Thursday, August 18, 2016
Playing Doc's Games
[ed. I've mentioned William Finnegan's Pulitzer Prize winning Barbarian Days before (here's an excellent review). Just read it. This essay, originally published in 1992, eventually became part of the book.]
Wise Surfboards, the only surf shop in San Francisco, is a bright, high-ceilinged place flanked by a Mexican restaurant and a Christian day-care center out in the far reaches of a sleepy working-class seaside suburb known as the Sunset District. Bob Wise, the shop’s proprietor, was talking to a small group of local surfers one winter afternoon when I stopped in. “So Doc, who can see the surf from his window, calls me up and says, ‘Come on, let’s go out,’ ” Wise said. “So I keep asking him, ‘But how is it?’ And he goes, ‘It’s interesting.’ So I go over there and we go out and it’s just totally terrible. So Doc says, ‘What did you expect?’ Turns out that when Doc says it’s interesting, that means it’s worse than terrible.”
Wise was talking about Mark Renneker, a family-practice physician and surfer who lives in the Sunset District. And so were two young guys I overheard a few days later at a windy overlook on the south side of the Golden Gate. We were watching surf break against the base of the long black cliff beneath us—the spot down there is called Dead Man’s, and the tide was still too high for surfing it—when one of them pointed north and howled. Across the Gate, which is a magnificent stretch of water running from the Pacific Ocean into San Francisco Bay, giant waves were breaking in a shipping hazard known as the Potato Patch. Although they were several miles from where we stood, and wind-ripped and horribly confused, the waves had, because they were so big, the three-dimensionality of waves seen from much closer. “Hey, give me your binoculars,” one of the young guys said to the other. “Doc’s probably out there.”
Actually, Mark was working that afternoon at a clinic in inner-city San Francisco, but the kids on the cliff were not misinformed: Mark had tried to surf the Potato Patch—an idea so farfetched and scary that those who knew the area, but had not talked to the witnesses, invariably refused to believe it. Since these guys were not, I knew, San Francisco surfers, of whom there were only a few dozen, their remarks meant that Mark’s notoriety was no longer confined to the city.
That morning, I had stood on another overlook—a sand embankment at Ocean Beach, in the Sunset District—and watched Mark demonstrate some of the qualities that gave him his peculiar status among other surfers. The waves were big, ragged, relentless, with no visible channels for getting through the surf from the shore. Getting out looked impossible, and the waves looked not worth the effort anyway, but Mark was out there, a small black-wetsuited figure in a world of furious white water, throwing himself into the stacked walls of onrushing foam. Each time he seemed to be making headway, a new set of waves would appear on the horizon, bigger than the last and breaking farther out (the biggest were breaking perhaps two hundred yards from shore), and drive him back into the area that surfers call the impact zone.
Watching with me was Tim Bodkin, a hydrogeologist, surfer, and Mark’s next-door neighbor. Bodkin was getting a huge kick out of Mark’s ordeal. “Forget it, Doc!” he kept shouting into the wind, and then he would laugh. “He’s never going to make it. He just won’t admit it.” At times, we lost sight of him altogether. The waves rarely gave him a chance even to clamber onto his surfboard and paddle; mostly, he was underwater, diving under waves, swimming seaward along the bottom somewhere, dragging his board behind him by a leash attached to his ankle. After thirty minutes, I began to worry: the water was very cold, and the surf was very powerful. Bodkin, aglow with schadenfreude, did not share my concern. Finally, after about forty-five minutes, there was a brief lull in the waves. Mark scrambled onto his board and paddled like a windmill in a hurricane, and within three minutes he was outside, churning over the crests of the next set with five yards to spare. Once he was safely beyond the surf, he sat up on his board to rest, a black speck bobbing on a blue, windblown sea. Bodkin, disgusted, left me alone on the embankment.
I knew how Bodkin felt. Mark’s joy in surfing adversity had often appalled me. Earlier that winter, he and I had been out together in big surf at Ocean Beach. We paddled out easily—conditions were immaculate, the channels easy to read—but we misjudged the size of the surf and took up a position that was too close to shore. Before we caught our first waves, a huge set caught us inside.
The first wave snapped my ankle leash—a ten-foot length of polyurethane, strong enough to pull a car uphill—as if it were a piece of string. I swam underneath that wave and then kept swimming, toward the open ocean. The second wave looked like a three-story building. It, like the first wave, was preparing to break a few yards in front of me. I dived deep and swam hard. The lip of the wave hitting the surface above me sounded like a bolt of lightning exploding at very close range, and it filled the water with shock waves. I managed to stay underneath the turbulence, but when I surfaced I saw that the third wave of the set belonged to another order of being. It was bigger, thicker, and drawing much more heavily off the bottom than the others. My arms felt rubbery, and I started hyperventilating. I dived very early and very deep. The deeper I swam, the colder and darker the water got. The noise as the wave broke was preternaturally low, a basso profundo of utter violence, and the force pulling me backward and upward felt like some nightmare inversion of gravity. Again, I managed to escape, and when I finally surfaced I was far outside. There were no more waves, which was fortunate, since I was sure that one more would have finished me. Mark was there, though, perhaps ten yards to my right. He had been duck-diving and escaping the unimaginable just as narrowly as I had. His leash had not broken, however; he was reeling in his board. As he did so, he turned to me, with a manic look in his eyes, and yelled, “This is great!” It could have been worse. He could have yelled, “This is interesting!”
Weeks later, I learned that, from a record-keeping point of view, Mark had indeed found that afternoon’s surf interesting. He stayed out in the water for four hours (I made the long swim to shore, collected my board, and went home to bed) and measured the wave interval—the time it takes two waves in a wave train (surfers call it a set) to pass a fixed point—at twenty-five seconds. It was the longest interval Mark had ever seen at Ocean Beach. Mark could make this arcane observation—I have never heard another surfer even mention wave interval, let alone measure it—with authority, because he has been keeping, since 1969, a detailed record of every time he goes surfing. He records where he surfed, the size of the waves, the direction of the swell, a description of conditions, what surfboard he rode, who his companions (if any) were, any memorable events or observations, and data for year-to-year comparisons. Thus, the entry for Sunday, December 22, 1985, recorded, among other things, that my leash broke on the twenty-first day of that surf season on which Mark had surfed waves eight feet or bigger, and the ninth day on which he had surfed waves ten feet or bigger.
Mark’s logbook also showed that the longest period of time he had gone without surfing since 1969 was three weeks. That happened in 1971, during a brief stint in college in Arizona. Since then, he had twice been forced out of the water for periods of slightly less than two weeks by injuries suffered at Ocean Beach. Otherwise, he had rarely gone more than a few days without surfing, and he had often surfed every day for weeks on end. Jessica Dunne, a painter, with whom Mark has lived since college, says that when he doesn’t surf for a few days he becomes odd. “He gets explosive, and he seems to shrink inside his clothes,” she says. “And when he hears the surf start to come back up he gets so excited that he can’t sleep. You can actually see the muscles in his chest and shoulders swelling as he sits on the couch listening to the surf build through the night.” In a sport open only to the absurdly dedicated—it takes years to master the rudiments of surfing, and constant practice to maintain even basic competence—Mark is the fanatics’ fanatic. His fanaticism carries him into realms that are literally uncharted, such as the Potato Patch. “One thing about Doc,” says Bob Wise, who has been surfing in San Francisco for almost thirty years. “He keeps open the idea that anything is possible.”
With me, Mark for years kept open the possibility that I might rise before dawn on a winter day, pull on a cold, damp wetsuit, and throw myself into the icy violence of big Ocean Beach. I came to dread his early-morning calls. Dreams full of giant gray surf and a morbid fear of drowning would climax with the scream of the phone in the dark. For most surfers, I think—for me, certainly—waves have a spooky duality. When you are absorbed in surfing them, they seem alive, each with a distinct, intricate personality and quickly changing moods, to which you must react in the most intuitive, almost intimate way—too many surfers have likened riding waves to making love—and yet waves are not alive, not sentient, and the lover you reach to embrace can turn murderous without warning. Somehow, this duality doesn’t seem to haunt Mark. His conscious life and his unconscious life have a weird seamlessness. His surfing dreams, as he recounts them, all seem to be about recognizable places on recognizable days. He notes the tides and swells in his dreams as if they were going into his logbook. If he’s upset when he wakes, it’s because he was looking forward to riding one more dream wave. His voice on the other end of the line at dawn was always bright, raucous, from the daylight world: “Well? How’s it look?” (...)
Riding a serious wave is for an accomplished surfer what playing, say, Chopin’s Polonaise in F-Sharp Minor might be for an accomplished pianist. Intense technical concentration is essential, but many less selfless emotions also crowd around. Even in unchallenging waves, the faces of surfers as they ride become terrible masks of fear, frustration, anger. The most revealing moment is the pullout, the end of a ride, which usually provokes a mixed grimace of relief, distress, elation, and dissatisfaction. The assumption, common among non-surfers, that riding waves is a slaphappy, lighthearted business—fun in the sun—is for the most part mistaken. (...)
The science of surfers is not pure but heavily applied—and completely unsystematic. It is full of myths and superstitions—the widespread belief that a full moon brings big swells, for instance. It also suffers from a fatal anthropomorphism. When you are all wrapped up in surfing them, waves seem alive. They have personalities, distinct and intricate. They act, you react. It’s a tender, intimate relationship, and it can thus come as a shock when the wave turns out to be not only insentient but, on occasion, lethal. Wave love is a one-way street.
It is also platonic, in that it trades heavily on the ideal. Surfers have a perfection fixation. Its origin is in the endless variety of waves, and in their ephemerality. Surfers seek a rare and specialized kind of wave. When a great break is discovered, world surfing attention focusses furiously on the reports, the photographs, the film. How good is it? How consistent? How difficult, how dangerous? Could I ride it? The ocean being what it is, no place is perfect. Every wave has its virtues and its flaws, and even at the same spot no two waves are ever exactly the same. No break is good on all tides and winds and swells—not to mention flat spells and storms. Still, great surf spots always arouse the fantasy. What if that magnificent wave keeps breaking just like that for another four hundred yards? What if the next wave is just as good? What if it stays that good, hour after hour, day after day? Surfers are always looking for better waves, and the platonic ideal, the perfect wave, keeps them travelling to the farthest reaches of the globe; it kept me on the ocean roads for years on end. There is a dense and growing lore, a grand arcanum of the world’s waves, which complements the localized jargon, the cabalistic code through which surfers trade the secrets of their avocation.
Local surf cultures, meanwhile, sprout and flourish near virtually every ridable break on earth. In some places, such as southern Brazil, surfing is a rich boy’s sport, taking the social place of polo or the hunt. In most places, it’s a multiclass affair, as it was originally, in old Hawaii. I’ve surfed with yuppie architects and stolid crab fishermen in Ireland, with the sons of campesinos and the sons of oligarchs in Central America. Everywhere, though, one finds the same complicated, passionate attention to minute details of local waves, weather, and coastline. Surfers are like farmers or hunters in their rapt absorption in nature’s vicinal habits and vagaries. Ask a voluble local about seasonal variations at his home break, and he’ll still be diagramming offshore canyons in the dirt an hour later.
by William Finnegan, New Yorker | Read more: Part 1 and Part 2
Image:Tim Finley
Wise Surfboards, the only surf shop in San Francisco, is a bright, high-ceilinged place flanked by a Mexican restaurant and a Christian day-care center out in the far reaches of a sleepy working-class seaside suburb known as the Sunset District. Bob Wise, the shop’s proprietor, was talking to a small group of local surfers one winter afternoon when I stopped in. “So Doc, who can see the surf from his window, calls me up and says, ‘Come on, let’s go out,’ ” Wise said. “So I keep asking him, ‘But how is it?’ And he goes, ‘It’s interesting.’ So I go over there and we go out and it’s just totally terrible. So Doc says, ‘What did you expect?’ Turns out that when Doc says it’s interesting, that means it’s worse than terrible.”
Wise was talking about Mark Renneker, a family-practice physician and surfer who lives in the Sunset District. And so were two young guys I overheard a few days later at a windy overlook on the south side of the Golden Gate. We were watching surf break against the base of the long black cliff beneath us—the spot down there is called Dead Man’s, and the tide was still too high for surfing it—when one of them pointed north and howled. Across the Gate, which is a magnificent stretch of water running from the Pacific Ocean into San Francisco Bay, giant waves were breaking in a shipping hazard known as the Potato Patch. Although they were several miles from where we stood, and wind-ripped and horribly confused, the waves had, because they were so big, the three-dimensionality of waves seen from much closer. “Hey, give me your binoculars,” one of the young guys said to the other. “Doc’s probably out there.”Actually, Mark was working that afternoon at a clinic in inner-city San Francisco, but the kids on the cliff were not misinformed: Mark had tried to surf the Potato Patch—an idea so farfetched and scary that those who knew the area, but had not talked to the witnesses, invariably refused to believe it. Since these guys were not, I knew, San Francisco surfers, of whom there were only a few dozen, their remarks meant that Mark’s notoriety was no longer confined to the city.
That morning, I had stood on another overlook—a sand embankment at Ocean Beach, in the Sunset District—and watched Mark demonstrate some of the qualities that gave him his peculiar status among other surfers. The waves were big, ragged, relentless, with no visible channels for getting through the surf from the shore. Getting out looked impossible, and the waves looked not worth the effort anyway, but Mark was out there, a small black-wetsuited figure in a world of furious white water, throwing himself into the stacked walls of onrushing foam. Each time he seemed to be making headway, a new set of waves would appear on the horizon, bigger than the last and breaking farther out (the biggest were breaking perhaps two hundred yards from shore), and drive him back into the area that surfers call the impact zone.
Watching with me was Tim Bodkin, a hydrogeologist, surfer, and Mark’s next-door neighbor. Bodkin was getting a huge kick out of Mark’s ordeal. “Forget it, Doc!” he kept shouting into the wind, and then he would laugh. “He’s never going to make it. He just won’t admit it.” At times, we lost sight of him altogether. The waves rarely gave him a chance even to clamber onto his surfboard and paddle; mostly, he was underwater, diving under waves, swimming seaward along the bottom somewhere, dragging his board behind him by a leash attached to his ankle. After thirty minutes, I began to worry: the water was very cold, and the surf was very powerful. Bodkin, aglow with schadenfreude, did not share my concern. Finally, after about forty-five minutes, there was a brief lull in the waves. Mark scrambled onto his board and paddled like a windmill in a hurricane, and within three minutes he was outside, churning over the crests of the next set with five yards to spare. Once he was safely beyond the surf, he sat up on his board to rest, a black speck bobbing on a blue, windblown sea. Bodkin, disgusted, left me alone on the embankment.
I knew how Bodkin felt. Mark’s joy in surfing adversity had often appalled me. Earlier that winter, he and I had been out together in big surf at Ocean Beach. We paddled out easily—conditions were immaculate, the channels easy to read—but we misjudged the size of the surf and took up a position that was too close to shore. Before we caught our first waves, a huge set caught us inside.
The first wave snapped my ankle leash—a ten-foot length of polyurethane, strong enough to pull a car uphill—as if it were a piece of string. I swam underneath that wave and then kept swimming, toward the open ocean. The second wave looked like a three-story building. It, like the first wave, was preparing to break a few yards in front of me. I dived deep and swam hard. The lip of the wave hitting the surface above me sounded like a bolt of lightning exploding at very close range, and it filled the water with shock waves. I managed to stay underneath the turbulence, but when I surfaced I saw that the third wave of the set belonged to another order of being. It was bigger, thicker, and drawing much more heavily off the bottom than the others. My arms felt rubbery, and I started hyperventilating. I dived very early and very deep. The deeper I swam, the colder and darker the water got. The noise as the wave broke was preternaturally low, a basso profundo of utter violence, and the force pulling me backward and upward felt like some nightmare inversion of gravity. Again, I managed to escape, and when I finally surfaced I was far outside. There were no more waves, which was fortunate, since I was sure that one more would have finished me. Mark was there, though, perhaps ten yards to my right. He had been duck-diving and escaping the unimaginable just as narrowly as I had. His leash had not broken, however; he was reeling in his board. As he did so, he turned to me, with a manic look in his eyes, and yelled, “This is great!” It could have been worse. He could have yelled, “This is interesting!”
Weeks later, I learned that, from a record-keeping point of view, Mark had indeed found that afternoon’s surf interesting. He stayed out in the water for four hours (I made the long swim to shore, collected my board, and went home to bed) and measured the wave interval—the time it takes two waves in a wave train (surfers call it a set) to pass a fixed point—at twenty-five seconds. It was the longest interval Mark had ever seen at Ocean Beach. Mark could make this arcane observation—I have never heard another surfer even mention wave interval, let alone measure it—with authority, because he has been keeping, since 1969, a detailed record of every time he goes surfing. He records where he surfed, the size of the waves, the direction of the swell, a description of conditions, what surfboard he rode, who his companions (if any) were, any memorable events or observations, and data for year-to-year comparisons. Thus, the entry for Sunday, December 22, 1985, recorded, among other things, that my leash broke on the twenty-first day of that surf season on which Mark had surfed waves eight feet or bigger, and the ninth day on which he had surfed waves ten feet or bigger.
Mark’s logbook also showed that the longest period of time he had gone without surfing since 1969 was three weeks. That happened in 1971, during a brief stint in college in Arizona. Since then, he had twice been forced out of the water for periods of slightly less than two weeks by injuries suffered at Ocean Beach. Otherwise, he had rarely gone more than a few days without surfing, and he had often surfed every day for weeks on end. Jessica Dunne, a painter, with whom Mark has lived since college, says that when he doesn’t surf for a few days he becomes odd. “He gets explosive, and he seems to shrink inside his clothes,” she says. “And when he hears the surf start to come back up he gets so excited that he can’t sleep. You can actually see the muscles in his chest and shoulders swelling as he sits on the couch listening to the surf build through the night.” In a sport open only to the absurdly dedicated—it takes years to master the rudiments of surfing, and constant practice to maintain even basic competence—Mark is the fanatics’ fanatic. His fanaticism carries him into realms that are literally uncharted, such as the Potato Patch. “One thing about Doc,” says Bob Wise, who has been surfing in San Francisco for almost thirty years. “He keeps open the idea that anything is possible.”
With me, Mark for years kept open the possibility that I might rise before dawn on a winter day, pull on a cold, damp wetsuit, and throw myself into the icy violence of big Ocean Beach. I came to dread his early-morning calls. Dreams full of giant gray surf and a morbid fear of drowning would climax with the scream of the phone in the dark. For most surfers, I think—for me, certainly—waves have a spooky duality. When you are absorbed in surfing them, they seem alive, each with a distinct, intricate personality and quickly changing moods, to which you must react in the most intuitive, almost intimate way—too many surfers have likened riding waves to making love—and yet waves are not alive, not sentient, and the lover you reach to embrace can turn murderous without warning. Somehow, this duality doesn’t seem to haunt Mark. His conscious life and his unconscious life have a weird seamlessness. His surfing dreams, as he recounts them, all seem to be about recognizable places on recognizable days. He notes the tides and swells in his dreams as if they were going into his logbook. If he’s upset when he wakes, it’s because he was looking forward to riding one more dream wave. His voice on the other end of the line at dawn was always bright, raucous, from the daylight world: “Well? How’s it look?” (...)
Riding a serious wave is for an accomplished surfer what playing, say, Chopin’s Polonaise in F-Sharp Minor might be for an accomplished pianist. Intense technical concentration is essential, but many less selfless emotions also crowd around. Even in unchallenging waves, the faces of surfers as they ride become terrible masks of fear, frustration, anger. The most revealing moment is the pullout, the end of a ride, which usually provokes a mixed grimace of relief, distress, elation, and dissatisfaction. The assumption, common among non-surfers, that riding waves is a slaphappy, lighthearted business—fun in the sun—is for the most part mistaken. (...)
The science of surfers is not pure but heavily applied—and completely unsystematic. It is full of myths and superstitions—the widespread belief that a full moon brings big swells, for instance. It also suffers from a fatal anthropomorphism. When you are all wrapped up in surfing them, waves seem alive. They have personalities, distinct and intricate. They act, you react. It’s a tender, intimate relationship, and it can thus come as a shock when the wave turns out to be not only insentient but, on occasion, lethal. Wave love is a one-way street.
It is also platonic, in that it trades heavily on the ideal. Surfers have a perfection fixation. Its origin is in the endless variety of waves, and in their ephemerality. Surfers seek a rare and specialized kind of wave. When a great break is discovered, world surfing attention focusses furiously on the reports, the photographs, the film. How good is it? How consistent? How difficult, how dangerous? Could I ride it? The ocean being what it is, no place is perfect. Every wave has its virtues and its flaws, and even at the same spot no two waves are ever exactly the same. No break is good on all tides and winds and swells—not to mention flat spells and storms. Still, great surf spots always arouse the fantasy. What if that magnificent wave keeps breaking just like that for another four hundred yards? What if the next wave is just as good? What if it stays that good, hour after hour, day after day? Surfers are always looking for better waves, and the platonic ideal, the perfect wave, keeps them travelling to the farthest reaches of the globe; it kept me on the ocean roads for years on end. There is a dense and growing lore, a grand arcanum of the world’s waves, which complements the localized jargon, the cabalistic code through which surfers trade the secrets of their avocation.
Local surf cultures, meanwhile, sprout and flourish near virtually every ridable break on earth. In some places, such as southern Brazil, surfing is a rich boy’s sport, taking the social place of polo or the hunt. In most places, it’s a multiclass affair, as it was originally, in old Hawaii. I’ve surfed with yuppie architects and stolid crab fishermen in Ireland, with the sons of campesinos and the sons of oligarchs in Central America. Everywhere, though, one finds the same complicated, passionate attention to minute details of local waves, weather, and coastline. Surfers are like farmers or hunters in their rapt absorption in nature’s vicinal habits and vagaries. Ask a voluble local about seasonal variations at his home break, and he’ll still be diagramming offshore canyons in the dirt an hour later.
by William Finnegan, New Yorker | Read more: Part 1 and Part 2
Image:Tim Finley
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
Insurance Companies Want to Weaken Obamacare. We Can’t Let Them
Insurance companies keep pretending that participating in the Affordable Care Act exchanges is killing their business model. Aetna, one of the five largest insurance companies in the United States, announced on Tuesday that it was withdrawing from 70% of the Obamacare exchange markets it operates in by next year. And two other major insurers – UnitedHealthCare and Humana – also announced recently that they would be withdrawing their products from large portions of the exchanges where they’re available.
But this corporate hardship story couldn’t be further from the truth: Aetna’s overall profits surged last year, and its share prices have risen consistently since the ACA passed in 2010.
All the other major insurance companies have noted similar rises, even as the product that they offer has been deteriorating. Premiums have long outpaced wage increases and underinsurance is rife even among those with insurance.
So while staying wouldn’t have drastically endangered their bottom lines, the decision may, however, cause uninsured Americans looking for Affordable Care Act coverage have even fewer subpar options to pick from. One county in Arizona is slated to not have a single option available next year. These withdrawals could hurt Americans and the ACA in a way Republicans have only dreamed of.
If business is booming, why penalize Americans seeking healthcare? The picture becomes clearer when looking at the state of the health insurance industry at large. In short: politics.
The past few years have seen unprecedented consolidation between insurance companies as they’ve merged and become behemoths. In an endless quest to have unlimited negotiating power, insurance companies big and small have been joining together. The big five – Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, Humana and UnitedHealthCare – now control a disproportionate chunk of the market. Most recently, Aetna and Humana announced a bid to merge, threatening to make the American health insurance market even more uncompetitive. The justice department filed suit to block it.
It’s possible, then, that the mass withdrawal from ACA participation is a political chess move. Or, as Elizabeth Warren wrote in a Facebook post last week: “The health of the American people should not be used as bargaining chips to force the government to bend to one giant company’s will.”
Aetna and Humana’s holdout from the exchanges is further evidence of just how important it is to hold them accountable, particularly since recent data shows that the risk levels of patients enrolling in the exchanges was starting to slow. (One of the excuses companies used to walk away from the exchanges was that they didn’t budget for the large percentage of sick Americans, rather than a mix of sick and well, who rushed to sign up when the ACA’s ban on discriminating against pre-existing conditions went into effect.) Insurance companies aren’t the only ones out to give Americans a raw deal: in an analysis I published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, I detailed how an inability to negotiate prices effectively with pharmaceutical companies could bankrupt Medicare.
But the fact is, insurance companies want to have their cake and eat it too. They love the ACA when enrolling young, low-risk people who would otherwise be penalized for not having insurance. But they want to deny care to patients who are actually sick and need the coverage.
by Haider Javed Warraich, The Guardian | Read more:
But this corporate hardship story couldn’t be further from the truth: Aetna’s overall profits surged last year, and its share prices have risen consistently since the ACA passed in 2010.All the other major insurance companies have noted similar rises, even as the product that they offer has been deteriorating. Premiums have long outpaced wage increases and underinsurance is rife even among those with insurance.
So while staying wouldn’t have drastically endangered their bottom lines, the decision may, however, cause uninsured Americans looking for Affordable Care Act coverage have even fewer subpar options to pick from. One county in Arizona is slated to not have a single option available next year. These withdrawals could hurt Americans and the ACA in a way Republicans have only dreamed of.
If business is booming, why penalize Americans seeking healthcare? The picture becomes clearer when looking at the state of the health insurance industry at large. In short: politics.
The past few years have seen unprecedented consolidation between insurance companies as they’ve merged and become behemoths. In an endless quest to have unlimited negotiating power, insurance companies big and small have been joining together. The big five – Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, Humana and UnitedHealthCare – now control a disproportionate chunk of the market. Most recently, Aetna and Humana announced a bid to merge, threatening to make the American health insurance market even more uncompetitive. The justice department filed suit to block it.
It’s possible, then, that the mass withdrawal from ACA participation is a political chess move. Or, as Elizabeth Warren wrote in a Facebook post last week: “The health of the American people should not be used as bargaining chips to force the government to bend to one giant company’s will.”
Aetna and Humana’s holdout from the exchanges is further evidence of just how important it is to hold them accountable, particularly since recent data shows that the risk levels of patients enrolling in the exchanges was starting to slow. (One of the excuses companies used to walk away from the exchanges was that they didn’t budget for the large percentage of sick Americans, rather than a mix of sick and well, who rushed to sign up when the ACA’s ban on discriminating against pre-existing conditions went into effect.) Insurance companies aren’t the only ones out to give Americans a raw deal: in an analysis I published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, I detailed how an inability to negotiate prices effectively with pharmaceutical companies could bankrupt Medicare.
But the fact is, insurance companies want to have their cake and eat it too. They love the ACA when enrolling young, low-risk people who would otherwise be penalized for not having insurance. But they want to deny care to patients who are actually sick and need the coverage.
by Haider Javed Warraich, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Jessica Hill/AP
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
NSA Hacking Tools Have Been Revealed Online
[ed. The irony is too obvious. See also: 'Auction of NSA tools sends secutiry companies scambling.]
A cache of hacking tools with code names such as Epicbanana, Buzzdirection and Egregiousblunder appeared mysteriously online over the weekend, setting the security world abuzz with speculation over whether the material was legitimate.
The file appeared to be real, according to former NSA personnel who worked in the agency’s hacking division, known as Tailored Access Operations (TAO).
“Without a doubt, they’re the keys to the kingdom,” said one former TAO employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal operations. “The stuff you’re talking about would undermine the security of a lot of major government and corporate networks both here and abroad.”Said a second former TAO hacker who saw the file: “From what I saw, there was no doubt in my mind that it was legitimate.”
The file contained 300 megabytes of information, including several “exploits,” or tools for taking control of firewalls in order to control a network, and a number of implants that might, for instance, exfiltrate or modify information.
The exploits are not run-of-the-mill tools to target everyday individuals. They are expensive software used to take over firewalls, such as Cisco and Fortinet, that are used “in the largest and most critical commercial, educational and government agencies around the world,” said Blake Darche, another former TAO operator and now head of security research at Area 1 Security.
The software apparently dates back to 2013 and appears to have been taken then, experts said, citing file creation dates, among other things.
“What’s clear is that these are highly sophisticated and authentic hacking tools,” said Oren Falkowitz, chief executive of Area 1 Security and another former TAO employee.
Several of the exploits were pieces of computer code that took advantage of “zero-day” or previously unknown flaws or vulnerabilities in firewalls, which appear to be unfixed to this day, said one of the former hackers.
The disclosure of the file means that at least one other party — possibly another country’s spy agency — has had access to the same hacking tools used by the NSA and could deploy them against organizations that are using vulnerable routers and firewalls. It might also see what the NSA is targeting and spying on. And now that the tools are public, as long as the flaws remain unpatched, other hackers can take advantage of them, too.
The NSA did not respond to requests for comment.
“Faking this information would be monumentally difficult, there is just such a sheer volume of meaningful stuff,” Nicholas Weaver, a computer security researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an interview. “Much of this code should never leave the NSA.”
The tools were posted by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers using file-sharing sites such as BitTorrent and DropBox.
by Ellen Nakashima, WP | Read more:
Image: Spy vs.Spy via:
Keanu Reeves Will Build a $78,000 Motorcycle Just for You
[ed. Dude is just too cool. What a bike.]
Don’t mistake Keanu Reeves for some nice-guy motorcycle dilettante.
He doesn’t care about your trendy Scrambler-riding blue jeans or your fashion-forward “motorcycle” jacket. And he definitely doesn’t want to ride your pretty little café racer.
He is, on the other hand, more than happy to talk with you about the Arch Motorcycles KRGT-1 superbikes he makes with his longtime friend, Gard Hollinger, a revered designer in the motorcycle world. The $78,000 motorcycles are based on a prototype Hollinger made for Reeves years ago; each of the 2,032cc, V-twin-engine beasts are made to order in Hawthorne, Calif., an hour south of Los Angeles.
by Hannah Elliott, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Adam Wolffbrandt/Bloomberg
He doesn’t care about your trendy Scrambler-riding blue jeans or your fashion-forward “motorcycle” jacket. And he definitely doesn’t want to ride your pretty little café racer.
He is, on the other hand, more than happy to talk with you about the Arch Motorcycles KRGT-1 superbikes he makes with his longtime friend, Gard Hollinger, a revered designer in the motorcycle world. The $78,000 motorcycles are based on a prototype Hollinger made for Reeves years ago; each of the 2,032cc, V-twin-engine beasts are made to order in Hawthorne, Calif., an hour south of Los Angeles.
by Hannah Elliott, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Adam Wolffbrandt/Bloomberg
Monday, August 15, 2016
An Atheist of a Certain Kind
The very first thing I wrote on the internet that ever got any kind of traffic – I remember being thrilled to see it hit 100 views and floored after it cleared 1000 – was a piece I wrote about being an atheist of a certain kind. These pieces are pretty common now, but at the time it was rare enough to make noise: I was an atheist (not an agnostic or questioning or “spiritual but not religious” but an atheist) who was not angry, did not see my role as undermining other people’s religious beliefs, and who felt comprehensively alienated from what I perceived to be the atheist mainstream. Over the next several years I wrote often about these themes, and again got a lot of attention for them, or as much as a guy with a Blogger account was likely to expect.
I haven’t written about atheism a lot for several years, though, and I’m not sure I would write that original piece today. This isn’t really because my beliefs have changed, but because the discussion around atheism has changed. I would have expected to like those developments, but I haven’t.
To be clear, I still think the sensible attitude towards religion, for an atheist, is one of passive non-belief more than active anti-belief. That is, I’m not much interested in getting others to drop their religious beliefs, and I’m not at all interested in having atheism as an identity. Atheism is not something you do, for me. Atheists who base an entire identity around non-belief, who get up in the morning and go do atheism, seem to me to be replicating one of the most pernicious parts of religion: that it compels you to do certain things that have neither any clear moral purpose absent God (eat this bread, kneel here for awhile, give this money to that priest) nor provide any particular personal gratification. The best part of atheism is that you don’t have to get up on Sunday morning. Atheists who want to start atheist temples or whatever baffle me. Nor could I ever get up the energy to go out and spread the good word of atheism, which again replicates much of that which we have rightfully critiqued. A- is not Anti-.
People have an obligation to not try and answer political questions with references to inherently a-rational evidence, or to try and insert religious belief into scientific discussions. “You can’t get an abortion because God says so” is unhelpful as a political argument even if you believe in God; the world is not 6000 years old and science cannot proceed usefully if we are forced to entertain the notion that it is. But these obligations are not contingent on dropping religious belief. They are only contingent on maintaining a sense of what is the religious sphere and what’s the broader social sphere. Many, many people succeed at that. I still maintain many friendships with religious people and always will.
But still, I no longer find it useful to publicly be an atheist of a certain type. I suppose I’m being a hipster in saying that attitudes like my own became too popular. But I’m more and more frustrated with a common canard now often voiced by both mainstream liberals with religious beliefs and reform atheists alike, which is the notion that angry atheists are “just as bad” as evangelical Christians. I’ve head that exact formulation – “just as bad” – more times than I can count. That notion simply isn’t true, and it’s destructive. To begin with, not only do the aggressively religious outnumber the aggressively atheistic by huge margins, they are also far more politically organized and influential. For however much the Christian right’s political power has attenuated, they remain a potent force, particularly in state elections, and particularly when it comes to certain issues, such as abortion. If we expand this critique simply to ask whether the influence of atheism has been as high as that of religion, I find the comparison simply absurd. The Catholic Church alone is a vast entity with enormous resources that it uses strategically to alter the world. And many of its goals are contrary to my conception of the public good. Bill Maher is a jerk with a television show. Christianity is an army with many soldiers, and Christianity is just one religion.(...)
Perhaps the bigger problem is this: I find that the conversation about religion and atheism has become so wrapped up in a meta-discussion about how to act and why that the basic question of whether or not there’s a god gets elided. And that’s not a healthy development. I have had the curious experience of religious people, after praising my critiques of aggressive atheism, then pressing me to question the atheism itself – “Come on. Aren’t you just a little bit doubtful? Don’t you have some belief in God?” They seem to think that because I am reasonable in one way that I most likely am reasonable, to them, in that other way. But this is to trample on my basic self-definition of an atheist, in precisely the way I wouldn’t do to them. I want my very genuine, and very strong, lack of belief to be respected in the same way I try to respect the space for others to believe whatever. (...)
The question, I guess, comes down once again to my definition of respect. Too many atheists I interact with, whether online in the political sphere or in real life in the academic sphere, intend to respect (or “honor”) other people’s religious beliefs but do so in a way that I would describe as humoring, in the pejorative sense. Reform atheists are often pleasant and good-hearted people, but they are also often patronizing. When people talk about the “value of spirituality,” or the “power of tradition,” or just generally get annoyed by atheism, while assuming away the existence of a deity, they are not engaged in respect; they’re engaged in subtle condescension. “I respect your journey” is a way to say “the core of your belief is immaterial to me and thus does not threaten me.” Treating Pope Francis as a groovy old guy with some sweet beliefs and a few wacky ideas about water into wine insults him and the world’s billion Catholics.
I haven’t written about atheism a lot for several years, though, and I’m not sure I would write that original piece today. This isn’t really because my beliefs have changed, but because the discussion around atheism has changed. I would have expected to like those developments, but I haven’t.
To be clear, I still think the sensible attitude towards religion, for an atheist, is one of passive non-belief more than active anti-belief. That is, I’m not much interested in getting others to drop their religious beliefs, and I’m not at all interested in having atheism as an identity. Atheism is not something you do, for me. Atheists who base an entire identity around non-belief, who get up in the morning and go do atheism, seem to me to be replicating one of the most pernicious parts of religion: that it compels you to do certain things that have neither any clear moral purpose absent God (eat this bread, kneel here for awhile, give this money to that priest) nor provide any particular personal gratification. The best part of atheism is that you don’t have to get up on Sunday morning. Atheists who want to start atheist temples or whatever baffle me. Nor could I ever get up the energy to go out and spread the good word of atheism, which again replicates much of that which we have rightfully critiqued. A- is not Anti-.
People have an obligation to not try and answer political questions with references to inherently a-rational evidence, or to try and insert religious belief into scientific discussions. “You can’t get an abortion because God says so” is unhelpful as a political argument even if you believe in God; the world is not 6000 years old and science cannot proceed usefully if we are forced to entertain the notion that it is. But these obligations are not contingent on dropping religious belief. They are only contingent on maintaining a sense of what is the religious sphere and what’s the broader social sphere. Many, many people succeed at that. I still maintain many friendships with religious people and always will.
But still, I no longer find it useful to publicly be an atheist of a certain type. I suppose I’m being a hipster in saying that attitudes like my own became too popular. But I’m more and more frustrated with a common canard now often voiced by both mainstream liberals with religious beliefs and reform atheists alike, which is the notion that angry atheists are “just as bad” as evangelical Christians. I’ve head that exact formulation – “just as bad” – more times than I can count. That notion simply isn’t true, and it’s destructive. To begin with, not only do the aggressively religious outnumber the aggressively atheistic by huge margins, they are also far more politically organized and influential. For however much the Christian right’s political power has attenuated, they remain a potent force, particularly in state elections, and particularly when it comes to certain issues, such as abortion. If we expand this critique simply to ask whether the influence of atheism has been as high as that of religion, I find the comparison simply absurd. The Catholic Church alone is a vast entity with enormous resources that it uses strategically to alter the world. And many of its goals are contrary to my conception of the public good. Bill Maher is a jerk with a television show. Christianity is an army with many soldiers, and Christianity is just one religion.(...)
Perhaps the bigger problem is this: I find that the conversation about religion and atheism has become so wrapped up in a meta-discussion about how to act and why that the basic question of whether or not there’s a god gets elided. And that’s not a healthy development. I have had the curious experience of religious people, after praising my critiques of aggressive atheism, then pressing me to question the atheism itself – “Come on. Aren’t you just a little bit doubtful? Don’t you have some belief in God?” They seem to think that because I am reasonable in one way that I most likely am reasonable, to them, in that other way. But this is to trample on my basic self-definition of an atheist, in precisely the way I wouldn’t do to them. I want my very genuine, and very strong, lack of belief to be respected in the same way I try to respect the space for others to believe whatever. (...)
The question, I guess, comes down once again to my definition of respect. Too many atheists I interact with, whether online in the political sphere or in real life in the academic sphere, intend to respect (or “honor”) other people’s religious beliefs but do so in a way that I would describe as humoring, in the pejorative sense. Reform atheists are often pleasant and good-hearted people, but they are also often patronizing. When people talk about the “value of spirituality,” or the “power of tradition,” or just generally get annoyed by atheism, while assuming away the existence of a deity, they are not engaged in respect; they’re engaged in subtle condescension. “I respect your journey” is a way to say “the core of your belief is immaterial to me and thus does not threaten me.” Treating Pope Francis as a groovy old guy with some sweet beliefs and a few wacky ideas about water into wine insults him and the world’s billion Catholics.
by Fredrik deBoer | Read more:
'Colonel' Sanders - How to Succeed in Business by Really, Really Trying
[ed. I somehow got sidetracked on researching "Kentucky Colonel" and of course had to read about one of the most famous people ever to hold that honorary title. What a life. For all you young whippersnappers who think the only paths to riches and fame are through Wall Street, Silicon Valley or Hollywood, read about someone who failed miserably and repeatedly thoughout his life and never gave up. You could call him the Steve Jobs of the fast food industry. See also: Is This the Top-Secret KFC Recipe?]
Sanders was born on September 9, 1890, in a four-room house located 3 miles (5 km) east of Henryville, Indiana. He was the oldest of three children born to Wilbur David and Margaret Ann (née Dunlevy) Sanders. The family attended the Advent Christian Church. The family were of mostly Irish and English ancestry. His father was a mild and affectionate man who worked his 80-acre farm, until he broke his leg after a fall. He then worked as a butcher in Henryville for two years. Sanders' mother was a devout Christian and strict parent, continuously warning her children of "the evils of alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and whistling on Sundays."
One summer afternoon in 1895, his father came home with a fever and died later that day. Sanders' mother obtained work in a tomato cannery, and the young Harland was required to look after and cook for his siblings. By the age of seven, he was reportedly skilled with bread and vegetables, and improving with meat; the children foraged for food while their mother was away for days at a time for work. When he was 10, Harland began to work as a farmhand for local farmers Charlie Norris and Henry Monk.
In 1902, Sanders' mother remarried to William Broaddus, and the family moved to Greenwood, Indiana. Sanders had a tumultuous relationship with his stepfather. In 1903, he dropped out of seventh grade (later stating that "algebra's what drove me off"), and went to live and work on a nearby farm. At age 13, he left home by himself. He then took a job painting horse carriages in Indianapolis. When he was 14, he moved to southern Indiana to work as a farmhand for Sam Wilson for two years.
Sanders was born on September 9, 1890, in a four-room house located 3 miles (5 km) east of Henryville, Indiana. He was the oldest of three children born to Wilbur David and Margaret Ann (née Dunlevy) Sanders. The family attended the Advent Christian Church. The family were of mostly Irish and English ancestry. His father was a mild and affectionate man who worked his 80-acre farm, until he broke his leg after a fall. He then worked as a butcher in Henryville for two years. Sanders' mother was a devout Christian and strict parent, continuously warning her children of "the evils of alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and whistling on Sundays."One summer afternoon in 1895, his father came home with a fever and died later that day. Sanders' mother obtained work in a tomato cannery, and the young Harland was required to look after and cook for his siblings. By the age of seven, he was reportedly skilled with bread and vegetables, and improving with meat; the children foraged for food while their mother was away for days at a time for work. When he was 10, Harland began to work as a farmhand for local farmers Charlie Norris and Henry Monk.
In 1902, Sanders' mother remarried to William Broaddus, and the family moved to Greenwood, Indiana. Sanders had a tumultuous relationship with his stepfather. In 1903, he dropped out of seventh grade (later stating that "algebra's what drove me off"), and went to live and work on a nearby farm. At age 13, he left home by himself. He then took a job painting horse carriages in Indianapolis. When he was 14, he moved to southern Indiana to work as a farmhand for Sam Wilson for two years.
Early career
In 1906, with his mother's approval, Sanders left the area to live with his uncle in New Albany, Indiana. His uncle worked for the streetcar company, and secured Sanders a job as a conductor.
Sanders falsified his date of birth and enlisted in the United States Army in October 1906, completing his service commitment as a teamster in Cuba. He was honorably discharged in February 1907 and moved to Sheffield, Alabama, where an uncle lived. There, he met his brother Clarence who had also moved there in order to escape their stepfather. The uncle worked for the Southern Railway, and secured Sanders a job there as a blacksmith's helper in the workshops. After two months, Sanders moved to Jasper, Alabama where he got a job cleaning out the ash pans of trains from the Northern Alabama Railroad (a division of the Southern Railway) when they had finished their run. Sanders progressed to become a fireman (steam engine stoker) at the age of 16 or 17.
In 1909, Sanders found laboring work with the Norfolk and Western Railway. While working on the railroad, he met Josephine King of Jasper, Alabama, and they were married shortly afterwards. They would go on to have a son, Harland, Jr., who died in 1932 from infected tonsils, and two daughters, Margaret Sanders and Mildred Sanders Ruggles. He then found work as a fireman on the Illinois Central Railroad, and he and his family moved to Jackson, Tennessee. By night, Sanders studied law by correspondence through the La Salle Extension University. Sanders lost his job at Illinois after brawling with a colleague. While Sanders moved to work for the Rock Island Railroad, Josephine and the children went to live with her parents. After a while, Sanders began to practice law in Little Rock, which he did for three years, earning enough in fees for his family to move with him. His legal career ended after a courtroom brawl with his own client.
After that, Sanders moved back with his mother in Henryville, and went to work as a laborer on the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1916, the family moved to Jeffersonville, where Sanders got a job selling life insurance for the Prudential Life Insurance Company. Sanders was eventually fired for insubordination. He moved to Louisville and got a sales job with Mutual Benefit Life of New Jersey.
In 1920, Sanders established a ferry boat company, which operated a boat on the Ohio River between Jeffersonville and Louisville. He canvassed for funding, becoming a minority shareholder himself, and was appointed secretary of the company. The ferry was an instant success. Around 1922 he took a job as secretary at the Chamber of Commerce in Columbus, Indiana. He admitted to not being very good at the job, and resigned after less than a year. Sanders cashed in his ferry boat company shares for $22,000 ($306,000 today) and used the money to establish a company manufacturing acetylene lamps. The venture failed after Delco introduced an electric lamp that they sold on credit.
Sanders moved to Winchester, Kentucky, to work as a salesman for the Michelin Tire Company. He lost his job in 1924 when Michelin closed their New Jersey manufacturing plant. In 1924, by chance, he met the general manager of Standard Oil of Kentucky, who asked him to run a service station in Nicholasville. In 1930, the station closed as a result of the Great Depression.
In 1906, with his mother's approval, Sanders left the area to live with his uncle in New Albany, Indiana. His uncle worked for the streetcar company, and secured Sanders a job as a conductor.
Sanders falsified his date of birth and enlisted in the United States Army in October 1906, completing his service commitment as a teamster in Cuba. He was honorably discharged in February 1907 and moved to Sheffield, Alabama, where an uncle lived. There, he met his brother Clarence who had also moved there in order to escape their stepfather. The uncle worked for the Southern Railway, and secured Sanders a job there as a blacksmith's helper in the workshops. After two months, Sanders moved to Jasper, Alabama where he got a job cleaning out the ash pans of trains from the Northern Alabama Railroad (a division of the Southern Railway) when they had finished their run. Sanders progressed to become a fireman (steam engine stoker) at the age of 16 or 17.
In 1909, Sanders found laboring work with the Norfolk and Western Railway. While working on the railroad, he met Josephine King of Jasper, Alabama, and they were married shortly afterwards. They would go on to have a son, Harland, Jr., who died in 1932 from infected tonsils, and two daughters, Margaret Sanders and Mildred Sanders Ruggles. He then found work as a fireman on the Illinois Central Railroad, and he and his family moved to Jackson, Tennessee. By night, Sanders studied law by correspondence through the La Salle Extension University. Sanders lost his job at Illinois after brawling with a colleague. While Sanders moved to work for the Rock Island Railroad, Josephine and the children went to live with her parents. After a while, Sanders began to practice law in Little Rock, which he did for three years, earning enough in fees for his family to move with him. His legal career ended after a courtroom brawl with his own client.
After that, Sanders moved back with his mother in Henryville, and went to work as a laborer on the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1916, the family moved to Jeffersonville, where Sanders got a job selling life insurance for the Prudential Life Insurance Company. Sanders was eventually fired for insubordination. He moved to Louisville and got a sales job with Mutual Benefit Life of New Jersey.
In 1920, Sanders established a ferry boat company, which operated a boat on the Ohio River between Jeffersonville and Louisville. He canvassed for funding, becoming a minority shareholder himself, and was appointed secretary of the company. The ferry was an instant success. Around 1922 he took a job as secretary at the Chamber of Commerce in Columbus, Indiana. He admitted to not being very good at the job, and resigned after less than a year. Sanders cashed in his ferry boat company shares for $22,000 ($306,000 today) and used the money to establish a company manufacturing acetylene lamps. The venture failed after Delco introduced an electric lamp that they sold on credit.
Sanders moved to Winchester, Kentucky, to work as a salesman for the Michelin Tire Company. He lost his job in 1924 when Michelin closed their New Jersey manufacturing plant. In 1924, by chance, he met the general manager of Standard Oil of Kentucky, who asked him to run a service station in Nicholasville. In 1930, the station closed as a result of the Great Depression.
Later career
In 1930, the Shell Oil Company offered Sanders a service station in North Corbin, Kentucky, rent free, in return for paying them a percentage of sales. Sanders began to serve chicken dishes and other meals such as country ham and steaks. Initially he served the customers in his adjacent living quarters before opening a restaurant. It was during this period that Sanders was involved in a shootout with a Matt Stewart, a local competitor, over the repainting of a sign directing traffic to his station. Stewart killed a Shell official who was with Sanders and was convicted of murder, eliminating Sanders' competition. Sanders was commissioned as a Kentucky Colonel in 1935 by Kentucky governor Ruby Laffoon. His local popularity grew, and, in 1939, food critic Duncan Hines visited Sanders's restaurant and included it in Adventures in Good Eating, his guide to restaurants throughout the US. The entry read:
He left his mistress, Claudia Ledington-Price, as manager of the North Corbin restaurant and motel. In 1942, he sold the Asheville business. In 1947, he and Josephine divorced and Sanders married Claudia in 1949, as he had long desired. Sanders was "re-commissioned" as a Kentucky Colonel in 1950 by his friend, Governor Lawrence Wetherby.
In 1952, Sanders franchised "Kentucky Fried Chicken" for the first time, to Pete Harman of South Salt Lake, Utah, the operator of one of that city's largest restaurants. In the first year of selling the product, restaurant sales more than tripled, with 75% of the increase coming from sales of fried chicken. For Harman, the addition of fried chicken was a way of differentiating his restaurant from competitors; in Utah, a product hailing from Kentucky was unique and evoked imagery of Southern hospitality. Don Anderson, a sign painter hired by Harman, coined the name Kentucky Fried Chicken. After Harman's success, several other restaurant owners franchised the concept and paid Sanders $0.04 per chicken.
Sanders believed that his North Corbin restaurant would remain successful indefinitely, but at age 65 sold it after the new Interstate 75 reduced customer traffic. Left only with his savings and $105 a month from Social Security, Sanders decided to begin to franchise his chicken concept in earnest, and traveled the US looking for suitable restaurants. After closing the North Corbin site, Sanders and Claudia opened a new restaurant and company headquarters in Shelbyville in 1959. Often sleeping in the back of his car, Sanders visited restaurants, offered to cook his chicken, and if workers liked it negotiated franchise rights.
Although such visits required much time, eventually potential franchisees began visiting Sanders instead. He ran the company while Claudia mixed and shipped the spices to restaurants.The franchise approach became highly successful; KFC was one of the first fast food chains to expand internationally, opening outlets in Canada and later in England, Mexico and Jamaica by the mid-1960s. The company's rapid expansion to more than 600 locations became overwhelming for the aging Sanders. In 1964, then 73 years old, he sold the Kentucky Fried Chicken corporation for $2 million ($15.3 million today) to a partnership of Kentucky businessmen headed by John Y. Brown, Jr. (a then-29-year-old lawyer and future governor of Kentucky) and Jack C. Massey (a venture capitalist and entrepreneur), and he became a salaried brand ambassador. The initial deal did not include the Canadian operations (which Sanders retained) or the franchising rights in England, Florida, Utah, and Montana (which Sanders had already sold to others).
In 1965, Sanders moved to Mississauga, Ontario to oversee his Canadian franchises and continued to collect franchise and appearance fees both in Canada and in the U.S. Sanders bought and lived in a bungalow at 1337 Melton Drive in the Lakeview area of Mississauga from 1965 to 1980. In September 1970 he and his wife were baptized in the Jordan River. He also befriended Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell.
Sanders remained the company's symbol after selling it, traveling 200,000 miles a year on the company's behalf and filming many TV commercials and appearances. He retained much influence over executives and franchisees, who respected his culinary expertise and feared what The New Yorker described as "the force and variety of his swearing" when a restaurant or the company varied from what executives described as "the Colonel's chicken". One change the company made was to the gravy, which Sanders had bragged was so good that "it'll make you throw away the durn chicken and just eat the gravy" but which the company simplified to reduce time and cost. As late as 1979 Sanders made surprise visits to KFC restaurants, and if the food disappointed him, he denounced it to the franchisee as "God-damned slop" or pushed it onto the floor. In 1973, Sanders sued Heublein Inc.—the then parent company of Kentucky Fried Chicken—over the alleged misuse of his image in promoting products he had not helped develop. In 1975, Heublein Inc. unsuccessfully sued Sanders for libel after he publicly described their gravy as "wallpaper paste" to which "sludge" was added.
Sanders and his wife reopened their Shelbyville restaurant as "Claudia Sanders, The Colonel's Lady" and served KFC-style chicken there as part of a full-service dinner menu, and talked about expanding the restaurant into a chain. He was sued by the company for it. After reaching a settlement with Heublein, he sold the Colonel's Lady restaurant, and it has continued to operate since then (currently as the "Claudia Sanders Dinner House"). It serves his "original recipe" fried chicken as part of its (non-fast-food) dinner menu, and it is the only non-KFC restaurant that serves an authorized version of the fried chicken recipe.
Sanders remained critical of Kentucky Fried Chicken's food. In the late 1970s he told the Louisville Courier-Journal:
In 1930, the Shell Oil Company offered Sanders a service station in North Corbin, Kentucky, rent free, in return for paying them a percentage of sales. Sanders began to serve chicken dishes and other meals such as country ham and steaks. Initially he served the customers in his adjacent living quarters before opening a restaurant. It was during this period that Sanders was involved in a shootout with a Matt Stewart, a local competitor, over the repainting of a sign directing traffic to his station. Stewart killed a Shell official who was with Sanders and was convicted of murder, eliminating Sanders' competition. Sanders was commissioned as a Kentucky Colonel in 1935 by Kentucky governor Ruby Laffoon. His local popularity grew, and, in 1939, food critic Duncan Hines visited Sanders's restaurant and included it in Adventures in Good Eating, his guide to restaurants throughout the US. The entry read:
41 — Jct. with 25, 25 E. ½ Mi. N. of Corbin. Open all year except Xmas.In July 1939, Sanders acquired a motel in Asheville, North Carolina. His North Corbin restaurant and motel was destroyed in a fire in November 1939, and Sanders had it rebuilt as a motel with a 140-seat restaurant. By July 1940, Sanders had finalized his "Secret Recipe" for frying chicken in a pressure fryer that cooked the chicken faster than pan frying. As the United States entered World War II in December 1941, gas was rationed, and as the tourists dried up, Sanders was forced to close his Asheville motel. He went to work as a supervisor in Seattle until the latter part of 1942. He later ran cafeterias for the government at an ordnance works in Tennessee, followed by a job as assistant cafeteria manager in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
A very good place to stop en route to Cumberland Falls and the Great Smokies. Continuous 24-hour service. Sizzling steaks, fried chicken, country ham, hot biscuits. L. 50¢ to $1; D., 60¢ to $1
He left his mistress, Claudia Ledington-Price, as manager of the North Corbin restaurant and motel. In 1942, he sold the Asheville business. In 1947, he and Josephine divorced and Sanders married Claudia in 1949, as he had long desired. Sanders was "re-commissioned" as a Kentucky Colonel in 1950 by his friend, Governor Lawrence Wetherby.
In 1952, Sanders franchised "Kentucky Fried Chicken" for the first time, to Pete Harman of South Salt Lake, Utah, the operator of one of that city's largest restaurants. In the first year of selling the product, restaurant sales more than tripled, with 75% of the increase coming from sales of fried chicken. For Harman, the addition of fried chicken was a way of differentiating his restaurant from competitors; in Utah, a product hailing from Kentucky was unique and evoked imagery of Southern hospitality. Don Anderson, a sign painter hired by Harman, coined the name Kentucky Fried Chicken. After Harman's success, several other restaurant owners franchised the concept and paid Sanders $0.04 per chicken.
Sanders believed that his North Corbin restaurant would remain successful indefinitely, but at age 65 sold it after the new Interstate 75 reduced customer traffic. Left only with his savings and $105 a month from Social Security, Sanders decided to begin to franchise his chicken concept in earnest, and traveled the US looking for suitable restaurants. After closing the North Corbin site, Sanders and Claudia opened a new restaurant and company headquarters in Shelbyville in 1959. Often sleeping in the back of his car, Sanders visited restaurants, offered to cook his chicken, and if workers liked it negotiated franchise rights.
Although such visits required much time, eventually potential franchisees began visiting Sanders instead. He ran the company while Claudia mixed and shipped the spices to restaurants.The franchise approach became highly successful; KFC was one of the first fast food chains to expand internationally, opening outlets in Canada and later in England, Mexico and Jamaica by the mid-1960s. The company's rapid expansion to more than 600 locations became overwhelming for the aging Sanders. In 1964, then 73 years old, he sold the Kentucky Fried Chicken corporation for $2 million ($15.3 million today) to a partnership of Kentucky businessmen headed by John Y. Brown, Jr. (a then-29-year-old lawyer and future governor of Kentucky) and Jack C. Massey (a venture capitalist and entrepreneur), and he became a salaried brand ambassador. The initial deal did not include the Canadian operations (which Sanders retained) or the franchising rights in England, Florida, Utah, and Montana (which Sanders had already sold to others).
In 1965, Sanders moved to Mississauga, Ontario to oversee his Canadian franchises and continued to collect franchise and appearance fees both in Canada and in the U.S. Sanders bought and lived in a bungalow at 1337 Melton Drive in the Lakeview area of Mississauga from 1965 to 1980. In September 1970 he and his wife were baptized in the Jordan River. He also befriended Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell.
Sanders remained the company's symbol after selling it, traveling 200,000 miles a year on the company's behalf and filming many TV commercials and appearances. He retained much influence over executives and franchisees, who respected his culinary expertise and feared what The New Yorker described as "the force and variety of his swearing" when a restaurant or the company varied from what executives described as "the Colonel's chicken". One change the company made was to the gravy, which Sanders had bragged was so good that "it'll make you throw away the durn chicken and just eat the gravy" but which the company simplified to reduce time and cost. As late as 1979 Sanders made surprise visits to KFC restaurants, and if the food disappointed him, he denounced it to the franchisee as "God-damned slop" or pushed it onto the floor. In 1973, Sanders sued Heublein Inc.—the then parent company of Kentucky Fried Chicken—over the alleged misuse of his image in promoting products he had not helped develop. In 1975, Heublein Inc. unsuccessfully sued Sanders for libel after he publicly described their gravy as "wallpaper paste" to which "sludge" was added.
Sanders and his wife reopened their Shelbyville restaurant as "Claudia Sanders, The Colonel's Lady" and served KFC-style chicken there as part of a full-service dinner menu, and talked about expanding the restaurant into a chain. He was sued by the company for it. After reaching a settlement with Heublein, he sold the Colonel's Lady restaurant, and it has continued to operate since then (currently as the "Claudia Sanders Dinner House"). It serves his "original recipe" fried chicken as part of its (non-fast-food) dinner menu, and it is the only non-KFC restaurant that serves an authorized version of the fried chicken recipe.
Sanders remained critical of Kentucky Fried Chicken's food. In the late 1970s he told the Louisville Courier-Journal:
My God, that gravy is horrible. They buy tap water for 15 to 20 cents a thousand gallons and then they mix it with flour and starch and end up with pure wallpaper paste. And I know wallpaper paste, by God, because I've seen my mother make it. ... There's no nutrition in it and they ought not to be allowed to sell it. ... crispy recipe is nothing in the world but a damn fried doughball stuck on some chicken.Sanders later used his stock holdings to create the Colonel Harland Sanders Trust and Colonel Harland Sanders Charitable Organization, which used the proceeds to aid charities and fund scholarships. His trusts continue to donate money to groups like the Trillium Health Care Centre; a wing of their building specializes in women's and children's care and has been named after him. The Sidney, British Columbia based foundation granted over $1,000,000 in 2007, according to its 2007 tax return.
by Wikipedia | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
Awake in a Nightmare
John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare
via: Wikipedia
[ed. There's a Reddit thread titled "What is the weirdest sensation that you only experienced ONCE?", which made me think of a couple nightmares in my life that were so terrorizing I still get the chills. One (I know now) was probably "sleep paralysis", a condition that feels like you're unable to move a single muscle but are wide awake. This is usually accompanied by a sense of some huge malevolent presence or force in the room (and a large, heavy pressure hovering above or on your chest). In my case, I also experienced a deep, soul-vibrating thrumming sound, which was the scariest part. The other weirdest feeling was a nightmare too, but this time my appendages (head and hands) were extremely huge and disproportionate to the rest of my body, so much so that if I swung them I'd tumble over and be crushed (sort of like those big balloons you see in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade). I've always thought that if Hell existed, these two experiences are what it would feel like.]
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Images: Zillow
Sunday, August 14, 2016
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,
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.
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. (...)
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:
Saturday, August 13, 2016
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.
Image: Denis Morin
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:
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