The Acquisitive Self, Minus the Self

Los Angeles isn’t exactly the place that comes to mind when you think of decorous restraint in the display of wealth, even in the dregs of the Great Recession. Here in my hometown, possibly more than in any other outpost of faux-meritocratic privilege in our republic of getting and spending, untrammeled acquisition is understood as an expression of individual will—and more than that, a matter of taste.

Yet for all the studio money sloshing around our bright, stucco world, most of us have never encountered the miniscule stratum of humans that hovers above the rich: the pure, gilt-edged, entrenched, multigenerational wealthy. Movie star money is food stamps compared to oil money, hedge fund money, and even some of that dank old money that still floats around the haciendas of Pasadena. We might have stood kegside next to Kirsten Dunst once, but we don’t know the kinds of rich people that F. Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he wrote that the rich “are different from you and me”: the Vanderbilts, Rothschilds, and Astors. Hell, our L.A. doesn’t even boast a new-money Midwestern poultry heiress.

We don’t see these types—let alone interact with them—because they’ve largely seceded from public view. This is the guilt-prone social formation that Paul Fussell dubbed the “top out-of-sight class,” because you typically can’t see their houses/compounds unless you have access to a helicopter. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, the top out-of-sight class had been very much in sight; Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and Philadelphia’s Main Line mansions are still monuments to their Caligulan self-regard. But ever since the Great Depression, and its attendant booms in Social Realist art and Popular Front politics, they staged a quiet but striking mass retreat. So spooked out were the über-rich that they became almost discreet. “The situation now is very different from the one in the 1890s satirized by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class,” Fussell wrote in 1983. “In [Veblen’s] day the rich delighted to exhibit themselves conspicuously. . . . Now they hide.”

Thirty years later, this is still mostly true, but thanks to the exhibition-friendly canons of social media, the scions of excess are back and flaunting it, baby—and it’s an entirely underwhelming display. These aren’t the out-of-sight rich but their twentysomething children, flouting their parents’ wealth-whispers code of silence. With acres of unproductive time on their hands, bored rich kids are using their gold-plated iPhones to post images of their baubles of privilege, their chemical stimulants of preference, and their outlandish bar tabs on Instagram, the photo-sharing service of the moment. It’s a bit as though a Bret Easton Ellis novel has come blandly to life, without the benefit of any irony.

Predictably enough, a Tumblr photo-blog has stirred vacantly into being, to compile all these outpourings of opulence in one convenient place. Launched in 2012 by a founder who remains anonymous, Rich Kids of Instagram (RKOI for short) curates and tags photos posted on Instagram by the likes of Barron Hilton, Tiffany Trump, and other “funemployed” trust-funders. The Tumblr, which slaps a whimsical, intricately scrolled frame around each photo but adds little else, doesn’t come with a explanation or an editorial policy, other than that it purports to show you the lifestyles that the unseen rich had previously shared only with their similarly rich friends. “They have more money than you do and this is what they do,” goes the tagline.

Why should we look? The payoffs for the nonrich civilian viewer are oddly perfunctory. After all of the social mythologies we’ve lovingly constructed to envelop the delusions of the 1 percent, this is the lurid end-of-the-rainbow payoff they’ve decided to lord over the rest of us—a fistful of watches, car interiors, and European spa photos? The content of Rich Kids of Instagram is less the aftermath of an imperial Roman bacchanal than the shamefaced hangover of an especially inane and oversexed (though well-appointed!) frat party. Around about the dozenth selfie featuring a buff and/or emaciated scion nestled into a private jet with a bottle of Cristal and a $10,000 clip of cash (“Always make sure to tip your pilot and co-pilot 10k. #rulesofflyingprivate”), you can’t help but wonder, “Is that all there is?”

The Duller Image

Indeed, in strictly visual terms, the site is hard to distinguish from a luxe Sharper Image catalog—merchandised out, to be sure, but disappointingly clichéd. The rich boys of Instagram—the son of fashion mogul Roberto Cavalli, for example, and a weak-chinned fellow with the handle Lord_Steinberg—post pictures of their IWC Grande Complication Perpetual watches, multiple Lamborghinis, and six-figure bar tabs. Here, all the shiny expensive crap seems to cry out, is what I’ve done with my life in lieu of becoming an adult. The young rich ladies, such as Alexa Dell (of, you know, the Dell computers fortune), mainly document how all this pelf looks from the other side of the gender divide: they snap pics of themselves surrounded by tangerine Hermès shopping bags, eating sushi sprinkled with 24K gold flakes, and holding their American Express Centurion card minimum payment notifications (typically $40,000).

There’s not even much in the way of the makings of righteous socialist outrage. (Swazi Leaks this most definitely is not; that project, by contrast, pairs leaked photographs of Swaziland’s high-rolling absolute monarch with pictures of $1-a-day sub-subsistence conditions in the slums.) Yes, the rich kids seem determined to remind us that they have stuff the rest of us will never have. The captions they post with their photos are, at times, slyly aware of their part in inequality (cf. a picture of a private jet and a luxury car with the caption “The struggle is real”). But for all that, the kids don’t seem especially power-hungry so much as aimless and languid. Behind these faux-provocative posts lurks a desperate clamor for attention that almost verges on a cry for help—something that makes you feel a certain involuntary (and certainly undeserved) pity for these manically self-documented upper-crusters.

by Natasha Vargas-Cooper, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Amanda Konishi

Teachers Are Laborers, Not Merchants

I got an email request to talk about online-only education and why I’m such a skeptic that it can replace physical education. I’ve written about this before but let me try to sum it up.

Here’s the model that the constant “online education will replace physical colleges” types advance: education is about gaining knowledge; knowledge is stored in the heads of teachers; schooling is the transfer of that knowledge from the teacher’s head to the student’s head; physical facilities are expensive, but online equivalents are cheap; therefore someone will build an Amazon that cuts out the overhead of the physical campus and connects students to teachers in the online space or, alternatively, cuts teachers out altogether and just transfers the information straight into the brains of the student.

The basic failure here is the basic model of transfer of information, like teachers are merchants who sell discrete products known as knowledge or skills. In fact education is far more a matter of labor, of teachers working to push that information into the heads of students, or more accurately, to compel students to push it into their own heads. And this work is fundamentally social, and requires human accountability, particularly for those who lack prerequisite skills.

I’ve said this before: if education was really about access to information, then anyone with a library card could have skipped college well before the internet. The idea that the internet suddenly made education obsolete because it freed information from being hidden away presumes that information was kept under lock and key. But, you know, books exist and are pretty cheap and they contain information. Yet if you have a class of undergraduates sit in a room for an hour twice a week with some chemistry textbooks, I can tell you that most of them aren’t going to learn a lot of chemistry. The printing press did not make teachers obsolete, and neither has the internet.

Some of those undergrads might learn chemisty. There are small numbers of people in the world who are really self-motivated to learn. I sometimes get people who ask me if they should get into the Great Courses or similar services. And I tend to tell them, well, since you’re self-motivated and you want to learn and you’re willing to invest, sure. The problem is that most people just aren’t built that way. There’s a romantic vision of education that’s very common to reformers – everybody’s an autodidact, deep down inside. But the truth is, most students aren’t self-motivated. Most students learn only under compulsion from society. True, everyone has subjects that they love, but everyone also has subjects that they hate, and the basic premise of a curriculum is that individuals cannot determine for themselves exactly what they need to learn. Meanwhile, many or most students try to escape these obligations, to varying degrees. Truancy law exists for a reason, and even in the ostensibly-voluntary world of the university, most students do what they can to avoid work as much as possible. I’m just trying to be real with you. Most people skip school when they can.

This is particularly important because many of the challenges of the university today come from the fact that we’re educating more and more students who are nontraditional and less prepared than previous cohorts. From 2001 to 2011, total enrollments at American institutions grew by about a third. That’s a ton! And that growth was heavily concentrated among students who tend to be harder to educate – those from poorer backgrounds and those whose parents did not graduate from college. What we need to do, and what many schools are struggling to do, is to give these students the “soft skills” – time management, study habits, persistence, etc – that their peers typical get from middle-class-and-above, college-educated parents, who have the time and experience to inculcate such skills.

Unsurprisingly, what limited research there is suggests that MOOCs (which is only one piece of the online pie) tend to have horrid completion rates; most people aren’t likely to force themselves to log on and get the work done even when they’d prefer to be doing something else. Because online-only education is usually presented in terms of cost savings, it is perhaps most likely to be adopted by those very students who are least able to take advantage of it, particularly given that many of them work full-time and raise children. That sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. (...)

Education is always getting disrupted, in the Silicon Valley mind. And though they dress it up in a million different ways, this disruption always functions the same way: by minimizing the teacher, the actual human being, whose job it is to inspire and direct and cajole and, yes, to drag students into competence. Either the teachers are replaced by an iPad or they’re forced to scale up the number of students they can teach by factors of hundreds or thousands through online technologies. One way or the other, the teacher is the problem the technology is designed to solve.

by Fredrik deBoer |  Read more:

Image: Vanderbilt University

Fat Thinking and Economies of Variety

Leak before failure is a fascinating engineering principle, used in the design of things like nuclear power plants. The idea, loosely stated, is that things should fail in easily recoverable non-critical ways (such as leaks) before they fail in catastrophic ways (such as explosions or meltdowns). This means that various components and subsystems are designed with varying margins of safety, so that they fail at different times, under different conditions, in ways that help you prevent bigger disasters using smaller ones.

So for example, if pressure in a pipe gets too high, a valve should fail, and alert you to the fact that something is making pressure rise above the normal range, allowing you to figure it out and fix it before it gets so high that a boiler explosion scenario is triggered. Unlike canary-in-the-coalmine systems or fault monitoring/recovery systems, leak-before-failure systems have failure robustnesses designed organically into operating components, rather than being bolted on in the form of failure management systems.

Leak-before-failure is more than just a clever idea restricted to safety issues. Understood in suitably general terms, it provides an illuminating perspective on how companies scale.

Learning as Inefficiency

If you stop to think about it for a moment, leak-before-failure is a type of intrinsic inefficiency where monitoring and fault-detection systems are extrinsic overheads. A leak-before-failure design implies that some parts of the system are over-designed relative to others, with respect to the nominal operating envelope of the system. In a chain with a clear weakest link, the other links can be thought of as having been over-designed to varying degrees.

In the simplest case, leak-before-failure is like deliberately designing a chain with a calibrated amount of non-uniformity in the links, to control where the weakest link lies,. You can imagine, for instance, a chain with one link being structurally weaker than the rest, so it is the first to break under tensile stress (possibly in a way that decouples the two ends of the chain in a safe way as illustrated below).

Failure landscapes designed on the basis of leak-before-failure principles can sometimes do more than detect certain exceptional conditions. They might even prevent higher-risk scenarios by increasing the probability of lower-risk scenarios. One example is what is known as sacrificial protection: using a metal that oxidizes more easily to protect one that oxidizes less easily (magnesium is often used to protect steel pipes if I am remembering my undergrad metallurgy class right).

The opposite of leak-before-failure is another idea in engineering called design optimization, which is based on the exact opposite principle that all parts of a system should fail simultaneously. This is the equivalent of designing a chain with such extraordinarily high uniformity that at a certain stress level, all the links break at once (or what is roughly an equivalent thing, the probability distribution of link failure becomes a uniform distribution, with equal expectation that any link could be the first to break, based on invisible and unmodeled non-uniformities). (...)

Leak-before-failure can be understood, in critical-path terms, as moving the bottleneck and critical path to a locus that allows a system to be primed for a particular type of high-value learning. Instead of putting it where you maximize output, utilization, productivity, or any of the other classic “lean” measures of performance.

Or to put it another way, leak-before-failure is about figuring out where to put the fat. Or to put it yet another way, it’s about figuring out how to allocate the antifragility budget. Or to put it a third way, it’s about designing systems with unique snowflake building blocks. Or to put it a fourth way, it is to swap the sacred and profane values of industrial mass manufacturing. Or to put it a fifth way, it’s about designing for a bigger envelope of known and unknown contingencies around the nominal operating regime.

Or to put it in a sixth way, and my favorite way, it’s about designing for economies of variety. Learning in open-ended ways gets cheaper with increasing (and nominally unnecessary) diversity, variability and uniqueness in system design.

Note that you sometimes don’t need to explicitly know what kind of failure scenario you’re designing for. Introducing even random variations in non-critical components that have identical nominal designs is a way to get there (one example of this is the practice, in data centers, of having multiple generations of hardware, especially hard disks, in the architecture)

The fact that you can think of the core idea in so many different ways should tell you that there is no formula for leak-before-failure thinking: it is a kind of creative-play design game which I call fat thinking. To get to economies of scale and scope, you have to think lean. To get to economies of variety on the other hand, you have to think fat.

by Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm | Read more:
Images: uncredited

The Big Smoke

It was rush hour on a mid-May morning, and Bruce Linton, ceoof the world’s largest producer of legally grown, sold, smoked, vaped, and consumed marijuana, sat in the driver’s seat of a rented Dodge Charger, heading south, against Toronto traffic, on his way to wine country. He kept the speedometer at a respectable, but law-bending, 120 kilometres per hour, except when trucks or cars got in his way. Then the forty-nine-year-old pressed on the throttle.

It wasn’t yet 8 a.m., but Linton had been up for four hours, having woken around 4 a.m. next to his wife in a quiet and leafy part of the capital once known as the home of the Ottawa Senators and the rest of the city’s nouveau riche. He’d begun his day by pacing around his house in the dark and looking out at his swimming pool while he fired off a dozen emails. Then he’d driven to the airport and caught a plane to Toronto. I’d jumped in the car with him shortly after 7 a.m. and had been throwing questions at him ever since.

Linton’s eyes darted between the open road and the passenger seat, where I scribbled his words into a notebook. He waited for my pen to catch up. “If you really want to get all of this, we need to do a book,” he said. Then he recounted how he and a small team of tech and policy geeks with Bay Street cred had turned an abandoned Hershey’s factory into the most recognized grow op on the planet, and how they were now inking deals with industrialists in Germany, horticulturalists in Australia, sexual-aid manufacturers in Colorado, and celebrities in California. It’s all part of a fast-moving game that, if won, could leave Linton and his executives at the helm of a billion-dollar company when recreational pot becomes legal in Canada.

The needle crept toward 130 kilometres per hour as Linton described a future in which Canada would supplant Israel as the global leader in the scientific research of cannabinoids while replacing the Netherlands as cultural homeland of marijuana innovation and export. It’s a grand dream, to be sure, but one he insists is quickly becoming a reality. Headquartered in Smiths Falls, Ontario, his three-year-old company—Canopy Growth Corp.—is emerging as a national cannabis conglomerate. At the time we spoke, Linton was in advanced negotiations to get the high-cannabidiol strains he was growing in Scarborough sold in pill and oil form at pharmacies across the country. But it was his vision for the tetrahydrocannabinol (thc) drawn from the weed in his Niagara-on-the-Lake greenhouse that seemed truly inspired.

It’s a two-stage plan. First, he’ll let customers get used to seeing a range of his combustible marijuana strains for sale in the same stores that carry traditional liquors. Then he’ll release a line of drinkable cannabis products. Linton sees a world in which thc will become one of the main ingredients inside corked bottles of what future generations will consider premium booze. thc-laced soda pop is already available on the black market, and people have been infusing liquor with cannabis at their homes for years. Linton is going to take it mainstream, challenging the spirits establishment by producing an entirely new beverage that offers a different sort of buzz. Most people still think of pot as something to smoke and vape, or as something that can be added to food. Linton wants to show it can be so much more.

Shortly before 9 a.m., we started to see signs for the United States border. “We’re running early,” Linton said. “Let’s get breakfast.” He pulled off the highway and made for a McDonald’s drive-thru. He ordered an extra-large coffee and two breakfast burritos for himself and an Egg McMuffin meal for me.

We sat in the parking lot and ate off our laps. Between bites of salsa-doused burrito, Linton explained how rare it is to witness the birth of an industry, especially one based on a known commodity with a pre-established market. The drug already has a multi-generational user base estimated at seven-million people in Canada alone. Linton is determined not just to reach as many of those people as possible, but also to access the worldwide market. “Three years ago, I knew nothing about growing pot,” he confessed. “Now I’m the ceo of the biggest grow op willing to publish its address.”

At times, Linton sounded less like a traditional drug-policy reformer and more like a corporate monopolist. There are those who criticize him for this, but he doesn’t seem to care.

The cultural and political landscape surrounding marijuana is changing fast, and Linton, more than anyone else, seems primed to profit from it. The Trudeau government has promised to do what only Uruguay had done before: declare a national end to the prohibition on the recreational growth, sale, and consumption of marijuana. Linton’s company—and his country—is set to spearhead a global movement.

“Cannabis is going to be the great disruptor of our time,” he said. “Once the recreational markets start opening up, this whole industry is going to explode. We’ve got a three-to-four-year lead over the rest of the world, but we gotta make sure we don’t lose it.” He scrunched up his burrito wrappers and tossed them into the paper takeout bag by my feet; then he peeled the free-coffee stickers from both our cups and stuck them to the back of his BlackBerry.

“I love any company with a loyalty program,” he said. Then he fired up the Charger and asked, “Are you ready to see the Farm?” (...)

It was just after noon, and Linton was already behind on the to-do list he’d written on a Post-it. The first item involved printing out a homework assignment for one of his sons. Now he was preparing for item number four, “Fraud audit with Deloitte,” and the equally intriguing number five, “Meet Colorado sex guys.”

Linton invited me into his office, which had a “Mr. Wonka” nameplate on the door. He twisted the top off a bottle of Canadian Tire–brand water, took a swig, and began dialing a number on his phone. Soon, he was on the line with the owners of a Colorado-based sex-spray company that claimed to have harnessed the “therapeutic aphrodisiac” within cannabis and was now making a niche for itself by producing “the first marijuana-infused personal lubricant for her pleasure.” It took an hour before Linton was done negotiating the beginnings of a licencing agreement to sell the Colorado company’s line of products—which included suppositories it claimed could both relieve menstrual pain and boost sexual pleasure. No one on the call knew what the deal should be worth. Still, sex and weed seemed to go together, at least in the minds of the suppository guys, and Linton wanted a cut in case they were right. When the call ended, he got up from his chair with a bolt of nervous energy and said, “This is the most exciting part about all of this.”

“The sex spray?” I asked.

“People are just starting to figure out all that can be done with this stuff. We’re not just growing pot. We’re growing cannabinoids.”

It has been 211 years since scientists first extracted morphine from opium and began using it for medicinal purposes—a historical development that Linton believes is relevant to the future of marijuana. “Who smokes opium anymore?” he asked. Linton believes his crops will soon be used as a sort of opioid-light—a less addictive, less harmful, and ultimately lifesaving alternative to the roughly 20 million prescriptions for opioid-based painkillers being written in this country every year.

by Brett Popplewell, The Walrus |  Read more:

Image: Richmond Lam

The Sea of Crises

When he comes into the ring, Hakuho, the greatest sumotori in the world, perhaps the greatest in the history of the world, dances like a tropical bird, like a bird of paradise. Flanked by two attendants — his tachimochi, who carries his sword, and his tsuyuharai, or dew sweeper, who keeps the way clear for him — and wearing his embroidered apron, the kesho-mawashi, with its braided cords and intricate loops of rope, Hakuho climbs onto the trapezoidal block of clay, two feet high and nearly 22 feet across, where he will be fighting. Here, marked off by rice-straw bales, is the circle, the dohyo, which he has been trained to imagine as the top of a skyscraper: One step over the line and he is dead. A Shinto priest purified the dohyo before the tournament; above, a six-ton canopy suspended from the arena’s ceiling, a kind of floating temple roof, marks it as a sacred space. Colored tassels hang from the canopy’s corners, representing the Four Divine Beasts of the Chinese 1 constellations: the azure dragon of the east, the vermilion sparrow of the south, the white tiger of the west, the black tortoise of the north. Over the canopy, off-center and lit with spotlights, flies the white-and-red flag of Japan.Japanese mythology, like many aspects of early Japanese culture, was heavily influenced by China.

Hakuho bends into a deep squat. He claps twice, then rubs his hands together. He turns his palms slowly upward. He is bare-chested, 6-foot-4 and 350 pounds. His hair is pulled up in a topknot. His smooth stomach strains against the coiled belt at his waist, the literal referent of his rank:yokozuna, horizontal rope. Rising, he lifts his right arm diagonally, palm down to show he is unarmed. He repeats the gesture with his left. He lifts his right leg high into the air, tipping his torso to the left like a watering can, then slams his foot onto the clay. When it strikes, the crowd of 13,000 souls inside the Ryogoku Kokugikan, Japan’s national sumo stadium, shouts in unison: “Yoisho!” — Come on! Do it! He slams down his other foot: “Yoisho!” It’s as if the force of his weight is striking the crowd in the stomach. Then he squats again, arms held out winglike at his sides, and bends forward at the waist until his back is near parallel with the floor. Imagine someone playing airplane with a small child. With weird, sliding thrusts of his feet, he inches forward, gliding across the ring’s sand, raising and lowering his head in a way that’s vaguely serpentine while slowly straightening his back. By the time he’s upright again, the crowd is roaring.

In 265 years, 69 men have been promoted to yokozuna. Just 69 since George Washington was a teenager. 2 Only the holders of sumo’s highest rank are allowed to make entrances like this. Officially, the purpose of the elaborate dohyo-iri is to chase away demons. (And this is something you should register about sumo, a sport with TV contracts and millions in revenue and fan blogs and athletes in yogurt commercials — that it’s simultaneously a sport in which demon-frightening can be something’s official purpose.) But the ceremony is territorial on a human level, too. It’s a message delivered to adversaries, a way of saying This ring is mine, a way of saying Be prepared for what happens if you’re crazy enough to enter it.

Hakuho is not Hakuho’s real name. Sumo wrestlers fight under ring names called shikona, formal pseudonyms governed, like everything else in sumo, by elaborate traditions and rules. Hakuho was born Mönkhbatyn Davaajargal in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in 1985; he is the fourth non-Japanese wrestler to attain yokozuna status. Until the last 30 years or so, foreigners were rare in the upper ranks of sumo in Japan. But some countries have their own sumo customs, brought over by immigrants, and some others have sports that are very like sumo. Thomas Edison filmed sumo matches in Hawaii as early as 1903. Mongolian wrestling involves many of the same skills and concepts. In recent years, wrestlers brought up in places like these have found their way to Japan in greater numbers, and have largely supplanted Japanese wrestlers at the top of the rankings. Six of the past eight yokozuna promotions have gone to foreigners. There has been no active Japanese yokozuna since the last retired in 2003. This is a source of intense anxiety to many in the tradition-minded world of sumo in Japan.

As a child, the story goes, Davaajargal was skinny. This was years before he became Hakuho, when he used to mope around Ulaanbaatar, thumbing through sumo magazines and fantasizing about growing as big as a house. His father had been a dominant force in Mongolian wrestling in the 1960s and ’70s, winning a silver medal at the 1968 Olympics and rising to the rank of undefeatable giant. It was sumo that captured Davaajargal’s imagination, but he was simply too small for it.

When he went to Tokyo, in October 2000, he was a 137-pound 15-year-old. No trainer would touch him. Sumo apprentices start young, moving into training stables called heya where they’re given room and board in return for a somewhat horrifying life of eating, chores, training, eating, and serving as quasi-slaves to their senior stablemates (and eating). Everyone agreed that little Davaajargal had a stellar wrestling brain, but he was starting too late, and his reedlike body would make real wrestlers want to kick dohyo sand in his face. Finally, an expat Mongolian rikishi (another word for sumo wrestler) persuaded the master of the Miyagino heya to take Davaajargal in on the last day of the teenager’s stay in Japan. The stablemaster’s gamble paid off. After a few years of training and a fortuitous late growth spurt, Davaajargal emerged as the most feared young rikishi in Japan. He was given the name Hakuho, which means “white Peng”; a Peng is a giant bird in Chinese mythology.

Hakuho’s early career was marked by a sometimes bad-tempered rivalry with an older wrestler, a fellow Mongolian called Asashoryu (“morning blue dragon”), who became a yokozuna in 2003. Asashoryu embodied everything the Japanese fear about the wave of foreign rikishi who now dominate the sport. He was hotheaded, unpredictable, and indifferent to the ancient traditions of a sport that’s been part of the Japanese national consciousness for as long as there’s been a Japan.

This is something else you should register about sumo: It is very, very old. Not old like black-and-white movies; old like the mists of time. Sumo was already ancient when the current ranking system came into being in the mid-1700s. The artistry of the banzuke, the traditional ranking sheet, has given rise to an entire school of calligraphy. Imagine how George Will would feel about baseball if he’d seen World Series scorecards from 1789. This is how many Japanese feel about sumo.

Asashoryu brawled with other wrestlers in the communal baths. He barked at referees — an almost unthinkable offense. He pulled another wrestler’s hair, a breach that made him the first yokozuna ever disqualified from a match. Rikishi are expected to wear kimonos and sandals in public; Asashoryu would show up in a business suit. He would show up drunk. He would accept his prize money with the wrong hand. (...)

Hakuho began to make waves around the peak of Asashoryu’s invulnerable reign. Five years younger than his rival, Hakuho was temperamentally his opposite: solemn, silent, difficult to read. “More Japanese than the Japanese” — this is what people say about him. Asashoryu made sumo look wild and furious; Hakuho was fathomlessly calm. He seemed to have an innate sense of angles and counterweights, how to shift his hips a fraction of an inch to annihilate his enemy’s balance. In concept, winning a sumo bout is simple: either make your opponent step outside the ring or make him touch the ground with any part of his body besides the soles of his feet. When Hakuho won, how he’d done it was sometimes a mystery. The other wrestler would go staggering out of what looked like an even grapple. When Hakuho needed to, he could be overpowering. He didn’t often need to.

The flaming circus of Asashoryu’s career was good for TV ratings. But Hakuho was a way forward for a scandal-torn sport — a foreign rikishi with deep feelings for Japanese tradition, a figure who could unite the past and future. At first, he lost to Asashoryu more than he won, but the rivalry always ran hot. In 2008, almost exactly a year after the Yokozuna Deliberation Council promoted Hakuho to the top rank, Asashoryu gave him an extra shove after hurling him down in a tournament. The two momentarily squared off. In the video, you can see the older man grinning and shaking his head while Hakuho glares at him with an air of outraged grace. Over time, Hakuho’s fearsome technique and Asashoryu’s endless seesawing between injury and controversy turned the tide in the younger wrestler’s favor. When Asashoryu retired unexpectedly in 2010 after allegedly breaking a man’s nose outside a nightclub, Hakuho had taken their last seven regulation matches and notched a 14-13 lifetime record against his formerly invincible adversary.

With no Asashoryu to contend with, Hakuho proceeded to go 15-0 in his next four tournaments. He began a spell of dominance that not even Asashoryu could have matched. In 2010, he compiled the second-longest winning streak in sumo history, 63 straight wins, which tied a record set in the 1780s. He has won, so far, a record 10 tournaments without dropping a single match. When I arrive in Tokyo, in early January 2014, Hakuho has 27 championships, two more than Asashoryu’s career total and within five of the all-time record. That he will break the record is a foregone conclusion. He is in his prime, and since winning his first basho in May 2006, he has won more than half of all the grand tournaments held in Japan.

Watching Hakuho’s ring entrance, that harrowing bird dance, it is hard to imagine what his life is like. To have doubled in size, more than doubled, in the years since his 15th birthday; to have jumped cultures and languages; to have unlocked this arcane expertise. To be followed on the street. To be a non-Japanese acting as a samurai-incarnate, the last remnant of a fading culture. At the time when I went to Tokyo, there was one other yokozuna in Japan, Harumafuji, another Mongolian. He was widely seen as a second-tier champion, and when I arrived he was out with an ankle injury. Hakuho is everything. How do you experience that without losing all sense of identity? How do you remember who you are?

by Brian Phillips, Grantland |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Ratf**ked: American Democracy Betrayed

[ed. See also: Can the States Save American Democracy?]

Political paralysis. Hyperpartisanship. Decline of political civility. Denial of voting rights to groups that support the opposition. Low voter turnout. There may be other valid grievances about what’s become of our democracy, but that’s a useful list to start with. To mention them raises the question of where to begin to resolve at least some of our political problems. I’m not alone in thinking that the single problem most worth attacking first, the solution to which could go a long way toward untangling our political morass, is the blatantly partisan manipulation of our system of decennial redistricting by the states.

Redistricting works in a circular fashion by which the states get caught up in an ongoing cycle of self-protecting exploitation of the advantages of incumbency. Thus a party wins control of the legislature of a state that then draws its state and congressional districts in a way that maintains that party in power. (Also winning the governorship helps a lot.) With that power the controlling state party can decide to try to limit the voting rights of groups that might disturb this convenient arrangement and elect a president of the other party.

So much of our political commentary is clouded by a perceived and real need to be “evenhanded” (the pressures, especially on broadcasters, and especially from the right, are real) that the picture of what’s going on in our politics is often distorted. The inescapable fact is that Republicans have historically been more attuned than Democrats to the political advantages of gaining and maintaining power at the state level and more inclined to involve themselves in what might seem unglamorous structural questions.

One result is that the Republicans are overrepresented in Congress. They’ve pulled that off by working to dominate state governments and thereby get themselves in a position to draw most of the congressional districts, which gives them the power to perpetuate themselves in Congress. Thus—if they’re of a mind to—they can block whatever a Democratic president wants to do. As a result, we have a distorted contest for power between the two parties for control of the executive and legislative branches.

As of now, through redistricting, the Republicans have built themselves a bulwark against losing control of at least one of the houses of Congress—barring an unusually strong landslide. So well have the House Republicans protected themselves or been protected from a contest from the other party that, according to the Cook Political Report, only 37 out of 435 seats are being contested this year. While the precise number can be affected by other factors such as retirements or whether someone from the opposition party decides to run, redistricting, or incumbent protection, is the overwhelmingly relevant factor.

Since “gerrymandering”—drawing an oddly shaped district to give one party an advantage—has been with us since the early 1800s, what’s so different about the redistricting of today that causes such a fuss, if not yet a sufficiently strong one? The early gerrymandering was quaint compared to the current practice. The system for protecting incumbents that was used for over two centuries has turned into something else.

The Republican sweep of the House in 2010 led to efforts—and an opportunity—to preserve those gains, or as many of them as possible, by transforming the practice of redistricting in the individual states into a national party effort to shape and maintain a House majority. That effort employed sophisticated means—organized computer data that show the block-by-block makeup of an area—and money from the party and allied interest groups to win and keep power in one of the houses of Congress, irrespective of what happens in the presidential election or the overall party breakdown of the votes for the House.

The sorry story of how the House of Representatives became unrepresentative is clearly laid out in a new book, Ratf**cked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy. Despite the wise-guy title, David Daley, editor in chief of Salon and digital media fellow at the Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia, has written a sobering and convincing account of how the Republicans figured out the way to gain power in the state legislatures and, as a consequence, in the federal government through an unprecedented national effort of partisan redistricting.

By contrast the Democrats simply weren’t as interested in such dry and detailed stuff as state legislatures and redistricting. Besides, as a Democratic strategist told Daley, “The Republicans have always been better than Democrats at playing the long game.” Daley argues that the Democrats blew it after their triumphant election in 2008 of the nation’s first black president. The celebration went on too long. For the Republicans, Obama’s victory represented the threat of long-term Democratic dominance.

The thing to do, some Republican operatives concluded, was to focus on winning as many seats in state legislatures as possible in the 2010 midterm election and then press that advantage in the redistricting that would follow—picking up federal and state seats to offset Obama’s 2008 victory. The result was the Republican 2010 sweep of state governments as well as the House of Representatives—they picked up a stunning sixty-three House seats (taking control of the House) and six Senate seats (expanding their minority status), and also took control of twenty-nine of the fifty governorships and twenty-six state legislatures (to the Democrats’ fifteen).

At the time, national attention was on the congressional sweep, which resulted mainly from a major Republican assault on Obama and the recently passed Affordable Care Act and an effort (essentially guided from Washington) to form the Tea Party, an antigovernment “grassroots” movement. But arguably the more significant result of the 2010 election was that in the states the Republicans were in a position to redraw most of the congressional districts—and they did so with an unprecedentedly high-powered national project called REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project.

REDMAP was a new way to aim for successful partisan redistricting by concentrating first on winning the greatest majority possible in the congressional and state elections preceding the next Census and using the state majorities to redraw the districts. So successful was the Republican-dominated redistricting after 2010 that, in 2012, while the Democrats won 1.5 million more votes for Congress than the Republicans did, they gained only eight seats, hardly a change at all. Thus the Republicans, sheltered by the previous redistricting, held a thirty-three-vote advantage in the House despite the fact that they’d been decisively outvoted.

And then, in the next midterm election, in 2014, the Republicans parlayed dislike of Obama and their advantage from the redrawn districts into another wave of successes in gaining more congressional and state-level seats. The resulting situation was overwhelming Republican political power at the state level after 2014: they controlled thirty-two governorships, ten more than they had in 2009; they also controlled thirty-three of forty-nine state houses of representatives, and thirty-five of forty-nine state senates. (Nebraska has a unicameral state legislature.) Democrats held 816 fewer state legislative seats than they did before Obama was sworn in as president.

The Democrats to some extent brought this on themselves by not bestirring themselves to vote in the midterm elections. Only 36.6 percent of registered voters bothered to cast a ballot in 2014. The Democrats didn’t begin to organize themselves to offset the Republican advantage in drawing congressional lines until 2014, when they formed a super PAC, Advantage 2020, to do so; but they didn’t hold their first national meeting until December 2014. As far as control of the House is concerned, barring an overwhelming landslide this year the Democrats lost the decade.

Daley’s important contributions are to give us the history and to describe the impact of the Republican advantage in drawing districts after 2010. In doing so he joins a running argument over what, exactly, contributed to the notable increase over the past few years in political polarity and gridlock in Washington. On this question, many people have been influenced by the book The Big Sort, by Bill Bishop (2008). The nub of Bishop’s argument is that people are increasingly choosing to live among the like-minded and this has contributed to increased partisanship and paralysis.

Daley essentially dismisses this thesis and makes what seem more convincing arguments about what has caused these developments:

The problem with our politics is not that all of us are more partisan, or the Big Sort. It’s that we have been sorted—ratfucked—into districts where the middle does not matter, where the contest only comes down to the most ideological and rancorous on either side. Because the Republicans drew the majority of these lines, there are more rancorous Republicans than Democrats.2

(The House Democrats who recently staged a sit-in on the House floor to push for consideration of a gun bill might have done well to keep this point in mind; if the day comes when they’re in the majority, the Republicans can be counted on to outdo them in disrupting House proceedings.)

Daley also explains one of the most important developments in recent years: the near disappearance of moderate Republicans. Democratic presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Bill Clinton could rely on moderate Republicans to help them pass their initiatives, while Obama has had virtually none. Where did the Republican moderates go? The answer is that most of the House moderates were eliminated by Republican redistricting. In drawing safe districts, the Republican mapmakers diminished the forces within a district—Democrats, minorities—that might pull a Republican representative to the left.

Senators aren’t redistricted, of course, but moderate Senate Republicans were subjected to the same political trend faced by moderate House Republicans: their renomination could be challenged from their right. Even reliable conservatives weren’t safe. The defeats for renomination of senior Republican Bob Bennett of Utah in a state convention in 2010 and Eric Cantor of Virginia in a primary in 2014 by Tea Party–backed challengers scared their colleagues.

In recent years, elections have been increasingly settled in the primaries. The near liquidation of moderate Republicans has virtually ended bipartisan coalitions that might support a Democratic president’s initiatives. And coalitions of Republicans and moderate Democrats in support of Republican proposals were also greatly diminished as a result of Republican line-drawing that lopped off areas, mainly in southern and border states, that had produced most of those moderate Democrats, or Blue Dogs. This led not only to fewer Democratic House seats but also to the gradual reduction of moderate Democrats, to the point of near extinction.

by Elizabeth Drew, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner with Democrat Nancy Pelosi, AndrewHarrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Mike Hutchings / Reuters
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[ed. Think I'll just mow the lawn...]

'Sleep Startup' Casper Dreams of Overturning the Mattress Racket

[ed. See also: Fido deserves the best.]

"Buying a mattress is one of the worst consumer experiences in the world," says Philip Krim. Yet, few startups have really tried to improve it — perhaps because the mattress business isn’t exactly the sexiest industry around. Buying a mattress will never be like buying an iPhone. The archetypal smarmy mattress store salesman is nothing like an Apple Store Genius. But Krim, the CEO of "sleep startup" Casper, doesn’t see how the two are so different.

You spend a third of your life sleeping on a mattress, which is probably also in line with the amount of time you spend on your smartphone. All the while, you drop hundreds of dollars on a phone every two years, but mattresses are a considered to be a pricey purchase, even when you only buy one every five or more years. But it’s hard to blame consumers, Krim says, since mattress stores are downright terrible. He decided to start his own company selling premium mattresses on the web, for half the cost of competitors. Casper’s first mattress goes on sale today.

"Statistically, lying on a bed for four minutes has no correlation to whether it’s the right bed for you," says Krim, citing leading mattress reviews site Sleep Like The Dead. But even if they were correlated, he’s convinced that most mattress stores are selling people the wrong beds. He wants to expose the showroom fallacy pervading mattress stores across the country. "We looked at the hotel industry, where they don’t ask you what kind of bed you need, and in general people love sleeping on hotel beds," he says. "We always knew about the games retailers play with having eight gradients of firmness — that’s part of how they guide you through the showroom towards something more expensive and more comfortable."

The most comfortable beds at the mattress store quite likely also cost the most to produce, but Krim’s convinced that he can produce a similar quality mattress for much cheaper. After reflecting on his experiences selling mattresses at his father’s e-commerce company and testing dozens of designs, Krim and co settled on a "medium-firm," 10-inch-deep bed that has a bottom layer of less expensive foam, a midsection of Tempur Pedic-esque memory foam, and a top layer of latex foam. For the final testing phases, Casper even lent some beds to local New York City Airbnb hosts and got feedback on how renters liked them.

Latex mattress often cost over $1500, but Casper’s mattresses cost between $500 for a twin-sized mattress and $950 for a king-sized mattress. You could attribute this price differential in part to the notoriously high markups in the mattress industry — markups which Krim says he has cut out by breaking down the supply chain and sourcing manufacturers one by one. Casper also cut costs by not dealing with resellers and showrooms. Thus, he says, Casper isn’t as much about creating a new mattress as much as it is about bringing what he claims is the best mattress technology to the masses for the first time. "Latex is the greatest sleep material out there, but it hasn’t been popularized in the US really — there’s no big company trying to sell the benefits to consumers," he says. "You can build something that’s universally supportive and comfortable for 99 percent of people out there."

by Ellis Hamburger, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Casper

Guardando Degas, Museo d’ Orsay, Parigi
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Wikipedia is not Therapy (and the Exploding Whale)

[ed. Linked from the article: Wikipedia is not Therapy.]

The term exploding whale most often refers to an event at Florence, Oregon, United States in November 1970, when a dead sperm whale (reported to be a gray whale) was blown up by the Oregon Highway Division in an attempt to dispose of its rotting carcass. The explosion threw whale flesh over 800 feet (240 m) away. This incident became famous in the United States when American humorist Dave Barry wrote about it in his newspaper column after viewing a videotape of television footage of the explosion. The event became well-known internationally a few decades later when the same footage circulated on the Internet. It was also parodied in the 2007 movie Reno 911!: Miami.

There have also been examples of spontaneously exploding whales. The most widely reported example was in Taiwan in 2004, when the buildup of gas inside a decomposing sperm whale caused it to explode in a crowded urban area while it was being transported for a post-mortem examination.

Event

On November 12, 1970, a 45-foot (14 m) long, 8-short-ton (7,300 kg) sperm whale beached itself at Florence on the central Oregon Coast. Oregon beaches are now under the jurisdiction of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, but in 1970, beaches were technically classified as state highways, so responsibility for disposing of the carcass fell upon the Oregon Highway Division (now known as the Oregon Department of Transportation, or ODOT). After consulting with officials from the United States Navy, the OHD decided to remove the whale in the same way as they would remove a boulder. They thought burying the whale would be ineffective as it would soon be uncovered, and believed dynamite would disintegrate the whale into pieces small enough for scavengers to clear up.

Thus, half a ton of dynamite was applied to the carcass. The engineer in charge of the operation, George Thornton, in an interview with Portland newsman Paul Linnman, stated that he wasn't exactly sure how much dynamite would be needed. Thornton later explained that he was chosen to remove the whale because the district engineer, Dale Allen, had gone hunting.

Coincidentally, a military veteran from Springfield with explosives training, Walter Umenhofer, was at the scene scoping a potential manufacturing site for his employer. Umenhofer warned Thornton that the planned 20 cases of dynamite was far too much; 20 sticks of dynamite would have sufficed. Umenhofer said Thornton was not interested in the advice. In an odd coincidence, Umenhofer's brand-new Oldsmobile, purchased during a "Get a Whale of a Deal" promotion in Eugene, was flattened by a chunk of falling blubber after the blast.

The resulting explosion was caught on film by cameraman Doug Brazil for a story reported by news reporter Paul Linnman of KATU-TV in Portland, Oregon. In his voice-over, Linnman joked that "land-lubber newsmen" became "land-blubber newsmen ... for the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds." The explosion caused large pieces of blubber to land near buildings and in parking lots some distance away from the beach. Only some of the whale was disintegrated; most of it remained on the beach for the OHD workers to clear away. In his report, Linnman also noted that scavenger birds, whom it had been hoped would eat the remains of the carcass after the explosion, did not appear as they were possibly scared away by the noise.

Ending his story, Linnman noted that "It might be concluded that, should a whale ever be washed ashore in Lane County again, those in charge will not only remember what to do, they'll certainly remember what notto do." When 41 sperm whales beached nearby in 1979, state parks officials burned and buried them.

Thornton later that day told the Eugene Register-Guard, "It went just exactly right. ... Except the blast funneled a hole in the sand under the whale" and that some of the whale chunks were subsequently blown back toward the onlookers and their cars.

Thornton was promoted to the Medford office several months after the incident, and served in that post until his retirement. When Linnman contacted him in the mid-1990s, the newsman said Thornton felt the operation had been an overall success and had been converted into a public-relations disaster by hostile media reports.

Currently, Oregon State Parks Department policy is to bury whale carcasses where they land. If the sand is not deep enough, they are relocated to another beach.

Renewed interest

For several years, the story of the exploding whale was commonly thought to be an urban legend. However, it was brought to widespread public attention by popular writer Dave Barry in his Miami Herald column of May 20, 1990, when he reported that he possessed footage of the event. Barry wrote, "Here at the [Exploding Animal Research] Institute we watch it often, especially at parties." Some time later, the Oregon State Highway division started to receive calls from the media after a shortened version of the article was distributed on bulletin boards under the title "The Far Side Comes to Life in Oregon". The unattributed copy of Barry's article did not explain that the event had happened approximately twenty-five years earlier. Barry later said that, on a fairly regular basis, someone would forward him the "authorless" column and suggest he write something about the described incident. As a result of these omissions, an article in the ODOT's TranScript notes that,

"We started getting calls from curious reporters across the country right after the electronic bulletin board story appeared," said Ed Schoaps, public affairs coordinator for the Oregon Department of Transportation. "They thought the whale had washed ashore recently, and were hot on the trail of a governmental blubber flub-up. They were disappointed that the story has twenty five years of dust on it."

Schoaps has fielded calls from reporters and the just plain curious in Oregon, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts. The Wall Street Journal called, and Washington, D.C.-basedGoverning magazine covered the immortal legend of the beached whale in its June issue. And the phone keeps ringing. "I get regular calls about this story," Schoaps said. His phone has become the blubber hotline for ODOT, he added. "It amazes me that people are still calling about this story after nearly twenty five years.

The footage that was referred to in the article, of the KATU news story reported by Paul Linnman, resurfaced later as a video file on several websites, becoming a well-known and popular internet meme. (These websites attracted criticism from upset people who complained that they were making fun of acts of animal cruelty, even though the whale was already dead. These critical emails were subsequently published by the amused site webmasters.)

A 2006 study found that the video had been viewed 350 million times across various websites.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Images: Wikipedia 

Foldable Smartphones

Samsung Files Another Foldable Smartphone Patent

[ed. Finally. See also: here and here]

Henri Boulanger Gray, Pétrole Stella poster(detail), 1897
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Walmart and the Multichannel Trap

In February 1991, the very month that Walmart overtook the most iconic American retailer in sales, Sears spokesman Jerry Buldak told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the companies couldn’t really be compared:

“We feel the mission of Sears is to be an integrated, powerful specialty merchant, with brand names and our own lines of exclusive merchandise,” company spokesman Jerry Buldak said. “We feel that distinguishes us from other retail specialty stores or discount chains.”

No other retailer, he said, offers customers as much under one roof: insurance and other financial services, Sears’ own credit-card operation, with more than 28 million customers, and a nationwide repair network to service merchandise.

Twenty-five years later the solipsism of Buldak’s statement remains remarkable, especially since Sears’ demise had been set in motion 29 years earlier.

1962 was perhaps the most consequential year in retailing history: in Ohio the five-and-dime retailer F.W. Woolworth Company created a new discount retailer called Woolco; S.S. Kresge Corporation created Kmart in Michigan; the Dayton Company opened the first Target in Minnesota; and Sam Walton founded the first Walmart. All four were based on the same premise: branded goods didn’t need the expensive overhead of mass merchandisers, which meant prices could be lower. Lower prices served in turn as a powerful draw for customers, driving higher volumes, which meant more inventory turns, which increased profitability.

Sears, which had introduced a huge number of those brands to America’s middle class, first through their catalog and then through a massive post-World War II expansion into physical retail, was stuck in the middle: higher prices than the discounters, but much less differentiation than high-end department stores. By the time Buldak gave his statement the company’s fate as an also-ran was sealed, even though no one at Sears had a clue: Buldak’s stated mission of being “an integrated, powerful specialty merchant, with brand names and our own lines of exclusive merchandise” failed to consider whether customers gave a damn.

Walmart in the Middle

There is certainly an echo of history in Amazon’s rise; over time the one-time bookseller has developed a dominant strategy that resembles Sears in its heyday: lower prices and better selection, and over the past few years especially, incredible convenience. Walmart has felt the pain for a while, at least in its stock price: Amazon overtook the largest retailer in market cap last summer, just in time for Walmart’s sales to flatten or even drop; in May the company reported a 1.1% decline in year-over-year same store sales in the U.S., the fourth poor quarter in a row.

Walmart is stuck in a new middle, surrounded not just by old competitors like Target, but new ones like Kroger (groceries have provided much of Walmart’s recent sales growth), deep discounters like Aldi, club-based retailers like Costco, and convenience-focused drugstores. Looming above all of them, though, is Amazon.

Walmart, which launched its first online site back in 1999, has consistently told investors it can handle the threat. In the clearest articulation of a strategy that has been repeated on earnings calls ad nauseum, then-CEO of Walmart.com in the U.S. Joel Anderson told investors on a 2011 analyst call:

One of our key pillars of digital success and differentiation will be about building a continuous channel approach. Specifically, I’d like to share with you the progress we have made in 3 areas to leverage our multichannel for the U.S. business. 

The first of those areas is around the idea of assortment. It is our role online to extend that shelf in the stores. The offline merchants here in Bentonville set the strategy, and then it’s our job to broaden that assortment… 

Secondly, I want to focus on access. Several pilots are currently in place to leverage our ship-from-store capabilities. We will offer next-day delivery at a very economical price. We will use these capabilities to reach customers in urban areas that we have not yet penetrated. 

The third area is fulfillment. We already have unlimited assets in place, nearly 4,000 stores, over 150 DCs. This will give us the flexibility to offer our customers best-in-class delivery options. 

For example, last week, we transitioned several disparaged shipping offers into one comprehensive fulfillment program. We are now offering 3 compelling free shipping programs. This is an excellent example of multichannel strategy beginning to come to life.

The fulfillment program Anderson went on to describe was ridiculously complex: “fast” shipped anything online to your local store, “faster” shipped a smaller selection to your house, while “fastest” made an even smaller selection available for pickup the same day. Anderson concluded:

“Fast, faster, fastest. What a great example of a continuous channel experience that cannot easily be replicated.”

What a positively Buldakian statement! Of course such an experience “cannot easily be replicated”, because who would want to? It was, like Sears’ “socks-to-stocks” strategy, driven by solipsism: instead of starting with customer needs and working backwards to a solution, Walmart started with their own reality and created a convoluted mess. Predictably it failed.

The Multichannel Trap

The problems with Walmart’s original approach were threefold:

• It was confusing: “Fast faster fastest” and its various iterations put all of the onus on customers to figure out what worked best for them, and for which items. Why, though, should customers bother? If they want to buy something in person, go to Walmart. If they want it delivered, go to Amazon. You know exactly what you will get from both experiences (which, by extension, favors Amazon in the long run).

• It was complicated: Much of Walmart’s economic might derived from a logistics system that included distribution centers serving clusters of stores, connected by Walmart’s own trucking fleet (and before the Internet, the world’s largest private satellite communication network). That seems on the surface like a useful tool for e-commerce, until you get into the reality that shipping individual items at all hours is a very different problem than shipping pallets to stores once a day (I would analogize it to Microsoft trying to port the Start menu from the desktop to a mobile phone), and solving for one business increases costs and complexity for the other.

• It was confined: This is where the Sears story comes full circle: Walmart spent decades building stores in smaller cities, not only killing off less efficient local retailers but also removing the need to visit mass merchandisers in the big city. The company still has not fully penetrated some urban areas, but more than enough urbanites drive out to Walmart and its competitors to have all but killed Sears, JC Penney, etc.

Now Amazon is doing the same to Walmart, but in this case the encirclement has been multidimensional: delivery of just about anything everywhere at prices that are usually hard to beat (and again, Prime customers aren’t even checking), and, over the last few years, within two days at worst, two hours at best.

by Ben Thompson, Stratechery |  Read more:

Image: Thomson Reuters via:

Kiyoshi Saito, Tanbo 1962
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Anti-Inflammatory Drug Reverses Memory Loss in Alzheimer’s-Disease-Model Mice

Anti-inflammatory drug mefenamic acid completely reversed memory loss and brain inflammation in mice genetically engineered to develop symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and amyloid beta-induced memory loss, a team led byDavid Brough, PhD, from the University of Manchester has discovered.

The non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) drug targets an important inflammatory pathway called the NLRP3 inflammasome, which damages brain cells, according to Brough. This is the first time a drug has been shown to target this inflammatory pathway, highlighting its importance in the disease model, Brough said.

“Because this drug is already available and the toxicity and pharmacokinetics of the drug is known, the time for it to reach patients should, in theory, be shorter than if we were developing completely new drugs. We are now preparing applications to perform early phase II trials to determine a proof-of-concept that the molecules have an effect on neuroinflammation in humans.”

“There is experimental evidence now to strongly suggest that inflammation in the brain makes Alzheimer’s disease worse. Until now, no drug has been available to target this pathway, so we are very excited by this result.”

by Kurzweil AI, Read more:

Image: NIH National Institute on Aging

Dispatch from Flyover Country

The august before last, my husband and I moved to Muskegon, a town on the scenic and economically depressed west coast of Michigan. I grew up in the state, but most of my friends have left it, or else are too beleaguered by children to answer their phones. We live in a trailer in the woods, one paneled with oak-grained laminate and beneath which a family of raccoons have made their home. There is a small screened-in porch and a large deck that extends over the side of a sand dune. We work there in the mornings beneath the ceiling of broadleaves, teaching our online classes and completing whatever freelance projects we’ve managed to scrape together that week. Occasionally, I’ll try to amuse him by pitching my latest idea for a screenplay. “An out-of-work stuntman leaves Hollywood and becomes an Uber driver,” I’ll say. “It’s about second chances in the sharing economy.” We write the kinds of things that return few material rewards; there is no harm in fantasizing. After dinner, we take the trail that runs from the back of the trailer through an aisle of high pines, down the side of the dune to Lake Michigan.

Evenings have been strange this year: hazy, surreal. Ordinarily, Michigan sunsets are like a preview of the apocalypse, a celestial fury of reds and tangerines. But since we moved here, each day expires in white gauze. The evening air grows thick with fog, and as the sun descends toward the water, it grows perfectly round and blood-colored, lingering on the horizon like an evil planet. If a paddle-boarder happens to cross the lake, the vista looks exactly like one of those old oil paintings of Hanoi. For a long time, we assumed the haze was smog wafting in from Chicago, or perhaps Milwaukee. But one night, as we walked along the beach, we bumped into a friend of my mother’s who told us it was from the California wildfires. She’d heard all about it on the news: smoke from the hills of the Sierra Nevada had apparently been carried on an eastern jet stream thousands of miles across the country, all the way to our beach.

“That seems impossible,” I said.

“It does seem impossible,” she agreed, and the three of us stood there on the shore, staring at the horizon as though if we looked hard enough, we might glimpse whatever was burning on the far side of the country.

The Midwest is a somewhat slippery notion. It is a region whose existence—whose very name—has always been contingent upon the more fixed and concrete notion of the West. Historically, these interior states were less a destination than a corridor, a gateway that funneled travelers from the east into the vast expanse of the frontier. The great industrial cities of this region—Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis—were built as “hubs,” places where the rivers and the railroads met, where all the goods of the prairie accumulated before being shipped to the exterior states. Today, coastal residents stop here only to change planes, a fact that has solidified our identity as a place to be passed over. To be fair, people who live here seem to prefer it this way. Gift shops along the shores of the Great Lakes sell T-shirts bearing the logo Flyover Living. For a long time, the unofficial nickname for the state of Indiana was “Crossroads of America.” Each time my family passed the state line, my sisters and I would mock its odd, anti-touristic logic (“Nothing to see here, folks!”).

When I was young, my family moved across the borders of these interior states—from Illinois to Michigan to Wisconsin. My father sold industrial lubricant, an occupation that took us to the kinds of cities that had been built for manufacturing and by the end of the century lay mostly abandoned, covered, like Pompeii, in layers of ash. We lived on the outskirts of these cities, in midcentury bedroom communities, or else beyond them, in subdivisions built atop decimated cornfields. On winter evenings, when the last flush of daylight stretched across the prairie, the only sight for miles was the green and white lights of airport runways blinking in the distance like lodestars. We were never far from a freeway, and at night the whistle of trains passing through was as much a part of the soundscape as the wind or the rain. It is like this anywhere you go in the Midwest. It is the sound of transit, of things passing through. People who grew up here tend to tune it out, but if you stop and actually listen, it can be disarming. On some nights, it’s easy to imagine that it is the sound of a more profound shifting, as though the entire landscape of this region—the north woods, the tallgrass prairies, the sand dunes, and the glacial moraines—is itself fluid and impermanent.

It’s difficult to live here without developing an existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still. I spent most of my twenties in south Chicago, in an apartment across from a hellscape of coal-burning plants that ran on grandfather clauses and churned out smoke blacker than the night sky. To live there during the digital revolution was like existing in an anachronism. When I opened my windows in summer, soot blew in with the breeze; I swept piles of it off my floor, which left my hands blackened like a scullery maid’s. I often thought that Dickens’s descriptions of industrial England might have aptly described twenty-first century Chicago. “It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.” Far from the blat of the city, there was another world, one depicted on television and in the pages of magazines—a nirvana of sprawling green parks and the distant silence of wind turbines. Billboards glowed above the streets like portals into another world, one where everything was reduced to clean and essential lines. You Are Beautiful, said one of them, its product unmentioned or unclear. Another featured a blue sky marked with cumulus clouds and the words: Imagine Peace.

I still believed during those years that I would end up in New York, or perhaps in California. I never had any plans for how to get there. I truly believed I would “end up” there, swept by that force of nature that funneled each harvest to the exterior states and carried young people off along with it. Instead, I found work as a cocktail waitress at a bar downtown, across from the state prison. The regulars were graying men who sat impassively at the bar each night, reading the Tribune in silence. The nature of my job, according to my boss, was to be an envoy of feminine cheer in that dark place, and so I occasionally wandered over to offer some chipper comment on the headlines—“Looks like the stimulus package is going to pass”—a task that was invariably met with a cascade of fatalism.

“You think any of that money’s going to make it to Chicago?”

“They should make Wall Street pay for it,” someone quipped.

“Nah, that would be too much like right.”

Any news of emerging technology was roundly dismissed as unlikely. If I mentioned self-driving cars, or 3-D printers, one of the men would hold up his cell phone and say, “They can’t even figure out how to get us service south of Van Buren.”

For a long time, I mistook this for cynicism. In reality, it is something more like stoicism, a resistance to excitement that is native to this region. The longer I live here, the more I detect it in myself. It is less disposition than habit, one that comes from tuning out the fashions and revelations of the coastal cities, which have nothing to do with you, just as you learned as a child to ignore those local boosters who proclaimed, year after year, that your wasted rustbelt town was on the cusp of revival. Some years ago, the Detroit Museum of Modern Art installed on its western exterior a neon sign that read EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT. For several months, this message brightened the surrounding blight and everyone spoke of it as a symbol of hope. Then the installation was changed to read: NOTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT. They couldn’t help themselves, I guess. To live here is to develop a wariness toward all forms of unqualified optimism; it is to know that progress comes in fits and starts, that whatever promise the future holds, its fruits may very well pass on by, on their way to somewhere else.

My husband and I live just up the hill from the grounds of a Bible camp where I spent the summers of my childhood, a place called Maranatha. People in town assume the name is Native American, but it is in fact an Aramaic word that means “Come, Lord,” and which appears in the closing sentences of the New Testament. The apostolic fathers once spoke the word as a prayer, and it was repeated by people of faith throughout the centuries, a mantra to fill God’s millennia-long silence. When the camp was built in the early years of the last century, a more ominous English formulation—“The Lord is Coming”—was carved into the cedar walls of the Tabernacle. Everyone is still waiting.

From Memorial Day to Labor Day, the grounds are overrun with evangelical families who come from all over the Midwest to spend their summer vacations on the beach. They stay for weeks at a time in the main lodge, and some stay for the whole summer in cottages built on stilts atop what is the largest collection of freshwater dunes in the world. My parents own one of these cottages; so do my grandparents. Each year, a representative from the DNR comes out to warn them that the dunes are eroding and the houses will one day slide into the lake—prophecies that go unheeded. Everyone plants more dune grass and prays for a few more years. I once pointed out to my mother that there is, in fact, a Biblical parable about the foolish man who builds his house on sand, but she chided me for my pedantic literalism. “That parable,” she said, “is about having a foundational faith.”

We moved here because we love this part of Michigan and because I have family here. Also, because it’s cheap to live here and we’re poor. We’ve lost track of the true reason. Or rather, the foremost reasons and the incidental ones are easy to confuse. Before, we were in Madison, Wisconsin, where we were teaching college writing and juggling other part-time jobs. As more of this work migrated online, location became negotiable. We have the kind of career people like to call “flexible,” meaning we buy our own health insurance, work in our underwear, and are taxed like a small business. Sometimes we fool ourselves into believing that we’ve outsmarted the system, that we’ve harnessed the plucky spirit of those DIY blogs that applaud young couples for turning a toolshed or a teardrop camper into a studio apartment, as though economic instability were the great crucible of American creativity.

On Saturday nights, the camp hosts a concert, and my husband and I occasionally walk down to the Tabernacle to listen to whatever band has been bused in from Nashville. Neither of us is a believer, but we enjoy the music. The bands favor gospel standards, a blend of highlands ballads and Gaither-style revivalism. The older generation here includes a contingent of retired missionaries. Many of them are widows, women who spent their youth carrying the gospel to the Philippines or the interior of Ecuador, and after the service they smile faintly at me as they pass by our pew, perhaps sensing a family resemblance. Occasionally, one of them will grip my forearm and say, “Tell me who you are.” The response to this question is “I’m Colleen’s daughter.” Or, if that fails to register: “I’m Paul and Marilyn’s granddaughter.” It is unnerving to identify oneself in this way. My husband once noted that it harkens back to the origins of surnames, to the clans of feudal times who identified villagers by patronymic epithets. John’s son became Johnson, etcetera. To do so now is to see all the things that constitute a modern identity—all your quirks and accomplishments—rendered obsolete.

This is among the many reasons why young people leave these states. When you live in close proximity to your parents and aging relatives, it’s impossible to forget that you too will grow old and die. It’s the same reason, I suspect, that people are made uncomfortable by the specter of open landscapes, why the cornfields and empty highways of the heartland inspire so much angst. There was a time when people spoke of such vistas as metaphors for opportunity—“expand your horizons”—a convention, I suppose, that goes back to the days of the frontier. Today, opportunity is the province of cities, and the view here signals not possibility but visible constraints. To look out at the expanse of earth, scraped clean of novelty and distraction, is to remember in a very real sense what lies at the end of your own horizon.

Many of our friends who grew up here now live in Brooklyn, where they are at work on “book-length narratives.” Another contingent has moved to the Bay Area and made a fortune there. Every year or so, these west-coasters travel back to Michigan and call us up for dinner or drinks, occasions they use to educate us on the inner workings of the tech industry. They refer to the companies they work for in the first person plural, a habit I have yet to acculturate to. Occasionally they lapse into the utopian, speaking of robotics ordinances and brain-computer interfaces and the mystical, labyrinthine channels of capital, conveying it all with the fervency of pioneers on a civilizing mission. Being lectured quickly becomes dull, and so my husband and I, to amuse ourselves, will sometimes play the rube. “So what, exactly, is a venture capitalist?” we’ll say. Or: “Gosh, it sounds like science fiction.” I suppose we could tell them the truth—that nothing they’re proclaiming is news; that the boom and bustle of the coastal cities, like the smoke from those California wildfires, liberally wafts over the rest of the country. But that seems a bit rude. We are, after all, Midwesterners. (...)

Madison was utopia for a certain kind of Midwesterner: the Baptist boy who grew up reading Wittgenstein, the farm lass who secretly dreamed about the girl next door. It should have been such a place for me as well. Instead, I came to find the live bluegrass outside the co-op insufferable. I developed a physical allergy to NPR. Sitting in a bakery one morning, I heard the opening theme of Morning Edition drift in from the kitchen and started scratching my arms as though contracting a rash. My husband tried to get me to articulate what it was that bothered me, but I could never come up with the right adjective. Self-satisfied? Self-congratulatory? I could never get past aesthetics. On the way home from teaching my night class, I would unwind by listening to a fundamentalist preacher who delivered exegeses on the Pentateuch and occasionally lapsed into fire and brimstone. The drive was long, and I would slip into something like a trance state, failing to register the import of the message but calmed nonetheless by the familiar rhythm of conviction.

Over time, I came to dread the parties and potlucks. Most of the people we knew had spent time on the coasts, or had come from there, or were frequently traveling from one to the other, and the conversation was always about what was happening elsewhere: what people were listening to in Williams-burg, or what everyone was wearing at Coachella. A sizeable portion of the evening was devoted to the plots of premium TV dramas. Occasionally there were long arguments about actual ideas, but they always crumbled into semantics. What do you mean by duty? someone would say. Or: It all depends on your definition of morality. At the end of these nights, I would get into the car with the first throb of a migraine, saying that we didn’t have any business discussing anything until we could, all of us, articulate a coherent ideology. It seemed to me then that we suffered from the fundamental delusion that we had elevated ourselves above the rubble of hinterland ignorance—that fair-trade coffee and Orange You Glad It’s Vegan? cake had somehow redeemed us of our sins. All of us had, like the man in the parable, built our houses on sand.

by Meghan O'Gieblyn, Threepenny Review | Read more:
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