‘The Organic Side, to Me, Is Scarier Than the Ad Side’

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is testifying in front of Congress this week. To accompany the testimony, Select All is publishing transcripts of interviews with four ex-Facebook employees and one former investor, conducted as part of a wider project on the crisis within the tech industry that will be published later this week. These interviews include:

• Former Facebook manager Sandy Parakilas on privacy, addiction, and why Facebook must “dramatically” change its business model.

• Early Facebook investor Roger McNamee on Facebook propaganda, early warning signs, and why outrage is so addictive.

• Former Facebook designer Soleio Cuervo on Facebook’s commitment to users, what the media gets wrong, and why regulation is unnecessary.

• Former Zuckerberg speechwriter Kate Losse on how the Facebook founder thinks and what is hardest for him to wrap his mind around.

This interview is with Antonio Garcia Martinez, a product manager on the Facebook Ads team between 2011 and 2012. He is the author of Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley Kindle.

There’s an assumption that what Facebook does for advertisers is hugely influential. But on the other hand, as Zuckerberg said right after the election, it was a pretty crazy idea that fake news could influence an election in a meaningful way. Where do you think that dissonance kind of came from? As somebody who worked on the ad side.

So you’re referring to his somewhat jaw-dropping initial post after the election on November 11th or 12th or whatever it was, right? The one where he basically dismissed the claim that Facebook could have impacted the election. I mean, that was kind of a crazy claim. I also was clearly astonished when I read it. Until literally a few days before, this entire ad sales team at Facebook was literally telling every politician with any budget that Facebook can actually hand them the election. It is incredibly disingenuous and strange for an exec to get up and say that there’s no way Facebook could have potentially impacted the election.

Two or three days later someone sat him down, and he very quickly backpedaled. I mean, that I think is the combination of a few factors. At the exec level, it might just be a function of the fact that he doesn’t know too much about ads, and when I say that it sounds horrible, but I don’t mean it in a necessarily critical way. Zuck has famously never been very interested in either money or revenue of the company. Obviously he understands that it’s a necessary evil, but it’s the sort of thing that he just outsources to Sheryl and whatever lieutenants that are taking care of the ad system.

He’s a micromanager, and I never even saw him once in the ads area micromanaging anything. He just doesn’t care. I’m sure he knows but not in a top-of-mind sort of way that there’s an ad political sales force numbering in the hundreds and a huge D.C. office and that there’s this entire effort actually to make politics more sensational. Look, it’s probably not something that he thought of when he sat down in a postelection moment of panic or emotion or whatever to write about, right? So I think some of it’s just that. Some of it’s … people always approach this with this kind of overweening techno-optimism, right?

They only ever see the positive side of the technologies they create. I mean, part of that is because we really, at heart, really are just such optimists, they can’t imagine negative scenarios, they don’t have some kind of, sort of tragic history.

At what moment would you say that blindness actually became a really big problem? It feels like the election was just sort of the bubbling over of a lot of long-simmering kinds of issues in this realm.

I do think the election was, certainly in the case of Facebook, a key inflection point, not just in how the public perceives them but how they perceive themselves, right? The biggest sign that things are seriously amiss, or that there’s real turmoil in Facebook is the number of leakers that journalists have managed to find. Historically, Facebook was like the most impenetrable company ever. Nobody would ever leak or talk bad about it and now they are, and a lot of this dirty laundry and the palace intrigue, all that shit is leaking out now in a way that it wouldn’t in the past. I think the election definitely fractured that internal sort of mission focus and cohesion that Facebook has traditionally enjoyed. I mean, to your broader question of when was there a transition point? I don’t know, I think it certainly fits the narrative to say, “Aha, the key moment in the movie, when everything changed …”

I think a lot of the save-the-world stuff comes from the origins of the Valley. If you go back to the Seventies and the counterculture, the hippy flower children dropped out, and Silicon Valley was this alternative to mainstream, industrial life. Steve Jobs would never have gotten a job at IBM or a more conventional firm. He had to create this other thing, which was imbued with a lot of that hippy dippy whatever. After a while, the whole thing became more sharp elbowed. It wasn’t hippies showing up any more.

There was a lot more of the libertarian, screw-the-government ethos. That whole idea of move fast, break things, and damn the consequences — which by the way is a very powerful philosophy. I’m not completely dinging it, you kind of need to have that attitude to get things done but, yeah, you do end up in situations like you did in this.

I think Silicon Valley has changed. It still flies under this marketing shell of “making the world a better place.” But under the covers it’s this almost sociopathic scene. Even me, when I had my shitty little start-up that I acquired, I was also in total asocial personality disorder mode, and I think it characterizes a lot of people in this world. (...)

What changes could have been made in the ad business and in the business models of internet advertising that could have averted some of this at least? Take Cambridge Analytica just as a recent example of this. I’m kind of curious about the ways in which the business model could have been reoriented to avoid some of this.

Look, I mean, advertising sucks, sure. But as the ad tech guys say, “We’re the people who pay for the internet.” It’s hard to imagine a different business model other than advertising for any consumer internet app that depends on network effects. I just can’t think of many examples of viable businesses of that nature that weren’t based on advertising. What else are you going to do? How else do you pay for this?

One proposal would be something like subscriptions. Is there an alternative that is meant for the public benefit, that you think makes sense? Is that something that resonates at all?

Normally I just discard the subscription proposal. Facebook’s actual average revenue per user in developed nations like the U.S. is pretty damn high. So it would put it on the order of a Netflix subscription, or more, potentially. Even though people might derive that much value from it, it’s unlikely that they’re just going to fork out a couple hundred bucks a year for Facebook.

Maybe in mature markets where everyone who is going to become a Facebook user is already a Facebook user, maybe there you could do it, if you combined it with some premium features, like I post a lot on Facebook and I have a blue checkmark and I guess I’m a power user, whatever. Posting on Facebook is at least as much about pumping my own personal brand as it is keeping touch with friends. Yeah, would I pay 23 bucks a month for really nice, advanced feature and a better UI, and posts that went out a certain time and better analytics? Yeah, maybe I would. It’s not crazy.

The other question is what do you charge, right? How does the pricing work? Part of the point of advertising is that it’s a price-discovery mechanism. You just don’t know what that time is worth until you actually subject it to an ads auction model. So, I mean, how’s it going to work? The reality is, it could end up being the developed world subsidizing Facebook for the developing world. Which is already the case, I guess, in the sense that the amount of money that Facebook makes in ads sort of provides Facebook for India. India doesn’t pay for itself, frankly. The U.S. and Europe pay for Facebook and then the marginal cost of it is relatively small, so they give it away in Brazil or India, or whatever, right?

You get into these pricing problems because there’s going be an old lady in Arkansas who’s only willing to pay 50 bucks for Facebook and then there’s me, I’d pay $1,000 a year probably for it, for personal branding reasons. But, I mean, how do you distinguish those two?

by Noah Kulwin and Antonio Garcia Martinez, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Helena Price

Risk-Aversion Meets a Hypervalued Market

Sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific.
– Roger Babson, September 5, 1929

Roger Babson’s first rule of investing was “keep speculation and investments separate.” He is remembered not only for founding Babson College in Massachusetts, but also for his speech at the National Business Conference, warning of an impending crash just two days after the 1929 peak, at the very beginning of a decline that would wipe out 89% of the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

As I’ve observed before, the back-story is that Babson’s presentation began as follows: “I’m about to repeat what I said at this time last year, and the year before…” The fact is that Babson had been “proven wrong” by an advance that had taken stocks relentlessly higher, doubling during those two preceding years. Over the next 10 weeks, all of those market gains would be erased. If Babson was “too early,” it certainly didn’t matter. From the low of the 1929 plunge, the stock market would then lose an additional 79% of its value by its eventual bottom in 1932 because of add-on policy errors that resulted in the Great Depression.

To slightly paraphrase Ben Hunt, how does something go down 90%? First it goes down 50%, then it goes down 80% more.

This lesson has been repeated, to varying degrees, at every market extreme across history. For example, the 1973-1974 decline wiped out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index (market returns over and above T-bill returns) all the way back to October 1958. The 2000-2002 market decline wiped out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index all the way back to May 1996. The 2007-2009 market decline wiped out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index all the way back to June 1995. I expect that the completion of the current market cycle will wipe out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index all the way back to about October 1997. That outcome wouldn’t even require the most reliable valuation measures we identify to breach their pre-bubble norms.

The chart below presents several valuation measures we find most strongly correlated with actual subsequent S&P 500 total returns in market cycles across history. They are presented as percentage deviations from their historical norms. At the January peak, these measures extended about 200% above (three times) historical norms that we associate with average, run-of-the-mill prospects for long-term market returns. No market cycle in history – not even those of recent decades, nor those associated with low interest rates – has ended without taking our most reliable measures of valuation to less than half of their late-January levels.

Don’t imagine that a market advance “disproves” concerns about overvaluation. In a steeply overvalued market, further advances typically magnify the losses that follow, ultimately wiping out years, and sometimes more than a decade, of what the market has gained relative to risk-free cash.

Daily news versus latent risks

I’ve been increasingly asked my opinion of the recent market volatility. The proper answer, I think, is that we’re observing the very early effects of risk-aversion in a hypervalued market. To some extent, the actual news events are irrelevant. I certainly wouldn’t gauge market risk by monitoring the day-to-day news on potential tariffs or even prospects for rate changes by the Fed.

Indeed, when our measures of market internals have been unfavorable (signaling risk-averse investor psychology), the S&P 500 has historically lost value, on average, even during periods of Fed easing, falling interest rates, or interest rates pinned near zero. The reason is that when investors are inclined toward risk-aversion, safe liquidity is a desirable asset rather than an inferior one, so creating more of the stuff doesn’t provoke speculation.

This distinction – that Fed easing can strongly amplify existing speculative pressures but is often wholly ineffective when investors are inclined to risk-aversion – is likely to smack believers in a “Fed put” like a ton of bricks over the completion of this cycle. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the financial memory of investors wasn’t so selective. Recall that the Fed eased aggressively and persistently throughout the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 collapses.

In a speculative market, bad news is good news and good news is good news. In a risk-averse market, the opposite is true. When investors have to argue among themselves about which news event is causing them to worry, the news is probably just providing day-to-day occasions for investors to act on more general concerns, like extreme valuation.

Does anyone really think the market crashed in October 1987 because of a larger-than-expected trade deficit with Germany? That’s the only news event people could find that day, and investors would fearfully monitor every blip in trade reports months afterward. Attributing the market change of the day to the particular news of the day is an exercise in spurious correlation. Unless there’s an event that will materially alter the long-term stream of cash flows that will be delivered by companies to investors for decades to come, what you’re actually seeing is a daily dance of surface-level investor psychology that gradually reveals or obscures the latent fundamentals below. (...)

Investment and speculation

Both Benjamin Graham and Roger Babson were careful to distinguish investment from speculation. This remains a critical distinction today. Understanding it will make an enormous difference to investors in the coming years.

When we examine market collapses across history, the common feature is that both investment merit and speculative merit are absent.

At its core, investment is about valuation. It’s about purchasing a stream of expected future cash flows at a price that’s low enough to result in desirable total returns, at an acceptable level of risk, as those cash flows are delivered over time. The central tools of investment analysis include an understanding of market history, cash flow projection, the extent to which various measures of financial performance can be used as “sufficient statistics” for that very long-term stream of cash flows (which is crucial whenever valuation ratios are used as a shorthand for discounted cash flow analysis), and a command of the basic arithmetic that connects the current price, the future cash flows, and the long-term rate of return.

At its core, speculation is about psychology. It’s about waves of optimism and pessimism that drive fluctuations in price, regardless of valuation. Value investors tend to look down on speculation, particularly extended periods of it. Unfortunately, if a material portion of one’s life must be lived amid episodes of reckless speculation that repeatedly collapse into heaps of ash, one is forced to make a choice. One choice is to imagine that speculation is actually investment, which is what most investors inadvertently do. The other choice is to continue to distinguish speculation from investment, and develop ways to measure and navigate both.

The central tools of speculative analysis focus on the observable prices, trading volume, sentiment, and other objects that emerge as the expression of investor psychology. For our part, two sorts of measures are useful; one dealing with the uniformity or divergence of price behavior, and the other dealing with overextended extremes.

We gauge investor preferences toward speculation or risk-aversion by extracting a signal from what we call “market internals” – the behavior of thousands of securities; individual stocks, industries, sectors, and security-types, including debt securities of varying creditworthiness. While we do keep our methods proprietary on that front, we’re very open about the underlying concepts: 1) when investors are inclined to speculate, they tend to be indiscriminate about it, and 2) when two securities diverge, the dispersion provides information about factors that they do not share in common. As a simple example, consider junk bonds versus high-grade bonds. Uniform market action conveys information or investor perceptions about interest rate pressures. Divergence conveys information or investor perceptions about oncoming credit risk and default.

With regard to overextended extremes, prior episodes of speculation in market cycles across history usually ended, or encountered sharp air-pockets, at the point where valuations, price extremes, and investor sentiment simultaneously reflected overvalued, overbought, overbullish conditions. Unfortunately, we learned the very hard way in recent years that, faced with zero interest rate policies, these syndromes were virtually useless in signaling even a pause in the relentless yield-seeking speculation and “there is no alternative” mindset that the Federal Reserve deliberately encouraged. So we had to adapt, ultimately restricting our discipline from taking a negative outlook unless we also observed explicit deterioration in our measures of market internals.

At present, stock market investors are faced with offensively extreme valuations, particularly among the measures best-correlated with actual subsequent market returns across history. Investment merit is absent. Investors largely ignored extreme “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” syndromes through much of the recent half-cycle advance, yet even since 2009, the S&P 500 has lost value, on average, when these syndromes were joined by unfavorable market internals.

We observed a clear deterioration in our measures of market internals in the week of February 2nd. While we have to be open to changes in market internals that might signal a resumption of speculative investor psychology, we don’t see that here. So speculative merit is also absent (apart than the rather weak potential that emerges from short-term “oversold” conditions). When we examine market collapses across history, the common feature is that both investment merit and speculative merit are absent.

by John P. Hussman Ph.D., Hussman Funds |  Read more:

Image: Hussman Funds

Mike Winklemann, Google Data Center 2079
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Elliot Erwitt, Wilmington, North Carolina, USA. 1950
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Data Lords

This afternoon I saw a friend on Twitter say that he doesn’t buy the idea that if people just paid Facebook some sort of fee the data and privacy issue would go away. Because he subscribes to the Times, the Post and the WSJ and they each track his readership habits and sell that data to advertisers or make it available to them for targeting. This is at least partly true – I’ll discuss the ins and outs of that point in a moment. But this is a good opportunity to discuss the real relationship between publishers and big data. It’s actually very different than it looks.

First, what my friend says is true. These publications are all in the data collection and sale business. Indeed, TPM is too – not directly at all but because of the ad networks (like Google and others) we have no choice but to work with. The key on the main claim is that the issue is one of diversity of revenue streams. Each of those big publications mentioned has at least three big revenue sources that are relevant to this conversation. They have premium advertisers for which the kind of data we’re talking about has limited importance. They also have subscriptions. The final bucket is made up of advertising that is heavily reliant on data and targeting.

The difference is that Facebook is almost 100% reliant on advertising which is not only reliant on data and targeting but reliant on the most aggressive kinds of data collection, tracking and targeting. That is Facebook’s entire business. Anything that cuts deeply into that model and advantage represents an existential threat.

But here’s the really salient point. Almost every publication participates in the data economy. But the data economy is almost universally a bad thing for publications, especially ones that have real audiences.

Allow me to explain.

Different publications have different kinds of audiences. If you want to sell consumer goods to a mass audience, you might advertise in People magazine or Yahoo News. If you want to advertise to affluent investors you might advertise on WSJ or Barron’s. If you want to advertise to highly educated progressive news junkies who are what ad industry types call ‘opinion leaders’ you might advertise on TPM.

Different publications have different audiences and they have different relationships with those audiences. Some have deep bonds of trust, others don’t. Historically (and increasingly today), publications sell subscriptions. They also sell ads which can command different rates depending the value advertisers attach to talking to different groups of people. If you have a strong brand and a key audience, a publication can command profitable advertising rates because they become a kind of gatekeeper for a given audience.

The evolution of big data, tracking, targeting and advertising over the last half dozen years has transformed this dynamic.

Let’s take a hypothetical publication, Fishing Times. In the old days, paper or digital, if you’re advertising fishing equipment, Fishing Times is a must-buy. But tracking and targeting changes that. Now Google or Facebook or a number of other players whose names you haven’t heard of can target people interested in fishing or even Fishing Times readers wherever they go on the internet. Let’s call these “Fishing Times readers” collectively.

So Fishing Times’s ad department is selling access to the prime Fishing Times readership. But the Data Lords can say, ‘we can show your ad just to Fishing Times readers when they’re on Facebook, or on some meme site, on the Times or TPM or really anywhere.’ Because the Data Lords have the data and they can track and target you. The publication’s role as the gatekeeper to an audience is totally undercut because the folks who control the data and the targeting can follow those readers anywhere and purchase the ads at the lowest price.

That’s not all. The Data Lords can also create something called ‘look alike audiences’, a key part of what Facebook (but by no means only Facebook) does. This means that the data may show that people with brown eyes, Toyota Camrys, fans of Katie Perry and chocolate milk buy the most fishing equipment and are the most intensely loyal readers of Fishing Times. Now the Data Lords can show your ads not only to Fishing Times readers (wherever they go on the web) but to this demographic profile which may seem to have no connection to fishing but yet has a demonstrated propensity to purchase fishing gear in the same way Fishing Times readers do.

There’s one final part of the equation. Let’s go back to advertising at Fishing Times. We have an advertiser who sells hand crafted fly fishing gear. This is pricey stuff and it appeals to only one, fairly small part of the Fishing Times demographic. The advertiser may set up a private auction or marketplace with Google which will allow them to show their ads on Fishing Times only when a reader fits a very specific demographic profile. So Fishing Times is getting those dollars but only a tiny fraction of them because the Data Lords have allowed them to pick and choose the small subset of the audience they want to show their ads to.

A few caveats: This transformation is not quite as total as I suggest. Some publications have sufficient brand cachet that appearing on their site retains a value of its own. Some have enough market power that they can keep the data/targeting world off their most prized publication real estate. But the dynamics I’ve noted are affecting all publications and most of them to a great degree. If you’re hearing about the advertising and monetization crisis so many publishers are facing, what I’m describing here is a huge part of what is going on.

There’s one more indeterminate asterisk that floats over all these calculations: that is, the Facebooks’, Googles’ and other Data Lords’ data pretty clearly isn’t as good as they claim. In recent weeks, for instance, Facebook has had to repeatedly reduce estimates of the “reach” of their ads (how many people actually see them). Since the value of ads is whether and how many people see them, having the reach numbers wrong is a pretty big deal.

In pure efficiency terms, most of this is great. As an advertiser I don’t have to pay high rates to reach New York Times readers on The New York Times. I can pay Google or Facebook to find them for me elsewhere for much cheaper prices. But as you can see, in this new world of data, tracking and targeting, it’s the Data Lords who have the power and get the money. It’s comparable to the way Apple’s iTunes and Spotify dramatically reduced the amount of money in music sales and took a big, big chunk of the reduced size pie for themselves. Amazon is comparable with books and a lot else.

by Josh Marshall, TPM |  Read more:

Image: Tobias Hase/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Report: This is Not a Gun

NEW YORK—In a discovery that flies in the face of conventional law enforcement wisdom of what does and does not constitute a deadly firearm, weapons and non-weapons experts alike reported Thursday that an array of objects including but not limited to steel pipes, wallets, and cell phones are not, in fact, guns. “After extensive research and careful analysis, we can definitively state that these objects are not guns and cannot inflict harm by firing bullets,” said head researcher Jerome Morvis, whose team found no reason why, despite obvious differences in the size, shape, and color of the objects in question, the items so often appear as firearms to the not-completely-untrained eye. “To any law enforcement officer unsure about the object a civilian is holding, we recommend looking at the firearm in your own hand and looking back for parallels between its physical qualities and those of the object in a suspect’s hands. If you find no similarities, the object does not pose an immediate danger.” In related news, the experts have released a guide to help law enforcement officials discern the difference between a gun and an African American man’s empty, upraised hand.

by The Onion |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Please share with the TSA, re: deadly food items.]

When Do You Know You're Old Enough to Die?

Four years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich, 76, reached the realisation that she was old enough to die. Not that the author, journalist and political activist was sick; she just didn’t want to spoil the time she had left undergoing myriad preventive medical tests or restricting her diet in pursuit of a longer life.

While she would seek help for an urgent health issue, she wouldn’t look for problems.

Now Ehrenreich felt free to enjoy herself. “I tend to worry that a lot of my friends who are my age don’t get to that point,” she tells the Guardian. “They’re frantically scrambling for new things that might prolong their lives.”

It is not a suicidal decision, she stresses. Ehrenreich has what she calls “a very keen bullshit detector” and she has done her research.

The results of this are detailed in her latest book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, published on 10 April.

Part polemic, part autobiographical, Ehrenreich – who holds a PhD in cellular immunology – casts a skeptical, sometimes witty, and scientifically rigorous eye over the beliefs we hold that we think will give us longevity.

She targets the medical examinations, screenings and tests we’re subjected to in older age as well as the multibillion-dollar “wellness” industry, the cult of mindfulness and food fads.

These all give us the illusion that we are in control of our bodies. But in the latter part of the book, Ehrenreich argues this is not so. For example, she details how our immune systems can turn on us, promoting rather than preventing the spread of cancer cells.

When Ehrenreich talks of being old enough to die, she does not mean that each of us has an expiration date. It’s more that there’s an age at which death no longer requires much explanation.

“That thought had been forming in my mind for some time,” she says. “I really have no hard evidence about when exactly one gets old enough to die, but I notice in obituaries if the person is over 70 there’s not a big mystery, there’s no investigation called for. It’s usually not called tragic because we do die at some age. I found that rather refreshing.” (...)

Ehrenreich, who is divorced, has talked to her children – Rosa, a law professor, and Ben, a journalist and novelist – about her realisation she is old enough to die, but “not in a grim way”. That wouldn’t be her style. While a sombre subject, she chats about it with a matter-of-fact humour.

“I just said: ‘This is bullshit. I’m not going to go through this and that and the other. I’m not going to spend my time, which is very precious, being screened and probed and subjected to various kinds of machine surveillance.’ I think they’re with me. I raised them right,” she laughs.

“The last time I had to get a new primary care doctor I told her straight out: ‘I will come to you if I have a problem, but do not go looking for problems.’”

She pauses: “I think I beat her into submission.”

by Lucy Rock, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Stephen Voss for the Guardian
[ed. See also: Why Are the Poor Blamed and Shamed for Their Deaths?]

John Coltrane
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Nova

Pay for Your Words

There used to be two kinds of words: written or spoken. Written statements were more consciously edited. You’d take full responsibility for what you wrote, and you’d have the chance to hone your words. One was always aware one was writing at least in part for posterity, whether literary or legal. One consciously crafted a voice. One expected to be judged for it.

And then there were the words used in bars and restaurants and rows, still performative of course but also meant to remain largely unrecorded: uttered to blow off steam, as a momentary flirtation or provocation, meant to then fall to the ground and be swept away.

Social media occupies a third, hybrid space – the worst of both worlds. On the one hand a post only makes sense in the context of a specific time and conversation, with its temperature and colour, like dinner-party discussion. But it is recorded like a seriously intended text, and can be judged with that severity long after the fact.

Or, naked and without context, these posts can be stripped for their behavioural qualities. Instead of information or meaning they are read for data: the frequency of certain words; how close certain words are to others; sentiment analysis; whether we use more aggressive language as a conversation proceeds; times of postings and what that says about our personality; whether our grammar, likes and dislikes indicate that we are conscientious or open, extrovert or neurotic.

The idea that our words can betray something about ourselves beyond what we think we are saying has always been the premise of psychoanalysis. When one talks to therapists the way we use words, our Freudian slips and ellipses, is how our unconscious is meant to emerge. But psychoanalysis’ confessions take place in a closed, secure space. Social media uses the same trick as the psychoanalyst: ‘What’s on your mind’ is the question Facebook asks when you open it, much like the shrink does when you enter their cabinet. But this time the unconscious is being revealed not to a doctor but a data broker.

This is the real nightmare of social media. Not so much that ‘they’ know something about me I considered private, hidden. Though that’s unpleasant it’s also somehow comforting, reinforcing the idea that there’s a stable ‘me’ I am fully aware of, to protect from ‘them’. More worrying is the idea that ‘they’ know something about me which I hadn’t realised myself, that my data betrays more about me than I know about myself: that I’m not who I think I am. Ones complete dissolution into data.

There’s a morality tale here: social media, that little narcissism machine, the easiest way we have ever had to place ourselves on a pedestal of vanity, propagandise ourselves, is also the mechanism that most efficiently breaks you up.

The more skilful social media user will claim that they have successfully created a persona, that they are involved in a creative game, that they are playing the data field not it them. But social media has its own logic which dictates that persona. (...)

‘The most tragic part of social media’, the writer Zinovy Zinik told me the other evening, ‘is that though people think they are expressing their personalities they’re always just quoting someone else’.

He meant that when people think they are writing ‘what’s on their mind’ on Facebook they are just following a set of sub-literary tropes, prescribed poses. And in the sense that people choose social media as the main forum to express themselves, that means there’s less of themselves all the time. For those who are more passive-expressive, there is always the option to re-post other people as a way of signalling your position: literally transforming oneself into a series of quotes.

As the evening wore on, Zinik and I looked back to the Moscow Conceptualists of the 1970s and 80s, a movement obsessed with the idea of how you could express the individual in a world where Soviet propaganda had occupied all modes of expression. Our politics are more Orson Wellesian than Orwellian, more Twitter-narcissistic than top-down totalitarian, but were there be tactics to be gleaned from them?

by Peter Pomerantsev, Granta | Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Why of Cooking

It’s a shame that the standard way of learning how to cook is by following recipes. To be sure, they are a wonderfully effective way to approximate a dish as it appeared in a test kitchen, at a star chef’s restaurant, or on TV. And they can be an excellent inspiration for even the least ambitious home cooks to liven up a weeknight dinner. But recipes, for all their precision and completeness, are poor teachers. They tell you what to do, but they rarely tell you why to do it.

This means that for most novice cooks, kitchen wisdom—a unified understanding of how cooking works, as distinct from the notes grandma lovingly scrawled on index-card recipes passed down through the generations—comes piecemeal. Take, for instance, the basic skill of thickening a sauce. Maybe one recipe for marinara advises reserving some of the starchy pasta water, for adding later in case the sauce is looking a little thin. Another might recommend rescuing a too-watery sauce with some flour, and still another might suggest a handful of parmesan. Any one of these recipes offers a fix under specific conditions, but after cooking through enough of them, those isolated recommendations can congeal into a realization: There are many clever ways to thicken a sauce, and picking an appropriate one depends on whether there’s some leeway for the flavor to change and how much time there is until dinner needs to be on the table.

The downside of learning to cook primarily through recipes, then, is that these small eurekas—which, once hit upon, are instantly applicable to nearly any other dish one prepares—are most often arrived at via triangulation. It’s like trying to learn a language only by copying down others’ sentences, instead of learning the grammar and vocabulary needed to put to paper lines of one’s own.

Short of enrolling in a cooking school, is there not a more direct, less haphazard way to arrive at a fuller idea of the theory behind good cooking? One gets the sense that chefs and cookbook authors are in possession of some magnificent guidebook full of culinary insights, consulting it to construct their dishes and revealing its secrets to everyday cooks only in fragments. No book could live up to that hyperbolic image, but I was still surprised, after roughly a year of searching, to find that there are very few books that concisely articulate the concepts that underlie good cooking, in a way that neither patronizes nor overwhelms. One might call what I was looking for “a metacookbook”—a book not about a certain cuisine or style of cooking, but about cooking itself—and I found good ones to be surprisingly rare.

One of the reasons for this is that the standard recommendations for a concept-based book about cooking are not completely helpful. Many of them, I found, were not metacookbooks at all, but rather in-depth guides to mastering the fundamentals of a classically respected cuisine (most often French or Italian) or matter-of-fact catalogues of cooking techniques, such as how to poach an egg or make a soufflé that doesn’t cave in. And of the recommendations that did fit the category, few struck a readable balance between in-the-weeds scientific digressions and everyday pragmatism. After reading through about a dozen metacookbooks, I did eventually arrive at the sort of knowledge I’d hoped for, but I also saw how some were much better than others at getting me there. Of all of them, my favorite—and the one I’m most likely to recommend to a beginning cook with even a faint desire to improve—is Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which is out this week.

by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

Husaberg  FE 390 Enduro 7 / Motorcycle / 2012
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The Big Question for Markets

These are unsettled times in financial markets.

Stock prices rose or fell by more than 1 percent in four of five days last week, and if anything those closing numbers masked even larger swings within each trading sessions. A common measure of expected stock market volatility is about to double its level from early January.

The proximate cause is pretty obvious: President Trump is threatening a trade war with China and perhaps other trading partners. But beneath those daily headlines are two more fundamental questions: Is there a Kudlow Put? And is there a Powell Put?

More specifically, will the White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow (and his free-trader allies within the administration) be able to rein in the Trump administration’s trade stance if markets keep falling? And will the Federal Reserve’s chairman, Jerome Powell, be ready to take action, such as by delaying interest rate increases or even cutting rates, if markets tumble further?

If the answers are “yes,” there isn’t much to worry about and the stock market should be able to keep humming along at its current high levels. If it’s a “no,” well, in a word, uh-oh.

A “put” is an option contract that offers its buyer protection against losses. If you own a stock worth $100 and buy a put with a strike price of $80, you are ensuring the ability to sell for that price if you wish, so you can’t lose more than 20 percent of your money.

Back in the 1990s, traders started referring to the “Greenspan Put,” the notion that the stock market as a whole had the equivalent of a giant put option in the form of the Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. Amid an emerging markets debt crisis in 1998, the Fed cut interest rates to try to guard the United States against economic fallout, which helped the stock market gain a whopping 29 percent that year despite the global troubles.

This notion that the Fed is always ready to act when the stock markets start to dip has almost become a piece of conventional wisdom in market circles over the years — often said with a bit of snark and implicit criticism of the Fed for supposedly bailing out investors whenever the going gets tough. Fed officials themselves hate the idea, and argue that they’re looking out for the economy, not markets.

Nonetheless, in the popular discourse the Greenspan Put gave way to the (Ben) Bernanke Put, and to the (Janet) Yellen Put, as Mr. Greenspan’s successors engaged in multiple rounds of “quantitative easing” in recent years.

Which brings us to the 2018 equivalents. (...)

The pattern on trade policy through the first 14 months of the Trump administration has been to pair blustery talk — about pulling out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, for example — with more modest policy actions and negotiations that may avert real economic damage.

But the question is whether that dynamic is changing, with the departure of more internationalist voices within the administration like Mr. Kudlow’s predecessor, Gary Cohn, and the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

If Mr. Kudlow is able to offer only soothing words in the White House driveway — and those words aren’t matched by restraint in policymaking — the Kudlow Put will turn out to be fairly worthless. A warning sign about that possibility came Thursday night, when the administration threatened tariffs on an additional $100 billion in Chinese imports, in retaliation to China’s retaliation.

This is the kind of escalation that would, if it became policy rather than mere threat, be quite ominous for financial markets. Again on Friday, Mr. Kudlow offered calming messages, saying “there are all kinds of back-channel discussions going on.” But given the continued escalation after his earlier attempts at calm, the Kudlow Put didn’t quite work, and the market fell 2 percent that day.

Then there is Mr. Powell, who is in his second month as Federal Reserve chairman. He delivered a speech Friday that threw into doubt whether the Powell Put exists — at least with respect to potential economic disruption from a trade war.

He mentioned that business contacts had told Fed officials they were worried that trade tensions could spill into broader economic distress. But he did not go the next step of giving any hint that this might lead the Fed to reconsider its plans to raise interest rates gradually in the year ahead.

There’s good reason for that. If the trade skirmish escalates into a trade war, it will harm economic growth, but it will also be inflationary. Prices would rise for American consumers in the near term because of the new tariffs, and would rise in the medium term as production of goods moved to less economically advantageous locations.

It is an economic problem that the Fed’s tools would be particularly ill suited to solve; the Fed can help address weak demand in the economy but can’t do much about a negative supply shock, which is what a trade war would be.

So it’s understandable that Mr. Powell would be quiet on the subject, and disinclined to float the possibility that Fed interest rate policy could or would prevent damage from a trade war. But if things continue to escalate, expect markets to hang on his every word even more in search of evidence that the Powell Put is real.

by Neil Irwin, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Jordan Spieth Misses a Victory, but Gains Another Masters Memory

When Jordan Spieth’s birdie putt on the 16th green dropped into the hole just after 5:40 p.m. on another stirring Masters Sunday, Spieth had made up the nine strokes that formed the gap between him and Patrick Reed at the beginning of the day.

At that moment, any number of stunning outcomes were possible for Spieth over the next hour. The Augusta National course record was in reach. So was the record for the biggest final-round comeback in Masters history. And, oh yes, Spieth could have won his second Masters and his fourth major championship, all three months before his 25th birthday.

But as the ball disappeared into the cup at No. 16 and the gallery erupted with an ovation that shook a sturdy grandstand, Spieth did not react.

There was no celebration, not even a smile. At last, he turned to his caddie, Michael Greller, and said, “Are you kidding me?”

Throughout a worldwide golf community that is drawn annually to the final two hours of the Masters tournament precisely because it produces examples of unmatched drama like Spieth’s rousing charge, there must have been a lot of people with the same notion on their lips.

Are you kidding me?

And while Spieth did not set any records and he finished in third place, two strokes behind Reed, he nonetheless created another indelible Masters memory, something he has done in each of the last five Aprils as a perennial contender here.

One takeaway from the 2018 Masters might be this: Golf fans might as well get used to Spieth as a dominant story line at Augusta National’s famed competition for a green jacket. Since 2014, Spieth has always seemed to be the one to watch — even when he has begun the day as an afterthought, as on Sunday.

All eyes did not turn to him immediately. The attention was on the final-group pairing of Reed and Rory McIlroy, whose Masters aspirations fizzled yet again. But Spieth began his day with birdies on the first and second holes.

Then he birdied the fifth, eighth and ninth holes, capping a torrid opening nine-hole score of five-under-par 31. Spieth was still four strokes behind Reed, who did not appear rattled. But perhaps because he is neither physically imposing nor long off the tee, Spieth attracts a fervent following in nearly every golf circle. And on Sunday, on the hills and hollows of Augusta National, the galleries began to relocate, quick-stepping so they could watch Spieth perform in Amen Corner.

by Bill Pennington, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

[ed. It was a great tournament.]

Emily Evans, Too Good to be True
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Reamde: Neal Stephenson’s Novel of Computer Viruses and Welsh Terrorists

Let us say that novelists are like unannounced visitors. While Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow pound manfully on the door, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith knock politely, little preparing you for the emotional ferociousness with which they plan on making themselves at home. Neal Stephenson, on the other hand, shows up smelling vaguely of weed, with a bunch of suitcases. Maybe he can crash for a couple of days? Two weeks later he is still there. And you cannot get rid of him. Not because he is unpleasant but because he is so interesting. Then one morning you wake up and find him gone. You are relieved, a little, but you also miss him. And you wish he’d left behind whatever it was he was smoking, because anything that allows a human being to write six 1,000-page novels in 12 years is worth the health and imprisonment risk.

It is tempting to call Stephenson a “cult writer,” but cult writers are typically under-or selectively read. All of Stephenson’s novels published since the late 1990s have been best sellers, and some of his original editions go for precious-metal asking prices online. His still-fresh, still-­astounding cyberpunk parody “Snow Crash” (1992) standardized use of the Sanskrit word “avatar” to denote virtual human identities and came impressively close to predicting how the Internet would come to be understood, which is to say as a “metaverse” paradoxically larger than the world that enfolds it. For these and other reasons, Stephenson is the rare writer whose 20-year-old magazine essays have their own Wikipedia pages.

That leaves us with his dense, funny and erudite novels, which are packed with so many different kinds of information, they sometimes scarcely feel like novels at all. What do they feel like? Eldritch downloads, maybe, from some mind-­flaying computer brain.

This critic — a Stephenson fan and admirer of long standing — has read most of Stephenson’s novels. His “Baroque Cycle,” a three-volume megatome about 17th- and 18th-century Europe and New England published over 2003 and 2004, put the author’s many gifts on full display. But halfway through the second volume I set the “Cycle” aside. Mainly it was the prose, which made it feel as if one were being winked at for a thousand pages by a Laurence Sterne impersonator. Stephenson followed up with “Anathem” (2008), a work of philosophically inclined science fiction that seemed determined to scare away anyone who regards “A Canticle for Leibowitz” as anything less than the premier achievement of human imagination.

If you are a Stephenson fan who believes “Snow Crash” and “Cryptonomicon” (1999) are his greatest novels, “Reamde” will come as very good news, for in many ways it can be read as a thematic revisitation of those excellent precursors. Once again Stephenson is asking us to think about virtual worlds and information storage; once again, by God, he makes reading so much fun it feels like a deadly sin.

Just about any novel’s plot can be made to sound ridiculous in summary, but the plot of “Reamde” is ridiculous no matter how sympathetically one summarizes. Here goes: Richard Forthrast, an erstwhile drug smuggler who funneled his earnings into founding a Fortune 500 video game company, takes under his wing a young woman named Zula, who was born to hardship in East Africa and later adopted by Richard’s Iowan sister. Richard’s company is the publisher of a massively multiplayer online game called T’Rain, which has eclipsed World of Warcraft as the world’s most popular such entertainment. Zula’s boyfriend, Peter, borrows a thumbstick from Richard, which he uses to save stolen credit card information and gives to an associate of the Russian mafia. Richard’s thumbstick, unfortunately, is tainted with a T’Rain virus called REAMDE (“an accidental or deliberate/ironical misspelling of README”), created by a Chinese T’Rain player. The virus incapacitates the Russians’ computers, after which they come violently calling for assistance. With Peter and Zula in tow, the Russians fly illegally into Xiamen, China, to find and kill the Chinese hacker responsible for the virus. This brings them into accidental contact with a jihadist cell led by one Abdallah Jones, a wanted terrorist, who despite being black and British somehow regards China as an appropriate place to hide. Jones kidnaps Zula and flies her into the wilds of British Columbia. The novel ends with a 150-page-long running firefight along the Canadian-­American border. So it turns out you can make this stuff up.

Stephenson’s novels have always been a little nuts, but thoughtfully nuts. That he is even able to keep this big, careening, recreational-­vehicular novel on the road during its hairpin narrative turns says a lot about him as a plot juggler and information wrangler. But “Reamde,” at a certain point, becomes less a novel than a book-shaped IV bag from which plot flows. 

by Tom Bissell, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: via:
[ed. I stumbled upon Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" just over a year ago and have been reading everything I can since (no small feat considering most of his novels are 900 pages+ long). Currently reading Reamde. Favorites in order: Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age (Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer), and Seveneves. It feels like Reamde just might muscle its way into third place when I'm done with it. Recommendation: Forget the Baroque Cycle (starting with Quicksilver). I didn't care for it at all. Stephenson seems almost prescient, each novel focusing on a different technology long before each became current: Snow Crash (virtual reality and bitmapped viruses); Cryptonomicon (cryptocurrencies, offshore data havens, encryption); Dimond Age (nanotechnology); Seveneves (space technology, end of the world); and Reamde (ransomware and security on a world-wide gaming network - Facebook, anyone?). Take my word for it Stephenson is the real deal.]

The Pain and the Passion That Fuel the Rock

If the world seemed a little bit sluggish this morning – if the birds weren't singing as sweetly, or the sun hung a bit lower in the sky – it might be because Dwayne Johnson didn't work out.

On any other day, Johnson would be up before dawn, clanging and banging on the 45,000 pounds of equipment in the torture chamber of a home gym he calls his Iron Paradise. But not today. Today Johnson slept in until the downright slothful hour of 6 a.m., in a hotel suite in Beverly Hills under the alias Sam Cooke, where he now sits perusing the newspaper while his longtime girlfriend, Lauren Hashian, enjoys a bowl of room-service granola.

The reason for this uncharacteristic idleness? Johnson and Hashian have a two-year-old daughter, Jasmine, and a second child arriving in a few weeks. "We're in the home stretch," says Hashian, rubbing her belly – so they left the toddler with the nanny for the night and snuck off for a little romantic getaway. "We're getting it in now before it's too late." Johnson, padding around the suite in gym socks and a T-shirt that reads BLOOD SWEAT RESPECT, says he and Hashian were originally going to get married this spring in Hawaii. "But then we got pregnant," he says. "And Mama don't wanna take wedding pictures with a big belly – Mama wanna look good." They weren't exactly trying to have another baby. "We were talking about it," he says. "And then all of a sudden I get a text from her with a [picture of a] pregnancy test." Apparently it didn't take much. "All I did was look at her," Johnson jokes. "Guess what. You're pregnant. Baby in you now."

"He just gave me the eyebrow," says Hashian. "Pew. Here's a baby."

Johnson says he's excited. "I had Simone when I was 29" – his older daughter, now 16, whom he had with his ex-wife, Dany Garcia, who's now his manager. (They make it work.) "Guys don't mature until much, much later, so it's nice to be in my fourth level and have babies again." Fourth level – that's a new one. Johnson, 45, grins. "It's better than saying the actual number."

Do they have a name picked out? "I think we do," Hashian says. "We're thinking about Tia. It's simple, it's Polynesian-ish. And I feel like she might come out looking like a Tia. I mean, she could come out any which way, because we're complete opposites" – she's fair and delicate, he's brown and colossal. I love that name, I tell her.

"Yeah?" says Johnson, sounding pleased. "Thank you. You're probably the fourth person who's heard it. It was funny – we were having dinner with Emily Blunt, who I'm getting ready to work with [on Disney's Jungle Cruise], and I said, 'What do you think of Tia?' And she went – beat, beat, beat – 'No one's gonna fuck with a Tia Johnson.' "

Especially not when her father is Dwayne Johnson, roughly the size of a grain elevator. When he was in high school, other kids were suspicious of him because they thought he was an undercover cop. (For the record, a pretty solid pitch for a Dwayne Johnson movie.) Even now, as the most beloved star in Hollywood not named Tom Hanks, Johnson and his giganticness can still give pause. Director Brad Peyton, who's worked with him on three films – including the new monster romp Rampage – says the first time they met, Johnson was dressed as Hobbs, from the Fast & Furious franchise. "I was like, 'Oh, my God – this guy is frighteningly large,' " Peyton says. "I was shitting myself he looked so intimidating. It took me, like, 15 minutes to get over it."

As if to combat this, Johnson carries himself with an abiding gentleness, like a grizzly bear who rolls over so you can rub its belly. On our way to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, we pass a manager who apologizes to him for last night. "Oh, it's all good!" Johnson says. Only after we're out of earshot does he reluctantly relate what happened. It turns out when he got back to the suite around 2 a.m., following a long day of work, Hashian was still wide awake, thanks to a mysterious buzzing near the bed. "I shut the AC off, we called for earplugs, maintenance came," Johnson says. "Finally they had to move us at, like, three in the morning. It was a whole thing."

What a bummer – and on their special night, too. "One night!" Johnson says. He throws his hands up, mock-exasperated. "The hits just keep on coming."

They do, actually. Johnson is riding a wave of success as the most bankable star in Hollywood – the closest that movies in 2018 have to a sure thing. A recent Wall Street Journal report revealed that his upfront payday for an upcoming film would be $22 million; a source close to Johnson says that figure is low by "two bills." But the most surprising part of the news may have been how unsurprising it was: Of course the Rock is worth $20 million-plus. After all, there's a reason last year's Jumanji sequel grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide, and all due respect, it's not Jack Black.

As producer Beau Flynn, who's made six of Johnson's films, says, even at that price, "Dwayne is a massive steal and a bargain."

"He's a freak of nature," says Johnson's Rampage co-star Jeffrey Dean Morgan. "It seems like every month he's in a movie and making a killing. In the middle of shooting Rampage, he's off hosting SNL and doing ads for Apple and running for president and whatever else. He works out at 3:30 in the morning so he can get to set on time. I don't know how he does it. And the other thing is, he's a family dude, so not only is he juggling the 9 million things he's got on his plate for work, he's also raising kids and got a happy marriage. Jesus Christ. I kind of fucking hate him."

Spending time with Dwayne Johnson is pretty much as uplifting as you'd expect. He will give you a fist bump that makes your humerus vibrate. He will ask your spouse and/or child's name and then make a point to repeat it 17 times. His warmth and enthusiasm will be infectious, and you will leave with newfound inspiration to wake up earlier and exercise more and be kinder to people and also maybe join the Marines? That's just the kind of guy he is. (...)

Johnson has found a sweet spot with the characters he plays: highly skilled bad-asses who are also sensitive and vulnerable, flawed yet decent men with big biceps and bigger hearts. "No one's going to see me play a borderline psychopath suffering from depression," he says. "I have friends I admire, Oscar winners, who approach our craft with the idea of 'Sometimes it comes out a little darker, and nobody will see it, but it's for me.' Great. But I have other things I can do for me. I'm gonna take care of you, the audience. You pay your hard-earned money – I don't need to bring my dark shit to you. Maybe a little – but if it's in there, we're gonna overcome it, and we're gonna overcome it together."

by Josh Eells, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Mark Seliger
[ed. For Calvin, who loves Moana (and Maui).]

Paul Simon/Photek Remix

Paul Simon's 'Graceland' to Receive Dance Remix Album

[ed. Ackk... what next? A dance remix of the Beatles White Album? Leave a masterpiece alone (although, apparently, this was approved by The Master himself). Since he allegedly ripped this track off from Los Lobos to begin with, what are we to make of all this? Irony? Self-inflicted wound? Senility? Late-stage capitalism?]

Taylor's Revolutionary V-Brace

In an age when eye-catching, futuristic musical instrument designs grab headlines and social media buzz—whether it’s a 3D-printed violin or a sleek, carbon-fiber piano—a new system of guitar bracing might appear to be a tougher sell. After all, these braces, which reinforce a guitar’s top and back, are all but invisible to the player and listener, and they can seem rather inconsequential even to a guitarist.

But some guitar lovers know how crucial the unglamorous bracing is to the sound and playability of any instrument. When Taylor Guitars unveiled its new V-Class bracing system in January, the company insisted it would be a groundbreaking step designed to boost the volume and sustain of its instruments, while also improving their intonation. The company presented several models to dealers, the music press, and select performers, followed by a formal rollout at the 2018 Winter NAMM trade show in Anaheim, California.

Bob Taylor, who cofounded the El Cajon, California–based company in 1974, said it was time to “stop trying to tweak our inventory within an inch of its life” and instead make a bolder, more decisive change. He entrusted Andy Powers, the company’s 37-year-old master designer, to develop a new system that would challenge X-bracing, long the most popular pattern for flattop guitars, and pioneered by Taylor’s closest competitor, C.F. Martin. The new system would signify a passing of the baton (or pick) as Powers makes his mark on a company whose greatest designs have upended tradition.

A Dance of Strength and Flexibility

As the name implies, V-bracing consists of two braces that join at the base of the top, near the end block, and extend out on either side of the soundhole in the form of a V. Three cross-braces add further support. “I took a fresh look at the X-brace design and thought, Well, for one, it works pretty good,” Powers told Acoustic Guitar. “But it represents a compromise. That compromise would be: How do you make something that’s really strong and really flexible? How can it be those two things?”

More to the point, Powers identified an uneasy tradeoff between volume and sustain. The rigidity of X-bracing, he says, enables notes to have a longer sustain—the kind of effect one finds on a solidbody guitar like a Gibson Les Paul, for example. But achieving volume requires a more flexible surface that promotes air movement. A banjo, with its flexible drumhead, has such qualities—tremendous volume with little sustain. “You try and tweak that balance between volume and sustain and sometimes you lean a little more in one direction or another,” Powers said of his quandary.

Powers, who is a lifelong surfer and occasional surfboard shaper, had a revelation one morning as he watched the waves off the San Diego coast. He observed how a stone jetty was funneling the churning surf into smoother wave patterns. Watching further, he wondered if one could create a bracing pattern that would have a similar effect. It would allow the sides of a guitar body to freely vibrate, enhancing volume while providing a stiff foundation for the strings, thereby promoting sustain.

“Calm, still waters with good waves coming in—that’s what I wanted to happen,” Powers said. As he developed a solution, he also fell back on his studies of mandolin, violin, and archtop guitar construction.

With so much contemporary popular music played on electronic instruments and relying on pitch-corrected vocals, guitarists are increasingly expected to have flawless intonation. Powers discovered that the V-bracing had the added effect of improving intonation within chords. “There’s always a fighting, or beating, between what a guitar can deliver and the note you’re actually trying to play,” he noted. “You get this rub. There’s a friction,” which Powers says can make a guitar sound slightly out-of-tune.

George Gruhn, the owner of Gruhn Guitars in Nashville, Tennessee, was pleased with a model that he tried last year. “Tone is difficult to describe, but in general, I think the V-brace gives a remarkably well-balanced sound,” he said. “It seems to cancel out some conflicting harmonics that make things sound out of tune at times. It’s one of the most in-tune guitars I’ve ever played by any maker.”

Building on a History of Innovation

Powers’ use of a surf analogy recalls an early episode in the history of this Southern California company. In one of his first, scrappy efforts to rethink guitar construction procedures, Bob Taylor sought to decorate a fretboard with mother-of-pearl. Unaware that he could purchase the materials at a guitar shop, Taylor went diving for abalone off the coast of La Jolla, broke up the shells with a hammer, and ground the pearl into usable pieces. This freewheeling approach to materials and craftsmanship has underpinned the company’s design changes over the decades, whether it was the launch of computer-controlled production machinery in the 1980s, inventing a new type of bolt-on neck joint in the 1990s, or investing heavily in sourcing sustainable wood in recent years.

To this day, Taylor and company co-founder Kurt Listug insist that a skilled artisan should be high up in the corporate ranks. “Think of other guitar builders,” Taylor says, “and ask yourself, ‘Can I put a name to that company’s luthier? What’s the wellspring of their guitars?’”

The son of a carpenter and artist in Oceanside, California, Powers crafted his first guitar by the age of eight. As a home-schooled teenager, he began building and selling guitars and ukuleles to his friends. After receiving an associate of arts degree from MiraCosta College in San Diego, he studied guitar performance and musicology at the University of California at San Diego. During this time, he established the Andy Powers Instrument Co.

Just as his business was starting to evolve, Powers crossed paths with Bob Taylor, who eventually set up a meeting and convinced him to join his company. The veteran guitar builder was planning for the future of the company, with the eventual goal of scaling back his direct involvement, and needed a builder with deep historical knowledge and the potential to stay on for the long haul.

Since Powers’ arrival, he has ushered in several changes to Taylor’s line of guitars: re-voicing the company’s top-selling 800 and 600 series, introducing a line of small-body 12-string guitars, and making a number of subtle bracing changes across the catalog. But company officials see Powers’ V-bracing development as analogous to an automaker that moves from internal combustion to an electric-powered engine.

by Brian Wise, Acoustic Guitar |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Hot-Air Dryers Suck in Bathroom Bacteria and Shoot Them at Your Hands

Washing your grubby mitts is one of the all-time best ways to cut your chances of getting sick and spreading harmful germs to others. But using the hot-air dryers common in bathrooms can undo that handy hygienic work.

Hot-air dryers suck in bacteria and hardy bacterial spores loitering in the bathroom—perhaps launched into the air by whooshing toilet flushes—and fire them directly at your freshly cleaned hands, according to a study published in the April issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The authors of the study, led by researchers at the University of Connecticut, found that adding HEPA filters to the dryers can reduce germ-spewing four-fold. However, the data hints that places like infectious disease research facilities and healthcare settings may just want to ditch the dryers and turn to trusty towels.

Indeed, in the wake of the blustery study—which took place in research facility bathrooms around UConn—"paper towel dispensers have recently been added to all 36 bathrooms in basic science research areas in the UConn School of Medicine surveyed in the current study,” the authors note.

The research findings largely square with other data showing that hot-air dryers and jet dryers can launch and disperse germs from hands into the air and onto surfaces—essentially setting off a very dirty bathroom bomb. But the new study clearly demonstrates that the less powerful hot-air dryers can also bathe hands with germs already swirling in the wash room.

The researchers speculated that “one reason hand dryers may disperse so many bacteria is the large amount of air that passes through hand dryers, 19,000 linear feet/min at the nozzle. The convection generated by high airflow below the hand dryer nozzles could also draw in room air.”

by Beth Mole, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Alisha Vargas