Tuesday, October 18, 2016
In Refrigerators, Tomatoes Lose Flavor at the Genetic Level
The tomato hitching a ride home in your grocery bag today is not the tomato it used to be. No matter if you bought plum, cherry or heirloom, if you wanted the tastiest tomato, you should have picked it yourself and eaten it immediately.
That’s because a tomato’s flavor — made up of sugars, acids and chemicals called volatiles — degrades as soon as it’s picked from the vine. There’s only one thing you can do now: Keep it out of the fridge.
Researchers at The University of Florida have found in a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that when tomatoes are stored at the temperature kept in most refrigerators, irreversible genetic changes take place that erase some of their flavors forever.
Harry J. Klee, a professor of horticultural sciences who led the study, and his colleagues took two varieties of tomatoes — an heirloom and a more common modern variety — and stored them at 41 degrees Fahrenheit before letting them recover at room temperature (68 degrees Fahrenheit). When they looked at what happened inside the tomatoes in cold temperatures, Dr. Klee said the subtropical fruit went into shock, producing especially damaging changes after a week of storage. After they were allowed to warm up, even for a day, some genes in the tomatoes that created its flavor volatiles had turned off and stayed off. (...)
But this research may seem mostly academic. The average American consumes nearly 20 pounds of fresh tomatoes a year. And despite researchers, industries and farmers all striving to create the tastiest tomatoes, there are some things we can’t yet control.
After all, most of the tomatoes we eat out of season are plucked from their vines probably in Florida or Mexico, just as they started to ripen. They are sorted, sized, graded and packed into a box with other tomatoes, totaling 25 pounds. Then they stay in a humidity and temperature-controlled room (no less than 55 degrees Fahrenheit) and ingest ethylene, a gas to make them ripen, for two to four days before being transported on a temperature-controlled truck to a warehouse. There they are repackaged, re-sorted and shipped to your grocer. There, if demand is low or if there’s no room, they may be stored in a fridge, and by the time you get them, it’s been a week to ten days.
“It’s probably never going to equal the one that matured in your backyard over the 80 or 90 days that you grew it, but it beats stone soup” said Reggie Brown, a manager at Florida Tomato Committee, which produces up to half of America’s fresh tomatoes in the winter.
That’s because a tomato’s flavor — made up of sugars, acids and chemicals called volatiles — degrades as soon as it’s picked from the vine. There’s only one thing you can do now: Keep it out of the fridge.
Researchers at The University of Florida have found in a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that when tomatoes are stored at the temperature kept in most refrigerators, irreversible genetic changes take place that erase some of their flavors forever.Harry J. Klee, a professor of horticultural sciences who led the study, and his colleagues took two varieties of tomatoes — an heirloom and a more common modern variety — and stored them at 41 degrees Fahrenheit before letting them recover at room temperature (68 degrees Fahrenheit). When they looked at what happened inside the tomatoes in cold temperatures, Dr. Klee said the subtropical fruit went into shock, producing especially damaging changes after a week of storage. After they were allowed to warm up, even for a day, some genes in the tomatoes that created its flavor volatiles had turned off and stayed off. (...)
But this research may seem mostly academic. The average American consumes nearly 20 pounds of fresh tomatoes a year. And despite researchers, industries and farmers all striving to create the tastiest tomatoes, there are some things we can’t yet control.
After all, most of the tomatoes we eat out of season are plucked from their vines probably in Florida or Mexico, just as they started to ripen. They are sorted, sized, graded and packed into a box with other tomatoes, totaling 25 pounds. Then they stay in a humidity and temperature-controlled room (no less than 55 degrees Fahrenheit) and ingest ethylene, a gas to make them ripen, for two to four days before being transported on a temperature-controlled truck to a warehouse. There they are repackaged, re-sorted and shipped to your grocer. There, if demand is low or if there’s no room, they may be stored in a fridge, and by the time you get them, it’s been a week to ten days.
“It’s probably never going to equal the one that matured in your backyard over the 80 or 90 days that you grew it, but it beats stone soup” said Reggie Brown, a manager at Florida Tomato Committee, which produces up to half of America’s fresh tomatoes in the winter.
by Joanna Klein, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Fred Tanneau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Is the Self-Driving Car UnAmerican?
“If I were asked to condense the whole of the present century into one mental picture,” the novelist J. G. Ballard wrote in 1971, “I would pick a familiar everyday sight: a man in a motor car, driving along a concrete highway to some unknown destination. Almost every aspect of modern life is there, both for good and for ill — our sense of speed, drama, and aggression, the worlds of advertising and consumer goods, engineering and mass-manufacture, and the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signaled landscape.” In other words: Life is a highway. And the highway, Ballard believed, was a bloody, beautiful mess.
At the time, Ballard was still a relatively obscure science-fiction writer whose novels portrayed a future beset by profound ecological crises (drought, flood, hurricane winds) and psychotic outbursts of violence. His work notably lacked the kinds of gleaming gadgetry that decorated most sci-fi. But by the turn of the 1970s, he had begun developing an obsession with one technology in particular: the old-fashioned automobile. Cars had deep, mythic resonances for him. He had grown up a coddled kid in colonial Shanghai, where a chauffeur drove him to school in a big American-made Packard. When he was 11, during the Second World War, the Japanese invaded Shanghai and the car was confiscated, reducing the family to riding bicycles. A few years later, his world shrank once again when he was interned in a Japanese concentration camp, where he remained for over two years. He emerged with a visceral horror of barbed wire and a love for “mastodonic” American automobiles (and American fighter jets, which he called “the Cadillacs of air combat”).
For Ballard, the car posed a beguiling paradox. How could it be such an erotic object, at once muscular and voluptuous, virginal and “fast,” while also being one of history’s deadliest inventions? Was its popularity simply a triumph of open-road optimism — a blind trust that the crash would only ever happen to someone else? Ballard thought not. His hunch was that, on some level, drivers are turned on by the danger, and perhaps even harbor a desire to be involved in a spectacular crash. A few years later, this notion would unfurl, like a corpse flower, into Crash, his incendiary novel about a group of people who fetishize demolished cars and mangled bodies.
Over the course of a century, Ballard wrote, the “perverse technology” of the automobile had colonized our mental landscape and transformed the physical one. But he sensed that the car’s toxic side effects — the traffic, the carnage, the pollution, the suburban sprawl — would soon lead to its demise. At some point in the middle of the 21st century, he wrote, human drivers would be replaced with “direct electronic control,” and it would become illegal to pilot a car. The sensuous machines would be neutered, spayed: stripped of their brake pedals, their accelerators, their steering wheels. Driving, and with it, car culture as we know it, would end. With the exception of select “motoring parks,” where it would persist as a nostalgic curiosity, the act of actually steering a motor vehicle would become an anachronism.
The finer details of his prediction now appear quaint. For example, he believed that the steering wheel would be replaced by a rotary dial and an address book, allowing riders to “dial in” their destination. The car would then be controlled via radio waves emitted by metal strips in the road. “Say you were in Toronto and you dial New York, and a voice might reply saying, ‘Sorry, New York is full. How about Philadelphia, or how about Saskatoon?’ ” (Back then, the notion was not as far-fetched as it sounds; American engineers worked to invent a “smart highway” from the 1930s all the way until the 1990s.) Ballard failed to foresee that it would be cars, not highways, that would one day become radically smarter, their controls seized not by Big Brother but by tech bros. In 2014, in a move that would have horrified Ballard, Google unveiled its first fully self-driving car, which has been shorn of its steering wheel and given an aggressively cute façade, like a lobotomized Herbie The Love Bug.
In Ballard’s grim reckoning, the end of driving would be just one step in our long march toward the “benign dystopia” of rampant consumerism and the surveillance state, in which people willingly give up control of their lives in exchange for technological comforts. The car, flawed as it was, functioned as a bulwark against “the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.” “The car as we know it now is on the way out,” Ballard wrote. “To a large extent I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea — freedom. (...)
The potential benefits of such a world are far-reaching. Self-driving cars could grant the freedom of mobility to an increasingly elderly and infirm population (not to mention children and pets and inanimate objects) for whom driving is not an option. Since human error accounts for more than 90 percent of car accidents, each year driverless cars have the potential to save millions of lives. Fewer accidents means fewer traffic jams, and less traffic means less pollution. A new ecosystem of driverless futurists has sprouted up to calculate the technology’s effects on urbanism (the end of parking!), work-life balance (the end of dead time!), the environment (the end of smog!), public health (the end of drunken driving!), and manufacturing (the end of the automobile workforce as we know it!).
But these are just slivers of the vast changes that will take place — culturally, politically, economically, and experientially — in the world of the driverless car. Stop for a moment to consider the magnitude of this transformation: Our republic of drivers is poised to become a nation of passengers.
The experience of driving a car has been the mythopoeic heart of America for half a century. How will its absence be felt? We are still probably too close to it to know for sure. Will we mourn the loss of control? Will it subtly warp our sense of personal freedom — of having our destiny in our hands? Will it diminish our daily proximity to death? Will it scramble our (too often) gendered, racialized notions of who gets to drive which kinds of cars? Will middle-aged men still splurge on outlandishly fast (or, at least, fast-looking) self-driving vehicles? Will young men still buy cheap ones and then blow their paychecks tricking them out? If we are no longer forced to steer our way through a traffic jam, will it become less existentially frustrating, or more? What will become of the cinematic car chase? What about the hackneyed country song where driving is a metaphor for life? Will race-car drivers one day seem as remotely seraphic to us as stunt pilots? Will we all one day assume the entitled air of the habitually chauffeured?
by Robert Moor, NY Mag/Select/All | Read more:
Image:Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection (Wayne's World).
At the time, Ballard was still a relatively obscure science-fiction writer whose novels portrayed a future beset by profound ecological crises (drought, flood, hurricane winds) and psychotic outbursts of violence. His work notably lacked the kinds of gleaming gadgetry that decorated most sci-fi. But by the turn of the 1970s, he had begun developing an obsession with one technology in particular: the old-fashioned automobile. Cars had deep, mythic resonances for him. He had grown up a coddled kid in colonial Shanghai, where a chauffeur drove him to school in a big American-made Packard. When he was 11, during the Second World War, the Japanese invaded Shanghai and the car was confiscated, reducing the family to riding bicycles. A few years later, his world shrank once again when he was interned in a Japanese concentration camp, where he remained for over two years. He emerged with a visceral horror of barbed wire and a love for “mastodonic” American automobiles (and American fighter jets, which he called “the Cadillacs of air combat”).For Ballard, the car posed a beguiling paradox. How could it be such an erotic object, at once muscular and voluptuous, virginal and “fast,” while also being one of history’s deadliest inventions? Was its popularity simply a triumph of open-road optimism — a blind trust that the crash would only ever happen to someone else? Ballard thought not. His hunch was that, on some level, drivers are turned on by the danger, and perhaps even harbor a desire to be involved in a spectacular crash. A few years later, this notion would unfurl, like a corpse flower, into Crash, his incendiary novel about a group of people who fetishize demolished cars and mangled bodies.
Over the course of a century, Ballard wrote, the “perverse technology” of the automobile had colonized our mental landscape and transformed the physical one. But he sensed that the car’s toxic side effects — the traffic, the carnage, the pollution, the suburban sprawl — would soon lead to its demise. At some point in the middle of the 21st century, he wrote, human drivers would be replaced with “direct electronic control,” and it would become illegal to pilot a car. The sensuous machines would be neutered, spayed: stripped of their brake pedals, their accelerators, their steering wheels. Driving, and with it, car culture as we know it, would end. With the exception of select “motoring parks,” where it would persist as a nostalgic curiosity, the act of actually steering a motor vehicle would become an anachronism.
The finer details of his prediction now appear quaint. For example, he believed that the steering wheel would be replaced by a rotary dial and an address book, allowing riders to “dial in” their destination. The car would then be controlled via radio waves emitted by metal strips in the road. “Say you were in Toronto and you dial New York, and a voice might reply saying, ‘Sorry, New York is full. How about Philadelphia, or how about Saskatoon?’ ” (Back then, the notion was not as far-fetched as it sounds; American engineers worked to invent a “smart highway” from the 1930s all the way until the 1990s.) Ballard failed to foresee that it would be cars, not highways, that would one day become radically smarter, their controls seized not by Big Brother but by tech bros. In 2014, in a move that would have horrified Ballard, Google unveiled its first fully self-driving car, which has been shorn of its steering wheel and given an aggressively cute façade, like a lobotomized Herbie The Love Bug.
In Ballard’s grim reckoning, the end of driving would be just one step in our long march toward the “benign dystopia” of rampant consumerism and the surveillance state, in which people willingly give up control of their lives in exchange for technological comforts. The car, flawed as it was, functioned as a bulwark against “the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.” “The car as we know it now is on the way out,” Ballard wrote. “To a large extent I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea — freedom. (...)
The potential benefits of such a world are far-reaching. Self-driving cars could grant the freedom of mobility to an increasingly elderly and infirm population (not to mention children and pets and inanimate objects) for whom driving is not an option. Since human error accounts for more than 90 percent of car accidents, each year driverless cars have the potential to save millions of lives. Fewer accidents means fewer traffic jams, and less traffic means less pollution. A new ecosystem of driverless futurists has sprouted up to calculate the technology’s effects on urbanism (the end of parking!), work-life balance (the end of dead time!), the environment (the end of smog!), public health (the end of drunken driving!), and manufacturing (the end of the automobile workforce as we know it!).
But these are just slivers of the vast changes that will take place — culturally, politically, economically, and experientially — in the world of the driverless car. Stop for a moment to consider the magnitude of this transformation: Our republic of drivers is poised to become a nation of passengers.
The experience of driving a car has been the mythopoeic heart of America for half a century. How will its absence be felt? We are still probably too close to it to know for sure. Will we mourn the loss of control? Will it subtly warp our sense of personal freedom — of having our destiny in our hands? Will it diminish our daily proximity to death? Will it scramble our (too often) gendered, racialized notions of who gets to drive which kinds of cars? Will middle-aged men still splurge on outlandishly fast (or, at least, fast-looking) self-driving vehicles? Will young men still buy cheap ones and then blow their paychecks tricking them out? If we are no longer forced to steer our way through a traffic jam, will it become less existentially frustrating, or more? What will become of the cinematic car chase? What about the hackneyed country song where driving is a metaphor for life? Will race-car drivers one day seem as remotely seraphic to us as stunt pilots? Will we all one day assume the entitled air of the habitually chauffeured?
by Robert Moor, NY Mag/Select/All | Read more:
Image:Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection (Wayne's World).
Monday, October 17, 2016
The Secret of Excess
[ed. In honor of Mario's selection as chef for the Obama's last State Dinner at the White House. My son and I used to watch cooking shows all the time (before the Food Channel really got going... Graham Kerr, Sara Moulton, Emeril Lagasse... but I always liked Mario the best (for his awesome insights into Italian cooking and his cool guitar playing at the end of each episode).]
The first glimpse I had of what Mario Batali’s friends had described to me as the “myth of Mario” was during a weekend in January last year, when I invited him to dinner with some friends. Batali, the chef and co-owner of Babbo, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, is such a proficient cook that he is rarely invited to people’s homes for a meal, and he went out of his way to be a grateful guest. He arrived with a jar of quince-flavored grappa, which he’d made himself (the fruit renders it almost drinkable); a bottle of nocino, which he’d also made (same principle, but with walnuts); three bottles of wine; and a white, dense slab of lardo—literally, the raw “lardy” back of a very fat pig, which he’d cured with herbs and salt. I was a reasonably comfortable cook, keen but a little chaotic, and I was delighted to have Batali in the kitchen, if only for his pedagogical interventions. He has been cooking for a cable-television audience for more than six years and has an uninhibited way of telling you that only a moron would wrap the meat in foil after cooking it. The evening, by then, had been effectively taken over. Not long into it, Batali had cut very thin slices of the lardo and, with a flourish of intimacy, laid them individually on our tongues, whispering that we needed to let the lardo melt to appreciate what the pig had eaten just before he died. The pig, evidently, had been five hundred and seventy-five pounds, almost three times the size of a normal pig, and, near the end, had lived exclusively on walnuts, apples, and cream. (“It’s the best song sung in the key of pig,” Batali said.) No one at dinner that evening had knowingly eaten pure fat before (“At the restaurant, I tell the waiters to call it prosciutto bianco, or else people won’t touch it”), and by the time he had persuaded us to a third helping my heart was racing and we were all very thirsty.On trips to Italy made with his Babbo co-owner, Joe Bastianich, Batali has been known to share an entire case of wine during dinner, and, while we didn’t drink anything like that, we were all infected by his live-very-hard-for-now approach and had more than was sensible. I don’t know. I don’t really remember. There was also the grappa and the nocino, and one of my last recollections is of Batali around three in the morning—back arched, eyes closed, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, his red Converse high-tops pounding the floor—playing air guitar to Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” Batali had recently turned forty, and I remember thinking that it was a long time since I’d seen a grown man playing air guitar. He then found the soundtrack for “Buena Vista Social Club,” tried to salsa with one of the guests (who promptly fell over a sofa), tried to dance with her boyfriend (who was unresponsive), and then put on a Tom Waits CD and sang along as he went into the kitchen, where, with a machinelike speed, he washed the dishes and mopped the floor. He reminded me that we had an arrangement for the next day—he’d got tickets to a New York Giants game, courtesy of the commissioner of the N.F.L., who had just eaten at Babbo—and disappeared with three of my friends. They ended up at Marylou’s, in the Village—in Batali’s description, “a wise-guy joint where you get anything at any time of night, none of it good.”
It was nearly daylight when he got home, the doorman of his apartment building told me the next day as the two of us tried to get Batali to wake up: the N.F.L. commissioner’s driver was waiting outside. When Batali was roused, forty-five minutes later, he was momentarily perplexed, standing in his doorway in his underwear and wondering why I was there. Batali has a remarkable girth, and it was a little startling to see him so clad, but within minutes he had transformed himself into the famous television chef: shorts, high-tops, sunglasses, his red hair pulled back into a ponytail. He had become Molto Mario—the many-layered name of his cooking program, which, in one of its senses, means, literally, Very Mario (that is, an intensified Mario, an exaggerated Mario, and an utterly over-the-top Mario)—and a figure whose renown I didn’t fully appreciate until, as guests of the commissioner, we were allowed on the field before the game. Fans of the New York Giants are happy caricatures (the ethic is old-fashioned blue-collar, even if they’re corporate managers), and I was surprised by how many of them recognized the ponytailed chef, who stood on the field facing them, arms crossed over his chest, and beaming. “Hey, Molto!” one of them shouted. “What’s cooking, Mario?” “Mario, make me a pasta!” On the East Coast, “Molto Mario” is on twice a day (at eleven-thirty in the morning and five-thirty in the afternoon). I had a complex picture of the metropolitan working male—policeman, Con Ed worker, plumber—rushing home to catch lessons in how to braise his broccoli rabe and get just the right forked texture on his homemade orecchiette. (Batali later told me that when the viewing figures for his show first came in they were so overwhelmingly male that the producers thought they weren’t going to be able to carry on.) I stood back, with one of the security people, taking in the spectacle (by now a crowd was chanting “Molto! Molto! Molto!”)— this proudly round man, whose whole manner said, “Dude, where’s the party?”
“I love this guy,” the security man said. “Just lookin’ at him makes me hungry.”
Mario Batali arrived in New York in 1992, when he was thirty-one. He had two hundred dollars, a duffelbag, and a guitar. Since then, he has become the city’s most widely recognized chef and, almost single-handedly, has changed the way people think about Italian cooking in America. The food he prepares at Babbo, which was given three stars by the Times when the restaurant opened, in 1998, is characterized by intensity—of ingredients, of flavor—and when people talk of it they use words like “heat” and “vibrancy,” “exaggeration” and “surprise.” Batali is not thought of as a conventional cook, in the business of serving food for profit; he’s in the much murkier enterprise of stimulating outrageous appetites and satisfying them aggressively. (In Batali’s language, appetites blur: a pasta made with butter “swells like the lips of a woman aroused,” roasted lotus roots are like “sucking the toes of the Shah’s mistress,” and just about anything powerfully flavored—the first cherries of the season, the first ramps, a cheese from Piedmont—”gives me wood.”) Chefs are regular visitors and are subjected to extreme versions of what is already an extreme experience. “We’re going to kill him,” Batali said to me with maniacal glee as he prepared a meal for Wylie Dufresne, the former chef of 71 Clinton, who had ordered a seven-course tasting menu, to which Batali then added a lethal-seeming number of impossible-to-resist extra courses. The starters (variations, again, in the key of pig) included a plate of lonza (the cured backstrap from one of Batali’s cream-apple-and-walnut-fattened pigs); a plate of coppa (made from the same creamy pig’s shoulder); a fried pig foot; a porcini mushroom, stuffed with garlic and thyme, and roasted with a piece of Batali’s own pancetta (cured pig belly) wrapped around its stem; plus (“just for the hell of it”) tagliatelle topped withguanciale (cured pig jowls), parsnips, and black truffle. A publisher who was fed by Batali while talking to him about booking a party came away vowing to eat only soft fruit and water until he’d recovered: “This guy knows no middle ground. It’s just excess on a level I’ve never known before—it’s food and drink, food and drink, food and drink, until you start to feel as though you’re on drugs.” This spring, Mario was trying out a new motto, borrowed from the writer Shirley O. Corriher: “Wretched excess is just barely enough.”
by Bill Buford, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ruven Afanador
The Meaning of Open Trade and Open Borders
Near the end of his 1817 treatise, “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation,” David Ricardo advanced the “law of comparative advantage,” the idea that each country—not to mention the world that countries add up to—would be better off if each specialized in the thing it did most efficiently. Portugal may be more productive than Britain in both clothmaking and winemaking; but if Portugal is comparatively more productive in winemaking than clothmaking, and Britain the other way around, Portugal should make the wine, Britain the cloth, and they should trade freely with one another. The math will work, even if Portuguese weavers will not, at least for a while—and even if each country’s countryside will come to seem less pleasingly variegated. The worker, in the long run, would be compensated, owing to “a fall in the value of the necessaries on which his wages are expended.” Accordingly, Ricardo argued in Parliament for the abolition of Britain’s “corn laws,” tariffs on imported grain, which protected the remnants of the landed aristocracy, along with their rural retainers. Those tariffs were eventually lifted in 1846, a generation after his death; bread got cheaper, and lords got quainter.
The case for free trade, embodied in deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, remains at bottom Ricardo’s. And the long run is still working out pretty much as he assumed. The McKinsey Global Institute, or M.G.I., reported in 2014 that some twenty-six trillion dollars in goods, services, and financial investments crossed borders in 2012, representing about thirty-six percent of global G.D.P. The report, looking country by country, reckoned that burgeoning trade added fifteen to twenty-five per cent to global G.D.P. growth—as much as four hundred and fifty billion dollars. “Countries with a larger number of connections in the global network of flows increase their GDP growth by up to 40 percent more than less connected countries do,” the M.G.I. said.
But the case against free trade seems also to be based on Ricardo’s premises, albeit with heightened compassion for the Portuguese weavers and British wheat farmers. American critics—Bernie Sanders, earnestly; Donald Trump, cannily—argue that trade decimated U.S. manufacturing by forcing American products into competition with countries where wages, labor, and environmental standards are not nearly as strong as those in America, or by ignoring how some countries, especially China, manipulate their currency to encourage exports. Sanders launched his post-primary movement, “Our Revolution,” in late August, with an e-mail to potential donors. The most conspicuous demand to rally the troops was opposition to the T.P.P. “Since 2001, nearly 60,000 manufacturing plants in this country have been shut down,” the e-mail said, “and we have lost almost 5 million decent-paying manufacturing jobs. nafta alone led to the loss of almost three-quarters of a million jobs—the Permanent Normalized Trade Agreement with China cost America four times that number: almost 3 million jobs.” These agreements “are not the only reason” why manufacturing in the United States has declined, the e-mail goes on, but “they are important factors.”
Such evidence for why the T.P.P. should be thrown out is hard to dispute, since the e-mail doesn’t say what jobs were gained because of past deals, or explore what other “factors” may be important. President Obama, the champion of the T.P.P., may grant that certain provisions of the deal might be strengthened in favor of American standards without agreeing with “Our Revolution” on what’s bathwater and what’s baby. What’s clearer is that the anti-trade message is hitting home, especially among the hundred and fifty million Americans, about sixty-one per cent of the adult population, with no post-high-school degree of any kind.
The investor Jeremy Grantham in July wrote an op-ed in Barron’s noting that some ten million net new jobs were created in the U.S. since the lows of 2009 (the actual number being fifteen million), while “a remarkable 99 percent” excluded people without a university degree. That’s a crisis, not of unemployment but of unemployability, which backshadows skepticism about the T.P.P. and trade as a whole. Trump’s lead over Hillary Clinton among less-well-educated white voters remains solid, in spite of his alleged sexual predations; a large number of voters remain drawn to his grousing about the balance-of-trade deficit—which he presents as if it were a losing football score. Clinton has apparently decided to pass up the teachable moment, pretty much adopting Sanders’s anti-trade line, though her private views almost certainly remain more nuanced. In an e-mail exposed by the WikiLeaks hack, purporting to detail a conversation between Clinton aides, she allegedly told Banco Itau, a Brazilian bank, in 2013, that she favored, at “some time in the future,” a “hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders”—a curious case of a leak embarrassing a candidate by showing her to be more visionary and expert than she wants to appear.
The anxiety is understandable, but the focus on trade deals seriously underestimates the changes that have reshaped global corporations over the past generation. Trade, increasingly, is mostly not in finished goods like Portuguese wine. It is, rather, in components moving within corporate networks—that is, from federated sources toward final assembly, then on to sales channels, in complex supply chains. An estimated sixty per cent of international trade happens within, rather than between, global corporations: that is, across national boundaries but within the same corporate group. It is hard to shake the image of global corporations as versions of post-Second World War U.S. multinationals: huge command-and-control pyramids, replicating their operations in places where, say, customers are particularly eager or labor is particularly cheap. This is wrong. Corporations are hierarchies of product teams, which live in a global cloud. “Made in America” is an idealization.
The product manager of the Chevrolet Volt, which Obama singled out at the time of the auto bailout, told me in 2009 that the car was a kind of Lego build: the design was developed by an international team in Michigan, the chassis came from the U.S., the battery cells from Korea, the small battery-charging engine from Germany, the electrical harnesses from Mexico, suspension parts from Canada, and smartphone-integration software from Silicon Valley. More and more, the design of products and services happens in distributed hubs. The serendipitous sourcing of technologies and customer characteristics, the lowering of transaction costs, the trade flows enabled by accelerated financing and logistics—all of these—presume growing network integration and social media, the latter increasingly important to glean marketing data.
The point is that each component, and each step in production, adds value differently. Where value is added will depend on what corporate accountants call “cost structure”: how much of the component or step requires local materials, or unskilled labor, or skilled labor wedded to expensive capital equipment, or high transportation costs, and so forth. Some components, like the fuel injectors assembled into the Volt’s German engine, required high-technology production systems. Labor was a trivial part of the cost structure, and the engine could be built in the highest-wage region on the planet. Harnesses, in contrast, which required a much higher proportion of manual labor—and were relatively easy to ship—were inevitably sourced from places where workers make as little as a tenth as much as Americans, thousands of miles away. No tariffs can reverse this trend, and no currency manipulation can drive it. Between 2005 and 2012, the M.G.I. found, thirty-eight per cent of trade derived from “emerging economies,” up from fourteen per cent in 1990.
by Bernard Avishai , New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Bill Pugliano
The case for free trade, embodied in deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, remains at bottom Ricardo’s. And the long run is still working out pretty much as he assumed. The McKinsey Global Institute, or M.G.I., reported in 2014 that some twenty-six trillion dollars in goods, services, and financial investments crossed borders in 2012, representing about thirty-six percent of global G.D.P. The report, looking country by country, reckoned that burgeoning trade added fifteen to twenty-five per cent to global G.D.P. growth—as much as four hundred and fifty billion dollars. “Countries with a larger number of connections in the global network of flows increase their GDP growth by up to 40 percent more than less connected countries do,” the M.G.I. said.But the case against free trade seems also to be based on Ricardo’s premises, albeit with heightened compassion for the Portuguese weavers and British wheat farmers. American critics—Bernie Sanders, earnestly; Donald Trump, cannily—argue that trade decimated U.S. manufacturing by forcing American products into competition with countries where wages, labor, and environmental standards are not nearly as strong as those in America, or by ignoring how some countries, especially China, manipulate their currency to encourage exports. Sanders launched his post-primary movement, “Our Revolution,” in late August, with an e-mail to potential donors. The most conspicuous demand to rally the troops was opposition to the T.P.P. “Since 2001, nearly 60,000 manufacturing plants in this country have been shut down,” the e-mail said, “and we have lost almost 5 million decent-paying manufacturing jobs. nafta alone led to the loss of almost three-quarters of a million jobs—the Permanent Normalized Trade Agreement with China cost America four times that number: almost 3 million jobs.” These agreements “are not the only reason” why manufacturing in the United States has declined, the e-mail goes on, but “they are important factors.”
Such evidence for why the T.P.P. should be thrown out is hard to dispute, since the e-mail doesn’t say what jobs were gained because of past deals, or explore what other “factors” may be important. President Obama, the champion of the T.P.P., may grant that certain provisions of the deal might be strengthened in favor of American standards without agreeing with “Our Revolution” on what’s bathwater and what’s baby. What’s clearer is that the anti-trade message is hitting home, especially among the hundred and fifty million Americans, about sixty-one per cent of the adult population, with no post-high-school degree of any kind.
The investor Jeremy Grantham in July wrote an op-ed in Barron’s noting that some ten million net new jobs were created in the U.S. since the lows of 2009 (the actual number being fifteen million), while “a remarkable 99 percent” excluded people without a university degree. That’s a crisis, not of unemployment but of unemployability, which backshadows skepticism about the T.P.P. and trade as a whole. Trump’s lead over Hillary Clinton among less-well-educated white voters remains solid, in spite of his alleged sexual predations; a large number of voters remain drawn to his grousing about the balance-of-trade deficit—which he presents as if it were a losing football score. Clinton has apparently decided to pass up the teachable moment, pretty much adopting Sanders’s anti-trade line, though her private views almost certainly remain more nuanced. In an e-mail exposed by the WikiLeaks hack, purporting to detail a conversation between Clinton aides, she allegedly told Banco Itau, a Brazilian bank, in 2013, that she favored, at “some time in the future,” a “hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders”—a curious case of a leak embarrassing a candidate by showing her to be more visionary and expert than she wants to appear.
The anxiety is understandable, but the focus on trade deals seriously underestimates the changes that have reshaped global corporations over the past generation. Trade, increasingly, is mostly not in finished goods like Portuguese wine. It is, rather, in components moving within corporate networks—that is, from federated sources toward final assembly, then on to sales channels, in complex supply chains. An estimated sixty per cent of international trade happens within, rather than between, global corporations: that is, across national boundaries but within the same corporate group. It is hard to shake the image of global corporations as versions of post-Second World War U.S. multinationals: huge command-and-control pyramids, replicating their operations in places where, say, customers are particularly eager or labor is particularly cheap. This is wrong. Corporations are hierarchies of product teams, which live in a global cloud. “Made in America” is an idealization.
The product manager of the Chevrolet Volt, which Obama singled out at the time of the auto bailout, told me in 2009 that the car was a kind of Lego build: the design was developed by an international team in Michigan, the chassis came from the U.S., the battery cells from Korea, the small battery-charging engine from Germany, the electrical harnesses from Mexico, suspension parts from Canada, and smartphone-integration software from Silicon Valley. More and more, the design of products and services happens in distributed hubs. The serendipitous sourcing of technologies and customer characteristics, the lowering of transaction costs, the trade flows enabled by accelerated financing and logistics—all of these—presume growing network integration and social media, the latter increasingly important to glean marketing data.
The point is that each component, and each step in production, adds value differently. Where value is added will depend on what corporate accountants call “cost structure”: how much of the component or step requires local materials, or unskilled labor, or skilled labor wedded to expensive capital equipment, or high transportation costs, and so forth. Some components, like the fuel injectors assembled into the Volt’s German engine, required high-technology production systems. Labor was a trivial part of the cost structure, and the engine could be built in the highest-wage region on the planet. Harnesses, in contrast, which required a much higher proportion of manual labor—and were relatively easy to ship—were inevitably sourced from places where workers make as little as a tenth as much as Americans, thousands of miles away. No tariffs can reverse this trend, and no currency manipulation can drive it. Between 2005 and 2012, the M.G.I. found, thirty-eight per cent of trade derived from “emerging economies,” up from fourteen per cent in 1990.
by Bernard Avishai , New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Bill Pugliano
A New Website Lets You Buy Buffet Leftovers for Dirt-Cheap
Ah, buffets.
At any “normal” restaurant you might be considered off your rocker if you were to order a scoop of mashed potatoes, a slice of tiramisu, three garlic shrimp, a lamb kebab, three pieces of California roll, two baby back ribs, a few shreds of smoked salmon, and some brisket. But at a buffet, all of your clusterfucky eating dreams can come true!
This is the glory of buffets. But when it comes to the pricier ones, those less likely to have you locked in your bathroom for three hours later that night, the only thing decidedly un-glorious about the experience is the cost. A decent spread can set you back quite a few bucks—and even worse, that’s knowing that at the end of the day or night, they’ll just be tossing all of that uneaten creamed spinach and bread pudding straight into the garbage. (Or, in some cases, sending it off to farms to literally be thrown into a trough and fed to very happy pigs.)
But a new company called BuffetGo wants to make the most of our gluttony and the collateral of our eyes being bigger than our stomachs.
BuffetGo describes itself as “combating global climate change, world hunger, and the food waste epidemic around the world” using a “unique closing-time discount concept that allows you to enjoy amazing meals starting $1 [sic].”
Here’s the idea: You buy a heavily discounted meal from BuffetGo’s site and bring your receipt to the participating restaurant during the last 15 to 30 minutes of service. (Example: The Hilton in Costa Mesa has a breakfast buffet that usually costs $20, but is just $4 through BuffetGo if you show up between 10:40 and 11 AM and fill up your takeaway box with whatever scraps remain at that point.)
After launching last month, BuffetGo’s website is now live and operational for restaurants in New York City, Chicago, and the Los Angeles area. Most of the restaurants currently offering the service appear to be hotel buffets, but there are also some sushi buffets, seafood buffets, Indian buffets, Chinese buffets, and even bakeries. You can sort your options by meal times or styles of cuisine. Of the 24 restaurants currently participating, the cost for one of the company’s to-go boxes is between $2 and $5, compared to regular prices of $10 to $20 for a meal.
BuffetGo founder Emil Rosengren Lolby told the Los Angeles Times, “This new and revolutionary way of dealing with the food waste epidemic problem our planet is suffering from is beneficial for all parts.”
At any “normal” restaurant you might be considered off your rocker if you were to order a scoop of mashed potatoes, a slice of tiramisu, three garlic shrimp, a lamb kebab, three pieces of California roll, two baby back ribs, a few shreds of smoked salmon, and some brisket. But at a buffet, all of your clusterfucky eating dreams can come true!This is the glory of buffets. But when it comes to the pricier ones, those less likely to have you locked in your bathroom for three hours later that night, the only thing decidedly un-glorious about the experience is the cost. A decent spread can set you back quite a few bucks—and even worse, that’s knowing that at the end of the day or night, they’ll just be tossing all of that uneaten creamed spinach and bread pudding straight into the garbage. (Or, in some cases, sending it off to farms to literally be thrown into a trough and fed to very happy pigs.)
But a new company called BuffetGo wants to make the most of our gluttony and the collateral of our eyes being bigger than our stomachs.
BuffetGo describes itself as “combating global climate change, world hunger, and the food waste epidemic around the world” using a “unique closing-time discount concept that allows you to enjoy amazing meals starting $1 [sic].”
Here’s the idea: You buy a heavily discounted meal from BuffetGo’s site and bring your receipt to the participating restaurant during the last 15 to 30 minutes of service. (Example: The Hilton in Costa Mesa has a breakfast buffet that usually costs $20, but is just $4 through BuffetGo if you show up between 10:40 and 11 AM and fill up your takeaway box with whatever scraps remain at that point.)
After launching last month, BuffetGo’s website is now live and operational for restaurants in New York City, Chicago, and the Los Angeles area. Most of the restaurants currently offering the service appear to be hotel buffets, but there are also some sushi buffets, seafood buffets, Indian buffets, Chinese buffets, and even bakeries. You can sort your options by meal times or styles of cuisine. Of the 24 restaurants currently participating, the cost for one of the company’s to-go boxes is between $2 and $5, compared to regular prices of $10 to $20 for a meal.
BuffetGo founder Emil Rosengren Lolby told the Los Angeles Times, “This new and revolutionary way of dealing with the food waste epidemic problem our planet is suffering from is beneficial for all parts.”
by Hilary Pollack, Munchies | Read more:
Image: Flickr user Wonderlane
Sunday, October 16, 2016
The Mathematical Genius of Auto-Tune
Auto-Tune — one of modern history’s most reviled inventions — was an act of mathematical genius.
The pitch correction software, which automatically calibrates out-of-tune singing to perfection, has been used on nearly every chart-topping album for the past 20 years. Along the way, it has been pilloried as the poster child of modern music’s mechanization. When Time Magazine declared it “one of the 50 worst inventions of the 20th century”, few came to its defense.
But often lost in this narrative is the story of the invention itself, and the soft-spoken savant who pioneered it. For inventor Andy Hildebrand, Auto-Tune was an incredibly complex product — the result of years of rigorous study, statistical computation, and the creation of algorithms previously deemed to be impossible.
Hildebrand’s invention has taken him on a crazy journey: He’s given up a lucrative career in oil. He’s changed the economics of the recording industry. He’s been sued by hip-hop artist T-Pain. And in the course of it all, he’s raised pertinent questions about what constitutes “real” music.
The Oil Engineer
Andy Hildebrand was, in his own words, “not a normal kid.”
A self-proclaimed bookworm, he was constantly derailed by life’s grand mysteries, and had trouble sitting still for prolonged periods of time. School was never an interest: when teachers grew weary of slapping him on the wrist with a ruler, they’d stick him in the back of the class, where he wouldn’t bother anybody. “That way,” he says, “I could just stare out of the window.”
After failing the first grade, Hilbrebrand’s academic performance slowly began to improve. Toward the end of grade school, the young delinquent started pulling C’s; in junior high, he made his first B; as a high school senior, he was scraping together occasional A’s. Driven by a newfound passion for science, Hildebrand “decided to start working [his] ass off” -- an endeavor that culminated with an electrical engineering PhD from the University of Illinois in 1976.
In the course of his graduate studies, Hildebrand excelled in his applications of linear estimation theory and signal processing. Upon graduating, he was plucked up by oil conglomerate Exxon, and tasked with using seismic data to pinpoint drill locations. He clarifies what this entailed:
“I realized that if I could save Exxon $500 million,” he recalls, “I could probably do something for myself and do pretty well.” (...)
An engineer by trade, Hildebrand had always been a musician at heart.
As a child, he was something of a classical flute virtuoso and, by 16, he was a “card-carrying studio musician” who played professionally. His undergraduate engineering degree had been funded by music scholarships and teaching flute lessons. Naturally, after leaving Landmark and the oil industry, Hildebrand decided to return to school to study composition more intensively.
While pursuing his studies at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, Hildebrand began composing with sampling synthesizers (machines that allow a musician to record notes from an instrument, then make them into digital samples that could be transposed on a keyboard). But he encountered a problem: when he attempted to make his own flute samples, he found the quality of the sounds to be ugly and unnatural.
“The sampling synthesizers sounded like shit: if you sustained a note, it would just repeat forever,” he harps. “And the problem was that the machines didn’t hold much data.”
Hildebrand, who’d “retired” just a few months earlier, decided to take matters into his own hands. First, he created a processing algorithm that greatly condensed the audio data, allowing for a smoother, more natural-sounding sustain and timbre. Then, he packaged this algorithm into a piece of software (called Infinity), and handed it out to composers.
Infinity improved digitized orchestral sounds so dramatically that it uprooted Hollywood’s music production landscape: using the software, lone composers were able to accurately recreate film scores, and directors no longer had a need to hire entire orchestras.
“I bankrupted the Los Angeles Philharmonic,” Hildebrand chuckles. “They were out of the [sample recording] business for eight years.” (We were unable to verify this, but The Los Angeles Times does cite that the Philharmonic entered a "financially bleak" period in the early 1990s).
Unfortunately, Hildebrand’s software was inherently self-defeating: companies sprouted up that processed sounds through Infinity, then sold them as pre-packaged soundbanks. “I sold 5 more copies, and that was it,” he says. “The market totally collapsed.”
But the inventor’s bug had taken hold of Hildebrand once more. In 1990, he formed his final company, Antares Audio Technology, with the goal of innovating the music industry’s next big piece of software. And that’s exactly what happened.
by Zachary Crockett , Priceomics | Read more:
Images: uncredited
The pitch correction software, which automatically calibrates out-of-tune singing to perfection, has been used on nearly every chart-topping album for the past 20 years. Along the way, it has been pilloried as the poster child of modern music’s mechanization. When Time Magazine declared it “one of the 50 worst inventions of the 20th century”, few came to its defense.
But often lost in this narrative is the story of the invention itself, and the soft-spoken savant who pioneered it. For inventor Andy Hildebrand, Auto-Tune was an incredibly complex product — the result of years of rigorous study, statistical computation, and the creation of algorithms previously deemed to be impossible.Hildebrand’s invention has taken him on a crazy journey: He’s given up a lucrative career in oil. He’s changed the economics of the recording industry. He’s been sued by hip-hop artist T-Pain. And in the course of it all, he’s raised pertinent questions about what constitutes “real” music.
The Oil Engineer
Andy Hildebrand was, in his own words, “not a normal kid.”
A self-proclaimed bookworm, he was constantly derailed by life’s grand mysteries, and had trouble sitting still for prolonged periods of time. School was never an interest: when teachers grew weary of slapping him on the wrist with a ruler, they’d stick him in the back of the class, where he wouldn’t bother anybody. “That way,” he says, “I could just stare out of the window.”
After failing the first grade, Hilbrebrand’s academic performance slowly began to improve. Toward the end of grade school, the young delinquent started pulling C’s; in junior high, he made his first B; as a high school senior, he was scraping together occasional A’s. Driven by a newfound passion for science, Hildebrand “decided to start working [his] ass off” -- an endeavor that culminated with an electrical engineering PhD from the University of Illinois in 1976.
In the course of his graduate studies, Hildebrand excelled in his applications of linear estimation theory and signal processing. Upon graduating, he was plucked up by oil conglomerate Exxon, and tasked with using seismic data to pinpoint drill locations. He clarifies what this entailed:
“I was working in an area of geophysics where you emit sounds on the surface of the Earth (or in the ocean), listen to reverberations that come up, and, from that information, try to figure out what the shape of the subsurface is. It’s kind of like listening to a lightning bolt and trying to figure out what the shape of the clouds are. It’s a complex problem.”Three years into Hildebrand’s work, Exxon ran into a major dilemma: the company was nearing the end of its seven-year construction timeline on an Alaskan pipeline; if they failed to get oil into the line in time, they’d lose their half-billion dollar tax write-off. Hildebrand was enlisted to fix the holdup — faulty seismic monitoring instrumentation — a task that required “a lot of high-end mathematics.” He succeeded.
“I realized that if I could save Exxon $500 million,” he recalls, “I could probably do something for myself and do pretty well.” (...)An engineer by trade, Hildebrand had always been a musician at heart.
As a child, he was something of a classical flute virtuoso and, by 16, he was a “card-carrying studio musician” who played professionally. His undergraduate engineering degree had been funded by music scholarships and teaching flute lessons. Naturally, after leaving Landmark and the oil industry, Hildebrand decided to return to school to study composition more intensively.
While pursuing his studies at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, Hildebrand began composing with sampling synthesizers (machines that allow a musician to record notes from an instrument, then make them into digital samples that could be transposed on a keyboard). But he encountered a problem: when he attempted to make his own flute samples, he found the quality of the sounds to be ugly and unnatural.
“The sampling synthesizers sounded like shit: if you sustained a note, it would just repeat forever,” he harps. “And the problem was that the machines didn’t hold much data.”
Hildebrand, who’d “retired” just a few months earlier, decided to take matters into his own hands. First, he created a processing algorithm that greatly condensed the audio data, allowing for a smoother, more natural-sounding sustain and timbre. Then, he packaged this algorithm into a piece of software (called Infinity), and handed it out to composers.
Infinity improved digitized orchestral sounds so dramatically that it uprooted Hollywood’s music production landscape: using the software, lone composers were able to accurately recreate film scores, and directors no longer had a need to hire entire orchestras.
“I bankrupted the Los Angeles Philharmonic,” Hildebrand chuckles. “They were out of the [sample recording] business for eight years.” (We were unable to verify this, but The Los Angeles Times does cite that the Philharmonic entered a "financially bleak" period in the early 1990s).
Unfortunately, Hildebrand’s software was inherently self-defeating: companies sprouted up that processed sounds through Infinity, then sold them as pre-packaged soundbanks. “I sold 5 more copies, and that was it,” he says. “The market totally collapsed.”
But the inventor’s bug had taken hold of Hildebrand once more. In 1990, he formed his final company, Antares Audio Technology, with the goal of innovating the music industry’s next big piece of software. And that’s exactly what happened.
by Zachary Crockett , Priceomics | Read more:
Images: uncredited
Freedom from Food
There are plenty of superpowers that would make a nice addition to my current lifestyle. I would be delighted to wake up one morning with the ability to fly, to become invisible, or even to turn matter into gold, provided my Midas touch came with a reliable on-off switch. But the superpower that I really want – the one I actually daydream about, wasting time that I don’t have – is the ability to create an extra day or two for myself each week. As the clock strikes midnight between Monday and Tuesday, a private portal would open up: an extra day, just for me. While everyone else sleeps, I write, read, send emails, and maybe even clean the oven, before going to bed and waking up on Tuesday, rested and refreshed just like everyone else, but with everything done.
The odds are reasonable that you might share this fantasy, in the abstract if not in the details. Each year, Gallup asks people in the US whether they feel pressed for time, and, each year for the past two decades, half of the population says that they generally do not have enough time to do what they want. The results – stress, sleep deprivation, and even obesity – are equally well-documented. What if all of those people could have an extra 90 minutes every day, to use as we see fit? Rob Rhinehart, a 25-year-old engineer and entrepreneur based in Studio City, California, believes that his new product, Soylent, can offer exactly that.
‘According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, people spend about 90 minutes a day on food,’ Rhinehart explained. That figure is an average that includes grocery shopping, food preparation, consumption, and doing the dishes. By opting out of food, and replacing it with Soylent – named after the soy lentil burgers in the sci-fi novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966) by Harry Harrison, rather than its much better-known film adaptation Soylent Green (1973) which came up with the cannibalistic plotline – Rhinehart told me that he’s saved ‘easily an hour a day, plus’.
Rhinehart came up with the idea for a nutritionally complete liquid food substitute in December 2012, spurred by dissatisfaction at his expensive, time-consuming and nutritionally dubious diet of fast food, frozen quesadillas, and pasta. In February 2013, he wrote a blog post entitled ‘How I Stopped Eating Food’, in which he reported feeling like the ‘six-million-dollar man’ after just 30 days of replacing food with a ‘thick, odourless, beige liquid’ made up of ‘every substance the body needs to survive, plus a few extras shown to be beneficial’.
The response was overwhelming. Readers of Hacker News, a website popular with programmers and tech entrepreneurs, were the first to latch on to Rhinehart’s Soylent post, encouraging him to share the recipe online. When he did, it quickly spawned an animated Reddit thread in which DIY Soylent adopters reviewed recipes, discussed magnesium sourcing, and compared bowel movements. Within three months, Rhinehart decided that demand was sufficient for him to quit his tech start-up and form his own company in order to supply Soylent to the masses. By the time Soylent 1.0 started shipping in May 2014, the company had already accumulated a backlog of more than 20,000 pre-orders, adding up to more than $2 million dollars in sales and – at a conservative estimate – a collective saving of 2,875 years.
What, one wonders, are people doing with all this extra time? Will we see a new Renaissance: a Soylent-fuelled flowering of novels, art or, at the very least, apps? It is perhaps too early to tell, but early signs are mixed. (...)
It is, of course, perfectly reasonable to ask whether the answer to the problems that Soylent and its convenience-food precursors solve could actually be tackled more effectively by addressing the core problem, not the symptom. If women bear an unequal share of food-related labour, perhaps tackling gender inequality might result in similar benefits with fewer trade-offs than the TV dinner. Similarly, if confusing packaging claims, clickbait scare stories, and manipulative grocery store layouts contribute to an overwhelming sense that the act of feeding yourself and your family involves a stressful, complex, and far too fatiguing set of choices, then perhaps we need to rethink the contemporary food environment rather than opt out altogether.
With that question in mind, let’s examine the trade-offs associated with replacing food with Soylent more closely.
Among its detractors’ most common complaints is the argument that food – and, specifically, the rituals around its preparation and consumption – is essential to culture and community. The family meal, in particular, is currently talked up as a cure to almost everything that ails us. Social scientists and politicians largely agree that sitting down to eat together every evening reduces child delinquency, substance abuse and the risk of obesity, improves health and mental well-being, and even holds the key to academic achievement.
Soylent’s Rhinehart, on the other hand, no longer even owns a kitchen table and chairs, and tells me he’s looking forward to creating a customised version of Soylent for kids for when he has offspring of his own. When I asked whether he found himself holding on to any last vestiges of mealtime rituals, he laughed.
‘The concept of the meal is kind of gone,’ he replied. ‘As soon as I feel a little hunger, I just down some Soylent.’ In fact, he added, with a note of pride, ‘people are surprised at how fast I drink it. I can do 20 ounces in just a few seconds at this point. So I’ve even kind of optimised down the seconds I devote to drinking it.’
The end of the meal is not a source of concern for Rhinehart at all – and perhaps rightly so. After all, as he pointed out to me, regular meals ‘were an invention in the first place’. As the historian Abigail Carroll wrote in her book Three Squares (2013), the US family dinner, despite its sacred role in contemporary culture, is only 150 years old. She notes that, like Rhinehart, the majority of 17th-century Virginia households had no table. Bowls and utensils were also in short supply before the 19th century, meaning that family members often ate in sequence rather than together. Meanwhile, Carroll ascribes the rise of the family dinner to the Industrial Revolution. Once the urban 9-to-5 replaced the agricultural schedule, she explains, ‘evening became the only significant portion of the workday when siblings and parents could reconnect, dinner became special, and it still is’.
by Nicola Twilley, Aeon | Read more:
Image:Tom Bieber/Getty
The odds are reasonable that you might share this fantasy, in the abstract if not in the details. Each year, Gallup asks people in the US whether they feel pressed for time, and, each year for the past two decades, half of the population says that they generally do not have enough time to do what they want. The results – stress, sleep deprivation, and even obesity – are equally well-documented. What if all of those people could have an extra 90 minutes every day, to use as we see fit? Rob Rhinehart, a 25-year-old engineer and entrepreneur based in Studio City, California, believes that his new product, Soylent, can offer exactly that.
‘According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, people spend about 90 minutes a day on food,’ Rhinehart explained. That figure is an average that includes grocery shopping, food preparation, consumption, and doing the dishes. By opting out of food, and replacing it with Soylent – named after the soy lentil burgers in the sci-fi novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966) by Harry Harrison, rather than its much better-known film adaptation Soylent Green (1973) which came up with the cannibalistic plotline – Rhinehart told me that he’s saved ‘easily an hour a day, plus’.Rhinehart came up with the idea for a nutritionally complete liquid food substitute in December 2012, spurred by dissatisfaction at his expensive, time-consuming and nutritionally dubious diet of fast food, frozen quesadillas, and pasta. In February 2013, he wrote a blog post entitled ‘How I Stopped Eating Food’, in which he reported feeling like the ‘six-million-dollar man’ after just 30 days of replacing food with a ‘thick, odourless, beige liquid’ made up of ‘every substance the body needs to survive, plus a few extras shown to be beneficial’.
The response was overwhelming. Readers of Hacker News, a website popular with programmers and tech entrepreneurs, were the first to latch on to Rhinehart’s Soylent post, encouraging him to share the recipe online. When he did, it quickly spawned an animated Reddit thread in which DIY Soylent adopters reviewed recipes, discussed magnesium sourcing, and compared bowel movements. Within three months, Rhinehart decided that demand was sufficient for him to quit his tech start-up and form his own company in order to supply Soylent to the masses. By the time Soylent 1.0 started shipping in May 2014, the company had already accumulated a backlog of more than 20,000 pre-orders, adding up to more than $2 million dollars in sales and – at a conservative estimate – a collective saving of 2,875 years.
What, one wonders, are people doing with all this extra time? Will we see a new Renaissance: a Soylent-fuelled flowering of novels, art or, at the very least, apps? It is perhaps too early to tell, but early signs are mixed. (...)
It is, of course, perfectly reasonable to ask whether the answer to the problems that Soylent and its convenience-food precursors solve could actually be tackled more effectively by addressing the core problem, not the symptom. If women bear an unequal share of food-related labour, perhaps tackling gender inequality might result in similar benefits with fewer trade-offs than the TV dinner. Similarly, if confusing packaging claims, clickbait scare stories, and manipulative grocery store layouts contribute to an overwhelming sense that the act of feeding yourself and your family involves a stressful, complex, and far too fatiguing set of choices, then perhaps we need to rethink the contemporary food environment rather than opt out altogether.
With that question in mind, let’s examine the trade-offs associated with replacing food with Soylent more closely.
Among its detractors’ most common complaints is the argument that food – and, specifically, the rituals around its preparation and consumption – is essential to culture and community. The family meal, in particular, is currently talked up as a cure to almost everything that ails us. Social scientists and politicians largely agree that sitting down to eat together every evening reduces child delinquency, substance abuse and the risk of obesity, improves health and mental well-being, and even holds the key to academic achievement.
Soylent’s Rhinehart, on the other hand, no longer even owns a kitchen table and chairs, and tells me he’s looking forward to creating a customised version of Soylent for kids for when he has offspring of his own. When I asked whether he found himself holding on to any last vestiges of mealtime rituals, he laughed.
‘The concept of the meal is kind of gone,’ he replied. ‘As soon as I feel a little hunger, I just down some Soylent.’ In fact, he added, with a note of pride, ‘people are surprised at how fast I drink it. I can do 20 ounces in just a few seconds at this point. So I’ve even kind of optimised down the seconds I devote to drinking it.’
The end of the meal is not a source of concern for Rhinehart at all – and perhaps rightly so. After all, as he pointed out to me, regular meals ‘were an invention in the first place’. As the historian Abigail Carroll wrote in her book Three Squares (2013), the US family dinner, despite its sacred role in contemporary culture, is only 150 years old. She notes that, like Rhinehart, the majority of 17th-century Virginia households had no table. Bowls and utensils were also in short supply before the 19th century, meaning that family members often ate in sequence rather than together. Meanwhile, Carroll ascribes the rise of the family dinner to the Industrial Revolution. Once the urban 9-to-5 replaced the agricultural schedule, she explains, ‘evening became the only significant portion of the workday when siblings and parents could reconnect, dinner became special, and it still is’.
by Nicola Twilley, Aeon | Read more:
Image:Tom Bieber/Getty
The Stanford Letters
Millions of people have read the twelve-page letter written from a 23-year-old “Emily Doe” to her 20-year-old victimizer, Brock Turner, and to the judge in her case, Aaron Persky. On June 2, Persky sentenced Turner to six months — of a maximum fourteen years — in Santa Clara County’s jail. Eight male and four female jurors had found the ex–Stanford freshman guilty on three charges of sexual assault, including assault with intent to commit rape, after hearing competing and incomplete explanations for the night of January 17, 2015, when Doe went with her sister to a fraternity party, got drunk, disappeared, and was found half-naked and unconscious behind a Dumpster while Turner was caught running from the scene, drunk but clothed. Doe found him guilty on a fourth charge, that of not understanding the first three: “You have been convicted of violating me with malicious intent, and all you can admit to is consuming alcohol,” she wrote in her letter, delivered at the sentencing, in open court. “You should have never done this to me. Secondly, you should have never made me fight so long to tell you [that] you should have never done this to me.” (...)
Doe tells a story around a crime that is also, to start, a crime story so well done that CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield called it “riveting” before taking twenty-two minutes of her Legal View broadcast to read it live. The details are chosen to excruciate, not to reveal. At the hospital, Doe and two nurses “worked to comb the pine needles out of my hair, six hands to fill one paper bag,” and I feel scratchings on the back of my own neck. She describes a “beige cardigan” that an officer had seen as a “grey sweatshirt,” and even if you think that police reports are infallible and she is lying, you must know that the “beige cardigan” could only be hers while a “grey sweatshirt” could have been sluttily borrowed from a jock. She says “underwear,” not “panties,” and her dress is not “skin tight” but “hiked up.” It’s hard to show rape from the point of view of the victim without falling on a pornographic angle, but she is describing the ex post facto photographs, not the act, and her word choices obscure her fleshly and identifying characteristics, removing any enticements to gawk. For all her letter’s virality, no one could describe the trial or her case as sensational.
Yet the letter was a sensation. Rape stories are told all the time, but few are told to the rapist. (...)
Doe says to Turner, “You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.” If her triumph in until today is more like a wake-up call than an old-fashioned martyr act, it is partly because she sounds so present, so alive, and partly because she does not have to be her own witness. In a singular twist, Doe had two: Carl-Fredrik Arndt and Peter Jonsson, a pair of Swedish graduate students who are the ideal messengers of objectivity. Sober, intelligent, male, white but not American, Arndt and Jonsson were cycling by when they saw Turner on top of Doe and rushed to stop him. Neither trial nor letter is likely to have happened without “the Swedes,” who become another choice detail: Doe for a year has slept with two bicycles she drew herself taped above her bed, “to remind myself there are heroes in this story.” Witness her narrative control, her narrative’s impact, as Vice President Joe Biden writes in his “Open Letter to a Courageous Young Woman,” published on BuzzFeed a week after Doe’s, that “I do not know your name — but thanks to you, I know that heroes ride bicycles.”
Heroes, for now, do not swim. In his own eleven-page letter to the judge, delivered in advance of the sentencing, Turner says he wishes he “never was good at swimming or had the opportunity to attend Stanford” so “the newspapers wouldn’t want to write” — and people wouldn’t care — that he’s a rapist. Most people who know him as a villain were introduced to him not by the news around the trial, but by the international news event of Emily Doe’s letter, months later. It is not his talent that made this sentencing a watershed. It is hers.
American trials are based on the universal truism that the best or most believable version of the story wins. For Doe’s story to “lose” to Turner’s in the eyes of the judge, who all but let him off in his sentencing, is the injustice no one is quite talking about. “I thought things were going fine with [Emily Doe],” Turner writes to Persky, despite having had a year to rethink that thought, “and that I just existed in a reality where nothing can go wrong or nobody could think of what I was doing as wrong.” Doe has spent the same year learning to articulate the lack of acquiescence — or conversely, the total and undesiring acquiescence — that is rape today. I have written before that I’m not interested in what motivates a rapist; I’m interested in what permits him. But I’m annoyed that so many young rapists lack interest in their own motivations, or are led to believe that an absence of real psychic motive will make the crime merely an act, when really it’s the uninterested mereness of the act that makes it feel, to some victims, so criminal. (...)
Here is Turner’s account of going to a party to drink with his crew:
Turner’s reaction to his arrest the next morning is astonishment:
Doe tells a story around a crime that is also, to start, a crime story so well done that CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield called it “riveting” before taking twenty-two minutes of her Legal View broadcast to read it live. The details are chosen to excruciate, not to reveal. At the hospital, Doe and two nurses “worked to comb the pine needles out of my hair, six hands to fill one paper bag,” and I feel scratchings on the back of my own neck. She describes a “beige cardigan” that an officer had seen as a “grey sweatshirt,” and even if you think that police reports are infallible and she is lying, you must know that the “beige cardigan” could only be hers while a “grey sweatshirt” could have been sluttily borrowed from a jock. She says “underwear,” not “panties,” and her dress is not “skin tight” but “hiked up.” It’s hard to show rape from the point of view of the victim without falling on a pornographic angle, but she is describing the ex post facto photographs, not the act, and her word choices obscure her fleshly and identifying characteristics, removing any enticements to gawk. For all her letter’s virality, no one could describe the trial or her case as sensational.Yet the letter was a sensation. Rape stories are told all the time, but few are told to the rapist. (...)
Doe says to Turner, “You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.” If her triumph in until today is more like a wake-up call than an old-fashioned martyr act, it is partly because she sounds so present, so alive, and partly because she does not have to be her own witness. In a singular twist, Doe had two: Carl-Fredrik Arndt and Peter Jonsson, a pair of Swedish graduate students who are the ideal messengers of objectivity. Sober, intelligent, male, white but not American, Arndt and Jonsson were cycling by when they saw Turner on top of Doe and rushed to stop him. Neither trial nor letter is likely to have happened without “the Swedes,” who become another choice detail: Doe for a year has slept with two bicycles she drew herself taped above her bed, “to remind myself there are heroes in this story.” Witness her narrative control, her narrative’s impact, as Vice President Joe Biden writes in his “Open Letter to a Courageous Young Woman,” published on BuzzFeed a week after Doe’s, that “I do not know your name — but thanks to you, I know that heroes ride bicycles.”
Heroes, for now, do not swim. In his own eleven-page letter to the judge, delivered in advance of the sentencing, Turner says he wishes he “never was good at swimming or had the opportunity to attend Stanford” so “the newspapers wouldn’t want to write” — and people wouldn’t care — that he’s a rapist. Most people who know him as a villain were introduced to him not by the news around the trial, but by the international news event of Emily Doe’s letter, months later. It is not his talent that made this sentencing a watershed. It is hers.
American trials are based on the universal truism that the best or most believable version of the story wins. For Doe’s story to “lose” to Turner’s in the eyes of the judge, who all but let him off in his sentencing, is the injustice no one is quite talking about. “I thought things were going fine with [Emily Doe],” Turner writes to Persky, despite having had a year to rethink that thought, “and that I just existed in a reality where nothing can go wrong or nobody could think of what I was doing as wrong.” Doe has spent the same year learning to articulate the lack of acquiescence — or conversely, the total and undesiring acquiescence — that is rape today. I have written before that I’m not interested in what motivates a rapist; I’m interested in what permits him. But I’m annoyed that so many young rapists lack interest in their own motivations, or are led to believe that an absence of real psychic motive will make the crime merely an act, when really it’s the uninterested mereness of the act that makes it feel, to some victims, so criminal. (...)
Here is Turner’s account of going to a party to drink with his crew:
Once I was there, I began consuming alcohol in the form of beer while socializing with the people at the party. . . . I felt comfortable and safe knowing that I was just one of many members on the swim team that were there. It felt as though my behavior with consuming alcohol was completely ordinary and what was accepted within my newfound family.Now look at Doe’s account of doing essentially the same thing:
On the way there, I joked that undergrad guys would have braces. . . . I called myself “big mama,” because I knew I’d be the oldest one there. I made silly faces, let my guard down, and drank liquor too fast not factoring in that my tolerance had significantly lowered since college.She has a nickname, a silly face. She acts as herself. He is ordinary on purpose, “just one of many members” in a faceless group. It’s his face we see — in the school photo, and later in the mug shot — and not hers, but it’s the purpose of speech to say what bodies can’t. Which of these two people sounds like she has an inner life, by virtue of which she requires some outer protection?
Turner’s reaction to his arrest the next morning is astonishment:
Someone came in after they had taken my clothes and swabbed my body for some reason. He told me that I was being charged with rape and I immediately responded with complete and utter shock. He then said to me that he agreed that it was a hard thing to wake up to and I just thought are you kidding me? . . .
I thought that all I had to communicate was the truth — that in no way was I trying to rape anyone, in no way was I trying to harm anyone, and in no way was I trying to take advantage of anyone.The repetition is certainly trying. What difference does it make whether or not he tried to rape her if he did rape her, and if he didn’t rape her, why doesn’t he say, “I didn’t rape anyone?” Who could “anyone” be, besides a code name for the secret that, to him, she could have been anyone at all? Charged with five counts — the two heaviest of which, rape of an intoxicated person and rape of an unconscious person, were dropped — and sent to jail before being freed on $150,000 bail, Turner remains “in complete shock and disbelief.” Meanwhile, in the hospital, Doe recalls, a “deputy explained I had been assaulted. I . . . remained calm, assured he was speaking to the wrong person.” Again, she, too, can’t believe it. Then she is “asked to sign papers that [say] Rape Victim and I thought something has really happened.” She has been asleep the whole time he’s been awake, and yet it’s she who first adjusts to reality; it’s she whose memory is so strong that the loss of it amounts to full horror. Where Turner says “someone,” she says “deputy.” Where he says “for some reason,” she says how and where she was swabbed. And so when she lapses into the vagueness of something has really happened we can trust that she is not being vague in the sense of evasive, that whatever the something is it must be unspeakable, not just inconvenient for her.
by Sarah Nicole Prickett, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Jo Ann Callis, Untitled. 1976
Saturday, October 15, 2016
Dads' Rights: Attorneys for Divorcing Dads
Andrew Jones was shocked when his wife started a child custody battle in 2014. The couple had separated five months earlier after, he says, he caught her in a series of extramarital affairs. They had agreed on an informal settlement: he moved from their 2,700 sq ft home into a mobile home, paid her $500 a month in child support and could spend equal time with their five- and three-year-old kids. When he received the letter with a court date, Jones was not hopeful.
“I felt like I wasn’t going to have a life,” says the 46-year-old who works as an HVAC technician. “I heard so many horror stories of divorce and how pretty much women get all your paycheques and you have no way to live.”
Jones (his last name was changed to protect the identity of his children) represented himself in court while his wife hired an attorney who he says is “well-known” in their North Carolina county for “getting women anything and everything they want in court”. The attorney, he says “kind of gives you the feeling that she hates men. That all men are dogs and men don’t want to be in their child’s lives.”
Jones nervously told the judge all he wanted was equal time with his kids. The following month, he received a letter from the court saying he owed $1,300 a month in child support – a payment that would be big stretch on his wage of $26 an hour. He had already cleared out his savings to pay off his and his wife’s combined debts, so to keep up with payments Jones sold his truck, $4,000 worth of tools, and stopped eating out or having a social life. But the money wasn’t even the worst part: he was only allowed to see his kids eight days out of the month.
“When you have kids it changes your life,” he says. “You can’t go without them and [when you do] it wears you down emotionally and physically.”
In family law, tales of fathers who pay exorbitant child support and rarely get to see their kids are commonplace. Recently, firms that specialize in men’s divorce have popped up all over America to capitalize on so-called gender-based discrimination in courts. While many family law firms have seen a drop in divorce filings, these niche attorneys claim business is thriving.
Yet their very existence is controversial. Critics claim any good lawyer is equipped to handle a man’s divorce and that instead of pushing for greater equality under the law, these firms perpetuate sexist stereotypes about women.
While family laws are gender neutral, there’s no doubt that judges and lawyers interpret them based on certain beliefs. In many cases, judges still consider a woman the more natural caretaker, a stubborn holdover from the decades in which mothers only worked at home. (...)
Joseph Cordell, founder of the largest men’s divorce-focused firm in America, says the stereotypes of mothers as nurturers and men as providers leads to systemic discrimination against fathers.
“As a society we’ve made progress regarding gender in a number of areas,” he says. “But the dark corner of the room when it comes to civil rights, I can tell you, is dads’ rights in family courts.”
by Angelina Chapin, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Echo/Getty Images/Cultura RF
“I felt like I wasn’t going to have a life,” says the 46-year-old who works as an HVAC technician. “I heard so many horror stories of divorce and how pretty much women get all your paycheques and you have no way to live.”Jones (his last name was changed to protect the identity of his children) represented himself in court while his wife hired an attorney who he says is “well-known” in their North Carolina county for “getting women anything and everything they want in court”. The attorney, he says “kind of gives you the feeling that she hates men. That all men are dogs and men don’t want to be in their child’s lives.”
Jones nervously told the judge all he wanted was equal time with his kids. The following month, he received a letter from the court saying he owed $1,300 a month in child support – a payment that would be big stretch on his wage of $26 an hour. He had already cleared out his savings to pay off his and his wife’s combined debts, so to keep up with payments Jones sold his truck, $4,000 worth of tools, and stopped eating out or having a social life. But the money wasn’t even the worst part: he was only allowed to see his kids eight days out of the month.
“When you have kids it changes your life,” he says. “You can’t go without them and [when you do] it wears you down emotionally and physically.”
In family law, tales of fathers who pay exorbitant child support and rarely get to see their kids are commonplace. Recently, firms that specialize in men’s divorce have popped up all over America to capitalize on so-called gender-based discrimination in courts. While many family law firms have seen a drop in divorce filings, these niche attorneys claim business is thriving.
Yet their very existence is controversial. Critics claim any good lawyer is equipped to handle a man’s divorce and that instead of pushing for greater equality under the law, these firms perpetuate sexist stereotypes about women.
While family laws are gender neutral, there’s no doubt that judges and lawyers interpret them based on certain beliefs. In many cases, judges still consider a woman the more natural caretaker, a stubborn holdover from the decades in which mothers only worked at home. (...)
Joseph Cordell, founder of the largest men’s divorce-focused firm in America, says the stereotypes of mothers as nurturers and men as providers leads to systemic discrimination against fathers.
“As a society we’ve made progress regarding gender in a number of areas,” he says. “But the dark corner of the room when it comes to civil rights, I can tell you, is dads’ rights in family courts.”
by Angelina Chapin, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Echo/Getty Images/Cultura RF
Victor Juhasz
[ed. I'm so ready for this election to be over (like, six months ago) and hesitant to devote one more inch of blog space to Trump, but this is such a great illustration that I couldn't resist reprinting it. It accompanies an article (link below) by the always great Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone.]
The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump
Friday, October 14, 2016
Forest Bathing Will Improve Your Health
The tonic of the wilderness was Henry David Thoreau’s classic prescription for civilization and its discontents, offered in the 1854 essay Walden: Or, Life in the Woods. Now there’s scientific evidence supporting eco-therapy. The Japanese practice of forest bathing is proven to lower heart rate and blood pressure, reduce stress hormone production, boost the immune system, and improve overall feelings of wellbeing.
Forest bathing—basically just being in the presence of trees—became part of a national public health program in Japan in 1982 when the forestry ministry coined the phrase shinrin-yoku and promoted topiary as therapy. Nature appreciation—picnicking en masse under the cherry blossoms, for example—is a national pastime in Japan, so forest bathing quickly took. The environment’s wisdom has long been evident to the culture: Japan’s Zen masters asked: If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears, does it make a sound?
To discover the answer, masters do nothing, and gain illumination. Forest bathing works similarly: Just be with trees. No hiking, no counting steps on a Fitbit. You can sit or meander, but the point is to relax rather than accomplish anything.
“Don’t effort,” says Gregg Berman, a registered nurse, wilderness expert, and certified forest bathing guide in California. He’s leading a small group on the Big Trees Trail in Oakland one cool October afternoon, barefoot among the redwoods. Berman tells the group—wearing shoes—that the human nervous system is both of nature and attuned to it. Planes roar overhead as the forest bathers wander slowly, quietly, under the green cathedral of trees.
From 2004 to 2012, Japanese officials spent about $4 million dollars studying the physiological and psychological effects of forest bathing, designating 48 therapy trails based on the results. Qing Li, a professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, measured the activity of human natural killer (NK) cells in the immune system before after exposure to the woods. These cells provide rapid responses to viral-infected cells and respond to tumor formation, and are associated with immune system health and cancer prevention. In a 2009 study Li’s subjects showed significant increases in NK cell activity in the week after a forest visit, and positive effects lasted a month following each weekend in the woods.
This is due to various essential oils, generally called phytoncide, found in wood, plants, and some fruit and vegetables, which trees emit to protect themselves from germs and insects. Forest air doesn’t just feel fresher and better—inhaling phytoncide seems to actually improve immune system function.
by Ephrat Livni, Quartz | Read more:
Image: via:
Forest bathing—basically just being in the presence of trees—became part of a national public health program in Japan in 1982 when the forestry ministry coined the phrase shinrin-yoku and promoted topiary as therapy. Nature appreciation—picnicking en masse under the cherry blossoms, for example—is a national pastime in Japan, so forest bathing quickly took. The environment’s wisdom has long been evident to the culture: Japan’s Zen masters asked: If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears, does it make a sound?To discover the answer, masters do nothing, and gain illumination. Forest bathing works similarly: Just be with trees. No hiking, no counting steps on a Fitbit. You can sit or meander, but the point is to relax rather than accomplish anything.
“Don’t effort,” says Gregg Berman, a registered nurse, wilderness expert, and certified forest bathing guide in California. He’s leading a small group on the Big Trees Trail in Oakland one cool October afternoon, barefoot among the redwoods. Berman tells the group—wearing shoes—that the human nervous system is both of nature and attuned to it. Planes roar overhead as the forest bathers wander slowly, quietly, under the green cathedral of trees.
From 2004 to 2012, Japanese officials spent about $4 million dollars studying the physiological and psychological effects of forest bathing, designating 48 therapy trails based on the results. Qing Li, a professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, measured the activity of human natural killer (NK) cells in the immune system before after exposure to the woods. These cells provide rapid responses to viral-infected cells and respond to tumor formation, and are associated with immune system health and cancer prevention. In a 2009 study Li’s subjects showed significant increases in NK cell activity in the week after a forest visit, and positive effects lasted a month following each weekend in the woods.
This is due to various essential oils, generally called phytoncide, found in wood, plants, and some fruit and vegetables, which trees emit to protect themselves from germs and insects. Forest air doesn’t just feel fresher and better—inhaling phytoncide seems to actually improve immune system function.
by Ephrat Livni, Quartz | Read more:
Image: via:
Fast Fashion is Creating an Environmental Disaster
No one wants your cheap, old clothes—not even the neediest people on Earth.
Visitors who stepped into fashion retailer H&M’s showroom in New York City on April 4, 2016, were confronted by a pile of cast-off clothing reaching to the ceiling. A T.S. Eliot quote stenciled on the wall (“In my end is my beginning”) gave the showroom the air of an art gallery or museum. In the next room, reporters and fashion bloggers sipped wine while studying the half-dozen mannequins wearing bespoke creations pieced together from old jeans, patches of jackets and cut-up blouses.
This cocktail party was to celebrate the launch of H&M’s most recent Conscious Collection. The actress Olivia Wilde, spokeswoman and model for H&M’s forays into sustainable fashion, was there wearing a new dress from the line. But the fast-fashion giant, which has almost 4,000 stores worldwide and earned over $25 billion in sales in 2015, wanted participants to also take notice of its latest initiative: getting customers to recycle their clothes. Or, rather, convincing them to bring in their old clothes (from any brand) and put them in bins in H&M’s stores worldwide. “H&M will recycle them and create new textile fibre, and in return you get vouchers to use at H&M. Everybody wins!” H&M said on its blog.
It’s a nice sentiment, but it’s a gross oversimplification. Only 0.1 percent of all clothing collected by charities and take-back programs is recycled into new textile fiber, according to H&M’s development sustainability manager, Henrik Lampa, who was at the cocktail party answering questions from the press. And despite the impressive amount of marketing dollars the company pumped into World Recycle Week to promote the idea of recycling clothes—including the funding of a music video by M.I.A.—what H&M is doing is nothing special. Its salvaged clothing goes through almost the exact same process as garments donated to, say, Goodwill, or really anywhere else.
Picture yourself with a trash bag of old clothes you’ve just cleaned out of your closet. You think you could get some money out of them, so you take them to a consignment or thrift store, or sell them via one of the new online equivalents, like ThredUp. But they’ll probably reject most of your old clothes, even the ones you paid dearly for, because of small flaws or no longer being in season. With fast fashion speeding up trends and shortening seasons, your clothing is quite likely dated if it’s more than a year old. Many secondhand stores will reject items from fast-fashion chains like Forever 21, H&M, Zara and Topshop. The inexpensive clothing is poor quality, with low resale value, and there’s just too much of it.
If you’re an American, your next step is likely to throw those old clothes in the trash. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 84 percent of unwanted clothes in the United States in 2012 went into either a landfill or an incinerator.
When natural fibers, like cotton, linen and silk, or semi-synthetic fibers created from plant-based cellulose, like rayon, Tencel and modal, are buried in a landfill, in one sense they act like food waste, producing the potent greenhouse gas methane as they degrade. But unlike banana peels, you can’t compost old clothes, even if they're made of natural materials. “Natural fibers go through a lot of unnatural processes on their way to becoming clothing,” says Jason Kibbey, CEO of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. “They’ve been bleached, dyed, printed on, scoured in chemical baths.” Those chemicals can leach from the textiles and—in improperly sealed landfills—into groundwater. Burning the items in incinerators can release those toxins into the air.
Meanwhile, synthetic fibers, like polyester, nylon and acrylic, have the same environmental drawbacks, and because they are essentially a type of plastic made from petroleum, they will take hundreds of years, if not a thousand, to biodegrade.
Despite these ugly statistics, Americans are blithely trashing more clothes than ever. In less than 20 years, the volume of clothing Americans toss each year has doubled from 7 million to 14 million tons, or an astounding 80 pounds per person. The EPA estimates that diverting all of those often-toxic trashed textiles into a recycling program would be the environmental equivalent of taking 7.3 million cars and their carbon dioxide emissions off the road.
Trashing the clothes is also a huge waste of money. Nationwide, a municipality pays $45 per ton of waste sent to a landfill. It costs New York City $20.6 million annually to ship textiles to landfills and incinerators—a major reason it has become especially interested in diverting unwanted clothing out of the waste stream. The Department of Sanitation’s Re-FashioNYC program, for example, provides large collection bins to buildings with 10 or more units. Housing Works (a New York–based nonprofit that operates used-clothing stores to fund AIDS and homelessness programs) receives the goods, paying Re-FashioNYC for each ton collected, which in turn puts the money toward more bins. Since it launched in 2011, the program has diverted 6.4 million pounds of textiles from landfills, and Housing Works has opened up several new secondhand clothing sales locations.
But that’s only 0.3 percent of the 200,000 tons of textiles going to the dump every year from the city. Just 690 out of the estimated 35,000 or so qualified buildings in the city participate.
Smaller municipalities have tried curbside collection programs, but most go underpublicized and unused. The best bet in most places is to take your old clothing to a charity. Haul your bag to the back door of Goodwill, the Salvation Army or a smaller local shop, get a tax receipt and congratulate yourself on your largess. The clothes are out of your life and off your mind. But their long, international journey may be just beginning.
Made to Not Last
According to the Council for Textile Recycling, charities overall sell only 20 percent of the clothing donated to them at their retail outlets. All the big charities I contacted asserted that they sell more than that—30 percent at Goodwill, 45 to 75 percent at the Salvation Army and 40 percent at Housing Works, to give a few examples. This disparity is probably because, unlike small charity shops, these larger organizations have well-developed systems for processing clothing. If items don’t sell in the main retail store, they can send them to their outlets, where customers can walk out with a bag full of clothing for just a few dollars. But even at that laughably cheap price, they can’t sell everything.
“When it doesn’t sell in the store, or online, or outlets, we have to do something with it,” says Michael Meyer, vice president of donated goods retail and marketing for Goodwill Industries International. So Goodwill—and others—“bale up” the remaining unwanted clothing into shrink-wrapped cubes taller than a person and sell them to textile recyclers.
This outrages people who believe the role of thrift shop charities is to transfer clothes to the needy. “What Really Happens to Your Clothing Donations?” read a Fashionista headline earlier this year. The story hinted, "Let’s just say they’re not all going towards a good cause.”
“People like to feel like they are doing something good, and the problem they run into in a country such as the U.S. is that we don’t have people who need [clothes] on the scale at which we are producing,“ says Pietra Rivoli, a professor of economics at Georgetown University. The nonprofit N Street Village in Washington, D.C., which provides services to homeless and low-income women, says in its wish list that “due to overwhelming support,” it can’t accept any clothing, with the exception of a few particularly useful and hard-to-come-by items like bras and rain ponchos.
Fast fashion is forcing charities to process larger amounts of garments in less time to get the same amount of revenue—like an even more down-market fast-fashion retailer. “We need to go through more and more donations to find those great pieces, which can make it more costly to find those pieces and get them to customers,” says David Raper, senior vice president of business enterprises at Housing Works. Goodwill’s strategy is much the same, says Meyer: “If I can get more fresh product more quickly on the floor, I can extract more value.”
This strategy—advertising new product on a weekly basis—is remarkably similar to that of Spanish fast-fashion retailer Zara, which upended the entire fashion game by restocking new designs twice a week instead of once or twice a season. And so clothing moves through the system faster and faster, seeking somebody, anybody, who will pay a few cents for it.
Visitors who stepped into fashion retailer H&M’s showroom in New York City on April 4, 2016, were confronted by a pile of cast-off clothing reaching to the ceiling. A T.S. Eliot quote stenciled on the wall (“In my end is my beginning”) gave the showroom the air of an art gallery or museum. In the next room, reporters and fashion bloggers sipped wine while studying the half-dozen mannequins wearing bespoke creations pieced together from old jeans, patches of jackets and cut-up blouses.
This cocktail party was to celebrate the launch of H&M’s most recent Conscious Collection. The actress Olivia Wilde, spokeswoman and model for H&M’s forays into sustainable fashion, was there wearing a new dress from the line. But the fast-fashion giant, which has almost 4,000 stores worldwide and earned over $25 billion in sales in 2015, wanted participants to also take notice of its latest initiative: getting customers to recycle their clothes. Or, rather, convincing them to bring in their old clothes (from any brand) and put them in bins in H&M’s stores worldwide. “H&M will recycle them and create new textile fibre, and in return you get vouchers to use at H&M. Everybody wins!” H&M said on its blog.It’s a nice sentiment, but it’s a gross oversimplification. Only 0.1 percent of all clothing collected by charities and take-back programs is recycled into new textile fiber, according to H&M’s development sustainability manager, Henrik Lampa, who was at the cocktail party answering questions from the press. And despite the impressive amount of marketing dollars the company pumped into World Recycle Week to promote the idea of recycling clothes—including the funding of a music video by M.I.A.—what H&M is doing is nothing special. Its salvaged clothing goes through almost the exact same process as garments donated to, say, Goodwill, or really anywhere else.
Picture yourself with a trash bag of old clothes you’ve just cleaned out of your closet. You think you could get some money out of them, so you take them to a consignment or thrift store, or sell them via one of the new online equivalents, like ThredUp. But they’ll probably reject most of your old clothes, even the ones you paid dearly for, because of small flaws or no longer being in season. With fast fashion speeding up trends and shortening seasons, your clothing is quite likely dated if it’s more than a year old. Many secondhand stores will reject items from fast-fashion chains like Forever 21, H&M, Zara and Topshop. The inexpensive clothing is poor quality, with low resale value, and there’s just too much of it.
If you’re an American, your next step is likely to throw those old clothes in the trash. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 84 percent of unwanted clothes in the United States in 2012 went into either a landfill or an incinerator.
When natural fibers, like cotton, linen and silk, or semi-synthetic fibers created from plant-based cellulose, like rayon, Tencel and modal, are buried in a landfill, in one sense they act like food waste, producing the potent greenhouse gas methane as they degrade. But unlike banana peels, you can’t compost old clothes, even if they're made of natural materials. “Natural fibers go through a lot of unnatural processes on their way to becoming clothing,” says Jason Kibbey, CEO of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. “They’ve been bleached, dyed, printed on, scoured in chemical baths.” Those chemicals can leach from the textiles and—in improperly sealed landfills—into groundwater. Burning the items in incinerators can release those toxins into the air.
Meanwhile, synthetic fibers, like polyester, nylon and acrylic, have the same environmental drawbacks, and because they are essentially a type of plastic made from petroleum, they will take hundreds of years, if not a thousand, to biodegrade.
Despite these ugly statistics, Americans are blithely trashing more clothes than ever. In less than 20 years, the volume of clothing Americans toss each year has doubled from 7 million to 14 million tons, or an astounding 80 pounds per person. The EPA estimates that diverting all of those often-toxic trashed textiles into a recycling program would be the environmental equivalent of taking 7.3 million cars and their carbon dioxide emissions off the road.
Trashing the clothes is also a huge waste of money. Nationwide, a municipality pays $45 per ton of waste sent to a landfill. It costs New York City $20.6 million annually to ship textiles to landfills and incinerators—a major reason it has become especially interested in diverting unwanted clothing out of the waste stream. The Department of Sanitation’s Re-FashioNYC program, for example, provides large collection bins to buildings with 10 or more units. Housing Works (a New York–based nonprofit that operates used-clothing stores to fund AIDS and homelessness programs) receives the goods, paying Re-FashioNYC for each ton collected, which in turn puts the money toward more bins. Since it launched in 2011, the program has diverted 6.4 million pounds of textiles from landfills, and Housing Works has opened up several new secondhand clothing sales locations.
But that’s only 0.3 percent of the 200,000 tons of textiles going to the dump every year from the city. Just 690 out of the estimated 35,000 or so qualified buildings in the city participate.
Smaller municipalities have tried curbside collection programs, but most go underpublicized and unused. The best bet in most places is to take your old clothing to a charity. Haul your bag to the back door of Goodwill, the Salvation Army or a smaller local shop, get a tax receipt and congratulate yourself on your largess. The clothes are out of your life and off your mind. But their long, international journey may be just beginning.
Made to Not Last
According to the Council for Textile Recycling, charities overall sell only 20 percent of the clothing donated to them at their retail outlets. All the big charities I contacted asserted that they sell more than that—30 percent at Goodwill, 45 to 75 percent at the Salvation Army and 40 percent at Housing Works, to give a few examples. This disparity is probably because, unlike small charity shops, these larger organizations have well-developed systems for processing clothing. If items don’t sell in the main retail store, they can send them to their outlets, where customers can walk out with a bag full of clothing for just a few dollars. But even at that laughably cheap price, they can’t sell everything.
“When it doesn’t sell in the store, or online, or outlets, we have to do something with it,” says Michael Meyer, vice president of donated goods retail and marketing for Goodwill Industries International. So Goodwill—and others—“bale up” the remaining unwanted clothing into shrink-wrapped cubes taller than a person and sell them to textile recyclers.
This outrages people who believe the role of thrift shop charities is to transfer clothes to the needy. “What Really Happens to Your Clothing Donations?” read a Fashionista headline earlier this year. The story hinted, "Let’s just say they’re not all going towards a good cause.”
“People like to feel like they are doing something good, and the problem they run into in a country such as the U.S. is that we don’t have people who need [clothes] on the scale at which we are producing,“ says Pietra Rivoli, a professor of economics at Georgetown University. The nonprofit N Street Village in Washington, D.C., which provides services to homeless and low-income women, says in its wish list that “due to overwhelming support,” it can’t accept any clothing, with the exception of a few particularly useful and hard-to-come-by items like bras and rain ponchos.
Fast fashion is forcing charities to process larger amounts of garments in less time to get the same amount of revenue—like an even more down-market fast-fashion retailer. “We need to go through more and more donations to find those great pieces, which can make it more costly to find those pieces and get them to customers,” says David Raper, senior vice president of business enterprises at Housing Works. Goodwill’s strategy is much the same, says Meyer: “If I can get more fresh product more quickly on the floor, I can extract more value.”
This strategy—advertising new product on a weekly basis—is remarkably similar to that of Spanish fast-fashion retailer Zara, which upended the entire fashion game by restocking new designs twice a week instead of once or twice a season. And so clothing moves through the system faster and faster, seeking somebody, anybody, who will pay a few cents for it.
by Jared T. Miller, Newsweek | Read more:
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