[ed. Perhaps you've noticed a perplexing paucity of posts lately (and dumb alliterations). Sorry. Beyond threatening nearly every functional institution in the world (not to mention, you know, basic human existence), Trump is making it extremely difficult to find much of anything worth posting about that doesn't include him; which (credit where credit is due), the media slavishly enables. I'll keep working on it but have to say... it's getting personal now. I think his whole agenda is based on undermining this blog.] 

Pro Bowl Adding Dodgeball

The NFL will attempt to invigorate the Pro Bowl by adding a dodgeball game between their players.

No, this is not a joke.

This is real.

The league announced Monday they are adding a skills competition to what they are calling a “re-imagined” Pro Bowl week leading up to the actual Pro Bowl on 29 January. The skills or as it might be better said “skills” competition will take place three days before year-end exhibition game between the NFL’s all-stars and will be run by the producers of the TV shows American Ninja Warrior and Hell’s Kitchen.

While there is extreme potential to turn the Pro Bowl into a sideshow so absurd that the whole idea of an all-star game might be killed for good, the Pro Bowl has been something of a joke for some time. Played for most of its ignominious history in Hawaii, players treated the game and the week before it as a vacation, making the game something of a glorified flag football contest. So many players drop out each year, creating such a deep pool of replacements that the idea of being a Pro Bowler has been devalued in the last two decades.

The NFL has long struggled to find footing for the game, at times moving it to the mainland, playing it either a week before or a week after the Super Bowl and finally eliminating league designations in favor of two teams chosen pick-up style. None of these novelties have worked. The Pro Bowl has remained an afterthought for fans. Ratings have languished and the whole concept has seemed to be a farce. There was probably nothing else for the NFL to do than let reality TV producers take charge.

In addition to dodgeball, the “skills” competition will feature relay races, a game in which players will throw balls at moving targets and a best hands contest. The league said the night will include “quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers, tight ends, linemen, linebackers and defensive backs”, presumably eliminating kickers and punters.

by Les Carpenter, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: 20th Century Fox/Everett/REX features

Sears Transformed America. It Deserves to Die With Dignity.

Listening to a Sears earnings call in 2016 is like realizing that the twinkling light you're admiring in the night sky is from a star that died 50 years ago.

Sears Holdings Corp. lost $748 million last quarter amid falling sales, an even worse performance than the dismal losses of the period a year earlier. There is no obvious reason that the business might improve. And yet executives are still discussing how important its shopper loyalty program is "to the future and growth of the company," as if the company were going to have growth, and shoppers and a future.

We can argue about whether the current problems date back to the Great Recession or to the 2005 merger with Kmart, in which some bright strategist decided that the solution to the problems of two struggling retailers with badly dated business models was to lash them together and hope that somehow these two rotted timbers could hold each other up. But this is a distraction, because in fact, the seeds of this decline were planted decades ago, during the last time Sears needed to reinvent itself, in the aftermath of World War II.

Sears was the Wal-Mart of its era, that era being the 1890s to the 1930s. The company used economies of scale to become the comprehensive retailer to the large segment of the population that lived in small towns with few retail options. Then, as now, smaller local retailers might resent it, but the "wishbook," aka the Sears Roebuck catalog selling spices and plows and player pianos and seemingly everything else, could be found in almost every farmhouse in America.

Eventually, the firm moved into brick-and-mortar retail. World War II left the company in trouble. With inventories and cash low because of wartime shortages, Sears embarked on an audacious expansion plan, building new stores and investing heavily in the automobile suburbs that were springing up everywhere. This decision by Sears helped create the retail landscape that many of us remember from our childhood: the massive suburban shopping mall, anchored by a giant Sears store.

That Sears store might not have a plow, but it could sell you tires for your car, a refrigerator for your kitchen, and makeup for your 16-year-old daughter's first dance. It was an impressive act of reinvention, at the kind of crisis point that often drives previous titans of industry out of business.

But however brilliant this move was at the time, it has heavy costs now. Retailers have a lot of assets: brand, human talent and of course their physical inventory. But ultimately every major brick-and-mortar retailer's biggest asset is geography -- as the real estate brokers like to say, "location, location, location." Geography saved Sears, for a time, but now its biggest asset is an albatross.

The malls that Sears anchored for decades now seem to be slowly dying. They, like Sears itself, are suffering from online competition. Companies in this situation are often urged to find a new business model, but when your core asset is prime locations that are no longer so prime, that's hard advice to follow.

Not that Sears hasn't tried. In its most recent earnings release, the company presented cheerily arranged facts and figures that aimed to soften, but could not hide, the fact that the company has not turned a profit in years. During the earnings call, the chief financial officer, Jason Hollar, spoke almost lovingly of all the stores they were planning to close: "As we reduce our overall store base, we believe we will inevitably end up with stores that are profitable, operate at a small loss, or have a clear path to profitability."

This rosy forecast is, of course, eminently evitable. It could be evited pretty darn quick. Closing stores can be the path back to profitability for fundamentally sound businesses that expanded too quickly, or into the wrong areas. But it is precisely Sears's basic competitive strengths that have been badly impaired by the changing retail landscape, so there's no obvious profitable core that the company can shrink back to.

by Megan McArdle, Bloomberg |  Read more:

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Joan Miró, Harlequin’s Carnival. 1924
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The $21,000 First Class Airplane Seat

YouTube Biggest Viral Videos of 2016

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[ed. Speaking of which, I just got done reading Ready Player One. Highly recommended.] 

Maybe the Answer Is That He Can't Divest

Since Donald Trump's surprise election one month ago, there's been a bubbling conversation about the mammoth conflicts of interest he will have if he is running or even owning his far flung business enterprises while serving as the head of state. I've suggested that the whole notion of 'conflicts of interest' doesn't really capture what we're dealing with here, which is really a pretty open effort to leverage the presidency to expand his family business. But a couple things came together for me today which make me think we've all missed the real issue.

Maybe he can't divest because he's too underwater to do so or more likely he's too dependent on current and expanding cash flow to divest or even turn the reins over to someone else.

Late this afternoon we got news that Trump will remain as executive producer of The Apprentice, now starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. That is, quite simply, weird. The presidency is time consuming and complicated, even for the lazier presidents. Does Trump really need to do this? Can he do it, just in terms of hours in the day? Of course, it may simply be a title that entitles him to draw a check. But does he need the check that bad?

The idea that Trump is heavily leveraged and reliant on on-going cash flow to keep his business empire from coming apart and collapsing into bankruptcy was frequently discussed during the campaign. But it's gotten pretty little attention since he was elected.

Here's something else.

After Trump got into that scuffle with Boeing, reporters asked about his ownership of Boeing stock. Trump replied that he'd already sold that stock. So there was no problem. But there's a bit more to it than that.

According to his spokesman, Trump sold all of his stock back in June, a portfolio which his disclosures suggest was worth as much as $38 million. Trump told Matt Lauer that he sold the stock because he was confident he'd win and "would have a tremendous ... conflict of interest owning all of these different companies" while serving as President.

Now, c'mon. Donald Trump sold off all his equities more than six months before he could become president because he was concerned about conflicts of interest? Please. That doesn't pass the laugh test.

But consider this. During the primaries Donald Trump loaned his campaign roughly $50 million. Over the course of the spring, as it became increasingly likely he'd be the nominee, that loan became increasingly conspicuous. Donors were wary of donating big money because they didn't want him to use it to pay himself back for that loan. Many suggested that he might not actually be able to part with that money. It became a big issue and Trump refused to forgive the loans.

It was only in June that Trump finally gave in and forgave the loan; this was confirmed in the June FEC disclosure that came out in late July. Who knows why Trump sold off all his stock holdings? Maybe he just had a feeling. Maybe he thought the market was too hot. Maybe he just had a spasm of prospective ethical concern. But let's be honest. The most obvious explanation is that forgiving that debt from his campaign required him — through whatever mix of contingencies — to free up more cash, either for the campaign or personal expenses or perhaps to have a certain amount of cash on hand because of terms of other debts. It does not seem plausible at all that the timing is coincidental.

Since we don't have Trump's tax returns, there's just a huge amount we don't know about his businesses. What we do know is that Trump appears to wildly exaggerate the scale of his wealth and exhibit a stinginess that is very hard to square with a man of the kinds of means he claims. A heavily leveraged business, one that is indebted and dependent on cash flow to keep everything moving forward, can be kind of like a shark. It has to keep moving forward or it dies.

by Josh Marshall, TPM |  Read more:

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[ed. Love this picture. Romney looks like anal sex is on the desert menu (if it wasn't already an appetizer.]

Bob Dylan - 2016 Nobel Prize In Literature Banquet Speech

Good evening, everyone. I extend my warmest greetings to the members of the Swedish Academy and to all of the other distinguished guests in attendance tonight.

I'm sorry I can't be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely with you in spirit and honored to be receiving such a prestigious prize. Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is something I never could have imagined or seen coming. From an early age, I've been familiar with and reading and absorbing the works of those who were deemed worthy of such a distinction: Kipling, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck, Albert Camus, Hemingway. These giants of literature whose works are taught in the schoolroom, housed in libraries around the world and spoken of in reverent tones have always made a deep impression. That I now join the names on such a list is truly beyond words.

I don't know if these men and women ever thought of the Nobel honor for themselves, but I suppose that anyone writing a book, or a poem, or a play anywhere in the world might harbor that secret dream deep down inside. It's probably buried so deep that they don't even know it's there.

If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I'd have about the same odds as standing on the moon. In fact, during the year I was born and for a few years after, there wasn't anyone in the world who was considered good enough to win this Nobel Prize. So, I recognize that I am in very rare company, to say the least.

I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: "Who're the right actors for these roles?" "How should this be staged?" "Do I really want to set this in Denmark?" His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. "Is the financing in place?" "Are there enough good seats for my patrons?" "Where am I going to get a human skull?" I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind was the question "Is this literature?"

When I started writing songs as a teenager, and even as I started to achieve some renown for my abilities, my aspirations for these songs only went so far. I thought they could be heard in coffee houses or bars, maybe later in places like Carnegie Hall, the London Palladium. If I was really dreaming big, maybe I could imagine getting to make a record and then hearing my songs on the radio. That was really the big prize in my mind. Making records and hearing your songs on the radio meant that you were reaching a big audience and that you might get to keep doing what you had set out to do.

Well, I've been doing what I set out to do for a long time, now. I've made dozens of records and played thousands of concerts all around the world. But it's my songs that are at the vital center of almost everything I do. They seemed to have found a place in the lives of many people throughout many different cultures and I'm grateful for that.

But there's one thing I must say. As a performer I've played for 50,000 people and I've played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried. The fact that the Nobel committee is so small is not lost on me.

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. "Who are the best musicians for these songs?" "Am I recording in the right studio?" "Is this song in the right key?" Some things never change, even in 400 years.

Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?"

So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.

My best wishes to you all,

Bob Dylan |  Read more:

Image: Rolling Stone

A Diner Waitress Whose Kindness Made Regular Customers Into Lifelong Friends

Lark Shellhamer left home at 15 and never finished school, but she's the best waitress I've ever known.

Her section fills in the early morning when the Village Inn remains mostly empty. The franchise diner in Midtown Anchorage has become a community of her regulars.

"She makes everybody happy," said Sandy Smart. "That's how you're supposed to be."

Sandy sits at her usual table for two hours every weekday morning, sipping coffee and nibbling an English muffin. I use her first name because this is a place of first names. Everyone calls her Grandma Sandy, including Lark and her two sons, Blaze and Cruz, also longtime waiters here.

Lark starts work at 5 a.m. The restaurant operates 24 hours except for weekends after the bars close. Some of the first customers are strippers after finishing their night's work and Bible study group members before starting their days.

Lark said the key to her success is treating them all with equal kindness.

My daughter Becky and I began coming in last year when my son was beginning school an hour earlier. Lark recognized us the second time we came in. The third time, she met us at the table with our coffee and hot chocolate ready.

We began looking forward to Lark's smile and energy. She zips around the dining room like a hyperactive middle-schooler, making sudden turns and stops, hugging customers and dropping into their booths to talk about kids or football, and then speeding off to deliver another big tray of comfort food.

Lark grew up in Eagle River. At 15 she dated a 19-year-old boyfriend who had received a lump of cash in an inheritance. When her mother gave her an ultimatum, Lark left. The couple flew to a random city, Dallas, and spent the inheritance on drugs. Lark ended up on her own, addicted to crack on the streets of Dallas.

Her first job was waiting tables in a Texas IHOP. She got clean. She eventually quit even coffee and soda.

Just before Christmas 27 years ago, Lark returned to Anchorage, pregnant, and three days later applied for a job at Village Inn. She has been there ever since, earning a living and raising her sons.

"I've been here busting my butt," she said. "I've never lied to them. They know how hard I've worked getting out of it."

One of her first Village Inn regulars came to the hospital when the baby was born, bringing Cruz a blanket she had made. She did the same for Blaze. That woman is too old to drive now, but friends help bring her in to breakfast to see Lark sometimes.

Early on Thursday, Nicholle Mills came in to write Christmas cards. She tries to arrive before it's busy to get as much of Lark's time as possible. They share advice on raising kids.

Josh Nelisnick and Joel Hoffenkamp came in after 7:30 a.m. and ordered sandwiches. They work overnight stocking shelves at Sam's Club. This habit has lasted nine years.

"Honestly, the food wasn't that good when we started coming here," Josh said. But the service made up for it.

Every summer, Lark throws a block party in her Eagle River neighborhood for them and her other Village Inn regulars. She hires a live band and sets up horseshoes and kids' games. Josh texted her one night about a great deal at Sam's on a bouncy house, so she's adding that.

Josh and Lark took their co-workers, from both Village Inn and Sam's Club, out bar-hopping one St. Patrick's Day. On Thursday, she knelt at the table with Josh and Joel to sign them up to jump into Goose Lake with her and another server for the Special Olympics Polar Plunge.

"This is pretty much my social life," Josh said.

Barb and Ruth Piotrowski came in with a card and gift for Lark, a pair of earrings. Lark makes Christmas baskets for her regulars. Ruth has been in Anchorage 69 years. She raised Barb here in the house where she still lives on Cordova Street.

"How long have we been coming here, Lark?" Barb asked.

Lark said, "I've got to think how old the kids are."

The answer turned out to be 20 years.

by Charles Wohlforth, Alaska Dispatch |  Read more:

Images: Loren Holmes

Galina Petrova-Džiaukštienė, Women Cleaning Fish, 1969.
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James Dean
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How the Twinkie Made the Superrich Even Richer

As fans gathered on Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, Al Roker pulled up in a big red delivery truck, ready to give America what it wanted: Twinkies.

The snack cakes flew through the air into the crowd pressed against metal barriers. One man shoved cream-filled treats into his mouth. Another “Today” host tucked Twinkies into the neckline of her dress.

Across the nation in the summer of 2013, there was a feeding frenzy for Twinkies. The iconic snack cake returned to shelves just months after Hostess had shuttered its bakeries and laid off thousands of workers. The return was billed on “Today” as “the sweetest comeback in the history of ever.”

Nowhere was it sweeter, perhaps, than at the investment firms Apollo Global Management and Metropoulos & Company, which spent $186 million in cash to buy some of Hostess’s snack cake bakeries and brands in early 2013.

Less than four years later, they sold the company in a deal that valued Hostess at $2.3 billion. Apollo and Metropoulos have now reaped a return totaling 13 times their original cash investment.

Behind the financial maneuvering at Hostess, an investigation by The New York Times found a blueprint for how private equity executives like those at Apollo have amassed some of the greatest fortunes of the modern era.

Deals like Hostess have helped make the men running the six largest publicly traded private equity firms collectively the highest-earning executives of any major American industry, according to a joint study that The Times conducted with Equilar, a board and executive data provider. The study covered thousands of publicly traded companies; privately held corporations do not report such data.

Stephen A. Schwarzman, a co-founder of Blackstone, took home the largest haul last year: nearly $800 million. He and other private equity executives receive more annually than the leaders of Facebook and Apple, companies that revolutionized the way society communicates.

The top executives at those six publicly traded private equity firms earned, on average, $211 million last year — which is about what Leon Black, a founder of Apollo, received. That amount was nearly 10 times what the average bank chief executive earned, though firms like Apollo face less public scrutiny on pay than banks do.

Private equity firms note that much of their top executives’ wealth stems from owning their own stock and that they have earned their fortunes bringing companies back to life by applying their operational and financial expertise. Hostess, a defunct snack brand that was quickly returned to profitability, is a textbook example of the success of this approach.

Yet even as private equity’s ability to generate huge profits is indisputable, the industry’s value to the work force and the broader economy is still a matter of debate. Hostess, which has bounced between multiple private equity owners over the last decade, shows how murky the jobs issue can be.

In 2012, the company filed for bankruptcy under the private equity firm Ripplewood Holdings. Months later, with Ripplewood having lost control and the company’s creditors in charge, Hostess was shut down and its workers sent home for good.

Without investment from Apollo and Metropoulos, Hostess brands and all those jobs might have vanished forever after the bankruptcy. The way these firms see it, they created a new company and new jobs with higher pay and generous bonuses.

But the new Hostess employs only 1,200 people, a fraction of the roughly 8,000 workers who lost their jobs at Hostess’s snack cake business during the 2012 bankruptcy.

And some Hostess employees who got their jobs back lost them again. Under Apollo and Metropoulos, Hostess shut down one of the plants they reopened in Illinois, costing 415 jobs.

The collapse and revival of Hostess illustrates how even in a business success, many workers don’t share in the gains. The episode also provides a snapshot of the economic forces that helped propel Donald J. Trump to the White House.

Since losing his job at Hostess in 2012, Mark Popovich has had three jobs, including one that paid about $10 an hour, half what he made at the Twinkie-maker. A lifelong Democrat and devoted “union man,” Mr. Popovich said he supported Mr. Trump, the first time he ever voted Republican.

“It’s getting old, getting bounced around all the time,” said Mr. Popovich, a 58-year-old Ohio resident.

Such frustrations stem from broader shifts in the economy, as all types of companies turn to automation to cut costs and labor unions lose their influence. While these changes have helped keep companies profitable, private equity has used these shifts in the workplace to supercharge wealth far beyond that of the typical chief executive.

And yet, Mr. Trump did not focus on private equity on the campaign trail, instead blaming the plight of the American working class on a shadowy cabal of elitist Democrats and Wall Street bankers who support trade deals that ship jobs overseas.

“People understand jobs going to China,” said Michael Hillard, an economics professor at the University of Southern Maine. “But no one has ever heard of these private equity firms that come in and do all this financial engineering. It is much more complicated and less visible.”

by Michael Corkery and Ben Protess, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Shaw Nielsen

Khandahar & Vaudou Game

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Todd Solondz, Wiener-Dog
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Dan Savage's Open Letter to Paul Allen on Lidding I-5

Dear Paul,

God, I fucking hate open letters. Some asshole writes something, addresses you in the first person, tosses it up somewhere, and you're somehow obligated to drop whatever you're doing and respond. I've made it a policy never to take the bait, Paul, because responding to one asshole's open letter means getting open letters from two dozen other assholes.

And fuck that, right?

But I'm writing you an open letter, Paul, because I'm an asshole, I guess. And because there's something I've wanted to say to you for 20 years, and I didn't run into you the one time I went to a Seahawks game, and the thing I've been wanting to say to your face all these years is suddenly relevant.

You really fucked up the Seattle Commons. But here's the good news, Paul: You have a chance to redeem yourself. There's a new effort to build a large urban park in the heart of Seattle. The Washington State Convention Center is holding an open house on December 7 to discuss a planned expansion and to showcase ideas for the public benefit package offered by the project—and they're inviting the Lid I-5 steering committee to speak. Maybe you should show up. Maybe you should get behind the Lid I-5 movement.

And by "get behind it," Paul, I mean "pay for it."

Readers of this open letter who aren't Paul Allen or weren't around in the mid-1990s may not have heard of the Seattle Commons. A brief recap: John Hinterberger, a columnist for the Seattle Times, thought Seattle needed a large central park—something like New York City's Central Park, Chicago's Grant Park, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park—and suggested creating one in South Lake Union [ed. near the Space Needle]. At the time, South Lake Union was a run-down, mostly empty neighborhood with some scattered (and cheap!) apartments, a little light industry, and acres of parking lots. Local developers had already transformed Belltown, a similar neighborhood, by packing it with rows of condo towers (and pushing out the cheap apartments and light industry) and they were eyeing South Lake Union.

You got behind the Seattle Commons, Paul, as the plan came to be known, and it immediately became associated with you and, by extension, with the tech boom and tech money and tech workers—and the resentments being stirred up by rent hikes and rising housing costs. (Sound familiar?) You loaned the Commons campaign $20 million to buy up property within the proposed boundaries of the park, you started buying up property around the perimeter of the park, you pledged millions more to endow a fund for maintenance and security, so that the park, if built, would not drain resources away from Seattle's other parks.

You were the man behind the Seattle Commons—the man underwriting it, the man who stood to profit most if the park got built.

And this is where you fucked up, Paul: Seattle voters were asked to tax themselves to pay for the construction of the park. The park would be built only if the voters agreed to cover the $111 million construction costs. The levy, over time and with interest, would cost taxpayers more than a quarter of a billion dollars.

We voted on the Seattle Commons twice: a 70-ish acre park in 1995, and a scaled-back 60-ish acre park in 1996. I supported the Seattle Commons, but the Stranger Election Control Board—now dominated by sensitive millennials, then dominated by fucking hippies—urged our readers to vote against the plan. It's possible the Commons would have passed if Seattle's Only Newspaper had backed it. So The Stranger fucked up too, Paul. But you fucked up worse.

Again, you stood to profit if the park got built. And the anti-Commons campaign pretended it could prevent you or anyone else from profiting off the redevelopment of South Lake Union by blocking construction of the park.

"The Commons proposes to change this commercial, light-industrial neighborhood to an upscale new 'urban village' using the park as a front lawn for luxury apartments and condominiums," the anti-Commons campaign wrote in the 1996 voters' pamphlet. "The Commons plan disregards the people who want to continue to live and work in South Lake Union."

Seattle voters rejected the Commons both times it went to the ballot. But voting down the park didn't save light industry in South Lake Union, or any of those cheap (and crumbling) apartments, and not a single parking lot was spared. The condos and office buildings went up anyway. Developers profited just the same—you profited—and displaced businesses didn't get any financial assistance to help them relocate, which had been part of the Commons plan, and the public didn't get a park out of the deal.

"Why haven't any of the new software billionaires this region has spawned put up the money?" Timothy Egan wondered aloud in the New York Times before the first Commons vote. You didn't take the hint.

This is what I've wanted to say to you for 20 years, Paul: You could have and you should have put up the money to build the park. There was a stock rally between the first and second Commons vote, and you made a billion dollars in one day. You should have cashed out a quarter of that day's take and paid for the park. (In all fairness, Paul, I can't find the headline about your billion-dollar windfall. Maybe it happened, maybe I was/am high. Even so, the value of your Microsoft stock—and you owned hundreds of millions of shares at the time—more than doubled between the first and second votes. You could have paid for the park by cashing out a miniscule slice of your stock.)

You should have called a press conference before the first vote and said, "Here's the money, build the park, name it after my mom."

Allen Park would be there now—Seattle's central park—and your name would be on the lips of Seattle residents. People would say, "We're headed to Allen Park," "My parents just moved into a condo near Allen Park," "We're playing softball today in Allen Park," "That's the part of Allen Park where the gays have sex in the bushes."

You've always wanted to leave your mark on the region, Paul, the place where you made your fortune. You hunger for a legacy. But no one is going to look at an office building or a condo tower 50 years from now and think, "Man, that Paul Allen, he was a visionary!"

What about the Museum of Pop Culture? Formerly the EMP Museum? Formerly the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame? Formerly the Experience Music Project? Originally the Jimi Hendrix Museum? Sorry, Paul, but MoPOP is going to be a food court 10 minutes after you're dead. They'll be selling tacos in the lounges and playing laser tag in the Sky Church before you're in the ground. (And what did that building cost you? One hundred million dollars—more than paying for the Commons would've cost you, Paul, once you toss in staff, tchotchkes, programming, and paying consultants to change the name every five fucking years.)

Your philanthropic efforts, while worthy, are scattered and random. Your collections will be broken up, your sports teams will be sold off, newer office buildings and swanker condos will go up, MoPOP will be the world's bling-blang-iest food court. You will not be remembered, Paul. Bill Gates will be the man who cured malaria, and you'll be a footnote, if that, on a Wiki page about South Lake Union. (Strike that, Paul: You're already a footnote. Go search "South Lake Union" on Historylink.org. You're literally a footnote.)

But you have a second chance, Paul. A second chance to get this right.

by Dan Savage, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Levi Hastings

The Outline

[ed. Can't you just feel the excitement?! Me neither.]

In an introductory post to his colorful new project, The Outline, Joshua Topolsky writes that the site is “a new kind of publication for a new kind of human.” The veteran editor (formerly of Engadget, The Verge, and Bloomberg Digital) knows that’ll make some people roll their eyes. That’s OK. Per The Outline’s cool-kids-only tagline: “It’s not for everyone. It’s for you.”

For all its esoteric posturing, the The Outline’s MO is actually pretty straightforward. Practically, it’s a source for articles, videos, quotes, photos, graphs, and games created and curated by members of the publication’s staff. Visually, it’s the amphetamine-addled cousin of Bloomberg’s irreverent 2014 redesign (which Topolsky also spearheaded). Functionally, it’s a discovery platform. And existentially, it’s a gamble on the way people will consume information in the future.

Topolsky is betting that an appetite exists not just for the content The Outline has on offer, but the way it presents that content. Its user interface is fashionably opaque—mysterious enough to keep you engaged, but not so impenetrable that it turns you away. This approach has worked before, most famously—and most successfully—for Snapchat. “We make it easy to play with,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel recently said of his app’s interface. “You can’t break anything.”

The Outline takes that philosophy and applies it to online publishing. Everything on the platform—ads included—hinges on cards (Topolsky calls them “atoms”), customizable templates, assembled by the publication’s editors, that visitors to the site can thumb through on their phones. Swiping sideways takes you to a new bit of content, sight unseen. If you like what you find, you can swipe vertically to dive deeper into a narrative. If you decide, three paragraphs in, that the story isn’t for you, simply swipe to the next card. “What we really want is for people to explore,” Topolsky says.

The result is a less utilitarian approach to news consumption. “My feeling when I look at something like this is it’s the experience that I’m supposed to consume,” says Lanny Geffen, vice president of strategy and UX at design studio OneMethod. “I’m supposed to flip through and have a messy, curious, where-do-I-go-next kind of experience. And that’s authentically digital.”

Another sign of digital authenticity: The Outline acknowledges that most of its traffic will arrive via links from Facebook, Twitter, email, and chat. Once a visitor has arrived, the design’s job is to keep her engaged. Not with a nav bar or list of latest stories (The Outline‘s organization places little emphasis on things like chronology or story hierarchy), but with its labyrinthine browsing experience. This can make it difficult to find your way back to a specific story, but it also encourages readers to swipe in search of content they haven’t seen.

It’s hard not to think of slot machines. In her book Addiction by Design, MIT anthropologist Natasha Schüll describes how casinos have optimized slots to maximize what they call time on device. By varying its payout, a well designed slot machine can lull gamblers into a state of prolonged, undivided attention to the task at hand. App developers have their own version of time on device (they call it time in app), and they have their own versions of variable payout (spent any time on Tinder lately?). Online publishers like The Outline (and WIRED, for that matter) have a version of time on device, too. They call it time on site. Thumbing through The Outline, unsure what your next swipe might bring, one can’t help but sense that it’s designed to appeal to the same compulsions as Tinder, and, yes, slot machines.

by Liz Stinson, Wired |  Read more:

Image: The Outline

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Color of the Year

A Guided Meditation on the New Pantone Color of the Year

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Donna Summer

[ed. It's nice to have some good backup singers.]

Big Bother Is Watching

Why Slack is designed to never give you any.

In Silicon Valley, communicating is not something you do; it is a problem you solve. Slack, currently one of tech’s hottest properties, started out as a simple in-house chat app for a videogame company. But in the great tradition of startup pivots, the Slack team realized that the real action was in their chat app, not the convoluted game they were creating. In 2013 they decided to roll out Slack to do for others what it had done for them: improve their office communications.

Since then, the app has grown to become the biggest, most bloated minder to ever patrol the digitized workplace. Billing itself as the mega-app that will soon make email obsolete, it has three million daily users, including, as its sales team is keen to tell you, most of the Fortune 100. For those companies that hitch their wagon to it, Slack is increasingly the piece of software that mediates the entire work experience. You chat with your coworkers. You check your social media feeds. You store your documents, track your budgets, book your travel, update your calendars, wrangle your to-do lists, order your lunch. It is a constant, thrumming presence, a hive of notifications and tasks and chitchat that nags at workers and reminds them that there’s always more to do, more to catch up on—and that nothing goes unrecorded. Its name, despite the superficial connotation of hang-loose downtime, indicates its ultimate, soaring ambition: Slack, the company’s CEO, Stewart Butterfield, recently revealed, is an acronym for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.

“Everything in Slack—messages, notifications, files, and all—is automatically indexed and archived so that you can have it at your fingertips whenever you want,” chirps the company’s marketing copy. A once harried, now grateful knowledge worker confronts Information with a capital “I,” swinging his sword at the looming pile. Slack cheers on the little guy: “Slice and dice your way to that one message in your communication haystack.”

Slack tracks and catalogs everything that passes through it, and that is supposed to be a perk. But if the little guy can find anything in the archive, so can his risk-mitigating boss.

The Game’s the Thing

Try Slack for the first time, and you will be struck by its informal vibe, cribbed, as far as I can tell, from Richard Scarry’s Busytown. There are a hundred cute ways to tell your coworker you “Got it,” where “it” is probably a sales report. The thumb’s-up emoji is in heavy rotation. There are no forced salutations or stiff valedictions. (If “All best” is the first casualty of the email-less revolution, I am guessing no one will cry.) GIFs are tolerated—even encouraged. Never before have so many gyrating bananas, tiny clapping hands, and RuPaul eye rolls infiltrated the workplace.

Next to the other indignities of the office—drug tests, non-compete and non-disclosure agreements, morality clauses, polygraphs—an animated dancing fruit might come as a relief, one more piece of flair to lighten the drudgery. Yet the seemingly free-wheeling patter of Slack, organized into what the company calls “channels,” has about as much spontaneity as a dentist’s office poster. Before you can dance like no one is watching, you have to know that someone is.

Slack slots neatly in the trend toward the gamification of labor and everyday communication—which only seems fitting, given its humble videogame beginnings. Sometimes the game is quite explicit. As you trick out your account, trawling Slack’s directory of third-party add-ons, you might see one called Scorebot. With Scorebot’s help, you can compete with your coworkers for the honor of most “socially adept”; the worker with the most positive emojis gets the most points. “Make everyday conversation a competition,” Scorebot’s website crows. For a moment, I wondered if Scorebot was a joke, but it seems to be an earnest creation of Crema, a Kansas City design firm, attracted to the honey of Slack’s popularity. (Now that Slack has launched an $80-million investment fund for app-makers, the honey is even sweeter.) And joke or no, Scorebot is just another arbitrary assessment tool in a work culture that bristles with them.

We are, I think, on the verge of another Slack pivot, if it hasn’t happened quietly already. As its watchful bots continue to circle, archiving and analyzing, retrieving and praising, the company will be forced to acknowledge that the true value of Slack lies not in its ability to enable productivity, but rather to measure it. The metrics business is booming, after all. Forget the annual performance review; with Slack’s help, managers could track their employees even more closely, and in ever more granular ways. And why stop at performance analytics? Sentiment analysis could automatically alert supervisors when employees’ idle bickering tips into mutiny. Depressed or anxious employees could be automatically served with puppy videos and advice bots. (...)

The Personal Is Professional

The rise of Slack can be attributed in part to the makeup of its client base: journalists and media companies are among its most visible users. They’re also some of the program’s biggest critics, having passed through the requisite phases of early adoption and breathless evangelism into a performative cynicism.

Of course, for every disaffiliate, there is a full-blown Slack convert, with the expected litany of advice listicles, tutorial videos, power user how-to books, and other shibboleths of the highly optimized online life. The company’s multibillion-dollar valuation has pushed it firmly into unicorn territory, meaning that its origin story is already cast into myth. Stewart Butterfield, company founder and CEO, has advanced to the vanguard of the influencer circuit, putting in face-time on C-SPAN and conference keynotes. There has been the requisite Wired cover story with an insufferably cheeky headline (“The Most Fascinating Profile You’ll Ever Read About a Guy and His Boring Startup”), which delivered—if you appreciate that all superlatives are relative.

Butterfield has claimed that Slack is ultimately a work reducer, that it increases “transparency” and shortens the workday. The company abides by the philosophy of “work hard, go home”—an odd choice for a cloud-based, cross-platform app that wants a piece of your every device. It is precisely tools like Slack that allow employees to work anywhere, whenever. Slack users may go home at 6 p.m., but their jobs follow them, pinging them from their smartphones.

“Do more of your work from Slack,” the company urged this summer while unveiling its new “message buttons,” which allow users to click, for example, “approve” or “deny” on an expense report. It could have offered the same sentiment by commanding, “Live more of your life through Slack.”

This total, dystopian immersion of life into work should send a chill coursing down to the ends of our carpel-tunnel-stricken fingertips. But of course, it gets worse: we are now monetizing the workers’ dystopia across several platforms at once. In November, Microsoft unveiled Teams, a Slack competitor that will soon come standard with Office 365, the company’s popular suite of business tools. Facebook recently launched a Slack competitor called Workplace, which has been hailed as “a new messaging app that embodies the dissolving distinction between personal and professional digital spaces.” Whoever thought that pitch would sound good must have known that the target users of Workplace already count themselves as addicts, conditioned for constant validation from their electronic supervisors and craving their next hits of dopamine. (After all, Facebook practically invented this kind of stimulus.)

Now that apps like these effectively distill the history and future not only of your job, but also of your personal life, who’d want to quit completely? Who could? It would be like leaving your memoir-in-progress on the bus—a simile that no longer makes sense, since your memoir manuscript, obviously, would be stored in the cloud. It would also mean giving up access to the digital equivalent of the office water-cooler—though, again, this simile is nowhere near immersive enough for an ever-shifting social/work platform that constantly calls out for your attention and participation. According to the company’s CEO, the average Slack user is “actively” using the app for two hours and twenty minutes per day, with the program often running in the background throughout the day (along with pushing alerts to smartphones). That means that what some take to be the workplace’s one pleasure—interacting with other humans—is heavily mediated through an optimize-everything app that never forgets.

by Jacob Silverman, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Dandy/John J. Cussler