'Jackie'

On Nov. 25, 1963, three days after becoming the world’s most famous widow, Jacqueline Kennedy slipped on a mourning veil. A diaphanous shroud reaching to her waist, it moved lightly as she walked behind her husband’s coffin in the cortege that traveled from the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral. The veil was transparent enough to reveal her pale face, though not entirely, ensuring that she was at once visible and obscured. “I don’t like to hear people say that I am poised and maintaining a good appearance,” she later said. “I am not a movie actress.”

Intensely affecting and insistently protean, the film “Jackie” is a reminder that for a time she was bigger than any star, bigger than Marilyn or Liz. She was the Widow — an embodiment of grief, symbol of strength, tower of dignity and, crucially, architect of brilliant political theater. Hers was also a spectacularly reproducible image. It’s no wonder that shortly after President John F. Kennedy died, Andy Warhol started on more than 300 portraits of the Widow, juxtaposing photographs of her taken before and after the assassination. She smiles in a few, in others she looks frozen (or is it stoic?); the ones that pop are tight close-ups. They look like frames for an unfinished motion picture.

“Jackie” doesn’t try to complete that impossible, apparently unfinishable movie, the never-ending epic known as “The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and What It Means to History.” Instead, set largely after his death, it explores the intersection of the private and the public while ruminating on the transformation of the past into myth. It also pulls off a nice representational coup because it proves that the problem known as the Movie Wife — you know her, the little lady hovering at the edge of both the frame and story — can be solved with thought and good filmmaking. And as in Warhol’s Jackie portraits, John F. Kennedy is somewhat of a bit player here.

Jack suaves in now and again, flashing his big teeth (he’s played by an uncanny look-alike, Caspar Phillipson), but as the film’s title announces, it’s all about her. Jackie (Natalie Portman, perfect) first appears at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. It’s soon after Jack’s death and she’s taken refuge in another white house, this one along Nantucket Sound. If its large windows suggest transparency, her tight face and coiled body relay that she has other plans for the unnamed journalist (Billy Crudup), who’s come to write about how she feels and what it means. In some roles, Ms. Portman stiffens up and never seems to get out of her head; in “Jackie” this works as a character trait.

The journalist is a chilly, unsympathetic fictional gloss on the writer Theodore H. White. On Nov. 29, 1963, one week after cradling her dying husband’s head in her lap, Mrs. Kennedy gave an interview to White that he said lasted about four hours. Originally titled “For President Kennedy: An Epilogue,” White’s article ran in Life magazine and was an exemplar of impressively marketable mythmaking — it inaugurated the Camelot fairy tale. White knew Kennedy, having written “The Making of the President, 1960,” an account of his presidential campaign. But the Widow was another matter entirely, and in his interview notes White scrawled the words “What does a woman think?” (...)

The White interview thrusts the story into the past, teleporting Jackie, for instance, onto Air Force One, where — with her back to the camera — she primps in a mirror while practicing an apparent speech in Spanish for the imminent Dallas trip. Dressed in her pink Chanel suit, she puts on her pillbox hat, as if ready for her entrance. The suit’s bright color gives the film a visual jolt, much like the deep-red roses that someone places in Jackie’s arms after she and Jack deplane. Some of the most famous photos from that day, like those of Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in on Air Force One, are in black and white, so it’s easy to miss that the smudges that later appeared on the pink suit were splatters of blood.

by Manohla Dargis, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Natalie Portman in "Jackie"

While We Weren’t Looking, Snapchat Revolutionized Social Networks

Snap Inc., the parent company of the popular photo-messaging and storytelling app Snapchat, is having a productive autumn.

A couple of weeks ago, Snap filed confidential documents for a coming stock offering that could value the firm at $30 billion, which would make it one of the largest initial public offerings in recent years. Around the same time, it began selling Spectacles, sunglasses that can record video clips, which have become one of the most sought-after gadgets of the season.

And yet, even when it’s grabbing headlines, it often seems as if Snap gets little respect.

Though Snapchat has overtaken Twitter in terms of daily users to become one of the most popular social networks in the world, it has not attracted the media attention that the 140-character platform earns, perhaps because journalists and presidential candidates don’t use it very much. Snapchat’s news division has become a popular and innovative source of information for young people, but it is rarely mentioned in the hand-wringing over how social media affected the presidential election.

And because Snapchat is used primarily by teenagers and 20-somethings, and it seems deliberately designed to frustrate anyone over 25, it is often dismissed as a frivolity by older people (especially readers of a certain newspaper based in New York who have my email address).

This is all wrong. If you secretly harbor the idea that Snapchat is frivolous or somehow a fad, it’s time to re-examine your certainties. In fact, in various large and small ways, Snap has quietly become one of the world’s most innovative and influential consumer technology companies.

Snap, which is based far outside the Silicon Valley bubble, in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, is pushing radically new ideas about how humans should interact with computers. It is pioneering a model of social networking that feels more intimate and authentic than the Facebook-led ideas that now dominate the online world. Snap’s software and hardware designs, as well as its marketing strategies, are more daring than much of what we’ve seen from tech giants, including Apple.

Snap’s business model, which depends on TV-style advertising that (so far) offers marketers fewer of the data-targeted options pioneered by web giants like Google, feels refreshingly novel. And perhaps most important, its model for entertainment and journalism values human editing and curation over stories selected by personalization algorithms — and thus represents a departure from the filtered, viral feeds that dominate much of the rest of the online news environment.

Snap is still relatively small; its 150 million daily user base pales in comparison to Facebook’s 1.2 billion, and its success is far from assured. In its novelty, it can sometimes veer toward the bizarre and inscrutable. And it’s not obvious that all of its advances are positive. (For instance, I’m not sure that it’s always better for our relationships to lose a record of our chats with friends.)

Yet it’s no wonder that Facebook and its subsidiaries appear obsessed with imitating Snap. As a font of ideas that many in the tech industry hadn’t considered before, Snap isn’t just popular, but also increasingly important.

“Regardless of what happens, they’ve reshaped the social media landscape,” said Joseph B. Bayer, a communications professor at Ohio State University who has studied Snapchat’s impact on how people communicate. “They’re making risky moves, trying to rethink what people want online as opposed to taking what’s already been done and adding a new flash.”

Techies value disruption, and it’s difficult to think of another online company that has shuffled the status quo as consistently as Snap has over the past few years.

Before Snapchat, the industry took for granted that everything users posted to the internet should remain there by default. Saving people’s data — and then constantly re-examining it to create new products and advertising — is the engine that supports behemoths like Google and Facebook.

At its founding in 2011, Snap pushed a new way: By default, the pictures posted through Snapchat are viewable for only a short time. At the time, it was a head-scratching idea, one that many assumed was good only for sexting. To the tech industry’s surprise, disappearing messages captivated users who had been afraid that their momentary digital actions might follow them around forever.

Snapchat’s “ephemeral” internet — which has since been imitated by lots of other companies, including, most recently, Instagram — did not just usher in a new idea for online privacy. It also altered what had once been considered a sacred law of online interaction: virality.

Every medium that has ever been popular online — from email to the web to social networks like Facebook — has been pervaded by things that are passed along from one user to another. This is not the case on Snapchat. Though Snapchat has introduced some limited means of forwarding people’s snaps, the short life of every snap means there is no obvious means for any single piece of content to become a viral hit within the app. (...)

There is, instead, a practiced authenticity. The biggest stars — even Kylie Jenner — get ahead by giving you deep access to their real lives. As a result, much of what you see on Snapchat feels less like a performance than on other networks. People aren’t fishing for likes and follows and reshares. For better or worse, they’re trying to be real.

by Farhad Manjoo, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Rebecca Smeyne

52 things I learned in 2016

My first full year working at Fluxx on a series of fascinating projects and learning about...

1. Call Me Baby is a call centre for cybercriminals who need a human voice as part of a scam. They charge $10 for each call in English, and $12 for calls in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish. [Brian Krebs]
2. Google’s advertising tools can track real-world shop visits. If a customer sees an ad then visits the relevant store a few days later, that conversion will appear in Google Adwords. Customers are tracked via (anonymised) Google Maps data. They’ve been doing this since 2014. [Matt Lawson]
3. In a mixed-gender group, when women talk 25% of the time or less, it’s seen as being “equally balanced”. If women talk 25–50% of the time, they’re seen as “dominating the conversation” [Caitlin Moran]
4. In July, 800,000 volunteers planted 49 million trees in Uttar Pradesh, India. [Brian Clark Howard]
5. Forty per cent of adults (aged 16 to 60) in OECD countries can’t use a computer well enough to delete an email. [Jakob Nielsen]
6. A Japanese insurance company is offering policies that cover social media backlash. [Tyler Cowen]
7. Abu Dhabi numberplate “1” sold for Dh31m (£6.8m) in November. However, the cheque bounced, and the buyer was arrested. [Asma Samir and Tom Crampton]
8. Australian musicians have performed with a synthesiser controlled by a petri dish of live human neurons: “The neurons were fed dopamine before the gig and went ballistic. The interaction with the drummer was very tight. The drum hits are processed into triggers and sent to the neurons.” [Andrew Finch and Guy Ben-Ary]
9. Less than 20% of Tencent’s (the creator of WeChat) revenues come from advertising, compared to over 95% for Facebook. [Connie Chan]
10. Opendoor is a controversial startup with this simple offer: “We’ll buy your home for market price, based off an algorithm, within 72 hours.” [Real Estate Pundit]
11. There are six million iPhones in Iran, despite them being banned by both the Iranian government and international sanctions. [Christopher Schroeder]
12. Pork scratchings are good for you. [Michael Ruhlman]
13. The percentage of older Americans with dementia has fallen by almost 25% since 2000. In other words, a million fewer people had dementia in 2012 than we’d have expected in 2000. [Sharon Begley]
14. A Californian company called Skinny Mirror sells mirrors that make you look thinner. When installed in the changing rooms of clothes shops, they can increase sales by 18%. [Kim Bhasin]
15. “Bangladesh was hit by a massive cyclone in May. Half a million people were evacuated, and thanks to early warning systems and shelters, only 23 people died. Cyclone deaths in the country have fallen by 98 percent since the systems were developed following a 1991 cyclone in which 140,000 people died.” The system involves 2,500 huge concrete cyclone shelters that are also used as schools. [Charles Kenny + watch this video about the Indian version of the shelters]
16. In Hong Kong, you can buy a $15,000 device called an IMSI Catcher which harvests the mobile phone numbers of everyone walking past, collecting up to 1,200 numbers a minute. [Ben Bryant]

by Tom Whitwell, Fluxx |  Read more:

Image: carving apples at a Blenheim Forge workshop in April.

What is Hawaii?

[ed. I've read some of Paul Theroux's other books and just got done reading Hotel Honolulu. It was entertaining. I have to say though, if you haven't grown up there, you will never completely get it (Hawaii). So much has to do with growing up in the culture. The shared experiences, customs, diversity, history, economics, isolation (among other things) all contribute to a unique and somewhat autonomous society. Usually, the first question anyone asks when introduced to someone else is: what high school did you go to? It's the basic context for establishing shared trust and communication.]

Hawaii offers peculiar challenges to anyone wishing to write about the place or its people. Of course, many writers do, arriving for a week or so and gushing about the beaches, the excellent food, the heavenly weather, filling travel pages with holiday hyperbole. Hawaii has a well-deserved reputation as a special set of islands, a place apart, fragrant with blossoms, caressed by trade winds, vibrant with the plucking of ukuleles, effulgent with sunshine spanking the water—see how easy it is? None of this is wrong; but there is more, and it is difficult to find or describe. (...)

One of the traits that I’ve found in many island cultures is a deep suspicion of the outsiders, palangi, as such people are called in Samoa, suggesting they’ve dropped from the sky; a haole in Hawaii, meaning “of another breath”; the “wash-ashore” as non-islanders are dismissively termed in Martha’s Vineyard and other islands. Of course it’s understandable that an islander would regard a visitor with a degree of suspicion. An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed. It is inconceivable that a newcomer, invariably superfluous, could bring a benefit to such a place; suspicion seems justified. The very presence of the visitor, the new arrival, the settler, suggests self-interest and scheming. (...)

I have lived in Hawaii for 22 years, and in this time have also traveled the world, writing books and articles about Africa, Asia, South America, the Mediterranean, India and elsewhere. Though I have written a number of fictional pieces, including a novel, Hotel Honolulu, set in Hawaii, I have struggled as though against monster surf to write nonfiction about the islands. I seldom read anything that accurately portrayed in an analytical way the place in which I have chosen to live. I have been in Hawaii longer than anywhere else in my life. I’d hate to die here, I murmured to myself in Africa, Asia and Britain. But I wouldn’t mind dying in Hawaii, which means I like living here.

Some years ago, I spent six months attempting to write an in-depth piece for a magazine describing how Hawaiian culture is passed from one generation to the other. I wrote the story, after a fashion, but the real tale was how difficult it was to get anyone to talk to me. I went to a charter school on the Big Island, in which the Hawaiian language was used exclusively, though everyone at the place was bilingual. Aware of the protocol, I gained an introduction from the headmaster of the adjoining school. After witnessing the morning assembly where a chant was offered, and a prayer, and a stirring song, I approached a teacher and asked if she would share with me a translation of the Hawaiian words I had just heard. She said she’d have to ask a higher authority. Never mind the translation, I said; couldn’t she just write down the Hawaiian versions?

“We have to go through the proper channels,” she said.

That was fine with me, but in the end permission to know the words was refused. I appealed to a Hawaiian language specialist, Hawaiian himself, who had been instrumental in the establishment of such Hawaiian language immersion schools. He did not answer my calls or messages, and in the end, when I pressed him, he left me with a testy, not to say xenophobic, reply.

I attended a hula performance. Allusive and sinuous, it cast a spell on me and on all the people watching, who were misty-eyed with admiration. When it was over I asked the kumu hula, the elder woman who had taught the dancers, if I could ask her some questions.

She said no. When I explained that I was writing about the process by which Hawaiian tradition was passed on, she merely shrugged. I persisted mildly and her last and scornful words to me were, “I don’t talk to writers.”

“You need an introduction,” I was told.

I secured an introduction from an important island figure, and I managed a few interviews. One sneeringly reminded me that she would not have bestirred herself to see me had it not been for the intervention of this prominent man. Another gave me truculent answers. Several expressed the wish to be paid for talking to me, and when I said it was out of the question they became stammeringly monosyllabic.

Observing protocol, I had turned up at each interview carrying a present—a large jar of honey from my own beehives on the North Shore of Oahu. No one expressed an interest in the origin of the honey (locally produced honey is unusually efficacious as a homeopathic remedy). No one asked where I was from or anything about me. It so happened that I had arrived from my house in Hawaii, but I might have come from Montana: No one asked or cared. They did not so much answer as endure my questions.

Much later, hearing that I had beehives, some Hawaiians about to set off on a canoe voyage asked if I would give them 60 pounds of my honey to use as presents on distant Pacific islands they planned to visit. I supplied the honey, mildly expressing a wish to board the canoe and perhaps accompany them on a day run. Silence was their stern reply: And I took this to mean that though my honey was local, I was not.

I was not dismayed: I was fascinated. I had never in my traveling or writing life come across people so unwilling to share their experiences. Here I was living in a place most people thought of as Happyland, when in fact it was an archipelago with a social structure that was more complex than any I had ever encountered—beyond Asiatic. One conclusion I reached was that in Hawaii, unlike any other place I had written about, people believed that their personal stories were their own, not to be shared, certainly not to be retold by someone else. Virtually everywhere else people were eager to share their stories, and their candor and hospitality had made it possible for me to live my life as a travel writer. (...)

But it wasn’t just native Hawaiians who denied me access or rebuffed me. I began to see that the whole of Hawaii is secretive and separated, socially, spacially, ethnically, philosophically, academically. Even the University of Hawaii is insular and uninviting, a place unto itself, with little influence in the wider community and no public voice—no commentator, explainer, nothing in the way of intellectual intervention or mediation. It is like a silent and rather forbidding island, and though it regularly puts on plays and occasionally a public lecture, it is in general an inward-looking institution, esteemed locally not for its scholarship but for its sports teams.

by Paul Theroux, Smithsonian |  Read more:

Image: Jacques Descloitres / Modis Land Rapid Response Team / NASA GSFC)

Barbara McCann
via:

Humanity’s Greatest Fear is About Being Irrelevant

Genevieve Bell is an Australian anthropologist who has been working at tech company Intel for 18 years, where she is currently head of sensing and insights. She has given numerous TED talks and in 2012 was inducted into the Women in Technology hall of fame. Between 2008 and 2010, she was also South Australia’s thinker in residence.

Why does a company such as Intel need an anthropologist?

That is a question I’ve spent 18 years asking myself. It’s not a contradiction in terms, but it is a puzzle. When they hired me, I think they understood something that not everyone in the tech industry understood, which was that technology was about to undergo a rapid transformation. Computers went from being on an office desk spewing out Excel to inhabiting our homes and lives and we needed to have a point of view about what that was going to look like. It was incredibly important to understand the human questions: such as, what on earth are people going to do with that computational power. If we could anticipate just a little bit, that would give us a business edge and the ability to make better technical decisions. But as an anthropologist that’s a weird place to be. We tend to be rooted in the present – what are people doing now and why? – rather than long-term strategic stuff. (...)

You are often described as a futurologist. A lot of people are worried about the future. Are they right to be concerned?

That technology is accompanied by anxiety is not a new thing. We have anxieties about certain types of technology and there are reasons for that. We’re coming up to the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the images in it have persisted.

Shelley’s story worked because it tapped into a set of cultural anxieties. The Frankenstein anxiety is not the reason we worried about the motor car or electricity, but if you think about how some people write about robotics, AI and big data, those concerns have profound echoes going back to the Frankenstein anxieties 200 years ago.

What is the Frankenstein anxiety?

Western culture has some anxieties about what happens when humans try to bring something to life, whether it’s the Judeo-Christian stories of the golem or James Cameron’s The Terminator.

So what is the anxiety about? My suspicion is that it’s not about the life-making, it’s about how we feel about being human. What we are seeing now isn’t an anxiety about artificial intelligence per se, it’s about what it says about us. That if you can make something like us, where does it leave us? And that concern isn’t universal, as other cultures have very different responses to AI, to big data. The most obvious one to me would be the Japanese robotic tradition, where people are willing to imagine the role of robots as far more expansive than you find in the west. For example, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori published a book called The Buddha in the Robot, where he suggests that robots would be better Buddhists than humans because they are capable of infinite invocations. So are you suggesting that robots could have religion? It’s an extraordinary provocation.

So you don’t agree with Stephen Hawking when he says that AI is likely “either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity”?

Mori’s argument was that we project our own anxieties and when we ask: “Will the robots kill us?”, what we are really asking is: “Will we kill us?” Coming from a Japanese man who lived through the 20th century that might not be an unreasonable question. He wonders what would happen if we were to take as our starting point that technology could be our best angels, not our worst – it’s an interesting thought exercise. When I see some of the big thinkers of our day contemplating the arc of artificial intelligence, what I see is not necessarily a critique of the technology itself but a critique of us. We are building the engines, so what we build into them is what they will be. The question is not will AI rise up and kill us, rather, will we give it the tools to do so? (...)

A lot of the work you do examines the intersection between the intended use of a device and how people actually use it – and examining the disconnection. Could you talk about something you’re researching at the moment?

I’m interested in how animals are connected to the internet and how we might be able to see the world from an animal’s point of view. There’s something very interesting in someone else’s vantage point, which might have a truth to it. For instance, the tagging of cows for automatic milking machines, so that the cows can choose when to milk themselves. Cows went from being milked twice a day to being milked three to six times a day, which is great for the farm’s productivity and results in happier cows, but it’s also faintly disquieting that the technology makes clear to us the desires of cows – making them visible in ways they weren’t before. So what does one do with that knowledge? One of the unintended consequences of big data and the internet of things is that some things will become visible and compel us to confront them.

by Ian Tucker, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Leah Nash/NYT/Eyevine

Free Software Makes Any Car Self-Driving

Here is a strategy for start-ups dealing with regulators who might shut down your product: Make it free.

Scrappy self-driving car start-up Comma.ai released a free software kit on Wednesday to help developers learn to build a device that can turn any car into an autonomous vehicle. The year-old company, which is founded by a well-known hacker and backed by prominent Silicon Valley investors, hopes to accelerate the development of self-driving cars while skirting the ire of Washington.

The move raises questions of how the United States should foster innovation for promising technologies that also carry great risks. Experts say self-driving cars have the potential to dramatically reduce the number of accidents of the roadway, most of which are caused by human errors. But Comma’s self-driving kit has only logged roughly 5,000 miles of road time, a number that is effectively a useless barometer for judging safety, said John Simpson, of the safety advocacy group Consumer Watchdog.

The announcement also reflects the types of maneuvering start-ups are increasingly engaging in as they chart a path in heavily regulated sectors of the economy. A wave of companies in areas such as housing, DNA testing and aerospace is weighing whether to work with officials or to follow the playbook of companies such as Uber and Airbnb — asking forgiveness, but not permission, and seeing where the chips fall.

In Comma’s case, the strategy was an end run around the rulemakers.

When Comma.ai’s founder, George Hotz, announced his plan to sell a do-it-yourself self-driving software and hardware kit for $999 at a large industry conference this fall, the tech world was giddy with excitement. While large automakers and technology giants have poured billions into autonomous vehicles, Comma’s tech would have dramatically lowered the bar for entry. (...)

“We want to be the Android operating system for self-driving cars,” Hotz said at a news conference Wednesday, held in the company's garage in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood. Hotz was referring to the open-source smartphone operating system, which has become ubiquitous because it is free and developers can easily innovate on it.

The code, which is available on the open-source collaboration platform GitHub, allows anyone (but really, hardcore hackers) to build a dashcam-like device that they can set up in their car. The device plugs into a port in the car called a controller area network, or BUS (in most cars built after 2006). Users must build the device with a 3-D printer and have an Android OnePlus 3 phone to run the code and provide the camera that can scan the road.

by Elizabeth Dwoskin, WP | Read more:
Image:Brian Fung

Psilocybin Could be Key to Treating Depression

A single dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, can lift the anxiety and depression experienced by people with advanced cancer for six months or even longer, two new studies show.

Researchers involved in the two trials in the United States say the results are remarkable. The volunteers had “profoundly meaningful and spiritual experiences” which made most of them rethink life and death, ended their despair and brought about lasting improvement in the quality of their lives.

The results of the research are published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology together with no less than ten commentaries from leading scientists in the fields of psychiatry and palliative care, who all back further research. While the effects of magic mushrooms have been of interest to psychiatry since the 1950s, the classification of all psychedelics in the US as schedule 1 drugs in the 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam war and the rise of recreational drug use in the hippy counter-culture, has erected daunting legal and financial obstacles to running trials.

“I think it is a big deal both in terms of the findings and in terms of the history and what it represents. It was part of psychiatry and vanished and now it’s been brought back,” said Dr Stephen Ross, director of addiction psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center and lead investigator of the study that was based there.

Around 40-50% of newly diagnosed cancer patients suffer some sort of depression or anxiety. Antidepressants have little effect, particularly on the “existential” depression that can lead some to feel their lives are meaningless and contemplate suicide.

The main findings of the NYU study, which involved 29 patients, and the larger one from Johns Hopkins University with 51 patients, that a single dose of the medication can lead to immediate reduction in the depression and anxiety caused by cancer and that the effect can last up to eight months, “is unprecedented,” said Ross. “We don’t have anything like it.”

The results of the studies were very similar, with around 80% of the patients attributing moderately or greatly improved wellbeing or life satisfaction to a single high dose of the drug, given with psychotherapy support. (...)

Patients describe the experiences as “re-organisational”, said Griffiths. Some in the field had used the term “mystical”, which he thought was unfortunate. “It sounds unscientific. It sounds like we’re postulating mechanisms other than neuroscience and I’m certainly not making that claim.”

Ross said psilocybin activates a sub-type of serotonin receptor in the brain. “Our brains are hard-wired to have these kinds of experiences - these alterations of consciousness. We have endogenous chemicals in our brain. We have a little system that, when you tickle it, it produces these altered states that have been described as spiritual states, mystical states in different religious branches. (...)

The commentators writing in the journal include two past presidents of the American Psychiatric Association, the past president of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology, a previous deputy director of the Office of USA National Drug Control Policy and a previous head of the UK Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority.

The journal editor, Professor David Nutt, was himself involved in a small trial of psilocybin in a dozen people with severe depression in the UK in May. The ten commentators in the journal, he writes in an editorial, “all essentially say the same thing: it’s time to take psychedelic treatments in psychiatry and oncology seriously, as we did in the 1950s and 1960s.”

by Sarah Boseley, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:NYU Langone Medical Center

We Asked 8,500 Internet Commenters Why They Do What They Do

My fascination with internet comments began as exasperation. I’d just written a short article that began with a quote from the movie “Blazing Saddles”: “Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” After the story published, I quickly heard from readers explaining that, actually, the quote was originally from an earlier movie, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” The thing was, I’d included that information in the article.

This was no isolated case: I soon published another story that mentioned, by name, a program called parkrun, and yet I got about a half dozen emails from people helpfully informing me of this cool thing called parkrun.

These episodes represented only a single type of comment, but they got me wondering about commenting more broadly. Only a small subset of readers ever comment. What compels them to take the time to weigh in? To learn more about the reasons that people comment, I collected data from two sources — an analysis of the comments here at FiveThirtyEight and a surveyof more than 8,500 people. What I learned shifted my views about commenters and gave me some interesting insights into the hive mind.

Why comment?

The first thing I wanted to know was, why comment? What exactly are commenters seeking? A survey like ours isn’t perfect since it’s inevitably biased toward the subset of people most inclined to answer an internet survey (and, of course, self-reported results are notoriously unreliable). But it does provide a peek into people’s motivation. Our survey takers gave a wide range of answers, and my colleague Leah Libresco randomly sampled 500 of them and sorted them into categories describing their motivations.

Our respondents’ reasons for commenting mirror the results of a recent survey of 600 news commenters by Talia Jomini Stroud and her colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s Engaging News Project. In their survey, the top three reasons that people gave for commenting were “to express an emotion or opinion,” “to add information” or “to correct inaccuracies or misinformation.”

The bikes-and-dogs theory

Certain stories seem to generate a disproportionate number of comments, and after years of being on the receiving end of comments, I’ve formed a theory: The subjects most likely to elicit impassioned responses are those that feel personal to the reader (a real-life experience with the subject has made them feel like an expert) and those that hit on identity in some way. It’s based on something a newspaper reporter in Boulder told me many years ago. Back then, readers were still mailing letters to the editor, and they had a seemingly endless appetite to debate two things: who was at fault in conflicts between cars and bikes and whether dogs should be allowed to run unleashed on city trails.

To test this theory, I asked readers about the circumstances that made them most likely to comment. The answers lent at least some support to the bikes-and-dogs theory. But respondents’ reasons were more complex than my one, unified theory; commenters were also driven by a desire to provide their own information or to argue against an idea they disagreed with.

How low do we go?

Since I started down this road after receiving comments from people who hadn’t read (or absorbed) the whole article, I also asked survey takers how closely they read a story before commenting.

Here again, I had a hypothesis: Maybe this commenting-without-reading phenomenon represents a variation of the backfire effect, in which a person who receives evidence that their belief is erroneous actually becomes more strongly convinced of the viewpoint they already held. In this case, the reader sees a headline that catches their interest and reminds them of something that they already know, which triggers them to think about their pre-existing knowledge or belief about the subject and then to blast it out to the world. The article they’re reading doesn’t inform them, it just provides an opportunity for them to reinforce (and broadcast) what they already know. I ran my theory by Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist who has studied the backfire effect. He told me it “seems plausible,” but said he wasn’t aware of any research testing this idea, “so in the spirit of your piece, I probably shouldn’t comment on it!”

When asked if they generally read the whole article before commenting, a few respondents to our survey said they only skimmed or didn’t read past the headline, but the vast majority of them reported that they read the story in its entirety.

That sounds encouraging, but I’m reluctant to take these answers at face value after talking to David Dunning, who’s a psychologist at the University of Michigan and one of the researchers known for identifying the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias that, as the paper introducing the effect puts it, causes people to “fail to recognize their own incompetence.” “People are notoriously bad at comprehending what they’ve actually comprehended from text,” he said. “The correlation between what people think they’ve read and what they’ve actually read is quite small.” In a classic 1982 study, researchers asked study subjects to read a text that contained blatant contradictions and found that subjects who failed to find the contradictions still rated their comprehension as high. This could explain all those “stinking badges” comments.

by Christie Aschwanden, FiveThirtyEight | Read more:
Image: Merjin Hos

[ed. haha...  "anybody can take Washington!"]
via:

Die Antwoord: The Real Zef Rappers of Beverly Hills

[ed. These two crack me up with their bizarro/gonzo/take no prisoners style. Plus, as Ninja says, they got those "next-level beats".]

Ninja, one half of the influential rave-rap act Die Antwoord, is none too pleased that from across the restaurant at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, Quentin Tarantino has cranked up the stereo, blasting Sarah Vaughan’s voice. “Can you not listen to that man and turn the music down,” he says to the waiter in a snarling, Afrikaans-inflected stage whisper. “Oh, yeah,” says Yolandi Visser, the shyer of the two. “Thank you,” she adds, as the waiter shuffles over to the stereo.

A few moments later, Tarantino stands, unsheathes an LP and drops the needle on side two of Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story,” then raises his glass to Ninja and Visser in a facetious toast — but they already have their backs to him and, tellingly, the volume is significantly lower.

Engaging in this sort of D.J. battle with an Oscar winner requires either the confidence of an L.A. insider or the carelessness of an interloper. Ninja, 42, and Visser, 32, the duo that pioneered Zef culture — South Africa’s response to America’s so-called white trash — are a bit of both. With matching mullets and meth-chic attire, the seemingly out-of-place pair is also oddly at home.

Accents notwithstanding, Ninja and Visser — who formed Die Antwoord in Cape Town in 2008, and now live between L.A. and Johannesburg — could at times be mistaken for native Angelenos, whether dissecting the menu’s vegetarian options (settling on avocado tartines), or recalling coffee at the home of David Lynch, who, for a while, was their neighbor in the hills above the Hollywood Bowl. The duo’s 10-year-old daughter, Sixteen, chose the house for them. (They co-parent but ended their romantic relationship some time ago.)

Die Antwoord exploded on the music scene in 2010 when videos for two songs from their debut album, “$O$,” became viral sensations. Interscope quickly signed them to a $10-million deal. Things didn’t go well. The label’s executives pushed them to record a follow-up heavy on collaborations and guest appearances. “Lady Gaga, the Black Eyed Peas and Far East Movement,” Ninja says. “And we were like, ‘Who? And no!’

The group backed out of the deal, started their own label, Zef Recordz, and went on to release two more albums. They’ve since seized every opportunity to raise a middle finger to the mainstream, in the process cultivating — and perhaps caricaturing — a persona of petulance. Offered the opportunity to open for Gaga, they responded with a video sendup of the singer (an impersonator gives birth to a cockroach, then gets mauled by a lion). They responded to an invite to Kanye West’s house by trash-talking him in a video they made in a bathroom. At their Austin City Limits performance in early October, Ninja dropped his pants and mooned the crowd. (...)

Die Antwoord’s founding D.J., known as God (formerly Hi-Tek), began sharing D.J. duties with Muggs, and they pushed each other. “There’s a Zulu saying that goes, ‘Spear sharpens spear,’” says Ninja. “The competition was ill.”

You could say the same about the garrulous Ninja and the reticent Visser. Their intensely codependent dynamic has long baffled observers, leading some to wonder if their behavior is an elaborate form of performance art. “When we laid down our verses on this album, Yolandi burned me nearly every single time,” Ninja says. “I remember thinking, ‘How can I compete?’ I’m in love with the cut of her voice. It’s just the most delicious frequency.” Hearing this, Visser pulls her knees up under her tank-top hoodie, then pulls the hood over her head and cinches it tight.

by Alex Bhattacharji, NY Times | Read more:
Image:YouTube

[ed. Here's a cool animated video: Happy Go Sucky Fucky]

On Political Correctness

If you say that something is technically correct, you are suggesting that it is wrong – the adverb before “correct” implies a “but”. However, to say that a statement is politically correct hints at something more insidious. Namely, that the speaker is acting in bad faith. He or she has ulterior motives, and is hiding the truth in order to advance an agenda or to signal moral superiority. To say that someone is being “politically correct” discredits them twice. First, they are wrong. Second, and more damningly, they know it.

If you go looking for the origins of the phrase, it becomes clear that there is no neat history of political correctness. There have only been campaigns against something called “political correctness”. For 25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting enemy has been a favourite tactic of the right. Opposition to political correctness has proved itself a highly effective form of crypto-politics. It transforms the political landscape by acting as if it is not political at all. Trump is the deftest practitioner of this strategy yet.

Most Americans had never heard the phrase “politically correct” before 1990, when a wave of stories began to appear in newspapers and magazines. One of the first and most influential was published in October 1990 by the New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein, who warned – under the headline “The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct” – that the country’s universities were threatened by “a growing intolerance, a closing of debate, a pressure to conform”.

Bernstein had recently returned from Berkeley, where he had been reporting on student activism. He wrote that there was an “unofficial ideology of the university”, according to which “a cluster of opinions about race, ecology, feminism, culture and foreign policy defines a kind of ‘correct’ attitude toward the problems of the world”. For instance, “Biodegradable garbage bags get the PC seal of approval. Exxon does not.”

Bernstein’s alarming dispatch in America’s paper of record set off a chain reaction, as one mainstream publication after another rushed to denounce this new trend. The following month, the Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz decried the “brave new world of ideological zealotry” at American universities. In December, the cover of Newsweek – with a circulation of more than 3 million – featured the headline “THOUGHT POLICE” and yet another ominous warning: “There’s a ‘politically correct’ way to talk about race, sex and ideas. Is this the New Enlightenment – or the New McCarthyism?” A similar story graced the cover of New York magazine in January 1991– inside, the magazine proclaimed that “The New Fascists” were taking over universities. In April, Time magazine reported on “a new intolerance” that was on the rise across campuses nationwide.

If you search ProQuest, a digital database of US magazines and newspapers, you find that the phrase “politically correct” rarely appeared before 1990. That year, it turned up more than 700 times. In 1991, there are more than 2,500 instances. In 1992, it appeared more than 2,800 times. Like Indiana Jones movies, these pieces called up enemies from a melange of old wars: they compared the “thought police” spreading terror on university campuses to fascists, Stalinists, McCarthyites, “Hitler Youth”, Christian fundamentalists, Maoists and Marxists.

Many of these articles recycled the same stories of campus controversies from a handful of elite universities, often exaggerated or stripped of context. (...)

None of the stories that introduced the menace of political correctness could pinpoint where or when it had begun. Nor were they very precise when they explained the origins of the phrase itself. Journalists frequently mentioned the Soviets – Bernstein observed that the phrase “smacks of Stalinist orthodoxy”– but there is no exact equivalent in Russian. (The closest would be “ideinost”, which translates as “ideological correctness”. But that word has nothing to do with disadvantaged people or minorities.) The intellectual historian LD Burnett has found scattered examples of doctrines or people being described as “politically correct” in American communist publications from the 1930s – usually, she says, in a tone of mockery.

The phrase came into more widespread use in American leftist circles in the 1960s and 1970s – most likely as an ironic borrowing from Mao, who delivered a famous speech in 1957 that was translated into English with the title “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”.

Ruth Perry, a literature professor at MIT who was active in the feminist and civil rights movements, says that many radicals were reading the Little Red Book in the late 1960s and 1970s, and surmises that her friends may have picked up the adjective “correct” there. But they didn’t use it in the way Mao did. “Politically correct” became a kind of in-joke among American leftists – something you called a fellow leftist when you thought he or she was being self-righteous. “The term was always used ironically,” Perry says, “always calling attention to possible dogmatism.”

by Moira Weigel, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Nathalie Lees

OK Go

[ed. They've had other inventive videos too, like: Here It Goes Again]

Thai-Style Clams in Coconut Broth

In some cases, it’s hard to say whether to call a dish a soup, or to call it soupy, souplike or brothy. All those terms are positives, in any case. Take steamed clams, for instance. For my purposes, a big bowl of clams bobbing around in a broth of their own qualifies as soup. Yes, we appreciate each little sweet clammy morsel as we suck it from the shell, but ultimately it is the clams’ savory juices, enjoyed spoonful by spoonful or slurped from the bowl’s edge, that really satisfy. With clams, the more broth the better.

There are countless approaches. Garlic, parsley and a splash of wine make the simplest sort of soupy clams. Whether you use large cherrystones, littlenecks, diminutive Manila clams or briny cockles, the technique is the same: Put them in a pot, clamp on the lid and turn the heat full blast. In a matter of minutes, the clams are open and ready to eat, swimming in a tasty sea.

That’s a perfect go-to option, but today I’m making a highly aromatic Thai-style version. It requires very little in the way of advance preparation or chopping, but you may need to make a small detour for a few key aromatic ingredients to perfume the soup. Most Asian groceries will have them. Lemongrass, galangal, lime leaf, hot pepper and coconut milk are among the classic Thai seasonings for shellfish; using them is dead simple (and all can be stored in the fridge for a week or more). To release their flavors, crush or bruise them. Bash the lemongrass, tear the lime leaf and slice the galangal before they go in the pot. If you want it especially piquant, smash the hot peppers and add them whole. Otherwise add thinly sliced Thai chiles to taste.

Spicy and refreshing, the bright-tasting broth is a mix of sweet, salty, sour and herbaceous. If you added mussels, scallops or prawns to the clams, no one would complain. But I still maintain it’s the glorious soupiness of this dish that is the real reason to make it.

Fragrant Thai-Style Clams in Coconut Broth

by David Tanis, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Karsten Moran

Barack Obama’s Contribution to the Decline of US Democracy

Yes, we can!

The iconic slogan “Yes, we can!” inspired the wave of enthusiasm that swept up millions of Americans during the presidential election of 2008 and carried Barack Obama to the White House. If that slogan epitomized the beginning of the Obama presidency, he had an equally iconic ending: the first African-American president shaking hands with the first president-elect in at least 100 years endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

In November 2008 Barack Obama won the presidency with almost 53% on a voter turnout of 58%. The winning percentage was the highest since 1988 and the turnout the largest for 50 years. The first non-white president took office on a surge of enthusiasm exceeding any since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 (by comparison John Kennedy went to the presidency with less than half of total votes and a winning margin of 0.2 percentage points).

The enthusiasm for Obama arose from fervent hope for specific changes: 1) a universal, affordable health system; 2) the end of two disastrous wars (Afghanistan and Iraq); 3) economic recovery from the worst collapse in 80 years; and 4) action against banks and bankers to prevent a recurrence of the collapse.

To fulfil these hopes, Obama had majorities in both houses of Congress, 58 of 100 Senators (largest majority of any party in 30 years) and 257 seats in the House (most since 1992). By any measure the new president enjoyed an overwhelming majority. Under some circumstances the Republican minority in the Senate could prevent voting, but a determined and bold president could force votes within the arcane Senate rules.

No he didn’t!

It quickly became obvious that Obama would be anything but determined and bold; on the contrary, avoiding conflict through compromise would guide his presidency. In face of a solidly right wing Republican opposition, attempting to compromise was recipe for failure, a disaster foretold and fulfilled.

Despite the large House and Senate majorities a litany of failure dogged the first two Obama years, some partial and others presented as success. Extension of the popular Medicare programme offered the obvious method of achieving a national health system (confusingly dubbed “single payer” by its adherents). Obama yielded before opposition from private “health care” corporations and drug companies.

The result was an extremely complicated, expensive and inefficient system acceptable to private interests. To make a bad outcome worse, seeking a non-existent compromise, the president delayed passage of the “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” for so long that no one enjoyed the limited benefits before the mid-term election in 2010 (it became law in March 2010). The Republicans would use attacks on the president’s dubious triumph to regain control of the House of Representatives and almost seize the Senate.

The quickly enacted fiscal stimulus (February 2009), American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, brought the closest thing to success. Because the president failed to challenge the Republican hysteria over the fiscal deficit that the stimulus necessarily increased, the mildly successful recovery package would also serve Republican election propaganda.

Having lost the propaganda battle on health care and recovery, Obama scored a third own goal by declining to prosecute any financial executive for the illegal dealings that helped provoke the Great Recession of 2008-2010. This failure combined with massive capital replenishment of banks handed the right wing Republicans a slogan more natural to progressives, “bailout Main Street, not Wall Street”.

Finally, far from ending the two wars began by his predecessor, Obama continued to wage them, even expanding US military operations to other countries with extensive use of military drones as the preferred killing agent. The specific promise to close the brutal detention camp on Cuban soil is unfulfilled.

Like Bill Clinton before him, Obama remained popular despite his failures. Like Clinton his eight years as president would after the initial hope decline deeper and deeper into failure. Perhaps the most shocking of these was the failure to mount serious opposition to the Republican gutting of the law protecting the right to vote, a savage blow to his fellow African-Americans. Weakening of the Voting Rights Act was de facto endorsement of state laws throughout the country restricting the rights of citizenship.

Had Obama ended two unpopular wars, supported an effective recovery programme, quickly forced through a Medicare-based health system for all, and aggressively reformed the US financial sector, he would be hailed as the greatest president since Franklin Roosevelt. Instead, he leaves condemned, yet another Democratic president whose neoliberal economic policies fed a rising of inequalities and shrinking of the well-being of the vast majority.

New Deal to neoliberalism

Wars, a flawed health care law and high unemployment did not give Donald Trump the key to the White House. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court will swear in the most dangerous president in American history for a different reason. Beginning with Jimmy Carter in the 1970s the leadership of the Democratic Party enthusiastically worked to make neoliberal ideology mainstream consensus and Donald Trump is the outcome.

An equitable sharing of the benefits of economic growth is the necessary condition to sustain democracy in a capitalist society. This condition was the basis for the so-called New Deal coalition forged by Franklin Roosevelt in the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s. It would serve as the guiding principle of the Democratic Party through the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

The policies to achieve this equitable sharing had a common theme, restrictions on the functioning of markets, with the purpose of preventing the anti-social consequences of capitalist competition. Concretely these restrictions were 1) trade unions to limit labour market competition, 2) anti-monopoly laws and strict regulations to prevent concentration of corporate power, and 3) severe constraints on financial capital.

Neoliberalism was and remains the antithesis of the New Deal political economy. In contrast to preventing the anti-social consequences of market competition, neoliberalism celebrates that competition, attributing its excesses to public regulation. With this inversion of logic, apologists for financial capital blamed the infamous “sub-prime crisis” on public regulation not fraud and deception by bankers.

by John Weeks, Open Democracy |  Read more:

Image: Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Elizabeth Cotten

Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Libba Cotten taught herself how to play the banjo and guitar at an early age. Although forbidden to do so, she often borrowed her brother's instruments when he was away, reversing the banjo and guitar to make them easier to play left-handed. Eventually she saved up the $3.75 required to purchase a Stella guitar from a local dry-goods store. Cotten immediately began to develop a unique guitar style characterized by simple figures played on the bass strings in counterpoint to a melody played on the treble strings, a method that later became widely known as "Cotten style." [ed. Also known as Cotten picking.] She fretted the strings with her right hand and picked with her left, the reverse of the usual method. Moreover, she picked the bass strings with her fingers and the treble (melody strings) with her thumb, creating an almost inimitable sound.

Libba married Frank Cotten when she was 15 (not a particularly early age in that era) and had one child, Lily. As Libba became immersed in family life, she spent more time at church, where she was counseled to give up her "worldly" guitar music. It wasn't until many years later that Cotten, due largely to a fortunate chance encounter, was able to build her immense talent into a professional music career. While working at a department store in Washington, D.C., Libba found and returned a very young and lost Peggy Seeger to her mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger. A month later, Cotten began work in the household of the famous folk-singing Seeger family.

The Seeger home was an amazing place for Libba to have landed entirely by accident. Ruth Crawford Seeger was a noted composer and music teacher while her husband, Charles, pioneered the field of ethnomusicology. A few years passed before Peggy discovered Cotten playing the family's gut-stringed guitar. Libba apologized for playing the instrument without asking, but Peggy was astonished by what she heard. Eventually the Seegers came to know Libba's instrumental virtuosity and the wealth of her repertoire.

Thanks largely to Mike Seeger's early recordings of her work, Elizabeth Cotten soon found herself giving small concerts in the homes of congressmen and senators, including that of John F. Kennedy. By 1958, at the age of sixty-two, Libba had recorded her first album, Elizabeth Cotten: Negro Folk Songs and Tunes (Folkways 1957, now reissued as Freight Train and Other North Carolina Folk Songs, Smithsonian Folkways 1989). Meticulously recorded by Mike Seeger, this was one of the few authentic folk-music albums available by the early 1960s, and certainly one of the most influential. In addition to the now well-recorded tune "Freight Train," penned by Cotten when she was only eleven or twelve, the album provided accessible examples of some of the "open" tunings used in American folk guitar.

by Smithsonian Folkways |  Read more:

Image: via:

[ed. Surely a genius. Freight Train was one of the earliest fingerpicking tunes I learned to play. Can you imagine just turning a guitar upside down and playing it that way? Here's her Wikipedia page.]

The Anger Room

When she was a teenager on the South Side of Chicago in the late 1990s, Donna Alexander fantasized about setting up a space where stressed-out people could relieve their tension in a safe, nonviolent way — by smashing mannequins, televisions, furniture and other objects. She was confident in her idea, but she wasn’t sure how to turn it into a business.

Finally, in the fall of 2008, and by then living in Dallas, Ms. Alexander began an experiment. She invited current and past co-workers to her garage to pulverize items she had collected from the curbs in her neighborhood. “I would play music on my laptop and just let them have at it,” she says. She charged $5. Soon, word of the stress-relief sessions spread throughout Dallas.

“I started getting strangers at my door asking if my house was the place to break stuff,” Ms. Alexander said. “When that happened, I knew I had a business.”

Over the next few years while she looked for a suitable location for the company, Ms. Alexander accrued a four-month waiting list. In December 2011, she quit her job as a marketing manager for a steakhouse to officially start the Anger Room in a 1,000-square-foot space in downtown Dallas.

The Anger Room charges $25 for five minutes of crushing printers, alarm clocks, glass cups, vases and the like. Prices rise to about $500 for custom room setups. The most expensive setup so far has been a faux retail store, replete with racks of clothing. (...)

Sessions in an anger room are meant to be therapeutic. But mental health professionals question the efficacy of rampaging in a faux cubicle or whacking airborne glasses.

“Although it’s appealing to think that expressing anger can reduce stress, there is not much evidence of that,” says George M. Slavich, a clinical psychologist and director of the Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. “On the contrary, the types of physiological and immune responses that occur during anger can actually be harmful for health.”

Mr. Slavich recommends stress-reduction techniques that can be incorporated into daily life, such as mindfulness-based stress reduction, meditation and cognitive behavior therapy.

Nevertheless, customers of the Anger Room have paid to re-enact a scene from the movie “Office Space,” in which the main characters, a trio of disgruntled computer programmers, beat a printer with a baseball bat. The company can also customize the workplace experience, recreating a customer’s own office.

“You have a desk with a computer and phone, chair and a mannequin dressed up in a suit, uniform or whatever relates to their real-life issue,” Ms. Alexander says.

Customers are provided with protective equipment that includes a helmet, goggles, boots and gloves. And they can pick out a music soundtrack — including classical, R&B, grunge and heavy metal — and an array of objects to swing.

“Some of our typical options are baseball bats, golf clubs, two-by-fours,” Ms. Alexander says. “We get things like metal pipes, mannequin arms and legs, skillets, legs from tables. Sledgehammers, crowbars and things like that.” Off-limits are sharp objects and those that use ammunition. (...)

Customers have included executives at large corporations, including Hilton and Microsoft, Ms. Alexander says. In the first year, the Anger Room’s revenue was $170,000. Since then, she has received about 2,500 inquiries from other aspiring anger-room entrepreneurs, and she is in the process of drafting a licensing agreement for franchisees.

by Claire Martin, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Cooper Neill
[ed. Sure beats this: Actually, Let’s Not Be in the Moment]

Skating Rink Closes After Public Outcry

An amusement park in Japan has been forced to close its skating rink after a torrent of online criticism over its centrepiece: thousands of fish frozen into the ice.

Space World in the city of Kitakyushu, south-west Japan, bowed to pressure to close the facility on Sunday after an online campaign denouncing the piscine graveyard as “cruel”, “immoral” and “weird”.

The rink, which was supposed to have stayed open until the spring, featured about 5,000 dead sprats, mackerel and other fish that had been bought from a local market embedded in the ice, some with their mouths still open in apparent suspended animation, according to local media reports.

The fish were also used to spell out “hello” under the ice and to form an arrow showing skaters which direction to follow.

Other parts of the rink showed rays and whale sharks that, the park pointed out, were merely enlarged photos that had been placed beneath the ice.

The outcry was prompted after the fish, some of which appear to be swimming in formation around a pillar, were featured in a local TV report last week.

Space World’s Facebook page was inundated with complaints and calls for the attraction to close.

One commenter said the park was “disrespectful of life”, while another said it was displaying an “appalling lack of morality”.

The facility’s website had touted the Ice Aquarium as an opportunity for visitors to “glide across the sea” in what it called the first attraction of its kind in the world.

But on Sunday, the park announced it was closing the ice rink. “We deeply apologise to people who felt uncomfortable about the Ice Aquarium event,” it said in a statement quoted in the Japan Times. “As a result, we have stopped the event from today.”

A spokesperson told the Asahi Shimbun that the park was considering holding a memorial service for the fish next year, adding that the fish were already dead when they were bought from a local wholesaler.

by Justin McCurry, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: The Guardian

Thankful

This photograph makes me so happy. It was taken at the White House, of course, on the day that 21 people received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I first saw it on Vin Scully’s Instagram page. I am thankful that Vin Scully has an Instagram page.

I have spent the last two days staring at this photograph more or less nonstop. It has everything. At the center, you have Vin Scully, a miracle. Look at the joy on his face. That’s not one of those “OK, everybody smile,” expressions — that is the pure and runaway wonder of a child who cannot believe that life has been so good to him.

That was the wonder that Vin Scully brought to baseball. You can talk, of course, about the poetry. “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.” You can talk about his sense of rhythm and tempo and music, the way he watched Henry Aaron hit the home run that passed the Babe, declared it gone, and then stepped aside for 27 seconds to let people hear the crowd roar, the fireworks go off, the rapture everyone felt just being there.

And then, at exactly the right beat, he sang:

“What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep south for breaking the record of an all-time baseball idol.”

You can talk about the stories, the interludes, the vivid descriptions, the way he would take the plainest of moments — baseball’s beauty is in all of its plain moments — and turn it slightly magical: “So,” he would say, “deuces wild, two balls, two strikes, two outs, two on and two runs in the game.”

But it was his joy, above all, the way he could express his own sense of fortune at every game for more than a half century, that made him a miracle. Vin Scully’s life has had great sadness in it. Personal tragedies. Long lives do. “In the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” Samuel Beckett wrote. Vin Scully went on, and somehow, through it all, conveyed that he still could not believe how wonderful it all is, a hitter, a pitcher, a beautiful day at Dodger Stadium. Pull up a chair and spend the afternoon with us.

To his right in the photograph, blocking the lower corner of the painting of John Tyler, that’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, of course, and the smile on his face is a bit more forced, a bit wearier. That too fits. “Listen kid,” he said to the boy in the cockpit in “Airplane,” “I’ve been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA. I’m out there busting my buns every night. Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes.”

Kareem’s game was pure efficiency. In his later years and after he retired, people would write about the beauty and gracefulness of his signature move, The Skyhook, but it always seemed to me that the miracle of The Skyhook was how ungraceful and unbeautiful it was; The Skyhook was scoring refined and distilled down to a sort of clear basketball concentrate. You knew it was coming. You had seen it a thousand times before. But it was unstoppable as rain and as unavoidable as the wind.

To Vin’s left in the photograph, with Ulysses S. Grant hovering over his shoulder, is Michael Jordan. He too has a camera-ready smile, though unsurprisingly, unlike Kareem’s, it is perfect.

by Joe Posnanski, Joe Blogs |  Read more:

Image: Vin Scully
[ed. Also, here's something Joe isn't too thankful about (Cleveland Browns): The Last Drive]

via: here and here