Monday, October 10, 2016
The Swimwear Industry’s Most Popular Fit Model
Chances are, if you’ve ever worn a swimsuit you felt kind of good about yourself in, Bonnie Fischer had a lot to do with it. Fischer is a swimwear and intimate-apparel fit model. Fit models are different from the models in fashion magazines or in advertisements because they don’t appear in promotional images; they provide feedback to design teams on how a new garment feels. How supported do their boobs feel by the elastic underneath? Does the strap feel secure or like it’s going to fall off your shoulder any second? Their comments about design elements like these make the next round of samples better and after a few rounds, the kinks are worked out, and the design is finalized and produced en mass in a range of sizes.
Fit models refer to each other with first names because they rarely know each other’s last names. Bonnie is Bonnie 34B. There is Julie 34C, Katie 34D, a Casey 34DD, a Jessica 38C, and so on. Bonnie is a perfect size 6 and covers a huge part of the market because her measurements are smack in the middle of the American women’s sizes you’d find on a clothing-store rack. Having your body be similar to the proportions of a fit model is likely the reason a garment felt really good on you and why you keep returning to a particular brand. The All-Stars of fit — Araks, J.Crew, Reebok, Badgley Mischka, Kohl’s, American Eagle, Jockey, even Thinx — are all among Bonnie’s massive list of clients.
I met Bonnie through my job running a design consultancy where we try to improve product categories that have traditionally been disempowering for women. In interviews, women kept telling us that they never feel less confident than when they’re trying on and wearing swimsuits. So since last year, we’ve been working on custom swimsuits. To get the basic patterns perfect, I hired Bonnie and we had a bunch of fittings as prototypes came back from the factory.
Bonnie is one of those women whose age is impossible to guess. You’ve probably passed her in midtown, rushing from one appointment to another in a hoodie and flared jeans with her long brown hair tied up in a bun. She arrives with a half-finished slice of pizza and says, “Okay. What do you have for me?” In less than a minute, she is out of her clothes and in my newest bikini. A feeling comes over me, similar to seeing a hickey on your boyfriend’s neck that you didn’t put there, as I spot marker lines all over her chest and torso from the hems of other bikinis she tried on that day.
Bonnie works with the focus of a surgeon. She can describe in amazing specificity how changing the tightness of the elastic will make her thigh look less like a bratwurst and how taking a ¼ of an inch off a strap will allow her boob to “fulfill the cup” properly. When the comments are done, we photograph her as she pivots front, side with arm raised, and back like a lieutenant in formation. Bonnie is so good, I don’t care if she isn’t monogamous.
Bonnie came to New York from Florida to be a dancer in the late ‘80s. She was enrolled at Alvin Ailey and worked odd jobs to make ends meet. A friend suggested she walk the halls of 1411 Broadway, where there were a bunch of swimwear companies looking for trade-show models. She made $150 a day for two weeks. It was the most money she’d ever made in her life. One day she fit a swimsuit for Bill Blass and he liked her so much he put her in his show.
From there, word spread about Bonnie. Now, she estimates that she and five other swimwear fit models cover about 80 percent of the swimwear that’s produced in the United States and Europe. She’s been fitting for over 20 years and has been able to keep her measurements consistent. She can try on a garment she fit ten years ago and it still fits like a glove.
by Sarah Krasley, NY Magazine/The Cut | Read more:
Fit models refer to each other with first names because they rarely know each other’s last names. Bonnie is Bonnie 34B. There is Julie 34C, Katie 34D, a Casey 34DD, a Jessica 38C, and so on. Bonnie is a perfect size 6 and covers a huge part of the market because her measurements are smack in the middle of the American women’s sizes you’d find on a clothing-store rack. Having your body be similar to the proportions of a fit model is likely the reason a garment felt really good on you and why you keep returning to a particular brand. The All-Stars of fit — Araks, J.Crew, Reebok, Badgley Mischka, Kohl’s, American Eagle, Jockey, even Thinx — are all among Bonnie’s massive list of clients.I met Bonnie through my job running a design consultancy where we try to improve product categories that have traditionally been disempowering for women. In interviews, women kept telling us that they never feel less confident than when they’re trying on and wearing swimsuits. So since last year, we’ve been working on custom swimsuits. To get the basic patterns perfect, I hired Bonnie and we had a bunch of fittings as prototypes came back from the factory.
Bonnie is one of those women whose age is impossible to guess. You’ve probably passed her in midtown, rushing from one appointment to another in a hoodie and flared jeans with her long brown hair tied up in a bun. She arrives with a half-finished slice of pizza and says, “Okay. What do you have for me?” In less than a minute, she is out of her clothes and in my newest bikini. A feeling comes over me, similar to seeing a hickey on your boyfriend’s neck that you didn’t put there, as I spot marker lines all over her chest and torso from the hems of other bikinis she tried on that day.
Bonnie works with the focus of a surgeon. She can describe in amazing specificity how changing the tightness of the elastic will make her thigh look less like a bratwurst and how taking a ¼ of an inch off a strap will allow her boob to “fulfill the cup” properly. When the comments are done, we photograph her as she pivots front, side with arm raised, and back like a lieutenant in formation. Bonnie is so good, I don’t care if she isn’t monogamous.
Bonnie came to New York from Florida to be a dancer in the late ‘80s. She was enrolled at Alvin Ailey and worked odd jobs to make ends meet. A friend suggested she walk the halls of 1411 Broadway, where there were a bunch of swimwear companies looking for trade-show models. She made $150 a day for two weeks. It was the most money she’d ever made in her life. One day she fit a swimsuit for Bill Blass and he liked her so much he put her in his show.
From there, word spread about Bonnie. Now, she estimates that she and five other swimwear fit models cover about 80 percent of the swimwear that’s produced in the United States and Europe. She’s been fitting for over 20 years and has been able to keep her measurements consistent. She can try on a garment she fit ten years ago and it still fits like a glove.
by Sarah Krasley, NY Magazine/The Cut | Read more:
Image: Chona Kasinger
Sunday, October 9, 2016
'New Day' in Lung Cancer Treatment
Merck & Co scored a double hit on Sunday with new clinical data showing its Keytruda immunotherapy offered big benefits in previously untreated lung cancer patients, either when given on its own or with chemotherapy.
As a monotherapy, Keytruda halved the risk of disease progression and cut overall deaths by 40 percent compared to chemotherapy alone in pre-selected patients whose tumors had been tested using a biomarker.
And when given with two older chemotherapy drugs in non-selected patients, it was almost twice as likely to shrink tumors as chemotherapy alone.
Another similar drug from Roche also demonstrated broad efficacy as a so-called second-line option in patients who had received prior treatment.
"Remember this day. It's a new day for lung cancer treatment," Stefan Zimmermann of Lausanne's University Hospital told reporters at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) congress as the results were presented.
An editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, where the Merck monotherapy results were published, said Keytruda could become "a new standard of care". (...)
Roger Perlmutter, Merck's head of research, said both trials suggested Keytruda could offer a broad array of patients meaningful improvement over standard platinum-based chemotherapy, which is now more than two decades old.
Drugs like Keytruda and Opdivo work by taking the brakes off the immune system and allowing the body's natural killer cells to home in on tumors.
by Ben Hirschler, Reuters | Read more:
Image: via:
As a monotherapy, Keytruda halved the risk of disease progression and cut overall deaths by 40 percent compared to chemotherapy alone in pre-selected patients whose tumors had been tested using a biomarker.
And when given with two older chemotherapy drugs in non-selected patients, it was almost twice as likely to shrink tumors as chemotherapy alone.Another similar drug from Roche also demonstrated broad efficacy as a so-called second-line option in patients who had received prior treatment.
"Remember this day. It's a new day for lung cancer treatment," Stefan Zimmermann of Lausanne's University Hospital told reporters at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) congress as the results were presented.
An editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, where the Merck monotherapy results were published, said Keytruda could become "a new standard of care". (...)
Roger Perlmutter, Merck's head of research, said both trials suggested Keytruda could offer a broad array of patients meaningful improvement over standard platinum-based chemotherapy, which is now more than two decades old.
Drugs like Keytruda and Opdivo work by taking the brakes off the immune system and allowing the body's natural killer cells to home in on tumors.
by Ben Hirschler, Reuters | Read more:
Image: via:
Donald and Billy on the Bus
It’s Billy Bush’s snickering that really gets to me. In the video from 2005, published Friday by The Washington Post, you can hear Mr. Bush (first cousin to George W.) wheezing ecstatically as Donald J. Trump brags, inadvertently into a hot mic, about sexually harassing and groping women. The pair, along with a passel of unidentified men, are on a bus en route to film an Access Hollywood segment with the actress Arianne Zucker.
Through the window of the bus, Mr. Bush seems to spot Ms. Zucker first, as she waits to greet them. “Sheesh,” he blurts, breathless, telling Mr. Trump how hot “your girl” is. You can feel Mr. Bush’s giddiness, a contact high, at getting to join a more powerful man in the oldest and most sacred of male bonding exercises: objectifying women.
Mr. Trump spies Ms. Zucker too. “Whoa!”
“Yes!” Mr. Bush grunts, Beavis-esque, “Yes, the Donald has scored!”
Of course, “the Donald” has not “scored.” The Donald is on the NBC lot to shoot a guest appearance on “Days of Our Lives” at the behest of his employer to promote his reality show, “The Apprentice,” while “Access Hollywood” produces an accompanying puff piece. This is work within work within work. Mr. Bush is at work. Mr. Trump is at work. Ms. Zucker is at work, and not only is she not Mr. Trump’s “girl,” she is a complete stranger who is also on camera and being paid to smile.
“Heh heh heh,” Mr. Bush snickers. “My man!”
Such has it always been: powerful men sorting women’s bodies into property and trash and “good” guys, average guys, guys you know, guys you love, guys on the “Today” show, going along with it. Snickering. Licking a boot here and there, joining in if they’re feeling especially bitter or transgressive or insecure or far from the cameras that day. Perhaps, at their most noble, staying silent. Never speaking up, because the social cost is too high. It’s easier to leave that for the victims to bear. After all, they’re used to it. (...)
Through the window of the bus, Mr. Bush seems to spot Ms. Zucker first, as she waits to greet them. “Sheesh,” he blurts, breathless, telling Mr. Trump how hot “your girl” is. You can feel Mr. Bush’s giddiness, a contact high, at getting to join a more powerful man in the oldest and most sacred of male bonding exercises: objectifying women.Mr. Trump spies Ms. Zucker too. “Whoa!”
“Yes!” Mr. Bush grunts, Beavis-esque, “Yes, the Donald has scored!”
Of course, “the Donald” has not “scored.” The Donald is on the NBC lot to shoot a guest appearance on “Days of Our Lives” at the behest of his employer to promote his reality show, “The Apprentice,” while “Access Hollywood” produces an accompanying puff piece. This is work within work within work. Mr. Bush is at work. Mr. Trump is at work. Ms. Zucker is at work, and not only is she not Mr. Trump’s “girl,” she is a complete stranger who is also on camera and being paid to smile.
“Heh heh heh,” Mr. Bush snickers. “My man!”
Such has it always been: powerful men sorting women’s bodies into property and trash and “good” guys, average guys, guys you know, guys you love, guys on the “Today” show, going along with it. Snickering. Licking a boot here and there, joining in if they’re feeling especially bitter or transgressive or insecure or far from the cameras that day. Perhaps, at their most noble, staying silent. Never speaking up, because the social cost is too high. It’s easier to leave that for the victims to bear. After all, they’re used to it. (...)
Every woman knows a version of Donald Trump. Most of us have known more of them than we can (or care to) recall. He’s the boss who thinks you owe him something; the date who thinks that silence means “yes” and “no” means “try harder”; the stranger who thinks your body’s mere existence constitutes an invitation to touch, take, own and destroy. He’s every deadbeat hookup, every narcissistic loser, every man who’s ever tried to leverage power, money, fame, credibility or physical strength to snap your boundaries like matchsticks. He is hot fear and cold dread and a pit in your stomach. He’s the man who held you back, who never took you seriously, who treated you like nothing until you started to believe it, who raped you and told you it was your fault and whose daddy was a cop so who would believe you anyway? (...)
Mr. Trump is rape culture’s blathering id, and Sunday night Hillary Clinton (who, no doubt, has just as many man-made scars as the rest of us) has to stand next to him on a stage, and remain unflappable as she’s held to an astronomically higher standard, and pretend that he is her equal while his followers persist in howling that sexism is a feminist myth. While Mr. Trump boasts about sexual assault and vows to suppress disobedient media, cable news pundits spend their time taking a protractor to Mrs. Clinton’s smile — a constant, churning, microanalysis of nothing.
Mr. Trump is rape culture’s blathering id, and Sunday night Hillary Clinton (who, no doubt, has just as many man-made scars as the rest of us) has to stand next to him on a stage, and remain unflappable as she’s held to an astronomically higher standard, and pretend that he is her equal while his followers persist in howling that sexism is a feminist myth. While Mr. Trump boasts about sexual assault and vows to suppress disobedient media, cable news pundits spend their time taking a protractor to Mrs. Clinton’s smile — a constant, churning, microanalysis of nothing.
by Lindy West, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ruth Fremson
Saturday, October 8, 2016
Take Them Apples
There's an apple renaissance underway, an ever-expanding array of colors and tastes in the apple section of supermarkets and farmers markets.
Less visible is the economic machinery that's helping to drive this revolution. An increasing number of these new apples are "club apples" — varieties that are not just patented, but also trademarked and controlled in such a way that only a select "club" of farmers can sell them.
To understand the new trend, start with the hottest apple variety of recent years: Honeycrisp.
"It's incredible," says Sydney Kuhn, who owns Kuhn Orchards in Cashtown, Pa. "That apple has such a following at this point." It's the most popular variety that Kuhn sells, by far.
Honeycrisp came from the University of Minnesota. Apple breeders there cross-pollinated different apple trees, created new genetic combinations and picked this one.
"I still remember the first day that I tasted it," says David Bedford, one of the university's apple breeders. This new, as-yet-unnamed apple was crisp. Bedford calls it "explosively crisp."
"That texture was so different that I had to pause and kind of think for a minute: Is this good? Is this bad?" he says.
Consumers decided it was good; so good, in fact, that they were willing to pay extra for it. And it dawned on people that there might be serious money in new apple varieties.
There's now a race underway to create the next Honeycrisp.
Which brings us to another variety, another product of the University of Minnesota. It's called SweeTango, and Bedford says it has all the crispness of Honeycrisp, plus more flavor: "I think this one has all the potential of Honeycrisp. It's actually a child of Honeycrisp."
But there's a crucial difference between the way these two varieties have found their way to consumers.
Anyone could plant a Honeycrisp tree. Apple growers just called up a nursery and ordered their trees. The variety was patented, so growers did have to pay a royalty of about a dollar per tree to the University of Minnesota, but that patent has now expired.
SweeTango, on the other hand, is much more tightly controlled.
The University of Minnesota licensed it to a single group of apple growers — 45 of them, mainly in the states of Washington, Michigan and New York. The group is called the Next Big Thing cooperative.
SweeTango apples come only from these growers. And their exclusive rights could last forever, because SweeTango is not just covered by a patent. The name SweeTango is also a trademark, which never expires. And for every bushel of SweeTango apples that these growers sell, they pay a royalty to the University of Minnesota.
The apples started arriving in stores a few years ago, joining a raft of other apples that are controlled in a similar way. More than a dozen of these so-called "managed" or "club" varieties are available, or will be soon. They're called "club apples" because you have to be part of a particular group to grow them.
Tim Byrne, president of the Minnesota-based Next Big Thing cooperative, which controls SweeTango, says there are good reasons for this trend.
The first is quality control. "If you have one management company overseeing the whole thing, you get to select the group that you want to manage the commercialization, the growing, the harvesting, the packing," he says. That way, you can make sure that all SweeTango apples in the store are of consistently high quality.
Also, there's control over quantity. You can grow enough to satisfy the demands of supermarket chains, but not so many that you drive down prices.
Perhaps most important, Byrne says, is the ability to organize marketing campaigns that convince consumers to buy the variety, and stores to stock it. Nobody did that for previous varieties, because anyone could plant them.
"If anyone can plant [a new variety], why could I put half a million dollars into a marketing campaign, out of my pocket, when everyone else can ride the coattails of that campaign?" says Byrne.
This is the future of the apple section in your supermarket, he says. Apple-growing clubs will compete for shelf space. Traditional "open" varieties, because they lack marketing muscle, will have trouble competing and may disappear. "It is going to be a world of managed brands, just like the soup aisle or the potato chip aisle or any other aisle," he says.
For a lot of people in the apple industry, this is an unsettling change.
Less visible is the economic machinery that's helping to drive this revolution. An increasing number of these new apples are "club apples" — varieties that are not just patented, but also trademarked and controlled in such a way that only a select "club" of farmers can sell them.
To understand the new trend, start with the hottest apple variety of recent years: Honeycrisp.
"It's incredible," says Sydney Kuhn, who owns Kuhn Orchards in Cashtown, Pa. "That apple has such a following at this point." It's the most popular variety that Kuhn sells, by far.Honeycrisp came from the University of Minnesota. Apple breeders there cross-pollinated different apple trees, created new genetic combinations and picked this one.
"I still remember the first day that I tasted it," says David Bedford, one of the university's apple breeders. This new, as-yet-unnamed apple was crisp. Bedford calls it "explosively crisp."
"That texture was so different that I had to pause and kind of think for a minute: Is this good? Is this bad?" he says.
Consumers decided it was good; so good, in fact, that they were willing to pay extra for it. And it dawned on people that there might be serious money in new apple varieties.
There's now a race underway to create the next Honeycrisp.
Which brings us to another variety, another product of the University of Minnesota. It's called SweeTango, and Bedford says it has all the crispness of Honeycrisp, plus more flavor: "I think this one has all the potential of Honeycrisp. It's actually a child of Honeycrisp."
But there's a crucial difference between the way these two varieties have found their way to consumers.
Anyone could plant a Honeycrisp tree. Apple growers just called up a nursery and ordered their trees. The variety was patented, so growers did have to pay a royalty of about a dollar per tree to the University of Minnesota, but that patent has now expired.
SweeTango, on the other hand, is much more tightly controlled.
The University of Minnesota licensed it to a single group of apple growers — 45 of them, mainly in the states of Washington, Michigan and New York. The group is called the Next Big Thing cooperative.
SweeTango apples come only from these growers. And their exclusive rights could last forever, because SweeTango is not just covered by a patent. The name SweeTango is also a trademark, which never expires. And for every bushel of SweeTango apples that these growers sell, they pay a royalty to the University of Minnesota.
The apples started arriving in stores a few years ago, joining a raft of other apples that are controlled in a similar way. More than a dozen of these so-called "managed" or "club" varieties are available, or will be soon. They're called "club apples" because you have to be part of a particular group to grow them.
Tim Byrne, president of the Minnesota-based Next Big Thing cooperative, which controls SweeTango, says there are good reasons for this trend.
The first is quality control. "If you have one management company overseeing the whole thing, you get to select the group that you want to manage the commercialization, the growing, the harvesting, the packing," he says. That way, you can make sure that all SweeTango apples in the store are of consistently high quality.
Also, there's control over quantity. You can grow enough to satisfy the demands of supermarket chains, but not so many that you drive down prices.
Perhaps most important, Byrne says, is the ability to organize marketing campaigns that convince consumers to buy the variety, and stores to stock it. Nobody did that for previous varieties, because anyone could plant them.
"If anyone can plant [a new variety], why could I put half a million dollars into a marketing campaign, out of my pocket, when everyone else can ride the coattails of that campaign?" says Byrne.
This is the future of the apple section in your supermarket, he says. Apple-growing clubs will compete for shelf space. Traditional "open" varieties, because they lack marketing muscle, will have trouble competing and may disappear. "It is going to be a world of managed brands, just like the soup aisle or the potato chip aisle or any other aisle," he says.
For a lot of people in the apple industry, this is an unsettling change.
by Dan Charles, NPR | Read more:
Image: Dan Charles
The Snarling Girl
Ambition. The word itself makes me want to run and hide. It’s got some inexorable pejorative stench to it. Why is that? I’ve been avoiding this essay like the plague. I’d so much rather be writing my novel, my silly secret sacred new novel, which will take a while, during which time I will not garner new followers nor see my name in the paper nor seek an advance from the publisher nor receive the hearts and likes and dings and dongs that are supposed to keep my carnivorous cancerous ego afloat. I will simply do my work. Hole up with family and friends, live in the world as best I can, and do my work.
The work: this is what I would like to talk about. The work, not the hearts and likes and dings and dongs. And maybe I can float the possibility that the work is best when it’s done nowhere near the hearts and likes and dings and dongs. Maybe I can suggest that there is plenty of time for hearts and likes and dings and dongs once the work is done, and done well. Maybe I can ever so gently point out that a lot of people seem rather addicted to the hearts and likes and dings and dongs, and seem to talk about and around writing a hell of a lot more than they actually do it. Maybe we can even talk about how some self-promote so extensively and shamelessly and heedlessly and artlessly that their very names become shorthand for how not to be.
I mean: ambition to what? Toward what? For what? In the service of what? Endless schmoozing and worrying and self-promotion and maniac flattery and status anxiety and name-dropping are available to all of us in any artistic medium. But the competitive edge is depressing. That thinly (or not at all) disguised desire to win. To best her or him or her or him, sell more, publish more, own the Internet, occupy more front tables, get tagged, have the most followers, be loudest, assume some throne. Is it because we want to believe that we are in charge of our destiny, and that if “things” aren’t “happening” for us, we are failing to, like, “manifest”? Or is it because we are misguided enough to think that external validation is what counts? Or is it because of some core narcissistic injury, some failure of love we carry around like a latent virus?
Perhaps it’s because knocking on doors like we’re running for damn office is a lot easier and simpler than sitting alone with our thoughts and knowledge and experience and expertise and perspective, and struggling to shape all that into exactly the right form, during which process we take the terrible chance that we might get it right and still no one will care. Maybe we are misguided enough to believe that what’s most important is that people care, regardless of whether or not we get it exactly right. Maybe getting it right doesn’t even matter if no one cares. Maybe not getting it right doesn’t matter if everyone cares. If I write an excellent book and it’s not a bestseller, did I write the excellent book? If I write a middling book and it is a bestseller, does that make it an excellent book? If I wander around looking for it on bookstore shelves so I can photograph it and post online, have I done good? If I publish a book and don’t heavily promote it, did I really publish a book at all!?
Here is what we know for sure: there is no end to want. Want is a vast universe within other vast universes. There is always more, and more again. There are prizes and grants and fellowships and lists and reviews and recognitions that elude us, mysterious invitations to take up residence at some castle in Italy. One can make a life out of focusing on what one does not have, but that’s no way to live. A seat at the table is plenty. (But is it a good seat? At which end of the table??? Alongside whom!?) A seat at the table means we are free to do our work, the end. Work! What a fantastic privilege. (...)
Some ambition is banal: Rich spouse. Thigh gap. Gold-buckle shoes. Quilted Chanel. Penthouse. Windowed office. Tony address. Notoriety. Ten thousand followers. A hundred thousand followers. Bestseller list. Editor-in-Chief. Face on billboard. A million dollars. A million followers. There are ways of working toward these things, clear examples of how it can be done. Programs, degrees, seminars, diets, schemes, connections, conferences. Hands to shake, ladders to climb. If you are smart, if you are savvy, who’s to stop you? Godspeed and good luck. I hope you get what you want, and when you do, I hope you aren’t disappointed.
Remember the famous curse? May you get absolutely everything you want.
Here’s what impresses me: Sangfroid. Good health. The ability to float softly with an iron core through Ashtanga primary series. Eye contact. Self-possession. Loyalty. Boundaries. Good posture. Moderation. Restraint. Laugh lines. Gardening. Activism. Originality. Kindness. Self-awareness. Simple food, prepared with love. Style. Hope. Lust. Grace. Aging. Humility. Nurturance. Learning from mistakes. Moving on. Letting go. Forms of practice, in other words. Constant, ongoing work. No endpoint in sight. Not goal-oriented, not gendered. Idiosyncratic and pretty much impossible to monetize.
I mean: What kind of person are you? What kind of craft have you honed? What is my experience of looking into your eyes, being around you? Are you at home in your body? Can you sit still? Do you make me laugh? Can you give and receive affection? Do you know yourself? How sophisticated is your sense of humor, how finely tuned your understanding of life’s absurdities? How thoughtfully do you interact with others? How honest are you with yourself? How do you deal with your various addictive tendencies? How do you face your darkness? How broad and deep is your perspective? How willing are you to be quiet? How do you care for yourself? How do you treat people you deem unimportant?
The work: this is what I would like to talk about. The work, not the hearts and likes and dings and dongs. And maybe I can float the possibility that the work is best when it’s done nowhere near the hearts and likes and dings and dongs. Maybe I can suggest that there is plenty of time for hearts and likes and dings and dongs once the work is done, and done well. Maybe I can ever so gently point out that a lot of people seem rather addicted to the hearts and likes and dings and dongs, and seem to talk about and around writing a hell of a lot more than they actually do it. Maybe we can even talk about how some self-promote so extensively and shamelessly and heedlessly and artlessly that their very names become shorthand for how not to be.
I mean: ambition to what? Toward what? For what? In the service of what? Endless schmoozing and worrying and self-promotion and maniac flattery and status anxiety and name-dropping are available to all of us in any artistic medium. But the competitive edge is depressing. That thinly (or not at all) disguised desire to win. To best her or him or her or him, sell more, publish more, own the Internet, occupy more front tables, get tagged, have the most followers, be loudest, assume some throne. Is it because we want to believe that we are in charge of our destiny, and that if “things” aren’t “happening” for us, we are failing to, like, “manifest”? Or is it because we are misguided enough to think that external validation is what counts? Or is it because of some core narcissistic injury, some failure of love we carry around like a latent virus?Perhaps it’s because knocking on doors like we’re running for damn office is a lot easier and simpler than sitting alone with our thoughts and knowledge and experience and expertise and perspective, and struggling to shape all that into exactly the right form, during which process we take the terrible chance that we might get it right and still no one will care. Maybe we are misguided enough to believe that what’s most important is that people care, regardless of whether or not we get it exactly right. Maybe getting it right doesn’t even matter if no one cares. Maybe not getting it right doesn’t matter if everyone cares. If I write an excellent book and it’s not a bestseller, did I write the excellent book? If I write a middling book and it is a bestseller, does that make it an excellent book? If I wander around looking for it on bookstore shelves so I can photograph it and post online, have I done good? If I publish a book and don’t heavily promote it, did I really publish a book at all!?
Here is what we know for sure: there is no end to want. Want is a vast universe within other vast universes. There is always more, and more again. There are prizes and grants and fellowships and lists and reviews and recognitions that elude us, mysterious invitations to take up residence at some castle in Italy. One can make a life out of focusing on what one does not have, but that’s no way to live. A seat at the table is plenty. (But is it a good seat? At which end of the table??? Alongside whom!?) A seat at the table means we are free to do our work, the end. Work! What a fantastic privilege. (...)
Some ambition is banal: Rich spouse. Thigh gap. Gold-buckle shoes. Quilted Chanel. Penthouse. Windowed office. Tony address. Notoriety. Ten thousand followers. A hundred thousand followers. Bestseller list. Editor-in-Chief. Face on billboard. A million dollars. A million followers. There are ways of working toward these things, clear examples of how it can be done. Programs, degrees, seminars, diets, schemes, connections, conferences. Hands to shake, ladders to climb. If you are smart, if you are savvy, who’s to stop you? Godspeed and good luck. I hope you get what you want, and when you do, I hope you aren’t disappointed.
Remember the famous curse? May you get absolutely everything you want.
Here’s what impresses me: Sangfroid. Good health. The ability to float softly with an iron core through Ashtanga primary series. Eye contact. Self-possession. Loyalty. Boundaries. Good posture. Moderation. Restraint. Laugh lines. Gardening. Activism. Originality. Kindness. Self-awareness. Simple food, prepared with love. Style. Hope. Lust. Grace. Aging. Humility. Nurturance. Learning from mistakes. Moving on. Letting go. Forms of practice, in other words. Constant, ongoing work. No endpoint in sight. Not goal-oriented, not gendered. Idiosyncratic and pretty much impossible to monetize.
I mean: What kind of person are you? What kind of craft have you honed? What is my experience of looking into your eyes, being around you? Are you at home in your body? Can you sit still? Do you make me laugh? Can you give and receive affection? Do you know yourself? How sophisticated is your sense of humor, how finely tuned your understanding of life’s absurdities? How thoughtfully do you interact with others? How honest are you with yourself? How do you deal with your various addictive tendencies? How do you face your darkness? How broad and deep is your perspective? How willing are you to be quiet? How do you care for yourself? How do you treat people you deem unimportant?
by Elisa Albert, Hazlitt | Read more:
Image: Meg Hunt
Friday, October 7, 2016
[ed. Our old family dog (which looked just like this mom) had nine. Once they got up and running we had to barricade the family room and patio. They were everywhere... under the sofa, in closets, behind the toilet ...]
via:
The Examined Life
Daydream with me for a moment while I imagine my ideal classroom. The first thing that strikes you when you walk in is the arrangement of the room. Not serried ranks of desks lined up before a blackboard but comfortable seats placed in a large circle. This arrangement sends a message: here is a space for open discussion and the free exchange of ideas. On the wall is a poster of Bertrand Russell with the quotation: ‘Most people would sooner die than think, and most of them do.’ There is a display cabinet with row upon row of student dissertations, covering topics as diverse as business ethics, engineering, architecture, political history, linguistics and the philosophy of science.
The students enter, taking their places in the circle, ready for the seminar to begin. The teacher sits with them in the circle and gets straight down to business. ‘Am I the same person today as I was yesterday?’ she asks. Debate breaks out immediately. The teacher says little, interjecting occasionally to ask for clarification of a point, or to suggest that the class gives further consideration to an argument that one of the students has made.
After a lively initial exchange of ideas, things calm down a little and the teacher makes some remarks about the distinction between essential and non-essential properties. She then suggests the students read an extract from the writings of the philosopher John Locke. This stimulates further discussion and debate.
In their contributions, students draw on ideas they have encountered in different subjects. One says she is the person she is because of her DNA. The teacher asks for an explanation of the biology behind this idea. Someone questions how the theory applies to identical twins. Another student suggests that we all play roles in life and it is these roles that define our identity.
The atmosphere in the class is relaxed, collaborative, enquiring; learning is driven by curiosity and personal interest. The teacher offers no answers but instead records comments on a flip-chart as the class discusses. Nor does the lesson end with an answer. In fact it doesn’t end when the bell goes: the students are still arguing on the way out.
This is my ideal classroom. In point of fact, it is more than just a dream. My real classroom sometimes looks like this, at least occasionally. I learned when I began teaching that lessons in which students are actively involved in discussion, debate and enquiry tend to be more enjoyable and memorable both for the student and the teacher, therefore I try wherever possible to run things this way.
But the sad fact is that the vast majority of lessons are determined by a different goal. For most teachers and students, the classroom experience is shaped, down to the last detail, by the requirement to prepare for examinations. When students enter such classrooms, the focus is not on open-ended discussion or enquiry, but on learning ‘what we need to know’ to succeed in whichever examination is next on the horizon. Most likely, there will be a ‘learning outcome’ for the lesson, drawn straight from the exam syllabus. There will be textbooks with comments from the examiners, banks of possible exam questions and bullet-pointed notes with ‘model answers’. Far from being open spaces for free enquiry, the classroom of today resembles a military training ground, where students are drilled to produce perfect answers to potential examination questions. (...)
Teaching students to think for themselves is a laudable goal. But critics of this idea note that, left to themselves, the majority struggle to find the way ahead. Before students can reason independently, the argument runs, they need a great deal of background knowledge.
The point is well-made, but it is effective only as a counter to a naïve conception of independent learning. Its advocates claim that ‘free discovery’, in which students are given free rein to determine what and how to learn, is the best method of all. But advocates of education as a process of equipping the young to think for themselves ought to acknowledge the importance of imparting skills and information before meaningful enquiry can proceed.
Would you recommend the ‘Independent-Learning School of Driving’ to a friend’s son or daughter? Yes and no. They wouldn’t be impressed if they turned up for their first driving lesson only to be handed the keys and told to have a go and learn from their mistakes. On the other hand, we certainly want people to learn to drive independently; instructors ought to do themselves out of a job. The desirability of ‘independent learning’, then, turns on how we understand its relationship to conventional instruction.
In a sensible model of independent learning, it is not assumed that students are innately capable of thinking for themselves. Instead, this capacity is explicitly developed through teaching. It is a mildly paradoxical thought, but still true: students need to be taught to be independent. In the example with which we began, the teacher was guiding the discussion: introducing central arguments at key points, highlighting the use of reason, summarising and critiquing arguments, introducing terminology, and explaining important concepts. A great deal of guidance was provided, albeit not by a teacher at the front of the class lecturing students on how to think.
To foster the capacity of students to think for themselves it is crucial for the teacher and students to collaborate in managing a phased transition of responsibility for learning. At the outset, and even some way into the process, there might well be a fair amount of direct instruction going on, but it will be clear that its purpose is not an end in itself, but that the method is a means of developing the students’ capacity to think and work independently. They are being taught to think for themselves. As the process unfolds, independence grows.
The students enter, taking their places in the circle, ready for the seminar to begin. The teacher sits with them in the circle and gets straight down to business. ‘Am I the same person today as I was yesterday?’ she asks. Debate breaks out immediately. The teacher says little, interjecting occasionally to ask for clarification of a point, or to suggest that the class gives further consideration to an argument that one of the students has made.
After a lively initial exchange of ideas, things calm down a little and the teacher makes some remarks about the distinction between essential and non-essential properties. She then suggests the students read an extract from the writings of the philosopher John Locke. This stimulates further discussion and debate.In their contributions, students draw on ideas they have encountered in different subjects. One says she is the person she is because of her DNA. The teacher asks for an explanation of the biology behind this idea. Someone questions how the theory applies to identical twins. Another student suggests that we all play roles in life and it is these roles that define our identity.
The atmosphere in the class is relaxed, collaborative, enquiring; learning is driven by curiosity and personal interest. The teacher offers no answers but instead records comments on a flip-chart as the class discusses. Nor does the lesson end with an answer. In fact it doesn’t end when the bell goes: the students are still arguing on the way out.
This is my ideal classroom. In point of fact, it is more than just a dream. My real classroom sometimes looks like this, at least occasionally. I learned when I began teaching that lessons in which students are actively involved in discussion, debate and enquiry tend to be more enjoyable and memorable both for the student and the teacher, therefore I try wherever possible to run things this way.
But the sad fact is that the vast majority of lessons are determined by a different goal. For most teachers and students, the classroom experience is shaped, down to the last detail, by the requirement to prepare for examinations. When students enter such classrooms, the focus is not on open-ended discussion or enquiry, but on learning ‘what we need to know’ to succeed in whichever examination is next on the horizon. Most likely, there will be a ‘learning outcome’ for the lesson, drawn straight from the exam syllabus. There will be textbooks with comments from the examiners, banks of possible exam questions and bullet-pointed notes with ‘model answers’. Far from being open spaces for free enquiry, the classroom of today resembles a military training ground, where students are drilled to produce perfect answers to potential examination questions. (...)
Teaching students to think for themselves is a laudable goal. But critics of this idea note that, left to themselves, the majority struggle to find the way ahead. Before students can reason independently, the argument runs, they need a great deal of background knowledge.
The point is well-made, but it is effective only as a counter to a naïve conception of independent learning. Its advocates claim that ‘free discovery’, in which students are given free rein to determine what and how to learn, is the best method of all. But advocates of education as a process of equipping the young to think for themselves ought to acknowledge the importance of imparting skills and information before meaningful enquiry can proceed.
Would you recommend the ‘Independent-Learning School of Driving’ to a friend’s son or daughter? Yes and no. They wouldn’t be impressed if they turned up for their first driving lesson only to be handed the keys and told to have a go and learn from their mistakes. On the other hand, we certainly want people to learn to drive independently; instructors ought to do themselves out of a job. The desirability of ‘independent learning’, then, turns on how we understand its relationship to conventional instruction.
In a sensible model of independent learning, it is not assumed that students are innately capable of thinking for themselves. Instead, this capacity is explicitly developed through teaching. It is a mildly paradoxical thought, but still true: students need to be taught to be independent. In the example with which we began, the teacher was guiding the discussion: introducing central arguments at key points, highlighting the use of reason, summarising and critiquing arguments, introducing terminology, and explaining important concepts. A great deal of guidance was provided, albeit not by a teacher at the front of the class lecturing students on how to think.
To foster the capacity of students to think for themselves it is crucial for the teacher and students to collaborate in managing a phased transition of responsibility for learning. At the outset, and even some way into the process, there might well be a fair amount of direct instruction going on, but it will be clear that its purpose is not an end in itself, but that the method is a means of developing the students’ capacity to think and work independently. They are being taught to think for themselves. As the process unfolds, independence grows.
by John Taylor, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty
Thursday, October 6, 2016
As We Become Cameras
A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers).
—Susan Sontag, “The Image-World” (1973)
More photographs have been taken in the past year than were taken on all film combined. More than 2 trillion photos were shared last year, perhaps twice or more were captured and sit dormant on phone hard drives. This says nothing of video.
Sontag wrote the above from the gentle upward slope of the exponential curve of image-creation. She could probably feel the slight breeze of acceleration, but her face would melt at the velocity images have attained in the decade since her death.
Humanity’s appetite for creating, sharing, and consuming images appears insatiable. To do some back-of-the-envelope math:
The upper limit on global image consumption is 4.2 quadrillion per day, or 1.6 quintillion images a year, give or take.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter’s ruthless pursuit of dominance in video needs no further explanation.
Before images, there was time
Humanity’s appetite for time grew on a similarly aggressive curve.
Before the industrial revolution, it was uncommon for clocks to have minute hands. Only a very select class could afford a private timepiece until the 20th century.
Until the 1840s, time was local and highly variable. Each town set its own clock, from which private clocks would be roughly set by hand. The time in Pittsburg might be 27 minutes earlier than that in New York and no one much cared.
The railways made it possible to cross between these esoteric times much more frequently than by horse or foot, and demand for time expanded. Initially, time was an industrial substrate: running efficient trains required coordinated, well-publicized time across long distances.
The market for time exploded alongside the growth of rail, and by the 1870s time was a hot luxury item. In Paris, private residences, factories, and watchmakers’ shops could buy time: a special clock outfitted with a pneumatic synchronization mechanism was installed on the premises and linked by underground tube to a central time pump that dispensed time in the form of puffs of air. Any ambitious gentleman subscribed to this service, paying handsomely for time.*
In the early 20th century, time became a commodity. World War I saw the introduction of wristwatches to servicemen for coordinating trench warfare. The digital computer and eventually the Internet required time on an even more extreme scale. Without ubiquitous, precise (and to a lesser degree accurate) time, none of the software protocols involved in delivering this article to your screen would be possible.
These days, time is so common it is invisible. Within reach of me right now are at least ten milliseconds-precise clocks (iPhone, Android, Kindle, stereo, desktop, laptop, oven, TV, cable box, digital watch), most of which are kept accurate by syncing continuously, wirelessly, with an atomic clock. Still, our time-appetite is never sated: Stock traders are working hard against physical barriers to coordinate their process below the millisecond.
Like images, a capitalist society requires time.
In the 19th century, this ubiquity of time was far beyond the realm of fiction. Time seems to us a true fact of the world only because we have been steeped in so much of it for so long. The exponential expansion of time snuck up on us.
Creating even more images
By 2020, 80% of the world will be in possession of a physically unlimited camera attached (mostly) to an instantaneous global image distribution network. This will also be the screen that allows access to the visual experience of the rest of the world.
Smartphones still require a complex series of time-consuming gestures to create and distribute an image. An exponentially increasing appetite for images, as a practical matter, requires exponentially increasing creation. Wearable cameras will take care of that.
Wearable image-creation technology is here today. An Alibaba search turns up dozens of Shenzhen manufacturers able to produce 1080p, wifi-enabled cameras from commodity components for less than $50. I have a few of these on my desk — they’re not polished, but were Apple (or Xiaomi) to take up the project, a workable design and price point is easy to imagine.
Google Glass was an abject failure as a consumer device. This may seem strange, the wearable camera being by far its most well-implemented feature.
Glass failed because it was a tool for creating an order of magnitude more images before they were ready to be consumed. Skeptics rightly asked “Are you taking a video of me right now?” because there was no conceivable place to view such images. Our appetite hadn’t grown large enough, nor had the software to cater to it. Beme, Snapchat, Facebook, and likely dozens of others are building that consumption software right now. (...)
What happens when images are integrated as fully into our reality as time?
by Matt Hackett, Medium | Read more:
Images: uncredited
Tracking the Poke Trend
It certainly feels like the poke bowl was the dish of the summer — and turns out the numbers support that. But is interest in the Hawaiian dish here to stay? According to data provided by Foursquare (the app for discovering new places), the Hawaiian food "trend" has actually been imminent for quite some time. Eater recently mined that data to explore the roots of the poke craze — and project what the scope of Hawaiian dining might look like in the next few years.
Tracing poke's origins takes us to the Pacific islands. The raw fish salad is usually served with fresh add-ins (like avocado, edamame, or cucumbers) and seasoned with soy sauce. Poke bowls are often served over rice, leafy greens, or other grains. The dish has been a long-time staple in Hawaii and California, where people with indigenous roots in the Pacific islands, known as native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, have the largest populations in the country.
But in recent years poke has been spreading to other parts of the country, Foursquare data shows. The number of Hawaiian restaurants on Foursquare, which includes those that serve poke, has nearly doubled in the last two years, from 342 venues to 700 as of August 2016. This August alone new poke concepts have opened in several cities, including Phoenix, Orange County, Las Vegas, Chicago, and New York City. If the growth rate continues, by 2020 there could be more than 1,000 Hawaiian restaurants in the country.
What’s behind the spread? The growth of Hawaiian cuisine, especially in the west, could be linked to decades of migration and the Hawaiian diaspora. That includes three waves of 20th-century Hawaiian migrations, according to J Këhaulani Kauanui, a Wesleyan University professor who wrote about diaspora in a 2007 article for the Pacific Journal. The first two waves followed World War II and Hawaii’s statehood in 1959, respectively. The third wave began in the 1970s, when a rising cost of living created by tourism and development pushed more Hawaiians to places like California, Nevada, and Utah.
And that diaspora has spread. In Arizona and Utah, Hawaiian restaurants have doubled and tripled, respectively, in the last five years, Foursquare data shows. Those states also have some of the highest native Hawaiian populations in the country. On the east coast, Florida, home to the seventh highest population of native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in the US as of the 2010 Census, has gone from having only eight Hawaiian restaurants on Foursquare in 2013 to 24 today.
Tracing poke's origins takes us to the Pacific islands. The raw fish salad is usually served with fresh add-ins (like avocado, edamame, or cucumbers) and seasoned with soy sauce. Poke bowls are often served over rice, leafy greens, or other grains. The dish has been a long-time staple in Hawaii and California, where people with indigenous roots in the Pacific islands, known as native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, have the largest populations in the country.But in recent years poke has been spreading to other parts of the country, Foursquare data shows. The number of Hawaiian restaurants on Foursquare, which includes those that serve poke, has nearly doubled in the last two years, from 342 venues to 700 as of August 2016. This August alone new poke concepts have opened in several cities, including Phoenix, Orange County, Las Vegas, Chicago, and New York City. If the growth rate continues, by 2020 there could be more than 1,000 Hawaiian restaurants in the country.
What’s behind the spread? The growth of Hawaiian cuisine, especially in the west, could be linked to decades of migration and the Hawaiian diaspora. That includes three waves of 20th-century Hawaiian migrations, according to J Këhaulani Kauanui, a Wesleyan University professor who wrote about diaspora in a 2007 article for the Pacific Journal. The first two waves followed World War II and Hawaii’s statehood in 1959, respectively. The third wave began in the 1970s, when a rising cost of living created by tourism and development pushed more Hawaiians to places like California, Nevada, and Utah.
And that diaspora has spread. In Arizona and Utah, Hawaiian restaurants have doubled and tripled, respectively, in the last five years, Foursquare data shows. Those states also have some of the highest native Hawaiian populations in the country. On the east coast, Florida, home to the seventh highest population of native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in the US as of the 2010 Census, has gone from having only eight Hawaiian restaurants on Foursquare in 2013 to 24 today.
by Vince Dixon, Eater | Read more:
Image: Magdanatka/Shutterstock
In Defense of Mobile Homes
Consider the trailer park.
Or, better yet, reconsider the trailer park, whose stereotypical association with peeling paint and unemployed seniors is outdated.
The quiet story of trailer parks over the last two decades is their reinvention as “mobile home communities” by investors who saw a lucrative opportunity in providing housing to low-income Americans.
The billionaire investor and real estate mogul Sam Zell recently said of his investment fund that owns mobile home communities—some of which advertise amenities like pools and tennis clubs—that he doesn’t “know of any stock or property I’m involved in that has a better prospect.”
Since 2003, Warren Buffett has owned Clayton Homes, which builds houses destined for trailer parks across the country. At 1400 square feet, many of the homes don’t look like they were delivered on the back of a truck.
Franke Rolfe, a Stanford graduate who teaches people how to profit in the mobile home industry, buys dilapidated trailer parks, cleans them up, and rents mobile homes to the working poor. A 2014 New York Times Magazine article reported that he and a partner earned a 25% return on their investment.
Trailer parks’ appeal to these investors is simple. Millions of Americans struggle with rent payments, but still want a lawn. For them, mobile homes are the cheapest form of housing available. At the same time, it’s rare for someone to build a new mobile home park, because no homeowner wants a trailer park nearby. An industry with healthy demand but a fixed supply attracts the country’s capitalists.
These capitalists realized that trailer parks are an undervalued asset. But maximizing profits at a mobile home park isn’t pretty. It means taking advantage of the lack of supply and the expense of moving a mobile home to raise rents every year. These investors avoid states with rent control, and they’re attuned to just how much a family can pay without becoming insolvent.
But in their pursuit of profit, investors also dramatically increased the stock of well managed, affordable housing. And they’d create a lot more—at better prices—if America’s homeowners weren’t dead set against trailer parks.
Building the Affordable House
During his presidency, Bill Clinton championed efforts to “steadily expand the dream of homeownership to all Americans.” George W. Bush, too, promoted an “ownership society.” Helping Americans to own their homes, he said, would “put light where there’s darkness.”
Neither president could change the reality that many Americans cannot afford a house. The percentage of homeowners increased from 64% to a peak of 69% during their tenures. But the bump relied on no money down mortgages and irresponsible lending—the phenomenon satirized in The Big Short when the character played by Steve Carell tells a stripper in Florida that she really shouldn’t have five home loans. (In real life, it happened in Vegas.) Since the housing bubble burst, the homeownership rate has returned to 64%.
Why can’t we build affordable homes? America is full of gargantuan houses that are customized like each owner is a reality TV contestant. It sure seems like more people could afford homes if we made them smaller and more efficiently.
But according to Witold Rybczynski, an emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, that is not the case.
Writing in The Wilson Quarterly, Rybczynski cites the famous case of the “Levittowns” built for newly married GIs after World War II. Levitt and Sons constructed houses like Henry Ford built cars. “Teams of workers performed repetitive tasks,” Rybczynski writes, and every house was a one-story with the kitchen and bathroom facing the street to reduce the length of the pipes.
Each “Levittowner” was identical except for its paint job, and thanks to the cold efficiency of the process, they cost $9,900 in the 1950s. That’s around $90,000 in 2016 dollars. A new home today is more than twice as large and sells for $300,000.
So if we made ‘em like we did in the old days, could we slash the price? Rybczynski says no.
The modern McMansion seems like an expensive, bespoke product. But its construction is actually a triumph of industrial efficiency. Windows, doors, and other parts arrive prefabricated, Rybczynski writes, so labor costs have actually halved since 1949. Levitt and Sons spent $4 to $5 per square foot building Levittowners, and, adjusted for inflation, builders today spend the same amount.
Instead the problem is almost wholly that land is too expensive. Reduce the size of a new, modern house by 50%, Rybczynski notes, and houses in metropolitan areas will still cost over $200,000.
That’s the secret to the extreme affordability of a mobile home—take land out of the equation. (...)
When a business makes boatloads of money from poor customers, the answer can be unseemly if not illegal. In the subprime auto loan industry, executives offer low-income Americans car loans with such high fees that 1 in 4 customers default. Hidden fees are common, and when a customer fails to pay, companies still profit by repossessing and re-lending the car. The LA Times found that one Kia Optima was lent out and repossessed eight times in under three years.
Warren Buffett’s mobile home construction business, Clayton Homes, has been accused of using a similar, exploitative business model. According to reporting by the Seattle Times and the Center for Public Integrity, Clayton Homes lent customers money to buy their mobile homes at above-average rates and unexpectedly added fees or changed the terms of the loan. When low income buyers fell behind on their mobile home payments, Clayton Homes profited by repossessing the house and re-selling it.
The situation at mobile home parks like Rolfe’s, however, looks more like the poor’s experience with financial services. Since their meager savings aren’t profitable for banks, they pay for services wealthier Americans get for free: a few dollars to cash a check, a few dollars to send money to an aunt. And since they can’t afford a mortgage, they pay more dearly for the land under their mobile home.
As Rivlin recounts of his time at Rolfe’s Mobile Home University, he learned that “one of the best things about investing in trailer parks is that ambitious landlords can raise the rent year after year without losing tenants. The typical resident is more likely to endure the increase than pay a trucking company the $3,000 it can easily cost to move even a single-wide trailer to another park.” A 30% increase in rent “might sound steep,” but Rolfe says residents “can always pick up extra hours.”
This realization has earned Rolfe, his partners, and his fellow mobile home moguls handsome returns: poor Americans could afford to pay much more for a taste of homeownership.
by Alex Mayyasi, Priceonomics | Read more:
Or, better yet, reconsider the trailer park, whose stereotypical association with peeling paint and unemployed seniors is outdated.
The quiet story of trailer parks over the last two decades is their reinvention as “mobile home communities” by investors who saw a lucrative opportunity in providing housing to low-income Americans.
The billionaire investor and real estate mogul Sam Zell recently said of his investment fund that owns mobile home communities—some of which advertise amenities like pools and tennis clubs—that he doesn’t “know of any stock or property I’m involved in that has a better prospect.”Since 2003, Warren Buffett has owned Clayton Homes, which builds houses destined for trailer parks across the country. At 1400 square feet, many of the homes don’t look like they were delivered on the back of a truck.
Franke Rolfe, a Stanford graduate who teaches people how to profit in the mobile home industry, buys dilapidated trailer parks, cleans them up, and rents mobile homes to the working poor. A 2014 New York Times Magazine article reported that he and a partner earned a 25% return on their investment.
Trailer parks’ appeal to these investors is simple. Millions of Americans struggle with rent payments, but still want a lawn. For them, mobile homes are the cheapest form of housing available. At the same time, it’s rare for someone to build a new mobile home park, because no homeowner wants a trailer park nearby. An industry with healthy demand but a fixed supply attracts the country’s capitalists.
These capitalists realized that trailer parks are an undervalued asset. But maximizing profits at a mobile home park isn’t pretty. It means taking advantage of the lack of supply and the expense of moving a mobile home to raise rents every year. These investors avoid states with rent control, and they’re attuned to just how much a family can pay without becoming insolvent.
But in their pursuit of profit, investors also dramatically increased the stock of well managed, affordable housing. And they’d create a lot more—at better prices—if America’s homeowners weren’t dead set against trailer parks.
Building the Affordable House
During his presidency, Bill Clinton championed efforts to “steadily expand the dream of homeownership to all Americans.” George W. Bush, too, promoted an “ownership society.” Helping Americans to own their homes, he said, would “put light where there’s darkness.”
Neither president could change the reality that many Americans cannot afford a house. The percentage of homeowners increased from 64% to a peak of 69% during their tenures. But the bump relied on no money down mortgages and irresponsible lending—the phenomenon satirized in The Big Short when the character played by Steve Carell tells a stripper in Florida that she really shouldn’t have five home loans. (In real life, it happened in Vegas.) Since the housing bubble burst, the homeownership rate has returned to 64%.
Why can’t we build affordable homes? America is full of gargantuan houses that are customized like each owner is a reality TV contestant. It sure seems like more people could afford homes if we made them smaller and more efficiently.
But according to Witold Rybczynski, an emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, that is not the case. Writing in The Wilson Quarterly, Rybczynski cites the famous case of the “Levittowns” built for newly married GIs after World War II. Levitt and Sons constructed houses like Henry Ford built cars. “Teams of workers performed repetitive tasks,” Rybczynski writes, and every house was a one-story with the kitchen and bathroom facing the street to reduce the length of the pipes.
Each “Levittowner” was identical except for its paint job, and thanks to the cold efficiency of the process, they cost $9,900 in the 1950s. That’s around $90,000 in 2016 dollars. A new home today is more than twice as large and sells for $300,000.
So if we made ‘em like we did in the old days, could we slash the price? Rybczynski says no.
The modern McMansion seems like an expensive, bespoke product. But its construction is actually a triumph of industrial efficiency. Windows, doors, and other parts arrive prefabricated, Rybczynski writes, so labor costs have actually halved since 1949. Levitt and Sons spent $4 to $5 per square foot building Levittowners, and, adjusted for inflation, builders today spend the same amount.
Instead the problem is almost wholly that land is too expensive. Reduce the size of a new, modern house by 50%, Rybczynski notes, and houses in metropolitan areas will still cost over $200,000.
That’s the secret to the extreme affordability of a mobile home—take land out of the equation. (...)
When a business makes boatloads of money from poor customers, the answer can be unseemly if not illegal. In the subprime auto loan industry, executives offer low-income Americans car loans with such high fees that 1 in 4 customers default. Hidden fees are common, and when a customer fails to pay, companies still profit by repossessing and re-lending the car. The LA Times found that one Kia Optima was lent out and repossessed eight times in under three years.
Warren Buffett’s mobile home construction business, Clayton Homes, has been accused of using a similar, exploitative business model. According to reporting by the Seattle Times and the Center for Public Integrity, Clayton Homes lent customers money to buy their mobile homes at above-average rates and unexpectedly added fees or changed the terms of the loan. When low income buyers fell behind on their mobile home payments, Clayton Homes profited by repossessing the house and re-selling it.
The situation at mobile home parks like Rolfe’s, however, looks more like the poor’s experience with financial services. Since their meager savings aren’t profitable for banks, they pay for services wealthier Americans get for free: a few dollars to cash a check, a few dollars to send money to an aunt. And since they can’t afford a mortgage, they pay more dearly for the land under their mobile home.
As Rivlin recounts of his time at Rolfe’s Mobile Home University, he learned that “one of the best things about investing in trailer parks is that ambitious landlords can raise the rent year after year without losing tenants. The typical resident is more likely to endure the increase than pay a trucking company the $3,000 it can easily cost to move even a single-wide trailer to another park.” A 30% increase in rent “might sound steep,” but Rolfe says residents “can always pick up extra hours.”
This realization has earned Rolfe, his partners, and his fellow mobile home moguls handsome returns: poor Americans could afford to pay much more for a taste of homeownership.
by Alex Mayyasi, Priceonomics | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Wednesday, October 5, 2016
The Boyfriend Shirt
Being in a long-distance relationship means you wear your boyfriend’s shirt a lot, or at least it did for me. During the year my boyfriend and I spent living in different cities, I accumulated three to five shirts of his that I wore with more frequency than anything else in my closet besides my jeans. Each time he visited, I acquired a new shirt that he "accidentally" forgot to pack. It was never an accident. Wearing the shirts was a way to wrap myself up in his presence when he couldn’t be present himself, a balm for my inability to physically reach out over the distance.
It wasn’t a particularly fashionable choice when I wore these shirts in public – the shirts he left were usually his oldest and most worn-in ones; they were softer and they smelled like him but they didn’t look great. They also didn’t fit in the way "boyfriend" clothes are supposed to. Most men are actually not all that different in size from most women, and men’s clothing sizes aren’t actually all that different from women’s clothing sizes. I looked like I was wearing a very slightly too-big shirt that I’d pulled out of a laundry hamper.
But by wearing these shirts I was supposedly participating in a perennially current fashion trend. The "boyfriend clothing" trend, looks "borrowed from the boys" and "steal his jeans" styles have been popping up once again not because it’s fall but because at any time, in any season, some brand wants to tell everybody about boyfriends. It’s definitely not anything new.
Neither is a woman wearing clothes made for men. People like to trace women in menswear to Coco Chanel’s semi-androgynous style, but women had been wearing men’s clothes and incorporating menswear into their personal style since long before Chanel’s crisp white shirts and neat suits. Sarah Bernhardt, a nineteenth century actress whose tabloid-courting fame would be more at home in today’s Kardashian-era world, famously dressed in men’s clothes — it was a gimmick, but a gimmick that inspired hordes of imitators. By the early twentieth century, a woman in beautifully tailored men’s clothes was a recognizable form of glamour, whether Marlene Dietrich’s flawless black tie or Katherine Hepburn striding across a lawn in high-waisted pants.
The trend was, and is, inescapably about social class — whenever images of women in men’s clothes emerge into a mainstream idea of fashion, it’s a very wealthy woman; their wealth and fame protect the wearer, allowing them to publicly act out subversion from within the protective cocoon of money and social status. Men’s clothes on women, yes, but only a tuxedo tailored to a level beyond the reach of just about woman who might get ideas from photos of Dietrich. It’s for similar reasons that so many people incorrectly cite Chanel as the inventor of androgynous style; Chanel’s use of men’s fashion never impacted her traditional presentation of femininity and thus never threatened to give other women permission to do the same.
Popular images of women in menswear up through the 20th century for the most part show similarly meticulous tailoring. This isn’t "boyfriend" clothes yet — no one is trying to look like they just got out of someone else’s bed.
Perfume ads in the ‘90s and early ‘00s showing supermodels in large white dress shirts and nothing else, all the legs and trailing French cuffs, coincide with the onslaught of photos of petite female celebrities wearing men’s jeans. Both contribute to the popularization of "boyfriend" clothes. As off-duty celebrity style grows ever more popular, as we begin to be told not to aspire to look like the rich and famous at their best but — as social media and reality TV welcome us into celebrities’ day to day lives — at their most mundane, sloppiness becomes aspirational.
The boyfriend clothing item, whether jeans or a shirt (it’s pretty much always either jeans or a shirt), is about spontaneity. It’s about happenstance and carelessness and clothing that was left on the floor. It’s about the small ways in which we seek to own one another’s bodies, and about the desire for our relationships with others to leave visible marks on us, to follow us tangible out into the world beyond a private encounter. It’s about telling everybody that you had sex. Its visual reference is to a woman stumbling out of a man’s house in the morning having grabbed the dress shirt he was wearing the night before — it’s titillating because it’s just a little wrong, it’s almost appropriate but not quite.
It wasn’t a particularly fashionable choice when I wore these shirts in public – the shirts he left were usually his oldest and most worn-in ones; they were softer and they smelled like him but they didn’t look great. They also didn’t fit in the way "boyfriend" clothes are supposed to. Most men are actually not all that different in size from most women, and men’s clothing sizes aren’t actually all that different from women’s clothing sizes. I looked like I was wearing a very slightly too-big shirt that I’d pulled out of a laundry hamper.But by wearing these shirts I was supposedly participating in a perennially current fashion trend. The "boyfriend clothing" trend, looks "borrowed from the boys" and "steal his jeans" styles have been popping up once again not because it’s fall but because at any time, in any season, some brand wants to tell everybody about boyfriends. It’s definitely not anything new.
Neither is a woman wearing clothes made for men. People like to trace women in menswear to Coco Chanel’s semi-androgynous style, but women had been wearing men’s clothes and incorporating menswear into their personal style since long before Chanel’s crisp white shirts and neat suits. Sarah Bernhardt, a nineteenth century actress whose tabloid-courting fame would be more at home in today’s Kardashian-era world, famously dressed in men’s clothes — it was a gimmick, but a gimmick that inspired hordes of imitators. By the early twentieth century, a woman in beautifully tailored men’s clothes was a recognizable form of glamour, whether Marlene Dietrich’s flawless black tie or Katherine Hepburn striding across a lawn in high-waisted pants.
The trend was, and is, inescapably about social class — whenever images of women in men’s clothes emerge into a mainstream idea of fashion, it’s a very wealthy woman; their wealth and fame protect the wearer, allowing them to publicly act out subversion from within the protective cocoon of money and social status. Men’s clothes on women, yes, but only a tuxedo tailored to a level beyond the reach of just about woman who might get ideas from photos of Dietrich. It’s for similar reasons that so many people incorrectly cite Chanel as the inventor of androgynous style; Chanel’s use of men’s fashion never impacted her traditional presentation of femininity and thus never threatened to give other women permission to do the same.
Popular images of women in menswear up through the 20th century for the most part show similarly meticulous tailoring. This isn’t "boyfriend" clothes yet — no one is trying to look like they just got out of someone else’s bed.
Perfume ads in the ‘90s and early ‘00s showing supermodels in large white dress shirts and nothing else, all the legs and trailing French cuffs, coincide with the onslaught of photos of petite female celebrities wearing men’s jeans. Both contribute to the popularization of "boyfriend" clothes. As off-duty celebrity style grows ever more popular, as we begin to be told not to aspire to look like the rich and famous at their best but — as social media and reality TV welcome us into celebrities’ day to day lives — at their most mundane, sloppiness becomes aspirational.
The boyfriend clothing item, whether jeans or a shirt (it’s pretty much always either jeans or a shirt), is about spontaneity. It’s about happenstance and carelessness and clothing that was left on the floor. It’s about the small ways in which we seek to own one another’s bodies, and about the desire for our relationships with others to leave visible marks on us, to follow us tangible out into the world beyond a private encounter. It’s about telling everybody that you had sex. Its visual reference is to a woman stumbling out of a man’s house in the morning having grabbed the dress shirt he was wearing the night before — it’s titillating because it’s just a little wrong, it’s almost appropriate but not quite.
by Helena Fitzgerald, Racked | Read more:
Image: Dimitrov/Getty
What's in Bear Spray?
Fire off a can of bear spray and you’ll deploy a 25-foot-long hot pepper cloud that should prevent a bear from attacking. The stuff’s not lethal, but it will temporarily irritate a bear’s eyes and lungs enough that the animal will likely move on. You don’t spray it onto your body like, say, Deep Woods Off. (More on that in a bit.)
The stuff works. Professors Tom Smith and Steve Herrero have studied hundreds of bear attacks in Alaska and found that 93 percent of the time it was used, the bears ceased their aggression or activities like rummaging through trash. Bears injured only 2 percent of the people who deployed bear spray, compared to 56 percent of the people who tried to fend them off with a gun.
So, what’s in the can, and how does it work?
It starts with pepper, usually oleoresin of capsicum—a waxlike extract of hot peppers. Most manufacturers, says Smith, use the same stuff found in nearly every nonboutique brand of spicy food, from Tabasco to Hormel chili. Undiluted, it ranks on the Scoville heat unit scale at 3.2 million to 3.6 million. For reference, habanero peppers hit between 80,000 to 200,000. Because capsicum is so potent, the EPA, which regulates the sprays, says bear spray cannot contain more than 2 percent of the stuff.
Because it’s oil-based, capsicum is also sticky and tenacious. “If it’s discharged in a campground, the area is dead to the world for 24 hours,” says George Hyde, general manager of Counter Assault, the oldest manufacturer of bear spray. “Walk across the ground and it’ll become reatomized. Spray it on your tent or clothing and you’ll probably never use those things again.” Don’t think about it like the bear-repellant equivalent of DEET.
Then there’s the carrier, which holds the capsicum in an evenly mixed liquid state so you don’t have to shake the can before use. These vary between manufacturer and are typically trade secrets, but they make up 8 eight percent of the spray.
Finally, there’s the propellant. Almost every manufacturer uses R134a—the same gas used as a propellant in asthma inhalers. The chemical actually boils when it leaves the can, atomizing the chemicals mixed with the propellant into a cloud. Bear spray is pressurized to 80 pounds per square inch, making it capable of firing the mixture out of the nozzle at 75 miles per hour.
That propellant is the reason bear spray canisters have a four-year expiration date. No matter how good the seal between the can and the plastic nozzle, the cans lose pressure over time. It’s also why bear spray canisters can explode if left in a hot car. In one instance, says Hyde, someone left their can on the dashboard. When it exploded, the windshield was left with an orange-rimmed, six-inch-wide hole. The lesson: If you leave your bear spray in the car, throw it in a cooler. Even one without ice should keep the canister below explosive temperatures (somewhere around 180 degrees Fahrenheit for many cans). Conversely, the bear spray will work at temperatures below freezing, Smith says.
So what happens when you push the trigger and these three ingredients hit the air? When capsicum hits the bear’s face, the animal’s eyes close, its lungs constrict, and its body starts producing as much mucus as possible to expel the pepper. The bear is crying, wheezing, and coughing. “The bear goes from fight directly to flight,” says Hyde. “In one account, the bear turned to run from the spray and ran right into a tree.”
Bear spray works just as well on other animals. “If it has eyes and lungs, people have sprayed it with bear spray,” says Hyde. The list includes mountain lions, dogs, wild pigs, and moose. Hyde reports there are more instances of the spray being used on moose, which can be quite aggressive, than on bears. There is at least one case of Counter Assault being successfully used on a rattlesnake.
Of course, pepper spray is also used on people. Counter Assault and its main competitor, UDAP, both make pepper sprays for law enforcement and self-defense purposes. Police recently used it on protesters in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri. The difference between the products is the percentage of capsicum. The FDA has ruled that pepper spray used on people can contain no more than 1.3 percent of the pepper mix. The spray pattern is also different—law enforcement uses a more concentrated spray pattern so it gets on fewer people.
There’s some debate about how to best use pepper spray on bears. Some people say you should be upwind of the bear so the spray blows onto the bear. Others suggest shooting low, even bouncing the spray off the ground so it is assured of hitting the bear’s mucous membranes. Smith says those ideas are great in theory, but in practice, when faced with a charging bear, it’s best to just go ahead and use the spray no matter the conditions. “If you get too cute with it, you might end up mauled,” he says.
by Frederick Reimers, Outside | Read More
Image: sarkophoto
The stuff works. Professors Tom Smith and Steve Herrero have studied hundreds of bear attacks in Alaska and found that 93 percent of the time it was used, the bears ceased their aggression or activities like rummaging through trash. Bears injured only 2 percent of the people who deployed bear spray, compared to 56 percent of the people who tried to fend them off with a gun.
So, what’s in the can, and how does it work?It starts with pepper, usually oleoresin of capsicum—a waxlike extract of hot peppers. Most manufacturers, says Smith, use the same stuff found in nearly every nonboutique brand of spicy food, from Tabasco to Hormel chili. Undiluted, it ranks on the Scoville heat unit scale at 3.2 million to 3.6 million. For reference, habanero peppers hit between 80,000 to 200,000. Because capsicum is so potent, the EPA, which regulates the sprays, says bear spray cannot contain more than 2 percent of the stuff.
Because it’s oil-based, capsicum is also sticky and tenacious. “If it’s discharged in a campground, the area is dead to the world for 24 hours,” says George Hyde, general manager of Counter Assault, the oldest manufacturer of bear spray. “Walk across the ground and it’ll become reatomized. Spray it on your tent or clothing and you’ll probably never use those things again.” Don’t think about it like the bear-repellant equivalent of DEET.
Then there’s the carrier, which holds the capsicum in an evenly mixed liquid state so you don’t have to shake the can before use. These vary between manufacturer and are typically trade secrets, but they make up 8 eight percent of the spray.
Finally, there’s the propellant. Almost every manufacturer uses R134a—the same gas used as a propellant in asthma inhalers. The chemical actually boils when it leaves the can, atomizing the chemicals mixed with the propellant into a cloud. Bear spray is pressurized to 80 pounds per square inch, making it capable of firing the mixture out of the nozzle at 75 miles per hour.
That propellant is the reason bear spray canisters have a four-year expiration date. No matter how good the seal between the can and the plastic nozzle, the cans lose pressure over time. It’s also why bear spray canisters can explode if left in a hot car. In one instance, says Hyde, someone left their can on the dashboard. When it exploded, the windshield was left with an orange-rimmed, six-inch-wide hole. The lesson: If you leave your bear spray in the car, throw it in a cooler. Even one without ice should keep the canister below explosive temperatures (somewhere around 180 degrees Fahrenheit for many cans). Conversely, the bear spray will work at temperatures below freezing, Smith says.
So what happens when you push the trigger and these three ingredients hit the air? When capsicum hits the bear’s face, the animal’s eyes close, its lungs constrict, and its body starts producing as much mucus as possible to expel the pepper. The bear is crying, wheezing, and coughing. “The bear goes from fight directly to flight,” says Hyde. “In one account, the bear turned to run from the spray and ran right into a tree.”
Bear spray works just as well on other animals. “If it has eyes and lungs, people have sprayed it with bear spray,” says Hyde. The list includes mountain lions, dogs, wild pigs, and moose. Hyde reports there are more instances of the spray being used on moose, which can be quite aggressive, than on bears. There is at least one case of Counter Assault being successfully used on a rattlesnake.
Of course, pepper spray is also used on people. Counter Assault and its main competitor, UDAP, both make pepper sprays for law enforcement and self-defense purposes. Police recently used it on protesters in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri. The difference between the products is the percentage of capsicum. The FDA has ruled that pepper spray used on people can contain no more than 1.3 percent of the pepper mix. The spray pattern is also different—law enforcement uses a more concentrated spray pattern so it gets on fewer people.
There’s some debate about how to best use pepper spray on bears. Some people say you should be upwind of the bear so the spray blows onto the bear. Others suggest shooting low, even bouncing the spray off the ground so it is assured of hitting the bear’s mucous membranes. Smith says those ideas are great in theory, but in practice, when faced with a charging bear, it’s best to just go ahead and use the spray no matter the conditions. “If you get too cute with it, you might end up mauled,” he says.
by Frederick Reimers, Outside | Read More
Image: sarkophoto
Clothes to Watch Ladies Rock Climbing In
This gallery was inspired by GQ's climbing and fashion photo shoot from Joshua Tree National Park. If you haven't seen it yet, we strongly encourage you to check it out, ideally side by side with this gallery.
You’ve seen it at the bouldering gym, and maybe even on the runway—that outdoorsy look is so hot right now. But that’s nothing like seeing these outfits in action, in the wild. So we took three A-number-1 climbers and some adorable friends out for a weekend jaunt where all the far-out cool kids go—Vantage.
Why would you risk life and limb just to get to the top of a 50-foot high cliff? “Well, I thought, there must be more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking,” said male model Cyle G, “and when I started watching climbing, I realized this was it.”
Maybe that’s why millions of people are taking up climbing—they’re tired of just looking good in their active wear indoors. They want more.
“I just really like being able to hang around on the rocky crag and show off my cool climbing clothes, instead of just the gym,” said Kjersti C. “And there are always cute boys, just sitting around half naked watching us. Usually they’re just hanging out in the cars, keeping our beer cold and waiting to give us foot massages after a long day of sending hard. But sometimes, they even let us hose them down or splash around in a river and get super sexy. It’s pretty cool.”
by Outdoor Research | Read more:
Image: Elise Giordan
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