Thursday, November 10, 2016
Workout Gear for When You’re Not Breaking a Sweat
[ed. No, not from the Onion.]
The athleisure spectrum now runs from workout clothes to off-duty weekend uniforms to “elevated” high fashion clothes — think Rihanna’s Fenty x Puma collection, characterized as Marie Antoinette-inspired streetwear — that is perfect for after dark. In a roundup of the recent Paris shows, Vogue.com decreed that the trend is now influencing all levels of fashion: “The athleisure effect can’t be denied.”
The mecca for athleisure is on lower Fifth Avenue from 17th Street to 23rd Street, in the Flatiron neighborhood. Stores there stock everything from basic black leggings to this season’s oversize bomber jackets. Bonus: Some of the stores have studios, a few offering free classes, and salespeople who are plugged in to the latest neighborhood fitness craze. It’s like finding out where the best powder is on the mountain from the cool ski locals while they are setting your bindings.Start at the southern end of the strip with Lululemon, which helped set off the athleisure tsunami, at the brand’s flagship store at 114 Fifth Avenue at 17th Street. It’s the company’s largest store in the United States, offering an overwhelming selection of its infamous leggings, mocked by some as overhyped and overpriced ($68 to $148) yet beloved by Luluhead stalwarts as flattering essentials.
The Lululemon salespeople are like legging sommeliers, patiently explaining the various fabric types, and suggesting associated activities for each — wicking materials for hot yoga, for example, or compression fabric for cycling, and lattice sides for barre class. Be warned that Lululemon sizes are not ego-boosting: If you are usually a size 6, you may need an 8. Still, the salespeople will work with you until they can honestly say that yes, it looks good.
And although it may sound like a “Saturday Night Live” parody, the store has a concierge who will point customers to nearby workout options, like Swerve, the hot new team-inspired cycling studio, or the latest array of workouts at Flex Studios (Pilates, barre and TRX), and then help book the classes. Downstairs, there is a studio called Hub Seventeen, which has classes, some free and some that cost $10 to $20, art shows and film screenings that can be booked online.
(While it will take you away from the area, a 20-minute walk to the Lululemon Lab at 50 Bond Street is worth the detour. The design team, working in full view in the back of the store, creates clothes with New Yorkers in mind — functional and mostly in dark and neutral palettes. This is class, not mass. Prices range from $60 for tops, to up to $450 for coats. The strap leggings have a horizontal slit at the knee, a fashion-statement riff on torn jeans that also allows for freedom of movement. It is one of only two Lab stores; the other is in Vancouver, British Columbia. The clothes are available only at the store, not online.)
Gap-owned Athleta, at 126 Fifth Avenue at 18th Street, does not push the envelope, and that can be a good thing. Mannequins are dressed in laid-back and doable options, such as leggings ($65 to $98) layered with a chunky long sweater and topped with down vests. A rotating roster of A-list teachers — like Dana Trixie Flynn from Laughing Lotus yoga — teaches classes in the beautiful studio downstairs. Classes are free. It is best to book online in advance because they fill up.
To flesh out the basic look, cross the street for hoodies, graphic tees and sunglasses at Zara, 101 Fifth Avenue at 17th Street, or H&M, 111 Fifth Avenue at 18th Street.
Tory Sport, 129 Fifth Avenue at 20th Street, is the athleisure line started by the designer Tory Burch in 2015. The ’70s-infused style is right in the modern groove: color-blocked, chevron-patterned and with track stripes in cutting-edge, sports-friendly fabrics. Framed vintage Sports Illustrated covers of greats like John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova set the vibe for the collection and the store, which has the feel of a sleek, retro Scandinavian ski chalet.
On a recent visit, a Tory Sport saleswoman inquired, “What sport are you into?” before pointing to the separate golf, tennis, running and studio lines. Her own current favorite, she said, was the killer workouts at Tone House in the neighboring Murray Hill area: “The hardest workout I’ve ever had.”
However, sport distinctions quickly seem irrelevant, as even a dedicated yogi on her way to check out the seamless leggings will stop short at the golf clothes, like the cunning short-sleeve crew neck sweater ($225) that has a contrasting ring collar and is made of “performance cashmere.” That’s right: cashmere that wicks. The “Coming and Going” category is a catchall for wardrobe staples officially intended for going to and from the studio. But these pieces, made from performance fabrics, are appropriate for work or for social gatherings. A convertible blazer with zip-in nylon dickey and hoodie is a nice twist on a classic ($365).
Bandier, a few blocks north at 164 Fifth Avenue at 22nd Street, is a multibrand shop, the place to check out this season’s mesh or perforated fabrics, graphic leggings, camouflage motorcycle (camo moto) jackets, cropped tops and oversize bomber jackets. These are club-worthy, the elevated end of the spectrum. The store is the real deal, so worth braving the brisk (or overwhelmed?) salespeople, including one who handed a customer a size small bomber jacket to try on, while waving off the idea of taking a medium for comparison purposes, with a definitive, “It’s supposed to be fitted.”
Bandier has attitude. Painted on the wall in a cheeky script is the message: “Take Care of Your Girls.” Upstairs at Studio B — “Where Fashion Fitness and Music Go to Play” — you can take classes like Stoked Shred, ModelFIT sculpt and Yoga for Bad People. Sign up online; prices range from $15 to $35. (...)
It is worth the cardio schlep up four flights of stairs at 25 West 23rd Street, just around the corner toward Sixth Avenue, to Y7 Studio, the self-proclaimed home of “Original Hip-Hop Yoga,” to check out the small retail space. Score a black graphic crop top or muscle shirt (“I’m Like / Hey / What’s Up / Let’s Flow,” or “Namastizzle,” $50) and a New York Yogis snapback hat ($40) for instant street cred.
by Mary Billard, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Stefania Curto for The New York Times
Makeover Mania
1. The Problem
In theory, the redesign begins with a problem. The problem might be specific or systemic or subjective. A logo makes a company’s image feel out of date. A familiar household object has been overtaken by new technology. A service has become too confusing for new users. And so on. The world is, after all, full of problems.
The human desire to solve problems fuels brand-new inventions too: The wheel, for example, eased conveyance significantly. But the redesign tends to address problems with, or caused by, dimensions of the human-designed world, and identifying such problems may be the designer’s most crucial skill. Redesigns fail when they address the wrong problem — or something that really wasn’t a problem in the first place. While progress may entail change, change does not necessarily guarantee progress. But a clever redesign, one that addresses the right problem in an intelligent fashion, improves the world, if just by a bit.
As an example in miniature of how the redesign is supposed to work, consider New York’s bike-share program. In 2014, Dani Simons, then the director of marketing for Citi Bike, visited a School of Visual Arts interaction-design class and presented it with a problem to solve. Citi Bike was selling plenty of annual memberships, but it was failing to attract enough “casual” riders, the sorts of one-off users who might rent a bike for just a day or a week. The class went into the field, observing and interviewing people at Citi Bike stations, and at their final meeting, the students presented Simons with their findings — and potential solutions.
Simons was so impressed that she signed two students, Amy Wu and Luke Stern, to a three-month contract that summer. The two of them soon zeroed in on a particularly thorny design problem: the big, instructional decal on Citi Bike’s kiosks. Annual members used a key fob and had no reason to interact with the decal, but it was the gateway for casual users. Consisting mostly of text, the decals were dense and off-putting, especially to tourists uncomfortable with English. Some failed to understand that they were supposed to type in a code from a printed receipt to unlock a bike; instead, they tried to figure out how to insert the receipt itself into a slot on the docking station.
There was another, more prosaic reason that Stern and Wu focused on the decal: It was something they could actually change. Citi Bike is operated by a private firm, but New York’s Transportation Department oversees it, too, and the technology involves an external vendor. The decal, however, was produced in-house. So Stern and Wu proposed refashioning it, using a set of instructional pictograms loosely inspired by Ikea booklets. They tested several prototypes and endured baffled responses from Citi Bike users until eventually landing on a gridlike arrangement of visuals that people found intuitive. Simons and the Transportation Department signed off on a final version, and it was installed on the city’s 300-plus Citi Bike stations. Wu checked the service’s publicly available user data a month later and discovered that casual ridership had increased about 14 percent. “It was a little bit surreal,” Stern recalls. “We can actually make a difference.”
Indeed, this is the platonic ideal of the redesign: A designer sees a problem, proposes a solution, makes a difference. Such tidy narratives fuel a reigning ideology in which every object, symbol or pool of information is just another design problem awaiting some solution. The thermostat, the fire extinguisher, the toothbrush, the car dashboard — all have been redesigned, whether anybody was clamoring for their alteration or not.
This hunger for change has been a boon for firms like IDEO. Tim Brown, the company’s president and chief executive, has overseen IDEO’s steady expansion from product design to interactive and service design for businesses like Bank of America and Microsoft, and in more recent years even for municipalities and governments. He has been a vocal proponent of the idea that “design thinking” can be applied to just about any problem. “There are two takes on the redesign,” Brown says. “The glass-half-empty take on redesign is, ‘Oh, we’re unnecessarily redesigning a chair,’ or a lamp, or whatever.”
The glass-half-full take requires a broader perspective: “The need to redesign is really dependent on how fit for purpose the thing in question is,” Brown says. In his thinking, much of our world is built around systems designed to respond to the social structures and technologies of the industrial age. Everything from systems of education and health care to the design of cities and modes of transportation, he says, all trace their roots to a drastically different era and ought to be fundamentally rethought for the one we live in now. “I think we’ve potentially never been in a period of history where there are so many things that are no longer fit for purpose,” he says. “And therefore the idea of redesign is entirely appropriate, I think — even though it’s extremely difficult.”
2. What to Change
You don’t have to listen to Karim Rashid for very long to get a sense that he thinks pretty much every single manifestation of the built environment needs to be redesigned. Known for his colorful personal and professional style, he has had a long run as one of the most famous industrial designers in America. He believes design is a fundamentally social act that makes the world a better place. But it is also, he points out, a business. So in practice, most redesigns begin with a client; without one, not much happens. He has worked with many of them — on furniture, packaging, gadgets, housewares, luxury goods, even condos and hotels. But he has learned that even having a client does not guarantee that any given redesign will ever make it out of renderings and prototypes and into the real world. “People say I’m prolific,” he says. “Can you imagine if all the other stuff got to go to market?”
As Rashid sees it, so many of the things that surround us bear cumbersome vestiges of the past. “The world is full of this kind of kitsch history — history that has nothing to do with the world we live in now,” he says. He points to a redesign project of his that fizzled, a complete rethinking of the business-class tableware for Delta Air Lines. His proposal was bold: His bowls had sharp angles that echoed Delta’s triangular logo, his trays had subtle recesses that anchored dishes in place and his wineglasses skipped the stem in favor of a tapered shape with a wide base.
“The stem on a wineglass is meaningless,” Rashid says. He dismisses the conventional argument that it prevents the drinker’s hand from interfering with wine’s ideal temperature; to have the slightest such effect, he claims, you’d have to wrap your palm around the bowl for 20 straight minutes. The stem is actually a leftover artifact, he says, from centuries ago, when goblets made of metal had high stems to signal status and wealth. This design quirk remained after we switched to glass, Rashid says. Making wineglasses look a certain way because that’s how they have always looked is a classic example of privileging form over function. “I’m sitting in first class or business class on an airplane with turbulence,” Rashid says, “with a wineglass with a stem on it — do you understand? It’s so stupid, isn’t it?”
His proposed redesigns were striking, but they had to pass muster with the service-item maker, the flight attendants’ union and Delta itself — which ultimately declined to move forward with the concepts Rashid proposed. “It was all rejected,” he tells me, with a sigh. “Because it doesn’t look like domestic tableware.”
Rashid loves to “break archetypes,” in effect redesigning a whole object category. But the hurdles to doing so involve practicality as well as taste. More recently, he designed the Solarin mobile phone for Sirin Labs. It is equipped with extreme encryption capabilities and made with wealthy, privacy-obsessed customers in mind. It costs an eye-popping $12,000 and up. The client had a sky’s-the-limit attitude about imbuing the phone with a truly distinct form.
Rashid proposed an oval shape. “It would fit perfectly in your hand,” he says. His concept made it to prototype, and “everybody loved the oval phone.” But it turned out that only a handful of factories do smartphone glass assembly, and none were willing to retool an entire production line to accommodate a relatively small client. Moreover, existing operating systems are all designed to work in a grid format. The phone ended up with pronounced beveling at the edges, but was still fundamentally a rectangle. “I was so, so disappointed,” Rashid says. “I tried every trick.” Sounding almost wistful, he recalls a similar misadventure: an oval-shaped television set he designed for Samsung. “They showed it in some focus group, and it bombed,” he says, laughing. “People didn’t like the idea of an oval television. I have no idea why.”
3. What to Keep
I know why. And really, so does Rashid. As much as we are attracted to the new, we simultaneously cling to the familiar. This tension means that some redesigns — particularly in the realm of graphic design — can inspire surprisingly visceral public backlash. Earlier this year, for instance, Instagram updated its logo and app icon, simplifying the design and making it more colorful. The chorus of online moaning and mockery that followed grew so loud that it was actually reported on by The Times, which called it a “freak out.” Instagram didn’t budge, but a similar backlash in 2010 caused the Gap to retract plans for a new logo it had floated online. The University of California pulled back key elements of a redesign that met with a similarly furious response.
Probably the most notorious and consequential example involved Tropicana. In 2009, the brand rolled out a new look that included a full redesign of its familiar packaging and visual identity, dropping its orange-with-a-straw-in it logo — corny, perhaps, but very familiar — for a more stylish icon and a sans-serif type treatment. Fans howled online, but that probably mattered less than the reported 20 percent drop in retail sales. The redesign was withdrawn, and the brand went back to its old look.
Situations like this can unnerve clients, and this knowledge was certainly relevant to Mastercard when it decided this year to update its logo for the first time in more than 20 years. Raja Rajamannar, the global chief marketing and communications officer, says that the first parameter he gave his designer, Michael Bierut at Pentagram, “was not to mess things up.” The online crowd can get “pretty nasty,” he explains. “We don’t want to get mired in unnecessary controversy and negativity.”
This conservatism among clients can frustrate designers. “I was kind of brought up in this tradition that, you know, there’s nothing more inspiring than the blank slate, the open brief,” Bierut says. But over the years he has come to appreciate the challenge of “starting with a given,” particularly now.
“The last big period of redesign was the postwar era,” Bierut says. “There was this mania to make older companies look new and modern.” As a more corporate world emerged, the visual vernacular of mom-and-pop businesses looked quaint, and so design shifted from an emphasis on manufacturing things to selling more abstract forms of value. A railroad doesn’t run trains, the thinking went; it provides transportation — so instead of a representation of a locomotive, its more modern logo might rely on arrows and italic typography. More broadly, idiosyncratic or hand-drawn lettering gave way to stylized and minimal iconography and type treatments that projected far-flung and trustworthy power. “Corporate design was done as a command-and-control exercise,” he says, resulting in a master solution laid out in “a thick binder” prescribing how every branding element would appear.
By the ’80s and ’90s, that approach started to feel dated, suspicious and at odds with a vogue for more agile management theories. So in the last two decades, there has been a fresh wave of redesigns as companies have repositioned themselves in a more globalized, technologized marketplace. Mastercard is one of many examples of a company looking to update visual strategies designed with billboards and brick-and-mortar stores in mind for the age of social media and a transnational customer base.
Nevertheless, the specific dimensions of Mastercard’s “don’t mess it up” parameter included keeping the interlocking circles — one red, one yellow — that the brand has used for more than half a century. Bierut believes that this was wise: Unlike a book cover or a poster, a brand mark is “more like a building,” he says. “You don’t unveil it thinking it’s going to work once and then be on its way. It’s supposed to accrue value the longer it’s invested in.” The raw familiarity that builds up over years, which marketers refer to as “equity,” probably plays a bigger factor in our assessment of a supposedly great logo design than we realize. Bierut is tickled, for instance, by how many people seem to admire Target’s logo. “I can’t imagine if you went to your client whose name was Target and said, ‘I’ve got an idea,’ then you went away for a few weeks and came back with a circle with a dot in the middle, and an invoice,” he says. “The client would be skeptical — and the world at large would destroy you.”
For Mastercard, Pentagram got as creative as the brief allowed, offering dozens of yellow-and-red-circle variations — adding additional colors to suggest inclusivity, or a superminimal take presenting only the outlines of the interlocked rings. Rajamannar (and others at Mastercard, crosschecked by multiple rounds of market research) passed on those, opting for a treatment that amounted to a kind of reiteration of the existing mark. The colors became a little brighter, a set of stripes in their overlap was eliminated in favor of a single orange-y color and the name moved below the circles. Ultimately, in fact, the new symbol is designed to be able to stand alone, with no name at all; Rajamannar says testing conducted across 11 countries found 81 percent of respondents recognized the wordless version of the logo as Mastercard’s.
In short, the not-messing-it-up mission was deemed a success — and there was no notable backlash. “This kind of brand mark has become more ubiquitous than the designers of the ’60s and ’70s ever would have dreamed,” Bierut says, and that may explain a public interest in design that would have been a shock in that era. It should not be so surprising today; the design profession has been on a decades-long mission to have its work taken seriously across the culture. But now, having achieved what they wanted, many designers seem to wish the public would be more deferential — something Bierut finds amusing. “If designers claim to want people to be interested and invested in and care about design,” he says, “they sort of have to accept that interest on the terms of, you know, the audience.”
4. Where to Compromise
In 2011, Jamie Siminoff had just sold a start-up and was spending most of his days in his garage in Pacific Palisades, Calif., determined to come up with a new business concept. Tinkering with ideas including a gardening business and new conference-call technology, he soon became annoyed, because he could never hear his doorbell, and he kept missing visitors. So he “hacked together” a system that linked the bell to his phone. His wife told him that it was far more useful than the notions he was chasing in the garage. The idea evolved to include a camera and a motion detector — and thus the ability to monitor your front door from anywhere, with a smartphone, making the object as much about security as convenience.
The product he ended up with, Ring, is a good example of a broader phenomenon in the world of industrial design. The technology shifts that Brown and Rashid cite have quickened the pace of redesigns in more mundane, less grandiose ways. Thanks to the proliferation of cheap sensors, circuit boards, cameras and other components, practically every consumer good now seems susceptible to reinvention as a “smart object.” Even the path Siminoff traveled from concept to design was made easier by technology and start-up mania, first with the aid of a crowdfunding campaign, then with an unsuccessful but profile-raising appearance on “Shark Tank.”
Sometimes such a path results in a version of what the tech critic Evgeny Morozov calls “solutionism” — starting with a supposed breakthrough and then seeking out a supposed problem that it can hypothetically solve. And at times the presumed innovations in these tech-centric redesigns seem to run well ahead of their potential privacy and security pitfalls. (“Yes,” the tech site Motherboard reported last year, “your smart dildo can be hacked.”) But sometimes it results in a hit, like the widely celebrated update of the thermostat in internet-connected, app-controlled form created by the start-up Nest, which was ultimately bought by Google for $3.2 billion.
By his own account, Siminoff’s first stab at the product was a bit off. He called it Doorbot, and its look matched the geeky name: a vaguely sci-fi, curved object with a camera concealed by a spooky, bulbous protrusion. “That was the pride of the design,” Siminoff says now, laughing. He prototyped it in his garage with a couple of recent college graduates; none of them had a design background. The marketplace set him straight, he says: “No one wanted this big HAL 9000 thing on the front door.” He still believed in the object’s utility, but he realized he would need to redesign his redesign.
Siminoff found his way to Chris Loew, an industrial designer in Silicon Valley, with a long record in technology hardware; he worked on early versions of tablet products and spent 16 years at IDEO helping clients including Samsung and Oral-B. In more recent years he has been hired by a number of start-ups. Impressed by Siminoff, Loew also recognized the issues with Doorbot. “It was very gadgety,” he says, wryly. “You didn’t know if you were being shot with radiation or — you know, it’s not offensive, but you didn’t know what it was.” In short, it didn’t look like a doorbell, and even the most impressive technical capabilities have to be presented in a form that makes sense to the consumer.
In this case, that meant a design that resonated with basic home architecture. There were already serious technologized constraints: It had to accommodate a fairly large battery, a camera, a circuit board and a motion detector that required an opening of a specific size. And from a purely aesthetic perspective, the architectural setting imposed limits that might not apply to a free-standing product: Nobody really wants to tack a wild experiment in product design to a front door. Loew settled on a rectangular shape that would visually echo molding. “Everybody’s house is really just extruded shapes and planar shapes,” says Loew, who is now Ring’s lead product designer. The product comes in various finishes informed by classic door hardware, and is meant to be notable but not flashy.
The company has grown to 500 employees, with hundreds of thousands of installations already done. The only holdover from Doorbot is a circle around the button that glows blue when pressed.
In theory, the redesign begins with a problem. The problem might be specific or systemic or subjective. A logo makes a company’s image feel out of date. A familiar household object has been overtaken by new technology. A service has become too confusing for new users. And so on. The world is, after all, full of problems.
The human desire to solve problems fuels brand-new inventions too: The wheel, for example, eased conveyance significantly. But the redesign tends to address problems with, or caused by, dimensions of the human-designed world, and identifying such problems may be the designer’s most crucial skill. Redesigns fail when they address the wrong problem — or something that really wasn’t a problem in the first place. While progress may entail change, change does not necessarily guarantee progress. But a clever redesign, one that addresses the right problem in an intelligent fashion, improves the world, if just by a bit.
As an example in miniature of how the redesign is supposed to work, consider New York’s bike-share program. In 2014, Dani Simons, then the director of marketing for Citi Bike, visited a School of Visual Arts interaction-design class and presented it with a problem to solve. Citi Bike was selling plenty of annual memberships, but it was failing to attract enough “casual” riders, the sorts of one-off users who might rent a bike for just a day or a week. The class went into the field, observing and interviewing people at Citi Bike stations, and at their final meeting, the students presented Simons with their findings — and potential solutions.Simons was so impressed that she signed two students, Amy Wu and Luke Stern, to a three-month contract that summer. The two of them soon zeroed in on a particularly thorny design problem: the big, instructional decal on Citi Bike’s kiosks. Annual members used a key fob and had no reason to interact with the decal, but it was the gateway for casual users. Consisting mostly of text, the decals were dense and off-putting, especially to tourists uncomfortable with English. Some failed to understand that they were supposed to type in a code from a printed receipt to unlock a bike; instead, they tried to figure out how to insert the receipt itself into a slot on the docking station.
There was another, more prosaic reason that Stern and Wu focused on the decal: It was something they could actually change. Citi Bike is operated by a private firm, but New York’s Transportation Department oversees it, too, and the technology involves an external vendor. The decal, however, was produced in-house. So Stern and Wu proposed refashioning it, using a set of instructional pictograms loosely inspired by Ikea booklets. They tested several prototypes and endured baffled responses from Citi Bike users until eventually landing on a gridlike arrangement of visuals that people found intuitive. Simons and the Transportation Department signed off on a final version, and it was installed on the city’s 300-plus Citi Bike stations. Wu checked the service’s publicly available user data a month later and discovered that casual ridership had increased about 14 percent. “It was a little bit surreal,” Stern recalls. “We can actually make a difference.”
Indeed, this is the platonic ideal of the redesign: A designer sees a problem, proposes a solution, makes a difference. Such tidy narratives fuel a reigning ideology in which every object, symbol or pool of information is just another design problem awaiting some solution. The thermostat, the fire extinguisher, the toothbrush, the car dashboard — all have been redesigned, whether anybody was clamoring for their alteration or not.
This hunger for change has been a boon for firms like IDEO. Tim Brown, the company’s president and chief executive, has overseen IDEO’s steady expansion from product design to interactive and service design for businesses like Bank of America and Microsoft, and in more recent years even for municipalities and governments. He has been a vocal proponent of the idea that “design thinking” can be applied to just about any problem. “There are two takes on the redesign,” Brown says. “The glass-half-empty take on redesign is, ‘Oh, we’re unnecessarily redesigning a chair,’ or a lamp, or whatever.”
The glass-half-full take requires a broader perspective: “The need to redesign is really dependent on how fit for purpose the thing in question is,” Brown says. In his thinking, much of our world is built around systems designed to respond to the social structures and technologies of the industrial age. Everything from systems of education and health care to the design of cities and modes of transportation, he says, all trace their roots to a drastically different era and ought to be fundamentally rethought for the one we live in now. “I think we’ve potentially never been in a period of history where there are so many things that are no longer fit for purpose,” he says. “And therefore the idea of redesign is entirely appropriate, I think — even though it’s extremely difficult.”
2. What to Change
You don’t have to listen to Karim Rashid for very long to get a sense that he thinks pretty much every single manifestation of the built environment needs to be redesigned. Known for his colorful personal and professional style, he has had a long run as one of the most famous industrial designers in America. He believes design is a fundamentally social act that makes the world a better place. But it is also, he points out, a business. So in practice, most redesigns begin with a client; without one, not much happens. He has worked with many of them — on furniture, packaging, gadgets, housewares, luxury goods, even condos and hotels. But he has learned that even having a client does not guarantee that any given redesign will ever make it out of renderings and prototypes and into the real world. “People say I’m prolific,” he says. “Can you imagine if all the other stuff got to go to market?”
As Rashid sees it, so many of the things that surround us bear cumbersome vestiges of the past. “The world is full of this kind of kitsch history — history that has nothing to do with the world we live in now,” he says. He points to a redesign project of his that fizzled, a complete rethinking of the business-class tableware for Delta Air Lines. His proposal was bold: His bowls had sharp angles that echoed Delta’s triangular logo, his trays had subtle recesses that anchored dishes in place and his wineglasses skipped the stem in favor of a tapered shape with a wide base.
“The stem on a wineglass is meaningless,” Rashid says. He dismisses the conventional argument that it prevents the drinker’s hand from interfering with wine’s ideal temperature; to have the slightest such effect, he claims, you’d have to wrap your palm around the bowl for 20 straight minutes. The stem is actually a leftover artifact, he says, from centuries ago, when goblets made of metal had high stems to signal status and wealth. This design quirk remained after we switched to glass, Rashid says. Making wineglasses look a certain way because that’s how they have always looked is a classic example of privileging form over function. “I’m sitting in first class or business class on an airplane with turbulence,” Rashid says, “with a wineglass with a stem on it — do you understand? It’s so stupid, isn’t it?”
His proposed redesigns were striking, but they had to pass muster with the service-item maker, the flight attendants’ union and Delta itself — which ultimately declined to move forward with the concepts Rashid proposed. “It was all rejected,” he tells me, with a sigh. “Because it doesn’t look like domestic tableware.”
Rashid loves to “break archetypes,” in effect redesigning a whole object category. But the hurdles to doing so involve practicality as well as taste. More recently, he designed the Solarin mobile phone for Sirin Labs. It is equipped with extreme encryption capabilities and made with wealthy, privacy-obsessed customers in mind. It costs an eye-popping $12,000 and up. The client had a sky’s-the-limit attitude about imbuing the phone with a truly distinct form.
Rashid proposed an oval shape. “It would fit perfectly in your hand,” he says. His concept made it to prototype, and “everybody loved the oval phone.” But it turned out that only a handful of factories do smartphone glass assembly, and none were willing to retool an entire production line to accommodate a relatively small client. Moreover, existing operating systems are all designed to work in a grid format. The phone ended up with pronounced beveling at the edges, but was still fundamentally a rectangle. “I was so, so disappointed,” Rashid says. “I tried every trick.” Sounding almost wistful, he recalls a similar misadventure: an oval-shaped television set he designed for Samsung. “They showed it in some focus group, and it bombed,” he says, laughing. “People didn’t like the idea of an oval television. I have no idea why.”
3. What to Keep
I know why. And really, so does Rashid. As much as we are attracted to the new, we simultaneously cling to the familiar. This tension means that some redesigns — particularly in the realm of graphic design — can inspire surprisingly visceral public backlash. Earlier this year, for instance, Instagram updated its logo and app icon, simplifying the design and making it more colorful. The chorus of online moaning and mockery that followed grew so loud that it was actually reported on by The Times, which called it a “freak out.” Instagram didn’t budge, but a similar backlash in 2010 caused the Gap to retract plans for a new logo it had floated online. The University of California pulled back key elements of a redesign that met with a similarly furious response.
Probably the most notorious and consequential example involved Tropicana. In 2009, the brand rolled out a new look that included a full redesign of its familiar packaging and visual identity, dropping its orange-with-a-straw-in it logo — corny, perhaps, but very familiar — for a more stylish icon and a sans-serif type treatment. Fans howled online, but that probably mattered less than the reported 20 percent drop in retail sales. The redesign was withdrawn, and the brand went back to its old look.
Situations like this can unnerve clients, and this knowledge was certainly relevant to Mastercard when it decided this year to update its logo for the first time in more than 20 years. Raja Rajamannar, the global chief marketing and communications officer, says that the first parameter he gave his designer, Michael Bierut at Pentagram, “was not to mess things up.” The online crowd can get “pretty nasty,” he explains. “We don’t want to get mired in unnecessary controversy and negativity.”
This conservatism among clients can frustrate designers. “I was kind of brought up in this tradition that, you know, there’s nothing more inspiring than the blank slate, the open brief,” Bierut says. But over the years he has come to appreciate the challenge of “starting with a given,” particularly now.
“The last big period of redesign was the postwar era,” Bierut says. “There was this mania to make older companies look new and modern.” As a more corporate world emerged, the visual vernacular of mom-and-pop businesses looked quaint, and so design shifted from an emphasis on manufacturing things to selling more abstract forms of value. A railroad doesn’t run trains, the thinking went; it provides transportation — so instead of a representation of a locomotive, its more modern logo might rely on arrows and italic typography. More broadly, idiosyncratic or hand-drawn lettering gave way to stylized and minimal iconography and type treatments that projected far-flung and trustworthy power. “Corporate design was done as a command-and-control exercise,” he says, resulting in a master solution laid out in “a thick binder” prescribing how every branding element would appear.By the ’80s and ’90s, that approach started to feel dated, suspicious and at odds with a vogue for more agile management theories. So in the last two decades, there has been a fresh wave of redesigns as companies have repositioned themselves in a more globalized, technologized marketplace. Mastercard is one of many examples of a company looking to update visual strategies designed with billboards and brick-and-mortar stores in mind for the age of social media and a transnational customer base.
Nevertheless, the specific dimensions of Mastercard’s “don’t mess it up” parameter included keeping the interlocking circles — one red, one yellow — that the brand has used for more than half a century. Bierut believes that this was wise: Unlike a book cover or a poster, a brand mark is “more like a building,” he says. “You don’t unveil it thinking it’s going to work once and then be on its way. It’s supposed to accrue value the longer it’s invested in.” The raw familiarity that builds up over years, which marketers refer to as “equity,” probably plays a bigger factor in our assessment of a supposedly great logo design than we realize. Bierut is tickled, for instance, by how many people seem to admire Target’s logo. “I can’t imagine if you went to your client whose name was Target and said, ‘I’ve got an idea,’ then you went away for a few weeks and came back with a circle with a dot in the middle, and an invoice,” he says. “The client would be skeptical — and the world at large would destroy you.”
For Mastercard, Pentagram got as creative as the brief allowed, offering dozens of yellow-and-red-circle variations — adding additional colors to suggest inclusivity, or a superminimal take presenting only the outlines of the interlocked rings. Rajamannar (and others at Mastercard, crosschecked by multiple rounds of market research) passed on those, opting for a treatment that amounted to a kind of reiteration of the existing mark. The colors became a little brighter, a set of stripes in their overlap was eliminated in favor of a single orange-y color and the name moved below the circles. Ultimately, in fact, the new symbol is designed to be able to stand alone, with no name at all; Rajamannar says testing conducted across 11 countries found 81 percent of respondents recognized the wordless version of the logo as Mastercard’s.
In short, the not-messing-it-up mission was deemed a success — and there was no notable backlash. “This kind of brand mark has become more ubiquitous than the designers of the ’60s and ’70s ever would have dreamed,” Bierut says, and that may explain a public interest in design that would have been a shock in that era. It should not be so surprising today; the design profession has been on a decades-long mission to have its work taken seriously across the culture. But now, having achieved what they wanted, many designers seem to wish the public would be more deferential — something Bierut finds amusing. “If designers claim to want people to be interested and invested in and care about design,” he says, “they sort of have to accept that interest on the terms of, you know, the audience.”
4. Where to Compromise
In 2011, Jamie Siminoff had just sold a start-up and was spending most of his days in his garage in Pacific Palisades, Calif., determined to come up with a new business concept. Tinkering with ideas including a gardening business and new conference-call technology, he soon became annoyed, because he could never hear his doorbell, and he kept missing visitors. So he “hacked together” a system that linked the bell to his phone. His wife told him that it was far more useful than the notions he was chasing in the garage. The idea evolved to include a camera and a motion detector — and thus the ability to monitor your front door from anywhere, with a smartphone, making the object as much about security as convenience.
The product he ended up with, Ring, is a good example of a broader phenomenon in the world of industrial design. The technology shifts that Brown and Rashid cite have quickened the pace of redesigns in more mundane, less grandiose ways. Thanks to the proliferation of cheap sensors, circuit boards, cameras and other components, practically every consumer good now seems susceptible to reinvention as a “smart object.” Even the path Siminoff traveled from concept to design was made easier by technology and start-up mania, first with the aid of a crowdfunding campaign, then with an unsuccessful but profile-raising appearance on “Shark Tank.”
Sometimes such a path results in a version of what the tech critic Evgeny Morozov calls “solutionism” — starting with a supposed breakthrough and then seeking out a supposed problem that it can hypothetically solve. And at times the presumed innovations in these tech-centric redesigns seem to run well ahead of their potential privacy and security pitfalls. (“Yes,” the tech site Motherboard reported last year, “your smart dildo can be hacked.”) But sometimes it results in a hit, like the widely celebrated update of the thermostat in internet-connected, app-controlled form created by the start-up Nest, which was ultimately bought by Google for $3.2 billion.
By his own account, Siminoff’s first stab at the product was a bit off. He called it Doorbot, and its look matched the geeky name: a vaguely sci-fi, curved object with a camera concealed by a spooky, bulbous protrusion. “That was the pride of the design,” Siminoff says now, laughing. He prototyped it in his garage with a couple of recent college graduates; none of them had a design background. The marketplace set him straight, he says: “No one wanted this big HAL 9000 thing on the front door.” He still believed in the object’s utility, but he realized he would need to redesign his redesign.
Siminoff found his way to Chris Loew, an industrial designer in Silicon Valley, with a long record in technology hardware; he worked on early versions of tablet products and spent 16 years at IDEO helping clients including Samsung and Oral-B. In more recent years he has been hired by a number of start-ups. Impressed by Siminoff, Loew also recognized the issues with Doorbot. “It was very gadgety,” he says, wryly. “You didn’t know if you were being shot with radiation or — you know, it’s not offensive, but you didn’t know what it was.” In short, it didn’t look like a doorbell, and even the most impressive technical capabilities have to be presented in a form that makes sense to the consumer.
In this case, that meant a design that resonated with basic home architecture. There were already serious technologized constraints: It had to accommodate a fairly large battery, a camera, a circuit board and a motion detector that required an opening of a specific size. And from a purely aesthetic perspective, the architectural setting imposed limits that might not apply to a free-standing product: Nobody really wants to tack a wild experiment in product design to a front door. Loew settled on a rectangular shape that would visually echo molding. “Everybody’s house is really just extruded shapes and planar shapes,” says Loew, who is now Ring’s lead product designer. The product comes in various finishes informed by classic door hardware, and is meant to be notable but not flashy.
The company has grown to 500 employees, with hundreds of thousands of installations already done. The only holdover from Doorbot is a circle around the button that glows blue when pressed.
The Wisdom of Spock
[ed. "After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting."]
A Little Talk in Downing St.
[ed. And the media spent so much time and attention on it — always with the assertion that although there might not be anything nefarious or criminal there, it “raises questions” and so therefore had to get extended front-page treatment every time they could find an excuse to bring up — that this absurdly trivial matter became without question the single most important issue of the campaign. So Donald Trump, the most unqualified, ignorant, authoritarian, impulsive, reckless candidate in history is going to be president of the United States in part because, and let me repeat this, Hillary Clinton used the wrong email address. - Paul Waldman, WP via:]
How do you sign off an email? How, when writing to someone who is more than an acquaintance and less than an intimate, do you show that you mean well without being intrusively familiar? There is no common scale to draw on. You can make someone uncomfortable by sending them ‘xox’ in a work email when all they expected was a ‘cheers’. A late friend of mine always signed off ‘all good wishes’ – I felt that hit the right convivial-but-distant note. I started borrowing it, then ramped it up to ‘all best wishes’, fearing that ‘good’ might be interpreted as lukewarm, but now I am mildly regretting the inflation. I rattle out yet another round of doubly superlative ‘all best wishes’ and feel like Tchaikovsky giving the direction pppppp in his Symphony No. 6 when ppp would have done just as well. But it’s also possible to dial things down too far until a sign-off becomes an insult. The Twitter account ‘Very British Problems’ cites the problem of ‘receiving an email ending in “regards” and wondering what you’ve done to cause so much anger’.
In the age of letter-writing, deciding how to start and finish was so much simpler. In 1926, Fowler listed the various ways to end a proper letter:
My Darling Mr Asquith is a deeply sympathetic and scrupulously researched biography of the socialite Venetia Stanley (1887-1948). One of its main themes is the complex gradation of affection that could be expressed by different salutations at the start of letters between very posh associates in Edwardian and post-Edwardian times. In the letters of love and friendship exchanged between the members of Herbert Asquith’s circle – he was the Liberal prime minister from 1908 to 1916 – ‘dearest’ meant something different from ‘darling’ and ‘my darling’ was something else again. As Stefan Buczacki parses it, plain ‘darling’ was so commonly used as to be ‘fairly meaningless’ and so if you wanted to show that you truly had feelings for the person you were addressing the ante had to be upped. Adding a possessive was one way of making ‘darling’ more meaningful: ‘My darling’ carried ‘a slightly different connotation, and ‘My own darling’ a different one again. Another way was to go for the superlative: ‘“darlingest”, or “my darlingest”, were particularly affectionate, if ungrammatical,’ Buczacki notes.
When Asquith wrote to his second wife, Margot (his first wife died of typhoid in 1891), she was ‘my own darling’. But when, as a man in his sixties, he wrote to the Hon. Venetia Stanley, the twentysomething woman with whom he was besotted from 1912 to 1915, he employed fifty shades of ‘darlings’ and ‘beloveds’, ranging from ‘my very own darling’ to ‘most loved’ to ‘my darling of darlings’. These darlings multiplied across nearly six hundred love letters written by Asquith to Venetia, totalling nearly 300,000 words.
Venetia was the youngest daughter of the 4th Lord Stanley of Alderley, who, like most of the men in Venetia’s life, had been a Liberal MP, in his case between 1880 and 1885. She was the cousin of Clementine Churchill; before Clementine married Churchill some thought that Venetia and Winston might make a match. She had long brown hair, a deep plummy voice, and was later said by Isaiah Berlin, who met her in Cambridge in the 1930s, to be a ‘handsome, smart, awful woman’. Whatever Venetia’s other callings – in middle age she took up aviation, and she had a passion for keeping strange animals, including a Syrian brown bear called Lancelot – her greatest talent seems to have been as a confidante. According to Buczacki, she addressed ‘almost everyone’ as ‘darling’ or ‘my darling’, regardless of her feelings for them, which stood her in good stead on the social scene. But Asquith took her ‘darlings’ to heart.
Even by the standards of philandering old politicians, the outpouring of letters from Asquith to Venetia was extraordinary. When the letters started in spring 1912, there was nothing particularly political about them. Buczacki summarises the typical structure as ‘comments on the weather, where he was, where he was due to visit, snippets about his family, where and with whom he had dined, what he thought Venetia should be reading, a few literary or classical brainteasers for her to resolve, a wish for him to see her at the earliest opportunity and an affectionate valediction’. Often he wrote, in fairly conventional terms, about her physical charms or plans to take her out in his Laundalette car, which was one of his favourite fumbling grounds, since he couldn’t drive and therefore had to sit in the back, hands free. ‘Shall we go for a little drive, or will you come to Downing St & have a talk?’ he inquired in one letter. Other letters recalled snatched moments together. ‘It comes back to me – like a wave – that supreme half hour we spent in the gloaming on the wooden bench in the little garden.’
Increasingly, however, he interspersed his sweet nothings to Venetia with things that were ‘secret’, ‘very secret’ or ‘most secret’, to do with state business. A letter in which he lamented a new yellow dress that Venetia had bought – he jested that it was a ‘yellow peril’ – also contained his thoughts on the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the Finance Bill and Sylvia Pankhurst. Venetia, he was glad to find, shared his opposition to votes for women. He confided to her his anxiety about Irish Home Rule (it was Asquith who introduced the Third Home Rule Bill in 1912, 1913 and 1914 and then postponed it when war started). In July 1914, he warned Venetia that the situation in Europe was ‘as bad as it can possibly be’ and not helped by the Austrians being ‘quite the stupidest people in Europe (as the Italians are the most perfidious)’.
In the third month of the war, Asquith warned Venetia – ‘strictly between you and me’ – that Britain was weak in arms and ammunition in the event of a German invasion. Venetia was kept fully briefed on secret discussions that Asquith had with the Committee of Imperial Defence. Sometimes he even sent bundles of papers to accompany the letters, the better for her to understand them. He occasionally wrote to her during cabinet meetings and once during a War Council meeting. During most of the time Asquith was besotted with her, she was also being courted by Edwin Montagu, a Liberal MP whom she would go on to marry. It’s quite possible that Asquith and Montagu sat in the same cabinet meetings, both writing letters to Venetia. When war started, and she took on work as a nurse at the London Hospital, Asquith wrote to her all the more often. ‘During Venetia’s three months as a probationer nurse,’ Buczacki notes, ‘Prime Minister Asquith, while leading the largest empire in the history of the world in a global war, wrote to her 147 times, occasionally sending four letters in a single day.’ During one seven-day period, Asquith wrote Venetia 14 letters amounting to ten thousand words in all; page after page was filled with secret details about the conflict.
The question is why Asquith – a relatively cautious politician whose flaws, at least during the war, had more to do with a lack of decisiveness than excessive daring – would have risked national security and his own reputation so recklessly. Then again, he wasn’t the first or last politician with an urge to expose himself in ways that might ruin him. When I watched the recent documentary about Anthony Weiner, the American politician who scuppered first his congressional career and then his bid to become mayor of New York City with a series of ‘sexting’ scandals in which he was found to have sent explicit photos of himself to several women, I kept wondering why he had to involve another human being in his predilections. Wouldn’t a mirror have done just as well? But maybe the risk of self-sabotage is part of what drove him on. Asquith, too, was aware that he might be ruined if his letters to Venetia fell into the wrong hands. He told Venetia he was ‘certain’ that she wouldn’t help any scurrilous biographers by passing on his letters, which shows that he knew it was a possibility.
More straightforwardly, people do crazy things out of sexual frustration and it may be that Asquith was ejaculating words in the direction of Venetia Stanley because he couldn’t offload anything else.
How do you sign off an email? How, when writing to someone who is more than an acquaintance and less than an intimate, do you show that you mean well without being intrusively familiar? There is no common scale to draw on. You can make someone uncomfortable by sending them ‘xox’ in a work email when all they expected was a ‘cheers’. A late friend of mine always signed off ‘all good wishes’ – I felt that hit the right convivial-but-distant note. I started borrowing it, then ramped it up to ‘all best wishes’, fearing that ‘good’ might be interpreted as lukewarm, but now I am mildly regretting the inflation. I rattle out yet another round of doubly superlative ‘all best wishes’ and feel like Tchaikovsky giving the direction pppppp in his Symphony No. 6 when ppp would have done just as well. But it’s also possible to dial things down too far until a sign-off becomes an insult. The Twitter account ‘Very British Problems’ cites the problem of ‘receiving an email ending in “regards” and wondering what you’ve done to cause so much anger’.
In the age of letter-writing, deciding how to start and finish was so much simpler. In 1926, Fowler listed the various ways to end a proper letter:Yours faithfully: To unknown person on business.
Yours truly: To slight acquaintance.
Yours very truly: Ceremonious but cordial.
Yours sincerely: In invitations & friendly but not intimate letters.But that didn’t solve every dilemma. In an age of ritualised courtship and repressed emotions the difficulty was more likely to have to do with intimate letters than those written to business acquaintances.
My Darling Mr Asquith is a deeply sympathetic and scrupulously researched biography of the socialite Venetia Stanley (1887-1948). One of its main themes is the complex gradation of affection that could be expressed by different salutations at the start of letters between very posh associates in Edwardian and post-Edwardian times. In the letters of love and friendship exchanged between the members of Herbert Asquith’s circle – he was the Liberal prime minister from 1908 to 1916 – ‘dearest’ meant something different from ‘darling’ and ‘my darling’ was something else again. As Stefan Buczacki parses it, plain ‘darling’ was so commonly used as to be ‘fairly meaningless’ and so if you wanted to show that you truly had feelings for the person you were addressing the ante had to be upped. Adding a possessive was one way of making ‘darling’ more meaningful: ‘My darling’ carried ‘a slightly different connotation, and ‘My own darling’ a different one again. Another way was to go for the superlative: ‘“darlingest”, or “my darlingest”, were particularly affectionate, if ungrammatical,’ Buczacki notes.
When Asquith wrote to his second wife, Margot (his first wife died of typhoid in 1891), she was ‘my own darling’. But when, as a man in his sixties, he wrote to the Hon. Venetia Stanley, the twentysomething woman with whom he was besotted from 1912 to 1915, he employed fifty shades of ‘darlings’ and ‘beloveds’, ranging from ‘my very own darling’ to ‘most loved’ to ‘my darling of darlings’. These darlings multiplied across nearly six hundred love letters written by Asquith to Venetia, totalling nearly 300,000 words.
Venetia was the youngest daughter of the 4th Lord Stanley of Alderley, who, like most of the men in Venetia’s life, had been a Liberal MP, in his case between 1880 and 1885. She was the cousin of Clementine Churchill; before Clementine married Churchill some thought that Venetia and Winston might make a match. She had long brown hair, a deep plummy voice, and was later said by Isaiah Berlin, who met her in Cambridge in the 1930s, to be a ‘handsome, smart, awful woman’. Whatever Venetia’s other callings – in middle age she took up aviation, and she had a passion for keeping strange animals, including a Syrian brown bear called Lancelot – her greatest talent seems to have been as a confidante. According to Buczacki, she addressed ‘almost everyone’ as ‘darling’ or ‘my darling’, regardless of her feelings for them, which stood her in good stead on the social scene. But Asquith took her ‘darlings’ to heart.
Even by the standards of philandering old politicians, the outpouring of letters from Asquith to Venetia was extraordinary. When the letters started in spring 1912, there was nothing particularly political about them. Buczacki summarises the typical structure as ‘comments on the weather, where he was, where he was due to visit, snippets about his family, where and with whom he had dined, what he thought Venetia should be reading, a few literary or classical brainteasers for her to resolve, a wish for him to see her at the earliest opportunity and an affectionate valediction’. Often he wrote, in fairly conventional terms, about her physical charms or plans to take her out in his Laundalette car, which was one of his favourite fumbling grounds, since he couldn’t drive and therefore had to sit in the back, hands free. ‘Shall we go for a little drive, or will you come to Downing St & have a talk?’ he inquired in one letter. Other letters recalled snatched moments together. ‘It comes back to me – like a wave – that supreme half hour we spent in the gloaming on the wooden bench in the little garden.’
Increasingly, however, he interspersed his sweet nothings to Venetia with things that were ‘secret’, ‘very secret’ or ‘most secret’, to do with state business. A letter in which he lamented a new yellow dress that Venetia had bought – he jested that it was a ‘yellow peril’ – also contained his thoughts on the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the Finance Bill and Sylvia Pankhurst. Venetia, he was glad to find, shared his opposition to votes for women. He confided to her his anxiety about Irish Home Rule (it was Asquith who introduced the Third Home Rule Bill in 1912, 1913 and 1914 and then postponed it when war started). In July 1914, he warned Venetia that the situation in Europe was ‘as bad as it can possibly be’ and not helped by the Austrians being ‘quite the stupidest people in Europe (as the Italians are the most perfidious)’.
In the third month of the war, Asquith warned Venetia – ‘strictly between you and me’ – that Britain was weak in arms and ammunition in the event of a German invasion. Venetia was kept fully briefed on secret discussions that Asquith had with the Committee of Imperial Defence. Sometimes he even sent bundles of papers to accompany the letters, the better for her to understand them. He occasionally wrote to her during cabinet meetings and once during a War Council meeting. During most of the time Asquith was besotted with her, she was also being courted by Edwin Montagu, a Liberal MP whom she would go on to marry. It’s quite possible that Asquith and Montagu sat in the same cabinet meetings, both writing letters to Venetia. When war started, and she took on work as a nurse at the London Hospital, Asquith wrote to her all the more often. ‘During Venetia’s three months as a probationer nurse,’ Buczacki notes, ‘Prime Minister Asquith, while leading the largest empire in the history of the world in a global war, wrote to her 147 times, occasionally sending four letters in a single day.’ During one seven-day period, Asquith wrote Venetia 14 letters amounting to ten thousand words in all; page after page was filled with secret details about the conflict.
The question is why Asquith – a relatively cautious politician whose flaws, at least during the war, had more to do with a lack of decisiveness than excessive daring – would have risked national security and his own reputation so recklessly. Then again, he wasn’t the first or last politician with an urge to expose himself in ways that might ruin him. When I watched the recent documentary about Anthony Weiner, the American politician who scuppered first his congressional career and then his bid to become mayor of New York City with a series of ‘sexting’ scandals in which he was found to have sent explicit photos of himself to several women, I kept wondering why he had to involve another human being in his predilections. Wouldn’t a mirror have done just as well? But maybe the risk of self-sabotage is part of what drove him on. Asquith, too, was aware that he might be ruined if his letters to Venetia fell into the wrong hands. He told Venetia he was ‘certain’ that she wouldn’t help any scurrilous biographers by passing on his letters, which shows that he knew it was a possibility.
More straightforwardly, people do crazy things out of sexual frustration and it may be that Asquith was ejaculating words in the direction of Venetia Stanley because he couldn’t offload anything else.
by Bee Wilson, LRB | Read more:
Image: Margot Asquith and Venetia Stanley at the Scott-Sackville trial (1913)
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
Why You Won’t Get Your Day in Court
Over the past few decades, ordinary US citizens have increasingly been denied effective access to their courts. There are many reasons for this. One is the ever greater cost of hiring a lawyer. A second factor is the increased expense, apart from legal fees, that a litigant must pay to pursue a lawsuit to conclusion. A third factor is increased unwillingness of lawyers to take a case on a contingent-fee basis when the anticipated monetary award is modest. A fourth factor is the decline of unions and other institutions that provide their members with free legal representation. A fifth factor is the imposition of mandatory arbitration. A sixth factor is judicial hostility to class action suits. A seventh factor is the increasing diversion of legal disputes to regulatory agencies. An eighth factor, in criminal cases, is the vastly increased risk of a heavy penalty in going to trial.
For these and other reasons, many Americans with ordinary legal disputes never get the day in court that they imagined they were guaranteed by the law. A further result is that most legal disputes are rarely decided by judges, and almost never by juries. And still another result is that the function of the judiciary as a check on the power of the executive and legislative branches and as an independent forum for the resolution of legal disputes has substantially diminished—with the all-too-willing acquiescence of the judiciary itself.
Some of this may seem surprising to people accustomed to hearing about overburdened courts with overcrowded dockets. These very real burdens partly reflect the decades-old refusal of many legislatures to provide funds for new courts and new judges at a rate remotely comparable to the increase in population and the corresponding increase in cases. But aside from these facts, a closer look at changes in the courts’ dockets reveals some disturbing trends.
Until 1970, according to statistics compiled by the National Center for State Courts, the great majority of individuals who brought or defended lawsuits in state courts were represented by lawyers. But today as many as two thirds of all individual civil litigants in state trial courts are representing themselves, without a lawyer. Indeed, in some states, an astonishing 90 percent of all family law and housing law cases—which are the most common legal disputes for most Americans—involve at least one party who is not represented by a lawyer.
Individuals not represented by lawyers lose cases at a considerably higher rate than similar individuals who are represented by counsel. In mortgage foreclosure cases, for example, you are twice as likely to lose your home if you are unrepresented by counsel. Or to give a different kind of example, if you are a survivor of domestic violence, your odds of obtaining a protective order fall by over 50 percent if you are without a lawyer. While hard statistics are not available for every kind of case, surveys of state and federal judges repeatedly show that they are quite certain that parties unrepresented by counsel fare far worse than those who are represented by counsel, even when the judge tries to compensate for counsel’s absence.
This is hardly surprising. Unlike most European legal systems, the American legal system is an “adversary system,” where, in Chief Justice John Roberts’s words, the judge simply serves as an “umpire” determining which of the contestants has won the match. While the analogy may be overstated, the fact remains that very few laypersons, lacking a lawyer’s legal education or familiarity with the intricacies of modern law, can hope to compete with a party represented by a lawyer. As a practical matter, such unrepresented litigants are effectively denied a fair day in court.
This is bad enough when the unrepresented litigant is a plaintiff who has chosen to go to court without a lawyer because she cannot afford one. But increasingly, the unrepresented parties are defendants who were hauled into court by institutions well supplied with lawyers. For example, the most immediate impact of the Great Recession on the courts was a huge increase in foreclosure proceedings brought by banks and other mortgage lenders against those who had defaulted on their mortgages. These hapless homeowners, who in many cases had been inveigled by mortgage brokers into taking out excessive mortgages on which they inevitably defaulted, were now facing foreclosure without remotely having the money to retain a lawyer to defend them.
Despite the recent improvement in the economy, this peril persists. In New York State, for example, almost one third of all state court civil cases brought in 2015 were foreclosure actions; and in these, despite increased efforts by public interest groups to provide legal representation, nearly 40 percent of the defendants still were unrepresented. The same trend can also be seen in eviction proceedings brought against tenants. In New York City’s Housing Court, for example, 70 percent of tenant defendants who were sued in 2015 were unrepresented by counsel.
More generally, most observers agree that the primary reason so many Americans are unrepresented in court is that even people of moderate means simply cannot afford a lawyer. The provision of legal services has never operated according to free-market principles. Lawyers comprise a guild to which there are significant barriers to entry, not least the huge expense of a legal education. But in the past few decades, the price of hiring a lawyer to handle an everyday dispute has risen at a rate much greater than the average increase in income or wages. Thus, between 1985 and 2012 the average billing rate for law firm partners in the US increased from $112 per hour to $536 per hour, and for associate lawyers from $79 per hour to $370 per hour. These billing rates increased at more than three times the rate of inflation during the same period.
Economists differ about the reasons for this large increase in the price of legal help. But among the causes is a great increase in legal specialization. A corollary is that the “family lawyer” has become even more rare than the “family doctor.” But whereas the ordinary American can usually get decent health care under insurance provided through his employer or, more recently, the state, affordable legal insurance remains a rarity. The result is not only that a very large number of Americans who go to court, or are hauled into court, are unrepresented by counsel, but also that an unknown but probably even larger number of Americans who might otherwise seek legal redress for wrongs done to them simply cannot afford a lawyer and choose instead to forgo justice altogether.
Further still, even those individuals who can afford counsel rarely get their day in court. Rather, in the overwhelming majority of cases, they settle with their adversaries before the merits of their cases ever get heard. This is true even in federal courts, where, because of lighter dockets, there is much less institutional pressure to settle. Nevertheless, whereas in 1938 about 19 percent of all federal civil cases went to trial, by 1962 that rate had declined to 11.5 percent and by 2015 it had declined to an abysmal 1.1 percent. Although the data for state civil cases are less ample, it appears that in state courts the situation is even worse, with fewer than 1 percent of them now going to trial. And while it is true that some of the remaining 99 percent of cases are resolved by motions made in court and accepted by a judge, in the majority of cases the parties simply settle without any judge or jury reaching a decision on the merits.
by Jed S. Rakoff, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Honoré Daumier, 1846
For these and other reasons, many Americans with ordinary legal disputes never get the day in court that they imagined they were guaranteed by the law. A further result is that most legal disputes are rarely decided by judges, and almost never by juries. And still another result is that the function of the judiciary as a check on the power of the executive and legislative branches and as an independent forum for the resolution of legal disputes has substantially diminished—with the all-too-willing acquiescence of the judiciary itself.Some of this may seem surprising to people accustomed to hearing about overburdened courts with overcrowded dockets. These very real burdens partly reflect the decades-old refusal of many legislatures to provide funds for new courts and new judges at a rate remotely comparable to the increase in population and the corresponding increase in cases. But aside from these facts, a closer look at changes in the courts’ dockets reveals some disturbing trends.
Until 1970, according to statistics compiled by the National Center for State Courts, the great majority of individuals who brought or defended lawsuits in state courts were represented by lawyers. But today as many as two thirds of all individual civil litigants in state trial courts are representing themselves, without a lawyer. Indeed, in some states, an astonishing 90 percent of all family law and housing law cases—which are the most common legal disputes for most Americans—involve at least one party who is not represented by a lawyer.
Individuals not represented by lawyers lose cases at a considerably higher rate than similar individuals who are represented by counsel. In mortgage foreclosure cases, for example, you are twice as likely to lose your home if you are unrepresented by counsel. Or to give a different kind of example, if you are a survivor of domestic violence, your odds of obtaining a protective order fall by over 50 percent if you are without a lawyer. While hard statistics are not available for every kind of case, surveys of state and federal judges repeatedly show that they are quite certain that parties unrepresented by counsel fare far worse than those who are represented by counsel, even when the judge tries to compensate for counsel’s absence.
This is hardly surprising. Unlike most European legal systems, the American legal system is an “adversary system,” where, in Chief Justice John Roberts’s words, the judge simply serves as an “umpire” determining which of the contestants has won the match. While the analogy may be overstated, the fact remains that very few laypersons, lacking a lawyer’s legal education or familiarity with the intricacies of modern law, can hope to compete with a party represented by a lawyer. As a practical matter, such unrepresented litigants are effectively denied a fair day in court.
This is bad enough when the unrepresented litigant is a plaintiff who has chosen to go to court without a lawyer because she cannot afford one. But increasingly, the unrepresented parties are defendants who were hauled into court by institutions well supplied with lawyers. For example, the most immediate impact of the Great Recession on the courts was a huge increase in foreclosure proceedings brought by banks and other mortgage lenders against those who had defaulted on their mortgages. These hapless homeowners, who in many cases had been inveigled by mortgage brokers into taking out excessive mortgages on which they inevitably defaulted, were now facing foreclosure without remotely having the money to retain a lawyer to defend them.
Despite the recent improvement in the economy, this peril persists. In New York State, for example, almost one third of all state court civil cases brought in 2015 were foreclosure actions; and in these, despite increased efforts by public interest groups to provide legal representation, nearly 40 percent of the defendants still were unrepresented. The same trend can also be seen in eviction proceedings brought against tenants. In New York City’s Housing Court, for example, 70 percent of tenant defendants who were sued in 2015 were unrepresented by counsel.
More generally, most observers agree that the primary reason so many Americans are unrepresented in court is that even people of moderate means simply cannot afford a lawyer. The provision of legal services has never operated according to free-market principles. Lawyers comprise a guild to which there are significant barriers to entry, not least the huge expense of a legal education. But in the past few decades, the price of hiring a lawyer to handle an everyday dispute has risen at a rate much greater than the average increase in income or wages. Thus, between 1985 and 2012 the average billing rate for law firm partners in the US increased from $112 per hour to $536 per hour, and for associate lawyers from $79 per hour to $370 per hour. These billing rates increased at more than three times the rate of inflation during the same period.
Economists differ about the reasons for this large increase in the price of legal help. But among the causes is a great increase in legal specialization. A corollary is that the “family lawyer” has become even more rare than the “family doctor.” But whereas the ordinary American can usually get decent health care under insurance provided through his employer or, more recently, the state, affordable legal insurance remains a rarity. The result is not only that a very large number of Americans who go to court, or are hauled into court, are unrepresented by counsel, but also that an unknown but probably even larger number of Americans who might otherwise seek legal redress for wrongs done to them simply cannot afford a lawyer and choose instead to forgo justice altogether.
Further still, even those individuals who can afford counsel rarely get their day in court. Rather, in the overwhelming majority of cases, they settle with their adversaries before the merits of their cases ever get heard. This is true even in federal courts, where, because of lighter dockets, there is much less institutional pressure to settle. Nevertheless, whereas in 1938 about 19 percent of all federal civil cases went to trial, by 1962 that rate had declined to 11.5 percent and by 2015 it had declined to an abysmal 1.1 percent. Although the data for state civil cases are less ample, it appears that in state courts the situation is even worse, with fewer than 1 percent of them now going to trial. And while it is true that some of the remaining 99 percent of cases are resolved by motions made in court and accepted by a judge, in the majority of cases the parties simply settle without any judge or jury reaching a decision on the merits.
by Jed S. Rakoff, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Honoré Daumier, 1846
via:
[ed. We're screwed.]
President Trump is the shock heard round the world. Now that he has won, the instant explanations have already started to flood in: that the mobilisation (or not) of this or that demographic was decisive; that he tapped the angry anti-establishment mood; that he spoke for millions who felt abandoned by the prosperous and progressive; that American nativism was always far stronger than liberals wanted to think; that he was a celebrity candidate for the celebrity-obsessed age; that he rode the tiger of post-truth politics; that making America great again was a cut-through message in a militaristic and imperial nation; that white men (and many white women) had had it with political correctness; that misogyny swung it; that the mainstream media failed to call him out; that it is a verdict on the Barack Obama years; that Mrs Clinton was always the wrong candidate; that there was racist dirty work in the voting system; that it was the Russians that won it for him.
None of these explanations is irrelevant. All of them have something to say. But beware of instant certainties.
by Editorial Board, The Guardian | Read more:
On a Precipice
President Donald Trump. Three words that were unthinkable to tens of millions of Americans — and much of the rest of the world — have now become the future of the United States.
Having confounded Republican elites in the primaries, Mr. Trump did the same to the Democrats in the general election, repeating the judo move of turning the weight of a complacent establishment against it. His victory is a humbling blow to the news media, the pollsters and the Clinton-dominated Democratic leadership.
The candidates appeared neck-in-neck in the popular vote, but Mr. Trump bested Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College.
So who is the man who will be the 45th president?
After a year and a half of erratic tweets and rambling speeches, we can’t be certain. We don’t know how Mr. Trump would carry out basic functions of the executive. We don’t know what financial conflicts he might have, since he never released his tax returns, breaking with 40 years of tradition in both parties. We don’t know if he has the capacity to focus on any issue and arrive at a rational conclusion. We don’t know if he has any idea what it means to control the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
Here is what we do know: We know Mr. Trump is the most unprepared president-elect in modern history. We know that by words and actions, he has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people. We know he has threatened to prosecute and jail his political opponents, and he has said he would curtail the freedom of the press. We know he lies without compunction.
He has said he intends to cut taxes for the wealthy and to withdraw the health care protection of the Affordable Care Act from tens of millions of Americans. He has insulted women and threatened Muslims and immigrants, and he has recruited as his allies a dark combination of racists, white supremacists and anti-Semites. Given the importance of the alt-right to Mr. Trump’s rise, it is perhaps time to drop the “alt.” David Duke celebrated Mr. Trump’s victory on Tuesday night, tweeting, “It’s time to TAKE AMERICA BACK!!!”
When Mr. Trump has looked beyond our borders, he has said that he would tear up the agreement to prevent Iran from building nuclear arms and that he would do away with the North American Free Trade Agreement. He has said that he would repudiate last December’s Paris agreement on climate change, thereby abandoning America’s leadership role in addressing the biggest long-term threat to humanity. He has also threatened to abandon NATO allies and start a trade war with China.
We know that, with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, Mr. Trump would be able to restore a right-wing majority by filling the Supreme Court seat that Republican senators have held hostage for nine months.
Republicans will soon control every branch of the federal government, in addition to a majority of governorships and statehouses. There is no obvious check on Mr. Trump’s vengeful impulses. Other Republican leaders, including his running mate, Mike Pence, have largely made excuses for his most extreme behavior.
By challenging every norm of American politics, Mr. Trump upended first the Republican Party and now the Democratic Party, which attempted a Clinton restoration at a moment when the nation was impatient to escape the status quo. Misogyny and racism played their part in his rise, but so did a fierce and even heedless desire for change.
That change has now placed the United States on a precipice.
Having confounded Republican elites in the primaries, Mr. Trump did the same to the Democrats in the general election, repeating the judo move of turning the weight of a complacent establishment against it. His victory is a humbling blow to the news media, the pollsters and the Clinton-dominated Democratic leadership.
The candidates appeared neck-in-neck in the popular vote, but Mr. Trump bested Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College.
So who is the man who will be the 45th president?
After a year and a half of erratic tweets and rambling speeches, we can’t be certain. We don’t know how Mr. Trump would carry out basic functions of the executive. We don’t know what financial conflicts he might have, since he never released his tax returns, breaking with 40 years of tradition in both parties. We don’t know if he has the capacity to focus on any issue and arrive at a rational conclusion. We don’t know if he has any idea what it means to control the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
Here is what we do know: We know Mr. Trump is the most unprepared president-elect in modern history. We know that by words and actions, he has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people. We know he has threatened to prosecute and jail his political opponents, and he has said he would curtail the freedom of the press. We know he lies without compunction.
He has said he intends to cut taxes for the wealthy and to withdraw the health care protection of the Affordable Care Act from tens of millions of Americans. He has insulted women and threatened Muslims and immigrants, and he has recruited as his allies a dark combination of racists, white supremacists and anti-Semites. Given the importance of the alt-right to Mr. Trump’s rise, it is perhaps time to drop the “alt.” David Duke celebrated Mr. Trump’s victory on Tuesday night, tweeting, “It’s time to TAKE AMERICA BACK!!!”
When Mr. Trump has looked beyond our borders, he has said that he would tear up the agreement to prevent Iran from building nuclear arms and that he would do away with the North American Free Trade Agreement. He has said that he would repudiate last December’s Paris agreement on climate change, thereby abandoning America’s leadership role in addressing the biggest long-term threat to humanity. He has also threatened to abandon NATO allies and start a trade war with China.
We know that, with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, Mr. Trump would be able to restore a right-wing majority by filling the Supreme Court seat that Republican senators have held hostage for nine months.
Republicans will soon control every branch of the federal government, in addition to a majority of governorships and statehouses. There is no obvious check on Mr. Trump’s vengeful impulses. Other Republican leaders, including his running mate, Mike Pence, have largely made excuses for his most extreme behavior.
By challenging every norm of American politics, Mr. Trump upended first the Republican Party and now the Democratic Party, which attempted a Clinton restoration at a moment when the nation was impatient to escape the status quo. Misogyny and racism played their part in his rise, but so did a fierce and even heedless desire for change.
That change has now placed the United States on a precipice.
by Editorial Board, NY Times | Read more:
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
In Boomers’ Sunset, Election Reawakens an Old Divide
They came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, in the traumatic aftermath of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They fought and protested a war together, argued over Nixon and Kissinger together, laughed at Archie Bunker together. As children, they practiced air-raid drills; as adults, they cheered the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In the 1990s, they saw one of their own become president, watching him gain glory as one of the most gifted politicians of his time, but also infamy as one of its most self-indulgent — a poster child for the Me Generation.
They are of course the baby boomers, the collective offspring of the most fertile period in American history. At 75 million strong, they have been the most dominant force in American life for three decades, and one of its most maligned. Enlightened but self-centered, introspective but reckless, they are known among the cohorts that followed them — and even to some boomers themselves — as the generation that failed to live up to its lofty ideals, but still held fast to its sense of superiority.
If Bill Clinton was their white-haired id, Hillary Clinton is their superego in a pantsuit. A second Clinton presidency could represent a last hurrah for the baby boomers. But it could also offer a shot at a kind of generational redemption.
“There is a kind of do-over quality to it,” said Landon Y. Jones, the author of the 1980 book “Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation.” “This is their last chance to get it right.”
A shared history binds the boomers — as do, broadly speaking, some shared traits. Their parents suffered through the Depression and World War II before rearing them in the most prosperous society the world had ever seen. Inevitably, perhaps, they were guided by two polestars: responsibility and entitlement.
Those dueling impulses powered the rise of both Clintons: one impulse galvanizing supporters who deeply admired their commitment to public service, the other galling critics who saw them as playing by their own rules.
“There’s this tremendous idealism with the Clintons — actually living social change, embodying social change,” said Gil Troy, the author of “The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s” and a history professor at McGill University in Montreal. “But also, at the end of day, not just having this will to power, but also being so convinced of their own self-righteousness that they improvise a new set of morality and ethics.”
Like her husband’s, Mrs. Clinton’s political odyssey began in earnest when she volunteered for George McGovern’s youth-powered 1972 presidential bid, one that ended in a lopsided, welcome-to-adulthood takedown of ’60s idealism at the hands of President Richard M. Nixon and his “silent majority.” It was there, in the trenches, that the Clintons — still in their mid-20s, and not yet married — began to assemble the network of trusted friends that continues to surround them.
Twenty years later, at 46, Bill Clinton became the third-youngest president ever elected. At 69, Hillary Clinton would be the second-oldest. In many respects, her journey has become her generation’s journey — from protester to parent and now grandparent, from earnest idealist to battle-hardened realist.
They would be bookends on their cohort, one seizing the national stage on behalf of their generation in its prime, the other, who now qualifies for Medicare, vying to lead it into its dotage.
by Jonathan Mahler, NY Times | Read more:
Image: CreditNeal Boenzi/The New York Times
In the 1990s, they saw one of their own become president, watching him gain glory as one of the most gifted politicians of his time, but also infamy as one of its most self-indulgent — a poster child for the Me Generation.They are of course the baby boomers, the collective offspring of the most fertile period in American history. At 75 million strong, they have been the most dominant force in American life for three decades, and one of its most maligned. Enlightened but self-centered, introspective but reckless, they are known among the cohorts that followed them — and even to some boomers themselves — as the generation that failed to live up to its lofty ideals, but still held fast to its sense of superiority.
If Bill Clinton was their white-haired id, Hillary Clinton is their superego in a pantsuit. A second Clinton presidency could represent a last hurrah for the baby boomers. But it could also offer a shot at a kind of generational redemption.
“There is a kind of do-over quality to it,” said Landon Y. Jones, the author of the 1980 book “Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation.” “This is their last chance to get it right.”
A shared history binds the boomers — as do, broadly speaking, some shared traits. Their parents suffered through the Depression and World War II before rearing them in the most prosperous society the world had ever seen. Inevitably, perhaps, they were guided by two polestars: responsibility and entitlement.
Those dueling impulses powered the rise of both Clintons: one impulse galvanizing supporters who deeply admired their commitment to public service, the other galling critics who saw them as playing by their own rules.
“There’s this tremendous idealism with the Clintons — actually living social change, embodying social change,” said Gil Troy, the author of “The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s” and a history professor at McGill University in Montreal. “But also, at the end of day, not just having this will to power, but also being so convinced of their own self-righteousness that they improvise a new set of morality and ethics.”
Like her husband’s, Mrs. Clinton’s political odyssey began in earnest when she volunteered for George McGovern’s youth-powered 1972 presidential bid, one that ended in a lopsided, welcome-to-adulthood takedown of ’60s idealism at the hands of President Richard M. Nixon and his “silent majority.” It was there, in the trenches, that the Clintons — still in their mid-20s, and not yet married — began to assemble the network of trusted friends that continues to surround them.
Twenty years later, at 46, Bill Clinton became the third-youngest president ever elected. At 69, Hillary Clinton would be the second-oldest. In many respects, her journey has become her generation’s journey — from protester to parent and now grandparent, from earnest idealist to battle-hardened realist.
They would be bookends on their cohort, one seizing the national stage on behalf of their generation in its prime, the other, who now qualifies for Medicare, vying to lead it into its dotage.
by Jonathan Mahler, NY Times | Read more:
Image: CreditNeal Boenzi/The New York Times
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:
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):
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
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.]
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
Monday, November 7, 2016
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....]
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
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
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
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