Why Twitter Must Be Saved

It is election day in the United States, and the tech figure who had one of the biggest impacts on the current cycle is perhaps a non-obvious one: Jeff Bezos.

Back in 2013 Bezos bought the Washington Post, whose coverage of the campaign has been exemplary. The august newspaper’s reporting, particularly the work of David Fahrenthold, has uncovered stories that have had a far bigger impact than any number of tweets or blog posts or calls for days-off-work in Democrat-safe California ever could have had. What Bezos understood is a technology industry truism: impact is made at scale through the construction of repeatable processes. (...)

In this respect, what Bezos is doing feels almost obligatory. Technology — and I’m using the term very broadly here — has torn so much down; surely it’s the responsibility of technologists to build it back up.

And yet, I fear we as an industry are woefully unprepared for this responsibility. We glorify dropouts, endorse endless hours at work, and subscribe to a libertarian ideal that has little to do with reality. (...)

To say that this election cycle has only deepened those worries would be a dramatic understatement. This is not a partisan statement, just an objective statement that technology has made objective truth a casualty to the pursuit of happiness — or engagement, to use the technical term — and now life and liberty hang in the balance.

A few weeks ago, during the keynote of the Oculus Connect 3 developer conference, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg articulated a vision for Facebook that I found chilling:

At Facebook, this is something we’re really committed to. You know, I’m an engineer, and I think a key part of the engineering mindset is this hope and this belief that you can take any system that’s out there and make it much much better than it is today. Anything, whether it’s hardware, or software, a company, a developer ecosystem, you can take anything and make it much, much better. And as I look out today, I see a lot of people who share this engineering mindset. And we all know where we want to improve and where we want virtual reality to eventually get… 

The magic of VR software is this feeling of presence. The feeling that you’re really there with another person or in another place. And helping this community build this software and these experiences is the single thing I am most excited about when it comes to virtual reality. Because this is what we do at Facebook. We build software and we build platforms that billions of people use to connect with the people and things that they care about.

Leave aside the parts about virtual reality; what bothers me is the faint hints of utopianism inherent in Zuckerberg’s declaration: engineers can make things better by sheer force of will — and that Facebook is an example of just that. In fact, Facebook is the premier example just how efficient tech companies can be, and just how problematic that efficiency is when it is employed in the pursuit of “engagement” with no regard to the objective truth specifically or the impact on society broadly. (...)

And yet it is Twitter that has reaffirmed itself as the most powerful antidote to Facebook’s algorithm: misinformation certainly spreads via a tweet, but truth follows unusually quickly; thanks to the power of retweets and quoted tweets, both are far more inescapable than they are on Facebook. Twitter is a far preferable manifestation of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ famous concurrence in Whitney vs California (emphasis mine):

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject.

Brandeis’ concurrence was a defense of free speech, the right of which applies to government action; private companies are free to police their platforms at they wish. What, though, does free speech mean in an era of abundance? When information was scarce limiting speech was a real danger; when information is abundant shielding people from speech they might disagree with has its own perverse effects.

by Ben Thompson, Stratechery |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Let's wait a little longer. I'm sure another set will be by soon.]
via:

What Makes a Brand 'Cool' in 2016?

[ed. 'Authenticity', if this article is to be believed, seems premised mostly on optimizing media platforms and leveraging stars to "brand" products by association or aspiration. But isn't that what all advertising strives to do (and has done for, like... oh, forever)? In other words, it's all about hype, and authenticity as a concept doesn't mean a thing, except as a selling strategy. It's all contrived. Do you really believe a brand 'cares' about you? If so, seek help. These are businesses, not your friends (and be sure to read the last paragraph, the pretentiousness is... mind-boggling). See also: How Branded Content Got Weird.] 

As consumers, we have all kinds of ways to demonstrate our "coolness." For instance, we buy $60 French candles, only to later repurpose them as containers for makeup brushes. We wait in line at Sweetgreen for lunch. We read indie magazines on thick, glossy paper stock. We own a leather jacket, maybe even one with a shearling lining.

But how do the brands themselves do it? Not only are they tasked with producing the next big "It" thing, but their success also hinges on knowing us, the customers, better than we know ourselves. Within fashion — an industry that has spent the last several years in a state of flux — this poses an especially difficult challenge. (...)

Today's well-informed customers see right through any inauthenticity, so it's in a brand's best interest to show its true colors and wait for the appropriate shoppers to respond. "I think brands that are cool and buzzy start with a really specific point of view and a unique take on fashion, and that manifests itself into cool and buzzy," Claire Distenfeld, owner of New York City's Fivestory boutique, describes, explaining that this sincerity allows for distinctive brands to rise to the top. "They're not machines; they [don't have] a conglomerate of people telling them what to do," she says. "With Rosie [Assoulin] and Monse, what they're putting out there is really them. Maybe they're guided by a retailer or a mentor, but what comes out is their vision of what they want their brand to be — not what somebody else wants their brand to be, or hopes for their brand to be." (...)

Few companies understand "Instagrammy" better than beauty brand Glossier, which has reached, perhaps, the very pinnacle of "cool" since its launch in Oct. 2014. While every item in its now-expansive product line is sleek, natural-looking and effective, its secret weapon lies in its devoted community of "real girls," both online and off. With the return of brand loyalty comes a desire to seek membership in and support a tribe, and Glossier's clubhouse is open to all. Plus, it doesn't hurt that Glossier (much like fellow millennial-favorite brand, Reformation) casts a bevy of objectively "cool" models and downtown types in its shoots — think top models, musicians, downtown creatives and multihyphenate "It" girls — which certainly adds to its desirability factor. "Glossier is a prime example here, using multiple social channels to nurture their followers and foster engagement," Owen says, speaking on the importance of brand-to-customer connection. "By speaking the consumer's language, they've tapped into the millennial mindset to feel more like a friend than a corporate foe."

Which perfectly explains why Instagram is so vital to any aspiring "cool" brand. Glossier employs a number of hashtags — including "#glossierinthewild" — so to easily find images to post on its own official channels, and much of @glossier's Instagram visuals come directly from its shoppers. Hewitt explains how this type of user-generated content allows for the most followers and engagement, as brands encourage its customers to both take and post pictures in hopes of being reposted on the brand page — a feat that, in a feed as dreamy and highly followed as Glossier's, is considered something of an honor. "Social media branding is so important, because you have a chance to constantly be feeding your customers with new product, pretty images and selling your lifestyle," she says.

Coolness, as it always has, spans across an entire lifestyle, and in 2016, it's more aspirational to have a feed filled with experiences (say, an exotic vacation) than product alone. Owen testifies that the coolest brands recognize this, "and thus lead their label from a 360-approach to incorporate all aspects of a cultured life." For Hewitt, it's not just aspirational, but inspirational, too. "With social media, everyone is getting dressed to go somewhere or do something," she adds. "Following aspirational brands and influencers encourages our audiences to want to work harder to be part of that world."

by Maura Brannigan, Fashionista | Read more:
Image: Vetements

The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems

[ed. I remember the first time I logged onto a BBS back in the late 80's (with a 1200 baud modem) I was confused. Then transfixed. Then awestruck. I wasn't completely sure how a modem worked, but there I was, suddenly connected, and it felt like sneaking around in someone's house. It wasn't just me and a box anymore. There were message boards and files you could download (pirated games, and utilities, and pictures (nudes!)]. And the weirdest thing of all - the first time the sysop texted me to chat and a little window opened up - I could actually talk to someone else. On my computer! Scary and exhilarating. Ahh, good times. Then the internet came along and....]

I have a vivid, recurring dream. I climb the stairs in my parents’ house to see my old bedroom. In the back corner, I hear a faint humming.

It’s my old computer, still running my 1990s-era bulletin board system (BBS, for short), “The Cave.” I thought I had shut it down ages ago, but it’s been chugging away this whole time without me realizing it—people continued calling my BBS to play games, post messages, and upload files. To my astonishment, it never shut down after all.

BBSes once numbered in the tens of thousands in North America. These mostly text-based, hobbyist-run services played a huge part in the online landscape of the 1980s and ‘90s. Anyone with a modem and a home computer could dial-in, often for free, and interact with other callers in their area code.

Then the internet came along in the mid-1990s. Like a comet to the dinosaurs, it upended the natural order of things and wiped BBSes out. My system was one of the casualties, a victim of the desire to devote all my online time to the internet. The same scenario repeated itself on thousands of computers across the country until, one by one, the brightest lights of the BBS world blinked out of existence.

In 1991, my dad brought home a small black plastic box from work. He was an electronics engineer and regularly swapped state-of-the-art tech with his coworkers.

“This is a modem,” my dad said. “You can connect to other computers over the telephone with it.”

At the time, dad didn’t mean the internet, which we’d never heard of (it was mostly used by universities and government institutions at the time). No, he was referring to BBSes.

The first BBS came to life in 1978 during a particularly bad Chicago blizzard. Its inventors, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, wanted a way to keep up with their computer club without having to gather together in person. So they figured out a way to do it with computers.

The resulting software, called CBBS, allowed personal-computer owners with modems to dial-in to a dedicated system and leave messages that others would see later, when they, in turn, dialed up the BBS. People could, in theory, call BBSes anywhere, but since they'd have to pay for long-distance, they tended to stay local. The BBS concept was a digital version of a push-pin bulletin board that might flank a grocery store entrance or a college student union hallway.

By the time dad brought home the modem, BBSes had grown dramatically in scope. They facilitated file transfers, inter-BBS messaging networks, multi-node chat, and popular text-based games.

My 15-year-old brother began BBSing. He visited five or six local boards, with names like “Octopus’s Garden,” “Southern Pride,” and “Online's Place.” I followed in his footsteps the next summer, spending hundreds of glorious hours online.

Dialing into a BBS felt like whole-body teleportation. It was the intimacy of direct, computer-to-computer connection that did it. To call a BBS was to visit the private residence of a fellow computer fan electronically. BBS hosts had converted a PC—often their only PC—into a digital playground for strangers’ amusement.

For an 11-year-old exploring online spaces for the first time, my mental model for these electronic connections was physical. Although every BBS displayed walls of text—menus, options, and prompts—those characters somehow translated, in my brain, into a casual walk through a cozy living room or a stroll in a grassy yard.

Maybe it was because the system operators (sysops) that ran each BBS were always watching. Everything users did scrolled by on their screen, and they soaked in the joy of someone else using their computer. It was a gentle, pleasant form of surveillance.

The sysops might initiate one-on-one chat at any time. Long before texting and Slacking and Facebook messaging became the norm for interchange, BBS chats felt like being with someone in person. Sometimes strong personal relationships were built. My best friend is someone I first met when he called my BBS in 1993.

That personal connection was sorely missing on big-name online subscription services of the time—Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL. Even today, the internet is so overwhelmingly intertwined that it doesn't have the same intimate feel. Once the web arrived in the mid-1990s, it seemed inevitable that the BBS would die off.

But every mass extinction has its holdouts. Even today, a small community of people still run and call BBSes. Many seek the digital intimacy they lost years ago; 373 BBSes still operate, according to the Telnet BBS Guide, mostly in the United States. Many are set up to be accessible via internet-connected tools like Telnet, a text-based remote-login protocol originally designed for mainframes.

Did any direct-access, telephone-dial-up BBSes survive the internet’s proverbial asteroid? Sure enough, there are about 20 known dial-up BBSes in North America. And of those, only a handful have been running non-stop since the mid-1990s. These are the true dinosaurs walking among us. Who dares to run such antique systems, and why? Have any of them been left running by accident like the BBS in my dream? I had to find out.

by Benj Edwards, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Benj Edwards

The Great Gridlock Groundswell

Seattle sees itself as the shining city upon a hill — seven hills, in fact, in a nod to the geography of ancient Rome. There are downtown inclines so steep that the parking decks must be shaped like right triangles. The hills of the northern and southern halves of the city are divided by Lake Union, which must be traversed by bridge (or, if you’re feeling whimsical, by ferry). And from multiple elevated vantage points in the city, you can watch the mass of cars inching slowly down Interstate 5 and feel the nauseating dread that comes when you take in the full scope of a massive highway traffic jam.

As Americans have repopulated cities in recent years, Seattle has undergone especially marked growth. It’s the fourth-fastest-growing city among America’s top 50, according to census data, and it has ranked in the top five each of the past three years. The Seattle region is home to powerful industry — Boeing to the north and south, Microsoft to the east, and Amazon less than a mile from the Space Needle — and there is no end to the city’s growth in sight.

But — and when it comes to city planning, there are always multiple, onerous buts — there simply isn’t enough space to fit all of these people and their cars on the region’s highways. Seattle has the second-worst congestion in America during the evening commute, according to a study by TomTom, second only to Los Angeles. Ask a resident to describe the traffic and you’ll hear phrases like “comparable to Southern California,” or “horrible after 4 p.m.,” or “a giant clusterfuck.” Everyone agrees that traffic is bad, and given the local government’s projections that 800,000 more people will move to the Puget Sound region by 2040, it seems doomed to get worse.

How to fix it, then? A coalition of government officials, environmentalists, transportation advocates, and tech giants are pushing Sound Transit 3 (ST3), a plan to more than double the region’s light rail system at a cost of $54 billion over 25 years. The plan will be voted on by residents of Seattle’s King County, as well as neighboring Snohomish and Pierce counties, on November 8 (there’s an election that day, too, you may have heard). And it’s not the only big transit project on the ballot. In all, more than two dozen cities and counties across the United States will be voting on transit initiatives on Election Day.

ST3, though, is particularly bold. It would lay 62 new miles of light rail across three Washington counties, running from Tacoma in the south up through Seattle and into Everett in the north, while also branching off into Redmond and Issaquah in the east. Thirty-seven new train stations would be erected across the region, along with affordable housing near some of the new transit hubs. The plan would make Seattle’s rail system about the same size as the systems in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. It would be one of the largest local transit projects in American history.

It’s also hugely controversial. Opponents say the plan is too expensive, that the government can’t be trusted to fulfill the promised timeline, and that there are more pressing problems worthy of tax dollars. These are classic gripes from those dubious of ambitious infrastructure projects that can easily mutate into “boondoggles.” (The Big Dig, anyone?) But the Seattle transit project in particular has brought forth an unusual new opposing argument: What about driverless cars?

Some think introducing autonomous vehicles to Seattle could make ST3 obsolete before it’s even complete. Instead of finishing the light rail system, there are those who would rather give up now with the assumption that driverless cars are the real transit future.

Ridesharing, driving-assistance technology, and fully autonomous vehicles threaten to fundamentally change how we navigate cities in the coming decades in ways that experts say are difficult to predict. Driverless cars are already shuttling Uber customers around in Pittsburgh and being tested by Google in the tech-centric Seattle suburb of Kirkland. How far will the technology have advanced by 2041, when Seattle’s proposed transit project would be finished? Will a sprawling, fixed rail system still be useful, even when some cities today are already experimenting with Uber as an extension of public transit?

No matter where you live in America, there’s likely a sense that public transportation is in a state of disrepair at best, or crisis at worst. Two of our nation’s biggest public transportation systems, in New York and Washington, D.C., are undergoing major repairs that will last at least a year and, during that time, will have to intermittently shut down major train lines. San Francisco’s BART is an essential need for the lower and middle classes, but is constantly wracked with delays that tech workers who glide to work on corporate buses get to ignore. Usually, we throw tax dollars at these sorts of problems, but a growing number of tech evangelists are claiming we can innovate our way out of highway gridlock and a reliance on century-old transit tech.

I visited Seattle ahead of its own decision on the matter to find out how difficult it is to travel around the city and to talk to experts about how different technologies could make moving around easier. Through four fateful rides, I learned a lot about not just the future of transit in Seattle, but how we may navigate American cities in the coming years.

by Victor Luckerson, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Getty/Ringer

Tempest in a Sandwich

The chopped cheese is a New York success story — with a somewhat charged twist.

The sandwich, also called a chop cheese — ground beef with onions, topped by melted cheese and served with lettuce, tomatoes and condiments on a hero roll — has long been a staple of bodegas in Harlem and the Bronx. Now, it has started migrating from grill tops to restaurant menus, from the lyrics of rappers onto the pages of food blogs.

But this wider recognition has come with a side of controversy.

In June, a video made by a 20-year-old man from Harlem as a retort to a segment about the sandwich went viral, igniting a discussion about culture and privilege. The news that a new restaurant on the Upper West Side would feature a version costing more than $10 provoked another round of criticism.

Grab a seat, preferably a park bench. This is a story about how in a country in the midst of a roiling debate about race and class, a sandwich is not just a sandwich.

by Eli Rosenberg, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Nicole Craine

Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty
via:

Life in Circadia

[ed. Another good reason we should get rid of daylight savings time.]

To be fully integrated with an ecosystem, an organism must cling to its niches, and one of those is a carefully carved-out temporal niche. For example, the first mammals’ warm-bloodedness allowed for successful colonisation of the nighttime world, when reptilian systems slowed down. Two similar species can comfortably occupy the same space if they do so at different times of day. Our modern built environment provides food, warmth and light at all hours, as well as safeguarding us from nocturnal predators. Superficially, we’ve been liberated from our own niche in the day/night environment but, under the surface, that desynchrony is causing all manner of problems. We have not outgrown our need for an internal timing system – far from it.

With so much of the talk about bodyclocks focused on sleep, it’s easy to forget that all of our biological processes around the clock are organised by circadian rhythms. Every day of the internal schedule is full of appointments. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria glean oxygen from the atmosphere, and they also photosynthesise to store energy. But they can’t do both at once, so they alternate between nocturnal nitrogen-fixing and daytime photosynthesis. Mammals have many such processes to orchestrate, and just about everything our body does – from metabolism and DNA repair to immune responses and cognition – is under circadian control. In humans, normal organ functioning depends on a harmony in hierarchy: synchrony among molecular rhythms within each cell, among cells in each organ, and among organs in the body. Coordinated functioning ensures that the body doesn’t work against itself.

The human body is teeming with clocks, arranged in a hierarchy. At the helm, a master clock in the brain’s hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) sets the overall rhythm of the body. But each organ also has its own rhythm that’s generated internally. A clock, in the broadest sense, consists of any type of regular oscillation, and these clocks take the form of a transcription-translation feedback loop that circles back to the beginning in roughly 24 hours. Clock genes activate a process that results in protein synthesis, and once the concentration of those proteins in the cell reach a critical threshold, they come into the nucleus and turn off the clock gene that produced them. Once the proteins have broken down, the gene switches on and the cycle begins again.

Every day, the body corrects its clock to match its surroundings using daylight. A photoreceptor in the retina – the third photoreceptor after our black-and-white vision rods and colour vision cones – senses only overall light levels and reports directly to that master clock to reset it when it drifts off-course.

Those other clocks, some generated within the cell and others governing the workings of organs, have basically the same molecular organisation as the SCN but they are autonomous from it. They differ enormously in the extent to which their rhythms are coupled to the central clock and they can be influenced by other factors. For example, liver and pancreas clocks are easily reset by eating late at night, which overrides the SCN signals in those organs and puts them out of sync with the rest of the body. Jetlag’s groggy unpleasantness comes more from this uncoupling of clocks than from an earlier or later internal time, per se. It takes about a day per hour of time-change to reset the master clock, but it can take even longer to corral the organs into line with each other. The effects of circadian dysfunction can be disastrous in the long term – knock out the cellular clocks in just part of a mouse pancreas, for example, and diabetes quickly ensues.

by Jessa Gamble, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Richard Wilkinson

Theophilus London

[ed. Repost.]

Man Hacks Alexa Into Singing Fish Robot

[ed. Hilarious.]

Man hacks Alexa into singing fish robot, terror ensues.
by Russel Brandom, The Verge |  Read more:
Image: Brian Kane

via:

Wakayama rafting, Japan
via:

Books Should Send Us Into Therapy: On The Paradox of Bibliotherapy

As an advocate for both books and therapy, I determined, upon first hearing the word “bibliotherapy,” that this might be my bespoke profession. I go to group therapy. I read a lot of novels. I’m constantly recommending novels to my group. Members struggling with various problems typically don’t count on me to empathize through personal experience. They count on me for book recommendations. Your adult son is an expat in Europe and is exploring his sexuality? See Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors. You feel alienated from your wealthy family but drawn to nagging spiritual questions about existence? Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer is for you. Gutted by the loss of a loved one? You could do worse than James Agee’s A Death in the Family (Men’s therapy group, by the way).

The concept of bibliotherapy — a word coined in 1916 — long teetered on the edge of trendiness. But lately it has tilted toward truth. The highbrow media has weighed in favorably — consider Ceridwen Dovey’s much discussed New Yorker profile on The School of Life’s bibliotherapy team. And then the books: Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Andy Miller’s The Year of Reading Dangerously, William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education and, perhaps most notably, The Novel Cure by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin. Each book, to varying degrees, suggests connections between reading and happiness. A Google Scholar’s worth of criticism — my obscure favorite being Keith Oatley’s “Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation” (pdf) — has lent the idea scholarly heft. To be clear: nobody is arguing that reading books is a substitute for the medication required to treat acute mental illness. But the notion that novels might have a genuine therapeutic benefit for certain kinds of spiritual ailments seems legit.

If we concede that books can be therapeutic, then it seems appropriate to explore the potential pitfalls of asking literature to serve that cause. Of initial concern is the inherent presumptuousness of the endeavor. When I advise my fellow group therapy members — whom I know as intimately as I know anyone, if intimacy is defined by the sharing of anxiety, fear, and grief — what they should read, the assumption is that I’m able to divine how my interpretation of a novel will intersect with their predicted interpretations of the same novel. If reception theory tells us anything, it’s that this kind of interpretive foretelling, especially when refracted through the radically subjectivity of a novel, is a matter of great uncertainty, and maybe even an implicit form of lit bullying (“What? You didn’t pick up on that theme? What’s the matter with you?).

Plus, novels don’t work this way. They aren’t narrative prescriptions. Even when done badly, novels are artistic expressions necessarily unmoored from reality, expressions that ultimately depend on idiosyncratic characters who act, think, and feel, thereby becoming emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, and even physically embodied — quite differently — in every reader’s mind. Yes, The Great Gatsby has universal appeal. But there’s a unique Gatsby for every reader who has passed eyes over the book. (Maybe even Donald Trump has one: “not great, not great; an overrated loser.”) Given the tenuousness and variability of this personal act of translation, it’s hard not to wonder: How could anyone expect to intuit how anyone else might react to certain characters in certain settings under certain circumstances?

In The Novel Cure, Berthoud and Elderkin aren’t hampered by this question. They match personal contemporary ailments with common literary themes as if they were complementary puzzle pieces. They do so under the assumption that the mere presence of a literary counterpart to a contemporary dilemma automatically imbues a novel with therapeutic agency. They advise that a person dealing with adultery in real life might want to read Madame Bovary. Or that someone who struggles to reach orgasm should read Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Does this kind of advice make any sense?

Consider the adultery example. How can Berthoud and Elderkin assess exactly how novelistic adultery will be translated into thoughts and feelings about something as deeply contextualized as real life adultery? How can they assess if it will be translated at all? Think of all the possible reactions. Use your imagination. A contemporary cuckold could go off the rails at any juncture in the Bovary narrative. He could become so immensely interested in Gustave Flaubert’s intimately detailed portrait of 19th-century provincial life, and the people in it, that he eventually finds the cuckolding theme a distraction, finishes the novel, quits his high paying job, and commits himself to a graduate program in French social history. Books have driven people to do stranger things. Sure it’s unlikely, but my point is this: Telling someone precisely what to take from a novel, based on the superficiality of a shared event, isn’t therapeutic. It’s fascist. A repression of a more genuine response.

More interesting would be to reverse the bibliotherapeutic premise altogether. Instead of asking “what’s wrong with you?” and assigning a book, assign a book and ask “what’s wrong with you?” When I lend books to friends outside of therapy, this strategy (upon reflection) is basically what I’m testing. I’m not trying to solve a person’s problem. I’m trying, in a way, to create one. I want to shake someone out of complacency. Great novels (and sometimes not so great ones) jar us, often unexpectedly. Ever have a novel sneak upon you and kick you in the gut, leaving you staring into space, dazed by an epiphany? Yes. Novels do this. They present obstacles that elicit the catharsis (from katharo, which means clearing obstacles) we didn’t think we needed. We should allow books to cause more trouble in our lives.

But the sanguine bibliotherapeutic mission will have none of that. Its premise is to take down obstacles and march us towards happiness. Proof is how easily this genre of therapy veers into self-help territory. The New York Public Library’s “Bibliotherapy” page suggests that readers check out David Brooks’s The Road to Character, Cheryl Strayed’s Brave Enough, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. These books are assuredly smart books by smart writers, all of whom I admire. But the goal of this type of book is to help readers find some kind of stability. There’s obviously nothing wrong with that. But the problem from the perspective of literary fiction is that such “self-improvement” books seek to tamp down the very human emotions that literature dines out on: fear, insecurity, vulnerability, and the willingness to take strange paths to strange places. Imagine reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment without being at least little off kilter. You’d shut the book the moment Raskolnikov committed his murder. Being moved by fiction means being willing to be led astray a little. It helps if your rules are not ordinary.

It also seems prudent to wonder how the bibliotherapeutic pharmacy would bottle up the work of certain writers. Would it do so in a way that excludes literary genius? Almost assuredly it would. Cormac McCarthy, whom many critics consider one of the greatest writers ever — appears three times in The Novel Cure. Predictably, The Road is mentioned as a way to (a) gain insight into fatherhood and (b) achieve brevity of expression. That’s it — all talk of apocalypse and the survival instinct as integral influences on human morality is brushed aside. Inexplicably, Blood Meridian is listed as a book that sheds light on the challenge of going cold turkey. I have no idea here. None. But I do know that if you are a reader who grasps the totality of McCarthy’s work, your literary soul, as Cormac might put it, is drowning in a cesspool of roiling bile.

Because here is what bibliotherapy, as it’s now defined, has no use for: darkness. Real darkness. McCarthy’s greatest literary accomplishment is arguably Suttree, the culmination of a series of “Tennessee novels” that dealt in chilling forms of deviance — incest, necrophilia, self-imposed social alienation — that, on every page, sully the reader’s sense of decency. McCarthy’s greatest narrative accomplishment was likely No Country for Old Men, a blood splattered thriller that features a psychopath who kills random innocent people with a captive bolt pistol. These works, much like the work of Henry Miller (none of whose sex-fueled books get mentioned in The Novel Cure), aestheticize evil — in this case violence and misogynistic sex — into brilliant forms of literary beauty. They are tremendously important and profoundly gorgeous books, albeit in very disturbing ways. They are more likely to send you into therapy than practice it.

The good news for bibliotherapy is that there are too many hardcore fiction readers who know all too well that concerted reading enhances the quality of their lives. A single book might destabilize, tottering you into emotional turmoil. But books — collectively consumed through the steady focus of serious reading — undoubtedly have for many readers a comforting, even therapeutic, effect. This brand of bibliotherapy, a brand born of ongoing submission to great literature — not unlike traditional therapy — does not necessarily seek to solve specific problems. (In my group therapy, members have been dealing with the same unresolved issues for years. We define each other by them.) Instead, what evolves through both consistent reading and therapy is a deep, even profound, understanding of the dramas that underscore the challenges of being human in the modern world.

by James McWilliams, The Millions |  Read more:

Image: Cormac McCarthy uncredited

Robert Gober, Hope Hill Road, 1975
via:

Crony Beliefs

For as long as I can remember, I've struggled to make sense of the terrifying gulf that separates the inside and outside views of beliefs.

From the inside, via introspection, each of us feels that our beliefs are pretty damn sensible. Sure we might harbor a bit of doubt here and there. But for the most part, we imagine we have a firm grip on reality; we don't lie awake at night fearing that we're massively deluded.

But when we consider the beliefs of other people? It's an epistemic shit show out there. Astrology, conspiracies, the healing power of crystals. Aliens who abduct Earthlings and build pyramids. That vaccines cause autism or that Obama is a crypto-Muslim — or that the world was formed some 6,000 years ago, replete with fossils made to look millions of years old. How could anyone believe this stuff?!

No, seriously: how?

Let's resist the temptation to dismiss such believers as "crazy" — along with "stupid," "gullible," "brainwashed," and "needing the comfort of simple answers." Surely these labels are appropriate some of the time, but once we apply them, we stop thinking. This isn't just lazy; it's foolish. These are fellow human beings we're talking about, creatures of our same species whose brains have been built (grown?) according to the same basic pattern. So whatever processes beget their delusions are at work in our minds as well. We therefore owe it to ourselves to try to reconcile the inside and outside views. Because let's not flatter ourselves: we believe crazy things too. We just have a hard time seeing them as crazy.

So, once again: how could anyone believe this stuff? More to the point: how could we end up believing it?

After struggling with this question for years and years, I finally have an answer I'm satisfied with.

Beliefs as Employees

By way of analogy, let's consider how beliefs in the brain are like employees at a company. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it'll get us 70% of the way there.

Employees are hired because they have a job to do, i.e., to help the company accomplish its goals. But employees don't come for free: they have to earn their keep by being useful. So if an employee does his job well, he'll be kept around, whereas if he does it poorly — or makes other kinds of trouble, like friction with his coworkers — he'll have to be let go.

Similarly, we can think about beliefs as ideas that have been "hired" by the brain. And we hire them because they have a "job" to do, which is to provide accurate information about the world. We need to know where the lions hang out (so we can avoid them), which plants are edible or poisonous (so we can eat the right ones), and who's romantically available (so we know whom to flirt with). The closer our beliefs hew to reality, the better actions we'll be able to take, leading ultimately to survival and reproductive success. That's our "bottom line," and that's what determines whether our beliefs are serving us well. If a belief performs poorly — by inaccurately modeling the world, say, and thereby leading us astray — then it needs to be let go.

I hope none of this is controversial. But here's where the analogy gets interesting.

Consider the case of Acme Corp., a property development firm in a small town called Nepotsville. The unwritten rule of doing business in Nepotsville is that companies are expected to hire the city council's friends and family members. Companies that make these strategic hires end up getting their permits approved and winning contracts from the city. Meanwhile, companies that "refuse to play ball" find themselves getting sued, smeared in the local papers, and shut out of new business.

In this environment, Acme faces two kinds of incentives, one pragmatic and one political. First, like any business, it needs to complete projects on time and under budget. And in order to do that, it needs to act like a meritocracy, i.e., by hiring qualified workers, monitoring their performance, and firing those who don't pull their weight. But at the same time, Acme also needs to appease the city council. And thus it needs to engage in a little cronyism, i.e., by hiring workers who happen to be well-connected to the city council (even if they're unqualified) and preventing those crony workers from being fired (even when they do shoddy work).

Suppose Acme has just decided to hire the mayor's nephew Robert as a business analyst. Robert isn't even remotely qualified for the role, but it's nevertheless in Acme's interests to hire him. He'll "earn his keep" not by doing good work, but by keeping the mayor off the company's back.

Now suppose we were to check in on Robert six months later. If we didn't already know he was a crony, we might easily mistake him for a regular employee. We'd find him making spreadsheets, attending meetings, drawing a salary: all the things employees do. But if we look carefully enough — not at Robert per se, but at the way the company treats him — we're liable to notice something fishy. He's terrible at his job, and yet he isn't fired. Everyone cuts him slack and treats him with kid gloves. The boss tolerates his mistakes and even works overtime to compensate for them. God knows, maybe he's even promoted.

Clearly Robert is a different kind of employee, a different breed. The way he moves through the company is strange, as if he's governed by different rules, measured by a different yardstick. He's in the meritocracy, but not of the meritocracy.

And now the point of this whole analogy.

I contend that the best way to understand all the crazy beliefs out there — aliens, conspiracies, and all the rest — is to analyze them as crony beliefs. Beliefs that have been "hired" not for the legitimate purpose of accurately modeling the world, but rather for social and political kickbacks.

As Steven Pinker says,

People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true.

In other words, just like Acme, the human brain has to strike an awkward balance between two different reward systems:

• Meritocracy, where we monitor beliefs for accuracy out of fear that we'll stumble by acting on a false belief; and
• Cronyism, where we don't care about accuracy so much as whether our beliefs make the right impressions on others.

And so we can roughly (with caveats we'll discuss in a moment) divide our beliefs into merit beliefs and crony beliefs. Both contribute to our bottom line — survival and reproduction — but they do so in different ways: merit beliefs by helping us navigate the world, crony beliefs by helping us look good.

The point is, our brains are incredibly powerful organs, but their native architecture doesn't care about high-minded ideals like Truth. They're designed to work tirelessly and efficiently — if sometimes subtly and counterintuitively — in our self-interest. So if a brain anticipates that it will be rewarded for adopting a particular belief, it's perfectly happy to do so, and doesn't much care where the reward comes from — whether it's pragmatic (better outcomes resulting from better decisions), social (better treatment from one's peers), or some mix of the two. A brain that didn't adopt a socially-useful (crony) belief would quickly find itself at a disadvantage relative to brains that are more willing to "play ball." In extreme environments, like the French Revolution, a brain that rejects crony beliefs, however spurious, may even find itself forcibly removed from its body and left to rot on a pike. Faced with such incentives, is it any wonder our brains fall in line?

Even mild incentives, however, can still exert pressure on our beliefs. Russ Roberts tells the story of a colleague who, at a picnic, started arguing for an unpopular political opinion — that minimum wage laws can cause harm — whereupon there was a "frost in the air" as his fellow picnickers "edged away from him on the blanket." If this happens once or twice, it's easy enough to shrug off. But when it happens again and again, especially among people whose opinions we care about, sooner or later we'll second-guess our beliefs and be tempted to revise them.

Mild or otherwise, these incentives are also pervasive. Everywhere we turn, we face pressure to adopt crony beliefs. At work, we're rewarded for believing good things about the company. At church, we earn trust in exchange for faith, while facing severe sanctions for heresy. In politics, our allies support us when we toe the party line, and withdraw support when we refuse. (When we say politics is the mind-killer, it's because these social rewards completely dominate the pragmatic rewards, and thus we have almost no incentive to get at the truth.) Even dating can put untoward pressure on our minds, insofar as potential romantic partners judge us for what we believe.

If you've ever wanted to believe something, ask yourself where that desire comes from. Hint: it's not the desire simply to believe what's true.

In short: Just as money can pervert scientific research, so everyday social incentives have the potential to distort our beliefs.

Posturing

So far we've been describing our brains as "responding to incentives," which gives them a passive role. But it can also be helpful to take a different perspective, one in which our brains actively adopt crony beliefs in order to strategically influence other people. In other words, we use crony beliefs to posture.

by Kevin Simler, Melting Asphalt |  Read more:

Image: via:

Serj Fedulov, Waiting for Godot
via:

via:

What’s Your Ideal Community? The Answer Is Political

The American political map that has emerged over the last half-century, with blue cities and red beyond, is a product of both the ideological realignment of the two parties and geographic sorting among voters. It also raises a fascinating question about how our politics are shaped by where we live.

Is it simply that people who are already liberal choose dense urban environments and conservatives choose more suburban living? Or do these places influence how we feel about government — and each other — in ways that make us more liberal or conservative?

Political scientists, fortunately, cannot randomly assign people to cities, suburbs or rural outposts and then wait to see if their politics adapt. But their theories of why density might matter for partisanship add a provocative layer to how we think about the differences among us that are more often defined in an election year by education, income or race.

A large Pew survey two years ago of American political life found that self-described liberals overwhelmingly said they’d prefer to live where the homes are smaller and closer together but where the amenities are within walking distance. Conservatives chose the opposite trade-off: big homes, spaced farther apart, but with schools and restaurants miles away. The question got at a pattern underlying politics today: Beyond our disagreements about taxes, welfare or health care, partisans also fundamentally favor different kinds of places. (...)

Thomas Ogorzalek, a political scientist at Northwestern, argues that liberalism has its roots in big-city governments trying to solve the kinds of local problems that arise when diverse populations cram together. Compared with the suburbs or rural America, cities are more complex. They’re harder to govern, which means in many ways that they demand bigger government: a large transit agency to move people around, intricate parking rules to govern scarce spaces, a garbage truck armada to keep the streets clean.

“Externalities accumulate faster in dense places, and you need to do something about them,” Mr. Ogorzalek said. In other words, the trash piles up.

New York City, with its 24,000 restaurants and bars, needs a system of publicly posted health grades. A town with two restaurants may not. New York needs some colossal bridges connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. A smaller community doesn’t need public-works projects on that scale. New York requires a large police force. A rural resident may need self-reliance when the closest officer is 10 miles away.

It’s conceivable that people who live in cities come to value more active government. Or they’re more receptive to investing in welfare because they pass the homeless every day. Or they appreciate immigration because their cab rides and lunch depend on immigrants. This argument is partly about the people we’re exposed to in cities (the poor, foreigners), and partly about the logistics of living there.

“As someone who’s lived in cities for almost all of my adult life, it’s impossible to conceive of a well-functioning city without a strong public works and a strong governmental infrastructure,” said Thomas Sugrue, a historian at New York University. Government has actively shaped suburbia, too, for example engineering the mortgage tax breaks that make owning large homes more affordable. But those government interventions are often less visible. “They’re not invisible,” Mr. Sugrue said, “when you’re going down Eighth Street as it’s being repaved and the sewer lines underneath it are being replaced.”

The political analyst William Schneider articulated a similarly plausible idea about the politics of suburbia in a classic 1992 article for The Atlantic. As cities require reliance on the commons, Mr. Schneider argued that “to move to the suburbs is to express a preference for the private over the public.” The suburbs entail private yards over public parks, private cars over public transit, private malls over public squares. Suburban living even buys a kind of private government, Mr. Schneider wrote, with the promise of local control of neighborhood schools and social services that benefit only the people who can afford to live there.

His theory supports self-selection; people who want that environment move to it. But Jessica Trounstine, a political scientist at the University of California, Merced, believes that people who move to the suburbs, apolitically, can also become part of a political ideology that they find benefits them and their pocketbooks.

by Emily Badger, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Pew Research Center

How Instagram is Changing the Way We Eat

I often post pictures of my food online before I have tasted it. I take the photo, adjust the brightness, contrast and saturation, upload it to my social media accounts and rejoice in how amazing it is. Sometimes, when I go on to eat the food in front of me, I don’t even like it. That pretty orange and pistachio thing I made is bitter because the oranges have gone rancid. The photogenic Italian sfogliatella pastry, which I bought more or less entirely to take a photo of, is actually pretty tough. I am left chewing the pastry long after the “likes” have stopped trickling in. The interaction was sweet while it lasted, though.

We love to share our food. Not necessarily in the physical sense, because that would mean giving away something substantive and delicious. That gesture is still reserved for the people around us who we love and care about. But for the rest of the world – the school pals and the random followers and our prying family friends – we share our food online. We are sharing more food in this way than ever before, and a huge amount of this hungry, food-centric media revolves around food photography and short videos on platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook.

The annual Waitrose food and drink report, released on Wednesday, focuses on the way in which food has become social currency thanks to how we share and discuss it online. It is impossible to wade through the quagmire of social media without segueing into virtual treasure troves of #foodporn, #instafood and proudly #delicious content.

According to the report, one in five Brits has shared a food photo online or with our friends in the past month. We have managed to forge what looks like a rare pure corner of social media, where pleasure is the order of the day. No matter the poster or the politics, food shines bright as something that all of us can aspire to, if only we curate our lives and our diets carefully enough.

Most of us who document our meals online are amateurs, but there exists a sizeable, and hugely profitable, industry of professional food bloggers and Instagrammers, whose pristine food styling sets the tone for a whole aesthetic movement.

Take Sarah Coates who, off the back of the success of her blog The Sugar Hit and her 36,000 followers on Instagram, has released a cookbook and shaped a particular niche for herself in the online baking world. Hers is a self-avowedly saccharine, indulgent kind of food. Unlike much of the more earnest online food world, her photographs are bright, flooded with light and popping with flashes of colour, vibrancy and life. Punchy tones and patterns give the photos a kind of levity, in spite of the (wonderfully) butter-heavy, cloying sweetness of the food itself. Certain foods become emblems with a life of their own: waffles made in a round waffle-iron; doughnuts glazed or rolled in sugar; funfetti sprinkles. These posts amass huge amounts of interaction from followers, and spawn food trends of their own. First come the savvy Instagrammers, then the foodie public, and then, once we have all moved on to something new, the traditional food press. Glazed doughnuts from the Sugar Hit blog.

Once these Instagram-friendly foods go viral, they can completely change the way we eat. Breakfast, for example, has shifted from a decidedly unphotogenic cereal or marmalade on toast to the bright hues of avocado toast (there are nearly 250,000 #avocadotoast hashtagged photos on Instagram) and smoothie bowls. Even the humble fry-up has been rebranded, in the hands of the Hemsley sisters, as an oven-baked, meticulously arranged, “healthier” big breakfast. It looks great and presumably tastes awful, the oven tray divided into neat strips of colour, from leathery lean oven bacon to overdone eggs.

Among the foods billed to gain traction in 2017, today’s Waitrose report points to Hawaiian poke and even, in an alarming twist, vegetable yoghurts. No doubt these will be helped along in the likability stakes with their colourful, snappy Instagram vibe.

There is a big generation gap in this movement, though. According to the Waitrose report, 18- to 24-year olds are five times more likely to share photos of their food online than the over 55s – and that is certainly reflected in the types of cuisine, styling and tone that are popular in the online food world. So you are unlikely to find photos of old-fashioned sherry trifles, unpretty Irish stew or traditional meat-and-two-veg meals, unless it’s in a shrewdly ironic way.

Instead, there are fun, irreverent Instagram food circles, all funfetti and ice-cream sandwiches, and – in a twist that is so very 2016 that it makes my soul scream – flamingo pool float-shaped cakes. But just as popular are the serious, aspirational channels popularised by accounts such as @violetcakeslondon and @skye_mcalpine. Here, you will find beautifully shot, intricately staged photographs of the food and, crucially, the lifestyles of successful, creative thirtysomethings. These are wishful odes to how serene and perfect your life could be, if only you had the money, the £50 ceramic platters and the time. Perhaps in keeping with the broader asymmetry between the numbers of social media users in different generations, there’s a lot less to be seen of older people, or past food fashions, in this smart, moneyed, and overwhelmingly young world.

And yet it would be wrong to assume that this online culture doesn’t bleed through to tint the ways that real people cook and eat. For every wildly successful professional food blogger, there are countless amateurs posting the minutiae of their gastronomic day online. Meals that are Instagrammable – take, for instance, Borough Market’s Bread Ahead doughnuts, of which there are nearly 5,000 tagged photos on Instagram – become viral content in their own right. These foods become the must-eat and, more importantly, must-document meals of the moment. Restaurants such as London’s Bao keep punters queuing out the door just through the photogenic strength of one good dish. (For what it’s worth, I went to Bao to try their cloud-soft steamed buns and they were as good as they looked). Going green: fresh avocado and guacamole.

Increasingly, we are being influenced not just in the types of food that we eat, but how we cook and eat that food. The Waitrose report also states that almost half of us take more care over a dish if we think a photo might be taken of it, and nearly 40% claim to worry more about presentation than they did five years ago. We might include a garnish of picked thyme leaves to bring a pop of colour to a lemon drizzle cake, even if that thyme doesn’t really stand strong against the punch of the citrus. I am guilty of weeding out the messy and the misshapen from a batch of doughnuts or muffins before I take a photo. I might add a glaze that nobody wants, just because it will make the afternoon sun catch and glint in the furrows of the churros I just fried. It’s aesthetic first, taste later and, quite often, no taste at all.

by Ruby Tandoh, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: healthyeating_jo/Instagram

via: