior.  People don’t want to believe they have to speak like Obama or Clinton to participate meaningfully in politics, because most of us don’t speak like Obama or Clinton.

On the other hand, as Hillbilly Elegy says so well, that reflexive reverse-snobbery of the hillbillies and those like them is a real thing too, and something that undermines their prospects in life. Is there any way for it to be overcome, other than getting out of the bubble, as you did?

I’m not sure we can overcome it entirely. Nearly everyone in my family who has achieved some financial success for themselves, from Mamaw to me, has been told that they’ve become “too big for their britches.”  I don’t think this value is all bad.  It forces us to stay grounded, reminds us that money and education are no substitute for common sense and humility.  But, it does create a lot of pressure not to make a better life for yourself, and let’s face it: when you grow up in a dying steel town with very few middle class job prospects, making a better life for yourself is often a binary proposition: if you don’t get a good job, you may be stuck on welfare for the rest of your life.

I’m a big believer in the power to change social norms.  To take an obvious recent example, I see the decline of smoking as not just an economic or regulatory matter, but something our culture really flipped on.  So there’s value in all of us–whether we have a relatively large platform or if our platform is just the people who live with us–trying to be a little kinder to the kids who want to make a better future for themselves.  That’s a big part of the reason I wrote the book: it’s meant not just for elites, but for people from my own clan, in the hopes that they’ll better appreciate the ways they can help (or hurt) their own kin.

At the same time, the hostility between the working class and the elites is so great that there will always be some wariness toward those who go to the other side.  And can you blame them?  A lot of these people know nothing but judgment and condescension from those with financial and political power, and the thought of their children acquiring that same hostility is noxious.  It may just be the sort of value we have to live with.

The odd thing is, the deeper I get into elite culture, the more I see value in this reverse snobbery.  It’s the great privilege of my life that I’m deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism.  Like I said, it keeps you grounded, if nothing else!  But it would have been incredibly destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18.

I live in the rural South now, where I was born, and I see the same kind of social pathologies among some poor whites that you write about in Hillbilly Elegy. I also see the same thing among poor blacks, and have heard from a few black friends who made it out as you did the same kind of stories about how their own people turned on them and accused them of being traitors to their family and class — this, only for getting an education and building stable lives for themselves. The thing that so few of us either understand or want to talk about is that nobody who lives the way these poor black and white people do is ever going to amount to anything. There’s never going to be an economy rich enough or a government program strong enough to compensate for the lack of a stable family and the absence of self-discipline. Are Americans even capable of hearing that anymore? 

Judging by the current political conversation, no: Americans are not capable of hearing that anymore.  I was speaking with a friend the other night, and I made the point that the meta-narrative of the 2016 election is learned helplessness as a political value.  We’re no longer a country that believes in human agency, and as a formerly poor person, I find it incredibly insulting.  To hear Trump or Clinton talk about the poor, one would draw the conclusion that they have no power to affect their own lives.  Things have been done to them, from bad trade deals to Chinese labor competition, and they need help.  And without that help, they’re doomed to lives of misery they didn’t choose.

Obviously, the idea that there aren’t structural barriers facing both the white and black poor is ridiculous.  Mamaw recognized that our lives were harder than rich white people, but she always tempered her recognition of the barriers with a hard-noses willfulness: “never be like those a–holes who think the deck is stacked against them.”  In hindsight, she was this incredibly perceptive woman.  She recognized the message my environment had for me, and she actively fought against it.

There’s good research on this stuff.  Believing you have no control is incredibly destructive, and that may be especially true when you face unique barriers.  The first time I encountered this idea was in my exposure to addiction subculture, which is quite supportive and admirable in its own way, but is full of literature that speaks about addiction as a disease.  If you spend a day in these circles, you’ll hear someone say something to the effect of, “You wouldn’t judge a cancer patient for a tumor, so why judge an addict for drug use.”  This view is a perfect microcosm of the problem among poor Americans.  On the one hand, the research is clear that there are biological elements to addiction–in that way, it does mimic a disease.  On the other hand, the research is also clear that people who believe their addiction is a biologically mandated disease show less ability to resist it.  It’s this awful catch-22, where recognizing the true nature of the problem actually hinders the ability to overcome.

Interestingly, both in my conversations with poor blacks and whites, there’s a recognition of the role of better choices in addressing these problems.  The refusal to talk about individual agency is in some ways a consequence of a very detached elite, one too afraid to judge and consequently too handicapped to really understand.  At the same time, poor people don’t like to be judged, and a little bit of recognition that life has been unfair to them goes a long way.  Since Hillbilly Elegy came out, I’ve gotten so many messages along the lines of: “Thank you for being sympathetic but also honest.”

I think that’s the only way to have this conversation and to make the necessary changes: sympathy and honesty.  It’s not easy, especially in our politically polarized world, to recognize both the structural and the cultural barriers that so many poor kids face.  But I think that if you don’t recognize both, you risk being heartless or condescending, and often both.

by Rod Dreher, American Conservative |  Read more:
Image: a katz / Shutterstock.com

Scathing Report on Baltimore Cops Vindicates Black Residents

With startling statistics, a federal investigation of the Baltimore Police Department documents in 164 single-spaced pages what black residents have been saying for years: They are routinely singled out, roughed up or otherwise mistreated by officers, often for no reason.

The 15-month Justice Department probe was prompted by the death of Freddie Gray, the black man whose fatal neck injury in the back of a police van touched off the worst riots in Baltimore in decades. To many people, the blistering report issued Wednesday was familiar reading.

Danny Marrow, a retired food service worker, said that over the years, he has been stopped and hassled repeatedly by police.

"It started when I was 8 years old and they'd say, with no probable cause, 'Hey, come here. Where are you going?'" he said. "No cause, just the color of my skin."

"Bullies in the workplace," he said. "They don't want you to get angry or challenge their authority, so they'll use force, they'll put the handcuffs on too tight. And if you run, they're going to beat you up when they catch you."

The Justice Department looked at hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, including internal affairs files and data on stops, searches and arrests.

It found that one African-American man was stopped 30 times in less than four years and never charged. Of 410 people stopped at least 10 times from 2010 to 2015, 95 percent were black. During that time, no one of any other race was stopped more than 12 times.

With the release of the report, the city agreed to negotiate with the Justice Department a set of police reforms over the next few months to fend off a government lawsuit. The reforms will be enforceable by the courts.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Police Commissioner Kevin Davis acknowledged the longstanding problems and said they had started improvements even before the report was completed. They promised it will serve as a blueprint for sweeping changes.

"Fighting crime and having a better, more respectful relationship with the community are not mutually exclusive endeavors. We don't have to choose one or the other. We're choosing both. It's 2016," said Davis, who was appointed after the riots in April 2015.

Six officers, three white and three black, were charged in Gray's arrest and death. The case collapsed without a single conviction, though it did expose a lack of training within the department.

by Juliet Linderman and Eric Tucker, AP |  Read more:

Image: Brian Witte/AP

Think Amazon’s Drone Delivery Idea Is a Gimmick?

Amazon is the most obscure large company in the tech industry.

It isn’t just secretive, the way Apple is, but in a deeper sense, Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce and cloud-storage giant is opaque. Amazon rarely explains either its near-term tactical aims or its long-term strategic vision. It values surprise.

To understand Amazon, then, is necessarily to engage in a kind of Kremlinology. That’s especially true of the story behind one of its most important business areas: the logistics by which it ships orders to its customers.

Over the last few years, Amazon has left a trail of clues suggesting that it is radically altering how it delivers goods. Among other moves, it has set up its own fleet of trucks; introduced an Uber-like crowdsourced delivery service; built many robot-powered warehouses; and continued to invest in a far-out plan to use drones for delivery. It made another splash last week, when it showed off an Amazon-branded Boeing 767 airplane, one of more than 40 in its planned fleet.

These moves have fueled speculation that Amazon is trying to replace the third-party shipping companies it now relies on — including UPS, FedEx and the United States Postal Service — with its homegrown delivery service. Its logistics investments have also fed the general theory that Amazon has become essentially unbeatable in American e-commerce — no doubt one reason Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, felt the need this week to acquire an audacious Amazon rival, Jet.com, for $3.3 billion.

So what’s Amazon’s ultimate aim in delivery? After talking to analysts, partners and competitors, and prying some very minimal input from Amazon itself, I suspect the company has a two-tiered vision for the future of shipping.

First, it’s not trying to replace third-party shippers. Instead, over the next few years, Amazon wants to add as much capacity to its operations as possible, and rather than replace partners like UPS and FedEx, it is spending boatloads on planes, trucks, crowdsourcing and other novel delivery services to add to its overall capacity and efficiency.

Amazon’s longer-term goal is more fantastical — and, if it succeeds, potentially transformative. It wants to escape the messy vicissitudes of roads and humans. It wants to go fully autonomous, up in the sky. The company’s drone program, which many in the tech press dismissed as a marketing gimmick when Mr. Bezos unveiled it on “60 Minutes” in 2013, is central to this future; drones could be combined with warehouses manned by robots and trucks that drive themselves to unlock a new autonomous future for Amazon.

There are hurdles to realizing this vision. Drone delivery in the United States faces an uncertain regulatory future, and there are myriad technical and social problems to iron out. Still, experts I consulted said that a future populated with autonomous drones is closer at hand than one populated with self-driving cars.

“It’s a vastly easier problem — flying than driving,” said Keller Rinaudo, the co-founder of Zipline, a drone-delivery start-up that will begin deploying a system to deliver medical goods in Rwanda this fall. “If we had regulatory permission, we’d be delivering to your house right now,” he added, referring to the San Francisco Bay Area.

If Amazon’s drone program succeeds (and Amazon says it is well on track), it could fundamentally alter the company’s cost structure. A decade from now, drones would reduce the unit cost of each Amazon delivery by about half, analysts at Deutsche Bank projected in a recent research report. If that happens, the economic threat to competitors would be punishing — “retail stores would cease to exist,” Deutsche’s analysts suggested, and we would live in a world more like that of “The Jetsons” than our own.

by Farhad Manjoo, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

Cidade de Deus (City of God), Silvia Izquierdo/AP
via:

[ed. These are the days when I really miss Alaska. My buddy won the Seward Salmon Fishing Derby in Resurrection Bay one year ($10,000) after catching a 20+ lb. coho. We had a double strike (both monsters), but my fish (the bigger one of course) shook the hook right at the boat. He treated us to a great dinner though.]

Photo: Erik Hill, A Day on Resurrection Bay
via:

Raiva, ho un condominio interiore on Flickr

via: