Marcelo Pedroso’s ‘Brazilian Dream’ Poster
via:

[ed. I usually never watch network nightly news, but since I'm traveling that's all there is on the local channels. Tonight it was CBS, and I'd guess that about a third of the show was actually devoted to 'news' (I won't even mention what that news was about...ackk). The rest of the half-hour was given over to commercials for pharmaceutical products (with a couple of retirement investment services added for diversity). There must have been 15-20 commercials in half an hour (I didn't count). It was worse than an NFL game. I suppose you get used to this if you watch network news regularly, but the relentless drug pushing was quite an eye-opener.]

Image: via:

Transcript: President Obama on What Books Mean to Him

Michiko Kakutani, the chief book critic for The New York Times, interviewed President Obama about literature on Friday at the White House. Here are excerpts from the conversation, which have been edited and condensed.

These books that you gave to your daughter Malia on the Kindle, what were they? Some of your favorites?

I think some of them were sort of the usual suspects, so “The Naked and the Dead” or “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” I think she hadn’t read yet.

Then there were some books I think that are not on everybody’s reading list these days, but I remembered as being interesting, like “The Golden Notebook” by Doris Lessing, for example. Or “The Woman Warrior,” by Maxine [Hong Kingston].

Part of what was interesting was me pulling back books that I thought were really powerful, but that might not surface when she goes to college.

Have you had a chance to discuss them with her?

I’ve had the chance to discuss some. And she’s interested in being a filmmaker, so storytelling is of great interest to her. She had just read “A Moveable Feast.” I hadn’t included that, and she was just captivated by the idea that Hemingway described his goal of writing one true thing every day.

What made you want to become a writer?

I loved reading when I was a kid, partly because I was traveling so much, and there were times where I’d be displaced, I’d be the outsider. When I first moved to Indonesia, I’m this big, dark-skinned kid that kind of stood out. And then when I moved back from Indonesia to Hawaii, I had the manners and habits probably of an Indonesian kid.

And so the idea of having these worlds that were portable, that were yours, that you could enter into, was appealing to me. And then I became a teenager and wasn’t reading that much other than what was assigned in school, and playing basketball and chasing girls, and imbibing things that weren’t very healthy.

I think all of us did.

Yeah. And then I think rediscovered writing and reading and thinking in my first or second year of college and used that as a way to rebuild myself, a process I write about in “Dreams From My Father.”

That period in New York, where you were intensely reading.

I was hermetic — it really is true. I had one plate, one towel, and I’d buy clothes from thrift shops. And I was very intense, and sort of humorless. But it reintroduced me to the power of words as a way to figure out who you are and what you think, and what you believe, and what’s important, and to sort through and interpret this swirl of events that is happening around you every minute.

And so even though by the time I graduated I knew I wanted to be involved in public policy, or I had these vague notions of organizing, the idea of continuing to write and tell stories as part of that was valuable to me. And so I would come home from work, and I would write in my journal or write a story or two.

The great thing was that it was useful in my organizing work. Because when I got there, the guy who had hired me said that the thing that brings people together to have the courage to take action on behalf of their lives is not just that they care about the same issue, it’s that they have shared stories. And he told me that if you learn how to listen to people’s stories and can find what’s sacred in other people’s stories, then you’ll be able to forge a relationship that lasts.

But my interest in public service and politics then merged with the idea of storytelling.

What were your short stories like?

It’s interesting, when I read them, a lot of them had to do with older people.

I think part of the reason was because I was working in communities with people who were significantly older than me. We were going into churches, and probably the average age of these folks was 55, 60. A lot of them had scratched and clawed their way into the middle class, but just barely. They were seeing the communities in which they had invested their hopes and dreams and raised their kids starting to decay — steel mills had closed, and there had been a lot of racial turnover in these communities. And so there was also this sense of loss and disappointment.

And so a bunch of the short stories I wrote had to do with that sense, that atmosphere. One story is about an old black pastor who seems to be about to lose his church, his lease is running out and he’s got this loyal woman deacon who is trying to buck him up. Another is about an elderly couple — a white couple in L.A., — and he’s like in advertising, wrote jingles. And he’s just retired and has gotten cranky. And his wife is trying to convince him that his life is not over.

So when I think back on what’s interesting to me, there is not a lot of Jack Kerouac, open-road, young kid on the make discovering stuff. It’s more melancholy and reflective. (...)

It’s what you said in your farewell address about Atticus Finch, where you said people are so isolated in their little bubbles. Fiction can leap —

It bridges them. I struck up a friendship with [the novelist] Marilynne Robinson, who has become a good friend. And we’ve become sort of pen pals. I started reading her in Iowa, where “Gilead” and some of her best novels are set. And I loved her writing in part because I saw those people every day. And the interior life she was describing that connected them — the people I was shaking hands with and making speeches to — it connected them with my grandparents, who were from Kansas and ended up journeying all the way to Hawaii, but whose foundation had been set in a very similar setting.

And so I think that I found myself better able to imagine what’s going on in the lives of people throughout my presidency because of not just a specific novel but the act of reading fiction. It exercises those muscles, and I think that has been helpful.

And then there’s been the occasion where I just want to get out of my own head. [Laughter] Sometimes you read fiction just because you want to be someplace else. (...)

What books would you recommend at this moment in time, that captures this sense of turmoil?

I should probably ask you or some people who have had time to catch up on reading. I’ll confess that since the election, I’ve been busier than I expected. So one of the things I’m really looking forward to is to dig into a whole bunch of literature.

But one of the things I’m confident about is that, out of this moment, there are a whole bunch of writers, a lot of them young, who are probably writing the book I need to read. [Laughter] They’re ahead of me right now. And so in my post-presidency, in addition to training the next generation of leaders to work on issues like climate change or gun violence or criminal justice reform, my hope is to link them up with their peers who see fiction or nonfiction as an important part of that process.

When so much of our politics is trying to manage this clash of cultures brought about by globalization and technology and migration, the role of stories to unify — as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize — is more important than ever.

There’s something particular about quieting yourself and having a sustained stretch of time that is different from music or television or even the greatest movies.

And part of what we’re all having to deal with right now is just a lot of information overload and a lack of time to process things. So we make quick judgments and assign stereotypes to things, block certain things out, because our brain is just trying to get through the day.

We’re bombarded with information. Technology is moving so rapidly.

Look, I don’t worry about the survival of the novel. We’re a storytelling species.

I think that what one of the jobs of political leaders going forward is, is to tell a better story about what binds us together as a people. And America is unique in having to stitch together all these disparate elements — we’re not one race, we’re not one tribe, folks didn’t all arrive here at the same time.

What holds us together is an idea, and it’s a story about who we are and what’s important to us. And I want to make sure that we continue that.

by Michiko Kakutani, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Doug Mills/The New York Times

via:

Chargers Owner Dean Spanos Screwed San Diego, and L.A. Is About to Screw Him

I was born and raised in San Diego. I grew up 10 minutes from the beach in a small naval community, went to San Diego State University, and wore shorts 363 days a year. The only way I could have been more San Diego is if I were a carne asada burrito made by Tony Gwynn that said only the phrase, “Get out of the water, this is a fuckin’ local break, bro.”

But in 2003, after graduating college, I decided to move to Los Angeles. I wanted to become a screenwriter, and if I was ever truly going to “make it” I had to make the move. So I packed up all my shit, got an apartment in Hollywood next to a rent-by-the-hour motel, and started waiting tables. Fast-forward three years and I was in that same apartment, still waiting tables and desperately trying to get someone, anyone, to read one of my screenplays. Only two things brought me joy: listening to a coworker of mine who used to be in porn tell me about the weirdest dicks she ever saw, and watching the San Diego Chargers play football on Sunday afternoons. For a couple of hours, watching LaDainian Tomlinson bust through sure tackles made me feel like I was back home, where my life felt like it still had promise. Los Angeles had kicked the shit out of me in a way that only Los Angeles can.

Los Angeles is built on apathy. It has perfected the art of letting you know it doesn’t give a fuck about you. Everyone comes here to “make it,” and, because it’s so hard to do that, no one has the time or the sympathy to give a shit about you. You never even get a “no” in Los Angeles, because a “no” takes almost a second, and fuck you if you think you’re worth that. In fact, Los Angeles gives a shit about you only once you’ve become successful enough that the approval is no longer something you need. Apathy always seems better than hatred until you realize that at least someone has to put in effort to hate you. So when I saw the news that the Chargers were officially moving to Los Angeles, my mind immediately went to their owner, Dean Spanos.

Dean Spanos was given charge of the San Diego Chargers by his father in 1994, and, from minute one, no one in San Diego ever took him seriously. He so perfectly looked and sounded the part of “fuckwit son of a rich guy” that he was never really going to have any other identity unless he did something truly great. Unfortunately for him, and San Diego, that was not to be his destiny. Year after year he made decisions so dumb that even the incredibly mild San Diego sports media took notice. When he fired Marty Schottenheimer after a 14–2 season, he hired Norv Turner, a man who had finished 9–23 with the Oakland Raiders in his last head-coaching stint, to handle the primes of Philip Rivers and LT. And Dean did this not because he had any real faith in Norv as a head coach (no one did, not even Norv), but because Norv was the kind of coach who would pretend that Dean was somebody. Marty Schottenheimer made it very clear he did not give two shits about what Dean Spanos thought. Norv treated Deano like a smart football mind who had earned the job of president instead of like the son of the guy who owned the team. Every year, the Chargers found new and embarrassing ways to lose, and the once-pliable identity of Dean Spanos as “fuck-up rich kid” began to harden. Barring a Super Bowl win, Dean was running out of ways to become the respected big shot he so desperately wanted to be. There was one more way to create his own legacy: build a brand-new stadium.

If you’re not rich enough to build a football stadium, then you’re not rich enough to own a football team. It’s like owning a Ferrari; you can’t just be a guy who has the money for a Ferrari. You gotta be someone that can afford all the bullshit that comes with owning a Ferrari. Dean Spanos is like a dipshit who saved all his money for a Ferrari and now lives in a one-bedroom apartment and has to park that thing on the street, where it gets fucked with daily. In the mid-aughts, he started asking the city of San Diego to build him a stadium so he could feel like a big shot. We told him to fuck off and pay for it himself. We did it several times, in several different ways. At some point he realized he was never going to get his stadium. He would always be a loser in SD, and the only way he was going to be able to feel like a big shot was if he took the Chargers and left the city. He was like a high school nobody named Josh who dreamed of going to college in another place and rebranding himself as J-Money. So every year Dean would put forth some kind of bullshit proposal that he knew was bullshit to try to get us to help him build this stadium, just so he could someday say, “Hey NFL, I did my best, see? Can I be allowed to move to L.A. now?”

by Justin Halpern, The Ringer |  Read more:

Image: Getty Images/The Ringer

Image: Bert T.

How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games

The responsibilities and challenges of programmed luck.

On Sept. 16, 2007, a Japanese YouTuber who goes by the handle “Computing Aesthetic” uploaded a forty-eight-second-long video with the deafening title, “ULTRA MEGA SUPER LUCKY SHOT.” The video shows a high-scoring shot in Peggle, a vastly popular video game, loosely based on Japanese pachinko machines, in which a ball bearing clatters down the screen, accruing points as it bounces through a crowd of candy-colored pegs, which disappear shortly after being touched; more bounces, more points. Although Peggle involves some skill—before firing the ball, the player must carefully aim the launcher that dangles at the top of the screen—you are principally at the mercy of the luck of the bounce. In Computing Aesthetic’s footage, the points pile up as the ball bounces fortuitously between pegs. To underscore the seemingly miraculous shot, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” blares euphorically until, in the video’s final moments, the ball bearing sinks into the bucket at the base of the screen and the words “FEVER SCORE” flash onscreen. The description on the video, which has been watched nearly a quarter of a million times, reads, “I couldn’t balieve this when it happened!!!!!!!!!”

Computing Aesthetic’s video is just one of nearly 20,000 such YouTube clips labelled with the words “Peggle” and “Lucky,” uploaded by players so amazed at their good fortune in the game that they were moved to share the achievement with the world. But these players may not be as lucky as they’ve been led to believe. “In Peggle, the seemingly random bouncing of the balls off of pegs is sometimes manipulated to give the player better results,” Jason Kapalka, one of the game’s developers, admitted to me. “The Lucky Bounce that ensures that a ball hits a target peg instead of plunking into the dead ball zone is used sparingly. But we do apply a lot of extra ‘luck’ to players in their first half-dozen levels or so to keep them from getting frustrated while learning the ropes.” Tweaking the direction of any given bounce by just a few compass degrees—but not so much that the ball swerves unrealistically in mid-air—is enough to encourage beginners and not make the game too unbelievable, Kapalka said.

Fairness is the unspoken promise of most video games. Controlled by an omniscient and omnipotent designer, a video game has the capacity to be ultimately just, and players expect that it will be so. (Designers also have an incentive to be even-handed: A game that always beats you is a game you’ll soon stop playing.) And yet, when video games truly play by the rules, the player can feel cheated. Sid Meier, the designer of the computer game Civilization, in which players steer a nation through history, politics, and warfare, quickly learned to modify the game’s odds in order to redress this psychological wrinkle. Extensive play-testing revealed that a player who was told that he had a 33 percent chance of success in a battle but then failed to defeat his opponent three times in a row would become irate and incredulous. (In Civilization, you can replay the same battle over and over until you win, albeit incurring costs with every loss.) So Meier altered the game to more closely match human cognitive biases; if your odds of winning a battle were 1 in 3, the game guaranteed that you’d win on the third attempt—a misrepresentation of true probability that nevertheless gave the illusion of fairness. Call it the Lucky Paradox: Lucky is fun, but too lucky is unreal. The resulting, on-going negotiation among game players and designers must count as one of our most abstract collective negotiations. (...)

In mechanical games, luck is the player’s saving grace against the mechanism itself. In the early 1950s, the Chicago-based pinball manufacturer Gottlieb noticed that novice pinball players would occasionally lose a ball in the first few moments of a game. So it introduced an inverted V-shaped metal wall that, during a game’s opening seconds, would rise between the flippers at the base of the machine in order to keep an errant ball from disappearing down the gulley. In newer pinball machines, the blocking gate, known as a “ball saver” (a phrase invented by Chicago Coin for its 1968 pinball machine, Gun Smoke), is controlled by software; whether the wall rises or not is a matter of luck, of a kind that has been engineered into the algorithm.

In fully digital video games, luck is even more deeply baked into the experience, and must be actively simulated. When the soccer ball sails past the goalkeeper in FIFA, or when, inexplicably, a herd of race cars slows down to allow you to catch up, a game designer’s hand has just acted to provide some ghostly rigging. The effect of this manipulation is to flatter you and thereby keep you engaged. But it’s a trick that must be deployed subtly. A player who senses that he’s secretly being helped by the game will feel patronized; after all, luck is only luck if it’s truly unpredictable.

Which is where the problems begin.

by Simon Parkin, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Wren McDonald

The Death of the Tunnel Tree

Early last Monday morning, a friend of mine sent news that a tree we knew, a sequoia, had collapsed in a winter mountain storm. I was in New York, where two inches of hard snow sat on cars and tree branches that themselves looked like death. He was in Northern California, near the place where we grew up. No one is certain of the fallen tree’s age, but it is thought to have lived at least a thousand years. Any tribute I could give it would be fatuous; the tree was older than the language in which I can write.

The tree meant something more time-bound to humans, though, and, like a playboy worn down by the party circuit, bore the traces of a personable past. Giant sequoias are believed to be the largest living thing on Earth by volume. They are tall with short branches, and wear mantles of thick, russet bark that feels like Styrofoam and has the soft curves of poured wax. This one had a huge hole in its base—about ten feet tall, and even wider—that was carved in the eighteen-eighties. The idea was to let you walk not just around the tree but through it, making it a kind of skyscraper, a place in the forest where people could dwell. Over the years, the hollowed-out sequoia came to be called the Pioneer Cabin Tree, like a built thing, or the tunnel tree, like an essential piece of infrastructure. What was really meant was that it was our tree, our human tree, the one we singled out and marked with the illusions of our time. Its hollow had been razored with initials, and its wood had the polish of frequent touch. When the dusty, ferny mountain forest became Calaveras Big Trees State Park, in 1931, the tunnel tree emerged as a centerpiece, the California mountains’ Tour Eiffel.

In death, it was more. The A section of the Times, a paper not traditionally much concerned with California flora, gave the tree more than ten inches of space. The Los Angeles Times called it “iconic.” I watched the coverage with the media-age awkwardness of someone trying to feel the touch of death from a great distance. No one knew quite what to say, it seemed, and, although we all felt some vague measure of loss, it was unclear what to think about a life that had lasted longer than all memory. In the way of human grief, I want, instead of honoring the tree directly, to conjure up the world in which it was a monument for me. (...)

Most summers, as long as I remember, my family has rented, for a week, a cabin in the middle Sierras just off Highway 4. It’s quiet there, and inexpensive, and there aren’t a lot of Jet Skis on the water. When we started going up to Calaveras—that’s the family expression, “up to Calaveras”—it was because that’s where my mother’s parents took her. Later, my mother began urging other families to take cabins nearby. We arranged big dinners on creaking wood decks and ate grilled chicken in the light of citronella candles. When the summer meteor showers came, we’d lie on empty roads and watch the stars. The rented cabins would invariably be A-frames in the style of the high Carter Administration (ski-lodge shag carpet, macramé owls on the walls), and you would will yourself to sleep despite fears that a giant spider was about to leap down from the eaves. These unfamiliar terrors made the weeks seem long and sweet. One August, we were nearly washed off some boulders and downriver in an unexpected thunderstorm; the next July, I floated with the special harmony of adolescent lassitude across a lake, on an air mattress, with friends. I was fifteen, and it was the night when, by the prophecies of Nostradamus, the world was sure to end. That it didn’t end then, or the evening after, taught me something about wise men. That I’d felt at peace with the apocalypse—I was confident my fifteen-year-old life had a pleasant roundness, even a fulfillment—teaches me today how poorly we can see beyond the near horizon of experience. Visiting a place again and again, year after year, annunciates the slow progress of human growth. A kid that you recall shows up, abruptly, with the problems and the powers of a woman or a man.

That’s what the tunnel tree in Big Trees State Park meant to me: the function of eternity to graduate the progress of a life. The first time I saw the tree, I was about five, and my family took a photo in its hollow. We took another photo the next time we visited, and again after that. Over the years, I’ve been back probably twenty times, and a catalogue of imagery—first film, then digital—marks my family’s slow, peculiar progress. We look heartbreakingly small. The tree is really very big. That record ended this week, and I cannot shake the feeling that a certain vector of our history ended then as well.(...)

The temptation is to herald the tunnel tree’s death as an emblem. (The Times, in a second piece, presented its collapse as a symbol of this dire American season.) It is also easy, maybe just, for humans to take blame. Although trees often fall in storms, sequoias are equipped for the long haul—their stance is wide; their bark is fire-resistant—and a spell of winter weather is unlikely to have felled the tunnel tree without the huge, destabilizing chasm near its roots. We made the tree our own and, in the process, took away its immortality. It experienced time as few sequoias can, through human eyes: with friendship, wounds, some fame, and death.

by Nathan Heller, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Calif. State Parks/AFP/Getty

via:

Forgiveness Is Not a Binary State

In the summer of 2015, less than a week after Dylann Roof murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina — a crime for which, yesterday, he was sentenced to death — the relatives of his victims arrived at his first court appearance with a surprising message: forgiveness.

“We have no room for hating, so we have to forgive,” said one woman whose brother was killed in the attack. Another, whose mother was among the deceased, expressed similar sentiments: “You took something very precious from me,” she said, “but I forgive you.”

And a few days after that, writer Roxane Gay published a moving op-ed in the New York Times explaining why she did not. “I have no immediate connection to what happened in Charleston, S.C., last week beyond my humanity and my blackness,” she wrote, “but I do not foresee ever forgiving his crimes, and I am wholly at ease with that choice.”

Together, these two reactions — both powerful, both valid, diametrically opposed to each other — raise an important question about the slippery concept at their center. Forgiveness, clearly, is a highly personal choice, speeding healing for some and precluding healing for others. But what does it even mean to forgive, anyway?

It’s something we haven’t been asking ourselves for very long — it wasn’t until 1989 that psychologists even started to really study forgiveness — but psychologist Harriet Lerner believes we’ve been too hasty to rush into an answer. In her new book Why Won’t You Apologize?: Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts, Lerner argues that we’re flying blind: Academic research and conventional wisdom alike emphasize the positive effects of forgiveness without having reached any clear consensus as to what the act of forgiving really looks like.

“When I read the literature on forgiveness, I found myself confused. And it took me a while to sort out that the confusion was not mine, and had more to do with the way that forgiveness is talked about and written about,” she says. “What I began to be aware of is that the forgiveness experts were collapsing the messy complexity of human emotions into simplistic dichotomous equations, like you either forgive the wrongdoer or you’re a prisoner of your own anger and hate. Either you forgive, or your life will be mired down in corrosive emotions and you’ll never move forward.” The reality, she says, is that forgiveness is rarely so tidy — and that placing too much faith in its powers can actually harm, rather than help.

Forgiveness isn’t always a good idea.

Scientific literature is chock-full of ways that forgiveness can improve your mental and physical health: It can ease anxiety and depression, cut down on your risk of heart attack, even help you live longer. Letting go of a grudge, it seems, may be up there with exercising and getting enough sleep as one of the best things you can do for yourself.

But the problem with this framing, Lerner says, is that it can push people into extending the olive branch before they’re ready, turning forgiveness from a personal choice into something closer to an obligation: the emotional equivalent of eating your vegetables. And if you can’t bring yourself to do it, you’re going to feel all the worse.

“It’s a terribly hurtful thing to put forth the notion, which is everywhere, that there can be no peace or healing without forgiveness,” she says. “To suggest that the only way out of their unhappiness is that they have to transcend their legitimate anger and pain … It’s not anybody’s place — not your therapist, or your minister, or your coach, or Facebook, or whatever — it’s no one else’s job to tell you to forgive or not to.”

Lerner offers an example of what happens when they do: “[Let’s say] the hurt party opens a conversation with their mother about some earlier neglect or injustice. And the mother says, ‘I’m really sorry, what I did was wrong, do you forgive me?’” Most of the time, she says, “The impulse is to say, ‘I forgive you,’ because they’re so relieved the mother has acknowledged the harm. But the problem is that forgiveness takes its own time to hold.”

And if the hurt party can’t actually bring themselves to forgive, one of two things happens: On the one hand, they could power through, accept the apology anyway, and then grapple with lingering feelings of anger that now feel invalidated. Or, on the other hand, “If the hurt party says, ‘I don’t forgive you, I need more time,’ very often the hurt party becomes the bad guy. And the wrongdoer feels self-righteous because they’re angry the other person isn’t saying ‘I forgive you,’ and blame is shifted to the one who doesn’t forgive.” True forgiveness, she says, is something you earn, and something you wait for. It isn’t something you can request — because if you have to ask, odds are you won’t be getting the real thing.

by Cari Romm, Science of Us | Read more:
Image: Photo: Dennis Hallinan/Getty Images

All Bets Are Off

The bizzare saga of potential Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election has created a genuine emergency in American politics. This isn’t necessarily because of Russia’s actual actions — unless the most peculiar allegations turn out to be accurate — but because of Donald Trump’s response, and what this indicates about how he’ll govern.

Ignore the Trump “dossier” for the moment and forget the baseless conjecture about Russia hacking the U.S. voting process itself. All we need to know about Trump and the Republican Party can be found in their position on the simplest, most plausible part of the story: that Russia was behind the hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and John Podesta.

Is this in fact what happened? Certainly the Obama administration did itself no favors by failing to release any of the evidence underlying the strong conclusions in the the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s report. But Trump himself said at last week’s press conference, presumably based on a classified briefing, that “I think it was Russia.” Mike Pompeo, Trump’s nominee to run the Central Intelligence Agency, agreed during his confirmation hearings. There’s also the crucial dog that hasn’t barked: Unlike during the lead up to the Iraq War, no one from the intelligence agencies has been leaking doubts or claims that they’re being leaned on by the White House to provide the desired conclusion.

Under these circumstances, the reaction of anyone who actually cares about the United States has to be: We must investigate this with great seriousness and impartiality and find out exactly what happened. This requires an independent commission with sufficient funding, a broad mandate and legal authority that Congress creates but then can no longer influence.

Nothing should be less controversial than this. Whatever a nation’s political disagreements, in any functioning democracy there’s just one position on this issue: Only citizens can participate in deciding who governs it.

In every other circumstance Republicans love wrapping themselves in the flag and vowing to protect us from dastardly foreigners, even if this requires renaming the french fries in the congressional cafeteria. Few do this more than Trump himself, whose entire campaign was about the apocalyptic danger posed to us by China, Mexico, the freeloaders of NATO, Muslims from anywhere, and so on. Yet on the subject of Russia and this election he’s suddenly indifferent — even though fear of this type of foreign influence doesn’t require jingoistic xenophobia but just a rational, healthy belief in small-d democratic self-determination.

This is one of the key topics of George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address, the most famous political rhetoric in American history until the Gettysburg Address. “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” Washington warned, “the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

Washington was particularly concerned by the “common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party” – that is, loyalty to your own faction within the country above the country overall. This, he said, “opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions” and allows other countries to “practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils.”

Trump and the GOP are now busy proving how prescient Washington was. Trump has not endorsed an independent investigation of any Russian actions aimed at the election, nor released the financial information that would clarify any business relationships he has with Russians or Russian banks. Moreover, he can’t even bring himself to pretend in public that any of it matters much (although it’s hard to tell whether this is because he fears we’ll find out something nefarious he did or simply because his ego can’t bear his victory being thrown into doubt). Of all of Trump’s violations of basic democratic norms, his indifference to this most basic principle of self-government is the most shocking of all.

by Jon Schwarz, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley

It's a bad time to be a physicist.

At least, that’s what Oscar Boykin says. He majored in physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and in 2002 he finished a physics PhD at UCLA. But four years ago, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland discovered the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle first predicted in the 1960s. As Boykin points out, everyone expected it. The Higgs didn’t mess with the theoretical models of the universe. It didn’t change anything or give physcists anything new to strive for. “Physicists are excited when there’s something wrong with physics, and we’re in a situation now where there’s not a lot that’s wrong,” he says. “It’s a disheartening place for a physicist to be in.” Plus, the pay isn’t too good.

Boykin is no longer a physicist. He’s a Silicon Valley software engineer. And it’s a very good time to be one of those.

Boykin works at Stripe, a $9-billion startup that helps businesses accept payments online. He helps build and operate software systems that collect data from across the company’s services, and he works to predict the future of these services, including when, where, and how the fraudulent transactions will come. As a physicist, he’s ideally suited to the job, which requires both extreme math and abstract thought. And yet, unlike a physicist, he’s working in a field that now offers endless challenges and possibilities. Plus, the pay is great.

If physics and software engineering were subatomic particles, Silicon Valley has turned into the place where the fields collide. Boykin works with three other physicists at Stripe. In December, when General Electric acquired the machine learning startup Wise.io, CEO Jeff Immelt boasted that he had just grabbed a company packed with physicists, most notably UC Berkeley astrophysicist Joshua Bloom. The open source machine learning software H20, used by 70,000 data scientists across the globe, was built with help from Swiss physicist Arno Candel, who once worked at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Vijay Narayanan, Microsoft’s head of data science, is an astrophysicist, and several other physicists work under him.

It’s not on purpose, exactly. “We didn’t go into the physics kindergarten and steal a basket of children,” says Stripe president and co-founder John Collison. “It just happened.” And it’s happening across Silicon Valley. Because structurally and technologically, the things that just about every internet company needs to do are more and more suited to the skill set of a physicist.

The Naturals

Of course, physicists have played a role in computer technology since its earliest days, just as they’ve played a role in so many other fields. John Mauchly, who helped design the ENIAC, one of the earliest computers, was a physicist. Dennis Ritchie, the father of the C programming language, was too.

But this is a particularly ripe moment for physicists in computer tech, thanks to the rise of machine learning, where machines learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. This new wave of data science and AI is something that suits physicists right down to their socks.

by Cade Metz, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Einstein's Zurich Notebook

Resistance to the Antibiotic of Last Resort Is Silently Spreading

[ed. I've been keeping track of mcr-1 for a while now and surprised it hasn't gotten more coverage. There's a possible world pandemic in the making and no one seems to have noticed.]

The alarm bells sounded on November 18, 2015.

Antibiotic resistance is usually a slow-moving crisis, one of the reasons its danger can be hard to convey. One by one, over the years, the drugs used to fight the most stubborn infections have fallen by the wayside as bacteria have evolved resistance to them. For certain infections, the only drug left is colistin. Then on November 18, 2015, scientists published a report in the British medical journal The Lancet: A single, easily spreadable gene makes the bacteria that carry it resistant to colistin, our antibiotic of last resort.

Chinese scientists had found this gene, called mcr-1, in pig farms and on meat in supermarkets. Why pigs? Herein lies in the irony. Colistin is an old drug and, by modern standards, not a great one. It can cause severe kidney damage. As scientists developed better antibiotics over the decades, colistin fell out of human use. So in China, farmers started using it by the tons in animals, where low doses of antibiotics can promote growth.

Now it’s come full circle. Bacteria have evolved resistance to so many of those “better” antibiotics that colistin is critical for human health again. China didn’t use colistin in humans, but many countries including the U.S. do as a last resort.

Even more worrisome in the Lancet report was evidence that mcr-1 had already leapt from pigs to humans. Out of 1322 patient samples from hospitals in China, the team found 16 containing mcr-1. And, of course, drug-resistant bacteria don’t respect national borders. As the team was writing up its report, it noticed other researchers had uploaded genomes of bacteria in Malaysia containing the mcr-1 gene sequence to an online database. “The possibility that mcr-1-positive E. coli have spread outside China and into other countries in southeastern Asia is deeply concerning,” the authors warned.

To be clear, these E. coli with mcr-1 found in China were still susceptible to antibiotics other than colistin, but if a bacterium with genes that make it resistant to every other drug then picks up mcr-1, you get the nightmare scenario: a pan-resistant bacteria. These drug- resistant infections usually happen in people who are already sick or have weakened immune systems. (...)

The story of mcr-1’s silent spread is, by now, a familiar one. Over and over, scientists have identified genes conferring resistance to a class of antibiotics, only to find the gene had circled the globe. Another recent example is ndm-1, a gene found in 2009 that confers resistance to class of antibiotics called carbapenems. “It’s very rare to catch something at the very beginning,” says Alexander Kallen, a medical epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Looking for resistance is a constant game of catch-up. You don’t notice anything until there is something to notice; by the time there is something to notice, something bad has already happened. And you have to have eyes everywhere: Resistance initially found on a Chinese pig farm could repercussions all over the world.

When Timothy Walsh, a microbiologist at Cardiff University first heard of mcr-1’s existence from his colleague Yang Wang of China Agricultural University, he didn’t believe it. “It’s like the holy grail of resistance,” says Walsh. He was also skeptical because of the way colistin works. The antibiotic binds to molecules on the surface of bacteria—and modifying those molecules typically requires mutations in several different genes. Instead of getting lucky just once, that bacteria would have to get lucky several times to beat off colistin. In fact, other researchers had identified colistin-resistant bacteria before, which had multiple mutations in the DNA in their chromosomes.

But mcr-1 was just one gene. And more importantly, it didn’t live on chromosomes, which are tightly wound pieces of DNA. The mcr-1 gene sits on a little loop of free-floating DNA called a plasmid, which bacteria—even bacteria of different species—can easily swap like bracelets. That makes mcr-1 much easier to spread. A single bacteria might collect multiple plasmids with multiple genes for resistance to multiple antibiotics. Scientist have not yet found bacteria with mcr-1 that is resistant to all antibiotics, but don’t make the mistake of optimism. “It’s not a case of ‘if.’ It’s a case of ‘when,’” says Walsh.

by Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Ho New / Reuters

The xx

I See You

Taking a Break

[ed. I'm traveling so posts will be sporadic for a while. It also seems like a good time to share a personal milestone here at Duck Soup - half a million pageviews. I know, nothing like what the Death Star (Facebook) probably gets in 5 seconds. But still, a satisfying achievement nonetheless, and a good reason to thank this blog's loyal readers and contributors. The best way I can describe blogging is that it's like having your own little radio station in the middle of nowhere. There's this compulsion to put things out that you find interesting, regardless of who's listening. Hopefully, someone will get something out of it.

Clive Thompson wrote a book a while ago called Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better.  Talking about the satisfactions of blogging, one of the observations he made was: "Many people have told me that they feel the dynamic kick in with even a tiny handful of viewers. I’d argue that the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of 10 (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from 10 people to a million."  I can certainly agree with that. Half a million is a nice metric, but the biggest motivation is still just providing some value to someone regardless of the numbers. So, thanks again to everyone and I hope to be back soon. In the mean time, check out the archives.]

Image via:

What’s Killing the World’s Shorebirds?

Four gun-toting biologists scramble out of a helicopter on Southampton Island in northern Canada. Warily scanning the horizon for polar bears, they set off in hip waders across the tundra that stretches to the ice-choked coast of Hudson Bay.

Helicopter time runs at almost US$2,000 per hour, and the researchers have just 90 minutes on the ground to count shorebirds that have come to breed on the windswept barrens near the Arctic Circle. Travel is costly for the birds, too. Sandpipers, plovers and red knots have flown here from the tropics and far reaches of the Southern Hemisphere. They make these epic round-trip journeys each year, some flying farther than the distance to the Moon over the course of their lifetimes.

The birds cannot, however, outfly the threats along their path. Shorebird populations have shrunk, on average, by an estimated 70% across North America since 1973, and the species that breed in the Arctic are among the hardest hit1. The crashing numbers, seen in many shorebird populations around the world, have prompted wildlife agencies and scientists to warn that, without action, some species might go extinct.

Although the trend is clear, the underlying causes are not. That’s because shorebirds travel thousands of kilometres a year, and encounter so many threats along the way that it is hard to decipher which are the most damaging. Evidence suggests that rapidly changing climate conditions in the Arctic are taking a toll, but that is just one of many offenders. Other culprits include coastal development, hunting in the Caribbean and agricultural shifts in North America. The challenge is to identify the most serious problems and then develop plans to help shorebirds to bounce back.

“It’s inherently complicated — these birds travel the globe, so it could be anything, anywhere, along the way,” says ecologist Paul Smith, a research scientist at Canada’s National Wildlife Research Centre in Ottawa who has come to Southampton Island to gather clues about the ominous declines. He heads a leading group assessing how shorebirds are coping with the powerful forces altering northern ecosystems. (...)

Shorebirds stream north on four main flyways in North America and Eurasia, and many species are in trouble. The State of North America’s Birds 2016 report1, released jointly by wildlife agencies in the United States, Canada and Mexico, charts the massive drop in shorebird populations over the past 40 years.

The East Asian–Australasian Flyway, where shorelines and wetlands have been hit hard by development, has even more threatened species. The spoon-billed sandpiper (Calidris pygmaea) is so “critically endangered” that there may be just a few hundred left, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Red knots are of major concern on several continents. The subspecies that breeds in the Canadian Arctic, the rufa red knot, has experienced a 75% decline in numbers since the 1980s, and is now listed as endangered in Canada. “The red knot gives me that uncomfortable feeling,” says Rausch, a shorebird biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service in Yellowknife. She has yet to find a single rufa-red-knot nest, despite spending four summers surveying what has long been considered the bird’s prime breeding habitat.

The main problem for the rufa red knots is thought to lie more than 3,000 kilometres to the south. During their migration from South America, the birds stop to feed on energy-rich eggs laid by horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) in Delaware Bay (see ‘Tracking trouble in the Arctic’). Research suggests that the crabs have been so overharvested that the red knots have become deprived of much-needed fuel.

by Margaret Munro, Nature | Read more:
Image:Malkolm Boothroyd

A Trip of One’s Own

[ed. See also: Want More Productivity? Be Careful What You Wish For, and Micro-dosing: The Drug Habit Your Boss Is Gonna Love]

One day, while driving home to Berkeley after a poorly attended reading in Marin County, Ayelet Waldman found herself weighing the option of pulling the steering wheel hard to the right and plunging off the Richmond Bridge. “The thought was more than idle, less than concrete,” she recalls, “and though I managed to make it across safely, I was so shaken by the experience that I called a psychiatrist.” The doctor diagnosed her with a form of bipolar disorder, and Waldman began a fraught, seven-year journey to alter her mood through prescription drugs, a list so long that she was “able to recite symptoms and side effects for anything … shrinks might prescribe, like the soothing voice-over at the end of a drug commercial.” She was on a search for something, anything, that would quiet the voices, the maniac creativity, the irritable moods that caused her to melt down over the smallest mistakes. That’s when she began taking LSD.

Lysergic acid diethylamide is in the midst of a renaissance of sorts, a nonprescription throwback for an overmedicated generation. As pot goes mainstream—the natural solution to a variety of ills—LSD is close behind, in popularity if not legality. By 1970, two years after possession of LSD became illegal, an estimated two million Americans had used the drug; by 2015, more than 25 million had. In A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, Waldman explores her own experience of taking teeny, “subtherapeutic” doses of the drug. This “microdose,” about a tenth of your typical trip-inducing tab, is “low enough to elicit no adverse side effects, yet high enough for a measurable cellular response.” Her book is both a diatribe and diary. She offers a polemic on a racist War on Drugs that allows her, a middle-class white woman, to use illegal substances with ease, as well as a daily record of the improved mood and increased focus she experiences each time she takes two drops of acid under the tongue. Microdosing advocates argue that LSD is a safer and more reliable alternative to many prescription drugs, particularly those intended to treat mood disorders, depression, anxiety, and ADHD. Respite is what Waldman is chasing, a gradual tempering, drop by drop, of our fractured, frazzled selves. If the 1960s were about touching the void, microdosing is about pulling back from it.

I’d been on prescription antidepressants for about a year when I opened Waldman’s book. To say that mental illness runs in my own family would be an understatement. After listening to a very abridged version of my family medical history, my psychiatrist called me the “poster child for mental health screenings before marriage.” My sister, gripped with undiagnosed postpartum psychosis, once fantasized, as Waldman did, about driving off a bridge with her infant daughter in the car, and my mother killed herself by overdosing on OxyContin and other legal drugs a month before I graduated from college. Battle is the stock verb of illness—we battle cancer, depression, and addiction. But I cannot in good conscience say I battle my depression and anxiety. Rather, my madness and I are conjoined twins, fused at the head and hip: Together always, we lurch along in an adequate, improvised shuffle.

Like Waldman, I worry about the negative effects of taking an SSRI long-term. The daughter of hippies, a flower grandchild, I don’t trust the pharmaceutical industry to prioritize my wellness over their profits. I’ve long agreed with Waldman that “practitioners, even the best ones, still lack a complete understanding of the complexity and nuance both of the many psychological mood disorders and of the many pharmaceuticals available to treat them.” So when I finished the prologue to A Really Good Day, I set the book down and left my therapist a voicemail announcing my plan to wean myself off Celexa. Then I went on reading. I did not mention the new-old mystic’s medicine beckoning me—the third eye, the open door.

It’s surprisingly simple to get LSD. I asked a few friends, who asked a few of their friends, and the envelope arrived just a few days later with a friendly, letter-pressed postcard. Spliced into the card, via some impressive amateur surgery, was a tiny blue plastic envelope. Inside that was a piece of plain white paper divided with black lines into ten perfect squares: ten tabs of acid, 100 microdoses at a dollar each. (...)

If cocaine kept Wall Street humming at all hours in the 1980s, LSD today keeps the ideas flowing in Silicon Valley’s creative economy, solving problems that require both concentration and connectedness. Microdosing is offered as an improvement over Adderall and Ritalin, the analog ancestors of modern-day smart drugs. Old-school ADHD methamphetamines, it would seem, clang unpleasantly against Silicon Valley’s namaste vibe. Today’s microdosers “are not looking to have a trip with their friends out in nature,” an anonymous doser recently explained to Wired. “They are looking at it as a tool.” One software developer speaks of microdosing as though it were a widget one might download for “optimizing mental activities.” The cynic’s working definition might read, “microdose (noun): the practice of ingesting a small dose of a once-countercultural drug that made everyone from Nixon to Joan Didion flinch in order to make worker bees more productive; Timothy Leary’s worst nightmare; a late-capitalist miracle.”

Productivity is not Waldman’s purpose—pre-LSD, she could write a book in a matter of weeks—but neither is non-productivity, the glazed-over stoner effect. Waldman is instead insistent on the therapeutic value of microdosing. There is nothing, it seems, that LSD isn’t good for, no worry it can’t soothe, no problem it can’t solve. Once an afternoon delight of recreational trippers and high-school seniors, LSD has become a drug of power users: engineers, salesmen, computer scientists, entrepreneurs, writers, the anxious, the depressed. The trip isn’t the thing; instead, microdosing helps maintain a fragmented, frenzied order, little by little, one day at a time.

by Claire Vaye Watkins, TNR |  Read more:

Image: Tran Nguyen

Since It Can't Sue Us All, Getty Images Embraces Embedded Photos

[ed. I see Getty stock images every day. They're all over the net, so I began wondering about the company's business model. See also: Since It Can't Sue Us All, Getty Images Embraces Embedded Photos and Photographer Suing Getty for 1 Billion.]

Many companies are founded on inspiration or imitation. But Mark Getty, a grandson of the billionaire oilman J. Paul Getty, and Jonathan Klein, an investment banker who had been Getty’s boss, started theirs with a checklist. Tired of crafting deals for others, the pair came up with strict criteria for their own dream business. It had to be global, operating in a fragmented industry ready for consolidation, and on the cusp of change. And the less risk the better. “We didn’t want to fix something that was broken,” says Klein.

Although the business they started in 1995, Getty Images, didn’t have a big idea behind it like a Twitter or Facebook, it’s proven just as revolutionary. If Google is essential to navigating the Web, Getty has become essential to visualizing it. Cobbled together through acquisitions, Getty is the world’s largest photo and video agency, and its database of 80 million images is the raw material from which many of the Web’s slide shows and photo galleries are made. A search for its images of happy people, for instance, turns up 626,317 results. That depth allows Getty to license its image trove online to all manner of bloggers and websites, businesses small and large, advertisers, newspapers, and magazines (including this one).

With annual revenue approaching $1 billion, according to Getty, it’s become a media business too important to ignore. Carlyle Group certainly took notice: On Aug. 15, the private equity firm agreed to buy majority ownership of Getty from another private equity investor, Hellman & Friedman, in a deal that values the company at $3.3 billion. The Getty family and Klein will own the rest.

Mark Getty and Klein, a native of South Africa, were working at Hambros Bank in London when they stumbled upon the stock photo business. “It was a cottage industry, it didn’t have any business discipline,” says Klein, now chief executive officer (Getty is chairman). “It was run by and for photographers.”

They began by acquiring the premier photo library in Britain, Tony Stone Images, for $30 million. Since then, Getty has bought more than 100 other photo collections and companies. It went public in 1996, and three years later moved its headquarters to Seattle to be closer to the tech community and many of its customers. “They came in with a super-simple strategy and held to that,” says Stephen Mayes, who had worked at Tony Stone, stayed at Getty until 1998, and is now managing director of the photographer-owned VII Photo Agency. “They are not inherently entrepreneurial. They take good businesses and make them better.” Giorgio Psacharopulo, CEO of Magnum Photos, the cooperative started by Henri Cartier-Bresson and others, says: “We’re in awe of what Getty Images has been able to accomplish. But, like Wal-Mart, they operate at a scale that makes it difficult for smaller agencies to exist.”

Getty was early in recognizing the digital revolution’s impact on photography. In 1998, Getty acquired PhotoDisc, the first company to figure out how to sell photos in a digital format. “They always recognized the business eating their lunch and bought it,” says David Walker, executive editor of Photo District News, a trade publication. By 2001, Getty’s entire business was digital.

The bigger disruption came once digital cameras, and then mobile phones, began producing high-quality images—making everybody a potential photographer. By 2005, a company called iStockphoto emerged as the leading source of crowdsourced (otherwise known as amateur) images. Its average price for a photo was $2 to $3. Getty bought it for $50 million in 2006. “A lot of people thought we were cannibalizing our business,” Klein says. “But sometimes it’s perfectly legitimate to use a $5 picture.”

Getty’s move into the microstock business, as it’s called, came as the media and advertising industries were contracting and the Web was expanding. Soon Getty’s business model was turned upside down: While it started out providing expensive images for limited use to a small group of customers, now it also provides cheaper images for broad use to a big group of customers. Explains Klein: “The fundamental change is how and where pictures are being used.” Before Getty bought iStockphoto, it had some 150,000 customers a year. Now it has 1.3 million. “About 900,000 of them are small and medium-sized businesses, many of whom weren’t using images legally or at all,” Klein says. Fifteen years ago, Getty uploaded a few hundred photos a day; now it uploads tens of thousands. Getty used to license or sell 100,000 images a year; today it’s 30 million to 40 million.

by Susan Berfield, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image:  via:

Why We Can't Fix Twitter

Amtrak once asked a focus group what kind of food they wanted in the train’s cafe car. One participant requested more healthy choices, like salad and fruit. The person running the focus group said something like, “People always say they want the salad. Then they buy the cheeseburger.”

Today’s social media environment faces a similar paradox. It’s fashionable to complain about the low quality of Twitter conversations. We bemoan trolls, flame wars and the lack of nuance inherent in 140-character statements. Occasionally some high-profile tweeter will publicly declare that they are done with the platform, as the writer Lindy West did this week in an article titled: “I’ve left Twitter. It is unusable for anyone but trolls, robots and dictators.”

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently asked his followers to suggest ideas for improvement. He got plenty of recommendations, such as an edit button so users could fix erroneous or ill-considered tweets. Other suggestions included a bookmark button and improved reporting options for bullying.

It’s unclear if these kinds of changes will improve the quality of Twitter discourse. What they won’t fix is the company’s cafe car problem. We say that we want more civil, thoughtful dialogue. But do we really?

Imagine that a Silicon Valley start-up created an online discussion platform precisely to address this problem. There would be no trolls or shouting matches. Shrill sound bites would be replaced by measured conversations. Users would span the political spectrum, allowing for civil exchanges among people with different views.

“Wow,” you’d probably say. “The world needs a platform like that, especially right now!” You’d sign up. Then, you’d go right back to Twitter.

How do I know this? Because we created that alternative platform. It was an online discussion forum called Parlio, and its chief purpose was to host civil, thoughtful conversations. Parlio was founded by Wael Ghonim, the former Google executive best known for running the Facebook page that helped spark the 2011 Egyptian revolution. As the euphoria over the revolution faded, Ghonim found that social media only amplified polarization. “The same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart,” he said. In 2015 he and Osman Osman, another former Googler, launched Parlio, and I became chief strategy officer.

The user experience was straightforward. A member would post a short piece of writing, or maybe a link to an article. Then, other members would discuss it. We also hosted Q&As. But Parlio’s culture was markedly different from other social media platforms. It was intended for conversation, not mass broadcasting. You had to be invited to post, but anyone could be a reader. New members signed a civility pledge, and we had a zero-tolerance policy toward trolls.

Parlio built a small but devoted following, including thought leaders from media, academia and business. We hosted remarkably civil conversations about divisive issues like race, terrorism, refugees, sexism and even Donald Trump’s candidacy for president. Author Max Boot wrote in Commentary: “I find that I’m using Parlio more because I can find a more reasoned engagement there than I do on Twitter. Parlio is not, of course, going to threaten Twitter’s business anytime soon, but it is an augury of what can happen if Twitter doesn’t address the problem of anonymous hate-speech that is poisoning its user community.” Tom Friedman penned a New York Times column about Parlio’s attempt to create a new social media experience, writing, “I participated in a debate on Parlio and found it engaging and substantive.”

While people loved the idea of Parlio, we weren’t sure how quickly we could bring it to scale. Last year we joined forces with Quora, which had just reached 100 million monthly users. I am proud of what we created at Parlio, and I also learned a lot about user behavior. The main takeaway is that the social media experience that people say they want is often different from the one that they actively pursue. Here are some of the main challenges to building a civil, thoughtful social media platform:

We’re addicted to the promise of going viral

Say you’re a journalist, and you just published a big article. You have two options for engagement. The first is to receive a relatively small number of comments and questions from informed and influential people, including top thinkers in your field. Option two is a flood of Twitter mentions. Some will be smart, but many will be rants from complete strangers. We might think that we want option one. But deep down, we can’t give up the thrill of option two.

Any Twitter pundit with a large following is familiar with that thrill. It’s that moment right after your provocative statement starts ricocheting across the internet. Your feed explodes with new mentions and your followers dramatically increase. You have no idea who most of these people are, or even if they are real people, but you feel like a rock star. If your tweet goes really viral, you might get on TV. Maybe you will be invited to write an op-ed expanding on your tweet, even though 140 characters were all you had to say on the matter.

Generally speaking, Parlio couldn’t offer that experience. In part because we didn’t have the numbers, but also because our content was not particularly conducive to virality. Often what go viral are antagonistic declarations that are unburdened by nuance. Our president-elect is a master of such statements, which is why Twitter has been such a powerful tool for spreading his message.

Parlio did a decent job of delivering option one, however. Authors would come to Parlio to discuss articles they had written elsewhere. Some of those posts attracted high-quality engagement that is very difficult to find in online commenting sections, and the authors would be delighted. But the next time they wrote an article, sometimes those same authors would skip Parlio and post it on Twitter. The next section helps explain why.

by Emily Parker, Politico |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Utopian Capitalism

The system we know as Capitalism is both wondrously productive and hugely problematic. On the downside, capitalism promotes excessive inequality; it valorises immediate returns over long-term benefits; it addicts us to unnecessary products and it encourages excessive consumption of the world’s resources with potentially disastrous consequences – and that’s just a start. We are now deeply familiar with what can go wrong with Capitalism. But that is no reason to stop dreaming about some of the ways in which Capitalism could one day operate in a Utopian future:

In the Utopia, we’d spend less time thinking about the Dow Jones.

The Dow Jones, which is the world’s most prestigious financial index, takes a daily temperature reading of the US, assigning it a very precise number, which is widely reported in the news and which we tend to treat with a high degree of reverence. Such financial data seems to be telling us something of immense importance. It hints at an answer to the great questions of existence: are things going well or badly, is the world doing OK? How is life on earth?

It’s really worth asking such questions and reflecting heavily upon them. This is what philosophers traditionally like to do. But the numbers do not actually answer our questions, for the links between the Dow Jones figures and what is actually going on in human lives (their rise or fall) is far more elusive. It’s not that there is no connection whatsoever. The financial health of major US companies does have indirect, distant links to the economic side of everyone’s life. Yet the quality and character of daily life is powerfully affected by a great many things which the financial data does not recognise, for example, your health, the view from your window, the quality of your relationship, the amount of time you have to spend commuting, the connections you have with the neighbours, the state of your ambitions, your degree of envy, how your kids are doing. These may, indeed, be rather more important in determining ‘how things are going’ than the Dow Index. But the Dow doesn’t entirely admit this. It seems to be making a larger claim: to know how your life is going – and it brings to this claim a panoply of impressive arrows, charts and incomprehensible acronyms which cow us into believing in its authority, rather as our ancestors might have trusted in the confused mumblings of a priest sitting on top of an altar in a darkened temple.

For all our expertise, we have not yet learned how to devise reliable indicators of the state of nations and individuals. We do not have a daily set of figures to record what truly matters. It might help, for example, to know the incidence of unnecessary embarrassment or whether arrogance is becoming 0.1% more or less common. We don’t have figures measuring supplies of patience, tact and forbearance. We don’t have indices around envy, infidelity and fury.

In the absence of these vital indicators, we cling to the signals offered to us by Wall Street. We use words like depression and exuberance, terms well known from personal life, to describe the movements of stocks and shares. To ask for better indices of national well being sounds whimsical. Yet it ought not to, for we need data that homes in on things that matter greatly for what our lives are actually like. Issues like jealousy, boredom, beauty, frustration or anger shape our destinies just as much – if not more – than the fortunes of 3M (the Minnesota Mining Company) and the twenty nine other corporations whose trading forms the basis for calculating the Dow Jones figures.

The big issue is how we can get a diversity of indicators on our national dashboards. We are not suggesting the suppression of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. What we want to see is the rise of other – equally important – figures that report on a regular basis on elements of psychological and sociological life and which could form part of the consciousness of thoughtful and serious people. Today, a government cannot get rewarded, or chastised, for the impact its policies have on the frequency of domestic rows because rows are not recorded. When we measure things – and give the figures a regular public airing – we start the long process of collectively doing something about them.

In the Utopia, we wouldn’t just care about unemployment, we’d also worry about misemployment.

Employment means being, generically, in work. But misemployment means being in work but of a kind that fails to tackle with any real sincerity the true needs of other people: merely exciting them to unsatisfactory desires and pleasures instead. Like this fellow, dressing up as a hotdog to entice customers.

A man employed by the casino chain Las Vegas Sands to hand out flyers to tourists so as to entice them to use slot machines is clearly ‘employed’ in the technical sense. He’s marked as being off the unemployment registers. He is receiving a wage in return for helping to solve some (small) puzzle of the human condition of interest to his employers: that not enough tourists might otherwise leave the blue skies and cheerful bustle of a south Nevada city’s main street to enter the dark air-conditioned halls of an Egyptian-themed casino lined with ranks of ringing consoles.

The man is indeed employed, but in truth, he belongs to a large subsection of those in work we might term the ‘misemployed’. His labour is generating capital, but it is making no contribution to human welfare and flourishing. He is joined in the misemployment ranks by people who make cigarettes, addictive but sterile television shows, badly designed condos, ill-fitting and shoddy clothes, deceptive advertisements, artery-clogging biscuits and highly-sugared drinks (however delicious). The rate of misemployment in the economy is very high.

And while we may be genuinely grateful for a job and give our best to do it well, at the back of our minds we do – as employees – nurture the hope that our work contributes in some real way to the common good; that we are making, modestly, a difference.

It’s not just the most dramatically harmful kinds of work that register as misemployment. We intuitively recognise it when we think of work as ‘just a job’; when we sense that far too much of our time, effort and intelligence is spent on meetings that resolve little, on chivying people to sign up for products that – in our heart of hearts we don’t admire.

Economists and governments have, with moderate success, been learning techniques to reduce the overall rate of unemployment. Central to their strategy has been the lowering of interest rates and the printing of money. In the language of the field, the key to bringing down unemployment has been to ‘stimulate demand.’

Though technically effective, this method fails to draw any distinction between good and bad demand and therefore between employment and misemployment.

Fortunately, there are real solutions to bringing down the rate of misemployment. The trick isn’t just to stimulate demand per se, the trick is to stimulate the right demand: to excite people to buy the constituents of true satisfaction, and therefore to give individuals and businesses a chance to direct their labour, and make profits, in meaningful areas of the economy.

In a nation properly concerned with misemployment, the taste of the audience would be educated to demand and pay for the most important things. 20 per cent of the adult population might therefore be employed in mental health and flourishing. At least another 30 per cent would be employed in building an environment that could satisfy the soul. People would be taught to respect good furniture, healthy food, wholesome clothes, fruitful holidays…

To achieve such a state, it isn’t enough to print money. The task is to excite people to want to spend it on the right things. This requires public education so that audiences will recognise the value of what is truly valuable and walk past what fails to address their true needs.

This isn’t to suggest that the employment figures are irrelevant – they matter a great deal. They are the first thing to be attended to. All the same the raw figures mask a more ambitious index – and a central question: are we deploying human capital admirably?

by The Book of Life |  Read more:

Images:© Flickr/Scott Beale and uncredited