Tuesday, December 26, 2017
The Difficulty is the Point
I’ve recently finished marking 40-odd exams, mostly written by people between the ages of 18 and 21. In them our students had to answer questions about aspects of literature, such as free indirect speech or genre. They also had to write an essay of 1,000 words, on the work of Helen Garner, Christos Tsiolkas, Judith Wright, Jack Davis or Tim Winton.
My students are, for the most part, education students who live in regional Australia. If they get their degree, they are bound for early childhood centres, preschools, primary schools, high schools. These are our new teachers. (...)
I find myself pausing here, to wonder why I am writing this essay. I have two burning concerns: one is to give readers an insight into what it is currently like to teach at an Australian university. To satisfy this concern I want to tell you about semesters and classes shortened to save money on teaching; on passing incapable students simply to keep quotas up; on teaching students for whom attendance at university is no longer a necessary part of gaining a degree. This loops back to the idea of the university as business. Asking universities to stop making it easy for students to gain entrance, and making it easy for them to pass, is like asking Coca-Cola to slow down its sales. The logic of capitalism overrides everything.
The second concern is more abstract. I want to tell you about what it is like to teach literature to habituated non-readers, and why it is worth it.
Possibly the single most important component of English One is compulsory attendance. Again, if you have little to do with tertiary education you may not know this: that most universities no longer make attendance at tutorials and lectures compulsory. At other universities and in other subjects I have had to pass students who have attended no classes at all. Not distance or online students: internal students who live not far from campus. Some non-attendees do not learn enough to pass their subject; their non-attendance bites them on the arse, we fail them, everyone moves on. But many are able to access just enough information about the course to pass. And no one can say a word about the fact that they never came to class.
Spoon-fed, I hear you say? Don’t make me laugh. This is a feast of force-feeding, a Roman orgy of information and assistance, with students helpless and lolling while academics assist them in opening their mouths so the food can be tipped in, and then hold their jaws and help them masticate until it goes down. We keep asking ourselves why this generation are so anxious. They are anxious because nobody lets them do things alone: we intervene before they have had a chance to try, let alone succeed or fail. They never get to feel the limits, or the limitlessness, of their real selves.
But in English One, students are only allowed to miss two classes without a documented explanation. Not only that, but if they don’t pass the subject – they are allowed two attempts at this – they cannot take their literacy test, and they cannot receive their degree. I can’t tell you the difference this makes in a classroom. As a teacher, you feel traction: you feel as though you are doing something worthwhile. These students need you, and they must learn what you have to teach.
The first assignment in English One is called a Reading Reflection. It asks students to write about their reading habits: how often they read, what they read, what they feel they take from their reading.
What have our students been reading before they come to our class? Some – a very few, and almost always women – have read 19th century classics: the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens. Some – a very few, and almost always men – have read 20th century science fiction (Asimov and his ilk), and some of the Beats and their offspring: Kerouac, Bukowski, Burroughs.
The next and much larger group have read The Hunger Games, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, some or all of the Harry Potter series, and a lot of autobiographies, either by sportsmen (the men) or by women who have been held in dungeons for years by rapists (the women).
The final group, about the same size as the group of Hunger Games readers, read their and their friends’ Facebook pages, their own news feed, and the occasional copy of a women’s or a men’s magazine. None, unless they have been made to by their high school English teacher, has read anything by an Australian author.
The first time I taught Monkey Grip in English One I was struck by two things. First, by how many of my students were offended by it. They found it too sexually explicit, too full of “profanity”, and they deplored Norah’s method of parenting: the shared household, the children exposed to drug taking and other radical behaviours.
The second thing that struck me was how difficult my students found the 10-page extract. They didn’t know who Helen Garner was, the 1970s were too far away to mean anything to them, and they couldn’t locate themselves in the story. They didn’t know who was speaking, and who she was speaking to. How old was she, where was she, what was happening?
Here is the book’s opening sentence:
But if you have never read anything more difficult than a Harry Potter book, how are you meant to proceed?
by Tegan Bennett Daylight, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: uncredited
My students are, for the most part, education students who live in regional Australia. If they get their degree, they are bound for early childhood centres, preschools, primary schools, high schools. These are our new teachers. (...)
I find myself pausing here, to wonder why I am writing this essay. I have two burning concerns: one is to give readers an insight into what it is currently like to teach at an Australian university. To satisfy this concern I want to tell you about semesters and classes shortened to save money on teaching; on passing incapable students simply to keep quotas up; on teaching students for whom attendance at university is no longer a necessary part of gaining a degree. This loops back to the idea of the university as business. Asking universities to stop making it easy for students to gain entrance, and making it easy for them to pass, is like asking Coca-Cola to slow down its sales. The logic of capitalism overrides everything.
The second concern is more abstract. I want to tell you about what it is like to teach literature to habituated non-readers, and why it is worth it.
Possibly the single most important component of English One is compulsory attendance. Again, if you have little to do with tertiary education you may not know this: that most universities no longer make attendance at tutorials and lectures compulsory. At other universities and in other subjects I have had to pass students who have attended no classes at all. Not distance or online students: internal students who live not far from campus. Some non-attendees do not learn enough to pass their subject; their non-attendance bites them on the arse, we fail them, everyone moves on. But many are able to access just enough information about the course to pass. And no one can say a word about the fact that they never came to class.Spoon-fed, I hear you say? Don’t make me laugh. This is a feast of force-feeding, a Roman orgy of information and assistance, with students helpless and lolling while academics assist them in opening their mouths so the food can be tipped in, and then hold their jaws and help them masticate until it goes down. We keep asking ourselves why this generation are so anxious. They are anxious because nobody lets them do things alone: we intervene before they have had a chance to try, let alone succeed or fail. They never get to feel the limits, or the limitlessness, of their real selves.
But in English One, students are only allowed to miss two classes without a documented explanation. Not only that, but if they don’t pass the subject – they are allowed two attempts at this – they cannot take their literacy test, and they cannot receive their degree. I can’t tell you the difference this makes in a classroom. As a teacher, you feel traction: you feel as though you are doing something worthwhile. These students need you, and they must learn what you have to teach.
The first assignment in English One is called a Reading Reflection. It asks students to write about their reading habits: how often they read, what they read, what they feel they take from their reading.
What have our students been reading before they come to our class? Some – a very few, and almost always women – have read 19th century classics: the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens. Some – a very few, and almost always men – have read 20th century science fiction (Asimov and his ilk), and some of the Beats and their offspring: Kerouac, Bukowski, Burroughs.
The next and much larger group have read The Hunger Games, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, some or all of the Harry Potter series, and a lot of autobiographies, either by sportsmen (the men) or by women who have been held in dungeons for years by rapists (the women).
The final group, about the same size as the group of Hunger Games readers, read their and their friends’ Facebook pages, their own news feed, and the occasional copy of a women’s or a men’s magazine. None, unless they have been made to by their high school English teacher, has read anything by an Australian author.
The first time I taught Monkey Grip in English One I was struck by two things. First, by how many of my students were offended by it. They found it too sexually explicit, too full of “profanity”, and they deplored Norah’s method of parenting: the shared household, the children exposed to drug taking and other radical behaviours.
The second thing that struck me was how difficult my students found the 10-page extract. They didn’t know who Helen Garner was, the 1970s were too far away to mean anything to them, and they couldn’t locate themselves in the story. They didn’t know who was speaking, and who she was speaking to. How old was she, where was she, what was happening?
Here is the book’s opening sentence:
In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives.If you are reading this essay, you’re a reader. You probably know this sentence, and if you don’t, you are comfortable with interpreting it. You can hear a character beginning to form: its romantic, optimistic, nostalgic voice; a voice yearning for simplicity; probably, in its deliberate imitation of a child’s singsong, the voice of a woman, a mother. You know it might take a few pages to learn just who this woman is. You’re skilled in this sort of patience.
But if you have never read anything more difficult than a Harry Potter book, how are you meant to proceed?
by Tegan Bennett Daylight, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Amid Sales Drop, Harley-Davidson Wants to Teach More People to Ride
Harley-Davidson is placing a renewed emphasis on teaching people to ride as part of its efforts to attract more customers.
The Milwaukee-based company's decision to expand the number of dealerships with a Harley "Riding Academy" comes as the industry grapples with years of declining sales and an aging customer base.
The program launched in 2000 with about 50 locations and now 245 dealerships in the U.S. offer the three- or four-day course. The company says about a quarter of those launched since 2014.
Harley sold 124,777 new motorcycles through nine months in 2017, down from 135,581 during the same period the previous year, according to the company's most recent earnings report.
The Motorcycle Industry Council says the median age of motorcycle owners increased from 32 to 47 since 1990. About 46 percent of riders are over 50; only about 10 percent are 30-34.
Samantha Kay rode on the back of her father's motorcycle growing up, but when the 25-year-old took a class to ride for the first time she couldn't help being anxious.
"I think motorcycles inherently do scare a lot of people," said Kay, a Milwaukee woman who is one of 50,000 people nationwide who took a riding course at a Harley-Davidson dealership this year.
The training is one of the ways Harley is trying to attract a new generation of riders like Kay amid big demographic shifts.
"Some of the aging Baby Boomers, which have been the guts of Harley-Davidson's purchasers, they're getting older and some of them are just getting out of the sport because they can't handle the motorcycle anymore," said Clyde Fessler, who retired from Harley-Davidson in 2002 after holding several executive positions over 25 years. He created what became the "Riding Academy."
He said the idea "is getting people comfortable on a motorcycle and getting them to feel safe and confident."
In addition to riders getting older, a slow economic recovery has made it harder for millennials to buy new motorcycles, said Jim Williams, vice president of the American Motorcyclist Association.
Among the newest models, a 2018 Softail Slim starts at $15,899 and a 2018 Sportster Forty-Eight at $11,299.
"The younger generations are buying plenty of motorcycles, they're just not new," Williams said.
But it's not all the millennials' fault, said Robert Pandya, who managed public relations for Indian Motorcycles and Victory Motorcycles. Pandya recently launched "Give A Shift," a volunteer group discussing ideas to promote motorcycling. One of their conclusions, he said, is the idea that "if mom rides, the kids will ride."
Currently, women are about 14 percent of the riding population, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council.
"The biggest possible opportunity in motorcycling is to invite more women to ride," he said.
The Milwaukee-based company's decision to expand the number of dealerships with a Harley "Riding Academy" comes as the industry grapples with years of declining sales and an aging customer base.
The program launched in 2000 with about 50 locations and now 245 dealerships in the U.S. offer the three- or four-day course. The company says about a quarter of those launched since 2014.Harley sold 124,777 new motorcycles through nine months in 2017, down from 135,581 during the same period the previous year, according to the company's most recent earnings report.
The Motorcycle Industry Council says the median age of motorcycle owners increased from 32 to 47 since 1990. About 46 percent of riders are over 50; only about 10 percent are 30-34.
Samantha Kay rode on the back of her father's motorcycle growing up, but when the 25-year-old took a class to ride for the first time she couldn't help being anxious.
"I think motorcycles inherently do scare a lot of people," said Kay, a Milwaukee woman who is one of 50,000 people nationwide who took a riding course at a Harley-Davidson dealership this year.
The training is one of the ways Harley is trying to attract a new generation of riders like Kay amid big demographic shifts.
"Some of the aging Baby Boomers, which have been the guts of Harley-Davidson's purchasers, they're getting older and some of them are just getting out of the sport because they can't handle the motorcycle anymore," said Clyde Fessler, who retired from Harley-Davidson in 2002 after holding several executive positions over 25 years. He created what became the "Riding Academy."
He said the idea "is getting people comfortable on a motorcycle and getting them to feel safe and confident."
In addition to riders getting older, a slow economic recovery has made it harder for millennials to buy new motorcycles, said Jim Williams, vice president of the American Motorcyclist Association.
Among the newest models, a 2018 Softail Slim starts at $15,899 and a 2018 Sportster Forty-Eight at $11,299.
"The younger generations are buying plenty of motorcycles, they're just not new," Williams said.
But it's not all the millennials' fault, said Robert Pandya, who managed public relations for Indian Motorcycles and Victory Motorcycles. Pandya recently launched "Give A Shift," a volunteer group discussing ideas to promote motorcycling. One of their conclusions, he said, is the idea that "if mom rides, the kids will ride."
Currently, women are about 14 percent of the riding population, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council.
"The biggest possible opportunity in motorcycling is to invite more women to ride," he said.
by Ivan Moreno, AP | Read more:
Image: AP
[ed. Yeah, blame it on boomers, millennials - and women; just my opinion, but Harley's troubles go way beyond those easy targets. I keep seeing articles like this every couple of years. Maybe it's as simple as this: no one wants to ride big hogs anymore. I have a couple friends who sold theirs for smaller, nimbler bikes and couldn't be happier. Also, you don't need Harley to teach you how to ride, just sign up for a basic MSF (Motorcycle Safety Foundation) course. They're everywhere (and only cost about $125, or so). ]
The Surprising History (and Future) of Paperweights
On a Friday night this spring, I reported to the inaugural show at Fisher Parrish Gallery, in Bushwick. Some awfully cool looking folks were packed into the small white space. The table was laid with 117 new examples of paperweights. Almost none of them resembled the office accoutrement of last century, when open windows and fans sent paper sailing through reeking cigarette fog. These were objet d’art. They ranged from the purely ironic (a furry outgrowth) to the purely beautiful (chain links encrusted in sherbet crystals). Many were ineffable abstracts, and a few were just satisfying (animal figurines drilled into each other). “My life doesn’t justify a paperweight,” a girlfriend remarked. “My life isn’t settled enough. You don’t buy one until you think you’re not going to move.”
Paperweights had never struck me as markers of stability. But a month later, when I was laid off from the legacy media company where I worked for a print magazine, I surveyed my desk, picked up a stack of our branded notepads and a handle of whiskey and thought, At least I don’t have to lug no paperweight.
Then Saturday came without Saturday’s feel. In a vintage shop, I drifted from taxidermy pheasants to a shelf staged with dusted curio, and there was a Murano blown-glass paperweight. At its center, the softball-size bubble had a clear tubular ring, inside of which was a clear finial shape from which streaks of red sprayed in arches at 360 degrees. The thing was maybe five pounds? My fiancé found me cradling it to my heart. “You’re going to bring that home, aren’t you,” he said, meaning: Did my foolhardy troth to paper in the age of new media know no bounds? The paperweight seemed to englobe our opposed perspectives: he thought it looked like a nasty vortex; I thought it looked like a wine fountain. (...)
In the late forties, Jean Cocteau arranged for a young Truman Capote to have tea with Colette at her apartment in Paris. They did not manage to discuss literature; instead, Capote was moonstruck by the Frenchwoman’s collection of valuable antique paperweights, which she called “my snowflakes”:
At home, my weight immediately found its use. When you are a paperweight, you have one job, and it is so easy. In theory, any lousy rock could do it: be heavy (glass, crystal, marble, brass, and bronze have been standard issue), be flat-bottomed (spheres, pyramids, cubes, and discs tend not to topple), and sit pretty (on this last point, common geology would fail). If you can do that, you are doing great. Layoffs still involve paperwork, which, once printed, generally has to get notarized and posted; such documents can stagnate on your desk, along with odd to-do lists, tear sheets, bills, and greeting cards. But I found none of it was to be easily ignored or mislaid when it was pinned down by this shroom of glass that catches and carnivalizes the sky.
Last year, Christie’s mounted Dress Your Desk, an online auction of dozens of paperweights that had belonged to Arnold Neustadter, the inventor of that other once-ubiquitous desktop accessory, the Rolodex. He was “the most organized man I ever knew,” his son-in-law told an obit writer. Adding, “Whenever anyone put something on his desk that didn’t belong there, he’d move it.” Carleigh Queenth, head of ceramics at Christie’s, told me, “He had a really lovely collection, including some incredibly rare pieces like a Pantin salamander weight.” Only twenty of those are known to exist, and only extreme talent could have pulled off the forms, textures, and patterns (e.g., polka-dotted amphibian bod on floor of sand and lichen). A prior director of the Corning Museum of Glass, which has assembled one of the most important exhibitions of paperweights, regards these salamanders as “the greatest technical achievements of nineteenth-century paperweight makers.”
by Chantel Tattoli, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Ron Farina
Paperweights had never struck me as markers of stability. But a month later, when I was laid off from the legacy media company where I worked for a print magazine, I surveyed my desk, picked up a stack of our branded notepads and a handle of whiskey and thought, At least I don’t have to lug no paperweight. Then Saturday came without Saturday’s feel. In a vintage shop, I drifted from taxidermy pheasants to a shelf staged with dusted curio, and there was a Murano blown-glass paperweight. At its center, the softball-size bubble had a clear tubular ring, inside of which was a clear finial shape from which streaks of red sprayed in arches at 360 degrees. The thing was maybe five pounds? My fiancé found me cradling it to my heart. “You’re going to bring that home, aren’t you,” he said, meaning: Did my foolhardy troth to paper in the age of new media know no bounds? The paperweight seemed to englobe our opposed perspectives: he thought it looked like a nasty vortex; I thought it looked like a wine fountain. (...)
In the late forties, Jean Cocteau arranged for a young Truman Capote to have tea with Colette at her apartment in Paris. They did not manage to discuss literature; instead, Capote was moonstruck by the Frenchwoman’s collection of valuable antique paperweights, which she called “my snowflakes”:
There were perhaps a hundred of them covering two tables situated on either side of the bed: crystal spheres imprisoning green lizards, salamanders, millefiori bouquets, dragonflies, a basket of pears, butterflies alighted on a frond of ferns, swirls of pink and white and blue and white, shimmering like fireworks, cobras coiled to strike, pretty little arrangements of pansies, magnificent poinsettias. Colette suggested she might take them with her in her coffin, “like a pharaoh.”When she gave a Baccarat with a single white rose inside to Capote, he caught the fever. He sought paperweights at auctions in Copenhagen and Hong Kong. Once, he found a four-thousand-dollar weight in a junk shop in Brooklyn for which he shelled out just twenty bucks. In East Hampton, he successfully bid seven hundred dollars for a millefiori (“the real thing,” “an electrifying spectacle”) worth seven grand.
At home, my weight immediately found its use. When you are a paperweight, you have one job, and it is so easy. In theory, any lousy rock could do it: be heavy (glass, crystal, marble, brass, and bronze have been standard issue), be flat-bottomed (spheres, pyramids, cubes, and discs tend not to topple), and sit pretty (on this last point, common geology would fail). If you can do that, you are doing great. Layoffs still involve paperwork, which, once printed, generally has to get notarized and posted; such documents can stagnate on your desk, along with odd to-do lists, tear sheets, bills, and greeting cards. But I found none of it was to be easily ignored or mislaid when it was pinned down by this shroom of glass that catches and carnivalizes the sky.
Last year, Christie’s mounted Dress Your Desk, an online auction of dozens of paperweights that had belonged to Arnold Neustadter, the inventor of that other once-ubiquitous desktop accessory, the Rolodex. He was “the most organized man I ever knew,” his son-in-law told an obit writer. Adding, “Whenever anyone put something on his desk that didn’t belong there, he’d move it.” Carleigh Queenth, head of ceramics at Christie’s, told me, “He had a really lovely collection, including some incredibly rare pieces like a Pantin salamander weight.” Only twenty of those are known to exist, and only extreme talent could have pulled off the forms, textures, and patterns (e.g., polka-dotted amphibian bod on floor of sand and lichen). A prior director of the Corning Museum of Glass, which has assembled one of the most important exhibitions of paperweights, regards these salamanders as “the greatest technical achievements of nineteenth-century paperweight makers.”
by Chantel Tattoli, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Ron Farina
War On Terror Has Cost $250 Million A Day For 16 Years
American taxpayers have spent $1.46 trillion on wars abroad since September 11, 2001.
The Department of Defense periodically releases a “cost of war” report. The newly released version, obtained by the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News blog, covers the time from the September 11th terrorist attacks through mid-2017.
The Afghanistan War from 2001 to 2014 and Iraq War from 2003 to 2011 account for the bulk of expenses: more than $1.3 trillion. The continuing presence in Afghanistan and aerial anti-ISIS operations in Iraq and Syria since 2014 have cost a combined $120 billion.
The report’s costs include only direct war-related expenses such as operating and maintaining bases, procuring equipment, and paying for and feeding troops. It most notably does not include the expense of veteran’s benefits for troops who serve in these wars or the intelligence community’s expenses related to Global War on Terror.
A 2011 paper from Harvard Kennedy School professor Linda Bilmes estimated the cost of veterans’ benefits as $600 billion to $1 trillion over the next 40 years. That number was based on 482,364 veterans who were receiving compensation for disability connected to service as of February 2011. Since then, the number of veterans receiving compensation for service-related disability has increased drastically.
According to the Veterans’ Benefits Administration’s 2016 annual benefits report , 1,060,408 veterans are receiving service-related benefits, averaging $15,907 a year. The total annual benefits for Global War on Terror veterans’ benefits are currently $16.8 billion per year, which over the next 40 years would total $674 billion, placing it firmly within Bilmes’ original 2011 estimate.
The Department of Defense periodically releases a “cost of war” report. The newly released version, obtained by the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News blog, covers the time from the September 11th terrorist attacks through mid-2017.
The Afghanistan War from 2001 to 2014 and Iraq War from 2003 to 2011 account for the bulk of expenses: more than $1.3 trillion. The continuing presence in Afghanistan and aerial anti-ISIS operations in Iraq and Syria since 2014 have cost a combined $120 billion.
The report’s costs include only direct war-related expenses such as operating and maintaining bases, procuring equipment, and paying for and feeding troops. It most notably does not include the expense of veteran’s benefits for troops who serve in these wars or the intelligence community’s expenses related to Global War on Terror.
A 2011 paper from Harvard Kennedy School professor Linda Bilmes estimated the cost of veterans’ benefits as $600 billion to $1 trillion over the next 40 years. That number was based on 482,364 veterans who were receiving compensation for disability connected to service as of February 2011. Since then, the number of veterans receiving compensation for service-related disability has increased drastically.
According to the Veterans’ Benefits Administration’s 2016 annual benefits report , 1,060,408 veterans are receiving service-related benefits, averaging $15,907 a year. The total annual benefits for Global War on Terror veterans’ benefits are currently $16.8 billion per year, which over the next 40 years would total $674 billion, placing it firmly within Bilmes’ original 2011 estimate.
by Jay Cassano, IBT | Read more:
[ed. Nice to get some numbers. Other forms of "security" spending like TSA (which is now going global) are excluded, along with normal operational training, personnel and base support around the world.]
It Was Gold
The first thoughts about Joan Didion are not reasonable. The present literature about her is a hagiography that does not entirely trust itself; there is a vacancy at the centre of it that I call the ‘but surely’. But surely if these essays were published now, the hagiography says to itself at three in the morning, they would meet with a different reception? But surely if she wrote today, her ideas about feminism would be more in line with ours? But surely, for all her pointillism, she is failing to draw the conclusions we would most like to see? The hagiography turns the pillow over, looking for a cool spot. How much can we really rely on someone who loved The Doors? Why do all her last lines give the impression that she’s speaking from beyond the veil? What, in the end, is she actually saying? But surely she has told us that herself, and all along. What she is saying, standing in the corner of every piece, holding her yellow legal pad and watching, is: ‘I was there.’
The Centre Will Not Hold, the new Netflix documentary directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, lacks the three-in-the-morning question. It begins with a bridge and a blur, close-ups of bare feet and fresh typewriter ink. A rat crawls over a hippie, to show that in the Swinging Sixties, anything can happen. When Didion herself appears, her mouth is bright with lipstick and amused. Her gestures are as large as fireworks. She puts her whole self into the process of speaking, moving her hands as if she’s flinging handfuls of certainty away from her body. Charcoal cashmere and a slender chain; her hair the correct camel of a good coat. In a scene where she reads her own writing, she looks happy, and tastes one or two words longer than the others, for their well-chosenness. It calls to mind Maria Wyeth in Play It as It Lays, distinguishing between ‘the right bracelet and the amusing impersonation of the right bracelet and the bracelet that was merely a witless copy’.
It seems like the kind of documentary a nephew would make about an aunt who was not Joan Didion. We zoom in on the dark comprehension of her eyes in snapshots, sift for her face in photos of her pioneer ancestors and find it. The music is soft encouraging swells. The camera waits for her to weep. Dunne’s voice, when he speaks to her, is the voice of someone coaxing her to eat. Perhaps that is the point, even the value of the project. We are seeing a Joan we would not be seeing if she weren’t talking to a member of her family – talking, perhaps, to the child version of him, to whom paradise days are attached.
Still, there are oversized clues to the fact that the subject is out of the ordinary. At one point Dunne asks her how it felt to see the five-year-old child on acid when she was reporting in Haight-Ashbury. Her face works, and you are expecting her to say: ‘It was horrifying.’ Instead a light breaks, and she says: ‘It was gold.’ (...)
I thought of her essay about John Wayne – she loved him, and not just because he gathered the whole American West in a man. It was also because, as Katharine Hepburn observed, it was so thrilling to lean against him. Great like a tree, a place to rest. And didn’t she want to rest? Weren’t her burdens so heavy? In youth she had rested against the strength, the solid thereness of the West; in adulthood, didn’t she become paralysed when she felt it could no longer hold her? When she headed to San Francisco in 1967, wasn’t it because she suddenly saw America as a power that could no longer shoulder its people? (...)
To revisit Slouching towards Bethlehem and The White Album, in the paperback editions just released by 4th Estate, is to read an old up-to-the-minute relevance renewed. Inside these essays, the coming revolution feels neither terrifying nor exhilarating but familiar – if you are a reader of Joan Didion, you have been studying it all your life. Read ‘Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)’ and see if you do not recognise the man in the modern scene. ‘Actually I was interested not in the revolution but in the revolutionary.’ Where things are moving too fast she fixes a focal point. She captures the way the language becomes more memetic, more meaningless just as the ground begins to swell under the feet – as if the herd, sensing some danger, must consolidate its responses. Her adept turn to political writing in the 1980s and 1990s showed the same prescience; if you are tuned to where the language goes strange, you will anticipate the narrative they’re going to try to sell you.
The Centre Will Not Hold, the new Netflix documentary directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, lacks the three-in-the-morning question. It begins with a bridge and a blur, close-ups of bare feet and fresh typewriter ink. A rat crawls over a hippie, to show that in the Swinging Sixties, anything can happen. When Didion herself appears, her mouth is bright with lipstick and amused. Her gestures are as large as fireworks. She puts her whole self into the process of speaking, moving her hands as if she’s flinging handfuls of certainty away from her body. Charcoal cashmere and a slender chain; her hair the correct camel of a good coat. In a scene where she reads her own writing, she looks happy, and tastes one or two words longer than the others, for their well-chosenness. It calls to mind Maria Wyeth in Play It as It Lays, distinguishing between ‘the right bracelet and the amusing impersonation of the right bracelet and the bracelet that was merely a witless copy’.It seems like the kind of documentary a nephew would make about an aunt who was not Joan Didion. We zoom in on the dark comprehension of her eyes in snapshots, sift for her face in photos of her pioneer ancestors and find it. The music is soft encouraging swells. The camera waits for her to weep. Dunne’s voice, when he speaks to her, is the voice of someone coaxing her to eat. Perhaps that is the point, even the value of the project. We are seeing a Joan we would not be seeing if she weren’t talking to a member of her family – talking, perhaps, to the child version of him, to whom paradise days are attached.
Still, there are oversized clues to the fact that the subject is out of the ordinary. At one point Dunne asks her how it felt to see the five-year-old child on acid when she was reporting in Haight-Ashbury. Her face works, and you are expecting her to say: ‘It was horrifying.’ Instead a light breaks, and she says: ‘It was gold.’ (...)
I thought of her essay about John Wayne – she loved him, and not just because he gathered the whole American West in a man. It was also because, as Katharine Hepburn observed, it was so thrilling to lean against him. Great like a tree, a place to rest. And didn’t she want to rest? Weren’t her burdens so heavy? In youth she had rested against the strength, the solid thereness of the West; in adulthood, didn’t she become paralysed when she felt it could no longer hold her? When she headed to San Francisco in 1967, wasn’t it because she suddenly saw America as a power that could no longer shoulder its people? (...)
To revisit Slouching towards Bethlehem and The White Album, in the paperback editions just released by 4th Estate, is to read an old up-to-the-minute relevance renewed. Inside these essays, the coming revolution feels neither terrifying nor exhilarating but familiar – if you are a reader of Joan Didion, you have been studying it all your life. Read ‘Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)’ and see if you do not recognise the man in the modern scene. ‘Actually I was interested not in the revolution but in the revolutionary.’ Where things are moving too fast she fixes a focal point. She captures the way the language becomes more memetic, more meaningless just as the ground begins to swell under the feet – as if the herd, sensing some danger, must consolidate its responses. Her adept turn to political writing in the 1980s and 1990s showed the same prescience; if you are tuned to where the language goes strange, you will anticipate the narrative they’re going to try to sell you.
by Patricia Lockwood, London Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Ted Streshinsky/Corbis
Monday, December 25, 2017
H. Brockmann Petersen, easy chair, for Louis G. Thiersen & Søn, Denmark. 1953. Teak, brass and cane.
via:
Undoing Aging with Molecular and Cellular Damage Repair
Since the dawn of medicine, aging has been doctors’ foremost challenge. Three unsuccessful approaches to conquering it have failed: treating components of age-related ill health as curable diseases, extrapolating from differences between species in the rate of aging, and emulating the life extension that famine elicits in short-lived species. SENS Research Foundation is spearheading the fourth age of anti-aging research: the repair of age-related damage, that is, rejuvenation biotechnology.
The Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) approach was first proposed in 2002. “Senescence,” here, refers to the actuarial phenomenon—the trend that individuals within a population suffer from an increasing morbidity and mortality rate in (typically exponential) relation to their chronological age. “Negligible” is used in a statistical sense: we consider a level of senescence negligible if no age-related contribution to mortality is statistically demonstrable within a population, given the “background noise” of age-independent mortality (such as unfortunate encounters with motor vehicles). Finally, by “Engineered,” we indicate that this state is achieved by the deliberate application of biomedical therapies, and is not the normal situation. The goal of SENSE is thus unambiguously defined; we seek methods to convert a population experiencing a non-negligible level of senescence into one experiencing a negligible level.
To see how the goal of negligible senescence could be “engineered,” it is useful to consider a situation in which human ingenuity and perseverance has already achieved an analogous result. Motor vehicles experience a process of wear-and-tear essentially similar to organismal aging; the paint flakes, windowpanes chip, rust infiltrates the pipework, and so forth. Nonetheless, as vintage car owners will attest, it is entirely possible to keep one functional for an essentially indefinite period. Critically, this is achieved not by preventing the wear but by repairing the damage that does occur at a rate sufficient to ensure that the function of the machine is never irretrievably compromised.
Of course, the analogy is inexact; human bodies are far more complex than cars but a closer look at precisely how growing older leads to debility reveals that our ignorance need not be showstopping.
Aging can be characterized as a three-stage process. In the first stage, metabolic processes essential to life produce toxins. Secondly, a small amount of the damage caused by these toxins cannot be removed by the body’s endogenous repair systems, and consequently accumulates over time. In the third stage, the accumulation of damage drives age-related pathology.
This model—metabolism causes damage causes pathology—allows us to clarify the requirements for successful intervention in aging. Unlike the dynamic processes of metabolism and pathology, accumulated damage represents a relatively stationary target. That is to say, it may not be clear whether a given type of damage is pathological (on balance), but its absence from healthy twenty-year-olds indicates that it is not required for healthy life. Conversely it is clear that the total ensemble of types of damage is pathological, since fifty-year-olds have considerably less time to live than twenty-year-olds, and the only static difference between the two groups is the amount of accumulated damage present.
Accepting the implications of this model leads us to the SENS approach; by identifying and repairing all of the damage accumulated during aging, we can restore the body to a youthful state. Consequently, its dynamic metabolic processes will revert to their own norms, and the risk of mortality will be no higher than in any other equivalently “youthful” individual—whether they have actually lived for twenty years or 120. Furthermore—so long as our inventory of damage classes is sufficiently comprehensive—we can repeat this effort on a regular basis, and thus remain indefinitely below the threshold of pathology. Crucially, we can do this without a comprehensive understanding of the complex metabolic processes giving rise to damage, nor of those leading from damage to pathology. We need only an inventory of the types of damage which exist, which can be obtained directly by comparison of older and younger individuals. And, fortunately, it seems that all aging-related damage known to accumulate in the human body can be classified into just seven clearly defined categories: cell loss, cell death-resistance, cell over-proliferation, intracellular and extracellular “junk”, tissue stiffening and mitochondrial defects.
The Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) approach was first proposed in 2002. “Senescence,” here, refers to the actuarial phenomenon—the trend that individuals within a population suffer from an increasing morbidity and mortality rate in (typically exponential) relation to their chronological age. “Negligible” is used in a statistical sense: we consider a level of senescence negligible if no age-related contribution to mortality is statistically demonstrable within a population, given the “background noise” of age-independent mortality (such as unfortunate encounters with motor vehicles). Finally, by “Engineered,” we indicate that this state is achieved by the deliberate application of biomedical therapies, and is not the normal situation. The goal of SENSE is thus unambiguously defined; we seek methods to convert a population experiencing a non-negligible level of senescence into one experiencing a negligible level.To see how the goal of negligible senescence could be “engineered,” it is useful to consider a situation in which human ingenuity and perseverance has already achieved an analogous result. Motor vehicles experience a process of wear-and-tear essentially similar to organismal aging; the paint flakes, windowpanes chip, rust infiltrates the pipework, and so forth. Nonetheless, as vintage car owners will attest, it is entirely possible to keep one functional for an essentially indefinite period. Critically, this is achieved not by preventing the wear but by repairing the damage that does occur at a rate sufficient to ensure that the function of the machine is never irretrievably compromised.
Of course, the analogy is inexact; human bodies are far more complex than cars but a closer look at precisely how growing older leads to debility reveals that our ignorance need not be showstopping.
Aging can be characterized as a three-stage process. In the first stage, metabolic processes essential to life produce toxins. Secondly, a small amount of the damage caused by these toxins cannot be removed by the body’s endogenous repair systems, and consequently accumulates over time. In the third stage, the accumulation of damage drives age-related pathology.
This model—metabolism causes damage causes pathology—allows us to clarify the requirements for successful intervention in aging. Unlike the dynamic processes of metabolism and pathology, accumulated damage represents a relatively stationary target. That is to say, it may not be clear whether a given type of damage is pathological (on balance), but its absence from healthy twenty-year-olds indicates that it is not required for healthy life. Conversely it is clear that the total ensemble of types of damage is pathological, since fifty-year-olds have considerably less time to live than twenty-year-olds, and the only static difference between the two groups is the amount of accumulated damage present.
Accepting the implications of this model leads us to the SENS approach; by identifying and repairing all of the damage accumulated during aging, we can restore the body to a youthful state. Consequently, its dynamic metabolic processes will revert to their own norms, and the risk of mortality will be no higher than in any other equivalently “youthful” individual—whether they have actually lived for twenty years or 120. Furthermore—so long as our inventory of damage classes is sufficiently comprehensive—we can repeat this effort on a regular basis, and thus remain indefinitely below the threshold of pathology. Crucially, we can do this without a comprehensive understanding of the complex metabolic processes giving rise to damage, nor of those leading from damage to pathology. We need only an inventory of the types of damage which exist, which can be obtained directly by comparison of older and younger individuals. And, fortunately, it seems that all aging-related damage known to accumulate in the human body can be classified into just seven clearly defined categories: cell loss, cell death-resistance, cell over-proliferation, intracellular and extracellular “junk”, tissue stiffening and mitochondrial defects.
by Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. That's a bold statement. See also: Undoing Aging with Molecular and Cellular Damage Repair.]
[ed. That's a bold statement. See also: Undoing Aging with Molecular and Cellular Damage Repair.]
The Invisibility Cloak: An Interview with Ge Fei
Ge Fei is one of China’s foremost experimental writers. He started his career in the eighties with “vanguard fiction”—self-reflexive works focusing on history, historical narrative, memory, and myth. Now, for the first time, one of his novels is available in English: 2012’s The Invisibility Cloak, translated by Canaan Morse. It’s the first in our monthly book club with New York Review Books. Set in cutthroat, consumer-driven Beijing, the novel follows Mr. Cui, a down-at-heel Everyman who lives with his sister in an apartment where the wind is always blowing through a crack in the wall. Cui designs and installs custom stereos for hyperrich audiophiles and intellectuals, for whom he has an unreserved contempt. Then he reels in a promising but shady client who demands the best sound system in the world: an assignment that takes Cui to an unexpectedly dark place. The Invisibility Cloak is a comic tour de force; Kirkus Reviews wrote that it “packs in wit, social commentary, and an emotional depth that will lift the reader’s spirits like few recent English-language books.”
Last month, Ge Fei visited New York, where he appeared in conversation at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He was joined by Morse, his translator; and two moderators, Lydia H. Liu and Wun Tsun Tam. The exchange below is a condensed, edited version of their discussion, including some questions from the audience that day.
INTERVIEWER
How did you come up with the idea for the book?
FEI
What constitutes Chinese reality, particularly from the eighties onward, is always changing. With The Invisibility Cloak, I thought back to 1980, when I was an undergraduate in Shanghai and I felt that life for Chinese people was extremely spiritually rich. People didn’t care about material possessions so much, they didn’t care about clothes, what shoes you wore, what kind of watch you wore, they didn’t care if you knew rich people. In fact, wealth was held in contempt. Every weekend my friends would go to classical-music concerts—Bach, Beethoven, Haydn. Twenty-some years later, the change that’s occurred in this respect is unbelievable—from an incredibly rich spiritual life to a total lack of spiritual enrichment. Materialism is the word of the day. Money. Advancement. I wanted to add clarity to the meaning of classical music, what it meant to the people who lived through that earlier time.
The writing and structure of this book have a deep connection to a question that’s chased me all my life. When everything is moving in one direction—toward money, advancement, and feeling insecure about it—are there people out there who intentionally go the other way? I discovered that in one of my circles of friends in Beijing, these hi-fi enthusiasts, there were a number of such people. It reminded me of a metaphor from a Japanese author I like. He talks about crickets living in a closed box, no sunlight, no windows. You have these singing insects in there, they lay their eggs, they hatch, they grow, they sing, they die. Are there people who are willing to make themselves invisible and keep away from the “sunlight” of contemporary society? The author also mentions seeds—when flowers turn to seed, some will float in the wind and fall into fertile soil, while others will fall into dark corners or on top of trees. I was interested to find that there are people in China who’ve resisted modernity, who have held onto their own value systems. The character I chose as an entry point for The Invisibility Cloak is modeled on one of the great eccentrics I know in Beijing, one of my hi-fi enthusiast friends.
INTERVIEWER
Much of the novel is dedicated to audiophile culture and the pursuit of the greatest possible sound system. As an audio enthusiast yourself, can you comment on the spirituality of music and its relationship with these speakers, these machines, in your writing?
FEI
The centers of construction, sales, and distribution of audiophile equipment—we might call it “specialized audio-reproduction equipment”—are in Europe and America. But those with the greatest love for this equipment are in Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China. These are people who’ve carried their appreciation for sound quality to a fairly extreme degree. The nineties was really the golden age for audiophiles. I tried consciously to incorporate their specialized, material knowledge into this book. For instance, the fact that I specifically name the Autograph speakers won’t mean much to those who don’t deal in hi-fi, but music aficionados, the cognoscenti, will recognize it right away. For a long time, I was dreaming about writing a horror novel. I wondered if I could apply this desire to a novel about music. Readers might ask, How do you put together a horror story with all this talk about classical music? That was the challenge I decided to overcome. (...)
INTERVIEWER
One of the groups in The Invisibility Cloak that’s criticized most stridently is the group of intellectuals who like to blow hot air and make revisionist arguments that don’t stand up.
FEI
If there’s one group of people in China that I despise more than any other, it would be the intellectuals. As I was studying and teaching, I would go home, back to my parents’ house, and they would say, Oh, we can’t fix these problems, we’ll leave all this to you and the intellectuals. I used to have high hopes and expectations for the educated in China, because of course the scholar has always enjoyed an elevated position there. Scholars are supposed to be the people who take on the world’s problems as their own, who shoulder the world’s burdens. It wasn’t until the late nineties that I began to change my opinions, and I discovered that those who are outside of the intellectual community have ethical standards that we have a lot to learn from, and they’re the ones we rely on for the idea of the country and strong development of the country. These are people who are very misunderstood within the academic circle. I had a significant change in my personal ethics with regard to the rest of the world. Now I have two circles of friends, academics and nonacademics, and it’s from the nonacademics that I’ve learned more about who and how to be. It’s very easy for us to put labels on these people. This friend of mine who’s the model for the main character, he sold shoes, he’s worked in clothing factories, he has opinions on Chinese-Japanese relations, relations with America and Chinese politics. He has his own philosophies, completely different from my intellectual friends. When we all get together, he’ll end up in arguments with them, beating them right down. That particular transformation has changed the way I build relationships with people who are outside my immediate academic circle. It’s not just their meaningless talk. I thought, Are we giving the country to these people? That might not be a good idea. We look at officials and there may be plenty of them we don’t like, but at the very least they seem to have some experience of the actual world. Meanwhile, your scholars, so many go from book to book, and they analyze systems of value, of benefit, and of resources based on what they’ve read.
INTERVIEWER
What’s the meaning behind the name The Invisibility Cloak?
FEI
The Invisibility Cloak was not the book’s first title—it was something like Leftover Fragments of Emotion in the Floating Life. I used it, but it gave me a really unlucky, inauspicious feeling. I wanted to add aspects of the horror-movie concept into the title. One of the main characters in the book is invisibility—he carries an invisibility cloak, he disappears yet he reappears, he is the sudden face in the mirror, the flicker in the one frame that then disappears. The model for Cui, the protagonist, this guy has stubbornly built his own quotidian life. I think the destruction of the quotidian life is one of the most unfortunate consequences of modernity. This guy doesn’t wear T-shirts, it doesn’t matter how hot it is, he will never wear short sleeves. He always eats fish, he never eats meat, he never gets up before ten, he will do everything he can to make sure he doesn’t not get out of bed before ten in the morning, and he obviously calls me up at midnight. He keeps to his own life. He’s built this individual ideological structure, which is something I consider admirable and wish more people would do.
by Ge Fei, Lydia H. Liu and Wun Tsun Tam, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Cover, Invisibility Cloak
Last month, Ge Fei visited New York, where he appeared in conversation at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He was joined by Morse, his translator; and two moderators, Lydia H. Liu and Wun Tsun Tam. The exchange below is a condensed, edited version of their discussion, including some questions from the audience that day.INTERVIEWER
How did you come up with the idea for the book?
FEI
What constitutes Chinese reality, particularly from the eighties onward, is always changing. With The Invisibility Cloak, I thought back to 1980, when I was an undergraduate in Shanghai and I felt that life for Chinese people was extremely spiritually rich. People didn’t care about material possessions so much, they didn’t care about clothes, what shoes you wore, what kind of watch you wore, they didn’t care if you knew rich people. In fact, wealth was held in contempt. Every weekend my friends would go to classical-music concerts—Bach, Beethoven, Haydn. Twenty-some years later, the change that’s occurred in this respect is unbelievable—from an incredibly rich spiritual life to a total lack of spiritual enrichment. Materialism is the word of the day. Money. Advancement. I wanted to add clarity to the meaning of classical music, what it meant to the people who lived through that earlier time.
The writing and structure of this book have a deep connection to a question that’s chased me all my life. When everything is moving in one direction—toward money, advancement, and feeling insecure about it—are there people out there who intentionally go the other way? I discovered that in one of my circles of friends in Beijing, these hi-fi enthusiasts, there were a number of such people. It reminded me of a metaphor from a Japanese author I like. He talks about crickets living in a closed box, no sunlight, no windows. You have these singing insects in there, they lay their eggs, they hatch, they grow, they sing, they die. Are there people who are willing to make themselves invisible and keep away from the “sunlight” of contemporary society? The author also mentions seeds—when flowers turn to seed, some will float in the wind and fall into fertile soil, while others will fall into dark corners or on top of trees. I was interested to find that there are people in China who’ve resisted modernity, who have held onto their own value systems. The character I chose as an entry point for The Invisibility Cloak is modeled on one of the great eccentrics I know in Beijing, one of my hi-fi enthusiast friends.
INTERVIEWER
Much of the novel is dedicated to audiophile culture and the pursuit of the greatest possible sound system. As an audio enthusiast yourself, can you comment on the spirituality of music and its relationship with these speakers, these machines, in your writing?
FEI
The centers of construction, sales, and distribution of audiophile equipment—we might call it “specialized audio-reproduction equipment”—are in Europe and America. But those with the greatest love for this equipment are in Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China. These are people who’ve carried their appreciation for sound quality to a fairly extreme degree. The nineties was really the golden age for audiophiles. I tried consciously to incorporate their specialized, material knowledge into this book. For instance, the fact that I specifically name the Autograph speakers won’t mean much to those who don’t deal in hi-fi, but music aficionados, the cognoscenti, will recognize it right away. For a long time, I was dreaming about writing a horror novel. I wondered if I could apply this desire to a novel about music. Readers might ask, How do you put together a horror story with all this talk about classical music? That was the challenge I decided to overcome. (...)
INTERVIEWER
One of the groups in The Invisibility Cloak that’s criticized most stridently is the group of intellectuals who like to blow hot air and make revisionist arguments that don’t stand up.
FEI
If there’s one group of people in China that I despise more than any other, it would be the intellectuals. As I was studying and teaching, I would go home, back to my parents’ house, and they would say, Oh, we can’t fix these problems, we’ll leave all this to you and the intellectuals. I used to have high hopes and expectations for the educated in China, because of course the scholar has always enjoyed an elevated position there. Scholars are supposed to be the people who take on the world’s problems as their own, who shoulder the world’s burdens. It wasn’t until the late nineties that I began to change my opinions, and I discovered that those who are outside of the intellectual community have ethical standards that we have a lot to learn from, and they’re the ones we rely on for the idea of the country and strong development of the country. These are people who are very misunderstood within the academic circle. I had a significant change in my personal ethics with regard to the rest of the world. Now I have two circles of friends, academics and nonacademics, and it’s from the nonacademics that I’ve learned more about who and how to be. It’s very easy for us to put labels on these people. This friend of mine who’s the model for the main character, he sold shoes, he’s worked in clothing factories, he has opinions on Chinese-Japanese relations, relations with America and Chinese politics. He has his own philosophies, completely different from my intellectual friends. When we all get together, he’ll end up in arguments with them, beating them right down. That particular transformation has changed the way I build relationships with people who are outside my immediate academic circle. It’s not just their meaningless talk. I thought, Are we giving the country to these people? That might not be a good idea. We look at officials and there may be plenty of them we don’t like, but at the very least they seem to have some experience of the actual world. Meanwhile, your scholars, so many go from book to book, and they analyze systems of value, of benefit, and of resources based on what they’ve read.
INTERVIEWER
What’s the meaning behind the name The Invisibility Cloak?
FEI
The Invisibility Cloak was not the book’s first title—it was something like Leftover Fragments of Emotion in the Floating Life. I used it, but it gave me a really unlucky, inauspicious feeling. I wanted to add aspects of the horror-movie concept into the title. One of the main characters in the book is invisibility—he carries an invisibility cloak, he disappears yet he reappears, he is the sudden face in the mirror, the flicker in the one frame that then disappears. The model for Cui, the protagonist, this guy has stubbornly built his own quotidian life. I think the destruction of the quotidian life is one of the most unfortunate consequences of modernity. This guy doesn’t wear T-shirts, it doesn’t matter how hot it is, he will never wear short sleeves. He always eats fish, he never eats meat, he never gets up before ten, he will do everything he can to make sure he doesn’t not get out of bed before ten in the morning, and he obviously calls me up at midnight. He keeps to his own life. He’s built this individual ideological structure, which is something I consider admirable and wish more people would do.
by Ge Fei, Lydia H. Liu and Wun Tsun Tam, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Cover, Invisibility Cloak
Waking Up to the Gift of ‘Aliveness’
A few weeks ago, I found a surprising line in my lecture notes. I don’t know how long it had been there or how it got in. I don’t remember having written it or even having seen it before. It said, “The goal of life, for Pascal, is not happiness, peace, or fulfillment, but aliveness.” I believe the line may have been written by my teacher and friend, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. Bert died in April at the age of 87.
It is strange, on the face of it at least, to think that Bert may be speaking to me from the grave. It is stranger still, perhaps, that from that less-than-ideal vantage point he could be telling me about a possible goal of life. But if you knew how my lecture notes work, it might not seem so peculiar.
You see, I’ve been teaching the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, and the Existentialist tradition he prefigured, since Bert introduced me to them almost 30 years ago. The lecture notes I use started out as notes I took as a student in his courses. Over the years they grew and matured, not only in response to what I learned from my students but also, and especially, in response to many continuing conversations with Bert. The strands of influence in those notes are so many and so various that they have long grown obscure. It is sometimes a surprise, even to me, to discover what they contain.
Surprises like these are wonderful, but sometimes perplexing too. What could it mean, after all, that the goal of life is aliveness? It sounds almost banal, or even tautological. But perhaps, after a bit of thought, it resonates.
Think of the way that life really can become lifeless. You know what it’s like: rise, commute, work, lunch, work some more, maybe have a beer or go to the gym, watch TV. For a while the routine is nurturing and stabilizing; it is comfortable in its predictability. But soon the days seem to stretch out in an infinite line behind and before you. And eventually you are withering away inside them. They are not just devoid of meaning but ruthless in their insistence that they are that way. The life you are living announces it is no longer alive.
There are at least two natural, but equally flawed, responses to this announcement: constantly seek out newness or look for a stable, deeper meaning to your existing routine. In the 18th century, these responses were centered in Italy and Germany, respectively. Their descendants persevere today.
The Italian — Casanova was the paradigm — decides that what is missing from his life is spontaneity: He has died within his routine because it kills all his natural desires. To become alive again, he commits himself passionately to following his desires, take him where they may. He takes on many lovers — thrilling, consuming affairs! — but eventually he leaves each one for the next; he lives in the moment without a care for his past commitments or his future possibilities. His life moves from one raw excitement to another. Eventually, however, he becomes isolated, inconstant and unmoored. He hurts those around him. He becomes incapable of genuine connection with anyone and unsure of who he really is. He despairs.
The German takes a different approach. Shall we call him Kant? He decides that what is missing is a reason for his routine. He seeks it out. He tells himself a story, one that delivers a meaningful justification of his daily life. And then he enters into the routine once again, determined this time to live in the knowledge that no matter how deadening it becomes, it is justified and therefore must be pursued. It is his duty to do so. But even though he knows the why of what he is doing, he cannot escape the feeling that he is not living by doing it. The monotony re-establishes itself. He cannot escape the ruthless assertion of its insignificance. He despairs.
We see what these responses are aiming for — the aliveness they hope to achieve — by seeing how they ultimately fall short of their goal. To be alive is to have the passion of Casanova without its isolation, inconstancy and despair, or the resolute certainty of Kant, without its monotony and insignificance. Indeed, perhaps the best we can hope for is to point to the phenomenon in its absence: Aliveness is whatever is lacking when the monotony of the routine forces itself to the fore. But can we say something positive about what aliveness is?
A complete definition of the phenomenon is no doubt beyond our grasp. But there are two distinctive features of its elusiveness that I believe we can identify. The first is that every apparent source of aliveness disappears upon the inspection of it — the ground of aliveness recedes from view. Consider a simple example: the love you feel gazing at your lover’s face. When you are in love, you are alive; the whole world vibrates with significance. It is natural to want to hold onto that aliveness, to make it last forever, to find its source. And where else could it be but in your lover’s face? So you look. But beware! Look too closely and something falls apart.
For the greater the love that face evokes, the more transcendent your experience of that person, the less it seems possible that a face, a physicalface, could actually be its ground. The phenomenon is filled with the deepest mystery, like the man who is God or the brain that is mind. After all, how could this fleshy, corporeal thing, of skin and veins and muscles and fat, how could this mere physical stuff and substance give rise to the ecstasy and transport of love? Of course it does! But the more you look at what a human face is, the less it seems capable of doing what it does. The object of love, as an object of love, dissolves in looking at it. The ground of aliveness withdraws from view.
The second feature is equally enigmatic. When you really feel alive, your past, your present and your future somehow make sense together as the unity they have always promised to be. I sometimes feel truly alive, for instance, when I am teaching my students. When it is going well, when we are connected and engaged and the classroom is buzzing, it is not just that we are sharing a special moment together. For me, that moment has the special character that it does because it fulfills the promise implicit in moments like that from my own childhood and youth. It is the validation of what came before just as it is the preparation for what comes after. When you see in your students the sense that what is happening now will stay with them, will remain alive as a future memory that can sustain them in some other moment, far away and very different from the one we are now sharing, then the moment vibrates with an energy it wouldn’t otherwise have.
[ed. See also: Aliveness]
It is strange, on the face of it at least, to think that Bert may be speaking to me from the grave. It is stranger still, perhaps, that from that less-than-ideal vantage point he could be telling me about a possible goal of life. But if you knew how my lecture notes work, it might not seem so peculiar.
You see, I’ve been teaching the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, and the Existentialist tradition he prefigured, since Bert introduced me to them almost 30 years ago. The lecture notes I use started out as notes I took as a student in his courses. Over the years they grew and matured, not only in response to what I learned from my students but also, and especially, in response to many continuing conversations with Bert. The strands of influence in those notes are so many and so various that they have long grown obscure. It is sometimes a surprise, even to me, to discover what they contain.Surprises like these are wonderful, but sometimes perplexing too. What could it mean, after all, that the goal of life is aliveness? It sounds almost banal, or even tautological. But perhaps, after a bit of thought, it resonates.
Think of the way that life really can become lifeless. You know what it’s like: rise, commute, work, lunch, work some more, maybe have a beer or go to the gym, watch TV. For a while the routine is nurturing and stabilizing; it is comfortable in its predictability. But soon the days seem to stretch out in an infinite line behind and before you. And eventually you are withering away inside them. They are not just devoid of meaning but ruthless in their insistence that they are that way. The life you are living announces it is no longer alive.
There are at least two natural, but equally flawed, responses to this announcement: constantly seek out newness or look for a stable, deeper meaning to your existing routine. In the 18th century, these responses were centered in Italy and Germany, respectively. Their descendants persevere today.
The Italian — Casanova was the paradigm — decides that what is missing from his life is spontaneity: He has died within his routine because it kills all his natural desires. To become alive again, he commits himself passionately to following his desires, take him where they may. He takes on many lovers — thrilling, consuming affairs! — but eventually he leaves each one for the next; he lives in the moment without a care for his past commitments or his future possibilities. His life moves from one raw excitement to another. Eventually, however, he becomes isolated, inconstant and unmoored. He hurts those around him. He becomes incapable of genuine connection with anyone and unsure of who he really is. He despairs.
The German takes a different approach. Shall we call him Kant? He decides that what is missing is a reason for his routine. He seeks it out. He tells himself a story, one that delivers a meaningful justification of his daily life. And then he enters into the routine once again, determined this time to live in the knowledge that no matter how deadening it becomes, it is justified and therefore must be pursued. It is his duty to do so. But even though he knows the why of what he is doing, he cannot escape the feeling that he is not living by doing it. The monotony re-establishes itself. He cannot escape the ruthless assertion of its insignificance. He despairs.
We see what these responses are aiming for — the aliveness they hope to achieve — by seeing how they ultimately fall short of their goal. To be alive is to have the passion of Casanova without its isolation, inconstancy and despair, or the resolute certainty of Kant, without its monotony and insignificance. Indeed, perhaps the best we can hope for is to point to the phenomenon in its absence: Aliveness is whatever is lacking when the monotony of the routine forces itself to the fore. But can we say something positive about what aliveness is?
A complete definition of the phenomenon is no doubt beyond our grasp. But there are two distinctive features of its elusiveness that I believe we can identify. The first is that every apparent source of aliveness disappears upon the inspection of it — the ground of aliveness recedes from view. Consider a simple example: the love you feel gazing at your lover’s face. When you are in love, you are alive; the whole world vibrates with significance. It is natural to want to hold onto that aliveness, to make it last forever, to find its source. And where else could it be but in your lover’s face? So you look. But beware! Look too closely and something falls apart.
For the greater the love that face evokes, the more transcendent your experience of that person, the less it seems possible that a face, a physicalface, could actually be its ground. The phenomenon is filled with the deepest mystery, like the man who is God or the brain that is mind. After all, how could this fleshy, corporeal thing, of skin and veins and muscles and fat, how could this mere physical stuff and substance give rise to the ecstasy and transport of love? Of course it does! But the more you look at what a human face is, the less it seems capable of doing what it does. The object of love, as an object of love, dissolves in looking at it. The ground of aliveness withdraws from view.
The second feature is equally enigmatic. When you really feel alive, your past, your present and your future somehow make sense together as the unity they have always promised to be. I sometimes feel truly alive, for instance, when I am teaching my students. When it is going well, when we are connected and engaged and the classroom is buzzing, it is not just that we are sharing a special moment together. For me, that moment has the special character that it does because it fulfills the promise implicit in moments like that from my own childhood and youth. It is the validation of what came before just as it is the preparation for what comes after. When you see in your students the sense that what is happening now will stay with them, will remain alive as a future memory that can sustain them in some other moment, far away and very different from the one we are now sharing, then the moment vibrates with an energy it wouldn’t otherwise have.
by Sean D. Kelly, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ibai Acevedo/Getty Images[ed. See also: Aliveness]
Sunday, December 24, 2017
Advice on New Year’s Resolutions from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
It will soon be that time of year where many of us set ourselves up for failure. Make a resolution or don’t make a resolution; you will regret either. Or so the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard might quip. One estimate suggests that almost half of Americans make New Year’s resolutions, and yet less than 10 percent successfully follow through. Maybe we forget about them long before our snow boots dry out. Maybe life takes us on a different path. Maybe we stop caring. Maybe we simply fail. It might be tempting to do away with this farce altogether, but before we commit to being noncommittal about the New Year, it’s worth thinking through some of the options.
The tradition of making New Year’s resolutions is at least four thousand years old. The ancient Babylonians celebrated their new year—the rebirth of the sun god Marduk—in spring, to coincide with barley-sowing season. Akitu was a twelve-day festival in which the king would promise to fulfill an extensive list of duties. To seal the king’s commitment, the high priest would slap him hard across the face. The slap had to be firm enough to draw tears: proof of the king’s dedication and a reminder to him to be humble. As part of the festival, other people also pledged their allegiance to the king and the gods and promised to repay their debts.
It may be tempting to overthrow this ancient tradition, to make no resolutions, and to go along with the flow of life like a carefree leaf on the surface of a happily bubbling stream. But Kierkegaard would argue that such a metaphor is deceptive: we would be akin to a stone hurled across the surface of the water, which “skips lightly for a time, but as soon as it stops skipping, instantly sinks down into the depths.” Without commitments, we risk disappearing into the existential abyss. A life that lacks purpose creates anxiety. A meaningful life, Kierkegaard suggests, is one in which we actively assert ourselves in order to live more fully.
It’s all well and good to make promises, but there’s still the challenge of keeping them. Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that what differentiates humans from other creatures is that we have “the right to make promises.” Making promises addresses a fundamental aspect of our humanity: that each of us is and is not the person we will become in the future. This is confusing, so let’s get concrete: Are you the same person you will be next year? Well, not exactly. Gray hair may sprout, wrinkles may emerge, your voice may deepen and thicken, your joints begin to ache. Your physical characteristics will objectively change, even if minutely. Your emotional and psychological identity may also shift; you might get a new job or a new partner, a new hobby or a new therapist. A promise is a way of laying claim to an uncertain future. It is a way of projecting oneself into the coming months, protecting a commitment that may be impossible to keep. It is also a means of guarding or binding one’s identity—the I in I promise. Why does a nonhuman animal not make promises? Most don’t have a conception of themselves as individuals or a vested sense of identity. Yes, some animals may experience guilt, but guilt is not the same as the shame of breaking a longstanding promise. Nietzsche’s suggestion is that we ought to keep making resolutions—heartfelt, honest-to-God promises—lest we devolve into an animal-like state.
Nietzsche does not say, however, that we must keep our resolutions. Sometimes, many times, the cost is simply too high. To fulfill all promises unconditionally may be unwise, if not pig-headed and arrogant. For example, perhaps you committed to shedding a few pounds, but it turns out that your blood sugar plummets every time you go for more than two hours without a snack and you’re constantly on the verge of passing out. So that wasn’t a great resolution after all. Or you resolved not to go on any new dates and to focus on your career, but every morning you bump into the same lovely person at your favorite café. With new information, you just might need to leave some commitments behind. There’s no reason to feel guilty about that. The Romantic view of the self is that there’s no need to feel enslaved to an idea of ourselves that we wanted in the past. The self is forever in flux, changing, growing. The Romantic self is one that is ready to annihilate itself over and over again. As Nietzsche’s most famous protagonist Zarathustra says, “You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”
For an existentialist an unwillingness to “burn yourself in your own flame,” to overcome or break a promise, can be a sign of “bad faith.” “Bad faith” is a situation in which you disavow the immediate free will that is always at your disposal. Bad faith is “bad” because it denies the hard, metaphysical core of being human—radical freedom. Radical freedom means we are radically responsible both for keeping and for transgressing promises. The fragility of our promises is what makes them meaningful.
by John Kaag and Skye C. Cleary, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The tradition of making New Year’s resolutions is at least four thousand years old. The ancient Babylonians celebrated their new year—the rebirth of the sun god Marduk—in spring, to coincide with barley-sowing season. Akitu was a twelve-day festival in which the king would promise to fulfill an extensive list of duties. To seal the king’s commitment, the high priest would slap him hard across the face. The slap had to be firm enough to draw tears: proof of the king’s dedication and a reminder to him to be humble. As part of the festival, other people also pledged their allegiance to the king and the gods and promised to repay their debts.
It may be tempting to overthrow this ancient tradition, to make no resolutions, and to go along with the flow of life like a carefree leaf on the surface of a happily bubbling stream. But Kierkegaard would argue that such a metaphor is deceptive: we would be akin to a stone hurled across the surface of the water, which “skips lightly for a time, but as soon as it stops skipping, instantly sinks down into the depths.” Without commitments, we risk disappearing into the existential abyss. A life that lacks purpose creates anxiety. A meaningful life, Kierkegaard suggests, is one in which we actively assert ourselves in order to live more fully.It’s all well and good to make promises, but there’s still the challenge of keeping them. Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that what differentiates humans from other creatures is that we have “the right to make promises.” Making promises addresses a fundamental aspect of our humanity: that each of us is and is not the person we will become in the future. This is confusing, so let’s get concrete: Are you the same person you will be next year? Well, not exactly. Gray hair may sprout, wrinkles may emerge, your voice may deepen and thicken, your joints begin to ache. Your physical characteristics will objectively change, even if minutely. Your emotional and psychological identity may also shift; you might get a new job or a new partner, a new hobby or a new therapist. A promise is a way of laying claim to an uncertain future. It is a way of projecting oneself into the coming months, protecting a commitment that may be impossible to keep. It is also a means of guarding or binding one’s identity—the I in I promise. Why does a nonhuman animal not make promises? Most don’t have a conception of themselves as individuals or a vested sense of identity. Yes, some animals may experience guilt, but guilt is not the same as the shame of breaking a longstanding promise. Nietzsche’s suggestion is that we ought to keep making resolutions—heartfelt, honest-to-God promises—lest we devolve into an animal-like state.
Nietzsche does not say, however, that we must keep our resolutions. Sometimes, many times, the cost is simply too high. To fulfill all promises unconditionally may be unwise, if not pig-headed and arrogant. For example, perhaps you committed to shedding a few pounds, but it turns out that your blood sugar plummets every time you go for more than two hours without a snack and you’re constantly on the verge of passing out. So that wasn’t a great resolution after all. Or you resolved not to go on any new dates and to focus on your career, but every morning you bump into the same lovely person at your favorite café. With new information, you just might need to leave some commitments behind. There’s no reason to feel guilty about that. The Romantic view of the self is that there’s no need to feel enslaved to an idea of ourselves that we wanted in the past. The self is forever in flux, changing, growing. The Romantic self is one that is ready to annihilate itself over and over again. As Nietzsche’s most famous protagonist Zarathustra says, “You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”
For an existentialist an unwillingness to “burn yourself in your own flame,” to overcome or break a promise, can be a sign of “bad faith.” “Bad faith” is a situation in which you disavow the immediate free will that is always at your disposal. Bad faith is “bad” because it denies the hard, metaphysical core of being human—radical freedom. Radical freedom means we are radically responsible both for keeping and for transgressing promises. The fragility of our promises is what makes them meaningful.
by John Kaag and Skye C. Cleary, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Social Media Threat: People Learned to Survive Disease, We Can Handle Twitter
Society seems to be growing steadily crazier. And maybe it doesn’t just seem to be. Maybe it actually, is growing crazier.
I’ve been reading James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, and one of the interesting aspects to the earliest civilizations is how fragile they were. A bunch of people and their animals would crowd together in a city, and diseases that weren’t much of a threat when everybody was spread out hunting and gathering would suddenly spread like wildfire and depopulate the town almost overnight.
As Scott writes, an early city was more like a refugee resettlement camp than a modern urban area. He observes that “the pioneers who created this historically novel ecology could not possibly have known the disease vectors they were inadvertently unleashing.”
Then I ran across this observation on Twitter: “The Internet is rewiring brains and social relations. Could it be producing a civilizational nervous breakdown?” And I saw another article noting that depression in teens skyrocketed between 2010 and 2015, as smartphones took over. It made me wonder if we’re in the same boat as the neolithic cities, only for what you might call viruses of the mind: Toxic ideas that spread like wildfire. (...)
... in recent years we’ve gone from an era when ideas spread comparatively slowly, to one in which social media in particular allow them to spread like wildfire. Sometimes that’s good, when they’re good ideas. But most ideas are probably bad; certainly 90% of ideas aren’t in the top 10%. Maybe we don’t know the mental disease vectors that we’re inadvertently unleashing.
It took three things to help control the spread of disease in cities: sanitation, acclimation and better nutrition. In early cities, after all, people had no idea how diseases spread, something we didn’t fully understand until the late 19th century. But rule-of-thumb sanitation made things a lot better over time. Also, populations eventually adapted: Diseases became endemic, not epidemic, and usually less severe as people developed immunity. And finally, as Scott notes, surviving disease was always a function of nutrition, with better-nourished populations doing much better than malnourished ones.
Maybe there are some lessons for us here. We don’t know much about the spread of ideas, or what would constitute the equivalent of intellectual indoor plumbing. (Censorship isn’t enough, as it often just promotes the spread of bad ideas that people in power like). Over time we’ll learn more. Maybe we’ll come up with something like the germ theory of disease for ideas.
And perhaps people will acclimate. Twitter is still new, and amplifies crazy opinions. People may learn to spend less time on social media or to avoid them altogether. (In Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, the elites of the future consume their news on paper, and send each other handwritten notes; electronic communication is for the plebes.) But that will take time.
Where we can do something right away is with the equivalent of nutrition. Traditional training in critical thinking — the sort of thing the humanities used to revolve around, before they became focused on “social justice” — seems like it would be a useful protective. A skepticism regarding groupthink, ad hominem arguments and virtue signaling would likely offer considerable protection against the sort of mass hysteria we seem increasingly vulnerable to. Likewise, a social consensus on important ideas — the kinds of things we used to teach in civics classes — would help.
Better nourished minds are likely more resistant to social-media contagion. We’d better do something about it, before the real epidemic strikes.
by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, USA Today | Read more:
Image: via
I’ve been reading James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, and one of the interesting aspects to the earliest civilizations is how fragile they were. A bunch of people and their animals would crowd together in a city, and diseases that weren’t much of a threat when everybody was spread out hunting and gathering would suddenly spread like wildfire and depopulate the town almost overnight.
As Scott writes, an early city was more like a refugee resettlement camp than a modern urban area. He observes that “the pioneers who created this historically novel ecology could not possibly have known the disease vectors they were inadvertently unleashing.”Then I ran across this observation on Twitter: “The Internet is rewiring brains and social relations. Could it be producing a civilizational nervous breakdown?” And I saw another article noting that depression in teens skyrocketed between 2010 and 2015, as smartphones took over. It made me wonder if we’re in the same boat as the neolithic cities, only for what you might call viruses of the mind: Toxic ideas that spread like wildfire. (...)
... in recent years we’ve gone from an era when ideas spread comparatively slowly, to one in which social media in particular allow them to spread like wildfire. Sometimes that’s good, when they’re good ideas. But most ideas are probably bad; certainly 90% of ideas aren’t in the top 10%. Maybe we don’t know the mental disease vectors that we’re inadvertently unleashing.
It took three things to help control the spread of disease in cities: sanitation, acclimation and better nutrition. In early cities, after all, people had no idea how diseases spread, something we didn’t fully understand until the late 19th century. But rule-of-thumb sanitation made things a lot better over time. Also, populations eventually adapted: Diseases became endemic, not epidemic, and usually less severe as people developed immunity. And finally, as Scott notes, surviving disease was always a function of nutrition, with better-nourished populations doing much better than malnourished ones.
Maybe there are some lessons for us here. We don’t know much about the spread of ideas, or what would constitute the equivalent of intellectual indoor plumbing. (Censorship isn’t enough, as it often just promotes the spread of bad ideas that people in power like). Over time we’ll learn more. Maybe we’ll come up with something like the germ theory of disease for ideas.
And perhaps people will acclimate. Twitter is still new, and amplifies crazy opinions. People may learn to spend less time on social media or to avoid them altogether. (In Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, the elites of the future consume their news on paper, and send each other handwritten notes; electronic communication is for the plebes.) But that will take time.
Where we can do something right away is with the equivalent of nutrition. Traditional training in critical thinking — the sort of thing the humanities used to revolve around, before they became focused on “social justice” — seems like it would be a useful protective. A skepticism regarding groupthink, ad hominem arguments and virtue signaling would likely offer considerable protection against the sort of mass hysteria we seem increasingly vulnerable to. Likewise, a social consensus on important ideas — the kinds of things we used to teach in civics classes — would help.
Better nourished minds are likely more resistant to social-media contagion. We’d better do something about it, before the real epidemic strikes.
by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, USA Today | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. The author mentions Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age but perhaps a better example might be Snow Crash which imagines the spread of a mental virus via algorithmically designed bitmapped image. In terms of what can be done, 1) indoor plumbing: provide better access to mental health treatments and facilities at less expense, and remove research restrictions on so-called psychedelic pharmaceuticals (ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA, etc); 2) immunity: establish regulations, guidelines, best practices - whatever - for social media that mitigate psychologically addictive programming (like you would for any drug, and require full disclosure and uses of all acquired data); 3) nourishment: agree with the author, more emphasis should be placed on humanities and civics instruction in schools (and not just old dead white guys and wars).]
Saturday, December 23, 2017
Smartphones Have an Unexpected New Rival
Last week, an Indian government official announced that iPhones will start rolling off an assembly line in Bangalore by the end of April, targeted at local customers. It's a big moment for Apple Inc., which is counting on India's emerging middle class to make up for slowing sales in other markets. But don't bet on the iPhone conquering India, or any other emerging market, just yet.
That's because smartphones of all kinds are facing stiff competition from an unlikely new challenger: feature phones. With simple handsets and small screens intended mostly for calls and text messages -- similar to the Nokia or Motorola you probably owned years ago -- a new generation of feature phones is suddenly looking like a threat to Apple and its rivals.
For a technology long ago left for dead, feature phones have lately made some impressive gains. After years of almost continuous decline, global shipments have grown for two consecutive quarters. Growth in emerging markets has been especially impressive: In Africa, feature-phone shipments surged 32 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2016, compared to a decline of 5.2 percent for smartphones. Expect that trend to continue, for a few reasons.
One obvious advantage is price. At the end of 2016, the average global price of a smartphone was $256, compared to $19.30 for a feature phone. In emerging markets, where even educated urbanites typically earn less than $10,000 a year (in India, they average $5,385), that doesn't leave much in the way of consumer choice. But even if a buyer has $256 to spare, the booming secondhand market offers far better options than a smartphone. In Ghana, where I recently spent a few weeks, $256 will buy a used Pentium III desktop computer, a flat-screen monitor, a satellite dish and a decoder box to pirate satellite television broadcasts.
Another factor is battery life. In many emerging markets, where electricity service can be intermittent, smartphones that have to be recharged each day can't compete against feature phones that can now go for weeks on a single charge. In West Africa, it's the rare smartphone owner who doesn't also carry a feature phone as a hedge against missing calls and messages due to battery depletion. Equally important, most emerging-market customers prepay for voice and data, making smartphones that passively eat up bandwidth a major inconvenience.
That's because smartphones of all kinds are facing stiff competition from an unlikely new challenger: feature phones. With simple handsets and small screens intended mostly for calls and text messages -- similar to the Nokia or Motorola you probably owned years ago -- a new generation of feature phones is suddenly looking like a threat to Apple and its rivals.For a technology long ago left for dead, feature phones have lately made some impressive gains. After years of almost continuous decline, global shipments have grown for two consecutive quarters. Growth in emerging markets has been especially impressive: In Africa, feature-phone shipments surged 32 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2016, compared to a decline of 5.2 percent for smartphones. Expect that trend to continue, for a few reasons.
One obvious advantage is price. At the end of 2016, the average global price of a smartphone was $256, compared to $19.30 for a feature phone. In emerging markets, where even educated urbanites typically earn less than $10,000 a year (in India, they average $5,385), that doesn't leave much in the way of consumer choice. But even if a buyer has $256 to spare, the booming secondhand market offers far better options than a smartphone. In Ghana, where I recently spent a few weeks, $256 will buy a used Pentium III desktop computer, a flat-screen monitor, a satellite dish and a decoder box to pirate satellite television broadcasts.
Another factor is battery life. In many emerging markets, where electricity service can be intermittent, smartphones that have to be recharged each day can't compete against feature phones that can now go for weeks on a single charge. In West Africa, it's the rare smartphone owner who doesn't also carry a feature phone as a hedge against missing calls and messages due to battery depletion. Equally important, most emerging-market customers prepay for voice and data, making smartphones that passively eat up bandwidth a major inconvenience.
by Adam Minter, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Chris Jackson/Getty Images
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