The Pleasures of Protest: Taking on Gentrification in Chinatown

[ed. If there's anywhere I'd like to live in Seattle (if there was anywhere I could live in Seattle, it would be the Asian district - or Beacon Hill, the outermost reaches of its influence). Sadly, those communities won't be around in their present form much longer I'm afraid.]

On a cold night in the early winter months of 2007, I was with a group of tenants — all Latino and Chinese immigrant families — clustered together in front of their home, two buildings on Delancey Street that straddled the border between Chinatown and the Lower East Side. We were there, shivering in the cold, to protest their landlords.

Ever since they bought the two buildings in 2001, the owners of 55 Delancey and 61 Delancey Street — Nir Sela, Michael Daniel, and 55 Delancey Street Realty LLC — had been attempting to kick out the Chinese and Latino families who had lived there, but in recent months, the situation had come to a head. They had begun aggressively bringing tenants to housing court, often on trumped up charges (one lawsuit argued that, based on the number of shoes displayed inside the apartment, it was obvious that more than just one family lived there); offered several families significant buyouts to leave; and had refused to make basic repairs. For stretches at a time, and in the coldest days of winter, there had been no heat or hot water.

That evening, huddled in our winter coats and clutching hand-made signs, we waited for the arrival of one of the owners, who had agreed to meet with us and discuss our demands.

I had been volunteering with CAAAV, a tenant organizing group in Chinatown, and in the months prior, I had spent many of my nights going from apartment to apartment, often with Zhi Qin Zheng, a resident of the building as well as an organizer at CAAAV, helping to painstakingly document their living conditions and assisting residents in calling the city’s 311 hotline so that each housing code violation would be on record.

Their apartments were cramped, even rundown, but for these families, it was home, and they wanted to stay. Over the years, each building had become a small community, one where people felt comfortable leaving their doors open and asking each other to watch their children. “If we left, where would we go?” Sau Ying Kwok, a feisty grandmother with a nimbus of frizzy hair, wondered aloud. She had become one of the more vocal leaders in the building, along with the soft-spoken You Liu Lin, a man in his middle years with a penchant for Brylcreeming his hair as well as shoving bottles of water and perfect Fuji apples into my hands whenever I knocked on his door.

I often questioned why I was there on those trips. I had moved to the city three years prior from Texas, fresh out of college and possessing a vague notion that I would put my Asian American Studies degree to use and, in the words of 1960s radicals inspired by Mao Zedong, “serve the people.”

In a way, I was continuing the tradition of those who were part of the Asian American movement of the 1960s — young, mostly college-educated Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans who not only coined the term “Asian American” but also immersed themselves in ethnic enclaves like Chinatown on the east and west coasts.

In Serve The People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties, her book chronicling the Asian American movement, Karen Ishizuka wrote that people had to become Asian American. It wasn’t about your ethnic background, but “a political identity developed out of the oppositional consciousness of the Long Sixties, in order to be seen and heard.”

But there has always been a disconnect between these Asian American activists and the people they served, who tended to be primarily working-class immigrants, a disconnect that I felt keenly. What was I, an ABC (American-born Chinese) doing in a mostly immigrant community, with my barely passable Mandarin? I didn’t really know, but I felt a complicated sense of belonging that I had never experienced before, complicated because I was, in many ways, an outsider — someone not from the neighborhood or embedded in its history, who wasn’t threaded through the day-to-day life that makes a grouping of city blocks a community. Yet the residents didn’t treat me as an outsider when they invited me into their homes; being Chinese, it seemed, was enough.

It was easy to understand why the owners would want to wholesale evict these families, who all lived in rent-stabilized apartments where rents were, on average, $1000 or less, far below what the owners could charge in the hot real estate market of lower Manhattan, where people fought for the right to pay $3000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.

That night, I got a lesson in what some have called the pleasures of protest. When Nir Sela and his wife arrived and saw the mass of people waiting for them on the sidewalk, when they saw the cameras, they quickly turned around and walked away. We began following them, scores of people chanting, “Shame on you! Shame on you!” They quickly got into a cab and sped away. Despite the abrupt cancellation of the meeting we had planned, everyone seemed pleased, smiles on their faces.

Soon after, the tenants decided to go on a rent strike. It was a success — a few months later, the owners capitulated, agreeing to make all the necessary repairs and to end eviction proceedings, along with a payment of $3000 to each household. Less than a year later, I would join the staff of CAAAV as a full-time housing organizer, still high off the success of that campaign victory.

But in a city where finance capital reigns, this sense of victory wouldn’t last for long.

* * *

Chinatown as we know it today didn’t really exist until the 1970s, when, in the wake of the 1965 Immigration Act, Chinese immigrants began arriving in large numbers.

Yet as early as the 1850s, one could find a small bachelor community of Chinese men living in what was then known as Five Points (and what some today have called “America’s first slum”), a neighborhood that had arisen on top of a landfill whose residents were free blacks as well as Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants. Jacob Riis in his influential 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, devoted an entire chapter to Chinatown, writing dismissively, “Chinatown as a spectacle is disappointing. Next door to the Bend, it has little of its outdoor stir and life, none of its gayly-colored rags or picturesque filth and poverty.” Yet the neighborhood, he noted, had already taken on the tinge of the exotic, New Yorkers believing it was rife with far more opium dens than actually existed.

The black residents fled after an anti-abolition riot; the Chinese men, sailors as well as workers who had moved from the west coast in the wake of increasingly oppressive laws and racist mob violence, stayed because they had nowhere else to go. “Residents of New York Chinatown could not cross Canal Street into Little Italy without the risk of being beaten up;” wrote John Kuo Wei Tchen, the historian and founder of the Museum of Chinese in America, “laundry men in the scattered boroughs and suburbs illegally lived in the back of their shops because they could not rent apartments.”

By the early 1960s, there were only 5,000 residents of Chinatown, mostly elderly men who lived on the blocks clustered around Columbus Park. The neighborhood surrounding it was in decline, the Irish having moved away decades prior, and the Jewish and Italian immigrants who had come to define the Lower East Side having already begun fleeing in rapid numbers.

Without the 1965 Immigration Act, Chinatown would have faded away. But as tens of thousands of immigrants began flocking to New York City, the empty tenements and boarded up storefronts filled with families and small businesses, and the old garment factories once again hummed with the sound of sewing machines, this time manned by a workforce of Chinese immigrant women. Chinatown mushroomed over the next two decades, spreading until it was bordered by Soho and Tribeca to the west and the East River on the opposite end, with Delancey Street settled as the line delineating Chinatown from the Lower East Side.

According to the scholar Peter Kwong, this expansion ended by the mid-1990s, halted by the revitalization of the neighborhoods bordering Chinatown. The events of 9/11 further destabilized the neighborhood, located as it was so close to the Financial District, but, as Kwong put it in the New York Times: “The root cause of the decline of Chinatown predated the 9/11 attack; the collapse of the garment industry and years of harm done by real estate speculation had already taken their toll on the community.”

I didn’t know any of this history when I came to New York City in 2004 and moved into an apartment in central Harlem, itself a neighborhood in flux, where I paid $750 each month to live with two roommates. Like most, all I knew was that Chinatown had a lot of Chinese people, and that fact alone drew me to the neighborhood on evenings after work and on weekends. Having grown up in south Texas, I had moved in large part out of a desire to live somewhere where I could feel a sense of belonging that I hadn’t had as a child.

People expressed a lot of strange beliefs about Chinatown, ideas that became increasingly more bizarre to me the more time I spent in the neighborhood. It’s often described as “gritty” or “dirty,” or as “exotic.” Other commonly used descriptors are “authentic” and “unchanging.”

Those descriptions made me cringe, not only for the casual racism underpinning them and, in the words of the scholar Lisa Lowe in her book Immigrant Acts, “the gaze that seeks to exoticize [Chinatown] as antiquated artifact”, but because they miss an essential truth of the neighborhood — that what is thought of as exotic or authentic to some, is simply the minutiae of life for others. (...)

And yet I too was guilty of a sort of fetishization, for I had my own foolish, romantic notions of the neighborhood, tinged with a nostalgia for a home I had never had. Eating dumplings wasn’t just a meal — it was embracing my culture. During the four years that I worked in the neighborhood, these notions were quickly disabused by the everyday life and reality that I saw around me. I began to understand that Chinatown was a vibrant neighborhood of the present, the kind that urban planning writer and activist Jane Jacobs described as displaying the “exuberant diversity” that she believed characterized the best cities, the ones that thrived.

by Esther Wang, Longreads |  Read more:

Image: Katie Kosma

Leo Berne, Hunger, February 2016
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The State of the Menswear Union

[ed. I have more nice clothes to wear than I have opportunities to wear them.]

A man in his early thirties relaxes outside a barber shop on Crosby Street one humid New York afternoon. He scrolls intently through his iPhone, the square ice cubes in a cup resting by his elbow tinted brown by what little remains of his coffee.

He looks great: thick black dreads piled in a haphazardly perfect manner atop his head, an off-white linen shirt that's both stylish and functionally appropriate for the unrelenting heat, baby blue pants that hug — not squeeze — his body, canvas sneakers, no socks. He's the modern man, cool and comfortable and aesthetically aware.

The other guys wandering down Crosby Street look similar, many with skinny black jeans rolled at the ankles, the better to show off bright new Nikes. The coolest dude pairs pants that have huge holes in the knees with an oversized white tee under button-down chambray, plus a flat-brim hat. He disappears into a building that's under construction. Even the worst-dressed men — five bros loudly recounting the previous night's exploits — look pretty good. They make their athleisure tracksuit pants work with the simple shirts and sneakers they chose after waking up hungover that morning.

Yes, this is Crosby Street, one of the most fashionable blocks in New York City, where signs herald the imminent opening of a Rick Owens boutique and idle stoop-sitters could be professional models. Guys should dress well here. But the focus on clothes has spread far, far beyond Soho.

We're witnessing a fascinating, exciting, very specific moment, a "choose-your-own-adventure time of menswear, where guys are letting their freak flags fly," in the words of Jian DeLeon, senior menswear editor for trend forecasting company WGSN. Information has never been more readily available, and online shopping has lowered the barrier to entry significantly. (...)

Traditionally, conversations about men's style have been quieter than the ones about women's, constantly happening only if you know where to look. In the last decade or so, though, they've become easier to find. The discussion moved online in the midaughts when forums like Ask Andy About Clothes and blogs like The Sartorialist started to enter the consciousness of a certain type of man. Guys geeking out about fashion could find each other, sharing tips about designers, history, whatever. Age mattered less than disposition. On the message boards and in the comments sections, no one knew or cared who was a teenager in Iowa or a thirtysomething in Manhattan. The only thing that mattered was that the poster had a smart sense of style, which meant focusing on timeless quality rather than of-the-moment trends, and offered an intelligent opinion.

Fast forward a few years, and the menswear conversation shifted to Tumblr, where you could find an endless stream of guys dressing to impress, often to the point of absurdity. This became known as #menswear, a reference to the Tumblr hashtag, and was epitomized by images of wannabe tastemakers peacocking at Pitti Uomo. (The mockumentary The Life of Pitti Peacocks features garish paisley suit jackets, absurd floral-print pants, and more in just its first half-minute; it illustrates the see-and-be-seen insanity perfectly, as do so many Instagram photos.) In response, satirical Tumblrs like Kevin Burrows and Lawrence Schlossman's Fuck Yeah Menswear cropped up, injecting a bit of fun into the increasingly self-serious #menswear movement. It was, after all, just clothes.

The ultimate distillation of this scene came with Four Pins, the Complex-owned site headed by Schlossman and his team of rabble-rousers. They took aim at anything and everything, mixing biting commentary with long explainers that placed trends in historical context. Readers had their laughs while learning about the clothes they were wearing, or at least aspired to own.

When Four Pins shut down in January, it felt like the end of an era. "It wasn't like someone was going to make their own Four Pins," says Schlossman, who now works as a brand director at the resale site Grailed. "It was more like if Four Pins can't succeed, then maybe this movement is done. It wasn't that the door was open. It was like the door was slammed shut."

Green agrees. "If ever there was a menswear punk-rock era, where it was like the Wild, Wild West — a bunch of uncool dudes talking shit and building this following that no one had ever really seen before, having fun, and making fun of these designers and men's clothing — that was it," he says. "As annoying as some of those guys are and as corny as some of them are, I think a lot of them are really witty and really smart. We made fun of it at the time, but I gotta say, I think it was special."

While #menswear might be dead, menswear has never been bigger. Online menswear sales in particular grew faster than every other category between 2010 and 2015, and show no signs of slowing down; research firm Euromonitor International speculates that the global menswear market will rise from $29 billion in 2015 to $33 billion by 2020. (By comparison, the women's clothing market actually declined by 0.9 percent annually between 2011 and 2016, according to research company IBISWorld.) One-third of men reported they'd like to spend more money on clothes in 2016 than they did in 2015, according to Rupa Ghosh, a retail analyst at Mintel.

Menswear is moving to the masses.

by Noah Davis, Racked |  Read more:
Image: Lindsay Mound

Why Luck Plays a Big Role in Making You Rich

Robert Frank was playing tennis one cold Saturday morning in Ithaca, N.Y., when his heart stopped. Sudden cardiac arrest—a short-circuit in the heart’s electrical signaling—kills 98 percent of its victims and leaves most of the rest permanently impaired.

Yet two weeks later, Frank was back on the tennis court.

How did this happen? There was a car accident a few hundred yards away from where Frank collapsed. Two ambulances responded but the injuries were minor and only one was needed. The other ambulance, usually stationed five miles away, reached Frank in minutes.

“I’m alive today because of pure dumb luck,” says Frank, a 71-year-old economics professor at Cornell University. Or you can call it a miracle. Either way, Frank can’t take credit for surviving that day. From coincidence or the divine, he got help. Nine years later, he is still grappling with the concept of luck. And, applied to his field of economics, it’s led him into some dangerous territory: wealth.

Talk about luck and money in the same sentence, he says, and prepare to deal with “unbridled anger.” U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and President Barack Obama were pilloried for suggesting rich Americans should be grateful for what Obama called “this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.” Even referring to the wealthy as “the luckiest among us”—as I did a few months ago—can spark some unhinged reactions.

“There are people who just don’t want to hear about the possibility that they didn’t do it all themselves,” Frank says.

Mild-mannered and self-effacing, he isn’t about to tell the rich “you didn’t build that,” as Obama did (and likely regretted). Frank’s new book, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, is a study in diplomacy. Combining memoir with academic research, it’s an earnest argument that all of us—even the rich—would be better off recognizing how luck can lead to success. (...)

Winner-take-all markets

For more than 20 years, Frank has been studying the rise of winner-take-all markets—fields of fierce economic competition in which only a few top performers take home the bulk of the rewards. More and more of the economy is starting to look like sports or music, Frank says, where millions of people compete and the winners are paid thousands of times more than the runners-up.

Another example he gives is the humble neighborhood accountant. In the 20th century, the typical accountant was competing against nearby rivals. If you worked hard, there was a good chance of winning over the most lucrative clients in town. Today, neighborhood accountants face much more competition: Sophisticated global accounting firms can swoop in and sign up their biggest clients. Tax preparation, an accountant’s bread and butter, has been mostly swallowed up by two large players—H&R Block for storefront preparation and TurboTax online.

“Technology has enabled people who are best at what they do to extend their reach geographically,” Frank says. TurboTax was initially just one of a number of tax software programs on the market. But, as happened with search engines and social media sites, it was able to win over customers early, and its competitive advantage snowballed. TurboTax now dominates online tax preparation—thousands of local accountants replaced by one company.

In these winner-take-all markets, luck can play a huge role. A simulation conducted by Frank shows how: Imagine a tournament in which every contestant is randomly assigned a score representing their skill. In this simple scenario, the most skilled person wins. The more competitors there are, the higher the score the winner will likely have.

Now introduce chance by randomly assigning each participant a “luck” score. That score, however, can play only a tiny role in the ultimate outcome, just 2 percent compared with 98 percent allotted to skill. This minor role for chance is enough to tilt the contest away from the top-skilled people. In a simulation with 1,000 participants, the person with the top skill score prevailed only 22 percent of the time. The more competition there is, the hardest it is for skill alone to win out. With 100,000 participants, the most skilled person wins just 6 percent of the time.

Frank writes:

Winning a competition with a large number of contestants requires that almost everything go right. And that, in turn, means that even when luck counts for only a trivial part of overall performance, there’s rarely a winner who wasn’t also very lucky.

Winner-take-all markets can end up creating vast wealth differences between the lucky and unlucky. One person—smart, persistent, but unlucky—struggles, while an equally (or even slightly less) talented and hard-working person gets a lucky break that can reap millions, or billions, of dollars.

by Ben Steverman, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: William Andrew/Getty Images

Life at the Nowhere Office

You wake up and wonder: What time is it? Your little touchscreen says 2:54 a.m. Or 7:21 a.m. Or whatever. It is always anytime. And anytime is check-in time. With one ear on your pillow you check the number of likes your latest Facebook post has harvested, the Retweets of your latest birdsong, and then onto the Inbox. After eyeballing what awaits in the day ahead, you sift through the messages and rank them on importance, returning to them when showered and fully awake.

Wherever you are, you respond to the most urgent requests and make sure to nowhere yourself by deleting your “sent from my iPhone” signature. You could be at your desk already, right? No one needs to know that you are two blocks away. You don’t want to convey that you are on the run and not giving them your full attention. So with some digital camouflaging you say: I am in a place where I can give you due consideration. At no point are we on the train, in a cafe, in bed, in the restroom. Except of course we are.

Many of us recognize this morning routine. It might seem mundane, but like any regime, it is has an aesthetic. In fact, this vignette reflects the ideals of het nieuwe werken, a Dutch term meaning “the new way of working,” a reorganization of the office that promotes flexibility and “efficient” design, combining the fruits of a digitally-connected world and organically-formed social structures. Hailed as a “silent revolution”, it purports to liberate creative and entrepreneurial potential that would otherwise go untapped. The modern “inspired” workspace serves as essential infrastructure to this new organization of work. Not only does it accommodate these new rhythms; it makes them look good.

The interconnected values of “frictionless” dynamism, notional flattening of managerial hierarchies, and sociability that define contemporary professional work are mirrored in the spaces and gadgets that allow us to function in this rootless, diffuse way. A quick trawl through some design blogs or a richly illustrated book like The Creative Workplace quickly reveals a number of conventions of the twenty-first-century inspired workspace: open plans, glass walls, communal table-desks, high ceilings. Likewise, and thanks largely to Apple, we prefer our mobile devices shiny and monochrome. Industrial touches like unfinished plywood, subway tile, exposed brick, and Edison bulbs round out these spaces and imbue them with an aura of artisanal making, attempting to give material form to production that in all likelihood is relegated to computer screens.

Across these diverse spaces, the two most consistent design principles are openness and a banishment of personal clutter. The new office presents itself as the interior design equivalent of everyone’s friend. It is comfortable and always available, a temporary platform onto which workers alight for meetings and some deskwork before fluttering off to another meeting, the home office, another job. But importantly, leave no trace behind. Remember: You have never been here.The “dynamic” workplace has arisen at a time when professional work has become increasingly insecure.

The luxury minimalism that defines the inspired workspace is an extension of a broader aesthetic movement that Kyle Chayka has termed Airspace. Airspace is a new International Style of sorts, a set of design conventions that has spread across the globe thanks to the homogenization of taste facilitated by social media. “It is the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live/work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go ... Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting,” Chayka writes. Indeed, all of the spaces he lists are, explicitly or not, workspaces for the mobile, constantly collaborating knowledge worker. Airspace is essentially diffused workspace because the office has become a mobile home. We take it with us everywhere we go.

How freeing this increased mobility is remains open to debate. Flexibility is a sharp double-edged sword within contemporary work culture. On the one hand, workers often do prefer the ability to drop in and out of the physical office: Recall the outcry when Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer clamped down on telecommuting at the company. On the other hand, as Nikil Saval and others have noted, it’s no coincidence that the “dynamic” workplace has arisen at a time when professional work has become increasingly insecure. Dynamism and mobility are meant to be liberating, but the darker connotations of cleared desks and ephemeral presence lurk in the shadows of the creative workplace’s imported espresso machines and Aeron chairs. (...)

Perhaps no individual did more to dismantle the physical barriers of these rooms than Robert Propst, an energetic American polymath who in the 1960s began advocating for a spatial organization of the workplace that most of us would recognize as the open-plan office, developing prototypes for what he called “Action Offices.” Nikil Saval writes in Cubed: A Secret History of the Office, that “Propst was one of the first designers to argue that office work was mental work and that mental effort was tied to environmental enhancement of one’s physical capabilities.” He essentially pioneered the very idea of the modern creative workspace.

The person Propst had in mind for his new, open, dynamic workspaces was the “knowledge worker,” a social figure newly articulated by management theorist Peter Drucker. As Saval tells it, knowledge workers were defined not only by their white-collar job titles, but also by a strong belief in their own mobility. Of course “mobility” didn’t have the association with precarity then that it does now. At the time, it was an exciting idea; each worker was in possession of his unique intellectual skillsets, untethered from specific institutions and free to pounce after each new opportunity as soon as it appeared.

This sense of mobility helped undermine traditional bureaucratic hierarchies and meshed perfectly with Propst’s design principles aimed at facilitating democratic, serendipitous encounters through diminished barriers and un-hierarchical gathering spaces like social tables rather than desks. Soon enough, the utopian design philosophy of Propst was co-opted and rationalized by the furniture industry, becoming a goldmine for his employer, Herman Miller. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that Propst’s “Action Offices” eventually morphed into the grim cubicle. And yet, with the advent of het nieuwe werken and its accommodating Airspace aesthetic, the twenty-first century has rebooted his dreams of the open, inspirational, social workplace. Propst 2.0. (...)

Regardless how we feel about this, there is a shared recognition that if one wants to express oneself in this world of hyped self-management, one needs to be hooked up to the cloud, be it for email, Facebook, or any other social media. This resignation is Heidegger’s technological determinism made manifest. Indeed how helpless we feel when our passwords don’t work and we are locked out of the system. If we want to get any work done, we can only do so on the terms afforded by technology, which includes our ever-dispersing workspaces. (...)

The result is that your office diffuses much like a gas following the laws of entropy. This anywhering of the office renders our attempts to disappear by implementing out-of-the-office replies instantly moot and futile. Work will fill the space available to it. And with no space spared, it will find you wherever you are: not just your work office, but also your home, your yoga studio, your children’s kindergarten. And what is more, in addition to our physical selves we now have to manage this professional avatar as well. And due to the ongoing metrification and financialization of work we are increasingly stripped of the clutter that makes us us. All of our quirks and idiosyncratic features have no use, as they can either not be numbered or would just make us look messy and thus unproductive.

It is here that the controlling nature of the new aesthetic becomes most limpid and palpable: the constant sanitization of our digital selves reflects the homogenized minimalism of Airspace. Such thorough self-regulation enacts our—apparently willing—participation in Lewis Coser’s “greedy organizations,” those that sever an individual’s social ties and “can thrive only if they are able to absorb their members fully and totally within their confines.” It is no coincidence that the pursuit of transparency within contemporary management techniques such the 360 performance appraisal is replicated in the new aesthetic of the office. In neither place is there room for “dirt,” or “matter out of place,” as the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously stated. On the CEO’s digital dashboard we are (and want to be) little more than a sanitized number, perfectly ordered in sleek spreadsheets, proving how efficient, valuable and productive we are and how can be deployed as a resource towards our new project.

by Miya Tokumitsu and Joeri Mol, TNR |  Read more:

Image: Rakic / Shutterstock

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Mario Sorrenti, Visionaire, Fall 1996
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The Drug of Choice For the Age of Kale

The day after Apollo 14 landed on the moon, Dennis and Terence McKenna began a trek through the Amazon with four friends who considered themselves, as Terence wrote in his book “True Hallucinations,” “refugees from a society that we thought was poisoned by its own self-hatred and inner contradictions.” They had come to South America, the land of yagé, also known as ayahuasca: an intensely hallucinogenic potion made from boiling woody Banisteriopsis caapi vines with the glossy leaves of the chacruna bush. The brothers, then in their early twenties, were grieving the recent death of their mother, and they were hungry for answers about the mysteries of the cosmos: “We had sorted through the ideological options, and we had decided to put all of our chips on the psychedelic experience.”

They started hiking near the border of Peru. As Dennis wrote, in his memoir “The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss,” they arrived four days later in La Chorrera, Colombia, “in our long hair, beards, bells, and beads,” accompanied by a “menagerie of sickly dogs, cats, monkeys, and birds” accumulated along the way. (The local Witoto people were cautiously amused.) There, on the banks of the Igara Paraná River, the travellers found themselves in a psychedelic paradise. There were cattle pastures dotted with Psilocybe cubensis—magic mushrooms—sprouting on dung piles; there were hammocks to lounge in while you tripped; there were Banisteriopsis caapi vines growing in the jungle. Taken together, the drugs produced hallucinations that the brothers called “vegetable television.” When they watched it, they felt they were receiving important information directly from the plants of the Amazon.

The McKennas were sure they were on to something revelatory, something that would change the course of human history. “I and my companions have been selected to understand and trigger the gestalt wave of understanding that will be the hyperspacial zeitgeist,” Dennis wrote in his journal. Their work was not always easy. During one session, the brothers experienced a flash of mutual telepathy, but then Dennis hurled his glasses and all his clothes into the jungle and, for several days, lost touch with “consensus reality.” It was a small price to pay. The “plant teachers” seemed to have given them “access to a vast database,” Dennis wrote, “the mystical library of all human and cosmic knowledge.”

If these sound like the joys and hazards of a bygone era, then you don’t know any ayahuasca users—yet. In the decades since the McKennas’ odyssey, the drug—or “medicine,” as many devotees insist that it be called—has become increasingly popular in the United States, to the point where it’s a “trendy thing right now,” as Marc Maron said recently to Susan Sarandon, on his “WTF” podcast, before they discussed what she’d learned from her latest ayahuasca experience. (“I kind of got, You should just keep your heart open all the time,” she said. “Because the whole point is to be open to the divine in every person in the world.”)

The self-help guru Tim Ferriss told me that the drug is everywhere in San Francisco, where he lives. “Ayahuasca is like having a cup of coffee here,” he said. “I have to avoid people at parties because I don’t want to listen to their latest three-hour saga of kaleidoscopic colors.”

Leanna Standish, a researcher at the University of Washington School of Medicine, estimated that “on any given night in Manhattan, there are a hundred ayahuasca ‘circles’ going on.” The main psychoactive substance in ayahuasca has been illegal since it was listed in the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, but Standish, who is the medical director of the Bastyr Integrative Oncology Research Center, recently applied for permission from the F.D.A. to do a Phase I clinical trial of the drug—which she believes could be used in treatments for cancer and Parkinson’s disease. “I am very interested in bringing this ancient medicine from the Amazon Basin into the light of science,” Standish said. She is convinced that “it’s going to change the face of Western medicine.” For now, though, she describes ayahuasca use as a “vast, unregulated global experiment.” (...)

The first American to study ayahuasca was the Harvard biologist Richard Evans Schultes, who pioneered the field of ethnobotany (and co-authored “Plants of the Gods,” with Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who discovered LSD). In 1976, a graduate student of Schultes’s brought a collection of the plants back from his field research to a greenhouse at the University of Hawaii—where Dennis McKenna happened to be pursuing a master’s degree. Thanks to McKenna, some B. caapi cuttings “escaped captivity,” he told me. “I took them over to the Big Island, where my brother and his wife had purchased some land. They planted it in the forest, and it happened to like the forest—a lot. So now it’s all over the place.”

Terence McKenna died in 2000, after becoming a psychedelic folk hero for popularizing magic mushrooms in books, lectures, and instructional cassette tapes. Dennis McKenna went on to get a doctorate in botany and is now a professor at the University of Minnesota. When we spoke, he was on a book tour in Hawaii. He had been hearing about ayahuasca use in a town on the Big Island called Puna, where people call themselves “punatics.” “Everybody is making ayahuasca, taking ayahuasca,” he said. “It’s like the Wild West.”

If cocaine expressed and amplified the speedy, greedy ethos of the nineteen-eighties, ayahuasca reflects our present moment—what we might call the Age of Kale. It is a time characterized by wellness cravings, when many Americans are eager for things like mindfulness, detoxification, and organic produce, and we are willing to suffer for our soulfulness.

Ayahuasca, like kale, is no joy ride. The majority of users vomit—or, as they prefer to say, “purge.” And that’s the easy part. “Ayahuasca takes you to the swampland of your soul,” my friend Tony, a photographer in his late fifties, told me. Then he said that he wanted to do it again.

by Ariel Levy, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Bjorn Lie

No ‘For Sale’ Sign? Silicon Valley Buyers Aren’t Deterred

Swell-looking home you’ve got here. Ever think about selling it? How about to me, right now?

That is increasingly the approach the house-hungry are using in Silicon Valley, where the number of homes on the market is so small that would-be buyers are driven to desperation. Their solution: seek out homes that are, in theory at least, not for sale.

Sue Zweig grew up in this working-class community, back when people said it was for the newly wed and the nearly dead. Not long ago, when she was out walking her dog, she began to realize things were different. A woman pulled over, asked about houses for sale in the neighborhood and ended up spending 45 minutes poking around Ms. Zweig’s living room and kitchen.

Her four-bedroom house was not on the market then, and it was not on the market a year or so later when another eager buyer showed up. This time, Ms. Zweig, a nurse, and her husband, Steve Zweig, made a deal for $1.375 million, a seven-figure profit over what they had paid in 1987. They moved out of the house last year.

Buyers in Silicon Valley must be aggressive and innovative as well as well-heeled, especially as housing inventory here hits its lowest point in at least 20 years. In San Mateo County, which includes Redwood City, the number of homes for sale in August was 1,184. That is a drop of 62 percent from a decade ago, even as the population increased more than 70,000.

It is a microcosm of a growing national problem. The number of homes on the market in the United States has fallen on a year-over-year basis for the last 14 months, the National Association of Realtors says. When adjusted for population, the inventory of homes for sale is the lowest it has been since modern records started being kept in 1982.

Flushing out people before they are officially ready to sell — by a few weeks or a few years — has obvious benefits for buyers, but sellers say they can profit, too. It streamlines an expensive process that traditionally consumes many months.

“We probably left money on the table,” said Mr. Zweig, a retired digital printer. “But we didn’t have to list it, didn’t have to do open houses, didn’t have to stage it.”

There is a long history among Silicon Valley’s elite of buying houses that are not for sale. Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire chief executive of Facebook, found a place he liked near San Francisco’s Mission District in 2012 and paid the owner at least twice what it was worth.

People of much more modest means are now echoing his tactics, even if they cannot extend his lavish terms.

“Technology is making people impatient,” said Steve Korn, a retired forklift facility manager who is now a real estate agent here. “No one wants a six-month slog anymore to get a new place or move on from an old place.”

Technology is also fueling this boom in a more direct way. Tech companies, especially Facebook and Google, have plans to build new campuses and hire even more workers.

That means even places like Redwood City, a longtime also-ran to neighbors like Atherton, Menlo Park and Palo Alto, are now hot. That’s a windfall for longtime residents like the Zweigs, who moved to a coastal town 220 miles south and built a new house.

Prices in their old Redwood City development have continued to soar, prompting some wishful dreams among those who remain.

Michele and Mike Sweeney put a “make me move” notice on their 2,060-square-foot house last year. That is a feature that the online real estate company Zillow offers to let owners solicit interest. Their demand was $1.9 million, significantly more than their house was worth.

“We used to say around here, ‘If it hits a million, we’re all selling,’” said Ms. Sweeney, who works for a hospital. “That was not too long ago.”

They were flooded with inquiries but did not make a deal. Now, according to Zillow, their house is rapidly approaching the price they wanted. “I asked my son, ‘Do you want to finish high school in Italy?’” Ms. Sweeney said.

by David Streitfeld, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Gabrielle Lurie

Pete Wells Has His Knives Out

[ed. Great article, and Pete Wells is a national treasure (his visit to Senor Frog's in Times Square has to be one of the funniest reviews I've ever read). Want to be the food critic for the world's most influencial newspaper in the world's most influencial city? Here's how you do it.]

Pete Wells, the restaurant critic of the Times, who writes a review every week—and who occasionally writes one that creates a national hubbub about class, money, and soup—was waiting for a table not long ago at Momofuku Nishi, a modish new restaurant in Chelsea. Wells is fifty-three and soft-spoken. His balance of Apollonian and Dionysian traits is suggested by a taste for drawing delicate sketches of tiki cocktails. Since starting the job, in 2012, he has eaten out five times a week. His primary disguise strategy is “to be the least interesting person in the room,” he had told me, adding, “Which I was, for many years. It’s not a stretch.” But he does vary his appearance. At times, he’ll be unshaven, in frayed jeans; in Chelsea, he looked like a European poet—a gray wool suit over a zip-up sweater, a flat cap pulled low, nonprescription glasses. He was carrying a memoir, written by a friend, titled “Bullies.”

Wells had encouraged me to arrive just ahead of him, and to ask for the reservation for two, at nine-forty-five, under the randomly chosen name of Michael Patcher. There was half a chance that I’d be allowed to sit before he showed up. If so, then at least one aspect of the evening would have what Wells calls a “civilian” texture, even if he was recognized. (As he put it, “If we’re very lucky, we might get a bad table.”) But when Wells arrived I was still waiting to sit down. So we stood near the door, at an awkward, congested spot from which we could have reached out and taken a clam from someone’s plate of Asian-Italian noodles.

The front of the room was bare and bright, and filled with thirty-year-olds on backless stools at communal pale-wood tables—a picnic held in a cell-phone store. The noise level reminded me of Wells’s review of a Tex-Mex restaurant: “It always sounds as if somebody were telling a woman at the far end of the table that he had just found $1,000 under the menu, and the woman were shouting back that Ryan Gosling had just texted and he’s coming to the restaurant in, like, five minutes!” Wells is not peevish about discomfort. His columns make a subtle study of what counts as fun in middle age—loyalties divided between abandon and an early night. His expressions of enthusiasm often take the form of wariness swept away: Wells found joy in a conga line at Señor Frog’s, in Times Square. But after dining at Momofuku Nishi he returned to his home, in Brooklyn, and wrote in his notes about “a hurricane of noise.”

Two minutes after Wells arrived at the restaurant, it became clear that he’d been spotted. His friend Jeff Gordinier—a journalist who, until recently, reported on restaurants for the Times—had spoken with me about Wells’s chances of remaining anonymous by referring to a famous contractual demand made by Van Halen: concert promoters were asked to supply the band with a backstage bowl of M&M’s, with the brown ones removed. David Lee Roth, Van Halen’s lead singer, has said that the request was not whimsical. It helped to show whether a contract had been carefully read and, therefore, whether the band’s complex, and potentially dangerous, technical requirements were likely to have been met. Gordinier said that an ambitious New York restaurant’s ability to spot Pete Wells is a similar indicator of thoroughness: “If they don’t recognize who he is, then they are missing a very important detail, and therefore they may not be paying attention to other important details.”

In 1962, Craig Claiborne became the first person at the Times to review restaurants regularly; two decades later, he published a memoir, noting that he had “disliked the power” of being a critic. He added, “It burdened my conscience to know that the existence or demise of an establishment might depend on the praise or damnation to be found in the Times.” Much of that power remains, even as it has seeped away from reviewers of theatre and painting; Wells is a vestige of newspaper clout. And, because successful chefs now often sit atop empires, a single bad review can threaten a dozen restaurants and a thousand employees. When Wells reviewed Vaucluse, on the Upper East Side, he began by identifying the restaurant’s parent company, founded by the chef Michael White and Ahmass Fakahany, a former Merrill Lynch executive: “A critic could run out of new ways to express disappointment in Altamarea Group restaurants if Altamarea didn’t keep coming up with new ways to disappoint.”

The Momofuku Group, run by the thirty-nine-year-old chef David Chang, has in recent years expanded into fast food, overseas restaurants, and a quarterly magazine named Lucky Peach. But Momofuku Nishi was the company’s first full-scale, sit-down restaurant to open in New York in five years. A visit from Wells was a certainty. A copy of the one photograph of him that is widely available online, in which he looks like a character actor available to play sardonic police sergeants, was fixed to a wall in the restaurant’s back stairwell. Chang recently told me that, despite the profusion of opinion online, he still thought of the Times as the “judge and jury” of a new venture, if not the executioner.

In the logjam by the restaurant’s door, a young woman in a dark fitted jacket—later identified as Gabrielle Nurnberger, one of the restaurant’s managers—smiled at Wells, then turned away. Wells said to me, “Look at this,” and we watched as she strode toward the kitchen with her arms down, like a gymnast starting a run-up. (At the equivalent moment of discovery in another restaurant, I saw a manager mouth to Wells’s server “Good luck,” and place a reassuring hand on her arm.) There was increased activity in and out of the kitchen, which was half exposed to the room. We waited a few more minutes, and were then shown to a spot at the edge of the hurricane, against a wall. Our neighbors were taking photographs directly above their bowls of Ceci e Pepe. The dish, a riff on pasta cacio e pepe, using fermented chickpea paste in place of Pecorino, was central to the restaurant’s promoted identity, suggesting technical expertise in the service of amused nonconformity. (Chang told me, later, that he had conceived of the menu as a “Fuck you” to Italian cuisine.) We were given menus with wry footnotes. Wells took off his fake glasses and put on his reading glasses.

Nurnberger became our server. Wells is an unassuming man who has become used to causing a stir, and this can be disorienting: it’s odd to hear him wonder, not unreasonably, if restaurants ever think of bugging his table. But a restaurant can’t openly acknowledge him. A while ago, he happened to sit next to Jimmy Fallon, the host of the “Tonight Show,” at the counter of a sushi restaurant in the Village. Both men were recognized. As Wells recalled it, Fallon “got the overt treatment”: “big smiles and ‘Thank you for coming in’ ” and perhaps an extra dish or two. Wells’s experience was that “every dish of mine was an object of attention and worry before it got to me”—he often has a slower meal than other diners do, because dishes get done again and again until they are deemed exemplary. As usual, his water glass “was always being topped up.” But it was “as if none of this were happening.”

Experienced for the first time, this covert cosseting feels slightly melancholy, like an episode of Cold War fiction involving futile charades and a likely defenestration. Nurnberger was a gracious server but, understandably, not quite at ease. She risked overplaying her role, like Sartre’s waiter in “Being and Nothingness,” who “bends forward a little too eagerly” and voices “an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer.” In her effort to help, Nurnberger came close to explaining what a menu was. Rote questions about how we gentlemen were getting on—usually asked of me—had a peculiar intensity. “I’m very reluctant to break the fourth wall,” Wells had said to me earlier, speaking of restaurant staff. “But I wish there were some subtle way to say, ‘Don’t worry!’ ” He sighed—he often sighs—and added, “I can’t honestly say that. Because sometimes they should worry.”

When Wells speaks, his fingers often flutter near his temples, as if he were a stage mentalist trying to focus. He ordered several plates of food; after hesitation, he asked for a glass of white wine. He does not follow Craig Claiborne’s practice, in the nineteen-sixties, of weighing himself every day, but he has begun to think of alcohol as calories that he can skip without being professionally lax. He is not fat, but the job stands between him and leanness: he can’t turn down food. “My body is not my own,” he said.

When dishes arrived, he looked at them sternly for a moment. We talked, or shouted, about his older son’s food allergies, and about a decision, just made at the Times, to have him regularly assess restaurants outside New York. (The first of these reviews, from Los Angeles, appears online on September 6th.) He talked of his earlier career, as an editor at Details, a columnist at Food & Wine, and the dining editor of the Times, when he had opportunities to watch chefs work and ask them questions. In his current role, he’d probably leave the room if someone like Chang turned up at the same cocktail party. “The danger is getting friendly with people you should feel free to destroy,” he said, and then stopped. “That’s not really the word, but you get the idea. People you should feel free to savage, when you have to.” Over my shoulder, Wells could see into the kitchen. At the start of the evening, Chang wasn’t visible, but then he was. “He may have been airlifted,” Wells said. For the critic’s benefit, a chef-commander, summoned from a sister restaurant or a back office, may take over from a lieutenant. Though Chang’s brand is built on unconventionality, he respected the convention of the fourth wall. The two men, who were on friendly terms before Wells became a critic, made eye contact but did not acknowledge each other.

by Ian Parker, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Luci Gutierrez

Richard Misrach, Desert Fire #77, 1984
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The Obama Years: Novelists Assess His Legacy

Tobias Wolff: ‘The coolness of his style has led to a lack of praise for what he has achieved’

Tobias Wolff is best known for his memoir This Boy’s Life, which won the Los Angeles Times book award for biography. His 1984 novella, The Barracks Thief, won the Pen/Faulkner award for fiction. He was the director of creative writing at Stanford from 2000 to 2002 and received a National Medal of Arts from the president in 2015.

Our candidates for president campaign as if they’re running for king, and not just any king – no quaint, hospital-touring symbol of national unity, no mere figurehead answerable to a constitution and a popular assembly. Congress? What’s that? If elected, our American candidate will, like an absolute monarch, resolve the thorniest problems of state simply by exerting his (or her!) will. Is the domestic economy on fire, and about to spread to our neighbours? He will “fix” it, because he “knows how”. Students drowning in debt? He’ll make college free! Islamic jihadists taking over cities in Syria and Iraq? He’ll carpet bomb them until we find out “if sand [and innocent civilians] can glow”.

Do suspected terrorists know more than they’re telling? He’ll have them tortured till they sing like Pavarotti, and kill their families into the bargain, and the military will just have to suck it up and do what he says, even if they say they won’t, and have the law to back them up. Law? What’s that? She’ll ban assault weapons; he’ll make sure you can take them to church.

The promise of immediate and radical change is a campaign fiction presented with such bald-faced effrontery that we hardly question it any more, unless it’s coming from the other side. Indeed, the performance can’t be sustained unless we support it with our credulity, like a tentful of rubes gaping at the tricks of a carnival magician, even offering ourselves up as subjects.

The wishful thinking that is the source of this credulity is, of course, a prelude to disappointment if our candidate actually gets elected. Take the case of candidate Barack Obama. He was going to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and close Guantánamo. He would save our failing economy, mend our broken healthcare system, and enact sensible gun control legislation. He would overhaul our immigration system, address climate change with meaningful policies, and change the bilious tone of our political discourse. We weren’t a nation of red states and blue states, he reminded us: we were the United States. Despite my years, I believed – believed not only that he meant what he said, but that he could get it done.

My wife and I gathered several friends on a November night in 2008, and watched with joy and disbelief as this young, literary, ironical man with a Kenyan father was elected to the presidency. Some of us had tears in our eyes. I was one. But as time went on those tears began to burn. He wasn’t getting it done, or so it seemed to me. Guantánamo was still in business. The planet kept heating up, and the wars dragged on, though increasingly waged by special forces. As before, just about anybody was free to walk into a gun store and come out armed, and each year some 30,000 Americans continued to pay for that freedom with their lives.

And the tone of political life had become even more toxic than before the election. During President Obama’s first State of the Union address, a congressman from South Carolina shouted: “You lie!” and became a Republican hero, even as the leaders of that party dedicated themselves to obstructing President Obama’s legislative initiatives and judicial appointments, effectively disabling the government in order, as the senate majority leader shamelessly admitted, to make Obama a one-term president. The birthers continued to question his legitimacy, and, further, to imply that he was a secret Muslim and supporter of Isis. He was Hitler. He was Lenin.

None of this of this was Obama’s fault. Indeed, he reacted to the unrelenting stream of slander and congressional malfeasance with unflappable calm and an air of faintly amused detachment. And for that I did blame him. The coolness I had admired during his campaign became an irritant. In fact, it drove me sort of crazy. Why didn’t he fight back? Show some rage at what was truly outrageous, the obstruction, the name-calling, the attacks on Michelle Obama for encouraging schools to serve healthy food, even for occasionally wearing dresses that showed her arms? Call these liars and bullies out, damn it! Politics is mud wrestling, did he not understand that? And if he really didn’t feel anger, then why not take some acting lessons, and fake it?

Well, I was wrong. As Barack Obama prepares to leave office, I think about what he managed to do in the face of implacable resistance. No, he didn’t close Guantánamo; the Republican congress wouldn’t let him, nor would they let him bring sanity to our gun laws, or to our immigration policies. But as most economists agree, his financial initiatives, narrowly approved, did save us from a profound recession, possibly even a depression. His successful auto industry bailout, fiercely contested at the time, saved countless jobs at virtually no expense to the taxpayer. If Obama couldn’t entirely extricate us from the wars he inherited, he has refrained from entangling us in new wars, despite being constantly urged to do so by congressmen and senators who otherwise refuse to spend tax dollars – on, say, education, or roads, or environmental safeguards.

Finally, 20 million Americans who did not have health insurance when Barack Obama took office have it now; and in spite of dire Republican predictions, and umpteen votes for repeal, it has actually lowered the healthcare cost inflation rate. No one in this country, however poor, or sick, need be without insurance. This achievement eluded Theodore Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, among others.

So why has Obama not been celebrated for what he’s done? Why did so many of us so often feel a sense of impatience, even disappointment? I believe it comes down to immaturity – in us, not him. At least part of the reason for our failure to recognise and praise what he’s accomplished has to do with his style – that coolness. He doesn’t brag, or gloat. He doesn’t call attention to himself, or proclaim his deeds in the thoroughfares, or ridicule those who oppose him. But we wanted him to. We wanted heat. We wanted anger, slashing rhetoric, mockery. We wanted him to call liars liars, idiots idiots. We wanted him to bully the bullies. We wanted him to wage war, and crow over his fallen enemies. And because we did not get the melodrama we demanded, we lost the plot.

But now we have a candidate who will give us all the sound and fury we could ask for, or imagine. Let’s see how we like it. Me, I’m already nostalgic for Obama.

by Tobias Wolff, Akhil Sharma, Attica Locke, Hari Kunzru, Jayne Anne Phillips, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: John Moore/Getty Images

Soaring Ocean Temperature is 'Greatest Hidden Challenge of Our Generation'

The soaring temperature of the oceans is the “greatest hidden challenge of our generation” that is altering the make-up of marine species, shrinking fishing areas and starting to spread disease to humans, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of ocean warming.

The oceans have already sucked up an enormous amount of heat due to escalating greenhouse gas emissions, affecting marine species from microbes to whales, according to an International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) report involving the work of 80 scientists from a dozen countries.

The profound changes underway in the oceans are starting to impact people, the report states. “Due to a domino effect, key human sectors are at threat, especially fisheries, aquaculture, coastal risk management, health and coastal tourism.”

Dan Laffoley, IUCN marine adviser and one of the report’s lead authors, said: “What we are seeing now is running well ahead of what we can cope with. The overall outlook is pretty gloomy.

“We perhaps haven’t realised the gross effect we are having on the oceans, we don’t appreciate what they do for us. We are locking ourselves into a future where a lot of the poorer people in the world will miss out.”

The scale of warming in the ocean, which covers around 70% of the planet, is “truly staggering”, the report states. The upper few metres of ocean have warmed by around 0.13C a decade since the start of the 20th century, with a 1-4C increase in global ocean warming by the end of this century.

The ocean has absorbed more than 90% of the extra heat created by human activity. If the same amount of heat that has been buried in the upper 2km of the ocean had gone into the atmosphere, the surface of the Earth would have warmed by a devastating 36C, rather than 1C, over the past century.

At some point, the report says, warming waters could unlock billions of tonnes of frozen methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from the seabed and cook the surface of the planet. This could occur even if emissions are drastically cut, due to the lag time between emitting greenhouse gases and their visible consequences.

Warming is already causing fish, seabirds, sea turtles, jellyfish and other species to change their behaviour and habitat, it says. Species are fleeing to the cooler poles, away from the equator, at a rate that is up to five times faster than the shifts seen by species on land.

With more than 550 types of marine fishes and invertebrates already considered threatened, ocean warming will exacerbate the declines of some species, the report also found.

The movement of fish will create winners and losers among the 4.3 billion people in the world who rely heavily upon fish for sustenance. In south-east Asia, harvests from fisheries could drop by nearly a third by 2050 if emissions are not severely curtailed. Global production from capture fisheries has already levelled off at 90m tonnes a year, mainly due to overfishing, at a time when millions more tonnes will need to be caught to feed a human population expected to grow to 9 billion by 2050.

Humans are also set to suffer from the spread of disease as the ocean continues to heat up. The IUCN report found there is growing evidence of vibrio bacterial disease, which can cause cholera, and harmful algal bloom species that can cause food poisoning. People are also being affected by more severe, if not more numerous, hurricanes due to the extra energy in the ocean and atmosphere.

by Oliver Milman, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Ralph Lee Hopkins/Alamy

Utagawa Hiroshige, Tōkaidō Road.
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Homo Deus – How Data Will Destroy Human Freedom

At the heart of this spellbinding book is a simple but chilling idea: human nature will be transformed in the 21st century because intelligence is uncoupling from consciousness. We are not going to build machines any time soon that have feelings like we have feelings: that’s consciousness. Robots won’t be falling in love with each other (which doesn’t mean we are incapable of falling in love with robots). But we have already built machines – vast data-processing networks – that can know our feelings better than we know them ourselves: that’s intelligence. Google– the search engine, not the company – doesn’t have beliefs and desires of its own. It doesn’t care what we search for and it won’t feel hurt by our behaviour. But it can process our behaviour to know what we want before we know it ourselves. That fact has the potential to change what it means to be human.

Yuval Noah Harari’s previous book, the global bestseller Sapiens, laid out the last 75,000 years of human history to remind us that there is nothing special or essential about who we are. We are an accident. Homo sapiens is just one possible way of being human, an evolutionary contingency like every other creature on the planet. That book ended with the thought that the story of homo sapiens could be coming to an end. We are at the height of our power but we may also have reached its limit. Homo Deus makes good on this thought to explain how our unparalleled ability to control the world around us is turning us into something new.

The evidence of our power is everywhere: we have not simply conquered nature but have also begun to defeat humanity’s own worst enemies. War is increasingly obsolete; famine is rare; disease is on the retreat around the world. We have achieved these triumphs by building ever more complex networks that treat human beings as units of information. Evolutionary science teaches us that, in one sense, we are nothing but data-processing machines: we too are algorithms. By manipulating the data we can exercise mastery over our fate. The trouble is that other algorithms – the ones that we have built – can do it far more efficiently than we can. That’s what Harari means by the “uncoupling” of intelligence and consciousness. The project of modernity was built on the idea that individual human beings are the source of meaning as well as power. We are meant to be the ones who decide what happens to us: as voters, as consumers, as lovers. But that’s not true any more. We are what gives networks their power: they use our ideas of meaning to determine what will happen to us.

Not all of this is new. The modern state, which has been around for about 400 years, is really just another data-processing machine. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1651, called it an “automaton” (or what we would call a robot). Its robotic quality is the source of its power and also its heartlessness: states don’t have a conscience, which is what allows them sometimes to do the most fearful things. What’s changed is that there are now processing machines that are far more efficient than states: as Harari points out, governments find it almost impossible to keep up with the pace of technological advance. It has also become much harder to sustain the belief – shared by Hobbes – that behind every state there are real flesh-and-blood human beings. The modern insistence on the autonomy of the individual goes along with a view that it should be possible to find the heart of this heartless world. Keep scratching at a faceless bureaucracy and you’ll eventually uncover a civil servant with real feelings. But keep scratching at a search engine and all you’ll find are data points.

We are just at the start of this process of data-driven transformation and Harari says there is little we can do to stop it. Homo Deus is an “end of history” book, but not in the crude sense that he believes things have come to a stop. Rather the opposite: things are moving so fast that it’s impossible to imagine what the future might hold. In 1800 it was possible to think meaningfully about what the world of 1900 would be like and how we might fit in. That’s history: a sequence of events in which human beings play the leading part. But the world of 2100 is at present almost unimaginable. We have no idea where we’ll fit in, if at all. We may have built a world that has no place for us.

Given what an alarming thought this is, and since we aren’t there yet, why can’t we do more to stop it from happening? Harari thinks the modern belief that individuals are in charge of their fate was never much more than a leap of faith. Real power always resided with networks. Individual human beings are relatively powerless creatures, no match for lions or bears. It’s what they can do as groups that has enabled them to take over the planet. These groupings – corporations, religions, states – are now part of a vast network of interconnected information flows. Finding points of resistance, where smaller units can stand up to the waves of information washing around the globe, is becoming harder all the time.

Some people have given up the fight. In place of the founding tenets of modernity – liberalism, democracy and personal autonomy – there is a new religion: Dataism. Its followers – many of whom reside in the Bay Area of California – put their faith in information by encouraging us to see it as the only true source of value. We are what we contribute to data processing. There is potentially a huge upside to this: it means we will face fewer and fewer obstacles to getting what we want, because the information needed to supply us will be instantly accessible. Our likes and our experiences will merge. Our lifespans could also be hugely extended: Dataists believe that immortality is the next frontier to be crossed. But the downside is obvious, too. Who will “we” be any more? Nothing more than an accumulation of information points. Twentieth-century political dystopias sought to stamp on individuals with the power of the state. That won’t be necessary in the coming century. As Harari says: “The individual will not be crushed by Big Brother; it will disintegrate from within.”

by David Runciman, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Alarmy

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Am I a Good Person?

The beginning of being a good person is the knowledge that you may not be, or that you have acted as a bad one would. After that it gets complicated.

The most obvious complication, perhaps, is that there is no agreement on what constitutes a good person. In fact there’s no agreement on whether we should even agree who a good person is. In some extreme forms of theoretical individualism, the only judge of whether you are good is you yourself: cheating on your taxes, being Donald Trump, writing comments on news sites – whatever’s right for you. In practice, however, no one ever really believes this. Even the sociopath cares for the opinion of others. It’s just that the tribute he wants from them is awe and devotion rather than love and respect.

But before we even get to the question of what would make a good person, there is a basic difficulty with our inquiry: if we ask ourselves, the answer we get will probably be tainted with lies. Even when we know we have done wrong, our minds set at work to scrub the knowledge out. A rather elegant study recently published in PNAS showed that we have difficulties even forming memories of the times we have behaved unethically, and if they ever are formed, they disintegrate faster than other ones. And this is a truth that was known long before lab science, by anyone who studies human nature, from St Augustine to Jane Austen.

This isn’t an insurmountable obstacle, but any project of self-knowledge has to take into account what a hard and largely unrewarding prospect it is. The alternatives, however, are worse. And it is always possible that at the end of our explorations we discover that we were not, after all, wholly intolerable and disgusting but just possibly good enough.

What would it mean to be good enough? Good enough at what?

Very roughly speaking there are three big ideas about how we could measure goodness: it could be a matter of following the right rules; it could be a matter of cultivating the right virtues; it might be something that was judged by success: did I leave the world a better place? All of these have been held to be self-evident in some cultures, and ludicrous in others. In practice, any judgment will have elements of all three, but one of them will be treated as predominant.

Our own culture now mostly takes consequentialism for granted. In that scheme, being a good person means that you had a good effect on the world. So you can answer the question by totting up all the good you did, balancing it against the bad things you have such a hard time remembering, and seeing how the register comes out. This is problematic for two reasons. The first is the element of luck. People with power seem more morally significant, and capable of being better, under these rules because they can change the world more. Conversely, the wholly powerless – babies, very old people, or severely disabled people – would seem morally insignificant because they can’t do anything. There’s also the problem of how you measure the good done in the world. Socrates thought that it was part of virtue to harm your enemies and other bad people. Jesus disagreed. Which scale do you want to measure yourself against?

by Andrew Brown, The Guardian |  Read more:

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I Wish My Teacher Knew

When Kyle Schwartz started teaching third grade at Doull Elementary School in Denver, she wanted to get to know her students better. She asked them to finish the sentence “I wish my teacher knew.”

What Kids Wish Their Teachers Knew

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Will Amazon Kill FedEx?

Last fall, when he was running for mayor of Wilmington, Ohio, John Stanforth heard a rumor. A big company was testing an airfreight operation at the local airport, Wilmington Air Park. Whoever it was wanted to keep the project quiet. People who frequented the airport said the company was wrapping its packages in black plastic to obscure any lettering and referred to its experiment as Project Amelia. He wasn’t sure which company it was, though some people were whispering it was Amazon.com.

Stanforth, 71, owns a storage business and looks a bit like the actor Jeffrey Tambor. In November he easily won the mayoral election. But even then he didn’t ask too many questions about what was going on at the airport. He didn’t want to jeopardize anything by being too nosy. “Guys, just bring me the jobs,” he recalls thinking.

Wilmington is about 35 miles southeast of Dayton and has a population of about 12,000. Jobs used to be plentiful. The air park was a hub for Airborne Express and then DHL, the German shipping company, which bought Airborne Express in 2003. Thousands of people toiled at the airport, sorting packages that arrived and loading them onto outbound planes. It wasn’t the most spiritually rewarding work, but it paid well, enabling package handlers to patronize the shops on Wilmington’s Main Street, to get haircuts in the barbershop and body illustrations at the tattoo parlor. Even the local bookstore did great business, especially when Harry Potter novels came out. “They shut down the main street,” Stanforth says wistfully, about the release party the store threw in 2007 for the seventh book in the Potter series. “There were people everywhere. Our Rotary Club made $1,000 selling shaved ice. A thousand bucks!”

In 2008, DHL shuttered its Wilmington operation, and almost everybody at the air park lost their jobs. “It was devastating,” Stanforth says. “You can’t lose that kind of an industry in a small community and not be hurt.” The following year, the city was featured on a 60 Minutes segment as a symbol of recessionary America. “When President Obama spoke of ‘the winter of our hardship’ in his inaugural address, no one in America understood that better than the folks we met in Wilmington, Ohio,” correspondent Scott Pelley said.

Starting in September 2015, people in the city noticed more planes flying in and out of the airport, loading and unloading those black-wrapped boxes. This March, Amazon announced that it was leasing 20 Boeing 767s from Air Transport Services Group, a cargo company that operates out of the air park. Amazon had also negotiated an option to buy nearly 20 percent of the company. “We’re excited to supplement our existing delivery network with a great new provider, ATSG, by adding 20 planes to ensure air cargo capacity to support one- and two-day delivery,” Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president for worldwide operations, said in a statement at the time. Amazon denies wrapping its boxes in black during the trial period.

Two weeks after Amazon’s announcement, I meet with Stanforth in a conference room outside his office at the municipal building. He’s joined by Marian Miller, his lively executive assistant, and Bret Dixon, Clinton County’s economic development director. Amazon still hasn’t said much about its plans for the air park, but Stanforth is hopeful there will be some jobs soon.

The mayor, who wears a green fleece jacket and confesses to being a little hard of hearing, lets his younger colleagues do most of the talking. “We don’t know what it’s going to do yet,” Miller says, “but we’re crossing our fingers. We have people that like slinging packages.”

It’s hard to tell who’s more pro-Amazon, Miller or Dixon. “They’re changing the face of e-commerce,” Dixon says.

“They are a feel-good company,” says Miller. “Who wouldn’t want a feel-good company like Amazon? Look at the way they treat their customers and their employees!”

The conversation turns to those Harry Potter events. Stanforth perks up. “Well, we had a local bookstore that really promoted it and took the initiative,” he says. “Sad to say, it’s closed up. Wonder who closed them up?”

Miller gives him a look. “Don’t say it.”

“Where does everybody get their books now?” Stanforth says, grinning.

“Don’t say that,” Miller warns him again.

“Amazon,” Stanforth says.

“I knew you were going to say it,” Dixon says, shaking his head.

Two months after the Ohio announcement, Amazon leased 20 more jets from Atlas Air, an air cargo company based in Purchase, N.Y. Amazon has also purchased 4,000 truck trailers. Meanwhile, a company subsidiary in China has obtained a freight-forwarding license that analysts say enables it to sell space on container ships traveling between Asia and the U.S. and Europe. In short, Amazon is becoming a kind of e-commerce Walmart with a FedEx attached.

With any other company, an expansion like this would be preposterous. But Amazon’s growth has been preposterous. In 2010 its annual revenue was $34 billion; last year, $107 billion. In 2010 the company employed 33,700 workers. By this June, it had 268,900. To have enough office space for its swelling headquarters staff, Amazon has swallowed Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, and it’s building three tree-filled biospheres in the city that will allow workers to take contemplative breaks, like so many Ralph Waldo Emersons in Jetsonian luxury. The company is the fifth-most valuable in the world: Its market capitalization is about $366 billion, which is roughly equal to the combined worth of Walmart, FedEx, and Boeing.

Amazon’s ambitions depend on the continued success of its Prime service. For $99 a year, Amazon Prime customers get two-day delivery at no extra charge. Those who sign up tend to spend almost three times as much as their non-Prime peers. The company zealously guards its numbers, but Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimates that Amazon had 63 million Prime members as of late June—19 million more than the year before. Amazon keeps subscribers in the fold by lavishing them with perks such as free access to Amazon Video, the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, and trial subscriptions to the Washington Post, which Bezos, a billionaire many times over, purchased for $250 million in cash three years ago. But more than anything, Prime members sign up for that fast shipping, which keeps getting faster. In many large cities, subscribers can now get free two-hour delivery on more than 25,000 items they might otherwise have bought at Walgreens or 7-Eleven. For an additional $7.99, orders arrive within an hour. Some company executives joked that the service should be called Amazon Magic; they went with Prime Now.

Providing near-instant gratification on Amazon’s scale isn’t cheap. Last year the company spent $11.5 billion on shipping—nearly twice what it did two years ago. Along with leasing jets and buying trailers, Amazon has opened more than 28 sorting centers, 59 delivery stations that feed packages to local couriers, and more than 65 Prime Now hubs stocked with best-selling items that can be rushed to customers around the world, according to MWPVL International, a Montreal-based supply chain consultant. “This year we estimate Amazon is going to sell 7.2 billion items,” says Gene Munster, an internet industry analyst at Piper Jaffray. “In 2020, which is only four years away, we expect them to sell 12.6 billion items.”

In June, Deutsche Bank released a report predicting that Amazon will eventually have a global shipping operation capable of moving goods directly from factories in China to customers in the U.S. and Europe, using not just 767s and container ships, but also self-driving trucks and drones. The report also said Amazon has a patent for “anticipatory package shipping” technology, which is just what it sounds like: When some Prime subscriber buys more deodorant, Amazon already has the box standing by, ready to label and ship. “It’s just one giant math exercise,” Deutsche Bank wrote, adding that Amazon has “hundreds of Ph.D. mathematicians” who spend their days optimizing logistics.

Others believe that Amazon will make a business out of its delivery network, as it did with Amazon Web Services, thereby challenging the world’s leading shipping companies. “I fully expect Amazon to build out a logistics supply chain that others can use,” says John Rossman, a former Amazon executive who’s now a managing director at the restructuring firm Alvarez & Marsal. “Over the next five years? I doubt it. Over 10 or 15 years? Oh yeah.”

by Devin Leonard, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Jake Stengel