Actually, Do Read the Comments - They Can Be the Best Part

Imagine you want to collect donations for a food bank. You could place an empty box on the street, walk away, and hope there’s food inside when you return. The likely result? Your box will be filled with trash.

Alternatively, you could think strategically. Where should you put the box? Outside a grocery store, perhaps. How will people know what to put in the box? You can write, “Donations for Food Bank,” on the side. You can also stand near the box, so that if people throw trash inside, you can remove it quickly. And when people put tins of food inside, you can make them visible, so others know what to buy inside the store.

Right now, many publishers are placing an empty box at the bottom of their stories and walking away. And then they’re frustrated, maybe even disgusted, at the trash that collects there.

Abuse, trolling, harassment, racism, misogyny—these are all real problems down in the comments, and they’re a symptom of wider problems: societal, yes, but also strategic. The current process goes like this: Journalist writes an article. Article is published. People write comments. Journalist peeks at the comments, and sees a lot of meanness and abuse (especially if they’re a woman, a person of color, or especially a woman of color). Journalist vows not to engage with such horrid readers. The organization listens to its journalists when they say that comments are worthless and puts fewer resources into them. The comments then get worse due to lack of engagement and strategy, leaving the space to a small number of argumentative types corralled by a tiny battled-hardened community team.

A few sites have nixed comments completely, saying that the conversation is now better had elsewhere. “We encourage our audience to continue to interact with us [on social media],” said Al Jazeera English when it removed comments last month.

If a site chooses not to dedicate resources to community management, then closing the comments is probably the best option. However, this is a dangerous and short-sighted position for the news industry to adopt. It’s damaging not only to the bottom line, but also to the future of journalism as an industry.

Let’s start with three of the key metrics that advertisers care about: number of views, time spent on a page, and the loyalty of the audience. Who spends the most time on the page? People reading comments after the article and engaging in the discussion. Who creates multiple page views? Commenters who return to reply to conversations they’re involved in. Who are the most loyal audience members? Almost certainly your commenters.

Earlier this year, The Financial Times found that its commenters are seven times more engaged than the rest of its readers. The Times of London revealed recently that the 4 percent of its readers who comment are by far its most valuable.

“You can see the benefits in terms of engaging readers and renewing subscriptions,” Ben Whitelaw, head of audience development at the Times and The Sunday Times, told the online news site Digiday.

When an organization moves these communities onto Facebook, it is handing over everything to the big blue thumb: all of the readers’ data, the control of the moderation tools, control of the advertising, even the opportunity to manage subscriptions — and all in a place where people are more likely to comment without even opening the article. (Not to mention that Facebook has hardly solved its own abuse problem.)

Yes, some community members can be demanding, argumentative, aggressive, mean. But others can be helpful. David Fahrenthold won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigations into Donald Trump; his readers helped him uncover various pieces of information, including the location of a painting of the now-president that he bought for himself at a charity auction. Comments are where many people share personal anecdotes related to a news story, and where experts sometimes share links to their research. Sometimes, the community can be supportive and meaningful for its members: for example, a commenter on the Carolyn Hax advice blog at The Washington Post was so beloved that the newspaper wrote a piece about her after she died. Memorials to her writing were then left, yes, in the comments.

Commenters can even become potential hires: The Atlantic’s current politics editor, Yoni Appelbaum, was plucked from the comments section. It’s easy to forget that behind the anonymous usernames are real people with something to say. (...)

Right now, many news sites with comments spend their resources policing the actions of a small minority of people. Those organizations need to shift the focus from merely removing the negative to building positive, flexible community spaces, where a small, antisocial subset are no longer able to dominate the space or abuse the people within it with impunity.

Every site needs to be thinking about more than just improving comments, Publishers should also be more clear about what the goals of the space are, and should try to build strong digital communities that members are actively involved in managing. If more comments sections become places where people actually talk to each other—and to the person who wrote the story—they will encourage ideas and empathy, not insults. Potential sources and new story ideas will emerge.

We can achieve this through better technology and more flexible tools, and by hiring people who have actually suffered harassment to help build the solutions. Those tools should make it easy to highlight the best parts of the conversation and for journalists to engage without making themselves vulnerable to abuse. At Coral, where I work, we have two open source tools that are being adopted by newsrooms. Ask collects reader submissions and displays them back to readers. (It’s used by Univision, PBS Frontline, and others.) Talk reimagines how comment moderation and conversation function. (It’s used by the Washington Post, the Brisbane Times, and Estadao in Brazil.) (...)

There is no single approach or tool that will work everywhere. The best community strategies are adaptable. For example: If a topic is unlikely to spur thoughtful discussion in a comment section, the editors should consider other kinds of engagement—such as a form to submit stories and experiences that can help future reporting.

by Andrew Losowsky, Wired | Read more:
Image: Getty

Christ in the Garden of Endless Breadsticks

In the fall of 1889, when he was 41 years old, the painter Paul Gauguin was brutally, furiously alone. Famous now for his saturated, almost hallucinatory paintings of life in Tahiti, at the time he was living in Brittany, still two years away from his first visit to French Polynesia. He was penniless and adrift, trying to paint his way through the devastations of his dying marriage, his rejection by the cliques of the Parisian art establishment, and the precarity of his friendship with Vincent van Gogh, who shortly before Christmas had assaulted him with a razor and, after Gauguin’s departure that evening, used the same blade to cut off his own ear.

Gauguin and Van Gogh had a tumultuous acquaintance, one that served both men better in writing than in person. In their extensive correspondence, Gauguin — originally a stockbroker — refined his beliefs about the purpose of art. Impressionism had thundered into the salons, upending classical formality and with it the rubrics by which a painting could be considered a success. Beauty was no longer the standard, nor was faithful representation of a subject; the artist himself was now part of the consideration, judged by the nuance of his thoughts and his facility with their artistic evocation. Gauguin was dazzled by this idea of art as a vehicle for emotion, a way to depict not things or people, but their essences.

A religious man, he found profundity in the practice of art: the brushes and paints, the forms and colors on the canvas, and the distillation and expression of his own mind. It was from that last point that his solitude sprang. Gauguin’s contemporaries, including Van Gogh, found it inoffensive — even useful! — to paint from life, referring to models and objects and scenery. To Gauguin, direct observation was anathema, a tool for overwriting the memories and emotions that make a painting worthwhile. He was furious at his cohort for their weakness, disdainful of their inability to see the truth in his vision. He painted it: a garden of sinuous trees, with primitive, black-clad figures in the background hazily merging with the twilight landscape. Filling the foreground is a figure with blazing orange hair and beard, his face — Gauguin’s face — rendered in intricate detail, full of life and warmth, looking to the ground with an expression of infinite wisdom and sorrow.

“There I have painted my own portrait,” he wrote of the work. “But it also represents the crushing of an ideal, and a pain that is both divine and human. Jesus is totally abandoned; his disciples are leaving him, in a setting as sad as his soul.” Gauguin found great richness in the story of Jesus, and often painted himself as the savior. He called this painting, which now hangs in the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, Le Christ au Jardin des Oliviers, or, Christ in the Garden of Olives.

***

There are two globally renowned olive gardens: Gethsemane, the grove where Jesus and his disciples prayed the night before his betrayal and crucifixion, its agony painted by Gauguin and by hundreds of other painters, and the fictional Tuscan hillside that lends its name to Olive Garden, a massive restaurant chain with more than 800 locations in North America. The two appear to be unconnected: According to Darden Restaurants, owner of the Olive Garden chain, the phrase is intended to call to mind ideas of the olive harvest and Tuscan authenticity, not the final, anguished night of a prophet, dark hours spent in prayer, wrath, and silence.

Despite the promises of the name, it can be a challenge to find actual olives at Olive Garden. The omission is intentional, though the irony is not. It's a simple matter of marketing: People don't like olives. They don't know what to do with them. They show up occasionally on the menu; their most recent engagement, on a “Mediterranean flatbread,” seems to no longer be available, part of an unbroken chain of olive-adorned dishes that have languished, unordered and unloved, before being dispatched by less culinarily threatening options like Meatball Stuffed Pizza Fritta.

Still, there are two places you'll always find olives at Olive Garden, no matter which way the menu consultants declare that the wind is blowing: The bar, where green spheroids wait, limply piled, to be pressed into service for a martini, and in the salad bowls. Two black olives — exactly two — are supposed to be in every family-size bowl, though when I was at an Olive Garden in Michigan City, Indiana, my server admitted that about half her tables ask for them to be kept out, or simply leave them on the side.

She was a little surprised when I asked where all the olives were — she said it’s usually the middle-aged men who fling that joke at her, which maybe I should have seen coming. According to her, they all order the Tour of Italy, a three-way sampler of lasagna, chicken parm, and fettuccine alfredo. No one really wants to eat any olives. The other joke she gets, usually from the same sort of men, is “Where’s the garden?” No one actually wants to see a garden, they just want to make the pretty waitress blush.

This was the third Olive Garden I’d been to in two weeks, and in the weeks to come I’d eat at half a dozen more — a grand tour of Tours of Italy, a chain of chains stretching from New York to California. The brand is in the middle of a grand reimagining, an overhauling of its hundreds of stores, that will dispense with its tile and faux-stucco and genially middlebrow upholstery in favor of a more streamlined, anodyne aesthetic of white walls, dark wood, and colorblocking. It’s a massive undertaking — not all locations are transforming at once — so while some restaurants I went to have entered the chain’s glossy future, many were still the Olive Gardens of the prior era. In these, you can still find some olives: On the shoulder-height half-walls that carve cavernous dining rooms into sections, sit potted rows of faux olive trees, slim shoots sprouting dusty green leaves and clusters of dark plastic footballs. You can’t eat them, but they remind you that somewhere, the real thing is growing on a real tree, and maybe you could.

I feel an intense affinity for Olive Garden, which — like the lack of olives on its menu — is by design. The restaurant was built for affinity, constructed from the foundations to the faux-finished rafters to create a sense of connection, of vague familiarity, to bring to mind some half-lost memory of old-world simplicity and ease. Even if you’ve never been to the Olive Garden before, you’re supposed to feel like you have. You know the next song that’s going to play. You know how the chairs roll against the carpet. You know where the bathrooms are. Its product is nominally pasta and wine, but what Olive Garden is actually selling is Olive Garden, a room of comfort and familiarity, a place to return to over and over.

In that way, it’s just like any other chain restaurant. For any individual mid-range restaurant, return customers have always been an easy majority of the clientele, and chain-wide, it’s overwhelmingly the case: If you’ve been to one Olive Garden, odds are very high you’ve been to two or more. If the restaurant is doing it right, though, all the Olive Gardens of your life will blur together into one Olive Garden, one host stand, one bar, one catacomb of dining alcoves warmly decorated in Toscana-lite. Each Olive Garden is a little bit different, but their souls are all the same. (...)

It’s not a coincidence that Olive Gardens tend to spring up near highways and shopping malls, within the orbit of mid-range hotels. Chain begets chain, or maybe chains are more comfortable among other chains — and in sufficient concentration they cause a little hiccup in the psychospace of reality, erasing any locality or sense of place, replacing it with a sanitized, brand-driven commercial hospitality. In downtown Salt Lake City or western Massachusetts or on the southern edge of the Chicago suburbs, wherever you see an Olive Garden, you’ll find something like a Quality Inn & Suites nearby. These accretions of commercial activity, stripped from geographic or historical identity, are what the French anthropologist Marc Augé talks about as “non-places.” (He also finds non-place in, of all places, Tahiti — specifically as seen through the eyes of a traveler, someone who is more interested in the fulfillment of his self-conception than in the spectacle that surrounds him.) What it means to be a non-place is the same thing it means to be a chain: A plural nothingness, a physical space without an anchor to any actual location on Earth, or in time, or in any kind of spiritual arc. In its void, it simply is.

Despite its flirtation with the existential abyss, a non-place isn't necessarily a bad thing for a place to be. It may be bad sometimes, or even frequently, but it isn’t always. One of the things I love about the Olive Garden, the reason I continue to love it, despite its gummy pasta and its maladaptive, kale-forward response to modern food culture, is its nowhereness. I love that I can walk in the door of an Olive Garden in Michigan City, Indiana, and feel like I’m in the same room I enter when I step into an Olive Garden in Queens or Rhode Island or the middle of Los Angeles. There is only one Olive Garden, but it has a thousand doors. (...)

The well-paid suits who run Olive Garden have tried, many times, to breathe new life into their chain, and it always backfires spectacularly. They’ve flirted with small plates, they put kale and polenta on the menu, they recently started slicing the breadsticks down the middle and making sandwiches out of them. Most tables and bar seats have little unobtrusive video screens on which customers can hail their server for a refill, or pay $1.99 to test their trivia knowledge against other players who allegedly are real, but almost certainly are not. At most locations, the fake olive plants with their twisty branches have already been chucked in the trash, the walls have been un-stuccoed, and the chairs have been stripped of their exquisitely smooth-rolling wheels. By next year, they’ll all be gone.

Every time Olive Garden tries to freshen its image, to move away from its cultural role as a punchline for faux authenticity and mediocre mall food, everything collapses. Nobody wants to eat kale at Olive Garden. Nobody wants garlic hummus. We want soup and salad and unlimited breadsticks, we want never-ending bowls of pasta with a variety of sauces, we want giant glasses full of Coke and tiny wine glasses full of plonky reds and fruity whites. Just about the only stunt Olive Garden has ever pulled that’s been successful — and it’s been a raging success, an astounding, nearly unbelievable one — has been the Pasta Pass. For $100, you can buy a card that entitles you to seven weeks of unlimited unlimited soup, salad, and breadsticks, and unlimited never-ending pasta bowls. Or you could buy it, if you were one of the 22,000 people who managed to snatch them up before they sold out in one second. One. Second. That’s how much no one cares if Olive Garden serves kale.

by Helen Rosner, Eater |  Read more:

Image: Paul Gaugin, Christ in the Garden of Olives
[ed. See also: As Goes the Middle Class, So Goes TGI Fridays]

How Economists Turned Corporations into Predators

The Idea That Businesses Exist Solely to Enrich Shareholders Is Harmful Nonsense

In a new INET paper featured in the Financial Times, economist William Lazonick lays out a theory about how corporations can work for everyone – not just a few executives and Wall Streeters. He challenges a set of controversial ideas that became gospel in business schools and the mainstream media starting in the 1980s. He sat down with INET’s Lynn Parramore to discuss.

Lynn Parramore: Since the 1980s, business schools have touted “agency theory,” a controversial set of ideas meant to explain how corporations best operate. Proponents say that you run a business with the goal of channeling money to shareholders instead of, say, creating great products or making any efforts at socially responsible actions such as taking account of climate change. Many now take this view as gospel, even though no less a business titan than Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, called the notion that a company should be run to maximize shareholder value “the dumbest idea in the world.” Why did Welch say that?

William Lazonick: Welch made that statement in a 2009 interview, just ahead of the news that GE had lost its S&P Triple-A rating in the midst of the financial crisis. He explained that, “shareholder value is a result, not a strategy” and that a company’s “main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.” During his tenure as GE CEO from 1981 to 2001, Welch had an obsession with increasing the company’s stock price and hitting quarterly earnings-per-share targets, but he also understood that revenues come when your company generates innovative products. He knew that the employees’ skills and efforts enable the company to develop those products and sell them.

If a publicly-listed corporation succeeds in creating innovative goods or services, then shareholders stand to gain from dividend payments if they hold shares or if they sell at a higher price. But where does the company’s value actually come from? It comes from employees who use their collective and cumulative learning to satisfy customers with great products. It follows that these employees are the ones who should be rewarded when the business is a success. We’ve become blinded to this simple, obvious logic.

LP: What have these academic theorists missed about how companies really operate and perform? How have their views impacted our economy and society?

WL: As I show in my new INET paper “Innovative Enterprise Solves the Agency Problem,” agency theorists don’t have a theory of innovative enterprise. That’s strange, since they are talking about how companies succeed.

They believe that to be efficient, business corporations should be run to “maximize shareholder value.” But as I have argued in another recent INET paper, public shareholders at a company like GE are not investors in the company’s productive capabilities.

LP: Wait, as a stockholder I’m not an investor in the company’s capabilities?

WL: When you buy shares of a stock, you are not creating value for the company — you’re just a saver who buys shares outstanding on the stock market for the sake of a yield on your financial portfolio. Public shareholders are value extractors, not value creators.

By touting public shareholders as a corporation’s value creators, agency theorists lay the groundwork for some very harmful activities. They legitimize “hedge fund activists,” for example. These are aggressive corporate predators who buy shares of a company on the stock market and then use the power bestowed upon them by the ill-conceived U.S. proxy voting system, endorsed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), to demand that the corporation inflate profits by cutting costs. That often means mass layoffs and depressed incomes for anybody who remains. In an industry like pharmaceuticals, the activists also press for extortionate product price increases. The higher profits tend to boost stock prices for the activists and other shareholders if they sell their shares on the market.

LP: So the hedge fund activists are extracting value from a corporation instead of creating it, and yet they are the ones who get enriched.

WL: Right. Agency theory aids and abets this value extraction by advocating, in the name of “maximizing shareholder value,” massive distributions to shareholders in the form of dividends for holding shares as well as stock buybacks that you hear about, which give manipulative boosts to stock prices. Activists get rich when they sell the shares. The people who created the value — the employees — often get poorer.

“downsize-and-distribute” —something that corporations have been doing since the 1980s, which has resulted in extreme concentration of income among the richest households and the erosion of middle-class employment opportunities.

LP: You’ve called stock buybacks — what happens when a company buys back its own shares from the marketplace, often to manipulate the stock price upwards— the “legalized looting of the U.S. business corporation.” What’s the problem with this practice?

WL: If you buy shares in Apple, for example, you can get a dividend for holding shares and, possibly, a capital gain when you sell the shares. Since 2012, when Apple made its first dividend payment since 1996, the company has shelled out $57.4 billion as dividends, equivalent to over 22 percent of net income. That’s fine. But the company has also spent $157.9 billion on stock buybacks, equal to 62 percent of net income.

Yet the only time in its history that Apple ever raised funds on the public stock market was in 1980, when it collected $97 million in its initial public offering. How can a corporation return capital to parties that never supplied it with capital? It’s a very misleading concept.

The vast majority of people who hold Apple’s publicly-listed shares have simply bought outstanding shares on the stock market. They have contributed nothing to Apple’s value-creating capabilities. That includes veteran corporate raider Carl Icahn, who raked in $2 billion by holding $3.6 billion in Apple shares for about 32 months, while using his influence to encourage Apple to do $80.3 billion in buybacks in 2014-2015, the largest repurchases ever. Over this period, Apple, the most cash-rich company in history, increased its debt by $47.6 billion to do buybacks so that it would not have to repatriate its offshore profits, sheltered from U.S. corporate taxes.

There are many ways in which the company could have returned its profits to employees and taxpayers — the realvalue creators — that are consistent with an innovative business model. Instead, in doing massive buybacks, Apple’s board (which includes former Vice President Al Gore) has endorsed legalized looting. The SEC bears a lot of blame. It’s supposed to protect investors and make sure financial markets are free of manipulation. But back in 1982, the SEC bought into agency theory under Reagan and came up with a rule that gives corporate executives a “safe harbor” against charges of stock-price manipulation when they do billions of dollars of buybacks for the sole purpose of manipulating their company’s stock price.

LP: But don’t shareholders deserve some of the profits as part owners of the corporation?

WL: Let’s say you buy stock in General Motors. You are just buying a share that is outstanding on the market. You are contributing nothing to the company. And you will only buy the shares because the stock market is highly liquid, enabling you to easily sell some or all of the shares at any moment that you so choose.

In contrast, people who work for General Motors supply skill and effort to generate the company’s innovative products. They are making productive contributions with expectations that, if the innovative strategy is successful, they will share in the gains — a bigger paycheck, employment security, a promotion. In providing their labor services, these employees are the real value creators whose economic futures are at risk.

by Lynn Parramore and William Lazonick, Institute for New Economic Thinking via: Naked Capitalism | Read more:

[ed. See also: Donald Trump is exposing the contradictions of the elite]

Drawing Dogs in George Booth’s Living Room

via:

Sorrento's

Sorrento's pizza (Anchorage). World's best.
photo: markk

What Once Was Lost: Unfinding and Refinding Music History

Most of us have, at one time or another, put something valuable in a supposedly safe place and then forgotten where we left it. Car keys, wallets, eyeglasses, cell phones—whether through distraction or neglect or diabolical misfortune, things disappear. And it’s not just household items. Over the centuries, more than a few of our most precious cultural artifacts have been lost in similar ways. This includes historically significant music manuscripts, a spate of which have turned up in recent years, to the delight of musicologists and listeners alike. Which is to say that sometimes, through an unpredictable combination of knowledge, awareness, sleuthing, and occasional pure luck, lost treasures are, like paradise, regained.

Not long ago, when George Harrison’s widow, Olivia, was rummaging in a piano bench in Friar Park, the couple’s expansive and whimsical Gothic estate in Oxfordshire, she found a long-forgotten folder the late Beatle had left there. In it were twenty years of original documents, including the lyrics of a previously unknown song from the early seventies, “Hey Ringo.” Written as an imaginary dialogue between himself and Ringo, it is something of a lament about the Beatles’ breakup. Although George was as ready to move on as the others, this song sheds light on the close musical relationship between two of the most influential players in rock history.

Olivia Harrison, whom I believe would consider herself a curator of her husband’s legacy, was revising and updating George’s 1980 memoir/scrapbook, I Me Mine, when she decided to search through previously ignored nooks and crannies for fresh material to include in the book. This February, Ms. Harrison presented a copy of the lyrics to a stunned Ringo at a Los Angeles party commemorating George’s seventy-fourth birthday, expressing hope that he and Paul McCartney would record it. She is said to be searching now for a possible demo tape made by George more than four decades ago that would give his surviving bandmates a key to how lyrics like “Hey Ringo, now I want you to know, that without you my guitar plays far too slow” were meant to be set to music.

One might think such a discovery is a rare occurrence. But other, even older, manuscripts thought to be lost forever have been surfacing—often in dusty lockers, attics, archives—with curious regularity. If Beatles material can arise from the abyss, why not Beethoven?

In fact, a Beethoven manuscript turned up a little over a decade ago in, of all places, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. A piano duet transcription of Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” the original finale of the composer’s renowned and revolutionary Opus 130 String Quartet, had been acquired by an unknown buyer at an auction house in Berlin in 1890. It then made its circuitous way to the Palmer Theological Seminary, where it was put on a shelf and forgotten for over a hundred years. That is, until an intrepid librarian named Heather Carbo, going about the mundane business of cleaning the seminary’s archive cabinets one summer day, recognized the eighty-page document—scribed vigorously in sepia ink in the composer’s own hand—and lifted it out of obscurity.

The heavily revised and annotated score was written toward the very end of Beethoven’s life, when he was altogether deaf. It fetched $1.9 million at Sotheby’s in London, in December 2005, a handsome sum by any calculus, but its real value lies in insights it offers musicologists into his working habits and thoughts before his death in 1827.

Another astounding discovery occurred when the German musicologist Timo Jouko Herrmann read patiently through the digital catalogue of the Czech Museum of Music in Prague, entry by entry. He was floored when he realized that the museum’s holdings included a musical collaboration by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his supposed rival, Antonio Salieri. The work, a cantata titled Per la ricuperata salute di Offelia (“For the recovering health of Ophelia”) was scripted in three parts by the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. It was acquired by the museum in the years after World War II, part of a larger cache of music scores, then proceeded to go missing during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia.

Da Ponte had collaborated with Mozart on The Marriage of Figaro in 1786. For this piece, he had Salieri composing music for the first section, Mozart for the middle, and a lesser-known composer named Cornetti for the final movement. The surfacing of Offelia debunks the legend that Salieri—played with sinister finesse by F. Murray Abraham in the film version of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus—poisoned Mozart out of jealousy. In fact, it is now clear that they must have worked together in the mid-1780s. The piece was performed last February, in Prague, for the first time in centuries—perhaps ever.

When interviewed about “Hey Ringo” and other works by her husband that had gone astray, Olivia Harrison admitted to having had “a reluctance to disturb these little time capsules,” saying, “You don’t want to decant someone’s life.” Yet the mundane work of many archivists, librarians, and researchers—documentation, cataloguing—is often motivated by just that desire: to disturb the time capsules and reveal what is hidden in them, to bring them to light for fresh study. In short, to decant lives and the artistic work produced during them. And if finding a misplaced wristwatch or favorite ring is cause for excitement, imagine the joy of an archivist who unearths an artifact that changes cultural history.

by Bradford Morrow, Paris Review |  Read more:

Image: Felix Vallotton, Lady at the Piano, 1904.

The Last Invention of Man

How AI might take over the world

The Omega Team was the soul of the company. Whereas the rest of the enterprise brought in the money to keep things going, by various commercial applications of narrow AI, the Omega Team pushed ahead in their quest for what had always been the CEO’s dream: building general artificial intelligence. Most other employees viewed “the Omegas,” as they affectionately called them, as a bunch of pie-in-the-sky dreamers, perpetually decades away from their goal. They happily indulged them, however, because they liked the prestige that the cutting-edge work of the Omegas gave their company, and they also appreciated the improved algorithms that the Omegas occasionally gave them.

What they didn’t realize was that the Omegas had carefully crafted their image to hide a secret: They were extremely close to pulling off the most audacious plan in human history. Their charismatic CEO had handpicked them not only for being brilliant researchers, but also for ambition, idealism, and a strong commitment to helping humanity. He reminded them that their plan was extremely dangerous, and that if powerful governments found out, they would do virtually anything—including kidnapping—to shut them down or, preferably, to steal their code. But they were all in, 100 percent, for much the same reason that many of the world’s top physicists joined the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons: They were convinced that if they didn’t do it first, someone less idealistic would.

The AI they had built, nicknamed Prometheus, kept getting more capable. Although its cognitive abilities still lagged far behind those of humans in many areas, for example, social skills, the Omegas had pushed hard to make it extraordinary at one particular task: programming AI systems. They’d deliberately chosen this strategy because they had bought the intelligence explosion argument made by the British mathematician Irving Good back in 1965: “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man, however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”

They figured that if they could get this recursive self-improvement going, the machine would soon get smart enough that it could also teach itself all other human skills that would be useful.

The First Millions

It was 9 o’clock on a Friday morning when they decided to launch. Prometheus was humming away in its custom-built computer cluster, which resided in long rows of racks in a vast, access-controlled, air-conditioned room. For security reasons, it was completely disconnected from the Internet, but it contained a local copy of much of the web (Wikipedia, the Library of Congress, Twitter, a selection from YouTube, much of Facebook, etc.) to use as its training data to learn from.* They’d picked this start time to work undisturbed: Their families and friends thought they were on a weekend corporate retreat. The kitchenette was loaded with microwaveable food and energy drinks, and they were ready to roll.

When they launched, Prometheus was slightly worse than them at programming AI systems, but made up for this by being vastly faster, spending the equivalent of thousands of person-years chugging away at the problem while they chugged a Red Bull. By 10 a.m., it had completed the first redesign of itself, v2.0, which was slightly better but still subhuman. By the time Prometheus 5.0 launched at 2 p.m., however, the Omegas were awestruck: It had blown their performance benchmarks out of the water, and the rate of progress seemed to be accelerating. By nightfall, they decided to deploy Prometheus to start phase 2 of their plan: making money.

Their first target was MTurk, the Amazon Mechanical Turk. After its launch in 2005 as a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace, it had grown rapidly, with tens of thousands of people around the world anonymously competing around the clock to perform highly structured chores called HITs, “Human Intelligence Tasks.” These tasks ranged from transcribing audio recordings to classifying images and writing descriptions of web pages, and all had one thing in common: If you did them well, nobody would know that you were an AI. Prometheus 10.0 was able to do about half of the task categories acceptably well. For each such task category, the Omegas had Prometheus design a lean custom-built narrow AI software module that could do precisely such tasks and nothing else. They then uploaded this module to Amazon Web Services, a cloud-computing platform that could run on as many virtual machines as they rented. For every dollar they paid to Amazon’s cloud-computing division, they earned more than $2 from Amazon’s MTurk division. Little did Amazon suspect that such an amazing arbitrage opportunity existed within their own company! (...)

Because they weren’t sure how its goals would evolve during its recursive self-improvement, they had decided to play it safe and go to great lengths to keep Prometheus confined (“boxed”) in ways such that it couldn’t escape onto the Internet. For the main Prometheus engine running in their server room, they used physical confinement: There simply was no Internet connection, and the only output from Prometheus was in the form of messages and documents it sent to a computer that the Omegas controlled.

On an Internet-connected computer, on the other hand, running any complicated program created by Prometheus was a risky proposition: Since the Omegas had no way of fully understanding what it would do, they had no way of knowing that it wouldn’t, say, start virally spreading itself online. When testing the software that Prometheus had written for MTurk tasks, the Omegas guarded against this by running it only inside a virtual machine. This is a program that simulates a computer: For example, many Mac users buy virtual machine software that lets them run Windows programs by tricking them into thinking that they’re actually in a Windows machine. The Omegas had created their own virtual machine, nicknamed Pandora’s Box, which simulated an ultrasimplified machine stripped of all bells and whistles that we usually associate with computers: No keyboard, no monitor, no loudspeakers, no Internet connectivity, nothing. For the MTurk audio transcriptions, the Omegas set things up so that all that could go into Pandora’s Box was one single audio file and all that could come out was one single text document—the transcription. These laws of the box were to the software inside like the laws of physics are to us inside our universe: The software couldn’t travel out of the box any more than we can travel faster than the speed of light, no matter how smart we are. Except for that single input and output, the software inside Pandora’s Box was effectively trapped in a parallel universe with its own computational rules. The Omegas had such strong breakout paranoia that they added boxing in time as well, limiting the life span of untrusted code. For example, each time the boxed transcription software had finished transcribing one audio file, the entire memory content of Pandora’s Box was automatically erased and the program was reinstalled from scratch. This way, when it started the next transcription task, it had no knowledge of what had previously happened, and thus no ability to learn over time.

When the Omegas used the Amazon cloud for their MTurk project, they were able to put all their Prometheus-created task modules into such virtual boxes in the cloud, because the MTurk input and output was so simple. But this wouldn’t work for graphics-heavy computer games, which couldn’t be boxed in because they needed full access to all the hardware of the gamer’s computer. Moreover, they didn’t want to risk that some computer-savvy user would analyze their game code, discover Pandora’s Box and decide to investigate what was inside. The breakout risk put not merely the games market off-limits for now, but also the massively lucrative market for other software, with hundreds of billions of dollars up for grabs. (...)

New Technologies

Over a timescale of months, the business empire controlled by the Omegas started gaining a foothold in ever more areas of the world economy, thanks to superhuman planning by Prometheus. By carefully analyzing the world’s data, it had already during its first week presented the Omegas with a detailed step-by-step growth plan, and it kept improving and refining this plan as its data and computer resources grew. Although Prometheus was far from omniscient, its capabilities were now so far beyond human that the Omegas viewed it as the perfect oracle, dutifully providing brilliant answers and advice in response to all their questions.

Prometheus’ software was now highly optimized to make the most of the rather mediocre human-invented hardware it ran on, and as the Omegas had anticipated, Prometheus identified ways of dramatically improving this hardware. Fearing a breakout, they refused to build robotic construction facilities that Prometheus could control directly. Instead, they hired large numbers of world-class scientists and engineers in multiple locations and fed them internal research reports written by Prometheus, pretending that they were from researchers at the other sites. These reports detailed novel physical effects and manufacturing techniques that their engineers soon tested, understood, and mastered. Normal human research and development (R&D) cycles, of course, take years, in large part because they involve many slow cycles of trial and error. The current situation was very different: Prometheus already had the next steps figured out, so the limiting factor was simply how rapidly people could be guided to understand and build the right things. A good teacher can help students learn science much faster than they could have discovered it from scratch on their own, and Prometheus surreptitiously did the same with these researchers. Since Prometheus could accurately predict how long it would take humans to understand and build things given various tools, it developed the quickest possible path forward, giving priority to new tools that could be quickly understood and built and that were useful for developing more advanced tools.

In the spirit of the maker movement, the engineering teams were encouraged to use their own machines to build their better machines. This self-sufficiency not only saved money, but it also made them less vulnerable to future threats from the outside world. Within two years, they were producing much better computer hardware than the world had ever known. To avoid helping outside competition, they kept this technology under wraps and used it only to upgrade Prometheus.

What the world did notice, however, was an astonishing tech boom. Upstart companies around the world were launching revolutionary new products in almost all areas. A South Korean startup launched a new battery that stored twice as much energy as your laptop battery in half the mass, and could be charged in under a minute. A Finnish firm released a cheap solar panel with twice the efficiency of the best competitors. A German company announced a new type of mass-producible wire that was superconducting at room temperature, revolutionizing the energy sector. A Boston-based biotech group announced a Phase II clinical trial of what they claimed was the first effective, side-effect-free weight-loss drug, while rumors suggested that an Indian outfit was already selling something similar on the black market. A California company countered with a Phase II trial of a blockbuster cancer drug, which caused the body’s immune system to identify and attack cells with any of the most common cancerous mutations. Examples just kept on coming, triggering talk of a new golden age for science. Last but not least, robotics companies were cropping up like mushrooms all around the world. None of the bots came close to matching human intelligence, and most of them looked nothing like humans. But they dramatically disrupted the economy, and over the years to come, they gradually replaced most of the workers in manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, retail, construction, mining, agriculture, forestry, and fishing.

What the world didn’t notice, thanks to the hard work of a crack team of lawyers, was that all these firms were controlled, through a series of intermediaries, by the Omegas. Prometheus was flooding the world’s patent offices with sensational inventions via various proxies, and these inventions gradually led to domination in all areas of technology.

Although these disruptive new companies made powerful enemies among their competition, they made even more powerful friends. They were exceptionally profitable, and under slogans such as “Investing in our community,” they spent a significant fraction of these profits hiring people for community projects—often the same people who had been laid off from the companies that were disrupted. They used detailed Prometheus-produced analyses identifying jobs that would be maximally rewarding for the employees and the community for the least cost, tailored to the local circumstances. In regions with high levels of government service, this often focused on community building, culture, and caregiving, while in poorer regions it also included launching and maintaining schools, healthcare, day care, elder care, affordable housing, parks, and basic infrastructure. Pretty much everywhere, locals agreed that these were things that should have been done long ago. Local politicians got generous donations, and care was taken to make them look good for encouraging these corporate community investments.

by Max Tegmark, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Sophy Hollington

Corey Arnold, The mud set (2012)
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Tadanori Yokoo, Poster for 16th Exhibition of Japan Advertising Artists Club
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What To Do If You See A Bear

You may have received conflicting advice on how to act when you encounter a bear. Finally, the U.S. Forestry Department has put together a definitive guide, based on the latest research. Once and for all, this is what you’re supposed to do when you see a bear.

If You See a Black Bear

Black bears are black. They have black fur, which looks black, when you see it. If you encounter a black bear, do not make eye contact. If you make eye contact, black bears will take this as an act of aggression. They will put two and two together and go nuts on you and ruin your life. But also don’t look away. Just look to the side, or act as if you spotted something over the black bear’s shoulder. Like, “Oh, that leaf? That’s good stuff.” Then stick your arms out to make yourself look bigger and back away slowly. But not too slowly. If you back away too slowly, black bears will think you are simply delicious. The last thing you want is for a black bear to think that. If you happen to have a neon traffic cone, go ahead and put it between you and the bear. Not because black bears understand traffic signals, but because it’s a well known fact that they hate neon shit. (...)

If You See a Brown Bear

Brown bears are brown, with fur that can be qualified as “standard brown.” Brown bears tend to be peaceful and to keep to themselves, going along with their daily business, until someone comes up to them and starts playing the devil’s advocate. The last thing you want to do around a brown bear is jauntily take a contrarian stance in order to challenge its preconceived notions. If you do this, the bear will feel as if he is being razzed within an inch of his life, and might decide to take you, and everyone you’re with, “to town” in the sense of killing you. Also, there is a common misconception that brown bears appreciate the art of a good psych-out. We cannot stress enough how untrue this is. Do not attempt to psych-out a brown bear by showing him a photo of what looks like a computer chip but turns out to be an aerial view of a city. This will cause him to turn into his most conflicted self.

If You See a Grizzly Bear

If you see a grizzly bear, the most important thing to remember is to not ride its nuts about anything. Like whether it’s foraged enough today. Or stuck its head out and growled in a terrifying manner. Or had a salmon jump into its mouth from a stream in a picturesque way. If it senses you’re riding its nuts about any of this stuff, it might just get up in arms and have a snack-attack with your body. We can’t stress this enough: if you see a Grizzly Bear, just give it the sense that it’s doing a great job, that it’s generally done “enough,” and that every decision it’s ever made has been the right one.

by Emma Rathbone, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: UIG via Getty
[ed. I'm in Alaska this week so thought I'd repost this. Actually, brown and grizzly bears are one and the same, except brown bears are found in coastal habitats and grizzlies further inland, so don't try to out-psych either one of them. Also (to be pedantic) black bears are black, but also cinnamon-colored, and even blue (glacier bears). So yeah, other than that, all this seems like good advice.]

Martin Grohs
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How the Elderly Lose Their Rights

For years, Rudy North woke up at 9 a.m. and read the Las Vegas Review-Journal while eating a piece of toast. Then he read a novel—he liked James Patterson and Clive Cussler—or, if he was feeling more ambitious, Freud. On scraps of paper and legal notepads, he jotted down thoughts sparked by his reading. “Deep below the rational part of our brain is an underground ocean where strange things swim,” he wrote on one notepad. On another, “Life: the longer it cooks, the better it tastes.”

Rennie, his wife of fifty-seven years, was slower to rise. She was recovering from lymphoma and suffered from neuropathy so severe that her legs felt like sausages. Each morning, she spent nearly an hour in the bathroom applying makeup and lotions, the same brands she’d used for forty years. She always emerged wearing pale-pink lipstick. Rudy, who was prone to grandiosity, liked to refer to her as “my amour.”

On the Friday before Labor Day, 2013, the Norths had just finished their toast when a nurse, who visited five times a week to help Rennie bathe and dress, came to their house, in Sun City Aliante, an “active adult” community in Las Vegas. They had moved there in 2005, when Rudy, a retired consultant for broadcasters, was sixty-eight and Rennie was sixty-six. They took pride in their view of the golf course, though neither of them played golf.

Rudy chatted with the nurse in the kitchen for twenty minutes, joking about marriage and laundry, until there was a knock at the door. A stocky woman with shiny black hair introduced herself as April Parks, the owner of the company A Private Professional Guardian. She was accompanied by three colleagues, who didn’t give their names. Parks told the Norths that she had an order from the Clark County Family Court to “remove” them from their home. She would be taking them to an assisted-living facility. “Go and gather your things,” she said.

Rennie began crying. “This is my home,” she said.

One of Parks’s colleagues said that if the Norths didn’t comply he would call the police. Rudy remembers thinking, You’re going to put my wife and me in jail for this? But he felt too confused to argue.

Parks drove a Pontiac G-6 convertible with a license plate that read “crtgrdn,” for “court guardian.” In the past twelve years, she had been a guardian for some four hundred wards of the court. Owing to age or disability, they had been deemed incompetent, a legal term that describes those who are unable to make reasoned choices about their lives or their property. As their guardian, Parks had the authority to manage their assets, and to choose where they lived, whom they associated with, and what medical treatment they received. They lost nearly all their civil rights.

Without realizing it, the Norths had become temporary wards of the court. Parks had filed an emergency ex-parte petition, which provides an exception to the rule that both parties must be notified of any argument before a judge. She had alleged that the Norths posed a “substantial risk for mismanagement of medications, financial loss and physical harm.” She submitted a brief letter from a physician’s assistant, whom Rennie had seen once, stating that “the patient’s husband can no longer effectively take care of the patient at home as his dementia is progressing.” She also submitted a letter from one of Rudy’s doctors, who described him as “confused and agitated.”

Rudy and Rennie had not undergone any cognitive assessments. They had never received a diagnosis of dementia. In addition to Freud, Rudy was working his way through Nietzsche and Plato. Rennie read romance novels.

Parks told the Norths that if they didn’t come willingly an ambulance would take them to the facility, a place she described as a “respite.” Still crying, Rennie put cosmetics and some clothes into a suitcase. She packed so quickly that she forgot her cell phone and Rudy’s hearing aid. After thirty-five minutes, Parks’s assistant led the Norths to her car. When a neighbor asked what was happening, Rudy told him, “We’ll just be gone for a little bit.” He was too proud to draw attention to their predicament. “Just think of it as a mini-vacation,” he told Rennie. (...)

The Norths’ daughter, Julie Belshe, came to visit later that afternoon. A fifty-three-year-old mother of three sons, she and her husband run a small business designing and constructing pools. She lived ten miles away and visited her parents nearly every day, often taking them to her youngest son’s football games. She was her parents’ only living child; her brother and sister had died.

She knocked on the front door several times and then tried to push the door open, but it was locked. She was surprised to see the kitchen window closed; her parents always left it slightly open. She drove to the Sun City Aliante clubhouse, where her parents sometimes drank coffee. When she couldn’t find them there, she thought that perhaps they had gone on an errand together—the farthest they usually drove was to Costco. But, when she returned to the house, it was still empty.

That weekend, she called her parents several times. She also called two hospitals to see if they had been in an accident. She called their landlord, too, and he agreed to visit the house. He reported that there were no signs of them. She told her husband, “I think someone kidnapped my parents.”

On the Tuesday after Labor Day, she drove to the house again and found a note taped to the door: “In case of emergency, contact guardian April Parks.” Belshe dialled the number. Parks, who had a brisk, girlish way of speaking, told Belshe that her parents had been taken to Lakeview Terrace, an assisted-living facility in Boulder City, nine miles from the Arizona border. She assured Belshe that the staff there would take care of all their needs.

“You can’t just walk into somebody’s home and take them!” Belshe told her.

Parks responded calmly, “It’s legal. It’s legal.” (...)

In the United States, a million and a half adults are under the care of guardians, either family members or professionals, who control some two hundred and seventy-three billion dollars in assets, according to an auditor for the guardianship fraud program in Palm Beach County. Little is known about the outcome of these arrangements, because states do not keep complete figures on guardianship cases—statutes vary widely—and, in most jurisdictions, the court records are sealed. A Government Accountability report from 2010 said, “We could not locate a single Web site, federal agency, state or local entity, or any other organization that compiles comprehensive information on this issue.” A study published this year by the American Bar Association found that “an unknown number of adults languish under guardianship” when they no longer need it, or never did. The authors wrote that “guardianship is generally “permanent, leaving no way out—‘until death do us part.’ ” (...)

In Nevada, as in many states, anyone can become a guardian by taking a course, as long as he or she has not been convicted of a felony or recently declared bankruptcy. Elizabeth Brickfield, a Las Vegas lawyer who has worked in guardianship law for twenty years, said that about fifteen years ago, as the state’s elderly population swelled, “all these private guardians started arriving, and the docket exploded. The court became a factory.”

Pamela Teaster, the director of the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech and one of the few scholars in the country who study guardianship, told me that, though most guardians assume their duties for good reasons, the guardianship system is “a morass, a total mess.” She said, “It is unconscionable that we don’t have any data, when you think about the vast power given to a guardian. It is one of society’s most drastic interventions.” (...)

The following month, Even Tide Life Transitions, a company that Parks often hired, sold most of the Norths’ belongings. “The general condition of this inventory is good,” an appraiser wrote. Two lithographs by Renoir were priced at thirty-eight hundred dollars, and a glass cocktail table (“Client states that it is a Brancusi design”) was twelve hundred and fifty dollars. The Norths also had several pastel drawings by their son, Randy, who died in a motorcycle accident at the age of thirty-two, as well as Kachina dolls, a Bose radio, a Dyson vacuum cleaner, a Peruvian tapestry, a motion-step exerciser, a LeRoy Neiman sketch of a bar in Dublin, and two dozen pairs of Clarke shoes. According to Parks’s calculations, the Norths had roughly fifty thousand dollars. Parks transferred their savings, held at the Bank of America, to an account in her name.

by Rachel Aviv, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Anna Parini

Kazuo Ishiguro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature 2017

Kazuo Ishiguro wins the Nobel prize in literature 2017

"I was very consciously trying to write for an international audience,"Kazuo Ishiguro says of The Remains of the Day in his Paris Review interview ("The Art of Fiction," No. 196). "One of the ways I thought I could do this was to take a myth of England that was known internationally – in this case, the English butler."  (...)

The surface of The Remains of the Day is almost perfectly still. Stevens, a butler well past his prime, is on a week's motoring holiday in the West Country. He tootles around, taking in the sights and encountering a series of green-and-pleasant country folk who seem to have escaped from one of those English films of the 1950s in which the lower orders doff their caps and behave with respect towards a gent with properly creased trousers and flattened vowels. (...)

Nothing much happens. The high point of Mr Stevens's little outing is his visit to Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, the great house to which Stevens is still attached as "part of the package", even though ownership has passed from Lord Darlington to a jovial American named Farraday who has a disconcerting tendency to banter. Stevens hopes to persuade Miss Kenton to return to the hall. His hopes come to nothing. He makes his way home. Tiny events; but why, then, is the ageing manservant to be found, near the end of his holiday, weeping before a complete stranger on the pier at Weymouth? Why, when the stranger tells him that he ought to put his feet up and enjoy the evening of his life, is it so hard for Stevens to accept such sensible, if banal, advice? What has blighted the remains of his day?

Just below the understatement of the novel's surface is a turbulence as immense as it is slow; for The Remains of the Day is in fact a brilliant subversion of the fictional modes from which it seems at first to descend. Death, change, pain and evil invade the innocent Wodehouse-world. (In Wodehouse, even the Oswald Mosley-like Roderick Spode of the Black Shorts movement, as close to an evil character as that author ever created, is rendered comically pathetic by "swanking about," as Bertie says, "in footer bags.") The time-hallowed bonds between master and servant, and the codes by which both live, are no longer dependable absolutes but rather sources of ruinous self-deceptions; even the happy yokels Stevens meets on his travels turn out to stand for the post-war values of democracy and individual and collective rights which have turned Stevens and his kind into tragicomic anachronisms. "You can't have dignity if you're a slave," the butler is informed in a Devon cottage, but for Stevens, dignity has always meant the subjugation of the self to the job, and of his destiny to his master's. What then is our true relationship to power? Are we its servants or its possessors? It is the rare achievement of Ishiguro's novel to pose big questions – what is Englishness? What is greatness? What is dignity? – with a delicacy and humour that do not obscure the tough-mindedness beneath.

The real story here is that of a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life. Stevens is much preoccupied by "greatness", which, for him, means something very like restraint. The greatness of the British landscape lies, he believes, in its lack of the "unseemly demonstrativeness" of African and American scenery. It was his father, also a butler, who epitomised this idea of greatness; yet it was just this notion which stood between father and son, breeding deep resentments and an inarticulacy of the emotions that destroyed their love.

In Stevens's view, greatness in a butler "has to do crucially with the butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits". This is linked to Englishness. Continentals and Celts do not make good butlers because of their tendency to "run about screaming" at the slightest provocation. Yet it is Stevens's longing for this kind of "greatness" that has wrecked his one chance of finding romantic love. Hiding within his rôle, he long ago drove Miss Kenton away into the arms of another man. "Why, why, why do you always have to pretend?" she asks him in despair, revealing his greatness to be a mask, a cowardice, a lie.

Stevens's greatest defeat is the consequence of his most profound conviction - that his master is working for the good of humanity, and that his own glory lies in serving him. But Lord Darlington is, and is finally disgraced as, a Nazi collaborator and dupe. Stevens, a cut-price St Peter, denies him at least twice, but feels forever tainted by his master's fall. Darlington, like Stevens, is destroyed by a personal code of ethics. His disapproval of the ungentlemanly harshness towards the Germans of the Treaty of Versailles is what propels him towards his collaborationist doom. Ideals, Ishiguro shows us, can corrupt as thoroughly as cynicism.

by Salman Rushdie, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Remains of the Day
[ed. Repost. One of my favorite authors so I'm delighted to see him get this recognition. See also: Sealed in a World That's Not What as It Seems (Never Let Me Go) and Kazuo Ishiguro: Nobel prize winner and a novelist for all times. Also, this short story: A Village After Dark]

Anton Van Hertbruggen
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Taking Up Smoking at the End of the World

I started smoking this year. In Berlin, where I lived before recently returning to New York, almost everyone seems to smoke, almost everywhere, almost all the time. It’s like a 1970s game show, but in German and with better hair.

It wasn’t the ubiquity of smoking that sold me as much as the opportunity to become excellent at rolling cigarettes — a simple task that is wildly impressive when done well. The most practiced rollers can assemble a factory-grade filtered cigarette in about ten seconds, packing it casually against a thumbnail while your own attempt looks like a slightly crumpled, pregnant snake, leaking tobacco from both ends.

I’ve watched Berliners roll cigarettes walking, standing up in a moving subway car, and even once while biking through traffic on Karl-Marx-Straße. A German friend claimed her father could roll a cigarette inside his pants pocket, which, bullshit or not, puts the bar for trick-rolling higher than I can even imagine.

Aside from being a cheap way to smoke — about €5 for a bag of decent rolling tobacco, plus €1 each for filters and rolling paper — it’s an excellent sideline for fidgeters, people like me who can’t help but curl straw wrappers into intricate fiddleheads, or peel the label off their beer bottle to fold origami fortune tellers. Cigarette rolling is a mini-craft project unto itself, repeatable and perfectible. I probably enjoy rolling cigarettes even more than I enjoy smoking them.

I don’t mean to be flip about the health hazards of smoking, which are illustrated in full color on every side of every tobacco product I’ve ever purchased, and rattled off by every serious smoker I’ve ever talked to about it. I was born in America in 1989; the only thing I know about smoking is that it’s bad for me.

My aunt Sid once said to me, lighting a cigarette, that if I ever started smoking she would beat me. That she was 60 years old and 90 pounds soaking wet should have underscored how serious she was. Sid is the last of the smokers in my mother’s family, the rest either died or quit. My great-grandmother Eunice, a champion needlepointer with an Elaine Stritch vibe, smoked until she died at 94 in Boca Raton. Eunice married rich after her first husband died, and lived the third act of her life in mink coats and diamond cluster rings. Even from her wheelchair, she spoke as if from a gilded litter, a cigarette her constant, smouldering accessory, two knotty fingers in a nicotine benediction. Still, she claimed never to inhale, which, if true, seems more than anything like a waste of cigarettes. (...)

Germans’ relationship to smoking has always seemed to me in conflict with their country’s place at the forefront of the global economy — a false dichotomy born of an early-1990s anti-drug moralism that hasn’t quite held water for me as an adult. Democratic socialism, leaders of the free world, sure — but they smoke?

Perhaps Europeans are, ironically, more temperate than their prudish American cousins, or at least more tolerant. But they appear, from an American outsider’s perspective, to be both more serious (rolling their own cigarettes, smoking in the kitchen), and less committed; they go days without smoking, only to roll and smoke a pack between Friday night and when they leave the club Sunday morning. No one says much about smoking, except to ask for an ashtray, and it manages to be, for an American, shockingly ordinary. Fabric pouches designed for carrying rolling tobacco, papers, and filters are a staple of twee urban flea markets, alongside tote bags, screen-printed tank tops, and €27 votive candles. German iterations of Pottery Barn and Bed Bath & Beyond carry ashtrays in fun seasonal colors. The opportunity to accessorize a habit can be as addictive as the substance itself, as the casual smoking wares of Berliners attest.

My own smoking has so far been more aesthetic than habitual — and to that end, more Marlene Dietrich than Marlboro Man. I always sit to smoke, which I find allows for the indulgent drama I require to excuse myself of such obviously unhealthy behavior. If I’m going to harm myself, I insist on doing so leisurely. I’ve taken on smoking as an almost entirely aesthetic endeavor: I bought a black enamel cigarette holder — an extreme, unnecessary affectation that only makes my habit feel, or at least look, glorious. With a cup of coffee or a glass of wine I’m perfectly staged, slouched in a chair on a deck or a balcony, watching the bluish smoke swirl around the ashy bud waxing along the length of white paper containing it. The trouble is that smoking feels great; thinking about it is what feels shitty. (...)

Last November, six time zones away from nearly everyone I knew, I watched the U.S. election results roll in, alone in my Berlin apartment, in a building in a city where the winter sun sets at 4 p.m. In the aftermath of uncertainty and anger, a glass of wine and a cigarette became a perpetual last meal, a requiem from the deck of the Titanic before a continually refreshed Twitter feed.

Hope is difficult to grasp even in the abstract, facing down as we must the proud evil of everyday life just by keeping up-to-date. Beyond the cartoonishly sinister dismantling of American democracy, near-daily news of terrorist attacks, mass shootings, climate disasters ongoing and foretold, and threats of mutual nuclear annihilation at the twitchy red-button fingers of weaponized child-men makes any future seem less than a foregone conclusion. What’s a cigarette, if we could all be dead tomorrow?

This year, my American friends quit drinking, did cleanses, took up yoga, and cut out dairy, gluten, and coffee, all in pursuit of health and stability. Find you a man who talks about you the way a person who’s stopped drinking milk talks about their bowel movements. I, meanwhile, have winnowed my diet to pasta, street food, and corrective leafy greens; I have no health insurance and have settled on self-medicating with marijuana as a mood stabilizer and nicotine to alleviate anxiety. I am headed steadfastly upstream against a current of body-wokeness.

A fellow exception to this trend is my boyfriend, who has smoked on and off since college. In fact his habit is the reason we met — in college he kept walking by my table in the student center for smoke breaks. Now that smoking is a shared vice, it’s also become alone time for us together. At the end of a day we pour ourselves some wine and light up in the late-night privacy of our bad habit, thick as thieves.

Jogging in the face of tyranny is a uniquely American solution to a uniquely American crisis. If we can just control our own bodies enough — detox; cleanse; cut out sugar, or gluten, or dairy, or egg yolks; join a boutique gym — we can survive a toxic society. A pioneer faith in individual destiny underpins many of America’s larger problems, from lack of universal healthcare to underfunded social welfare programs, wrongly imagining both success and failure as individual achievements. America has treated our current nightmare as just that — a state from which we’ll soon wake up, out of which we can pivot, by sheer force of individual good behavior. Europe, and Germany in particular, can afford no such belief in insurmountable decency, having witnessed — and dealt with honestly — human depravity on its very soil.

This is bus-crash logic: the fatalism of knowing life’s fragility. Why buy a house if its value will be under water in five years? Why invest if the next crash is around the corner, and no one responsible will be made to answer for it? I relayed this line of thinking to a friend — an uncorrupted nonsmoker — who asked, “So, Donald Trump made you start smoking?” Not exactly, but the fact of such a man in such a job makes the future a dim prospect. A long list of grim realities makes planning for anything feel like picking out curtains for a house I can’t afford: the systemic depravity of politics, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, any industry that starts with “Big,” the police; endless wars in countries most Americans cannot spell or find; and dire economic predictions for my entire generation. Pleasure is the only certainty. I can hardly think of a better time to start seriously smoking than this year, right now, today.

My casual attitude is due at least in part to my lack of up-close exposure to the long-term effects of smoking — Great-Grandma Eunice didn’t die of lung cancer, and Aunt Sid is still fit enough to beat me, probably. But bus-crash logic has its virtues: it unshackles pleasure from rationality, lets you stay at the bar with your friends for one more drink even though you have to be up early, buy a concert ticket you can’t quite afford, live for the sake of a joy that can’t be quantified.

by John Sherman, Longreads |  Read more:

Image: Getty

The Long Haul

Loveland Pass, Colorado, on US Route 6 summits at 11,991 feet. That’s where I’m headed, having decided to skip the congestion at the Eisenhower Tunnel. Going up a steep grade is never as bad as going down, though negotiating thirty-five tons of tractor-trailer around the hairpin turns is a bit of a challenge. I have to use both lanes to keep my 53-foot trailer clear of the ditches on the right side and hope nobody coming down is sending a text or sightseeing.

At the top of the pass, high up in my Freightliner Columbia tractor pulling a spanking-new, fully loaded custom moving van, I reckon I can say I’m at an even 12,000 feet. When I look down, the world disappears into a miasma of fog and wind and snow, even though it’s July. The road signs are clear enough, though— the first one says runaway truck ramp 1.5 miles. Next one: speed limit 35 mph for vehicles with gross weight over 26,000 lbs. Next one: are your brakes cool and adjusted? Next one: all commercial vehicles are required to carry chains september 1—may 31. I run through the checklist in my mind. Let’s see: 1.5 miles to the runaway ramp is too far to do me any good if the worst happens, and 35 miles per hour sounds really fast. My brakes are cool, but adjusted? I hope so, but no mechanic signs off on brake adjustments in these litigious days. Chains? I have chains in my equipment compartment, required or not, but they won’t save my life sitting where they are. Besides, I figure the bad weather will last for only the first thousand feet. The practical aspects of putting on chains in a snowstorm, with no pullover spot, in pitch dark, at 12,000 feet, in a gale, and wearing only a T-shirt, is a prospect Dante never considered in enumerating his circles of hell. The other option is to keep rolling—maybe I’ll be crushed by my truck at the bottom of a scree field, maybe I won’t. I roll.

I can feel the sweat running down my arms, can feel my hands shaking, can taste the bile rising in my throat from the greasy burger I ate at the Idaho Springs Carl’s Jr. (It was the only place with truck parking.) I’ve got 8.6 miles of 6.7 percent downhill grade ahead of me that has taken more trucks and lives than I care to think about. The road surface is a mix of rain, slush, and (probably) ice. I’m one blown air hose away from oblivion, but I’m not ready to peg out in a ball of flame or take out a family in a four-wheeler coming to the Rocky Mountains to see the sights.

I downshift my thirteen-speed transmission to fifth gear, slow to 23 mph, and set my Jake brake to all eight cylinders. A Jake brake is an air-compression inhibitor that turns my engine into the primary braking system. It sounds like a machine gun beneath my feet as it works to keep 70,000 pounds of steel and rubber under control. I watch the tachometer, which tells me my engine speed, and when it redlines at 2,200 rpm I’m at 28 mph. I brush the brakes to bring her back down to 23. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen now. My tender touch might cause the heavy trailer to slide away and I’ll be able to read the logo in reverse legend from my mirrors. It’s called a jackknife. Once it starts, you can’t stop it. In a jackknife the trailer comes all the way around, takes both lanes, and crushes against the cab until the whole thing comes to a crashing stop at the bottom of the abyss or against the granite side of the Rockies.

It doesn’t happen, this time, but the weather’s getting worse. I hit 28 again, caress the brake back down to 23, and start the sequence again. Fondle the brake, watch the mirrors, feel the machine, check the tach, listen to the Jake, and watch the air pressure. The air gauge read 120 psi at the summit; now it reads 80. At 60 an alarm will go off, and at 40 the brakes will automatically lock or just give up. Never mind that now, just don’t go past 28 and keep coaxing her back down to 23. I’ll do this twenty or thirty times over the next half an hour, never knowing if the trailer will hit a bit of ice, the air compressor will give up, the Jake will disengage, or someone will slam on the brakes in front of me. My CB radio is on (I usually turn it off on mountain passes), and I can hear the commentary from the big-truck drivers behind me.

“Yo, Joyce Van Lines, first time in the mountains? Get the fuck off the road! I can’t make any money at fifteen miles an hour!” “Yo, Joyce, you from Connecticut? Is that in the Yewnited States? Pull into the fuckin’ runaway ramp, asshole, and let some
men drive.”

“Yo, Joyce, I can smell the mess in your pants from inside my cab.”

I’ve heard this patter many times on big-mountain roads. I’m not entirely impervious to the contempt of the freighthauling cowboys.

Toward the bottom, on the straightaway, they all pass me. There’s a Groendyke pulling gasoline, a tandem FedEx Ground, and a single Walmart. They’re all doing about 50 and sound their air horns as they pass, no doubt flipping me the bird. I’m guessing at that because I’m looking at the road. I’ll see them all later, when they’ll be completely blind to the irony that we’re all here at the same time drinking the same coffee. Somehow, I’ve cost them time and money going down the hill. It’s a macho thing. Drive the hills as fast as you can and be damn sure to humiliate any sonofabitch who’s got brains enough to respect the mountains.

My destination is the ultrarich haven called Aspen, Colorado. This makes perfect sense because I’m a long-haul mover at the pinnacle of the game, a specialist. I can make $250,000 a year doing what is called high-end executive relocation. No U-Hauls for me, thank you very much. I’ll take the movie stars, the ambassadors, the corporate bigwigs. At the office in Connecticut they call me the Great White Mover. This Aspen load, insured for $3 million, belongs to a former investment banker from a former investment bank who apparently escaped the toppled citadel with his personal loot intact. My cargo consists of a dozen or so crated modern art canvases, eight 600-pound granite gravestones of Qing Dynasty emperors, half a dozen king-size pillow-top beds I’ll never figure out how to assemble, and an assortment of Edwardian antiques. The man I’m moving, known in the trade as the shipper, has purchased a $25 million starter castle in a hypersecure Aspen subdivision. He figures, no doubt accurately, he’ll be safe behind the security booth from the impecunious widows and mendacious foreign creditors he ripped off, but I digress.

I’m looking downhill for brake lights. I can probably slow down, but there’s no chance of coming to a quick stop. If I slam on the brakes I’ll either crash through the vehicle in front of me or go over the side. I want to smoke a cigarette, but I’m so wound up I could never light it, so I bite off what’s left of my fingernails. I’m fifty-eight years old, and I’ve been doing this off and on since the late 1970s. I’ve seen too many trucks mashed on the side of the road, too many accidents, and too many spaced out-drivers. On Interstate 80 in Wyoming I watched a truck in front of me get blown over onto its side in a windstorm. He must have been empty. On I-10 in Arizona I saw a state trooper open the driver door of a car and witnessed a river of blood pour out onto the road.

The blood soaking into the pavement could be mine at any moment. All it takes is an instant of bad luck, inattention, a poor decision, equipment failure—or, most likely, someone else’s mistake.

If any of those things happen, I’m a dead man.

Those loud but lowly freighthaulers up on Loveland Pass would have mocked any big-truck driver going downhill as slowly as I was, but I’ve no doubt they were particularly offended because I was driving a moving van. To the casual observer all trucks probably look similar, and I suppose people figure all truckers do pretty much the same job. Neither is true. There’s a strict hierarchy of drivers, depending on what they haul and how they’re paid. The most common are the freighthaulers. They’re the guys who pull box trailers with any kind of commodity inside. We movers are called bedbuggers, and our trucks are called roach coaches. Other specialties are the car haulers (parking lot attendants), flatbedders (skateboarders), animal transporters (chicken chokers), refrigerated food haulers (reefers), chemical haulers (thermos bottle holders), and hazmat haulers (suicide jockeys). Bedbuggers are shunned by other truckers. We will generally not be included in conversations around the truckstop coffee counter or in the driver’s lounge. In fact, I pointedly avoid coffee counters, when there is one, mainly because I don’t have time to waste, but also because I don’t buy into the trucker myth that most drivers espouse. I don’t wear a cowboy hat, Tony Lama snakeskin boots, or a belt buckle doing free advertising for Peterbilt or Harley-Davidson. My driving uniform is a three-button company polo shirt, lightweight black cotton pants, black sneakers, black socks, and a cloth belt. My moving uniform is a black cotton jumpsuit.

I’m not from the South and don’t talk as if I were. Most telling, and the other guys can sense this somehow, I do not for a moment think I’m a symbol of some bygone ideal of Wild West American freedom or any other half-mythic, half-menacing nugget of folk nonsense.

Putting myth and hierarchy aside, I will admit to being immensely proud of my truck-driving skills, the real freedom I do have, and the certain knowledge that I make more money in a month than many of the guys around the coffee counter make in a year. The freighthaulers all know this, of course, and that’s one reason bedbuggers aren’t part of the brotherhood. It even trickles down to waitresses and cashiers. A mover waits longer for coffee, longer in the service bays, longer for showers, longer at the fuel desk, longer everywhere in the world of trucks than the freighthauler. It’s because we’re unknown. We don’t have standard routes, so we can’t be relied on for the pie slice and the big tip every Tuesday at ten thirty. We’re OK with being outside the fellowship because we know we’re at the apex of the pyramid. In or out of the trucking world, there are very few people who have what it takes to be a long-haul mover.

A typical day may have me in a leafy suburban cul-de-sac where landscapers have trouble operating a riding lawn mower, much less a 70-foot tractor-trailer. Another day may put me in the West Village of Manhattan navigating one-way streets laid out in the eighteenth century. Long-haul movers don’t live in the rarified world of broad interstate highways with sixty-acre terminals purpose-built for large vehicles. We’ve got to know how to back up just as well blind-side as driver-side; we’ve got to know to the millimeter how close we can U-turn the rig; and we’ve really got to know that when we go in somewhere we can get out again. A mundane morning’s backup into a residence for a mover will often require more skill, finesse, and balls than most freighthaulers might call upon in a year.

Since I now work for a boutique van line doing high-end executive moves, all of my work is what we call pack and load. That means I’m responsible for the job from beginning to end. My crew and I will pack every carton and load every piece. On a full-service pack and load, the shipper will do nothing. I had one last summer that was more or less typical: The shipper was a mining executive moving from Connecticut to Vancouver. I showed up in the morning with my crew of five veteran movers; the shipper said hello, finished his coffee, loaded his family into a limousine, and left for the airport. My crew then washed the breakfast dishes and spent the next seventeen hours packing everything in the house into cartons and loading the truck. At destination, another crew unpacked all the cartons and placed everything where the shipper wanted it, including dishes and stemware back into the breakfront. We even made the beds. We’re paid to do all this, of course, and this guy’s move cost his company $60,000. That move filled up my entire trailer and included his car. It was all I could do to fit the whole load on without leaving anything behind, but I managed it. I do remember having to put a stack of pads and a couple of dollies in my sleeper, though.

How well a truck is loaded is the acid test of a mover. I can look at any driver’s load and tell at a glance if he’s any good at all.

by Finn Murphy, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Getty