Tuesday, May 8, 2018
Three Red Sweaters
Grainy 8mm and 16mm film now tends to evoke nostalgia but, in the decades before digital cameras, home movies were the only immediate way to visually document the present. The US filmmaker Martha Gregory makes wonderful use of her family’s trove of home movies, shot by her grandfather Charles from the 1950s to the 1970s, to craft her short documentary Three Red Sweaters and ask what happens to memories when we document our lives. Charles’s amateur filmmaking was mostly for his own enjoyment – and occasionally a means of social avoidance – but his sharp eye yielded lovely images of daily life, family vacations and children growing up.
[ed. This was my childhood.]
Monday, May 7, 2018
RealSelf: The TripAdvisor of Boob Jobs and Botox
Very few people these days will buy beauty products, go to a restaurant, or travel without checking online forums like Makeup Alley, Yelp, or TripAdvisor. So why would you think about getting Botox or a boob job without doing a little research first? That’s the premise behind RealSelf, an online community for cosmetic procedures that launched in 2006.
The company just landed $40 million in funding. Following an investment of $2 million in the first two years, this round is one sign that noninvasive cosmetic procedures and plastic surgery are having a moment. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 17.5 million surgical and minimally invasive (meaning things like injections and lasers) procedures were performed in the US, a 2 percent increase compared to 2016. More than 7.2 million of these were Botox injections. But prices and individual experiences can vary wildly, so consumers get real talk, and pictures, at RealSelf.
Pricing and doctor listings on the site are also a big deal. Each procedure lists an average price, as well as price ranges based on geography. Conversations and advice from users on how they financed procedures also abound, since they can run into the tens of thousands of dollars and are rarely covered by insurance.
While there is a stripped-down free listing available for doctors and practices, RealSelf charges anywhere from $200 a month to about $5,000 a month for doctors to advertise on the site. (The higher range applies to “really competitive markets where there’s a lot of audience,” like New York or Los Angeles.)
The site makes sure that potential consumers see doctors who provide services they’re shopping for, but RealSelf also requires that the doctors maintain a positive consumer rating on the site and actively engage with the community. Doctors aren’t always happy about the transparency of procedure pricing on the site, though.
“[Doctors] think that it’s not information that should be shared,” Seery says. “We just politely disagree and believe that it’s important, as a purchase out of your own pocket, that you have greater insight into pricing information. And also: Why does it cost what it does?”
by Cheryl Wischhover, Racked | Read more:
Image: Paul Hakimata/Getty Images/EyeEm
The company just landed $40 million in funding. Following an investment of $2 million in the first two years, this round is one sign that noninvasive cosmetic procedures and plastic surgery are having a moment. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 17.5 million surgical and minimally invasive (meaning things like injections and lasers) procedures were performed in the US, a 2 percent increase compared to 2016. More than 7.2 million of these were Botox injections. But prices and individual experiences can vary wildly, so consumers get real talk, and pictures, at RealSelf.
The TripAdvisor of cosmetic procedures
RealSelf is free for users and features reviews of every procedure you can imagine — and some you probably can’t — written by real people. While there are reviews of specific doctors, RealSelf is more focused on procedures in general. The Yelp equivalent would be like reviewing how much you liked your spaghetti rather than how great you thought Carmine’s was.
It also provides a “worth it” rating analogous to Amazon’s star ratings. Many procedures score in the high 80s and 90s. For example, a “mommy makeover” (usually a breast lift plus a tummy tuck) has been deemed 97 percent worth it; Fraxel, a popular facial laser treatment, is only 69 percent worth it, per users.
The company says the five most researched surgical procedures on the site are breast enhancement, tummy tuck, butt enhancement, nose jobs, and liposuction. The most researched noninvasive procedures are nonsurgical fat reduction, fillers, orthodontics, Botox-like treatments, and facial lasers.
When searching for a procedure, users have the option of reading reviews, scrolling through pictures, reading through a Q&A section, watching videos, chatting in a Reddit-like forum, reading information articles, and searching for doctors and pricing. It’s part shopping guide, part therapy session. (...)
RealSelf is free for users and features reviews of every procedure you can imagine — and some you probably can’t — written by real people. While there are reviews of specific doctors, RealSelf is more focused on procedures in general. The Yelp equivalent would be like reviewing how much you liked your spaghetti rather than how great you thought Carmine’s was.
It also provides a “worth it” rating analogous to Amazon’s star ratings. Many procedures score in the high 80s and 90s. For example, a “mommy makeover” (usually a breast lift plus a tummy tuck) has been deemed 97 percent worth it; Fraxel, a popular facial laser treatment, is only 69 percent worth it, per users.The company says the five most researched surgical procedures on the site are breast enhancement, tummy tuck, butt enhancement, nose jobs, and liposuction. The most researched noninvasive procedures are nonsurgical fat reduction, fillers, orthodontics, Botox-like treatments, and facial lasers.
When searching for a procedure, users have the option of reading reviews, scrolling through pictures, reading through a Q&A section, watching videos, chatting in a Reddit-like forum, reading information articles, and searching for doctors and pricing. It’s part shopping guide, part therapy session. (...)
Pricing and doctor listings on the site are also a big deal. Each procedure lists an average price, as well as price ranges based on geography. Conversations and advice from users on how they financed procedures also abound, since they can run into the tens of thousands of dollars and are rarely covered by insurance.
While there is a stripped-down free listing available for doctors and practices, RealSelf charges anywhere from $200 a month to about $5,000 a month for doctors to advertise on the site. (The higher range applies to “really competitive markets where there’s a lot of audience,” like New York or Los Angeles.)
The site makes sure that potential consumers see doctors who provide services they’re shopping for, but RealSelf also requires that the doctors maintain a positive consumer rating on the site and actively engage with the community. Doctors aren’t always happy about the transparency of procedure pricing on the site, though.
“[Doctors] think that it’s not information that should be shared,” Seery says. “We just politely disagree and believe that it’s important, as a purchase out of your own pocket, that you have greater insight into pricing information. And also: Why does it cost what it does?”
by Cheryl Wischhover, Racked | Read more:
Image: Paul Hakimata/Getty Images/EyeEm
The Social Network Employers Love to Raid
Piazza Technologies Inc. is a stealth company—largely unknown by the general public but familiar to almost anyone who’s studied computer science in the past few years. Some 2.5 million students use its free website to ask and answer one another’s questions about computers, engineering, math, and science, all under the supervision of their professors. Seven years in, Piazza says 98 percent of computer science students at the top 50 universities access its site; students report using it on average for at least three hours a day. (Or, more likely, per night.) Piazza fans abound in Silicon Valley: “I have used Piazza extensively throughout my education,” Vickram Gidwani, a Stanford grad student in electrical engineering, writes in an email. “It provides a great forum for any topic in the course.”
Now the Palo Alto company is doing the obvious thing—monetizing all those eyeballs. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Pooja Nath Sankar says it gradually dawned on her that Piazza was an ideal space for tech employers and students to meet. In late 2016 the company launched Piazza Careers. Companies pay for access to students who opt in; they can see professors’ evaluations of the students’ participation on the site, and they can narrow searches to, say, teaching assistants for artificial intelligence classes who are graduating in 2018. In April, Piazza lured Apple Inc.’s director of global recruiting projects, Sean Celli, to head client partnerships.
Piazza says 90 percent of the messages companies send to students get opened. The career feature is particularly appealing to companies that need tech talent but aren’t necessarily on students’ radar. So far, 80 are on board, including Whirlpool, Airbnb, Nvidia, Quicken Loans, Barclays, and Roche.
On the strength of its networking potential, Piazza (the Italian word for plaza, a meeting place) has attracted $32 million in venture capital from Bessemer Venture Partners, Felicis Ventures, Kapor Capital, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and SV Angel. “Piazza has a unique relationship to up-and-coming technical talent,” says Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures. “I sensed a real sort of affection for Piazza among the students. They would, like, smile.”
Sankar, 37, didn’t envision the site as a career platform. The original idea—and still her priority—was to help the kind of student she herself once was: a young woman who struggled to learn programming on her own because she was left out of all-male campus study groups. “I would be alone on the sidelines, too shy to ask for help,” she recalls. The online question-and-answer boards break down the barriers of gender and shyness. Students can choose to ask and answer questions anonymously. “I obsessed about the product based on my own experience,” Sankar says. (...)
Now Sankar is using her homework site to help others overcome disadvantages. Piazza provides an alternative to the discussion tools in education management systems such as Blackboard Learning and Moodle, “which are sometimes found to be frustrating,” Lydia Kavanagh, a professor at Australia’s University of Queensland who researched learning tools, wrote in an email. The only disadvantage about Piazza her study identified: “not suitable for conversation.” (Nonetheless, Sankar says some nerds have managed to set up dates on the site.)
Now the Palo Alto company is doing the obvious thing—monetizing all those eyeballs. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Pooja Nath Sankar says it gradually dawned on her that Piazza was an ideal space for tech employers and students to meet. In late 2016 the company launched Piazza Careers. Companies pay for access to students who opt in; they can see professors’ evaluations of the students’ participation on the site, and they can narrow searches to, say, teaching assistants for artificial intelligence classes who are graduating in 2018. In April, Piazza lured Apple Inc.’s director of global recruiting projects, Sean Celli, to head client partnerships.Piazza says 90 percent of the messages companies send to students get opened. The career feature is particularly appealing to companies that need tech talent but aren’t necessarily on students’ radar. So far, 80 are on board, including Whirlpool, Airbnb, Nvidia, Quicken Loans, Barclays, and Roche.
On the strength of its networking potential, Piazza (the Italian word for plaza, a meeting place) has attracted $32 million in venture capital from Bessemer Venture Partners, Felicis Ventures, Kapor Capital, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and SV Angel. “Piazza has a unique relationship to up-and-coming technical talent,” says Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures. “I sensed a real sort of affection for Piazza among the students. They would, like, smile.”
Sankar, 37, didn’t envision the site as a career platform. The original idea—and still her priority—was to help the kind of student she herself once was: a young woman who struggled to learn programming on her own because she was left out of all-male campus study groups. “I would be alone on the sidelines, too shy to ask for help,” she recalls. The online question-and-answer boards break down the barriers of gender and shyness. Students can choose to ask and answer questions anonymously. “I obsessed about the product based on my own experience,” Sankar says. (...)
Now Sankar is using her homework site to help others overcome disadvantages. Piazza provides an alternative to the discussion tools in education management systems such as Blackboard Learning and Moodle, “which are sometimes found to be frustrating,” Lydia Kavanagh, a professor at Australia’s University of Queensland who researched learning tools, wrote in an email. The only disadvantage about Piazza her study identified: “not suitable for conversation.” (Nonetheless, Sankar says some nerds have managed to set up dates on the site.)
by Peter Coy, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Illustration 731
Public Service Announcement for Programmers
Triplebyte is a company that helps programmers find jobs. You sign up, take some coding assessments, and if you pass they do everything from sending your name out to appropriate companies, to fast-tracking you to the final interview stage, to representing you in salary negotiations, to even paying for your flights and hotels while you interview. It is free for you; if you get hired; your company pays them for finding you. FAQ here. Aside from the fact that I am getting paid to shill them, I really do think they’re great; they represent exactly the kind of resume-blind, credential-blind, demographics-blind hiring I think everyone should be aiming for, and they’re helpful for the sort of low-executive-function people who couldn’t handle a job search well on their own.
[ed. Read the FAQ. Interesting service.]
Waste Management
For thousands of years, Homo sapiens flocked across continents in pursuit of bird, beast, and fresh water, leaving behind him a trail of gnawed bones and steaming waste. The moment we stopped removing ourselves from that waste, it had to be removed from us. Thus the origins of civilization, thus the glories of Rome, Paris, and Philadelphia. A civilization that cannot escape its own fecal matter is a civilization in trouble—unless, of course, the uneasy relationship between man and his effluents can evolve.
“The first regulations with respect to waste go back to the code of Hammurabi,” said Steve Askew, superintendent of New York’s North River Wastewater Treatment Plant, one of the world’s largest. “You have to bury your waste far from where you sleep.” And he gave me the look. Steve Askew never finished college, but that look had seen to the bottom of things. It was both spooky and intimidating, that particular look of pity and loathing the wise bestow upon the ignorant. He knew something I wanted to know: the ultimate fate of our waste.
“People wake up in the morning, they brush their teeth, flush the toilet,” said Askew. “They think it goes to the center of the earth.”
If you happen to live within one particular 5,100-acre patch of the West Side of Manhattan, instead of going to the center of the earth, your waste flows to Askew’s extraordinary concrete cesspit: twenty-eight concrete acres suspended above more than two thousand concrete caissons sunk into the shallows between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River. Constructed in the 1970s, topped by three swimming pools, a skating rink, and a carousel, North River cost the city a billion dollars, 100 million of which went straight into odor control.
North River is just one of New York City’s fourteen wastewater treatment plants, the first of which opened in 1886, along with the Statue of Liberty. These plants handle every conceivable kind of sewerable waste from the city’s eight million permanent residents, not to mention anything a commuter or a tourist might care to add. They separate the material that comes their way into solid, liquid, and gaseous parts, which they further subdivide into that which must be discarded, that which may be consumed, and that which someone, somewhere, might eventually be able to sell.
The substance that enters North River is mostly water, and the vast majority of that water leaves the plant after not much more than six hours, disinfected to the extent that it can merge inoffensively with the Hudson River. One flush on the Upper West Side at seven in the morning, and by three in the afternoon the water is back on the street, so to speak. What’s left over is a half-million gallons of concentrated daily waste, now known as sludge. (...)
The greatest increase occurs between eight and nine in the morning, when the city’s output swells from 70 million to 150 million gallons per day. This is known as the big flush. Now it was eleven a.m., and in a few hours the circadian flow of biology en masse would begin to diminish, eventually bottoming out around four in the morning, at 68 million gallons per day. The rhythm is as steady as the tides. “The Super Bowl halftime surge is a myth,” said Askew.
He led me across the concrete floor, through a concrete warehouse, and to the concrete screening room, where he began to extol the virtue and beauty of his eleven-mile-long sewage interceptor. By the time the morning flush finally rolls into North River, it has joined the downstream flow of all the other morning flushes from all the other sewage lines from Bank Street to the Upper West Side, and sunk fifty-four feet below sea level. It is here, at the extreme low point of this immense underground current, that North River gets to work. In the Stygian depths, its mighty diameter swollen to sixteen feet, the dark torrent branches into six channels, each of which must be pumped to the top floor of the plant, where gravity can once again take hold and set the outcast on a new journey.
Askew gazed into the inky pool of untreated wastewater and began to describe some of the marvels the interceptor had disclosed. Aside from the daily take of leaves, sticks, cans, and paper, the great rake had brought up quite a few vials of cocaine. When cops bang on the door, the toilet is a drug dealer’s best friend. Ditto for the professional forger: a good deal of counterfeit money has floated into Steve Askew’s hands. Twenty years ago a dog showed up, a living dog that became the mascot of a Brooklyn plant.
As we walked away from the pool, I asked about the wind. No matter what the weather is outside, no matter where we traveled inside, the thick concrete walls of North River generated bracing gusts. Askew explained that every minute, titanic blowing machines inhaled 600,000 cubic feet of fresh air and exhaled 750,000 cubic feet of carbon-filtered, bleach-scrubbed exhaust—six to twelve complete air changes per hour.
But the scouring of North River’s halitosis, while essential to community relations, has nothing to do with the plant’s core mission. The alchemy of purgative transformation starts in the warmth and humidity of the next chamber we visited, where submerged chemical mixers combine the waste with custom-made bacteria. “It’s volatizing off!” Askew yelled above the din of engines and bubbling brown water. Undeterred by the general uproar, Askew detailed the technical intricacies of fecal breakdown and development, but I’m afraid the cacophony blunted the nuances. So Askew dumbed down the lecture. “This looks really good!” he hollered. “Tan water! Light brown froth! Small bubbles! Musty smell! If the foam looks like chocolate mousse, that’s an indication of a bacteriological process!”
We headed to a low-ceilinged room so huge it did not appear to have walls. Here were the settling tanks, the final stop before the water returned to the world. Peace held sway among these last lagoons, and indistinct reservoirs misted into a concrete vanishing point hundreds of yards away. “On a cold morning, you will see the water vaporing off,” Askew said. “And it will rain inside the plant.”
He gave me the look. “When it is really cold, it snows inside the plant.” (...)
When the froth finally settled back into silence, Steve Askew backtracked through the concrete dungeons until we arrived at a perfectly normal conference room and a nice surprise—someone had ordered pizza!
Despite the skating rink and swimming pool, despite the bleach, the carbon filters, the white hard hats and the spotless lab coats of the technicians, despite the banks of UNIX computers and the sober talk of asymptotes and oxygen demand, despite the boardroom-size wood-veneer table and the well-upholstered ergonomic chairs and the rush of twenty thousand cubic feet of air per second, and despite, to put it bluntly, one of the most extraordinary concealments in all of human history, North River still managed to evoke unappetizing associations. But as I gazed at the cheese and red sauce and blackened crust, I recalled the words of one of the many wastewater professionals I had met that morning. “One of the things about the job—you still have to eat.”
So I sat down to lunch and learned about the glorious future of waste. Now that biochemists could scour the particles on the atomic level, the plant could recover ibuprofen, acetaminophen, endocrine disrupters, DEET, Prozac, and Chanel No. 5. Even caffeine could be extracted from the mix, and I had a hunch the citizens of New York excreted boatloads of stimulant. Perhaps Starbucks would be interested. The technology was there.
“Twenty years from now we will be removing things we have no idea about,” said Askew. “Penicillin, mercury, heroin. Will this be a pharm business? An energy business? An agribusiness?”
by Frederick Kaufman, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: The Ideal City, attributed to Fra Carnevale, c. 1482
“The first regulations with respect to waste go back to the code of Hammurabi,” said Steve Askew, superintendent of New York’s North River Wastewater Treatment Plant, one of the world’s largest. “You have to bury your waste far from where you sleep.” And he gave me the look. Steve Askew never finished college, but that look had seen to the bottom of things. It was both spooky and intimidating, that particular look of pity and loathing the wise bestow upon the ignorant. He knew something I wanted to know: the ultimate fate of our waste.
“People wake up in the morning, they brush their teeth, flush the toilet,” said Askew. “They think it goes to the center of the earth.”If you happen to live within one particular 5,100-acre patch of the West Side of Manhattan, instead of going to the center of the earth, your waste flows to Askew’s extraordinary concrete cesspit: twenty-eight concrete acres suspended above more than two thousand concrete caissons sunk into the shallows between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River. Constructed in the 1970s, topped by three swimming pools, a skating rink, and a carousel, North River cost the city a billion dollars, 100 million of which went straight into odor control.
North River is just one of New York City’s fourteen wastewater treatment plants, the first of which opened in 1886, along with the Statue of Liberty. These plants handle every conceivable kind of sewerable waste from the city’s eight million permanent residents, not to mention anything a commuter or a tourist might care to add. They separate the material that comes their way into solid, liquid, and gaseous parts, which they further subdivide into that which must be discarded, that which may be consumed, and that which someone, somewhere, might eventually be able to sell.
The substance that enters North River is mostly water, and the vast majority of that water leaves the plant after not much more than six hours, disinfected to the extent that it can merge inoffensively with the Hudson River. One flush on the Upper West Side at seven in the morning, and by three in the afternoon the water is back on the street, so to speak. What’s left over is a half-million gallons of concentrated daily waste, now known as sludge. (...)
The greatest increase occurs between eight and nine in the morning, when the city’s output swells from 70 million to 150 million gallons per day. This is known as the big flush. Now it was eleven a.m., and in a few hours the circadian flow of biology en masse would begin to diminish, eventually bottoming out around four in the morning, at 68 million gallons per day. The rhythm is as steady as the tides. “The Super Bowl halftime surge is a myth,” said Askew.
He led me across the concrete floor, through a concrete warehouse, and to the concrete screening room, where he began to extol the virtue and beauty of his eleven-mile-long sewage interceptor. By the time the morning flush finally rolls into North River, it has joined the downstream flow of all the other morning flushes from all the other sewage lines from Bank Street to the Upper West Side, and sunk fifty-four feet below sea level. It is here, at the extreme low point of this immense underground current, that North River gets to work. In the Stygian depths, its mighty diameter swollen to sixteen feet, the dark torrent branches into six channels, each of which must be pumped to the top floor of the plant, where gravity can once again take hold and set the outcast on a new journey.
Askew gazed into the inky pool of untreated wastewater and began to describe some of the marvels the interceptor had disclosed. Aside from the daily take of leaves, sticks, cans, and paper, the great rake had brought up quite a few vials of cocaine. When cops bang on the door, the toilet is a drug dealer’s best friend. Ditto for the professional forger: a good deal of counterfeit money has floated into Steve Askew’s hands. Twenty years ago a dog showed up, a living dog that became the mascot of a Brooklyn plant.
As we walked away from the pool, I asked about the wind. No matter what the weather is outside, no matter where we traveled inside, the thick concrete walls of North River generated bracing gusts. Askew explained that every minute, titanic blowing machines inhaled 600,000 cubic feet of fresh air and exhaled 750,000 cubic feet of carbon-filtered, bleach-scrubbed exhaust—six to twelve complete air changes per hour.
But the scouring of North River’s halitosis, while essential to community relations, has nothing to do with the plant’s core mission. The alchemy of purgative transformation starts in the warmth and humidity of the next chamber we visited, where submerged chemical mixers combine the waste with custom-made bacteria. “It’s volatizing off!” Askew yelled above the din of engines and bubbling brown water. Undeterred by the general uproar, Askew detailed the technical intricacies of fecal breakdown and development, but I’m afraid the cacophony blunted the nuances. So Askew dumbed down the lecture. “This looks really good!” he hollered. “Tan water! Light brown froth! Small bubbles! Musty smell! If the foam looks like chocolate mousse, that’s an indication of a bacteriological process!”
We headed to a low-ceilinged room so huge it did not appear to have walls. Here were the settling tanks, the final stop before the water returned to the world. Peace held sway among these last lagoons, and indistinct reservoirs misted into a concrete vanishing point hundreds of yards away. “On a cold morning, you will see the water vaporing off,” Askew said. “And it will rain inside the plant.”
He gave me the look. “When it is really cold, it snows inside the plant.” (...)
When the froth finally settled back into silence, Steve Askew backtracked through the concrete dungeons until we arrived at a perfectly normal conference room and a nice surprise—someone had ordered pizza!
Despite the skating rink and swimming pool, despite the bleach, the carbon filters, the white hard hats and the spotless lab coats of the technicians, despite the banks of UNIX computers and the sober talk of asymptotes and oxygen demand, despite the boardroom-size wood-veneer table and the well-upholstered ergonomic chairs and the rush of twenty thousand cubic feet of air per second, and despite, to put it bluntly, one of the most extraordinary concealments in all of human history, North River still managed to evoke unappetizing associations. But as I gazed at the cheese and red sauce and blackened crust, I recalled the words of one of the many wastewater professionals I had met that morning. “One of the things about the job—you still have to eat.”
So I sat down to lunch and learned about the glorious future of waste. Now that biochemists could scour the particles on the atomic level, the plant could recover ibuprofen, acetaminophen, endocrine disrupters, DEET, Prozac, and Chanel No. 5. Even caffeine could be extracted from the mix, and I had a hunch the citizens of New York excreted boatloads of stimulant. Perhaps Starbucks would be interested. The technology was there.
“Twenty years from now we will be removing things we have no idea about,” said Askew. “Penicillin, mercury, heroin. Will this be a pharm business? An energy business? An agribusiness?”
Image: The Ideal City, attributed to Fra Carnevale, c. 1482
James D. Morgan, Hillary Clinton with Maori performing arts group Te Kapa Haka o Whāngārā Mai Tawhiti
via:
[ed. Same reaction, wherever she goes.]
Sunday, May 6, 2018
Hot Seats
In a studio apartment in downtown Philadelphia, off Rittenhouse Square, I stood awaiting a product demonstration. Stephen Kuhl, a founder of the start-up Burrow, apologized that he had only a beta version to show me — the actual production model would feature some minor aesthetic tweaks. The other founder, Kabeer Chopra, motioned for me to give it a try. I sat down. It was definitely a couch.
Burrow is on an enviable trajectory right now. The company is a graduate of the prestigious Bay Area tech accelerator Y Combinator; it also has a healthy list of pre-orders for its product’s planned debut in January. But given that pedigree, the product is an unusual one: couches. Not cloud-connected couches or remote-controlled couches — just couches. Technically, the company makes a couch, singular, available in a few different colors and configurations. The one I was sitting on belonged to Jess Goodman, a friend of the founders and an early supporter. Its design was midcentury modern unexceptional, and it was perfectly nice. But the couch is not Burrow’s main attraction. Burrow is selling a couch experience.
When customers order a Burrow couch online, the standard model will ship to their apartments in three or four boxes. A human of average size should be able to take those boxes up the stairs (if they have stairs) and build the couch alone, without tools and within minutes.
Chopra and Kuhl tell me that for urban professionals between 25 and 35, the physical process of buying a sofa and moving it into an apartment is a series of “pain points.” Some of these points are literally painful, like carrying a large sofa up a flight of stairs. But the term is business speak for any kind of friction, however abstract, between a customer and a new couch. Burrow doesn’t claim to have improved upon the couch itself: It’s a pain-management company. (...)
If a company can get to market first and establish itself as the singular way to buy a particular necessity online, it can clean up — even if it’s appealing to a relatively small millennial luxury market. Most of the founders I spoke with mentioned Casper as an inspiration, and it’s easy to see why. The venture-funded company was an overnight success in 2014 selling foam mattresses online and delivering them compressed into manageable boxes. Last year the company was valued at over half a billion dollars. It stands out even among Silicon Valley fairy tales, which makes “Casper for couches” a self-explanatory business pitch.
The best thing about this whole product category is that it might represent a step away from Ikea’s disposability without going all the way back to Grandma’s antique sofa. If consumers are already thinking about moving, portability is at least as big an obstacle to maintaining furniture as mediocre craftsmanship and cheap materials. These companies want to make a couch that will last for 10 or 20 years, even if the buyers have no idea where they’ll be or what they’ll be doing that far down the line. Buying a piece of furniture that you will realistically hold onto longer is a kind of forward-thinking thrift.
But this new approach also hints at something more sinister, more bad-future. Different furniture suggests different ways of being in the world: A heavy table says one thing, and a mattress on the floor beside a folding chair says another. Campaign takes its name from the furnishings that British colonial functionaries would take on assignments, ready to pack up if recalled by the Crown. It’s an apt fit with one version of upwardly mobile millennial living, which involves reducing all “personal” needs to an efficient minimum. It’s a style beloved by Silicon Valley — which finances accessories like the liquid food replacement Soylent — and exemplified by the Google engineer who blogged about the time he spent living in a small truck near the office.
This Silicon Valley lifestyle and the Silicon Valley business model are caught in a chicken-and-egg dialectic. Each holds that whatever work can be automated, eliminated or subcontracted to others should be, thus leaving all our valuable code ninjas and management rock stars free to do more work, pursue expensive enriching experiences and watch Netflix. This is the luxury that some of the valley’s most successful products are offering; there are now niche online services for doing your laundry, chopping your food, driving you around and delivering your toilet paper. The entire app-services economy can serve as a dispersed and techno-mystified mother, a caretaker who dotes on the implied bachelor user.
The various furniture founders — Burrow’s, Greycork’s, Campaign’s, Floyd’s — experienced the same series of pain points when it came to couch ownership. All are city-dwelling men with at least some postgraduate education; four of them are 29, the fifth is 28. It’s not surprising that they should encounter similar hassles or, because most attended business school, think of comparable entrepreneurial solutions. But given that investors and customers have encouraged them, it’s worth asking exactly what kind of pain they plan to remove from our world.
We want our customers to spend their time on things that are meaningful to them,” Brad Sewell, of Campaign, tells me, “not sweating a couch up flights of stairs.” But his company’s target market actually pays for experiences like Tough Mudder, an extreme obstacle course where participants shell out over $100 to race miles through the mud, scale walls slicked with grease and be otherwise abused with their friends. It’s most likely not physical hurt that’s the problem with real-world couch-buying: It’s the forced interaction with others, the loss of control. The most appealing part of buying furniture online is that it saves customers from a series of questions to which there are no answers in advance: What if there’s nothing that looks right? What if you can’t get a cab or can’t find one with a trunk big enough for your purchase? What if you get it home and can’t lift it up the stairs or fit it through the doorway? Unlike many issues in our lives, these things can’t really be looked up ahead of time. There are risks you can’t plan your way out of, and the process is virtually impossible for one person to manage without help, whether paid or cajoled.
Maxwell Ryan, of Apartment Therapy, is not optimistic about the prospects of companies like Burrow. “There’s this Silicon Valley mind-set where they solve a problem and so they think they’re going to make a million dollars,” he says. “But just because it’s a problem for them doesn’t mean it’s a problem for everyone.
Burrow is on an enviable trajectory right now. The company is a graduate of the prestigious Bay Area tech accelerator Y Combinator; it also has a healthy list of pre-orders for its product’s planned debut in January. But given that pedigree, the product is an unusual one: couches. Not cloud-connected couches or remote-controlled couches — just couches. Technically, the company makes a couch, singular, available in a few different colors and configurations. The one I was sitting on belonged to Jess Goodman, a friend of the founders and an early supporter. Its design was midcentury modern unexceptional, and it was perfectly nice. But the couch is not Burrow’s main attraction. Burrow is selling a couch experience.
When customers order a Burrow couch online, the standard model will ship to their apartments in three or four boxes. A human of average size should be able to take those boxes up the stairs (if they have stairs) and build the couch alone, without tools and within minutes.Chopra and Kuhl tell me that for urban professionals between 25 and 35, the physical process of buying a sofa and moving it into an apartment is a series of “pain points.” Some of these points are literally painful, like carrying a large sofa up a flight of stairs. But the term is business speak for any kind of friction, however abstract, between a customer and a new couch. Burrow doesn’t claim to have improved upon the couch itself: It’s a pain-management company. (...)
The best thing about this whole product category is that it might represent a step away from Ikea’s disposability without going all the way back to Grandma’s antique sofa. If consumers are already thinking about moving, portability is at least as big an obstacle to maintaining furniture as mediocre craftsmanship and cheap materials. These companies want to make a couch that will last for 10 or 20 years, even if the buyers have no idea where they’ll be or what they’ll be doing that far down the line. Buying a piece of furniture that you will realistically hold onto longer is a kind of forward-thinking thrift.
But this new approach also hints at something more sinister, more bad-future. Different furniture suggests different ways of being in the world: A heavy table says one thing, and a mattress on the floor beside a folding chair says another. Campaign takes its name from the furnishings that British colonial functionaries would take on assignments, ready to pack up if recalled by the Crown. It’s an apt fit with one version of upwardly mobile millennial living, which involves reducing all “personal” needs to an efficient minimum. It’s a style beloved by Silicon Valley — which finances accessories like the liquid food replacement Soylent — and exemplified by the Google engineer who blogged about the time he spent living in a small truck near the office.
This Silicon Valley lifestyle and the Silicon Valley business model are caught in a chicken-and-egg dialectic. Each holds that whatever work can be automated, eliminated or subcontracted to others should be, thus leaving all our valuable code ninjas and management rock stars free to do more work, pursue expensive enriching experiences and watch Netflix. This is the luxury that some of the valley’s most successful products are offering; there are now niche online services for doing your laundry, chopping your food, driving you around and delivering your toilet paper. The entire app-services economy can serve as a dispersed and techno-mystified mother, a caretaker who dotes on the implied bachelor user.
The various furniture founders — Burrow’s, Greycork’s, Campaign’s, Floyd’s — experienced the same series of pain points when it came to couch ownership. All are city-dwelling men with at least some postgraduate education; four of them are 29, the fifth is 28. It’s not surprising that they should encounter similar hassles or, because most attended business school, think of comparable entrepreneurial solutions. But given that investors and customers have encouraged them, it’s worth asking exactly what kind of pain they plan to remove from our world.
We want our customers to spend their time on things that are meaningful to them,” Brad Sewell, of Campaign, tells me, “not sweating a couch up flights of stairs.” But his company’s target market actually pays for experiences like Tough Mudder, an extreme obstacle course where participants shell out over $100 to race miles through the mud, scale walls slicked with grease and be otherwise abused with their friends. It’s most likely not physical hurt that’s the problem with real-world couch-buying: It’s the forced interaction with others, the loss of control. The most appealing part of buying furniture online is that it saves customers from a series of questions to which there are no answers in advance: What if there’s nothing that looks right? What if you can’t get a cab or can’t find one with a trunk big enough for your purchase? What if you get it home and can’t lift it up the stairs or fit it through the doorway? Unlike many issues in our lives, these things can’t really be looked up ahead of time. There are risks you can’t plan your way out of, and the process is virtually impossible for one person to manage without help, whether paid or cajoled.
Maxwell Ryan, of Apartment Therapy, is not optimistic about the prospects of companies like Burrow. “There’s this Silicon Valley mind-set where they solve a problem and so they think they’re going to make a million dollars,” he says. “But just because it’s a problem for them doesn’t mean it’s a problem for everyone.
by Malcolm Harris, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Craig Cutler for The New York Times
God Bless ContraPoints
Well, I can tell you who is doing them. ContraPoints is doing them. And she’s doing them very well indeed. She’s on a one-woman blitzkrieg against the YouTube right. She knows how to use the medium as well as anybody, and she’s found a brilliantly inventive and totally unique way to convey left political ideas.
ContraPoints produces YouTube videos. They are often quite long, and they are frequently strange. When I was first showed them several months ago, I had absolutely no idea what to make of them. Each is about a political topic, and is usually anchored by a monologue from Contra explaining the issue at hand. But they are unlike anything else I’ve seen. Contra argues with multiple versions of herself (a Stalinist alter ego, a fascist alter ego, an anarchist alter ego, a liberal professor) in a dozen different costumes. An explanation of how capitalism artificially manufactures desires might suddenly turn into a parody advertisement for suppositories. A video critiquing Jordan Peterson does not begin, as one might assume, with his dreary books and lectures, but with Contra as a bewigged French aristocrat called Lady Foppington discoursing on the sovereign faculty of reason. To my utter delight, Contra’s explanation of what’s wrong with capitalism does not end with the usual call for proletarians to take up arms but with Contra at the piano, serenading herself with a rendition of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me” (one of my favorite songs).
But the bizarre and unpredictable aspects of Contra’s videos in no way compromise her analytical rigor. She understands right-wing arguments from front to back, and presents them far more articulately than most of those who espouse them sincerely. She concedes points where they’re valid, and is not shy about criticizing the left. (In fact, she has an entire video examining why some left-wing rhetorical tactics may be, shall we say, sub-optimal in building broad public support). On topics ranging from gender identity to free speech to Nazi-punching to trans-exclusionary feminism to Peterson’s stupid lobster thing and his concept of “postmodern neo-Marxism,” she painstakingly sorts through fallacies and flays bad arguments. She’ll tell the alt-right why their fears of “white genocide” are morally disgusting and statistically illiterate, or she’ll use the history of redlining and housing discrimination to show exactly how historic injustices created today’s racial disparities. And it’s fun all the way. She’ll explain the concept of race with an impersonation of an early 19th century phrenologist, or expose the cruelty of fat-shaming while recreating a 1980s home exercise video. And sometimes she’ll do these things in German or Japanese, or from the bathtub, or through a parody of Dave Rubin’s slobbering sycophantic interview show.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Video: YouTube
[ed. 10:27 - 12:30. Ice Cold MFs!]
How to Survive Your 40s
If you want to know how old you look, just walk into a French cafe. It’s like a public referendum on your face.
When I moved to Paris in my early 30s, waiters called me “mademoiselle.” It was “Bonjour, mademoiselle” when I walked into a cafe and “Voilà, mademoiselle” as they set down a coffee.
Around the time I turned 40, however, there was a collective switch, and waiters started calling me “madame.” These “madames” were tentative at first, but soon they were coming at me like a hailstorm. Now it’s “Bonjour, madame” when I walk in, “Merci, madame” when I pay my bill and “Au revoir, madame” as I leave. Sometimes several waiters shout this at once.
On one hand, I’m intrigued by this transition. Do these waiters gather after work for Sancerre and a slide show to decide which female customers to downgrade? (Irritatingly, men are “monsieur” forever.)
The worst part is that they’re trying to be polite. They believe I’m old enough that the title can’t possibly wound.
I realize that something has permanently shifted when I walk past a woman begging for money.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” she calls out to the young woman in a miniskirt a few steps ahead of me.
When I moved to Paris in my early 30s, waiters called me “mademoiselle.” It was “Bonjour, mademoiselle” when I walked into a cafe and “Voilà, mademoiselle” as they set down a coffee.
Around the time I turned 40, however, there was a collective switch, and waiters started calling me “madame.” These “madames” were tentative at first, but soon they were coming at me like a hailstorm. Now it’s “Bonjour, madame” when I walk in, “Merci, madame” when I pay my bill and “Au revoir, madame” as I leave. Sometimes several waiters shout this at once.
On one hand, I’m intrigued by this transition. Do these waiters gather after work for Sancerre and a slide show to decide which female customers to downgrade? (Irritatingly, men are “monsieur” forever.)The worst part is that they’re trying to be polite. They believe I’m old enough that the title can’t possibly wound.
I realize that something has permanently shifted when I walk past a woman begging for money.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” she calls out to the young woman in a miniskirt a few steps ahead of me.
“Bonjour, madame,” she says when I pass.
This has all happened too quickly for me to digest. I still have most of the clothes that I wore as a mademoiselle. There are mademoiselle-era cans of food in my pantry.
But the world keeps telling me that I’ve entered a new stage. While studying my face in a well-lit elevator, my daughter describes it bluntly: “Mommy, you’re not old, but you’re definitely not young.”
What exactly is this not-young age? I hear people in their 20s describe the 40s as a far-off decade of too-late, when they’ll regret things that they haven’t done. But for older people I meet, the 40s are the decade that they would most like to travel back to. “How could I possibly have thought of myself as old at 40?” asks Stanley Brandes, an anthropologist who wrote a book in 1985 about turning 40. “I sort of look back and think: God, how lucky I was. I see it as the beginning of life, not the beginning of the end.” (...)
And age 40 still feels pivotal. “The 40s are when you become who you are,” a British author in his 70s tells me, adding ominously, “And if you don’t know by your 40s, you never will.”
I’m starting to see that as a madame, even a newly minted one, I am subject to new rules. When I try to act adorably naïve now, people aren’t charmed — they’re baffled. Cluelessness no longer goes with my face. I’m expected to wait in the correct line at airports and show up on time for my appointments.
And yet brain research shows that in the 40s, some of these tasks are harder: On average we’re more easily distracted than younger people, we digest information more slowly and we’re worse at remembering specific facts. (The ability to remember names peaks in the early 20s.) You know you’re in your 40s when you’ve spent 48 hours trying to think of a word, and that word was “hemorrhoids.”
But there are upsides, too. What we lack in processing power we make up for in maturity, insight and experience. We’re better than younger people at grasping the essence of situations, controlling our emotions and resolving conflicts. We’re more skilled at managing money and explaining why things happen. We’re more considerate than younger people. And, crucially for our happiness, we’re less neurotic.
Indeed, modern neuroscience and psychology confirm what Aristotle said more than 2,000 years ago when he described men in their “primes” as having “neither that excess of confidence which amounts to rashness, nor too much timidity, but the right amount of each. They neither trust everybody nor distrust everybody, but judge people correctly.”
I agree. We’ve actually managed to learn and grow a bit. We see the hidden costs of things. Our parents have stopped trying to change us. We can tell when something is ridiculous. And other minds are finally less opaque. The seminal journey of the 40s is from “everyone hates me” to “they don’t really care.”
Even so, the decade is confusing. We can finally decode interpersonal dynamics, but we can’t remember a two-digit number. We’re at or approaching our lifetime peak in earnings, but Botox now seems like a reasonable idea. We’re reaching the height of our careers, but we can now see how they will probably end.
And this new age is strangely lacking in milestones. Childhood and adolescence are nothing but milestones: You grow taller, advance to new grades, and get your period, your driver’s license and your diploma. Then in your 20s and 30s you romance potential partners, find jobs and learn to support yourself. There may be promotions, babies and weddings. The pings of adrenaline from all these carry you forward and reassure you that you’re building an adult life.
In the 40s, we might still acquire degrees, jobs, homes and spouses, but these elicit less wonder now. The mentors and parents who used to rejoice in our achievements are preoccupied with their own declines. If we have kids, we’re supposed to marvel at their milestones. (...)
What have we aged into? We’re still capable of action, change and 10K races. But there’s a new immediacy to the 40s — and an awareness of death — that didn’t exist before. Our possibilities feel more finite. All choices now plainly exclude others. It’s pointless to keep pretending to be what we’re not. At 40, we’re no longer preparing for an imagined future life. Our real lives are, indisputably, happening right now. We’ve arrived at what Immanuel Kant called the “Ding an sich” — the thing itself.
This has all happened too quickly for me to digest. I still have most of the clothes that I wore as a mademoiselle. There are mademoiselle-era cans of food in my pantry.
But the world keeps telling me that I’ve entered a new stage. While studying my face in a well-lit elevator, my daughter describes it bluntly: “Mommy, you’re not old, but you’re definitely not young.”
What exactly is this not-young age? I hear people in their 20s describe the 40s as a far-off decade of too-late, when they’ll regret things that they haven’t done. But for older people I meet, the 40s are the decade that they would most like to travel back to. “How could I possibly have thought of myself as old at 40?” asks Stanley Brandes, an anthropologist who wrote a book in 1985 about turning 40. “I sort of look back and think: God, how lucky I was. I see it as the beginning of life, not the beginning of the end.” (...)
And age 40 still feels pivotal. “The 40s are when you become who you are,” a British author in his 70s tells me, adding ominously, “And if you don’t know by your 40s, you never will.”
I’m starting to see that as a madame, even a newly minted one, I am subject to new rules. When I try to act adorably naïve now, people aren’t charmed — they’re baffled. Cluelessness no longer goes with my face. I’m expected to wait in the correct line at airports and show up on time for my appointments.
And yet brain research shows that in the 40s, some of these tasks are harder: On average we’re more easily distracted than younger people, we digest information more slowly and we’re worse at remembering specific facts. (The ability to remember names peaks in the early 20s.) You know you’re in your 40s when you’ve spent 48 hours trying to think of a word, and that word was “hemorrhoids.”
But there are upsides, too. What we lack in processing power we make up for in maturity, insight and experience. We’re better than younger people at grasping the essence of situations, controlling our emotions and resolving conflicts. We’re more skilled at managing money and explaining why things happen. We’re more considerate than younger people. And, crucially for our happiness, we’re less neurotic.
Indeed, modern neuroscience and psychology confirm what Aristotle said more than 2,000 years ago when he described men in their “primes” as having “neither that excess of confidence which amounts to rashness, nor too much timidity, but the right amount of each. They neither trust everybody nor distrust everybody, but judge people correctly.”
I agree. We’ve actually managed to learn and grow a bit. We see the hidden costs of things. Our parents have stopped trying to change us. We can tell when something is ridiculous. And other minds are finally less opaque. The seminal journey of the 40s is from “everyone hates me” to “they don’t really care.”
Even so, the decade is confusing. We can finally decode interpersonal dynamics, but we can’t remember a two-digit number. We’re at or approaching our lifetime peak in earnings, but Botox now seems like a reasonable idea. We’re reaching the height of our careers, but we can now see how they will probably end.
And this new age is strangely lacking in milestones. Childhood and adolescence are nothing but milestones: You grow taller, advance to new grades, and get your period, your driver’s license and your diploma. Then in your 20s and 30s you romance potential partners, find jobs and learn to support yourself. There may be promotions, babies and weddings. The pings of adrenaline from all these carry you forward and reassure you that you’re building an adult life.
In the 40s, we might still acquire degrees, jobs, homes and spouses, but these elicit less wonder now. The mentors and parents who used to rejoice in our achievements are preoccupied with their own declines. If we have kids, we’re supposed to marvel at their milestones. (...)
What have we aged into? We’re still capable of action, change and 10K races. But there’s a new immediacy to the 40s — and an awareness of death — that didn’t exist before. Our possibilities feel more finite. All choices now plainly exclude others. It’s pointless to keep pretending to be what we’re not. At 40, we’re no longer preparing for an imagined future life. Our real lives are, indisputably, happening right now. We’ve arrived at what Immanuel Kant called the “Ding an sich” — the thing itself.
by Pamela Druckerman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Rosalie Stroesser
Saturday, May 5, 2018
Gimme Shelter Q1 2018 Update: Rents and House Prices All At or Near New Extremes
This post is a comprehensive update as to the cost of new and existing homes vs. renting, all measured compared with median household income. As such it is epistolary in length. So here is the TL:DR version:
Half a year ago I wrote a long post discussing “the real cost of shelter,” by which I meant not just the downpayment on a house, but the monthly carrying cost for a mortgage, and comparing both of those with median rent.
That comparison showed that, while the “real” cost of a house downpayment was at a new high, the “real” cost of median asking rent was even higher. By contrast, the monthly carrying cost of a mortgage was quite moderate. This meant that, if a buyer could find a way to put together a downpayment, home-owning was a bargain compared to renting.
As I’ll show below, six months of price and interest rate increases later, there is even more stress on both homebuyers and renters.
By way of a quick recap, I wrote six months ago that I had never seen a discussion of the relationship between the relative cost of homeownership vs. renting, particularly as a function of the household budget. The choice (or ability) to live in the residence one desires isn’t a matter of its cost by itself, but also the relative cost of the type of residence. What is the cost of a house compared with the cost of an apartment? How expensive are each of them compared with a household’s income? If both are too expensive, maybe the choice is made to live with mom and dad as an extended family.
So, here are the three relationships I’ll look at again in this post
1. the “real cost” of a downpayment on a house.
2. the “real cost of renting
3. the “real monthly carrying cost” of a mortgage
The best metric for calculating these “real” costs on a household is median household income.
- as a multiple of median household income, new home prices are at an extreme beyond even the peak of the housing bubble, while existing home prices are about 5% under theirs
- but unlike then, when apartment vacancies were high and rents cheap, now rents are *also* at an extreme as compared with median household income
- even with their recent increase, interest rates are still lower now than during the housing bubble, so the median monthly mortgage payment adjusted for median household income is even still about 10% less than it was at the peak of the housing bubble
- if the trends of rising prices and interest rates continue, at some point they will overcome the demographic tailwind of the large Millennial generation having reached typical home-buying age. At that point there may be another deflationary bust
Half a year ago I wrote a long post discussing “the real cost of shelter,” by which I meant not just the downpayment on a house, but the monthly carrying cost for a mortgage, and comparing both of those with median rent.
That comparison showed that, while the “real” cost of a house downpayment was at a new high, the “real” cost of median asking rent was even higher. By contrast, the monthly carrying cost of a mortgage was quite moderate. This meant that, if a buyer could find a way to put together a downpayment, home-owning was a bargain compared to renting.
As I’ll show below, six months of price and interest rate increases later, there is even more stress on both homebuyers and renters.
By way of a quick recap, I wrote six months ago that I had never seen a discussion of the relationship between the relative cost of homeownership vs. renting, particularly as a function of the household budget. The choice (or ability) to live in the residence one desires isn’t a matter of its cost by itself, but also the relative cost of the type of residence. What is the cost of a house compared with the cost of an apartment? How expensive are each of them compared with a household’s income? If both are too expensive, maybe the choice is made to live with mom and dad as an extended family.
So, here are the three relationships I’ll look at again in this post
1. the “real cost” of a downpayment on a house.
2. the “real cost of renting
3. the “real monthly carrying cost” of a mortgage
The best metric for calculating these “real” costs on a household is median household income.
by NewDealDemocrat, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
The United States of Japan
Thanks to hip-hop and Hollywood, the United States is still the world’s leading cultural exporter. But, in recent years, American culture has increasingly been following a playbook made in Japan. Consider the fascination with “the Japanese art of decluttering.” Its guru, Marie Kondo, lives in Japan. She generally relies on an interpreter, and it has been four years since she published a book in the U.S. While she has largely fallen off the radar in her home country, her popularity shows no signs of waning among Americans. One video of Kondo folding clothes, dubbed in English, has close to four million views on YouTube. On Valentine’s Day, Netflix sparked joy among fans with an announcement that it had greenlit a Kondo reality show.
Stripped down to its most minimalist outlines (an approach that Kondo would surely approve), a life of uncluttered simplicity represents a fantasy. Why should Americans be so compelled by one from Japan? Close to twenty years ago, the answer would have been “because Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future,” as the author William Gibson wrote in 2001. “The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line.” Gibson was referring to a Japan of trendy gadgets and services, such as high-tech cell phones and robot sushi bars, the flashy products of a hyper-consumer metropolis that inspired the creators of such films as “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix.” But what Gibson wrote about products was just as true about other, less visible trends in Japanese society: economic stagnation; a plunging fertility rate; a dramatic postponement of the “normal” milestones of adulthood, such as getting married or simply moving out of the family home; a creeping sense of ambivalence about what the future might hold. Seventeen years later, America has finally caught up. We don’t buy into Kondo’s life-changing magic just because we think Japan is cool; we also buy because our country is, in many ways, increasingly like Japan.
A cynic would point out that the life-changing Japanese magic of tidying up is a ploy to divest ourselves of all the Walkmans and Tamagotchis and other tchotchkes that Japan convinced us to buy in the first place. But Kondo didn’t write her books for us; they were the product of a training seminar, a sort of literary incubator, for the Japanese marketplace. And she is only the most internationally successful of many writing on the topic in Japan. Kondo’s first book appeared at the tail end of a fad for things danshari—a Buddhist term for tidying up that is written with the characters for refusal, disposal, and separation—that swept Japan in the aughts. The first salvoes in what might be called Japan’s “war on stuff” date back even earlier, to the first half of the nineteen-nineties. That is when the sudden crash of the Japanese real-estate and stock markets ushered in twenty years of stagnation so severe that the period is now known as the Lost Decades.
Amid the suffering economy and the collapse of social safety nets such as the promise of lifetime employment, younger Japanese lost the ambition for acquiring things that fuelled an earlier, more financially stable generation. Hiroshi Aoi, the president of the Marui Group, which operates Japan’s largest retail chain, was uniquely positioned to see how drastically consumers cut back. In an interview in 2016, he told me that the Lost Decades represented a “turning away from outward expressions of fashion.… The idea of personal fulfillment became the product, with things like foods, dining out, and leisure experiences rising to the forefront.” If this sounds familiar, it is because the same pattern is now repeating among America’s millennials. Some call it the “experience economy.” Others call it “post-materialism.” But this great turning inward in the face of economic uncertainty could just as accurately be called Japanization.
“Japanization” (and the related “Japanification”) is a term as loaded as it is fluid. During the dark colonial period of the nineteen-thirties and forties, it evoked yellow peril, conjuring images of Japanese imperial forces conquering their Asian neighbors and compelling them to adopt Japanese ways. By the late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties, Japanization had taken on a wholly different meaning: “the diffusion of Japanese management systems and practices” in non-Japanese organizations, as the researcher Barry Wilkinson put it, in a paper written with Jonathan Morris and Nick Oliver, “Japanizing the World: The Case of Toyota,” from 1992. Two decades later, the word took on a sinister pall once again, at least among economic pundits. “Few words strike greater fear in the hearts of economists and politicians,” William Pesek, the author of the book “Japanization” wrote. In that book, he defines the term as a “a noxious mix of trifling growth, high debt, falling consumer prices, waning confidence, and political dysfunction.” (Paul Krugman, of the Times, is a fan of the term, frequently invoking Japanification in his descriptions of slowing growth and ageing populations in the U.S., the E.U., and China.) (...)
Yet when the bubble burst, in 1990, plunging Japan into its Lost Decades, this marginalized community proved a resilient incubator of trends. Chief among these was the Pokémon video-game series, whose creator, Satoshi Tajiri, is a self-proclaimed otaku. (“Everything I did as a kid is kind of rolled into one thing,” the then thirtysomething told Time in 1999: “Pokémon.”) That the geeky exports dreamed up by people like Tajiri retain their appeal today is a testament to the passions of their creators. But it’s also a testament to the fact that all of us now spend huge amounts of time the way they did: sitting in front of screens, rummaging through our own pop-culture databases, obsessing over our virtual identities while indulging in our own childlike pleasures, which range from the aughts fad for cupcakes to cosplay or the latest Marvel superhero flick. The resounding box office success of Steven Spielberg’s cross-cultural mash-up “Ready Player One” is only the most recent affirmation of a societal trend: we’re all otaku now. Japan was, once again, simply ahead of the curve.
Stripped down to its most minimalist outlines (an approach that Kondo would surely approve), a life of uncluttered simplicity represents a fantasy. Why should Americans be so compelled by one from Japan? Close to twenty years ago, the answer would have been “because Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future,” as the author William Gibson wrote in 2001. “The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line.” Gibson was referring to a Japan of trendy gadgets and services, such as high-tech cell phones and robot sushi bars, the flashy products of a hyper-consumer metropolis that inspired the creators of such films as “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix.” But what Gibson wrote about products was just as true about other, less visible trends in Japanese society: economic stagnation; a plunging fertility rate; a dramatic postponement of the “normal” milestones of adulthood, such as getting married or simply moving out of the family home; a creeping sense of ambivalence about what the future might hold. Seventeen years later, America has finally caught up. We don’t buy into Kondo’s life-changing magic just because we think Japan is cool; we also buy because our country is, in many ways, increasingly like Japan.A cynic would point out that the life-changing Japanese magic of tidying up is a ploy to divest ourselves of all the Walkmans and Tamagotchis and other tchotchkes that Japan convinced us to buy in the first place. But Kondo didn’t write her books for us; they were the product of a training seminar, a sort of literary incubator, for the Japanese marketplace. And she is only the most internationally successful of many writing on the topic in Japan. Kondo’s first book appeared at the tail end of a fad for things danshari—a Buddhist term for tidying up that is written with the characters for refusal, disposal, and separation—that swept Japan in the aughts. The first salvoes in what might be called Japan’s “war on stuff” date back even earlier, to the first half of the nineteen-nineties. That is when the sudden crash of the Japanese real-estate and stock markets ushered in twenty years of stagnation so severe that the period is now known as the Lost Decades.
Amid the suffering economy and the collapse of social safety nets such as the promise of lifetime employment, younger Japanese lost the ambition for acquiring things that fuelled an earlier, more financially stable generation. Hiroshi Aoi, the president of the Marui Group, which operates Japan’s largest retail chain, was uniquely positioned to see how drastically consumers cut back. In an interview in 2016, he told me that the Lost Decades represented a “turning away from outward expressions of fashion.… The idea of personal fulfillment became the product, with things like foods, dining out, and leisure experiences rising to the forefront.” If this sounds familiar, it is because the same pattern is now repeating among America’s millennials. Some call it the “experience economy.” Others call it “post-materialism.” But this great turning inward in the face of economic uncertainty could just as accurately be called Japanization.
“Japanization” (and the related “Japanification”) is a term as loaded as it is fluid. During the dark colonial period of the nineteen-thirties and forties, it evoked yellow peril, conjuring images of Japanese imperial forces conquering their Asian neighbors and compelling them to adopt Japanese ways. By the late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties, Japanization had taken on a wholly different meaning: “the diffusion of Japanese management systems and practices” in non-Japanese organizations, as the researcher Barry Wilkinson put it, in a paper written with Jonathan Morris and Nick Oliver, “Japanizing the World: The Case of Toyota,” from 1992. Two decades later, the word took on a sinister pall once again, at least among economic pundits. “Few words strike greater fear in the hearts of economists and politicians,” William Pesek, the author of the book “Japanization” wrote. In that book, he defines the term as a “a noxious mix of trifling growth, high debt, falling consumer prices, waning confidence, and political dysfunction.” (Paul Krugman, of the Times, is a fan of the term, frequently invoking Japanification in his descriptions of slowing growth and ageing populations in the U.S., the E.U., and China.) (...)
Yet when the bubble burst, in 1990, plunging Japan into its Lost Decades, this marginalized community proved a resilient incubator of trends. Chief among these was the Pokémon video-game series, whose creator, Satoshi Tajiri, is a self-proclaimed otaku. (“Everything I did as a kid is kind of rolled into one thing,” the then thirtysomething told Time in 1999: “Pokémon.”) That the geeky exports dreamed up by people like Tajiri retain their appeal today is a testament to the passions of their creators. But it’s also a testament to the fact that all of us now spend huge amounts of time the way they did: sitting in front of screens, rummaging through our own pop-culture databases, obsessing over our virtual identities while indulging in our own childlike pleasures, which range from the aughts fad for cupcakes to cosplay or the latest Marvel superhero flick. The resounding box office success of Steven Spielberg’s cross-cultural mash-up “Ready Player One” is only the most recent affirmation of a societal trend: we’re all otaku now. Japan was, once again, simply ahead of the curve.
by Matt Alt, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Daniel Boczarski / Getty
Friday, May 4, 2018
The Magical Mystery Chord
In this fascinating clip from the CBC radio show, Randy's Vinyl Tap, the legendary Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive guitarist Randy Bachman unravels the mystery. The segment is from a special live performance, "Guitarology 101," taped in front of an audience at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto back in January, 2010. As journalist Matthew McAndrew wrote, "the two-and-a-half hour event was as much an educational experience as it was a rock'n'roll concert."
One highlight of the show was Bachman's telling of his visit the previous year with Giles Martin, son of Beatles' producer George Martin, at Abbey Road Studios. The younger Martin, who is now the official custodian of all the Beatles' recordings, told Bachman he could listen to anything he wanted from the massive archive--anything at all. Bachman chose to hear each track from the opening of "A Hard Day's Night." As it turns out, the sound is actually a combination of chords played simultaneously by George Harrison and John Lennon, along with a bass note by Paul McCartney. Bachman breaks it all down in an entertaining way in the audio clip above.
by YouTube
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