The Alt-Right Was Conjured Out of Pearl Clutching and Media Attention

They say that its power comes from its name. That it can only exist so long as it’s spoken. And that, voice by voice, it will continue to grow, until it is too large to keep in a box, and then too large to keep in the house, and then too large to keep. A runaway monster, feeding on its own designation.

So begins the horror story that isn’t a story at all—but instead summarizes the rise of the alt-right, a nebulous political movement that simultaneously stands for xenophobic white nationalism and also for antagonizing those who take offense to xenophobic white nationalism.

The emergence of the alt-right isn’t confined to the alt-right itself, however. With each article condemning or attempting to explain the alt-right, with each Twitter exchange and Facebook conversation blasting or laughing at or lauding its behavior, the alt-right monster has grown, its success more a reflection of the reaction it has been able to elicit than the strength of its own participants’ voices. Specifically assessing journalists’ role in perpetuating the alt-right story, Chava Gourarie notes that, the more the movement was reported on, the more reporting journalists were required to do; to speak of the alt-right is to make it so they can’t not be discussed.

It’s not difficult to see why people would be concerned. The alt-right embodies everything that goes bump on the internet in 2016. Not only do its members condemn—even actively antagonize—progressive calls for social justice, they do so with a knowing smirk, arguing that that they don’t actually mean the bigoted things they say, they’re just trying to freak out the normies.

Of course, whether extremism is sincere or—as in the case of Pepe, a frog meme conscripted into the alt-right’s cause—presented as some kind of joke, it is still extremism; as my co-author Ryan Milner and I argue of Pepe’s emergent bigotry, that is the message being communicated, and so that is the message, period.

And Pepe is just a drop in the bucket. Regardless of motivations, regardless of sincerity, the alt-right’s white supremacist cheerleading has emerged as a key factor in the presidential election. Two events in particular have ensured this ascendency.

The first was the alt-right’s racist harassment and subsequent hacking of Leslie Jones, a story Aja Romano describes as a “flashpoint of the alt-right’s escalating culture war.” One that also served as a flashpoint of the coverage the group would enjoy all summer, which journalists often, and not incorrectly, connected back to the election.

The second catalyst followed Hillary Clinton’s highly-publicized “alt-right speech” linking the group’s “God Emperor Trump” to white supremacy. Clinton’s speech was savvy in that it called Trump out for fanning the flames of bigotry, if not being an outright bigot himself. But it also provided the alt-right, and white nationalism more broadly, the largest platform it had ever enjoyed. The alt-right was, of course, “thrilled” with this attention, as their monster grew ever larger and more unwieldy.

The alt-right isn’t alone in this narrative. The loose hacking and trolling collective Anonymous emerged in a similar fashion. Given the amount of time that has passed since Anonymous first bubbled out of 4chan’s cauldron, I must specify: here I am referring specifically to Anonymous circa 2007-2010, a self-styled (and highly winking) “internet hate machine” interchangeable with 4chan’s /b/ board and synonymous with subcultural trolling. This is the Anonymous I explore in my first book, which I describe as existing in a “cybernetic feedback loop” with sensationalist corporate media. Anonymous would not have risen to such prominence, I argue, without sensationalist media—and Fox News in particular, as this infamous 2007 news clip attests—to simultaneously toot and condemn Anonymous’ horn. Their condemnation, of course, ultimately functioning as both advertisement and recruitment tool.

The connection between Anonymous and the alt-right doesn’t end there. As early as 2015, Jacob Siegal was noting the similarities between Anonymous and what would soon become known as the alt-right (at that point, the alt-right had yet to coalesce, though wisps of its eventual form permeate Siegal’s article).

It is impossible to know how many (if any) original Anons were swept into the alt-right fold. What is clear is that the alt-right pulls many of its in-jokes from 4chan’s persistently strong gravitational pull, for example the aforementioned Pepe. And many of the behaviors heralded by the alt-right—for example gaming post-debate polls or “shitposting” forums with racist pro-Trump memes—echo longstanding subcultural trolling tactics, like when trolling participants gamed the Time 100 list to favor 4chan founder Christopher “moot” Poole and cluttered more forums with more bigoted expression than can possibly be quantified.

The rhetorical and behavioral overlaps between early Anonymous and the alt-right help place both groups in context. But these nebulous collectives are most significantly linked through the conjuring process. In each case, previously insular communities were transformed into forces to be reckoned with. Into monsters, all through the repeated chanting of their name.

by Whitney Phillips, Motherboard |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

BMW Motorrad Vision Next 100

On Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif., BMW Group debuted a motorcycle concept so artificially intelligent that it eliminates the need for the rider to wear protective gear, including a helmet. (...)

So what does the future of motorcycles hold?

At least according to BMW, it's a bike that has self-balancing systems to keep it upright both when standing (a boon for novice riders, on par with training wheels for bicycles) and in motion (beneficial for experienced riders who want erudite handling at high speed). Several systems—one BMW calls a “Digital Companion,” which offers riding advice and adjustment ideas to optimize the experience, and one called “The Visor,” which is a pair of glasses that span the entire field of vision and are controlled by eye movements—correlate to return active feedback about road conditions to the rider while adjusting the ride of the bike continuously depending on the rider’s driving style. (Sure beats today's motorcycle touchscreen technology.)

It’s meant to equal the driverless systems automakers also expect to be producing in cars by 2040 and beyond.

“The bike has the full range of connected data from its surroundings and a set of intelligent systems working in the background, so it knows exactly what lies ahead,” said Holger Hampf, BMW's head of user experience.

It also purports to use a novel matte black “flexframe” that's nubile enough to allow the bike to turn without the joints found on today’s motorcycles. The idea is that when a rider turns the handlebar, it adjusts the entire frame to change the direction of the bike; at low speeds only a slight input is required, while at high speeds it needs strong input to change course. This should increase the safety factor of riding a bike so a small twitch at 100 mph isn't going to shoot you in an unexpected new direction.

by Hannah Elliott, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: BMW Group

Les âmes de pierre - 13
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Robots Will Replace Doctors, Lawyers, and Other Professionals

Faced with the claim that AI and robots are poised to replace most of today’s workforce, most mainstream professionals — doctors, lawyers, accountants, and so on — believe they will emerge largely unscathed. During our consulting work and at conferences, we regularly hear practitioners concede that routine work can be taken on by machines, but they maintain that human experts will always be needed for the tricky stuff that calls for judgment, creativity, and empathy.

Our research and analysis challenges the idea that these professionals will be spared. We expect that within decades the traditional professions will be dismantled, leaving most, but not all, professionals to be replaced by less-expert people, new types of experts, and high-performing systems.

We conducted around 100 interviews, not with mainstream professionals but with leaders and new providers in eight professional fields: health, law, education, audit, tax, consulting, journalism, architecture, and divinity. Our focus was on what has actually been achieved at the cutting edge. We also immersed ourselves in over 800 related sources — published books, internal reports, and online systems. We found plenty of evidence that radical change in professional work is already under way.

There are more monthly visits to the WebMD network, a collection of health websites, than to all the doctors in the United States. Annually, in the world of disputes, 60 million disagreements among eBay traders are resolved using “online dispute resolution” rather than lawyers and judges — this is three times the number of lawsuits filed each year in the entire U.S. court system. The U.S. tax authorities in 2014 received electronic tax returns from almost 50 million people who had relied on online tax-preparation software rather than human tax professionals. At WikiHouse, an online community designed a house that could be “printed” and assembled for less than £50,000. In 2011 the Vatican granted the first digital imprimatur to an app called “Confession” which helps people prepare for confession.

We believe these are but a few early indicators of a fundamental shift in professional service. Within professional organizations (firms, schools, hospitals), we are seeing a move away from tailored, unique solutions for each client or patient towards the standardization of service. Increasingly, doctors are using checklists, lawyers rely on precedents, and consultants work with methodologies. More recently, there has been a shift to systematization, the use of technology to automate and sometimes transform the way that professional work is done — from workflow systems through to AI-based problem-solving. More fundamentally, once professional knowledge and expertise is systematized, it will then be made available online, often as a chargeable service, sometimes at no cost, and occasionally but increasingly on a commons basis, in the spirit of the open source movement. There are already many examples of online professional service.

The claim that the professions are immune to displacement by technology is usually based on two assumptions: that computers are incapable of exercising judgment or being creative or empathetic, and that these capabilities are indispensable in the delivery of professional service. The first problem with this position is empirical. As our research shows, when professional work is broken down into component parts, many of the tasks involved turn out to be routine and process-based. They do not in fact call for judgment, creativity, or empathy.

The second problem is conceptual. Insistence that the outcomes of professional advisers can only be achieved by sentient beings who are creative and empathetic usually rests on what we call the “AI fallacy” — the view that the only way to get machines to outperform the best human professionals will be to copy the way that these professionals work. The error here is not recognizing that human professionals are already being outgunned by a combination of brute processing power, big data, and remarkable algorithms. These systems do not replicate human reasoning and thinking. When systems beat the best humans at difficult games, when they predict the likely decisions of courts more accurately than lawyers, or when the probable outcomes of epidemics can be better gauged on the strength of past medical data than on medical science, we are witnessing the work of high-performing, unthinking machines.

by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, HBR | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Amazon Wants to Get College Students Addicted to Prime

[ed. You've got to hand it to them, Amazon is always thinking ahead. Prime is a great idea and a pretty good deal.]

Vincent Wang needed new jeans and a coat just before classes began this semester at the University of California, Davis, where he studies nutrition. Rather than trek several miles off campus to the nearest Target or Walmart, he ordered the clothes from Amazon.com Inc. and retrieved them from new Amazon pickup lockers right next to the university store that sells Aggies T-shirts and hoodies.

Wang, 21, is one of millions of students who have taken advantage of Amazon Prime Student, which offers all the benefits of a regular Prime membership -- quick delivery, music and video streaming and free online photo storage -- for $50 a year, half the regular price. Amazon’s strategy echoes the one used for decades by the credit card companies: snag young consumers early and, with artful promotions, try to make them loyal for life.

The pickup lockers are just another way to pull students into the Amazon universe, giving them convenient locations to retrieve packages if they’re worried about having merchandise sent to dorm rooms and apartments. The centrally located kiosks mean Amazon can offer same-day delivery of 3 million products on many campuses -- faster than standard two-day delivery. The program catches students as they are forming new shopping habits, much like the Amazon program that woos new parents with discounted diapers.

“Even though it’s just a dorm room, college students are setting up a new household for the first time and doing their own laundry and getting their own groceries,” says Melanie Shreffler, senior insights director at the market research firm Cassandra. “Amazon steps in and plays the role of mom and dad for them in making sure they have what they need during this transition.”

Amazon is expanding campus locations much more quickly than bookstores serving the general public. The company has two bookstores in Seattle and San Diego and two more on the way in Portland, Oregon, and the Boston suburbs. By the end of the year, Amazon will have staffed pickup kiosks serving more than 500,000 college students at 16 schools around the country, including Purdue University, University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Pennsylvania. The expansion will continue next year, with Amazon targeting big schools with administrations receptive to kiosks that are meant to complement, not replace, the campus store, says Ripley MacDonald, who runs Amazon’s student programs.

“On a college campus, you have all of your future customers in one place,” he says. “We graduate students into full-price prime memberships.”

by Spencer Soper, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: David Paul Morris

Is Our World a Simulation?

When Elon Musk isn’t outlining plans to use his massive rocket to leave a decaying Planet Earth and colonize Mars, he sometimes talks about his belief that Earth isn’t even real and we probably live in a computer simulation.

“There’s a billion to one chance we’re living in base reality,” he said at a conference in June.

Musk is just one of the people in Silicon Valley to take a keen interest in the “simulation hypothesis”, which argues that what we experience as reality is actually a giant computer simulation created by a more sophisticated intelligence. If it sounds a lot like The Matrix, that’s because it is.

According to this week’s New Yorker profile of Y Combinator venture capitalist Sam Altman, there are two tech billionaires secretly engaging scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation. But what does this mean? And what evidence is there that we are, in fact, living in The Matrix?

One popular argument for the simulation hypothesis, outside of acid trips, came from Oxford University’s Nick Bostrom in 2003 (although the idea dates back as far as the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes). In a paper titled “Are You Living In a Simulation?”, Bostrom suggested that members of an advanced “posthuman” civilization with vast computing power might choose to run simulations of their ancestors in the universe.

This argument is extrapolated from observing current trends in technology, including the rise of virtual reality and efforts to map the human brain.

If we believe that there is nothing supernatural about what causes consciousness and it’s merely the product of a very complex architecture in the human brain, we’ll be able to reproduce it. “Soon there will be nothing technical standing in the way to making machines that have their own consciousness,” said Rich Terrile, a scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

At the same time, videogames are becoming more and more sophisticated and in the future we’ll be able to have simulations of conscious entities inside them.

“Forty years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were. Now 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality,” said Musk. “If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality.”

It’s a view shared by Terrile. “If one progresses at the current rate of technology a few decades into the future, very quickly we will be a society where there are artificial entities living in simulations that are much more abundant than human beings.”

If there are many more simulated minds than organic ones, then the chances of us being among the real minds starts to look more and more unlikely. As Terrile puts it: “If in the future there are more digital people living in simulated environments than there are today, then what is to say we are not part of that already?”

Reasons to believe that the universe is a simulation include the fact that it behaves mathematically and is broken up into pieces (subatomic particles) like a pixelated video game. “Even things that we think of as continuous – time, energy, space, volume – all have a finite limit to their size. If that’s the case, then our universe is both computable and finite. Those properties allow the universe to be simulated,” Terrile said.

“Quite frankly, if we are not living in a simulation, it is an extraordinarily unlikely circumstance,” he added.

So who has created this simulation? “Our future selves,” said Terrile.

by Olivia Solon, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Stringer/Reuters

Teenage Engineering / OD-11 / Speaker / 2014

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Joris Wegner / Troodon Bipedal Platform / Rendering / 2015

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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:

Image: Chona Kasinger

untitled by Leo Berne on Flickr.
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'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:
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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. (...)

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.

by Lindy West, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ruth Fremson

The Residents

[ed. Repost... woke up this morning with this tune in my head.]

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.

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?

by Elisa Albert, Hazlitt |  Read more:

Image: Meg Hunt

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[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 ...]
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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.

by John Taylor, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty

[ed. I know what you mean.]
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