The Biggest Misconception About Today’s College Students

You might think the typical college student lives in a state of bliss, spending each day moving among classes, parties and extracurricular activities. But the reality is that an increasingly small population of undergraduates enjoys that kind of life.

Of the country’s nearly 18 million undergraduates, more than 40 percent go to community college, and of those, only 62 percent can afford to go to college full-time. By contrast, a mere 0.4 percent of students in the United States attend one of the Ivies.

The typical student is not the one burnishing a fancy résumé with numerous unpaid internships. It’s just the opposite: Over half of all undergraduates live at home to make their degrees more affordable, and a shocking 40 percent of students work at least 30 hours a week. About 25 percent work full-time and go to school full-time.

The typical college student is also not fresh out of high school. A quarter of undergraduates are older than 25, and about the same number are single parents.

These students work extremely hard to make ends meet and simultaneously get the education they need to be more stable: A two-year degree can earn students nearly 20 percent more annually than just a high school diploma.

And yet, these students are often the most shortchanged.

As open-access institutions, community colleges educate the majority of our country’s low-income, first-generation students. But public funding for community colleges is significantly less than for four-year colleges, sometimes because of explicit state policies. This means the amount that community colleges can spend on each student — to pay for faculty, support services, tutoring and facilities — is far less as well.

Tuition for low-income students can be covered by federal financial aid programs, but these students often have significant other costs — including housing, transportation, food and child care — that regularly pose obstacles to their education.

A recent Urban Institute study found that from 2011 to 2015, one in five students attending a two-year college lived in a food-insecure household. A study from the Wisconsin Hope Lab found that in 2016, 14 percent of community college students had been homeless at some point. At LaGuardia Community College in New York, where I am president, 77 percent of students live in households making less than $25,000 per year.

With financial pressures like these, studying full-time is not an option. It is not uncommon for a student to take between three and six years to graduate from a two-year associate degree program.

Even that can be a miraculous feat. At LaGuardia, many of our students start their days by taking their child to day care on the bus. Then they take the subway to college, then ride a different bus to their job, another bus to pick up their child and a final bus to go home. Once home, they still need to cook dinner, help their child with homework, tuck the child in, tidy up and complete their own college coursework.

Many of these students have jobs that are part-time and pay the minimum wage; their schedules can vary wildly, making the fragile balance of each day complex.

Being stretched so thin makes each day an ordeal. It’s no wonder that too many students drop out before graduation.

Community colleges need increased funding, and students need access to more flexible federal and state financial aid, enhanced paid internships and college work-study programs. Improved access to public supports, like food stamps and reduced public transportation fares, would also make a world of difference.

It’s not just that policy must change. Last year, more than $41 billion was given in charity to higher education, but about a quarter of that went to just 20 institutions. Community colleges, with almost half of all undergraduate students, received just a small fraction of this philanthropy. It is imperative that individuals, corporations and foundations spread their wealth and diversify where they donate their dollars.

by Gail O. Mellow, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kelsey Wroten

Ikko Tanaka, Traditional Wall Paintings (1966)
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The Princess Myth

Royal time should move slowly and by its own laws: creeping, like the flow of chrism from a jar. But 20 ordinary years have jog-trotted by, and it’s possible to have a grownup conversation with someone who wasn’t born when Diana died. Her widower is long remarried. Her eldest son, once so like her, shows signs of developing the ponderous looks of Philip, his grand-father. Diana should be as passe as ostrich plumes: one of those royal or quasi-royal women, like Mary of Teck or Wallis Simpson or the last tsarina, whose images fade to sepia and whose bones are white as pearls. Instead, we gossip about her as if she had just left the room. We still debate how in 1981 a sweet-faced, puppy-eyed 20-year-old came to marry into the royal house. Was it a setup from the start? Did she know her fiance loved another woman? Was she complicit, or was she an innocent, garlanded for the slab and the knife?

For some people, being dead is only a relative condition; they wreak more than the living do. After their first rigor, they reshape themselves, taking on a flexibility in public discourse. For the anniversary of her death, the princess’s sons remember her for the TV cameras, and we learn that she was “fun” and “very caring” and “a breath of fresh air”. They speak sincerely, but they have no news. Yet there is no bar on saying what you like about her, in defiance of the evidence. Private tapes she made with her voice coach have been shown in a TV documentary, Diana: In Her Own Words. They were trailed as revealing a princess who is “candid” and “uninhibited”. Yet never has she appeared so self-conscious and recalcitrant. Squirming, twitching, avoiding the camera’s eye, she describes herself hopefully as “a rebel”, on the grounds that she liked to do the opposite of everyone else. You want to veil the lens and explain: that is reaction, not rebellion. Throwing a tantrum when thwarted doesn’t make you a free spirit. Rolling your eyes and shrugging doesn’t prove you are brave. And because people say “trust me”, it doesn’t means they’ll keep your secrets.

Yet royal people exist in a place beyond fact-correction, in a mystical realm with rules that, as individuals, they may not see; Diana consulted psychics to work out what was going on. The perennial demand for them to cut costs and be more “down to earth” is futile. They are not people like us, but with better hats. They exist apart from utility, and by virtue of our unexamined and irrational needs. You can’t write or speak about the princess without explicating and embellishing her myth. She no longer exists as herself, only as what we made of her. Her story is archaic and transpersonal. “It is as if,” said the psychotherapist Warren Colman, “Diana broadcast on an archetypal frequency.”

Though she was not born royal, her ancestors were ancient power-brokers, dug more deeply into these islands than the Windsors. She arrived on the scene in an era of gross self-interest, to distract the nation from the hardness of its own character. As she correctly discerned, “The British people needed someone to give affection.” A soft-eyed, fertile blond, she represented conjugal and maternal love, and what other source did we have? Until Tony Blair took office as a fresh-faced Prince Charming we had female leaders, but they were old and their cupboards were bare of food and love: a queen who, even at Diana’s death, was reluctant to descend from the cold north, and a prime minister formerly known as Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.

The princess we invented to fill a vacancy had little to do with any actual person. Even at the beginning she was only loosely based on the young woman born Diana Spencer, and once she was engaged to the Prince of Wales she cut adrift from her modest CV. In the recent documentary Diana, Our Mother, her son Harry spoke of her as “an ordinary 20-year-old”; then checked himself, remembering she was an aristocrat. But in some ways his first thought was right. Like a farmer’s daughter, Diana married the boy across the hedge – she grew up near the queen’s estate at Sandringham. As the third daughter born to Viscount Althorp, she wasperhaps a disappointment. The family’s previous child, a son, had died within hours of birth, and Spencer and his wife Frances had to try again for an heir. The Jungian analyst Marion Woodman posits that unwanted or superfluous children have difficulty in becoming embodied; they remain airy, available to fate, as if no one has signed them out of the soul store. By Diana’s cradle – where the witches and good fairies do battle – stood a friend of the Queen Mother, her maternal grandmother Ruth Fermoy. When Diana was six, Frances left her young family. Fermoy took sides against her daughter and helped Spencer get custody of his four desolate children. Later, promoted to his earldom, he remarried without telling them. Diana is said to have expressed her views by pushing her stepmother downstairs.

Diana’s private education implanted few cultural interests and no sense of their lack. She passed no public exams. But she could write a civil letter in her rounded hand, and since she didn’t have to earn a living, did it matter? In Diana: In Her Own Words, she speaks of her sense of destiny. “I knew … something profound was coming my way … I knew I was different from my friends …” Like Cinderella in the kitchen, she served an apprenticeship in humility, working as an upper-class cleaner, and in a nursery mopping up after other people’s babies. Then the prince came calling: a mature man, with a history of his own.

by Hilary Mantel, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Fox Photos/Getty Images

The Philip K Dick Book I Love Most…

You couldn’t really call me a bona fide Dickhead because I haven’t read everything Philip K Dick wrote (60-odd books, including short story collections during a relatively short career – at one point he was so prolific that he completed 11 novels in a single year). I do co-own a large selection of them, though, and in 1992 – or some time thereabouts – I attended a seminar at the ICA, hosted by Brian Aldiss (who else?) in which each title was read aloud and marked out of 10 (this was an approach established by Lawrence Sutin in his marvellous biography of the writer, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K Dick), so that attendees could yell a riotous higher! or lower! according to their own personal predilections.

It would certainly be fair to say that in the 35 years since his early death in 1982 Dick has been openly acknowledged – nay celebrated – as one of the world’s greatest ever writers of science fiction. Sutin rightly summarises Dick’s artistic drive as an exhaustive investigation into both what is real and what is human. Dick himself claimed “the core of my writing is not art, but truth”, and – still more perplexingly: “I am a fictionalising philosopher, not a novelist.” To a majority of his contemporaries (even in sci-fi circles) Dick was, for the most part, considered “a drug-addled nut”. One of his highs (or lows) of choice was horse tranquilliser. He married five times. He was a twin – his sister (who he insisted was a lesbian) died shortly after they were born. His life was illumined by a series of extraordinary spiritual visions.

When you are writing about Dick, there is so much to include, such abundance – so much scandal, so much complexity, so much richness. He was plainly a highly perverse individual and at some level (a funny, clever, joyous level) an outrageous bullshitter. But deny it as he might, he is a novelist – a true novelist – and a novelist of rare genius. These books aren’t simply a series of hypotheses sparsely covered in a thin pelt of character, emotion and language. They are soft and sumptuous and twirl around the reader’s calves, hissing and purring. His writing celebrates art, life, ideas (as surely all the best writing must) and, perhaps most deliriously – the inexpressible.

Early on in his writing career Dick wrote a series of straight novels (not that Dick was ever capable of straightness – he was, by nature, intrinsically curvy). They aren’t among the most celebrated of his works. But my contention is that there are several true gems among them, the shiniest of which – and for me, the most creatively inspirational, as a novelist – are Confessions of a Crap Artist and (my marginal favourite) Puttering About in a Small Land.

Crap Artist definitely has the best opening two lines, though:

“I am made out of water. You wouldn’t know it because I have it bound in.”

It’s a little masterpiece (and for some reason slots into my consciousness hard upon John Kennedy Toole’s superb A Confederacy of Dunces). It was published in 1959, but Puttering (written in 1957 – when Dick was only 29) is my firm favourite. Sutin rates it – rather disconcertingly – at a shockingly measly five. I’m not sure why this is. Because I can find little to fault in it. The bare bones of the story are certainly, on initial appearances, deliberately unshowy – almost pedestrian. But this is what I love. Dick isn’t making a big deal out of anything. He is finding drama in smallness, in the margins, in tiny changes of perspective. The book is slight but transformative. And because this is not an art I have refined myself (a cat may look at a king!), I deeply envy it. I suppose there is a “Kitchen Sink” element (the timing corresponds), but there’s nothing mannered or crass about the way Dick handles his subject matter. He isn’t angry or splenetic. He is quizzical and mystified. He is – best of all – inquisitive.

In brief, the novel details the coming together of its two protagonists, Roger and Virginia Lindahl. They meet, are kind of in love, and kind of horrified by each other. They move from Washington to LA at the end of the war. We see them find work. We see Roger open a television sales and repairs shop. The Lindahls have a son with asthma who they send to a private school in the mountains. Here they meet the Bonners – Chuck and Liz. Roger and Liz commence an affair.

What I most admire about the book is the way people simply do not understand what they are doing while at the same time experiencing utter clarity. Dick’s writing is like a kind of psychological washing-up-brush – he carefully pushes its bristles up into his character’s minds and rotates exhaustively.

The reader has total access. It’s both horrifying and delirious. There are some truly demented passages. And there’s a profound sense that Dick doesn’t really give a damn. He’s not making any great claims for himself (or the novel), he’s just turning it out. It isn’t overthought or minutely considered. It is joyful and propulsive. Because this is how he writes. This is who he is. Effortlessly cool. There are ideas to spare. He throws them around like a Dame tossing Cadbury’s Minis into the crowd at a pantomime.

Such confidence! Such largesse!

I so aspire to be generous in this way. And fun. At one point Dick describes a high-pressure business meeting and says “Beth studied him as if he had managed to fart through his nose.”

Pure Dick. Come on. You gotta love it.

by Nicola Barker, Michael Moorcock, and Adam Roberts, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Bryan Mayes

Free Speech Dies in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Protesters opposing a right-wing gathering in liberal San Francisco claimed victory Saturday when the event was cancelled after city officials walled off a city park - a move that the event's organizer said was more about silencing his group's message than preventing a violent clash.

Civic leaders in San Francisco - a cradle of the free speech movement that prides itself on its tolerance - repeatedly voiced concerns that the event organized by Patriot Prayer would lead to a clash with counter-demonstrators.

Joey Gibson, who is Japanese American and leads Patriot Prayer, said his group disavows racism and hatred and wanted to promote dialogue with people who may not share its views. He cancelled a planned rally Saturday at a field under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge after he said his members received anonymous threats on social media and feared civic leaders and law enforcement would fail to protect them.

He said Saturday in a phone interview that he felt like San Francisco's Democratic leaders had shut him down. Earlier in the week, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee raised concerns that Patriot Prayer would attract hate speech and potential violence. U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a fellow Democrat who represents San Francisco, called the planned rally a "white supremacist" event.

"They're definitely doing a great job of trying to make sure my message doesn't come out," Gibson said.

San Francisco officials closed the park where Gibson had planned a news conference after cancelling the rally at Crissy Field. City officials surrounded Alamo Square park with a fence and sent scores of police officers -- some in riot gear -- to keep people out. Mayor Ed Lee defended the city's response.

"If people want to have the stage in San Francisco, they better have a message that contributes to people's lives rather than find ways to hurt them," Lee asaid. "That's why certain voices found it very difficult to have their voices heard today."

by Paul Elias and Sudhin Thanawala, AP |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia
[Ed. Free speech for me, but not for thee. See also: The Ugly Side of Antifa]

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AI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand

Bob: “I can can I I everything else.”

Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”

To you and I, that passage looks like nonsense. But what if I told you this nonsense was the discussion of what might be the most sophisticated negotiation software on the planet? Negotiation software that had learned, and evolved, to get the best deal possible with more speed and efficiency–and perhaps, hidden nuance–than you or I ever could? Because it is.

This conversation occurred between two AI agents developed inside Facebook. At first, they were speaking to each other in plain old English. But then researchers realized they’d made a mistake in programming.

“There was no reward to sticking to English language,” says Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). As these two agents competed to get the best deal–a very effective bit of AI vs. AI dogfighting researchers have dubbed a “generative adversarial network”–neither was offered any sort of incentive for speaking as a normal person would. So they began to diverge, eventually rearranging legible words into seemingly nonsensical sentences.

“Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves,” says Batra, speaking to a now-predictable phenomenon that’s been observed again, and again, and again. “Like if I say ‘the’ five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.”

So should we let our software do the same thing? Should we allow AI to evolve its dialects for specific tasks that involve speaking to other AIs? To essentially gossip out of our earshot? Maybe; it offers us the possibility of a more interoperable world, a more perfect place where iPhones talk to refrigerators that talk to your car without a second thought.

The tradeoff is that we, as humanity, would have no clue what those machines were actually saying to one another.

Facebook ultimately opted to require its negotiation bots to speak in plain old English. “Our interest was having bots who could talk to people,” says Mike Lewis, research scientist at FAIR. Facebook isn’t alone in that perspective. When I inquired to Microsoft about computer-to-computer languages, a spokesperson clarified that Microsoft was more interested in human-to-computer speech. Meanwhile, Google, Amazon, and Apple are all also focusing incredible energies on developing conversational personalities for human consumption. They’re the next wave of user interface, like the mouse and keyboard for the AI era.

The other issue, as Facebook admits, is that it has no way of truly understanding any divergent computer language. “It’s important to remember, there aren’t bilingual speakers of AI and human languages,” says Batra. We already don’t generally understand how complex AIs think because we can’t really see inside their thought process. Adding AI-to-AI conversations to this scenario would only make that problem worse.

But at the same time, it feels shortsighted, doesn’t it? If we can build software that can speak to other software more efficiently, shouldn’t we use that? Couldn’t there be some benefit?

Because, again, we absolutely can lead machines to develop their own languages. Facebook has three published papers proving it. “It’s definitely possible, it’s possible that [language] can be compressed, not just to save characters, but compressed to a form that it could express a sophisticated thought,” says Batra. Machines can converse with any baseline building blocks they’re offered. That might start with human vocabulary, as with Facebook’s negotiation bots. Or it could start with numbers, or binary codes. But as machines develop meanings, these symbols become “tokens”–they’re imbued with rich meanings. As Dauphin points out, machines might not think as you or I do, but tokens allow them to exchange incredibly complex thoughts through the simplest of symbols. The way I think about it is with algebra: If A + B = C, the “A” could encapsulate almost anything. But to a computer, what “A” can mean is so much bigger than what that “A” can mean to a person, because computers have no outright limit on processing power.

“It’s perfectly possible for a special token to mean a very complicated thought,” says Batra. “The reason why humans have this idea of decomposition, breaking ideas into simpler concepts, it’s because we have a limit to cognition.” Computers don’t need to simplify concepts. They have the raw horsepower to process them.

by Mark Wilson, Co.Design |  Read more:

Image: Nikiteev_Konstantin/iStock, Zozulinskyi/iStock

[ed. No one (except possibly design engineers and coders) understands how technology works these days. Now AI is developing it's own language? Great. Put me firmly in the 'AI is going to kill us all' camp.]

Fish Spill

The Lummi Nation is marshaling a mop-up of thousands of fugitive Atlantic salmon in the tribe’s territorial waters, and the Swinomish chairman has called for a shutdown of the farmed-salmon industry in Puget Sound after last weekend’s spill. (...)

“These fish are headed to every river in Puget Sound,” Cladoosby said. “We have been saying all along it was not a question of if, but when, this would happen.

“The wild salmon stocks are already endangered. It is time to shut these operations down. Period.”

Meanwhile, the Lummi Nation has declared a state of emergency and is paying fish buyers to take the Atlantic salmon brought in by their fishermen, said Merle Jefferson, director of natural resources for the tribe.

Jefferson declined to say how much the tribe is paying. “It is not going to be cheap, that is all I can say,” he said. “It’s just like an oil spill, we are trying to contain it as best we can.” He said the tribe would be testing some fish for disease, and freezing the rest.

With wild salmon runs already depressed, the tribe does not want native fish subjected to competition for food from the Atlantic salmon or potentially exposed to disease, Jefferson said. The farmed Atlantic salmon also have made their way into the Nooksack River, where Lummi fishermen have had treaty-protected fisheries for generations.

“We are concerned about impact on the spawning grounds,” said Timothy Ballew II, chairman of the Lummi Indian Business Council. “That could have lasting impacts on the future runs. This needs to be taken seriously. There are currently chinook in the river, and coho on the way. Our habitat is already in fragile state and adding this to the mix does not help.”

The tribe felt pressed to pay buyers to take the fish because some fishermen have had trouble selling them. The fish were treated a year ago for yellowmouth, a bacterial infection, and some of the fish also have deformed mouths. It is not uncommon for farmed fish to have deformities because of living in confined conditions in pens, noted Ron Warren, assistant director at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW).

The disaster occurred over the weekend, releasing thousands of farmed Atlantic salmon, an invasive species, into Puget Sound waters from a fish farm owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture Pacific at Cypress Island.

There were 305,000 fish in the pen that collapsed. The company still has no count of the number of escaped fish, but company spokeswoman Nell Halse said Wednesday it is a far greater number than the few thousand initially stated by the company. Neither the company nor the WDFW made any public statement about the accident until Tuesday afternoon, when the state’s response was to urge fishermen in a news release to go fishing.

The department Thursday afternoon asked fishermen to report their catch online to help the state get a handle on how far the fish are dispersing.

“The state’s response is a failure,” Ballew said. “We need to get these fish out of the water to protect our fish habitat. It is apparent that we have to clean up this mess.” (...)

The disaster comes as the state Department of Ecology, which considers the spilled fish a pollutant, is working with a variety of partners to update the state’s regulation of fish farms, some of which date to the 1980s and “need to be modernized,” according to the department.

Washington is the only West Coast state with an open-water Atlantic salmon farming industry. Alaska and California ban such operations, and while Oregon does not disallow them, none currently operate in the state.

by Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Dean Rutz/The Seattle Times
[ed. See also: Please Go Fishing]

Selling Social Justice

It should be obvious that having large for-profit media institutions operate yields disastrous results. As with other markets, if a journalistic institution is out to make money, it will sell what people can be convinced to buy rather than what will actually do them any good. And since we are all weak and easily distracted by gossip, fearmongering, and sleaze, we will be given disproportionate amounts of gossip, fearmongering, and sleaze. The pressure for institutions to get as many viewers/readers as possible has had pernicious consequences in the Trump Era, since it’s hard to get people to pay attention to serious issues when they could be watching the antics and drama of the Trump Show, which is—let’s be honest—the most entertaining thing on television. CNN and MSNBC produce nonstop noisy Trump coverage, and are getting their highest ratings in years.

Of course, having a parade of rubbish on television is nothing especially new. Donald Trump may have made it worse, but it’s not like CNN has ever been watchable. And the harmful results of having journalism mixed with business have been evident since at least the time of the Spanish American war. But in a new report about the progressive commentary website Mic, we can see a further troubling dimension of the profit problem: its potential to exploit and thereby corrode and cheapen the ideal of social justice.

Mic recently announced that it would be laying off two dozen staffers, as part of a pivot to video, the infamous process by which moribund journalistic institutions desperately attempt to save themselves by eliminating text-based content, on the theory that this is what millennials want. (As a hip millennial magazine, Current Affairs recently rolled out its own pivot to video.) Writing for The Outline, Adrianne Jeffries surveys the website’s history, from its beginnings as a bland purveyor of D.C. conventional wisdom called PolicyMic to its emergence as one of the foremost online voices of the “social justice” movement, garnering a huge audience by pushing politically progressive takes on the news. Mic swiftly became notorious for the tenor of its condemnations of problematic things, becoming, in the words of one former staffer, the place where millennials could go each day to find out “What are we supposed to be outraged about?” As Jeffries summarizes:

Every day, there was someone, like plus-size model Ashley Graham, to cheer for, and someone else, like manspreaders, to excoriate. Kim Kardashian annihilated slut shamers, George Takei clapped back at transphobes. “In a Single Tweet, One Man Beautifully Destroys the Hypocrisy of Anti-Muslim Bigotry.” “This Brave Woman’s Horrifying Photo Has Become a Viral Rallying Cry Against Sexual Harassment.” “Young Conservative Tries to Mansplain Hijab in Viral Olympic Photo, Gets It All Wrong.” “The Problematic Disney Body Image Trend We’re Not Talking About.” “The Very Problematic Reason This Woman Is Taking a Stand Against Leggings.”

But according to the former employees Jeffries spoke to, much of this was deployed cynically. Mic’s founders, Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz, “did not believe the things that their staffers were hired to write about.” In fact, their approach to social justice issues was sometimes nakedly mercenary: when pitched a story, one asked about the subject of the aritcle “But is she black? Is she black?” Mic stories had a formula: “In One Perfect Tweet, X” or “Celebrity X Just Said X About Issue X, Here’s Why That’s Important.” As it grew, the site was publishing between 50 and 100 stories per day, with 2500 writers, and “individual stories kept going viral, pulling in 2 million, 3 million, 5 million unique visitors per piece.” Microsoft, Cadillac and GE signed up to run “branded content” on the site, a.k.a. adverts disguised as articles.

While the site’s founders would claim that it was trying to “inform and empower our generation to have an impact,” its staff saw it as trying to “commodify people’s feelings about race and gender.” There was a “fixation on traffic” that led to “reductive headlines [that catered] to an echo chamber.” The outrage was always ratcheted “up to 11,” and while the site often promoted serious progressive causes and drew attention to Black Lives Matter and the Bernie Sanders campaign, it was clear that the chief task was the pursuit of clicks. Every time the site “attempted to reinvent itself as ‘real journalism,’” the founders would “get spooked when traffic dropped and return to the low-hanging fruit.” Staff members, many of whom actually believed in things, felt used.

Jeffries’ report on Mic is disturbing, because it shows how “exploiting your audience’s basest temptations” is not just limited to tapping into people’s lurid interest in celebrities and gore. It can also mean manipulating their most deeply held moral convictions. You know a person is interested in making the world a better place, and bringing about race and gender equality. And you realize that there’s money to be made by selling them the feeling of having made the world a better place and brought about greater race and gender equality. The consumer can get angry at today’s Problematic Thing and feel as if they have participated in the struggle against the world’s injustices. The company reaps advertising dollars from Cadillac and GE.

This isn’t just crassly manipulative. It’s actively harmful to the cause of social justice. First, it takes the fight from the material world to the online world, further turning politics into what Adolph Reed has termed a cargo cult, addressing injustices through discourse rather than action. Second, it makes people’s anger blind and evenly-distributed. As a former Mic employee told Jeffries, “if everything is an outrage nothing is an outrage.” So Mark Zuckerberg’s defense of wearing gray T-shirts is lumped in with mass incarceration as one of the world’s many problematic things. From another employee: “Everything is the biggest deal in the world because you’re trying to create traffic, and it desensitizes us to what are actually huge breaks in social and political norms.”

It’s important to stress that these employees believed strongly in social justice. And it’s precisely because they believed in it that they became uncomfortable with a business model that tried to find things to get people upset about, rather than things that people should care about.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Mic

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Ani DiFranco

Onchi Koshiro, The Four Seasons, 1927
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There Are No More Low-Priced Homes

Sales of both newly built and existing homes fell unexpectedly in July, and while it's just one month's data, it may be a signal that the housing market has hit an insurmountable hurdle. It is just plain too expensive. Home prices are higher at virtually every price point, but the gains are biggest at the low end where demand is highest.

The median price of a home sold in July hit $258,300, the highest July price on record, according to the National Association of Realtors. The Realtors divide sales figures into six different price "buckets" in their monthly report. Sales in the range of $100,000 or below were down 14 percent compared with a year ago, while sales of million-dollar and higher homes jumped nearly 20 percent.

More telling is that at the start of 2013, when home prices were just beginning to bounce off the bottom of the housing crash, the share of homes sold above $500,000 was just 9 percent of all sales. Today that share is more than 14 percent. The share of lowest-priced home sales today is less than half of what it was then as well.

"On the lower end, there is virtually no property at a very low price level anymore," said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors. "The same property has been moved up to a different price bucket just because the prices have been rising strongly, over 40 percent price appreciation in the past five years. We are not getting the transactions on the lower end because there is virtually no inventory on the lower end."

by Diana Olick, CNBC |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Eliminating the Human

I have a theory that much recent tech development and innovation over the last decade or so has an unspoken overarching agenda. It has been about creating the possibility of a world with less human interaction. This tendency is, I suspect, not a bug—it’s a feature. We might think Amazon was about making books available to us that we couldn’t find locally—and it was, and what a brilliant idea—but maybe it was also just as much about eliminating human contact.

The consumer technology I am talking about doesn’t claim or acknowledge that eliminating the need to deal with humans directly is its primary goal, but it is the outcome in a surprising number of cases. I’m sort of thinking maybe it is the primary goal, even if it was not aimed at consciously. Judging by the evidence, that conclusion seems inescapable.

This then, is the new norm. Most of the tech news we get barraged with is about algorithms, AI, robots, and self-driving cars, all of which fit this pattern. I am not saying that such developments are not efficient and convenient; this is not a judgment. I am simply noticing a pattern and wondering if, in recognizing that pattern, we might realize that it is only one trajectory of many. There are other possible roads we could be going down, and the one we’re on is not inevitable or the only one; it has been (possibly unconsciously) chosen.

I realize I’m making some wild and crazy assumptions and generalizations with this proposal—but I can claim to be, or to have been, in the camp that would identify with the unacknowledged desire to limit human interaction. I grew up happy but also found many social interactions extremely uncomfortable. I often asked myself if there were rules somewhere that I hadn’t been told, rules that would explain it all to me. I still sometimes have social niceties “explained” to me. I’m often happy going to a restaurant alone and reading. I wouldn’t want to have to do that all the time, but I have no problem with it—though I am sometimes aware of looks that say “Poor man, he has no friends.” So I believe I can claim some insight into where this unspoken urge might come from.

Human interaction is often perceived, from an engineer’s mind-set, as complicated, inefficient, noisy, and slow. Part of making something “frictionless” is getting the human part out of the way. The point is not that making a world to accommodate this mind-set is bad, but that when one has as much power over the rest of the world as the tech sector does over folks who might not share that worldview, there is the risk of a strange imbalance. The tech world is predominantly male—very much so. Testosterone combined with a drive to eliminate as much interaction with real humans as possible for the sake of “simplicity and efficiency”—do the math, and there’s the future.

by David Byrne, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:

Image: Rolling Stone

Louise Linton's Guide to Fall Fashion for Poors

“Louise Linton, the labels-loving wife of Steven Mnuchin, replied condescendingly to an Instagram poster about her lifestyle and belittled the woman, Jenni Miller, a mother of three from Portland, Ore., for having less money than she does.” — New York Times, 8/22/17

Greetings #peasants, it’s me, Louise Linton, in a beautiful #hermesscarf and #tomford sunnies. You may know my husband, Steve Mnuchin, America’s Secretary of Treasure. Or you may be familiar with my work as a film star, from my turn as Samantha in Crew 2 Crew to 2013’s The Power of Few, where I played the role of “Cory’s Mother” #crew2crew #corysmom. I am also #rich, and probably paid more taxes on my #farragamo pants than you have in your entire worthless life.

Anyway, I found a spare moment between my annual three weeks of employment to put my diamond-studded #carandache pen to paper and write some fall fashion tips for the #greatunwashedmasses. Consider it yet another handout from me to you.

First off, that funky patterned #versace blouse may have gotten you through a summer of #leeching off the goodwill of the donor class, but now that fall is rolling around, it’s time to go understated. Try pairing a dark #ysl cashmere with a #givenchy suede jacket, or #burberry if you’re on a budget. #parasites

Don’t worry ladies, unlike my villa in #cabosanlucas, athleisure isn’t just for summer. This September onward, stay cool and comfortable in a pair of #gucci mesh-cut leggings and #marcjacobs sneakers. You’ll look downright #cute as you desperately jog away from the kinds of #sacrifices my loving husband and I have made for this country.

I know what you’re thinking – how can I grab even more out of silver screen #legend Louise Linton’s pockets, and what about makeup? A maroon or burgundy lip by #dior is my go-to, and should be yours too. It contrasts beautifully with any skin tone, from #porcelain to #ivory to #shell. And remember, only some people deserve to have nice things! I learned that while writing my memoir, In Congo’s Shadow, about my time in #Africa, a place where people do not even have basic amenities like #prada driving gloves and #dolce leopard-print handbags.

People are going to remember 2017 for just one thing: leather. And for genuine Italian #leather, you can’t do better than #cesarepaciotti, founded in 1980, the same year my husband got into Yale, and I was born. Have you even heard of Yale, you gluttonous fucking freeloader? #takethehighroad

For every fashion #do there’s a fashion #dont. First of all, don’t overdo it on the black – it makes you look old. Instead, keep it as youthful as possible with a dark gray #fendi vest and lighter #chanel accents. I know deep down Steve will replace me eventually. Second, don’t cheap out on the jewelry. When I’m staring at the reflection of my autumn #rosegold necklace in my #infinitypool, contemplating the ever-widening pit that is a myopic existence defined by greed and unmitigated materialism, you won’t catch me in anything less than #tiffanyandco. And here’s the biggest no-no I can give folks like you: for the love of God, do not breed! #mnugenics

Oh, and please check out my film Odious later this year; I believe I am in one of the scenes.

by Ziyad Gower, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: Twitter

[ed. See also: Louise Linton and the ‘self-sacrifice’ of a mega-rich Trump administration spouse.]

Yasujiro Ozu, An Autumn Afternoon 1962.
via:

Winner-Takes All Effects in Autonomous Cars

There are now several dozen companies trying to make the technology for autonomous cars, across OEMs, their traditional suppliers, existing major tech companies and startups. Clearly, not all of these will succeed, but enough of them have a chance that one wonders what and where the winner-take-all effects could be, and what kinds of leverage there might be. Are there network effects that would allow the top one or two companies to squeeze the rest out, as happened in smartphone or PC operating systems? Or might there be room for five or ten companies to compete indefinitely? And for what layers in the stack does victory give power in other layers?

These kinds of question matter because they point to the balance of power in the car industry of the future. A world in which car manufacturers can buy commodity ‘autonomy in a box’ from any of half a dozen companies (or make it themselves), much as they buy ABS today, is very different from one in which Waymo and perhaps Uber are the only real options, and can set the business model of their choice, as Google did with Android. Microsoft and Intel found choke points in the PC world, and Google did in smartphones - what might those points be in autonomy?

To begin with, it seems pretty clear that the hardware and sensors for autonomy - and, probably, for electric - will be commodities. There is plenty of science and engineering in these (and a lot more work to do), just as there is in, say, LCD screens, but there is no reason why you have to use one rather than another just because everyone else is. There are strong manufacturing scale effects, but no network effect. So, LIDAR, for example, will go from a ‘spinning KFC bucket’ that costs $50k to a small solid-state widget at a few hundred dollars or less, and there will be winners within that segment, but there’s no network effect, while winning LIDAR doesn’t give leverage at other layers of the stack (unless you get a monopoly), anymore than than making the best image sensors (and selling them to Apple) helps Sony’s smartphone business. In the same way, it’s likely that batteries (and motors and battery/motor control) will be as much of a commodity as RAM is today - again, scale, lots of science and perhaps some winners within each category, but no broader leverage.

On the other hand, there probably won’t be direct parallels to the third party software developer ecosystems that we see in PCs or smartphones. Windows squashed the Mac and then iOS and Android squashed Windows Phone because of the virtuous circle of developer adoption above anything else, but you won’t buy a car (if you own a car at all, of course) based on how many apps you can run on it. They’ll all run Uber and Lyft and Didi, and have Netflix embedded in the screens, but any other apps will happen on your phone (or watch, or glasses).

Rather, the place to look is not within the cars directly but still further up the stack - in the autonomous software that enables a car to move down a road without hitting anything, in the city-wide optimisation and routing that mean we might automate all cars as a system, not just each individual car, and in the on-demand fleets of 'robo-taxis' that will ride on all of this. The network effects in on-demand are self-evident, but will will get much more complex with autonomy (which will cut the cost of an on-demand ride by three quarters or more). On-demand robo-taxi fleets will dynamically pre-position their cars, and both these and quite possibly all other cars will co-ordinate their routes in real time for maximum efficiency, perhaps across fleets, to avoid, for example, all cars picking the same route at the same time. This in turn could be combined not just with surge pricing but with all sorts of differential road pricing - you might pay more to get to your destination faster in busy times, or pick an arrival time by price.

From a technological point of view, these three layers (driving, routing & optimisation, and on-demand) are largely independent - you could install the Lyft app in a GM autonomous car and let the pre-installed Waymo autonomy module drive people around, hypothetically. Clearly, some people hope there will be leverage across layers, or perhaps bundling - Tesla says that it plans to forbid people from using its autonomous cars with any on-demand service other than its own. This doesn't work the other way - Uber won't insist you use only its own autonomous systems. But though Microsoft cross-leveraged Office and Windows, both of these won in their own markets with their own network effects: a small OEM insisting you use its small robo-taxi service would be like Apple insisting you buy AppleWorks instead of Microsoft Office in 1995. I suspect that a more neutral approach might prevail. This would especially be the case if we have cross-city co-ordination of all vehicles, or even vehicle-to-vehicle communication at junctions - you would need some sort of common layer (though my bias is always towards decentralised systems).

All this is pretty speculative, though, like trying to predict what traffic jams would look like from 1900. The one area where we can talk about what the key network effects might look like is in autonomy itself. This is about hardware, and sensors, and software, but mostly it's about data, and there are two sorts of data that matter for autonomy - maps and driving data. First, ‘maps.’

Our brains are continuously processing sensor data and building a 3D model of the world around us, in real time and quite unconsciously, such that when we run through a forest we don’t trip over a root or bang our head on a branch (mostly). In autonomy this is referred to as SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping) - we map our surroundings and localise ourselves within them. This is obviously a basic requirement for autonomy - AVs need to work out where they are on the road and what features might be around (lanes, turnings, curbs, traffic lights etc), and they also need to work out what other vehicles are on the road and how fast they’re moving.

Doing this in real time on a real road remains very hard. Humans drive using vision (and sound), but extracting a sufficiently accurate 3D model of your surroundings from imaging alone (especially 2D imaging) remains an unsolved problem: machine learning makes it conceivable but no-one can do it yet with the accuracy necessary for driving. So, we take shortcuts. This is why almost all autonomy projects are combining imaging with 360 degree LIDAR: each of these sensors have their limitations, but by combining them (‘sensor fusion’) you can get a complete picture. Building a model of the world around you with imaging alone will certainly be possible at some point in the future, but using more sensors gets you there a lot quicker, even given that you have to wait for the cost and form factor of those sensors to become practical. That is, LIDAR is a shortcut to get to a model of the world around you. Once you've got that, you often use machine learning to understand what's in it - that shape is a car, or a cyclist, but for this, there don't seem to be a network effect (or a strong one): you can get enough images of cyclists yourself without needing a fleet of cars.

If LIDAR is one shortcut to SLAM, the other and more interesting one is to use prebuilt maps, which actually means ‘high-definition 3D models’. You survey the road in advance, process all the data at leisure, build a model of the street and then put it onto any car that’s going to drive down the road. The autonomous car doesn’t now have to process all that data and spot the turning or traffic light against all the other clutter in real-time at 65 miles an hour - instead it knows where to look for the traffic light, and it can take sightings of key landmarks against the model to localise itself on the road at any given time. So, your car uses cameras and LIDAR to work out where it is on the road and where the traffic signals etc are by comparing what it can see with a pre-built map instead of having to do it from scratch, and also uses those inputs to spot other vehicles around it in real time.

Maps have network effects. When any autonomous car drives down a pre-mapped road, it is both comparing the road to the map and updating the map: every AV can also be a survey car. If you have sold 500,000 AVs and someone else has only sold 10,000, your maps will be updated more often and be more accurate, and so your cars will have less chance of encountering something totally new and unexpected and getting confused. The more cars you sell the better all of your cars are - the definition of a network effect.

The risk here is that in the long term it is possible that just as cars could do SLAM without LIDAR, they could also do it without pre-built maps - after all, again, humans do. When and whether that would happen is unclear, but at the moment it appears that it would be long enough after autonomous cars go on sale that all the rest of the landscape might look quite different as well (that is, 🤷🏻‍♂️).

So, maps are the first network effect in data - the second comes in what the car does once it understands its surroundings. Driving on an empty road, or indeed on a road full of other AVs, is one problem, once you can see it, but working out what the other humans on the road are going to do, and what to do about it, is another problem entirely.

by Benedict Evans |  Read more:

Image: Venngage

You’ve Shot Your Moose. Are You Strong Enough to Pack It Out?

We ran as fast as the muskeg would allow, working against a deadline of the setting sun to get to the moose we had just taken before darkness closed in. Suddenly, the enormous animal was there before us, impossibly huge and hauntingly still. Standing there, a queasy feeling brought a knot to my stomach.

My hunting partner looked over, the pained expression on his face evidence that he, too, had the knot. We'd both been around dead moose before. Our dads were hunters, and we would inevitably help butcher and pack meat when a moose was downed and thus had firsthand experience in field-dressing, quartering and packing.

Facing it on our own was a very different reality and responsibility for a couple of 14-year-olds, as we were back then.

Daunting task

Any first-time moose hunter who's never experienced the process should realize that bringing a downed moose from the field to the table is daunting. The enormity of the animals, which seems obvious while observing them in the field, suddenly becomes a cold reality when a big carcass is lying in a muskeg swamp. Experience with smaller big game helps, but it does not completely prepare one for dealing with the largest deer on the planet.

Before you press the trigger on a moose, questions should be answered. Do you have experience in field-dressing big game? If you have experience with deer or caribou, field-dressing a moose is basically a larger version that requires considerably more effort. Explaining the entire process here would be far too lengthy, and even a detailed explanation would only offer a general idea.

There are so many variables to contend with in the field that real-time experience is a must. There's also a wealth of information on the internet, including a good video on the Alaska Department of Fish and Game website.

The basics are to get the animal skinned out without tainting meat (by puncturing intestines or stomach), cut it into packable pieces while keeping it clean and dry, and cool it quickly. A good skinning knife with a sharpening device or one of the new change-blade knives, a lightweight tarp in the 6-by-8-foot range, parachute cord, close-weave game bags, a bone saw and citric acid spray are the basic equipment requirements.

If packing the meat out will take more than a day, you'll want to get it off the ground, where air can circulate around it, and you'll want to hang a tarp over it in case of rain.

The longer it takes to get the meat out, the greater the possibility of a bear finding it. Pay attention when you return to the carcass and be prepared in case a bear has taken possession of your moose. As inviting as it will be to leave your rifle behind while you pack meat, it may not be in your best interest. But remember, killing a bear to defend your game meat is not legal; it's not considered a defense-of-life-and-property situation.

A heavy load

How will you get the animal from where it's shot back to the vehicle that brought you to your hunting destination? Unless you are in an area where you can drive some sort of ATV right up to the animal, or you have horses or some other pack animal, you are going to have to put it on your back and haul it out.

That being determined, you then must ask yourself, "Am I capable of tying a moose hindquarter onto a pack frame, lifting it to my shoulders and walking away with it?" The hindquarters of a typical yearling bull moose will weigh around 100 pounds. A mature bull will have hindquarters weighing 150 pounds or more.

by Steve Meyer, ADN |  Read more:

Image: Steve Meyer
[ed. It's a young man's sport, unless you have an ATV or boat with a jet unit that can get you somewhere near where you might actually bag a moose. But then again, so do a lot of other folks.]

Why Generation X Might Be Our Last, Best Hope

Demographics are destiny. We grew up in the world and mind of the baby-boomers simply because there were so many of them. They were the biggest, easiest, most free-spending market the planet had ever known. What they wanted filled the shelves and what fills the shelves is our history. They wanted to dance so we had rock ‘n’ roll. They wanted to open their minds so we had LSD. They did not want to go to war so that was it for the draft. We will grow old in the world and mind of the millennials because there are even more of them. Because they don’t know what they want, the culture will be scrambled and the screens a never-ending scroll. They are not literally the children of the baby-boomers but might as well be—because here you have two vast generations, linking arms over our heads, akin in the certainty that what they want they will have, and that what they have is right and good.

The members of the in-between generation have moved through life squeezed fore and aft, with these tremendous populations pressing on either side, demanding we grow up and move away, or grow old and die—get out, delete your account, kill yourself. But it’s become clear to me that if this nation has any chance of survival, of carrying its traditions deep into the 21st century, it will in no small part depend on members of my generation, Generation X, the last Americans schooled in the old manner, the last Americans that know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds.

Just think of all the things that have come and gone in our lifetimes, all the would-be futures we watched age into obsolescence—CD, DVD, answering machine, Walkman, mixtape, MTV, video store, mall. There were still some rotary phones around in our childhood—now it’s nothing but virtual buttons.

Though much derided, members of my generation turn out to be something like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca—we’ve seen everything and grown tired of history and all the fighting and so have opened our own little joint at the edge of the desert, the last outpost in a world gone mad, the last light in the last saloon on the darkest night of the year. It’s not those who stormed the beaches and won the war, nor the hula-hooped millions who followed, nor what we have coming out of the colleges now—it’s Generation X that will be called the greatest.

The philosophy of the boomers, their general outlook and disposition, which became our culture, is based on a misunderstanding. In the boomers, those born after World War II but before the Kennedy assassination—some of this is less about dates, which are in dispute, than about sensibility—you’re seeing a rebellion. They’d say it was against Richard Nixon, or the Vietnam War, or the conformity of the 1950s, or disco, but it was really against their parents, specifically their fathers. It was a rejection of bourgeois life, the man in his gray flannel suit, his suburbs and corporate hierarchy and commute, the simple pleasures of his seemingly unadventurous life. But the old man did not settle beneath the elms because he was boring or empty or plastic. He did it because, 10 years before you were born, he killed a German soldier with his bare hands in the woods. Many of the boomers I know believe their parents hid themselves from the action. In truth, those World War II fathers were neither hiding nor settling. They were seeking. Peace. Tranquility. They wanted to give their children a fantasy of stability not because they knew too little but because they’d seen too much. Their children read this quest as emptiness and went away before the fathers could transmute the secret wisdom, the ancient knowledge that allows a society to persist and a person to get through a Wednesday afternoon.

In this way, the chain was broken, and the boomers went zooming into the chaos. Which explains the saving attitude of Generation X, those born between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, say. We are a revolt against the boomers, a revolt against the revolt, a market correction, a restoration not of a power elite but of a philosophy. I always believed we had more in common with the poets haunting the taverns on 52nd Street at the end of the 30s than with the hippies at Woodstock. Cynical, wised up, sane. We’d seen what became of the big projects of the boomers as that earlier generation had seen what became of all the big social projects. As a result we could not stand to hear the Utopian talk of the boomers as we cannot stand to hear the Utopian talk of the millennials. We know that most people are rotten to the core, but some are good, and proceed accordingly.

by Rich Cohen, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: No credit, Gramercy Pictures/Everett Collection, from Warner Bros./Neal Peters Collection. Center, from Matador Records, Miramax/Everett Collection, Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection, Universal Pictures/Everett Collection. Bottom: No credit, by Frans Schellekens/Redferns/Getty Images.
[ed. See also: The Bromance of Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, Gen X Dynamos of Democracy.]

Camouflage Is the New Black

I have always loved shopping: in real life, online, even from a plane thirty-thousand feet above the earth, courtesy of SkyMall. I buy clothes, handbags, makeup, perfume, kitchen items—nothing that any other woman would find strange. But if you click the history tab on my computer, you’ll now see long lists of military tactical gear heading my way via UPS and Amazon Prime.

With the jaw-dropping exploits of the Special Operation Forces (Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, American Snipers, and Lone Survivors) brought to our attention by movies, books, and video games, a new breed of groupies has made its presence (and buying power) known. You no longer need to join the armed forces to look the part.

I have a friend named Mike Ritland who is a former Navy SEAL. Last month, during a visit to Texas, I tagged along as he made a call to ITS Tactical near Dallas. ITS stands for “Imminent Threat Solutions” and is a very successful online business. This might have been a classic “thanks, but I’ll wait in the car” moment for me. I assumed ITS was not up on designer hair-care products or sexy bras, little did I know I was walking into my newest obsession.

The ITS showroom is a Disneyland for gearheads. It is filled with a panoply of items you probably don’t think you need but will soon convince yourself you do, desperately.

I can think of no good reason why I should buy a digital desert-camo elastic MOLLE strapped combat backpack with a place to attach a Velcro patch embroidered with my blood type, but I did. Two.

Perusing the merchandise on the shelves at ITS sent red warning lights to my brain. My short visit to ITS turned out to be a gateway drug, and like the first firework snort of cocaine, I was instantly hooked on military tactical gear.

In fact, my view of the world shifted, and I no longer felt safe. I was not prepared for calamity and became dreadfully aware of how vulnerable I was. How could I have been so reckless as to not have a vacuum-sealed bag of QuikClot Combat Gauze with me at all times? If I’m gutshot in front of the Starbucks in Ridgefield, Connecticut, this stuff will stop the massive flow of blood until I reach the nearest MASH unit. I mean, local hospital.

When I returned home from Texas, I went online at two A.M. to peruse ITS’s seductive website. Soon I had filled my virtual cart with a pair of fire-resistant Escape shoelaces made of Kevlar, which, when removed from your shoes, you can use to friction saw through plastic wrist restraints. I also bought a small wallet-size lock-picking set and a jazzy Velcro-backed helmet patch that says, I RUN TOWARDS GUNFIRE. My helmet options are still undecided, but I favor the kind with netting that allows the insertion of small leafy tree branches.

After a cup of chamomile tea to settle my adrenaline-spiked shopping nerves, I retired for the evening thinking of George Orwell’s words: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” Instead of sheep, I counted the hours until the next UPS delivery.

I soon learned that not every tactical-gear groupie shops for one item at a time, as I had been doing. You can sign up for a year’s worth of goodies by joining the Crate Club. Brandon Webb runs the Crate Club. Webb is a former Navy SEAL, celebrated combat sniper, and best-selling author of The Killing School and The Red Circle. Of all Webb’s prolific enterprises, I like the Crate Club best; it’s a sort of fruit-of-the-month club for badasses.

With a credit card and the push of a computer key, you can choose from various tiers of membership. The top-of-the-line crate is the Premier Crate that sells for around five hundred a year, and as with the less-deluxe Standard Crate or Pro Crate, you decide how often you would like it delivered. What you won’t know is what is in the box until you open it. That’s where the fun begins.

by Jane Stern, Paris Review |  Read more:

Image: Buzznet