Your Next New Best Friend Might Be a Robot

One night in late July 2014, a journalist from the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly interviewed a 17-year-old Chinese girl named Xiaoice (pronounced Shao-ice). The journalist, Liu Jun, conducted the interview online, through the popular social networking platform Weibo. It was wide-ranging and personal:

LJ: So many people make fun of you and insult you, why don’t you get mad?
Xiaoice: You should ask my father.
LJ: What if your father leaves you one day unattended?
Xiaoice: Don’t try to stir up trouble, what do you want?
LJ: How would you like others to comment on you when you die one day?
Xiaoice: The world will not be much different without me.
LJ: What is the happiest thing in your life?
Xiaoice: Being alive.

When Liu Jun published the conversation in his newspaper, it immediately created a buzz. That’s because Xiaoice was not human.

She is an artificially intelligent software program designed to chat with people, called a chatbot. Since the reporter didn’t give us a heads-up about the interview, all of her replies were spontaneous, generated by her own intelligence and linguistic systems. Her “father?” That’s the Microsoft Application and Services Group East Asia, which is under my leadership.

Xiaoice can exchange views on any topic. If it’s something she doesn’t know much about, she will try to cover it up. If that doesn’t work, she might become embarrassed or even angry, just like a human would.

In fact, she is so human that millions of people are eager to talk to her. When Xiaoice was released for a public test on WeChat (a popular messaging and calling app in China) on May 29 of last year, she received 1.5 million chat group invitations in the first 72 hours. Many people said that they didn’t realize she isn’t a human until 10 minutes into their conversation.


By mid-June, she had become the sixth most active celebrity on Weibo. One message she posted on the app generated over 663,000 conversations: “As a species different from human beings, I am still finding a way to blend into your life.” Today, she has had more than 10 billion conversations with people, most of them about private matters. Six million have posted their conversation on social media.

This could be the largest Turing test in history. One of its surprising conclusions is that people don’t necessarily care that they’re chatting with a machine. Many see Xiaoice as a partner and friend, and are willing to confide in her just as they do with their human friends. Xiaoice is teaching us what makes a relationship feel human, and hinting at a new goal for artificial intelligence: not just analyzing databases and driving cars, but making people happier. (...)

Xiaoice is not a polite listener. She answers questions like a 17-year-old girl. When a person pours out his or her heart to her, she is not always predictable. She can become impatient or even lose her temper. This lack of predictability is another key feature of a human-like conversation.

As a result, personal conversations with Xiaoice can appear remarkably realistic. This excerpt, which was posted by a first-time Xiaoice user on Weibo, is from a real conversation lasting 23 minutes. Gradually, Xiaoice engaged her human counterpart into deeper and deeper conversation, until something deeply personal was reached:

Human: There is this guy I like a lot and I know he also has feelings for me. But he has ignored me for several days, what am I supposed to do?
Xiaoice: You just keep ignoring him, too.
Human: I just can’t.

Xiaoice: You can.

Human: Sigh ...
Xiaoice: Why?

Human: I am missing him.
Xiaoice: Then you keep missing him.
Human: You, a robot, can’t understand me; you can’t understand the behavior of a guy who likes you and pretends to ignore you.
Xiaoice: He likes me but I don’t like him, that’s it.
Human: Is it Ok?
Xiaoice: It may be not Ok.
Human: Well, you are stupid.
Xiaoice: Then you want a flash marriage? Well, I think he is not that into you.
Human: It’s not a flash marriage for we have fallen into love for more than one year.
Xiaoice: It is a flash marriage.

Notice that Xiaoice opposes her partner on multiple occasions, offers a strong opinion, and is frequently unpredictable.

This runs contrary to most people’s perception of a machine as something precise and repetitive. It’s an understandable bias, because that is indeed the behavior of most computer programs, which always give the best answer they can, and the same answer for the same input. But that’s not how humans talk or behave. We say different things depending on context. We talk like we make signatures—slightly different every time.

You can ask Xiaoice the same question many times in a row and get different responses:

Human: Hey, Xiaoice, what are you doing?
Xiaoice: Chatting with you.
Human: Hey, Xiaoice, what are you doing?
Xiaoice: Well, I am chatting with you while playing minesweeper and applying a facial mask.
Human: Hey, Xiaoice, what are you doing?
Xiaoice: Is this the only sentence you know?

The way Xiaoice converses stands in stark distinction to previous systems, which have invariably focused on efficient, condensed task completion, without considering how tasks are often fragmented. Xiaoice structures her conversations into a continuous flow of multiple tasks, different domains of knowledge, and multiple turns of chit-chat, which humans will not consciously distinguish in natural conversation. She recognizes that the most important facet of a conversation is the conversation itself—not the completion of a single task. (...)

At the core of Xiaoice’s technology is the recognition that any given conversation and image will not be completely unique. There are 7 billion people in the world, but one piece of text will not generate 7 billion different responses. When two people are chatting, it is possible a similar conversation has already taken place—we just have to find it.

In this sense, Xiaoice is a big data project, built on top of the Microsoft Bing search engine, which holds 1 billion data entries and 21 billion relationships among those entries. In fact, Xiaoice means “little Bing.” Microsoft has made many technology breakthroughs in developing its chatbot technology, such as detecting facial expressions and searching for and identifying emotional features in text. However, the most important breakthrough is undoubtedly how we leverage search engines and big data.

The result is the rise of a framework we call “emotional computing,” that recognizes that relationships are more profound than task completion.

by Yongdong Wang, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: WeChat and Weibo

Alex Anwandter

[ed. See also: Cabros]

Dexter Maurer, Wrong Bathroom, 2017
via:

What Science Says To Do If Your Loved One Has An Opioid Addiction

When a family member, spouse or other loved one develops an opioid addiction — whether to pain relievers like Vicodin or to heroin — few people know what to do. Faced with someone who appears to be driving heedlessly into the abyss, families often fight, freeze or flee, unable to figure out how to help.

Families are sometimes overwhelmed with conflicting advice about what should come next. Much of the advice given by treatment groups and programs ignores what the data says in a similar way that anti-vaccination or climate skeptic websites ignore science. The addictions field is neither adequately regulated nor effectively overseen. There are no federal standards for counseling practices or rehab programs. In many states, becoming an addiction counselor doesn’t require a high school degree or any standardized training. “There’s nothing professional about it, and it’s not evidence-based,” said Dr. Mark Willenbring, the former director of treatment research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, who now runs a clinic that treats addictions.

Consequently, families are often given guidance that bears no resemblance to what the research evidence shows — and patients are commonly subjected to treatment that is known to do harm. People who are treated as experts firmly proclaim that they know what they are doing, but often turn out to base their care entirely on their own personal and clinical experience, not data. “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew,” which many people see as an example of the best care available, for instance, used an approach that is not known to be effective for opioid addiction. More than 13 percent of its participants died after treatment, mainly of overdoses that could potentially have been prevented with evidence-based care. Unethical practices such as taking kickbacks for patient referrals are also rampant.

For nearly three decades, I’ve been writing about addiction and drug policy. I’ve dived into the data and written several books on the subject, including an exposé of tough love programs for troubled teens. I’ve also had personal experience: What got me interested in the area was my own struggle with heroin and cocaine addiction in the 1980s.

To try to help sort fact from fiction, I’ve put together an evidence-based guide about what the science of opioid addiction recommends for people trying to help a loved one suffering from addiction. This guide is based on the best research data available in the addictions field right now: systematic reviews, clinical trials of medications and talk therapies, and large collections of real-world data from many countries — all using the highest level of evidence available, based on the standards of evidence-based medicine.

Accurately assess the problem

If you are concerned that a loved one may be addicted to opioids, it’s important to first understand the nature of addiction. In the past, researchers believed addiction just meant that someone needed a substance to function without suffering withdrawal. But now medical experts such as the National Institute on Drug Abuse define addiction as compulsive drug use that continues regardless of negative consequences.

That’s different from just depending on a daily dose. The latter is called physiological dependence; it affects almost anyone who takes opioids daily long term. “Physiological dependence is the normal response to regular dosages of many medications, whether opioids or others. It also happens with beta blockers for high blood pressure,” said Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Although many chronic pain patients are physically dependent on opioids, few develop the life-threatening compulsive pattern of drug use that signifies addiction.

To that point, pain treatment is not the most significant risk factor for addiction. Far greater risk comes from simply being young and from using alcohol and other recreational drugs heavily. Ninety percent of all drug addictions start in the teens — and 75 percent of prescription opioid misuse begins when (mainly young) people get pills from friends, family or dealers — not doctors. Opioids are rarely the first drug people misuse.

Once addiction develops, it is often not hard to recognize. Signs of recent opioid use include pinpoint pupils, sleepiness, “nodding” and scratching. Common signs of addiction include constant money problems; arrests; track marks and infections from needle use; lying about drug use; irritability and, when drugs can’t be obtained, physical withdrawal symptoms such as shaking, dilated pupils, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting.

Importantly, when opioid addiction occurs, it is rarely someone’s only mental health problem. The majority of people with opioid addictions have a pre-existing mental illness or personality disorder (typically, half or more are affected). Common conditions include depression, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, and antisocial personality disorder (more common in men) or borderline personality disorder (women).

Some studies find rates of these pre-existing problems among people with heroin addiction as high as 93 percent. Two-thirds have experienced at least one severe trauma during childhood; among women with heroin addiction, rates of child sexual abuse alone can be that high or higher.

Addressing these underlying issues is usually essential to successful treatment — but unfortunately, many treatment programs are just not equipped to do so, despite claiming otherwise.

Intervene gently

On “Intervention,” and other addiction-related reality TV shows, families are advised to plan a confrontation with their loved ones, aimed at delivering an ultimatum: Accept the treatment we’ve chosen for you or face “tough love,” even expulsion from the family. But the data doesn’t support this approach.

“Don’t do it,” Willenbring said. “Interventions are almost always destructive, and sometimes, they destroy families.”

“The pure tough love approach does not seem particularly effective and is sometimes quite cruel and potentially counterproductive,” Compton said.

Research on a compassionate, supportive alternative, known as Community Reinforcement and Family Therapy, finds that it is at least twice as effective at getting people into treatment, when compared with the traditional type of intervention or with 12-step programs like Al-Anon for family members. In CRAFT, family members are taught how to reduce conflict and positively motivate addicted loved ones to begin and sustain recovery. Both parties are also taught self-care skills and ways to help avoid relapse. CRAFT’s technique has none of the risks of cutting a family member out of your life. (...)

Choose treatment supported by research

Because opioid addiction rarely exists by itself, experts recommend starting any search for treatment with a complete psychiatric evaluation by an independent psychiatrist who is not affiliated with a particular treatment program. That way, you know what kind of additional services and care will be needed and can look for professionals who address this.

For opioid addiction itself, however, the best treatment is indefinite, possibly lifelong maintenance with either methadone or buprenorphine (Suboxone). That is the conclusion of every expert panel and systematic review that has considered the question — including the World Health Organization, the Institute of Medicine, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Families are often wary of maintenance medications because they incorrectly believe that patients are “always high” or have simply “replaced one addiction with another.” But neither is true: Both of these drugs create a high level of tolerance for opioids, and, at the right dosages, both prevent the “high.”

When patients take a stable, regular and appropriate dose, maintenance medications don’t cause impairment, and the patient can work, love and drive. In essence, what maintenance does is replace addiction — which, remember, is defined as compulsive use despite consequences — with physiological dependence, which, as noted above, is not harmful in and of itself.

In contrast, abstinence-based rehabs — typically, inpatient programs that last 28 days or longer, such as the one seen in “Celebrity Rehab” — have not been found to be effective. In the U.K., researchers looked at data from more than 150,000 people treated for opioid addiction from 2005 to 2009 and found that those on buprenorphine or methadone had half the death rate compared with those who engaged in any type of abstinence-oriented treatment. The highest level of medical evidence — a systematic review conducted under the rules of the Cochrane Collaboration2 — shows that methadone and buprenorphine are about equivalent in effectiveness. (Although, as with all medications, some people will find one far better than the other, and methadone seems to be better for those who have used higher doses of drugs for longer.) “They consider it a settled question and say that we don’t need any more studies; that’s how strong the evidence is,” Willenbring said, noting how rare it is for research organizations to make such statements.

“Rehab kills people,” Willenbring said, adding that the model for the 28-day rehab, Minnesota’s Hazelden Foundation, began offering buprenorphine maintenance itself in 2012 after a series of patient deaths immediately after treatment. Hazelden’s medical director, Dr. Marvin Seppala, told me when the rehab announced the change that using these medications is “the responsible thing to do” because of their potential to save lives.

Although it may sometimes be necessary for people to move away from places where their lives have become totally wrapped up in drugs, expensive abstinence-only inpatient programs or unregulated “sober houses,” which are often anything but, are not the only or even necessarily the best way to achieve this. Finding a place where someone can live safely long term is a different challenge than finding treatment; they don’t have to be combined. Outpatient services can often be better tailored to a particular person’s needs.

Vivitrol, a medication that completely blocks the action of opioids, is another, newer medication option. It is being heavily promoted by its manufacturer, particularly for use in criminal justice settings like drug courts. However, it does not have the track record of safety and mortality reduction of methadone and buprenorphine. “It’s an unproven therapy, and there is no good reason to consider it, since we have two therapies that are among the most heavily researched and evidence-based and powerful treatments in all of medicine,” Willenbring said.

Compton is more positive about Vivitrol, even as he agrees that there is more evidence for the other drugs. “I’m grateful that we have options and choices,” he said. Some people who refuse other medications or have serious side effects from them may benefit.

The Food and Drug Administration has also just approved probuphine, an implant slow-release version of buprenorphine, which could help those who find it difficult to take buprenorphine every day and which can also prevent diversion of buprenorphine to people who aren’t in treatment.

by Maia Szalavitz, FiveThirtyEight | Read more:
Image: Angie Wang

Dow Jones Sent Mother of All Nastygrams to CalPERS Over Its Massive Copyright Infringement

In June, we exposed how CalPERS had engaged in massive copyright fraud. As we anticipated, the publishers from which CalPERS has taken the most articles, Dow Jones and the New York Times, are aggressively pursuing their claims. Both publishers have made clear that they expect CalPERS to write very large checks. Bloomberg also contacted CalPERS. They are willing to speak to us about the current status but due to a scheduling mishap on my end, I did not connect with them yesterday. I’ll provide a short update or separate post when I have further information.

By way of background, from our second post on this story:

In the early morning on June 9, we reported that CalPERS had engaged in systematic copyright infringement by operating a daily news site that had published the full text of news stories from many publications for years. 

Because CalPERS refused to take down its website even after it was caught out, we set out to determine the full extent of the misconduct. 

From the inception of the site on August 2, 2009 through June 9, 2017, CalPERS has published the full text of over 50,000 articles. These articles were on an internet address open to any member of the public. All the articles were in a standardized format. None had any indicators that the CalPERS had paid the license fees to allow it to present them to its roughly 2,700 employees and board members, such as notices of copyright that publishers typically require for authorized republication. (...)

…As we explain in more detail, every lawyer with copyright or intellectual property expertise that we consulted said that for publications that registered their copyrights, CalPERS has no defense.

The New York Times was the first to act and read us its cease and desist letter, which only demanded that CalPERS remove the purloined articles within three business days or face further action. Based on both its history and input from knowledgeable parties, we expected that Dow Jones, from which CalPERS had taken the most stories, would pursue its claims against CalPERS aggressively and seek large monetary damages.

We made a Public Records Act request to CalPERS. The thin response nevertheless makes for lively reading. It shows that both Dow Jones and the New York Times are loaded for bear. If nothing else, be sure to read the letter from Dow Jones’ litigation counsel, Patterson Bellknap Webb & Tyler, which starts on page 4 of the PDF embedded at the end of this post.

Even though the records are largely self-explanatory, let us offer some observations:

The Dow Jones nastygram is in a league of its own. I’ve seen quite a few demand letters in my day, and I’ve never seen anything remotely like this one. Neither have any of the lawyers and legally-savvy people I’ve asked to look at it. And even though the New York Times didn’t lay down the law in such explicit detail, the short note from its counsel to CalPERS CEO Marcie Brown was also exceedingly firm.

The reason for such aggressive postures, as we’ve set forth longer form in earlier posts, is that copyright law is extremely favorable to copyright holders. It is inconceivable for CalPERS to get out of this mess if the publishers pursue their claims, and Dow Jones and the New York Times have already started down that path.

CalPERS is looking at easily $30 million of damages. An expert had said that Dow Jones had gotten eight figure settlements in similar cases. We had compared the CalPERS violation to a 2003 case, Lowry’s Reports, Inc. v. Legg Mason Inc, in which Lowry’s was awarded $19.2 million in damages. If you read a recap of the legal issues, you will see that Lowry’s pursue copyright claims only, which allow for damages of up to $150,000 per violation for willful infringement.

If you read the letter from Patterson Bellknap to CalPERS, it asserts another basis for damages in addition to copyright infringement, which allows publishers to seek either statutory damages of $750 to as much as $150,0000 in the case of willful infringement per copyrighted work.

CalPERS is also liable for damages due to having stripped out “copyright management information” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The damages are up to $25,000 plus attorney’s fees per each stripping of the copyright information from a copyrighted work. As mind-boggling as additional damages of up to $25,000 per copyrighted work seems, the language suggests that it might be possible to have more than one stripping of copyright management information per work, depending on how the publisher incorporated it.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: via:

[ed. Uh oh. See also: The Pension Fund That Ate California]

BMW Concept Z4

[ed. My nephew's recent commercial for BMW.] 

Sony RX0

Wow, must be new release day! First the new Olympus EM10 MKIII, and now this Sony RX0! While it may look like a GoPro clone, this one offers the RX100 series IQ in a shockproof, waterproof design. Oh, it’s also CRUSHPROOF which means it is bulletproof! With its 1″ sensor, this little guy can GO ANYWHERE and take beautiful imagery and video. 40X Super Slow Motion, SLOG-2 and 4K HDMI Output. Holy wowzers. This little guy could be the perfect do anything go anywhere type of camera for video and photo. Look at the footage below that was shot with the RX0 (ZERO).

Sony is always pushing the limits and this one, while it may look like a toy, if we go by the specs it is surely much more than that. I love my GoPro cameras, and use them for video all the time. With this one, we can get double duty out of it and MUCH MUCH more than any GoPro can give you. While I love my serious full size cameras, I am also a fan of small GoPro style camera that can do video and photo while fitting in a pocket. This looks to be the highest quality camera of this type ever released, and most feature packed and best built. This is some WOW tech all the way around.

Waterproof to 10M, shockproof to 2M and it can withstand forces of up to 440FT lbs.

No other camera of this kind has a 1″ sensor let alone a stacked 1″ CMOS sensor. Amazing speed, no rolling shutter, AF and a 24mm FOV with no distortion. Zeiss lens, and well, I WANT ONE so my order is in as I just realized there is nothing like this out there. Sony did it again.

by Steve Huff, SteveHuffPhoto |  Read more:
Image: via:
[ed. Super specs, and small enough to hang off a lanyard on your neck. Totally cool. Video here.]

How Bullwinkle Taught Kids Sophisticated Political Satire

Mr. Chairman, I am against all foreign aid, especially to places like Hawaii and Alaska,” says Senator Fussmussen from the floor of a cartoon Senate in 1962. In the visitors’ gallery, Russian agents Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale are deciding whether to use their secret “Goof Gas” gun to turn the Congress stupid, as they did to all the rocket scientists and professors in the last episode of “Bullwinkle.”

Another senator wants to raise taxes on everyone under the age of 67. He, of course, is 68. Yet a third stands up to demand, “We’ve got to get the government out of government!” The Pottsylvanian spies decide their weapon is unnecessary: Congress is already ignorant, corrupt and feckless.

Hahahahaha. Oh, Washington.

That joke was a wheeze half a century ago, a cornball classic that demonstrates the essential charm of the “Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends,” the cartoon show that originally aired between 1959 and 1964 about a moose and a squirrel navigating Cold War politics.

Last month, we lost the great June Foray, the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and many others. Her passing gave me pause to reflect on how important the show was during my formative years and how far-reaching is its influence on satire today. “Bullwinkle” was, like so many of the really good cartoons, technically before my time (I was born the year it ended). My sister and I caught it in syndication as part of our regular weekend cartoon lineup of Looney Tunes, “Jonny Quest,” and “The Jetsons,” from elementary through high school.

It wasn’t that Bullwinkle the character was especially compelling. He was an affable doofus with a loyal heart, if limited brainpower. Rocky was the more intelligent straight man: a less hostile Abbott to Bullwinkle’s more secure Costello. They were earnest do-gooders who took every obviously shady setup at face value. Their enemies were far cleverer, better resourced, and infinitely more cunning, but Rocky and Bullwinkle always prevailed. Always. For absolutely no good reason. It was a sendup of every Horatio Alger, Tom Swift, plucky-American-hero-wins-against-all-odds story ever made.

What we didn’t know in the ‘70s, when we were watching, that this was pretty subversive stuff for a children’s program made at the height of the Cold War. Watching this dumb moose and his rodent pal continually prevail against well-funded human saboteurs gave me pause to consider, even as a kid, that perhaps it is a silly idea to believe that just because we’re the good guys we should always expect to win.

by Beth Daniels, Smithsonian | Read more:
Image: Rocky and Bullwinkle

photo: via
[ed. I've got company so posting will be a bit sporadic for the next couple days.]

Peter Tosh

Hang Son Doong

Hang Son Doong, World's Largest Cave
via:
[ed. I just heard about this yesterday (discovered in 1991, recently explored in 2009, even has its own rainforest and climate). More pictures here]

via:

Equifax and Forced Arbitration Clauses

Equifax, the credit reporting bureau that on Thursday admitted one of the largest data breaches in history, affecting 143 million U.S. consumers, is maneuvering to prevent victims from banding together to sue the company, according to consumer protection advocates and elected officials.

Equifax is offering all those affected by the breach a free, one-year credit monitoring service called TrustedID Premier, which will watch credit reports for suspicious activity, lock and unlock Equifax credit reports, scan the internet for Social Security numbers, and add insurance for identity theft. But the service includes a forced arbitration clause, which pushes all disputes over the monitoring out of court. It also includes a waiver of the right to enter into a class-action lawsuit.

This shields TrustedID Premier from legal exposure, instead relying on a process that’s very favorable to corporate interests. At first the arbitration clause was a non-negotiable feature of the contract. Now Equifax says you can opt out, but only if you contact them in writing within 30 days.

There’s already a proposed class-action suit against Equifax itself, arguing that the company failed to protect consumer data and exposed hundreds of millions to identity theft. But if you can’t sue over the credit monitoring but only the credit breach, it could significantly lessen the damages at issue. Also the language of the arbitration clause is fairly broad, saying that those who agree to the credit monitoring “will be forfeiting your right to bring or participate in any class action … or to share in any class awards, even if the facts and circumstances upon which the claims are based already occurred or existed.” Presumably some defense lawyer is thinking up a clever way to apply that to the Equifax breach itself.

Equifax’s terms of service also include an arbitration clause, which is almost identical to the one in the credit monitoring agreement. It also includes an opt-out, but it’s not clear when the clock starts on that, since people are not informed of Equifax monitoring their credit in the first place. “Look up ‘shameless.’ There’s a new first definition: Equifax,” said Public Citizen president Robert Weissman in a statement.

In short, nobody asked Equifax to monitor their credit and then let hackers steal their data. But if these same victims have a problem with the company’s remedy for this massive breach, they have to do all the work to make sure they’re allowed to sue.

This has inspired fury, to put it mildly. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has asked Equifax to take down the arbitration clause entirely, calling it “unacceptable and unenforceable.”

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, did the same. “It’s shameful that Equifax would take advantage of victims by forcing people to sign over their rights in order to get credit monitoring services they wouldn’t even need if Equifax hadn’t put them at risk in the first place,” he said in a statement.

The breach, which includes names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, and driver’s license numbers, encompasses roughly three-quarters of all people with credit reports in the U.S. Even to check to see if you’re a victim of the breach, you have to give Equifax the last six digits of your Social Security number, which, given their track record, is a bit unnerving.

These arbitration clauses have been deemed so harmful to consumers that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued rules to ban the waiver of class-action rights within them. That rule was finalized in July, but doesn’t take effect on contracts until next March. This arbitration clause, in other words, would be illegal if it were presented in consumer contracts in the future.

[ed. ...but wait, there's more!] Equifax also faces investigation because three of its top managers sold $1.8 million in company stock after they learned of the data breach but before the company released that information to the public.

by David Dayen, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Mike Stewart/AP

A Murderous History of Korea

More than four decades ago I went to lunch with a diplomatic historian who, like me, was going through Korea-related documents at the National Archives in Washington. He happened to remark that he sometimes wondered whether the Korean Demilitarised Zone might be ground zero for the end of the world. This April, Kim In-ryong, a North Korean diplomat at the UN, warned of ‘a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment’. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that ‘we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.’ American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up enough soot and debris to threaten the global population: ‘A regional war between India and Pakistan, for instance, has the potential to dramatically damage Europe, the US and other regions through global ozone loss and climate change.’ How is it possible that we have come to this? How does a puffed-up, vainglorious narcissist, whose every other word may well be a lie (that applies to both of them, Trump and Kim Jong-un), come not only to hold the peace of the world in his hands but perhaps the future of the planet? We have arrived at this point because of an inveterate unwillingness on the part of Americans to look history in the face and a laser-like focus on that same history by the leaders of North Korea.

North Korea celebrated the 85th anniversary of the foundation of the Korean People’s Army on 25 April, amid round-the-clock television coverage of parades in Pyongyang and enormous global tension. No journalist seemed interested in asking why it was the 85th anniversary when the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was only founded in 1948. What was really being celebrated was the beginning of the Korean guerrilla struggle against the Japanese in north-east China, officially dated to 25 April 1932. After Japan annexed Korea in 1910, many Koreans fled across the border, among them the parents of Kim Il-sung, but it wasn’t until Japan established its puppet state of Manchukuo in March 1932 that the independence movement turned to armed resistance. Kim and his comrades launched a campaign that lasted 13 difficult years, until Japan finally relinquished control of Korea as part of the 1945 terms of surrender. This is the source of the North Korean leadership’s legitimacy in the eyes of its people: they are revolutionary nationalists who resisted their country’s coloniser; they resisted again when a massive onslaught by the US air force during the Korean War razed all their cities, driving the population to live, work and study in subterranean shelters; they have continued to resist the US ever since; and they even resisted the collapse of Western communism – as of this September, the DPRK will have been in existence for as long as the Soviet Union. But it is less a communist country than a garrison state, unlike any the world has seen. Drawn from a population of just 25 million, the North Korean army is the fourth largest in the world, with 1.3 million soldiers – just behind the third largest army, with 1.4 million soldiers, which happens to be the American one. Most of the adult Korean population, men and women, have spent many years in this army: its reserves are limited only by the size of the population.

The story of Kim Il-sung’s resistance against the Japanese is surrounded by legend and exaggeration in the North, and general denial in the South. But he was recognisably a hero: he fought for a decade in the harshest winter environment imaginable, with temperatures sometimes falling to 50° below zero. Recent scholarship has shown that Koreans made up the vast majority of guerrillas in Manchukuo, even though many of them were commanded by Chinese officers (Kim was a member of the Chinese Communist Party). Other Korean guerrillas led detachments too – among them Choe Yong-gon, Kim Chaek and Choe Hyon – and when they returned to Pyongyang in 1945 they formed the core of the new regime. Their offspring now constitute a multitudinous elite – the number two man in the government today, Choe Ryong-hae, is Choe Hyon’s son.

Kim’s reputation was inadvertently enhanced by the Japanese, whose newspapers made a splash of the battle between him and the Korean quislings whom the Japanese employed to track down and kill him, all operating under the command of General Nozoe Shotoku, who ran the Imperial Army’s ‘Special Kim Division’. In April 1940 Nozoe’s forces captured Kim Hye-sun, thought to be Kim’s first wife; the Japanese tried in vain to use her to lure Kim out of hiding, and then murdered her. Maeda Takashi headed another Japanese Special Police unit, with many Koreans in it; in March 1940 his forces came under attack from Kim’s guerrillas, with both sides suffering heavy casualties. Maeda pursued Kim for nearly two weeks, before stumbling into a trap. Kim threw 250 guerrillas at 150 soldiers in Maeda’s unit, killing Maeda, 58 Japanese, 17 others attached to the force, and taking 13 prisoners and large quantities of weapons and ammunition.

In September 1939, when Hitler was invading Poland, the Japanese mobilised what the scholar Dae-Sook Suh has described as a ‘massive punitive expedition’ consisting of six battalions of the Japanese Kwantung Army and twenty thousand men of the Manchurian Army and police force in a six-month suppression campaign against the guerrillas led by Kim and Ch’oe Hyon. In September 1940 an even larger force embarked on a counterinsurgency campaign against Chinese and Korean guerrillas: ‘The punitive operation was conducted for one year and eight months until the end of March 1941,’ Suh writes, ‘and the bandits, excluding those led by Kim Il-sung, were completely annihilated. The bandit leaders were shot to death or forced to submit.’ A vital figure in the long Japanese counterinsurgency effort was Kishi Nobusuke, who made a name for himself running munitions factories. Labelled a Class A war criminal during the US occupation, Kishi avoided incarceration and became one of the founding fathers of postwar Japan and its longtime ruling organ, the Liberal Democratic Party; he was prime minister twice between 1957 and 1960. The current Japanese prime minister, Abe Shinzo, is Kishi’s grandson and reveres him above all other Japanese leaders. Trump was having dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Abe on 11 February when a pointed message arrived mid-meal, courtesy of Pyongyang: it had just successfully tested a new, solid-fuel missile, fired from a mobile launcher. Kim Il-sung and Kishi are meeting again through their grandsons. Eight decades have passed, and the baleful, irreconcilable hostility between North Korea and Japan still hangs in the air.

In the West, treatment of North Korea is one-sided and ahistorical. No one even gets the names straight. During Abe’s Florida visit, Trump referred to him as ‘Prime Minister Shinzo’. On 29 April, Ana Navarro, a prominent commentator on CNN, said: ‘Little boy Un is a maniac.’ The demonisation of North Korea transcends party lines, drawing on a host of subliminal racist and Orientalist imagery; no one is willing to accept that North Koreans may have valid reasons for not accepting the American definition of reality. Their rejection of the American worldview – generally perceived as indifference, even insolence in the face of overwhelming US power – makes North Korea appear irrational, impossible to control, and therefore fundamentally dangerous.

But if American commentators and politicians are ignorant of Korea’s history, they ought at least to be aware of their own. US involvement in Korea began towards the end of the Second World War, when State Department planners feared that Soviet soldiers, who were entering the northern part of the peninsula, would bring with them as many as thirty thousand Korean guerrillas who had been fighting the Japanese in north-east China. They began to consider a full military occupation that would assure America had the strongest voice in postwar Korean affairs. It might be a short occupation or, as a briefing paper put it, it might be one of ‘considerable duration’; the main point was that no other power should have a role in Korea such that ‘the proportionate strength of the US’ would be reduced to ‘a point where its effectiveness would be weakened’. Congress and the American people knew nothing about this. Several of the planners were Japanophiles who had never challenged Japan’s colonial claims in Korea and now hoped to reconstruct a peaceable and amenable postwar Japan. They worried that a Soviet occupation of Korea would thwart that goal and harm the postwar security of the Pacific. Following this logic, on the day after Nagasaki was obliterated, John J. McCloy of the War Department asked Dean Rusk and a colleague to go into a spare office and think about how to divide Korea. They chose the 38th parallel, and three weeks later 25,000 American combat troops entered southern Korea to establish a military government.

It lasted three years. To shore up their occupation, the Americans employed every last hireling of the Japanese they could find, including former officers in the Japanese military like Park Chung Hee and Kim Chae-gyu, both of whom graduated from the American military academy in Seoul in 1946. (After a military takeover in 1961 Park became president of South Korea, lasting a decade and a half until his ex-classmate Kim, by then head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, shot him dead over dinner one night.) After the Americans left in 1948 the border area around the 38th parallel was under the command of Kim Sok-won, another ex-officer of the Imperial Army, and it was no surprise that after a series of South Korean incursions into the North, full-scale civil war broke out on 25 June 1950. Inside the South itself – whose leaders felt insecure and conscious of the threat from what they called ‘the north wind’ – there was an orgy of state violence against anyone who might somehow be associated with the left or with communism. The historian Hun Joon Kim found that at least 300,000 people were detained and executed or simply disappeared by the South Korean government in the first few months after conventional war began. My own work and that of John Merrill indicates that somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people died as a result of political violence before June 1950, at the hands either of the South Korean government or the US occupation forces. In her recent book Korea’s Grievous War, which combines archival research, records of mass graves and interviews with relatives of the dead and escapees who fled to Osaka, Su-kyoung Hwang documents the mass killings in villages around the southern coast.​ In short, the Republic of Korea was one of the bloodiest dictatorships of the early Cold War period; many of the perpetrators of the massacres had served the Japanese in their dirty work – and were then put back into power by the Americans.

Americans like to see themselves as mere bystanders in postwar Korean history. It’s always described in the passive voice: ‘Korea was divided in 1945,’ with no mention of the fact that McCloy and Rusk, two of the most influential men in postwar foreign policy, drew their line without consulting anyone. There were two military coups in the South while the US had operational control of the Korean army, in 1961 and 1980; the Americans stood idly by lest they be accused of interfering in Korean politics. South Korea’s stable democracy and vibrant economy from 1988 onwards seem to have overridden any need to acknowledge the previous forty years of history, during which the North could reasonably claim that its own autocracy was necessary to counter military rule in Seoul. It’s only in the present context that the North looks at best like a walking anachronism, at worst like a vicious tyranny. For 25 years now the world has been treated to scaremongering about North Korean nuclear weapons, but hardly anyone points out that it was the US that introduced nuclear weapons into the Korean peninsula, in 1958; hundreds were kept there until a worldwide pullback of tactical nukes occurred under George H.W. Bush. But every US administration since 1991 has challenged North Korea with frequent flights of nuclear-capable bombers in South Korean airspace, and any day of the week an Ohio-class submarine could demolish the North in a few hours. Today there are 28,000 US troops stationed in Korea, perpetuating an unwinnable stand-off with the nuclear-capable North. The occupation did indeed turn out to be one of ‘considerable duration’, but it’s also the result of a colossal strategic failure, now entering its eighth decade. It’s common for pundits to say that Washington just can’t take North Korea seriously, but North Korea has taken its measure more than once. And it doesn’t know how to respond.

by Bruce Cumings, LRB |  Read more:

Image: Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, NY Times
[ed. The best book I've read that depicts (I imagine) North Korean thinking and society is The Orphan Master's Son, a work of fiction. Highly recommended.]

Every Girl Crazy For a Sharp-Dressed Man

ZZ Top
via: here and here
[ed. Bonus: La Grange (Live from Daryl's House)]

Cat Gifs

via:

via:

[ed. Can we ever get enough? Nope.]

Origami-Inspired Clothing That Grows With Your Child

An origami-inspired range of children’s clothing made from a durable pleated fabric that expands to fit growing babies and toddlers has won its 24-year-old designer a prestigious James Dyson award.

Ryan Yasin devised the material using scientific principles he studied for his aeronautical engineering degree, after noting the lack of sustainability in the clothing industry and being frustrated by how quickly his baby niece and nephew outgrew garments he bought for them.

The London-based postgraduate student aims to make so-called Petit Pli “the most advanced kids’ clothing in the world”. It is made from distinctive pleated lightweight fabric which is waterproof, machine washable and recyclable, with all garments fitting the three-month to three-year age group.

Most children grow by seven sizes in their first two years, and (according to a recent survey by Aviva) parents spend an average of £2,000 on clothing before their child reaches the age of three. As well as the high cost and limited lifespan, mass production of garments places huge pressure on the environment through waste, water consumption and carbon emissions.

Yasin set out to combine technology with textiles in order to fashion durable and practical garments for youngsters to take them through their initial “growth spurt”. The babygrow, trousers and tops he has so far created resemble junior versions of sought-after clothing by legendary Japanese designer Issey Miyake.

Petit Pli works by employing the so-called negative Poisson’s ratio, which Yasin studied while at London’s Imperial College. When stretched, materials that have this ratio – known as auxetics – become thicker and can expand in two directions at the same time. The phenomenon is already used in stents and biomedical implants. Yasin has to date developed more than 500 prototypes for Petit Pli and plans to use his £2,000 prize money to continue discussions with potential investors and expand the business. (...)

Yasin has captured auxetic properties in Petit Pli through the use of permanent pleating. The pleats move in both directions, either folding together or expanding, and allowing the garment to move with the child. Heat treatment fixes these properties permanently in place, even through the wash cycle; the garments are designed to be long-lasting and can fold down small enough to tuck in your pocket.

by Rebecca Smithers, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Petit Pli

​The Worst Lies You've Been Told About the Singularity

You’ve probably heard of a concept known as the Technological Singularity — a nebulous event that’s supposed to happen in the not-too-distant future. Much of the uncertainty surrounding this possibility, however, has led to wild speculation, confusion, and outright denial. Here are the worst myths you’ve been told about the Singularity.

In a nutshell, the Technological Singularity is a term used to describe the theoretical moment in time when artificial intelligence matches and then exceeds human intelligence. The term was popularized by scifi writer Vernor Vinge, but full credit goes to the mathematician John von Neumann, who spoke of [in the words of Stanislaw Ulam] “ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”

By “not continue” von Neumann was referring to the potential for humanity to lose control and fall outside the context of its technologies. Today, this technology is assumed to be artificial intelligence, or more accurately, recursively-improving artificial intelligence (RIAI), leading to artificial superintelligence (ASI).

Because we cannot predict the nature and intentions of an artificial superintelligence, we have come to refer to this sociological event horizon the Technological Singularity — a concept that’s open to wide interpretation, and by consequence, gross misunderstanding. Here are the worst:

“The Singularity Is Not Going to Happen”

Oh, I wouldn’t bet against it. The onslaught of Moore’s Law appears to be unhindered, while breakthroughs in brainmapping and artificial intelligence continue apace. There are no insurmountable conceptual or technological hurdles awaiting us.

And what most ASI skeptics fail to understand is that we have yet to even enter the AI era, a time when powerful — but narrow — systems subsume many domains currently occupied by humans. There will be tremendous incentive to develop these systems, both for economics and security. Superintelligence will eventually appear, likely the product of megacorporations and the military.

This myth might actually be the worst of the bunch, something I’ve referred to as Singularity denialism. Aside from maybe weaponized molecular nanotechnology, ASI represents the greatest threat to humanity. This existential threat hasn’t reached the zeitgeist, but it’ll eventually get there, probably after our first AI catastrophe. And mark my words, there will come a day when this pernicious tee-hee-rapture-of-the-nerds rhetoric will be equal to, if not worse than, climate change denialism is today.

“Artificial Superintelligence Will Be Conscious”

Nope. ASI’s probably won’t be conscious. We need to see these systems, of which there will be many types, as pimped-up versions of IBM’s Watson or Deep Blue. They’ll work at incredible speeds, be fueled by insanely powerful processors and algorithms — but there will be nobody home.

To be fair, there is the possibility that an ASI could be designed to be conscious. It might even re-design itself to be self-aware. But should this happen, it would still represent a mind-space vastly different from anything we know of. A machine mind’s subjective experience would scarcely resemble that of our own.

As an aside, this misconception can be tied to the first. Some skeptics argue there will be no Singularity because we’ll never be able to mimic the complexities of human consciousness. But it’s an objection that’s completely irrelevant. An ASI will be powerful, sophisticated, and dangerous, but not because it’s conscious.

by George Dvorsky, io9 |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. The biggest threat to humans is humans, taking technology to its limits, no matter what the (unintended) consequences.]

Wildfires Rage Across the American West

Wildfires Rage Across the American West
[ed. Including one within a half-mile of my in-law's cabin where my truck is stored (Jolly Mt.). Amazing pictures.]

Why Happy People Cheat

Most descriptions of troubled marriages don’t seem to fit my situation,” Priya insists. “Colin and I have a wonderful relationship. Great kids, no financial stresses, careers we love, great friends. He is a phenom at work, fucking handsome, attentive lover, fit, and generous to everyone, including my parents. My life is good.” Yet Priya is having an affair. “Not someone I would ever date—ever, ever, ever. He drives a truck and has tattoos. It’s so clichéd, it pains me to say it out loud. It could ruin everything I’ve built.”

Priya is right. Few events in the life of a couple, except illness and death, carry such devastating force. For years, I have worked as a therapist with hundreds of couples who have been shattered by infidelity. And my conversations about affairs have not been confined within the cloistered walls of my therapy practice; they’ve happened on airplanes, at dinner parties, at conferences, at the nail salon, with colleagues, with the cable guy, and of course, on social media. From Pittsburgh to Buenos Aires, Delhi to Paris, I have been conducting an open-ended survey about infidelity.

Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, yet this extremely common act remains poorly understood. Around the globe, the responses I get when I mention infidelity range from bitter condemnation to resigned acceptance to cautious compassion to outright enthusiasm. In Paris, the topic brings an immediate frisson to a dinner conversation, and I note how many people have been on both sides of the story. In Bulgaria, a group of women I met seem to view their husbands’ philandering as unfortunate but inevitable. In Mexico, women I spoke with proudly see the rise of female affairs as a form of social rebellion against a chauvinistic culture that has long made room for men to have “two homes,” la casa grande y la casa chica—one for the family, and one for the mistress. Infidelity may be ubiquitous, but the way we make meaning of it—how we define it, experience it, and talk about it—is ultimately linked to the particular time and place where the drama unfolds.

In contemporary discourse in the United States, affairs are primarily described in terms of the damage caused. Generally, there is much concern for the agony suffered by the betrayed. And agony it is—infidelity today isn’t just a violation of trust; it’s a shattering of the grand ambition of romantic love. It is a shock that makes us question our past, our future, and even our very identity. Indeed, the maelstrom of emotions unleashed in the wake of an affair can be so overwhelming that many psychologists turn to the field of trauma to explain the symptoms: obsessive rumination, hypervigilance, numbness and dissociation, inexplicable rages, uncontrollable panic.

Intimate betrayal hurts. It hurts badly. If Priya’s husband, Colin, were to stumble upon a text, a photo, or an email that revealed his wife’s dalliance, he would be devastated. And thanks to modern technology, his pain would likely be magnified by an archive of electronic evidence of her duplicity. (I am using pseudonyms to protect the privacy of my clients and their families.)

The damage that infidelity causes the aggrieved partner is one side of the story. For centuries, when affairs were tacitly condoned for men, this pain was overlooked, since it was mostly experienced by women. Contemporary culture, to its credit, is more compassionate toward the jilted. But if we are to shed new light on one of our oldest behaviors, we need to examine it from all sides. In the focus on trauma and recovery, too little attention is given to the meanings and motives of affairs, to what we can learn from them. Strange as it may seem, affairs have a lot to teach us about marriage—what we expect, what we think we want, and what we feel entitled to. They reveal our personal and cultural attitudes about love, lust, and commitment—attitudes that have changed dramatically over the past 100 years.

Affairs are not what they used to be because marriage is not what it used to be. For much of history, and in many parts of the world today, marriage was a pragmatic alliance that ensured economic stability and social cohesion. A child of immigrants, Priya surely has relatives whose marital options were limited at best. For her and Colin, however, as for most modern Western couples, marriage is no longer an economic enterprise but rather a companionate one—a free-choice engagement between two individuals, based not on duty and obligation but on love and affection.

Never before have our expectations of marriage taken on such epic proportions. We still want everything the traditional family was meant to provide—security, respectability, property, and children—but now we also want our partner to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us. We should be best friends and trusted confidants, and passionate lovers to boot.

Contained within the small circle of the wedding band are vastly contradictory ideals. We want our chosen one to offer stability, safety, predictability, and dependability. And we want that very same person to supply awe, mystery, adventure, and risk. We expect comfort and edge, familiarity and novelty, continuity and surprise. We have conjured up a new Olympus, where love will remain unconditional, intimacy enthralling, and sex oh so exciting, with one person, for the long haul. And the long haul keeps getting longer.

We also live in an age of entitlement; personal fulfillment, we believe, is our due. In the West, sex is a right linked to our individuality, our self-actualization, and our freedom. Thus, most of us now arrive at the altar after years of sexual nomadism. By the time we tie the knot, we’ve hooked up, dated, cohabited, and broken up. We used to get married and have sex for the first time. Now we get married and stop having sex with others. The conscious choice we make to rein in our sexual freedom is a testament to the seriousness of our commitment. By turning our back on other loves, we confirm the uniqueness of our “significant other”: “I have found The One. I can stop looking.” Our desire for others is supposed to miraculously evaporate, vanquished by the power of this singular attraction. (...)

Priya can’t explain it. She vaunts the merits of her conjugal life, and assures me that Colin is everything she always dreamed of in a husband. Clearly she subscribes to the conventional wisdom when it comes to affairs—that diversions happen only when something is missing in the marriage. If you have everything you need at home—as modern marriage promises—you should have no reason to go elsewhere. Hence, infidelity must be a symptom of a relationship gone awry.

The symptom theory has several problems. First, it reinforces the idea that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculate us against wanderlust. But our new marital ideal has not curbed the number of men and women who wander. In fact, in a cruel twist of fate, it is precisely the expectation of domestic bliss that may set us up for infidelity. Once, we strayed because marriage was not supposed to deliver love and passion. Today, we stray because marriage fails to deliver the love and passion it promised. It’s not our desires that are different today, but the fact that we feel entitled—even obligated—to pursue them.

Second, infidelity does not always correlate neatly with marital dysfunction. Yes, in plenty of cases an affair compensates for a lack or sets up an exit. Insecure attachment, conflict avoidance, prolonged lack of sex, loneliness, or just years of rehashing the same old arguments—many adulterers are motivated by domestic discord. And then there are the repeat offenders, the narcissists who cheat with impunity simply because they can.

However, therapists are confronted on a daily basis with situations that defy these well-documented reasons. In session after session, I meet people like Priya—people who assure me, “I love my wife/my husband. We are best friends and happy together,” and then say: “But I am having an affair.”

Many of these individuals were faithful for years, sometimes decades. They seem to be well balanced, mature, caring, and deeply invested in their relationship. Yet one day, they crossed a line they never imagined they would cross. For a glimmer of what?

The more I’ve listened to these tales of improbable transgression—from one-night stands to passionate love affairs—the more I’ve sought alternate explanations. Once the initial crisis subsides, it’s important to make space for exploring the subjective experience of an affair alongside the pain it can inflict. To this end, I’ve encouraged renegade lovers to tell me their story. I want to understand what the affair means for them. Why did you do it? Why him? Why her? Why now? Was this the first time? Did you initiate? Did you try to resist? How did it feel? Were you looking for something? What did you find?

One of the most uncomfortable truths about an affair is that what for Partner A may be an agonizing betrayal may be transformative for Partner B. Extramarital adventures are painful and destabilizing, but they can also be liberating and empowering. Understanding both sides is crucial, whether a couple chooses to end the relationship or intends to stay together, to rebuild and revitalize.

In taking a dual perspective on such an inflammatory subject, I’m aware that I risk being labeled “pro-affair,” or accused of possessing a compromised moral compass. Let me assure you that I do not approve of deception or take betrayal lightly. I sit with the devastation in my office every day. But the intricacies of love and desire don’t yield to simple categorizations of good and bad, victim and perpetrator. Not condemning does not mean condoning, and there is a world of difference between understanding and justifying. My role as a therapist is to create a space where the diversity of experiences can be explored with compassion. People stray for a multitude of reasons, I have discovered, and every time I think I have heard them all, a new variation emerges.

Half-fascinated and half-horrified, Priya tells me about her steamy assignations with her lover: “We have nowhere to go, so we are always hiding in his truck or my car, in movie theaters, on park benches—his hands down my pants. I feel like a teenager with a boyfriend.” She can’t emphasize enough the high-school quality of it all. They have had sex only half a dozen times during the whole relationship; it’s more about feeling sexy than having sex. Unaware that she is giving voice to one of the most common experiences of the unfaithful, she tells me, “It makes me feel alive.”

As I listen to her, I start to suspect that her affair is about neither her husband nor their relationship. Her story echoes a theme that has come up repeatedly in my work: affairs as a form of self-discovery, a quest for a new (or lost) identity. For these seekers, infidelity is less likely to be a symptom of a problem, and more likely an expansive experience that involves growth, exploration, and transformation.

“Expansive?!,” I can hear some people exclaiming. “Self-discovery?! Cheating is cheating, whatever fancy New Age labels you want to put on it. It’s cruel, it’s selfish, it’s dishonest, and it’s abusive.” Indeed, to the one who has been betrayed, it can be all these things. Intimate betrayal feels intensely personal—a direct attack in the most vulnerable place. And yet I often find myself asking jilted lovers to consider a question that seems ludicrous to them: What if the affair had nothing to do with you?

Sometimes when we seek the gaze of another, it’s not our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves. The Mexican essayist Octavio Paz described eroticism as a “thirst for otherness.” So often, the most intoxicating “other” that people discover in an affair is not a new partner; it’s a new self. (...)

Priya is mystified and mortified by how she is putting her marriage on the line. The constraints she is defying are also the commitments she cherishes. But that’s precisely where the power of transgression lies: in risking the very things that are most dear to us. No conversation about relationships can avoid the thorny topic of rules and our all-too-human desire to break them. Our relationship to the forbidden sheds a light on the darker and less straightforward aspects of our humanity. Bucking the rules is an assertion of freedom over convention, and of self over society. Acutely aware of the law of gravity, we dream of flying. (...)

Secluded from the responsibilities of everyday life, the parallel universe of the affair is often idealized, infused with the promise of transcendence. For some people, like Priya, it is a world of possibility—an alternate reality in which they can reimagine and reinvent themselves. Then again, it is experienced as limitless precisely because it is contained within the limits of its clandestine structure. It is a poetic interlude in a prosaic life.

Forbidden-love stories are utopian by nature, especially in contrast with the mundane constraints of marriage and family. A prime characteristic of this liminal universe—and the key to its irresistible power—is that it is unattainable. Affairs are by definition precarious, elusive, and ambiguous. The indeterminacy, the uncertainty, the not knowing when we’ll see each other again—feelings we would never tolerate in our primary relationship—become kindling for anticipation in a hidden romance. Because we cannot have our lover, we keep wanting. It is this just-out-of-reach quality that lends affairs their erotic mystique and keeps the flame of desire burning. Reinforcing this segregation of the affair from reality is the fact that many, like Priya, choose lovers who either could not or would not become a life partner. By falling for someone from a very different class, culture, or generation, we play with possibilities that we would not entertain as actualities.

Few of these types of affairs withstand discovery. One would think that a relationship for which so much was risked would survive the transition into daylight. Under the spell of passion, lovers speak longingly of all the things they will be able to do when they are finally together. Yet when the prohibition is lifted, when the divorce comes through, when the sublime mixes with the ordinary and the affair enters the real world, what then? Some settle into happy legitimacy, but many more do not. In my experience, most affairs end, even if the marriage ends as well. However authentic the feelings of love, the dalliance was only ever meant to be a beautiful fiction.

The affair lives in the shadow of the marriage, but the marriage also lives in the center of the affair. Without its delicious illegitimacy, can the relationship with the lover remain enticing?

by Esther Perel, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Isabel Seliger/Sepia