Air Pollution Masks – Fashion's Next Statement?

The intersect between fashion and practicality is not always the most compelling. But given that air pollution is the world’s largest single environmental health risk it seems inevitable they will come to influence each another.

Yesterday saw the launch of M90, an “urban breathing mask” created by the Swedish company Airinum and sold in more than 50 countries. Face masks are already a common sight in Asian countries, although the cheap washable cotton rectangles rarely perform well in tests. Surgical masks, the type usually worn by doctors, have tended to fare better – but are still largely ineffectual.

The market for pricier, more attractive masks has been growing steadily in the past few years. Sales are not notable but Freka, a British brand, had the monopoly for a while. And rightly so, given that they tapped into the trend for minimal sportswear, almostCéline-like in design, seeking to become more of a background accessory than anything stand-out.

Which sets Airinum apart. While the design is typically Scandinavian, these face masks are neon camo.

They aren’t the first luxe masks to have forayed into fashion. In the last few years, these have regularly appeared on the catwalk at Beijing fashion week, arguably being awarded the same gravitas as an It bag. (...)

Masks covered in the Burberry check (although they are not Burberry products) remain a common sight in Asian cities, in a bid to marry style with sensibility, even if they don’t work well. As to whether they’ll take off, affordability remains an issue. But if the aim is to market them in Europe and the US, where athleisure is king and vanity is key, perhaps this is the answer.

As for the fashion appraisal, trad camo is having a moment, particularly in menswear. But neon camo, nothing short of an eyesore, is unchartered territory. It’s also oxymoronic. But that’s the point: if the aim is to raise awareness of the problem, then it’s unlikely you’ll miss one of these on the street.

by Morwenna Ferrier, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Airinum

Is Apple Over?

I started personal computing on an Apple II circa 1977. It was a big step up from the Heathkit and Radio Shack DIY projects I tinkered with in grade school. When IBM introduced the IBM-PC circa 1981, I semi-defected, and in 1984 I became bi-computeral (you know why).

My company functioned in a computer multiverse for some time. Macs were for art, music and publishing; PCs were for business; DEC minicomputers were for science, math and engineering. The minicomputers went away by 2000, and then we were just Mac and PC. In 2006, shortly after Macs became Intel inside and Parallels Desktop (a utility that enabled users to run Windows programs on a Mac) debuted, we became a 100% Apple shop, and we never looked back.

For more than a decade, if Apple manufactured it, we purchased it – in bulk. There was no reason to hyper-evaluate the new specifications; we just sent a purchase order to Tekserve (now T2 Computing) for as many of the new Apple devices as we needed (and maybe a few we didn't need). There are so many Apple devices in our offices, someone once said, "It looks like Steve Jobs threw up in here."

That was then.

What malevolent force could entice me to seriously consider a PC? What wickedness could tempt me to contemplate a transitioning back to Windows? What could possibly lure me to the dark side? Only Apple itself has such power.

My iPhone 7 Plus Chronicle

On September 7, 2016, I stood on line for an hour to pick up my brand new iPhone 7 plus. I had made an appointment to be one of the first to pick one up because I was still a blind faith follower of the cult of Apple. There was going to be an issue with the headphone jack (well documented in my first treatise of dissent, "Apple iPhone 7: Are You F#$king Kidding Me"). But being one of the faithful means putting aside common sense.

The moment I started to transfer information from iCloud, I was in trouble. Some apps worked, others were greyed out, and certain features were hit or miss.

Two factory resets and four hours later, I called Apple Care. After 30 minutes on hold, I was told that my iPhone must be defective and needed to be replaced.

What?

"OK, I'll just go to the Genius Bar and have it replaced." "No, sorry," said the Apple Care person, "we don't have any extra iPhones at the stores; you'll have to send it back to us." "But because of the 'new phone every year' plan you sold me last time, you took my iPhone 6 Plus back. What will I do for a phone for the five to seven days you're telling me it will take for me to get the replacement?"

(Note: Because I review technology as part of my job, I had plenty of other smartphones, but if this happened to most people, they'd be offline for a week.)

It took two tries for Apple to send me a new phone. The first replacement was lost in shipping, and the second is the one I'm carrying now. I was without an iPhone for about two weeks. To make matters worse, Apple charged my credit card $950 for each phone, so although I had no iPhones, Apple put $2,850 of charges on my credit card, saying it would refund the difference when the missing phone and the bad phone were returned (which it ultimately did).

How could Apple not have replacement phones available for the inevitable number of defective phones it might sell? Here's a better question: Did Apple sell too many defective phones for its supply of replacements?

With the number of iPhones Apple sells, some are bound to be defective – but this was not an isolated incident.

My MacBook Pro Chronicle

I wrote my second treatise of dissent, "Apple MacBook Pro 2016: WTF?," about the all-singing, all-dancing 15-inch MacBook Pro before I received my unit. Here are two videos you may enjoy about unboxing my second MacBook Pro and its battery life. Second? Yes, second. I'm writing this article on my third 15-inch MacBook Pro because the first two were defective.

by Shelly Palmer, Ad Age |  Read more:

Image: Apple

Tell Me A Story

‘Data-Driven’ Campaigns Are Killing the Democratic Party

There’s a Southern proverb often attributed to Sam Rayburn: “There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.” One month into the Trump presidency, and it’s still unclear whether the Democratic Party will learn anything from a fourth kick.

For four straight election cycles, Democrats have ignored research from the fields of cognitive linguistics and psychology that the most effective way to communicate with other humans is by telling emotional stories. Instead, the Democratic Party’s affiliates and allied organizations in Washington have increasingly mandated “data-driven” campaigns instead of ones that are message-driven and data-informed. And over four straight cycles, Democrats have suffered historic losses.

After the 2008 election, Democrats learned all the wrong lessons from President Obama’s victory, ascribing his success to his having better data. He did have better data, and it helped, but I believe he won because he was the better candidate and had a better message, presented through better storytelling.

I’m not a Luddite. I did my graduate work in political science at MIT, and as a longtime Democratic strategist, I appreciate the role that data can play in winning campaigns. But I also know that data isn’t a replacement for a message; it’s a tool to focus and direct one.

We Democrats have allowed microtargeting to become microthinking. Each cycle, we speak to fewer and fewer people and have less and less to say. We all know the results: the loss of 63 seats and control of the House, the loss of 11 seats and control of the Senate, the loss of 13 governorships, the loss of over 900 state legislative seats and control of 27 state legislative chambers.

Yet despite losses on top of losses, we have continued to double down on data-driven campaigns at the expense of narrative framing and emotional storytelling.

Consider the lot of Bill Clinton. It has been widely reported that in 2016, Bill Clinton urged Hillary Clinton’s campaign to message on the economy to white working-class voters as well as to the “Rising American Electorate” (young voters, communities of color and single white women), but couldn’t get anyone to listen to him in Brooklyn. They had an algorithm that answered all questions. Theirs was a data-driven campaign. The campaign considered Bill to be old school—a storyteller, not data driven.

I feel his pain. And unless Democrats start to change things quickly, we’ll be feeling pain in elections yet to come.

Though the problem for Democrats is urgent, the challenge is not new. Before the clamor for a “data-driven” approach, the “best practices” embraced by much of the Democratic Party apparatus encouraged campaigns that were predominantly driven by issue bullet points. In 2000, for example, the Gore presidential campaign had no shortage of position papers, but it would be challenging (at best) to say what the campaign’s message was. In contrast, in Obama’s 2008 campaign, “Hope and Change” was not only a slogan, but a message frame through which all issues were presented.

Years ago, my political mentor taught me the problem with this approach, using a memorable metaphor: issues are to a campaign message what ornaments are to a Christmas tree, he said. Ornaments make the tree more festive, but without the tree, you don’t have a Christmas tree, no matter how many ornaments you have or how beautiful they are. Issues can advance the campaign’s story, but without a narrative frame, your campaign doesn’t have a message, no matter how many issue ads or position papers it puts forward.

Storytelling has been the most effective form of communication throughout the entirety of human history. And that is unlikely to change, given that experts in neurophysiology affirm that the neural pathway for stories is central to the way the human brain functions (“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor,” as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written).

The scientific evidence of the effectiveness of storytelling is extensive. Consider the 2004 book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, in which Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff applied the analytic techniques from his field to politics, explaining that “all of what we know is physically embodied in our brains,” which process language through frames: “mental structures that shape the way we see the world.”

Convincing a voter—challenging an existing frame—is no small task. “When you hear a word, its frame (or collection of frames) is activated in your brain,” writes Lakoff. As a result, “if a strongly held frame doesn’t fit the facts, the facts will be ignored and the frame will be kept.” How then to persuade voters? How can we get them to change the way they see the world? Tell a story.

Further evidence was put forward in 2007’s The Political Brain, by Emory University psychologist Drew Westen. “The political brain is an emotional brain,” Westen wrote, and the choice between electoral campaigns that run on an issue-by-issue debate versus those that embrace storytelling is stark: “You can slog it out for those few millimeters of cerebral turf that process facts, figures and policy statements. Or you can take your campaign to the broader neural electorate collecting delegates throughout the brain and targeting different emotional states with messages designed to maximize their appeal.”

For Democrats, a useful metaphor to frame our storytelling is that while conservatives believe we are each in our own small boat and it is up to each of us to make it on our own, progressive morality holds that we are all on a large boat and unless we maintain that boat properly, we will all sink together. That metaphor could serve as our narrative frame, and addressing issues within this frame—rather than as separate, unrelated bullet points—would allow us to present emotional stories using language that speaks to voters’ values.

by Dave Gold, Politico |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Carmen Cartiness Johnson, I can see China (2015)
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A Resort for the Apocalypse

Rising S Bunkers, one of several companies that specialize in high-end shelters—its Presidential model includes a gym, a workshop, a rec room, a greenhouse, and a car depot —says sales of its $500,000-plus units increased 700 percent last year. (This compares with a more modest 150 percent increase across other Rising S units.) Bunker companies won’t disclose customers’ names, but Gary Lynch, Rising S’s CEO, told me his clients include Hollywood actors and “highly recognizable sports stars.” Other luxury shelters are marketed to businesspeople, from bankers to Bill Gates, who is rumored to have bunkers beneath his houses in Washington State and California.

Whereas Cold War shelters, by design, were near the home and easy to get to, a handful of bunker companies are building entire survival communities in remote locations. Some of them share literal foundations with Cold War buildings: One project, Vivos XPoint, involves refurbishing 575 munitions-storage bunkers in South Dakota; Vivos Europa One, in Germany, is a Soviet armory turned luxury community with a subterranean swimming pool.

By contrast, Trident Lakes, a 700-acre, $330 million development in Ector, Texas, an hour and a half north of Dallas, is being built from scratch. Marketed as a “5-star playground, equipped with defcon 1 preparedness,” it is the project of a group of investors who incorporated as Vintuary Holdings. According to James O’Connor, the CEO, Trident Lakes “is designed for enjoyment like any other resort.” (This pitch is rather different from its Cold War–era counterparts: A 1963 bunker advertisement from the Kelsey-Hayes company shows a family tucked under its home, with just rocking chairs for comfort.)

In some regards, the plans for Trident Lakes do resemble those for a resort. Amenities will include a hotel, an athletic center, a golf course, and polo fields. The community is slated to have 600 condominiums, ranging in price from $500,000 to $1.5 million, each with a waterfront view (to which end, three lakes and 10 beaches will be carved out of farmland). Other features are more unusual: 90 percent of each unit will be underground, armed security personnel will guard a wall surrounding the community, and there will be helipads for coming and going.

by Ben Rowan, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Chris Philpot

Luke Pelletier
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The Glorious Exit of Jeffrey Loria, the Worst Owner in Sports

Over the past 18 years, as Jeffrey Loria sprayed the stench of his naked greed across baseball like the skunk he is, as he destroyed the sport in one city and bilked another out of billions of dollars, as he tore asunder a championship team and micromanaged countless others and behaved like the lamest sort of wannabe George Steinbrenner possible, all blowhard, zero substance, the aggrieved could take solace in one thing and one alone: Some day, the game would rid itself of him.

Mercy was not the exclusive domain of the Ninth Circuit on Thursday. Early in the day, simultaneous feelings of joy and fury accompanied the Forbes report that Loria had agreed to sell the Miami Marlins to an unnamed buyer for $1.6 billion. Joy because the owner who played arsonist to his own franchise was relinquishing his Zippo. And fury because one of the worst owners in sports had turned a $158.5 million investment into something worth 10 times as much, an example other owners with similarly feeble consciences may be tempted to copy.

Whatever frustration percolated over a rich man getting even richer paled compared to the ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead giddiness expressed by Marlins players and executives past and present in texts and calls to one another. Presuming the deal goes through – plenty of pitfalls remain, a source familiar with the agreement confirmed to Yahoo Sports, and Loria would like to bask in the glow of the All-Star Game at Marlins Stadium in July, so the timing of any sale remains unclear – it will bring to an end an ownership reign that stained the sport for more than a decade.

To understand the treachery of Loria and David Samson, the team president and son of Loria’s ex-wife, one need only understand a single number: $1.2 billion. That’s how much a $91 million note from J.P. Morgan to help finance the team’s new stadium, which opened in 2012, is going to cost Miami-area taxpayers. That’s 13 times the original loan. In all, $409 million worth of loans will balloon to $2.4 billion.

And here’s the thing: That’s not even the worst part. For years, the Marlins cried poor to local politicians, saying they needed a stadium to make money. Never would they open up their financials, of course, because they would have shown the Marlins had cleared nearly $50 million in profits the two years before Miami-Dade County approved the stadium funding. Ultimately, the government cowed, and the Marlins got perhaps the most sweetheart of sweetheart stadium deals, which is saying something. They covered only a quarter of construction costs. They keep all of the stadium revenues: tickets, parking, concessions. They pay $2.3 million annually in rent – money that goes to pay off a county loan.

by Jeff Passan, Yahoo Sports | Read more:
Image: via:

Why Whole Foods is Now Struggling

Organic food has never been so popular among American consumers. Ironically, that’s bad news for the brand that made organic a household name — namely, the Austin-based Whole Foods.

On Wednesday, Whole Foods reported what is arguably its worst performance in a decade, announcing its sixth consecutive quarter of falling same-store sales and cutting its outlook for the year. The company is closing nine stores, the most it has ever closed at one time. A mere 16 months ago, Whole Foods predicted it would grow its 470 U.S. locations to more than 1,200.

The problem is one that chief executive John Mackey probably didn’t predict when he first opened Whole Foods as a neighborhood natural foods store 36 years ago: Organics, then a fringe interest, have become so thoroughly mainstream that organic chains now have to face conventional big-box competitors. Mass-market retailers were responsible for 53.3 percent of organic food sales in 2015, according to the Organic Trade Association; natural retailers clocked in just north of 37.

And Whole Foods is hardly the only store feeling the squeeze: Sprouts and Fresh Market, the second- and third-largest publicly traded organic stores, have also seen falling stock prices.

“Whole Foods created this space and had it all to themselves for years,” said Brian Yarbrough, an analyst at Edward Jones. “But in the past five years, a lot of people started piling in. And now there's a lot of competition.”

In many ways, the story of Whole Foods's decline is also the story of how the organic movement took over the United States. Between 2005 and 2015, sales of organic food increased 209 percent, according to the Organic Trade Association. Last year, organic sales topped $43.3 billion.

The driving force behind this growth, most analysts agree, is none other than millennials: Consumers aged 18 to 34 are the largest buyers of organics, and they’re the most likely to consider themselves “knowledgeable” about their food. As they came of age, mainstream grocery chains have been forced to adapt, too.

Walmart ramped up its organics selection in 2006. Kroger introduced its Simple Truth brand in 2012 — the store’s chief executive, Mike Ellis, later said it was the store’s “most successful brand launch ever.” Earlier this week, Aldi announced plans for a $1.6 billion U.S. expansion, with much of that growth aimed at offering “a wider range of organic and gluten-free products.”

By volume, the largest organic retailer in the United States is believed to be Costco, which in 2015 sold $4 billion of organic produce and packaged foods. Like Walmart, Kroger and Aldi, Costco sells organic produce for considerably less than do natural food stores, farmers markets or Whole Foods. In fact, lowering prices has been one of Whole Food’s primary strategies for dealing with competitors.

Apart from shuttering stores and stalling expansion plans, the company is continuing to focus on 365 by Whole Foods, a two-year-old division aimed at launching stores for “value-conscious” consumers. It’s also been dropping prices at its regular locations and mailing out national discount circulars, something it had not previously done. Speaking to investors Wednesday, Mackey indicated that he did not want to see “too big of a gap” between the prices at Whole Foods and those at stores like Costco and Kroger.

But some organic advocates are concerned that lowering the prices of organic foods — an apparent prerequisite for mainstream popularity — can only happen at the expense of the movement’s early principles. This fear is not entirely new: Michael Pollan fretted about it in the pages of the New York Times when Walmart began selling organic Rice Krispie treats 11 years ago. But with results like Whole Foods's, it is becoming more urgent, said Ronnie Cummins, the co-founder of the Organic Consumers Association.

by Caitlin Dewey, WP | Read more:
Image:Ty Wright/Bloomberg News

Tom Guald
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Politics 101

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Why We're Post-Fact

Against Normalization: The Lesson of the Munich Post

The Islamic State's Thank You Letter to the Infidel King, Donald Trump

Trump Vexed by Challenges, Scale of Government

Indivisable: Inside the Protest Movement That Has Republicans Reeling (Indivisable Guide here:)

Emergency Preparedness Amongst the Liberal Elite

ALEXANDRA: We need go bags, Michael.

MICHAEL: You’re overreacting.

ALEXANDRA: That’s what you said last October when my panic attacks started. I’m just saying we need to be prepared, Michael. What if they repeal health care and we can’t afford your Xanax? What if Civil War erupts? What if they destroy the internet and we have to wait to subscribe to print? What if you forget to put a post-it over your laptop camera one day and they see you have a periodic table hanging in your office?

MICHAEL: We need go bags.

ALEXANDRA: WE NEED GO BAGS!

MICHAEL: What do we put in them? Is there an Amazon list? Is Prime still next day in the event of an apocalypse? Oh, sweet merciful Jon Stewart, tomorrow is Sunday.

ALEXANDRA: We’ll need to travel light. Bare essentials, Michael.

MICHAEL: Is the generator gassed up? How many gallons of gas does it take to charge a tablet?

ALEXANDRA: In this apocalyptic scenario, we’re assuming there’s no internet, remember?

MICHAEL: How many gallons to charge a Kindle?

ALEXANDRA: ESSENTIALS, MICHAEL. That means cellphones, passports, pussy hats. Should we take supplies to make protest signs?

MICHAEL: Can’t we just make a multi-purpose one in advance and take that?

ALEXANDRA: But what if they attack another group? It won’t be just the Muslims forever.

MICHAEL: Then we’ll make it say, “All lives matter.”

ALEXANDRA: JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, MICHAEL. Have you been living under an ecologically-responsible yurt? We can’t say that shit. People are going to think you aren’t woke.

MICHAEL: I still don’t understand that word. Is it a grammar thing? I haven’t slept since November. So did I woke last year?

ALEXANDRA: I don’t think that’s how it works. But I DO know you never, ever say “All Lives Matter.”

MICHAEL: There are way too many rules when total chaos reigns.

ALEXANDRA: We’re all making sacrifices, Michael. I desperately miss watching Empire.

MICHAEL: Are you allowed to boycott a Black TV show? I thought we were just boycotting Fox News. Now it’s the whole damn network?

ALEXANDRA: I think so. Honestly, I can’t keep up with what we’re boycotting. Thank heavens our Prius is self-driving because my Facebook feed keeps vacillating over which ride company is fleecing the immigrants.

MICHAEL: I know. I can’t even enjoy my heteronormative porn. I don’t even know who I am anymore. For a moment last night, I almost didn’t care that my fantasy league is in pieces.

ALEXANDRA: Wasn’t the Super Bowl last weekend? Isn’t football over?

MICHAEL: The season is over?!? WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING TO ME!?!?! Next you’ll tell me I can’t even enjoy a beer and steak.

ALEXANDRA: Methane gas, Michael. DiCaprio says no more red meat. And I haven’t found an American-made beer yet that didn’t support you-know-who. So we’re out. But that reminds me, we should throw in some boxes of wine. I’d normally prefer a white with the non-GMO, organic, fair-trade-certified kale chips and box of Lara bars I’ve packed, but refrigeration might be an issue. Red it is!

by Elly Lonon, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via:

photo: markk

Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember

[ed. When my mom began her decline with Alzheimer's this is how I imagined it must have felt.]

Short-term memory dominates all tasks—in cooking, for instance: I put the water to boil in a pot on the stove and remember that the water will boil while I chop the onions. I will put the sauté pan on the stove to heat up the oil for the onions, and I will then put the onions, which I will remember I have chopped, into the oil, which I remember I have heated for the onions. I will then add tomatoes. While the onions and tomatoes cook, I will put pasta in the water, which I remember I have boiled. I will know that in ten minutes I will put the cooked pasta into the tomato and onion stir, and thus have a simple tomato pasta meal.

If short-term memory is damaged as mine was, it works more like this: I put the water on to boil. I heat up the oil in the sauté pan. I chop the onions and then wonder for what it was that I chopped the onions. What might it be? I wash my hands, because I might as well—my hands are covered in onion juice, and my eyes are tearing. I return to the stove, where the oil is now scorching hot. I wonder what on earth it was I was cooking, why the sauté pan was left this way. I turn off the heat under the oil. I sigh and go upstairs. I forget everything I just did like a trail of dust in wind. Two hours later, after a nap, I return to the kitchen to a pile of chopped onions on the chopping block. The pan is cool but scorched. And I again wonder why. But mostly, my eyes turn to an empty stockpot on the stove, the burner turned on high. There is nothing in the stockpot, not even water. This happened over and over again in the months following my stroke. So I stopped cooking for a year.

Short-term memory is like an administrative assistant for the brain, keeping information on hand and organizing tasks—it will figuratively jot down a number, a name, an address, your appointments, or anything else for as long as you need to complete your transaction. It stores information on a temporary basis, on Post-it notes, before deciding whether or not to discard the memory/Post-it or move it into a file cabinet for long-term memory storage. Everything in long-term memory finds its way there through short-term memory, from the PIN for your ATM card to the words to the “Happy Birthday” song to the weather on your wedding day. In fact, you are exercising short-term memory now, by keeping track of what you read at the beginning of this sentence so that you can make sense of it at the end.

When short-term memory is damaged, it cannot track sentences. It must read the paragraph over and over again, because by the end of the sentence or paragraph, it will not remember the beginning. And because it does not remember the beginning, it cannot make meaning out of the entirety.

I look at a restaurant menu. I read each item, and when I get to the end of the list, I cannot remember what was at the beginning. I reread the menu. I get to the bottom of it. My brain gets tired, short-circuits, and all I see is random words. I cannot connect my appetite to the words. I cannot remember what food tastes like. I cannot connect the ingredients, “hand-cut green noodles with chanterelle mushroom ragù and gremolata,” into a whole. I cannot put together noodles and mushrooms and chopped herbs in my brain. I cannot connect those flavors into a picture, and I cannot connect them to my appetite, because I have no memory. I only know I am hungry, because I am light-headed and listless.

I put down the menu. I ask for a hamburger if I am dining alone. I ask my companion to order for me, if I am not dining alone. I always request hamburgers, because nearly every restaurant offers hamburgers, and because I cannot parse a menu and hold all the possibilities in my head in order to make a decision.

I am surprised, every time, when the hamburger arrives at the table, because I do not remember having ordered it. I chew it mechanically. There are no images flashing through my head reminding me of the first time I ate a hamburger, or all the barbecues I’ve attended, or the time after marching in the Rose Parade that I ate Burger King because Burger King gave out free burgers to participants at the end of the route. No. There is just blank space. There is chewing. Swallowing. The end of hunger.

When short-term memory is damaged, it will not retain new names. I do not remember someone who popped her head into my hospital room a few minutes ago. I do not remember the receptionist in the doctor’s waiting room. I do not remember who visited me in the hospital the day prior. I do not remember who gave me the flowers in my room. I have to write all these things down in my notebook, so I can refer back to it later.

If short-term memory is damaged, it may not be able to move things into long-term memory, because it takes time, even if not much. It can take about a minute for the memory to be retained. But with age or injury, our brains have less time to successfully move new information to long-term memory. As a result, it is difficult to recall the details of recent events. I see a book at the bookstore, and I buy it because it looks interesting. I go home and see two copies of that book on my bookshelf because I have bought that book over and over again.

I do not remember so many things that happened. I do not remember who was in my workshop the semester I returned to school before I was fully healed, returning because all I wanted to do was finish my degree. I do not remember the woman who befriended me in the wake of my stroke, who then months later wrote me a breakup card because supporting me, she said, was “too much.” I find the breakup card years later and look at the date in befuddlement. I do not remember printing my MFA thesis onto special paper and then assembling it and turning it in. I do not remember the names of any doctors at the hospital. I do not remember room numbers. In addition to not cooking, I do not even go grocery shopping for a whole year, because I forget what it is I have to buy, and if I write a list down, I forget where I put the list.

In the wake of my stroke, I remembered the names of people I’d known for years, even if I couldn’t remember the names of doctors I had just met. I recognized my best friend, Mr. Paddington, and my husband, Adam, and all my girlfriends, and greeted them. But when they’d leave the room and return, I would greet them once again, as if they hadn’t been in that same room just fteen minutes prior. I knew who they were, but I had lost track of time. My short-term memory was unable to move things into long-term storage.

by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Perrin

Dan Mcpharlin
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What the Closure of FRUiTS Magazine Means for Japanese Street Style

After two decades spent documenting the street style of Japanese teens across an impressive 233 issues, FRUiTS Magazine announced this weekend that it had printed its last copy. While the much discussed death of print media was perhaps a predictable cause of its demise, the actual reason for the magazine's closure that its founder, editor and chief photographer Shoichi Aoki gave was altogether more surprising. In an interview with Japanese site Fashionsnap, he said, simply, that "there are no more cool kids left to photograph."

Founded in 1997, FRUiTS was the definitive publication that championed Harajuku's colourfully dressed youth and provided a reliable and authentic record of emerging street trends and genuinely interesting dressers, in contrast to the contrived street style circus of fashion week peacocks. Recognised by its legions of readers as the magazine that introduced them to the saccharine, brave and frenetic world of Japanese fashion, FRUiTS will be sorely missed by the deserved cult following it has amassed. While fans of the magazine took to social media to decry its loss, some cited the magazine's insistence on photographing the same kids over and over again as the reason for its failure - commenting on a news article on Japanese culture site Spoon Tamago, Alan Yamamoto said that FRUiTS had become a "popularity contest", and that despite the magazine's closure "there's still so much fashion on the streets [in Tokyo] it's unbelievable." Misha Janette, founder of Tokyo Fashion Diaries, called the magazine's loss a "death blow to the already waning Japanese street scene", and called for more to be done to protect and nurture the area's style heritage.

The closure of a publication like FRUiTS is a bitter pill to swallow for many longtime fans of Japanese street style, but in many ways its demise has been a long time coming. However tempting it is to wax lyrical about Harajuku's unique cachet of cool, it's impossible to deny that the district's golden age has long passed. Historically regarded as an underground hotbed of street style that most foreign magazines would die to document, the area's magnetism has been numbed by overexposure and gentrification for quite a while now. The Hokoten pedestrian paradise that provided a nurturing crucible for Harajuku fashion was shut down in the late nineties, and although the area's girls and boys diffused over the surrounding square mile for the next two decades, things have changed. The reality in 2017 is that if you come to Tokyo hoping to see tribes of teens in the eye-grabbing garms and kawaii Decora that made FRUiTS famous, you're likely to be disappointed.

The Camden-esque transformation of Harajuku into a souvenir-saturated tourist trap means that instead of the trendsetting locals Gwen Stefani sang about in the early 00s, you're more likely to see white people dressed in tired lolita getups haunting the streets. There are still the odd shops like Dog, and 6%DokiDoki hidden close to Takeshita Street that cater to FRUiTS-worthy kids, but they are few and far between, and most of Harajuku now feels decidedly un-Japanese. Although the area has tourism to thank for its success in part, this has ultimately been the cause of its overexposure. (...)

Despite the increasing dominance of the high street, and the sentiment Aoki's statement suggests, Japan isn't facing an all-out style apocalypse; compared to most fashion capitals, Tokyo is still spoilt when it comes to achingly stylish dressers. In the past, kids paraded down Omotesando intending to get their picture taken, and managing to get into a magazine like FRUiTS was considered a great honour. If that was the case, then where are they now? These days, time spent on self-promotion is better invested online, and the lives of Harajuku's next generation play out on Instagram.

by Ashley Clarke, i-D | Read more:
Image: FRUiTS

Best All-Around Caliber for Alaska Big-Game Hunting? Can There Be Just One?

I suspect that the argument of what rifle cartridge is the best "all-around" caliber for Alaska big game hunting has burned as many calories in heated debate as what truck is better, Ford or Chevy. Forests have been decimated to publish various opinions.

When we moved to Alaska in 1971, I went back through old magazines my dad had and read everything I could find on the subject. I never experienced Nirvana, nothing seemed conclusive.

But it was entertaining. I spent my first Alaska summer cutting and installing spruce logs for septic tanks (yes, we did that) and was rewarded with a Winchester M70 in .300 Winchester Magnum for my efforts. That rifle instantly became my "all-around" rifle, largely because it was the only one I had.

Holy grail of hunting cartridges

After all this time, it seems that no malignancies have put the argument to death. New calibers appear routinely, providing the opportunity to revisit the argument and find the holy grail of Alaska hunting cartridges.

First, though, we have to acknowledge that a large share of hunters hunt for meat with rifles chambered for calibers that never make the list. There is ample evidence that more big game has been taken by those using the .30-30 Winchester or 30-06 Springfield than just about all others combined.

The requirements for a successful big game cartridge are not steeped in rocket science, as some of us gun folks would suggest. The caliber must be able to drive a projectile into the vitals of the animal and create enough damage to cause, if not instantaneous death, at least a fairly rapid demise. With the exception of some of the smaller .22 caliber center-fires, virtually all of them will accomplish the task. AR-15s and Mini-14s in .223 have become quite popular with western Alaska subsistence caribou hunters, although I have no idea how effective they find them to be.

Regardless of cartridge selection, the real issue rests on the shoulders of the hunter. Do they understand the capabilities of the cartridge and are they willing to accept the limitations? It really comes down to the effective range of the chosen round and the hunter's ability to shoot accurately regardless of the gun used. The hunter who is patient, who is willing to take the time to stalk the animal to get in range and to pass up shots that the cartridge cannot be expected to perform well on will do just fine with whatever caliber they choose to use.

A fair number of hunters don't have much interest in guns and shooting beyond bringing home winter meat. They will find all of this of little interest. They hunt with what they have and don't consider the details of it all.

Those of us who love it all — the hunting, the guns, and the shooting — find it a fascinating subject. We can and do blabber on for hours about velocity and energy, in-flight ballistics, terminal bullet performance, stopping power, and on and on. The first time Christine asked me a question about calibers, her eyes rolled back in her head a few minutes into my response. Small doses, she suggested.

A few suggestions

But here is the rub: Those of us who love to talk about it want nothing to do with an all-around rifle/cartridge. That means we only have one rifle — for us, a ridiculous concept. It is so much more interesting and fun to discuss a multitude of rifle/cartridge combinations tailored specifically for certain tasks and then, of course, get them. Most of us reload, which opens an entire world of custom loads with premium bullets at a fraction of the cost of shelf ammunition for our beloved rifles. Thus, some thoughts that are neither right or wrong, they're just mine.

*For Alaska's open-country game — Dall sheep, barren-ground caribou, and mountain goat — a flat shooting cartridge is desirable. While, in truth, most of the time these are taken within 200 yards, like most everything else in Alaska, there are times, like the last day of a 10-day hunt, when the only opportunity for a shot might be 400 yards. A plethora of cartridges, such as the .25-06, .270 Winchester, 7mm Remington Magnum, to name a few, fill the bill. My personal choice would be the 6.5-.300 Weatherby.

*Larger herbivores, moose and bison, seem to demand yet another rifle and for more than just the joy of having one. The bison is the only Alaska big-game animal that has a specific requirement as to the bullet weight and downrange energy of the cartridge used to hunt them. The bullet must weigh at least 200 grains and the retained energy of the bullet at 100 yards must be at least 2,000 foot-pounds. The 30-06 is the practical minimum for the task. Moose aren't particularly hard to kill. Having shot them with the 6mm/.284, .264 Winchester, .270 Winchester, .300 Winchester, .375 H&H and the .458 Winchester, none ever moved out of their tracks. The closest was 20 feet with a .458, the furthest, a bit over 400 yards with a .300 Winchester. They are, however, large animals and a heavier bullet for shots that might require deep penetration from a variety of angles is advantageous. Hoping to someday draw a bison permit, my choice for the "medium" rifle is the .300 Winchester. It makes a nice deer rifle in areas inhabited by brown bears as well.

*Then there is the big bear rifle. Brown bears can and have been taken with everything from the .223 Remington to the .460 Weatherby. They aren't bulletproof but do show more tenacity when wounded than other Alaska big game. Except those taken in "predator control" measures and the relatively rare case of being taken as food, brown bears are a trophy animal. The real allure is that they are considered dangerous. In order to be really dangerous they should be hunted up close and personal, halitosis distance if you will. That plays right into the justification to have a "heavy" rifle like a .375 H&H, .416 Rigby, .45/70, .450 Alaskan, or a .458 Winchester. My desire to hunt for trophies faded years ago, but you never know when an opportunity to help find a wounded bear might arise, and for such work I've always wanted a .470 Nitro Express in a double rifle of the British persuasion that has served on the Dark Continent. It's a piece of art and history that might never again see employment but what a terrific conversation piece around the campfire or fireplace.

The conversation is sort of like picking the best gun dog or the best partner. No matter your choice, the one you bring better be the right one.

by Steve Meyer, Alaska Dispatch |  Read more:
Image: Steve Meyer

Ed van der Elsken, "Paris, 1950"
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Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets

Abstract 

As robots and other computer-assisted technologies take over tasks previously performed by labor, there is increasing concern about the future of jobs and wages. We analyze the effect of the increase in industrial robot usage between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets. Using a model in which robots compete against human labor in the production of different tasks, we show that robots may reduce employment and wages, and that the local labor market effects of robots can be estimated by regressing the change in employment and wages on the change in exposure to robots in each local labor market—defined from the national penetration of robots into each industry and the local distribution of employment across industries. Using this approach, we estimate large and robust negative effects of robots on employment and wages. We show that commuting zones most affected by robots in the post-1990 era were on similar trends to others before 1990, and that the impact of robots is distinct and only weakly correlated with the prevalence of routine jobs, the impact of imports from China, and overall capital utilization. According to our estimates, each additional robot reduces employment by about seven workers, and one new robot per thousand workers reduces wages by 1.2 to 1.6 percent.

Introduction

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously predicted the rapid technological progress of the next 100 years, but also conjectured that this would translate into widespread “technological unemployment:” 

“We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come — namely, technological unemployment.” 

More than two decades later, Wassily Leontief would foretell of similar problems for workers: 

“Labor will become less and less important. . . More and more workers will be replaced by machines. I do not see that new industries can employ everybody who wants a job”(Leontief, 1952). 

Though these predictions did not come true in the decades that followed, there is renewed concern that with the striking advances in automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence, we are on the verge of —or perhaps we are already— seeing them realized (e.g., Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2012; Ford, 2016). The mounting evidence that the automation of a range of low-skill and medium-skill occupations has contributed to wage inequality and employment polarization (e.g., Autor, Levy and Murnane, 2003; Goos and Manning, 2007; Michaels, Natraj and Van Reenen, 2014) adds to these worries. 

These concerns notwithstanding, we have little systematic evidence of the equilibrium impact of these new technologies, and especially of robots, on employment and wages. One line of research (exemplified by Frey and Osbourne, 2013) investigates how feasible it is to automate existing jobs given current and presumed technological advances. Based on the tasks that workers perform, Frey and Osborne (2013) classify 702 occupations by how susceptible they are to automation. They conclude that over the next two decades, 47 percent of US workers are at the risk of automation. Using a related methodology, McKinsey puts the same number at 45 percent, while the World Bank estimates that 57 percen of the jobs in the OECD could be automated over the next two decades (World Development Report, 2016). Even if these studies were on target on what can be technologically feasible,1 these numbers do not correspond to the equilibrium impact of automation on employment and wages. First, even if the presumed technological advances materialize, there is no guarantee that firms would choose to automate; that would depend on the costs of substituting machines for labor and how much wages change in response to this threat. Second, the labor market impacts of new technologies depend not only on where they hit but also on the adjustment in other parts of the economy. For example, other sectors and occupations might expand to soak up the labor freed from the tasks that are now performed by machines and productivity improvements due to new machines may even expand employment in affected industries (Acemoglu and Restrepo, 2016). 

In this paper we move beyond these feasibility studies and estimate the equilibrium impact of one type of automation technology, industrial robots, on US labor markets. The International Federation of Robotics—IFR for short—defines an industrial robot as “an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, and multipurpose [machine]” (IFR, 2014). That is, industrial robots are machines that do not need a human operator and that can be programmed to perform several manual tasks such as welding, painting, assembling, handling materials, or packaging. Textile looms, elevators, cranes, transportation bands or coffee makers are not industrial robots as they have a unique purpose, cannot be reprogrammed to perform other tasks, and/or require a human operator. Although this definition excludes other types of capital that may also replace labor—most notably software and human-operated machines—it enables an internationally and temporally comparable measurement of industrial robots, which are argued to have already deeply impacted the labor market and expected to transform it in the decades to come.

by Daron Acemoglu, MIT and Pascual Restrepo, Yale and Boston University |  Read more: (pdf)

The Case Against Contemporary Feminism

It’s the same with feminism as it is with women in general: there are always, seemingly, infinite ways to fail. On the one hand, feminism has never been more widely proclaimed or marketable than it is now. On the other hand, its last ten years of mainstream prominence and acceptability culminated in the election of President Donald Trump. (The Times published an essay at the end of December under the headline “Feminism Lost. Now What?”) Since November 9th, the two main arguments against contemporary feminism have emerged in near-exact opposition to each other: either feminism has become too strict an ideology or it has softened to the point of uselessness. On one side, there is, for instance, Kellyanne Conway, who, in her apparent dislike of words that denote principles, has labelled herself a “post-feminist.” Among those on the other side is the writer Jessa Crispin, who believes that the push to make feminism universally palatable has negated the meaning of the ideology writ large.

Crispin has written a new book-length polemic on the subject, called “Why I Am Not a Feminist,” in which she offers definitions of feminism that are considerably more barbed than the earnest, cheeky slogans that have become de rigueur—“The future is female,” for example, as Hillary Clinton declared in her first video statement since the election, or “Girls just want to have fun-damental rights,” or “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” The dissidence at the root of these catchphrases has been obscured by their ubiquity on tote bags and T-shirts, and for Crispin the decline of feminism is visible in how easy the label is to claim. Feminism, she tells us, has become a self-serving brand popularized by C.E.O.s and beauty companies, a “fight to allow women to participate equally in the oppression of the powerless and the poor.” It’s a “narcissistic reflexive thought process: I define myself as feminist and so everything I do is a feminist act.” It’s an “attack dog posing as a kitten,” and—in what might be Crispin’s most biting entry—a “decade-long conversation about which television show is a good television show and which television show is a bad show.” (...)

Crispin’s argument is bracing, and a rare counterbalance; where feminism is concerned, broad acceptability is almost always framed as an unquestioned good. “Somewhere along the way toward female liberation, it was decided that the most effective method was for feminism to become universal,” Crispin writes. And the people who decided this “forgot that for something to be universally accepted, it must become as banal, as non-threatening and ineffective as possible.” Another, and perhaps less fatalistic, way of framing the matter: feminism is a political argument of such obvious reason and power that it has been co-opted as an aesthetic and transformed into merchandise by a series of influential profiteers. (...)

Here, and in some other places where Crispin’s argument requires her to take a precise measure of contemporary feminism, she—or this book’s production schedule—can’t quite account for the complexity of the times. From 2014 to 2016, I worked as an editor at Jezebel, a site that, when it was founded, in 2007, helped to define online feminism—and served ever afterward as a somewhat abstracted target for women who criticized contemporary feminism from the left. These critics didn’t usually recognize how quickly the center is always moving, and Crispin has the same problem. Much of what she denounces—“outrage culture,” empowerment marketing, the stranglehold that white women have on the public conversation—has already been critiqued at length by the young feminist mainstream. Her imagined Dworkin-hating dilettante, discussing the politics of bikini waxing and “giving blow jobs like it’s missionary work,” has long been passé. It’s far more common these days for young feminists to adopt a radical veneer. Lena Dunham’s newsletter sells “Dismantle the Patriarchy” patches; last fall, a Dior runway show included a T-shirt reading, “We Should All Be Feminists.” (The shirt is not yet on sale in the United States; it reportedly costs five hundred and fifty euros in France.) The inside threat to feminism in 2017 is less a disavowal of radical ideas than an empty co-option of radical appearances—a superficial, market-based alignment that is more likely to make a woman feel good and righteous than lead her to the political action that feminism is meant to spur.

The most vital strain of thought in “Why I Am Not a Feminist” is Crispin’s unforgiving indictment of individualism and capitalism, value systems that she argues have severely warped feminism, encouraging women to think of the movement only insofar as it leads to individual gains. We have misinterpreted the old adage that the personal is political, she writes—inflecting our personal desires and decisions with political righteousness while neatly avoiding political accountability. We may understand that “the corporations we work for poison the earth, fleece the poor, make the super rich more rich, but hey. Fuck it,” Crispin writes. “We like our apartments, we can subscribe to both Netflix and Hulu, the health insurance covers my SSRI prescription, and the white noise machine I just bought helps me sleep at night.”

That this line of argument seems like a plausible next step for contemporary feminism reflects the recent and rapid leftward turn of liberal politics. Socialism and anti-capitalism, as foils to Donald Trump’s me-first ideology, have taken an accelerated path into the mainstream. “Why I Am Not a Feminist” comes at a time when some portion of liberal women in America might be ready for a major shift—inclined, suddenly, toward a belief system that does not hallow the “markers of success in patriarchal capitalism . . . money and power,” as Crispin puts it. There is, it seems, a growing hunger for a feminism concerned more with the lives of low-income women than with the number of female C.E.O.s.

The opposing view—that feminism is not just broadly compatible with capitalism but actually served by it—has certainly enjoyed its share of prominence. This is the message that has been passed down by the vast majority of self-styled feminist role models over the past ten years: that feminism is what you call it when an individual woman gets enough money to do whatever she wants. Crispin is ruthless in dissecting this brand of feminism. It means simply buying one’s way out of oppression and then perpetuating it, she argues; it embraces the patriarchal model of happiness, which depends on “having someone else subject to your will.” Women, exploited for centuries, have grown subconsciously eager to exploit others, Crispin believes. “Once we are a part of the system and benefiting from it on the same level that men are, we won’t care, as a group, about whose turn it is to get hurt.”

by Jia Tolentino, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Liang Sen Xinhua/Eyevine/Redux

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