Monday, May 28, 2018
FaceTune is Conquering Instagram
The Oxford English Dictionary chose “selfie” as its word of the year at the end of 2013. At around the same time, four Israeli computer science PhD students and a supreme court clerk had an idea for an app that that would allow regular people to do Photoshop-style retouching of their smartphones photos.
That app was FaceTune.
The team behind it hoped they’d be able to sell enough copies of the app to raise a few hundred thousand dollars. Instead, the selfie-editing app was a runaway hit whose digital fingerprints can be seen all over the internet: pores, lines and zits are airbrushed to oblivion, teeth whitened and waists nipped. It has been endorsed by a swarm of Instagram influencers and celebrities including Khloe Kardashian – the social media equivalent of a royal warrant.
The first version has sold more than 10m copies (at between $3.99 and $5.99 each) and was Apple’s most popular paid app of 2017.
“We were really surprised. We didn’t think any single app would be significant enough to finance the entire growth of the company. It felt like we had won the lottery,” said Zeev Farbman, CEO of Lightricks, the Jerusalem-based startup that makes FaceTune as well as a handful of other photo and video-editing apps.
At the end of 2016, Lightricks launched an upgraded version of their flagship app, FaceTune 2. It’s free to download but $5.99 per month to unlock all of the features, which include a live-editing tool for users to tweak their selfies even before snapping the photo. It has already been downloaded more than 20m times, with almost 500,000 subscribers paying an average of $40 per year.
FaceTune’s success comes down to the way it makes it child’s play to alter images with far more precision than Snapchat filters but less complexity than professional editing tools like Photoshop.
“I mainly use it for beauty product and lifestyle shots to brighten them up,” said beauty blogger Amelia Perrin. “I’m quite a technophobe and can’t use anything like Photoshop, so it’s nice to have a relatively simple tool to sharpen things up.”
“If done properly, it should be hard to tell you’ve used it,” said Natasha Church, a makeup and beauty blogger who has made YouTube tutorials explaining how she edits her photos.
“If I’m taking a selfie I might use the ‘heal’ tool to get rid of a spot. Or if you’ve got enlarged pores you can use the ‘smooth’ tool. If I’m wearing sparkly eyeshadow I might use the ‘detail’ tool to make it pop a bit more,” she said.
All too often, however, FaceTune users go overboard, smoothing their selfies into amorphous avatars or slimming their bodies to the point of anatomical impossibility.
Overzealous FaceTuning is so widespread that recently celebrity model Chrissy Tiegen weighed in: “I don’t know what real skin looks like any more.”
by Olivia Solon, The Guardian | Read more:
That app was FaceTune.
The team behind it hoped they’d be able to sell enough copies of the app to raise a few hundred thousand dollars. Instead, the selfie-editing app was a runaway hit whose digital fingerprints can be seen all over the internet: pores, lines and zits are airbrushed to oblivion, teeth whitened and waists nipped. It has been endorsed by a swarm of Instagram influencers and celebrities including Khloe Kardashian – the social media equivalent of a royal warrant.The first version has sold more than 10m copies (at between $3.99 and $5.99 each) and was Apple’s most popular paid app of 2017.
“We were really surprised. We didn’t think any single app would be significant enough to finance the entire growth of the company. It felt like we had won the lottery,” said Zeev Farbman, CEO of Lightricks, the Jerusalem-based startup that makes FaceTune as well as a handful of other photo and video-editing apps.
At the end of 2016, Lightricks launched an upgraded version of their flagship app, FaceTune 2. It’s free to download but $5.99 per month to unlock all of the features, which include a live-editing tool for users to tweak their selfies even before snapping the photo. It has already been downloaded more than 20m times, with almost 500,000 subscribers paying an average of $40 per year.
FaceTune’s success comes down to the way it makes it child’s play to alter images with far more precision than Snapchat filters but less complexity than professional editing tools like Photoshop.
“I mainly use it for beauty product and lifestyle shots to brighten them up,” said beauty blogger Amelia Perrin. “I’m quite a technophobe and can’t use anything like Photoshop, so it’s nice to have a relatively simple tool to sharpen things up.”
“If done properly, it should be hard to tell you’ve used it,” said Natasha Church, a makeup and beauty blogger who has made YouTube tutorials explaining how she edits her photos.
“If I’m taking a selfie I might use the ‘heal’ tool to get rid of a spot. Or if you’ve got enlarged pores you can use the ‘smooth’ tool. If I’m wearing sparkly eyeshadow I might use the ‘detail’ tool to make it pop a bit more,” she said.
All too often, however, FaceTune users go overboard, smoothing their selfies into amorphous avatars or slimming their bodies to the point of anatomical impossibility.
Overzealous FaceTuning is so widespread that recently celebrity model Chrissy Tiegen weighed in: “I don’t know what real skin looks like any more.”
by Olivia Solon, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Nicole Hale via
[ed. The things you learn every day, huh.]
Tailspin: How Baby Boomers Broke America
Lately, most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, have been asking themselves some version of the same question: How did we get here? How did the world’s greatest democracy and economy become a land of crumbling roads, galloping income inequality, bitter polarization and dysfunctional government?
As I tried to find the answer over the past two years, I discovered a recurring irony. About five decades ago, the core values that make America great began to bring America down. The First Amendment became a tool for the wealthy to put a thumb on the scales of democracy. America’s rightly celebrated dedication to due process was used as an instrument to block government from enforcing job-safety rules, holding corporate criminals accountable and otherwise protecting the unprotected. Election reforms meant to enhance democracy wound up undercutting democracy. Ingenious financial and legal engineering turned our economy from an engine of long-term growth and shared prosperity into a casino with only a few big winners.These distinctly American ideas became the often unintended instruments for splitting the country into two classes: the protected and the unprotected. The protected overmatched, overran and paralyzed the government. The unprotected were left even further behind. And in many cases, the work was done by a generation of smart, hungry strivers who benefited from one of the most American values of all: meritocracy. (...)
I was one of those elite winners. In 1964, I was a bookworm growing up in Far Rockaway, a working-class section of Queens. One day, I read in a biography of John F. Kennedy that he had gone to something called a prep school. None of my teachers at Junior High School 198 had a clue what that meant, but I soon figured out that prep school was like college. You got to go to classes and live on a campus, only you got to go four years earlier, which seemed like a fine idea. It seemed even better when I discovered that some prep schools offered financial aid. I ended up at Deerfield Academy, in Western Massachusetts, where the headmaster, Frank Boyden, told my worried parents, who ran a perpetually struggling liquor store, that his financial-aid policy was that they should send him a check every year for whatever they could afford.
Three years later, in 1967, I found myself sitting in the headmaster’s office one day in the fall of my senior year with a man named R. Inslee Clark Jr., the dean of admissions at Yale. Clark looked over my record and asked me a bunch of questions, most of which were about where I had grown up and how I had ended up at Deerfield. Then he paused, looked me in the eye and asked if I really wanted to go to Yale – if it was my first choice. When I said yes, Clark’s reply was instant: “Then I can promise you that you are in. I will tell Mr. Boyden that you don’t have to apply anywhere else. Just kind of keep it to yourself.”
What I didn’t know then was that I was part of a revolution being led by Clark, whose nickname was Inky. I was about to become one of what would come to be known as Inky’s boys and, later, girls. We were part of a meritocracy infusion that flourished at Yale and other elite education institutions, law firms and investment banks in the mid-1960s and ’70s. It produced great progress in equalizing opportunity. But it had the unintended consequence of entrenching a new aristocracy of rich knowledge workers who were much smarter and more driven than the old-boy network of heirs born on third base–and much more able to enrich and protect the clients who could afford them. (...)
The Meritocracy’s ascent was about more than personal profit. As my generation of achievers graduated from elite universities and moved into the professional world, their personal successes often had serious societal consequences. They upended corporate America and Wall Street with inventions in law and finance that created an economy built on deals that moved assets around instead of building new ones. They created exotic, and risky, financial instruments, including derivatives and credit default swaps, that produced sugar highs of immediate profits but separated those taking the risk from those who would bear the consequences. They organized hedge funds that turned owning stock into a minute-by-minute bet rather than a long-term investment. They invented proxy fights, leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks that gave lawyers and bankers a bonanza of new fees and maximized short-term profits for increasingly unsentimental shareholders, but deadened incentives for the long-term growth of the rest of the economy.
Regulatory agencies were overwhelmed by battalions of lawyers who brilliantly weaponized the bedrock American value of due process so that, for example, an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule protecting workers from a deadly chemical could be challenged and delayed for more than a decade and end up being hundreds of pages long. Lawyers then contested the meaning of every clause while racking up fees of hundreds of dollars per hour from clients who were saving millions of dollars on every clause they could water down. (...)
As government was disabled from delivering on vital issues, the protected were able to protect themselves still more. For them, it was all about building their own moats. Their money, their power, their lobbyists, their lawyers, their drive overwhelmed the institutions that were supposed to hold them accountable–government agencies, Congress, the courts.
There may be no more flagrant example of the achievers’ triumph than how they were able to avoid accountability when the banks they ran crashed the economy. The CEOs had been able to get the courts to treat their corporations like people when it came to protecting the corporation’s right to free speech. Yet after the crash, CEOs got prosecutors and judges to treat them like corporations when it came to personal responsibility. The corporate structures they had built were so massive and so complex that, the prosecutors decided, no senior executive could be proved to have known what was going on. (...)
When they created ways to package mortgages into securities that could be resold to investors, for example, it was initially celebrated as a way to get more money into the mortgage pool, thereby making more mortgages available to the middle class. But by 2007 it had become far too much of a good thing. As the financial engineers continued to push the envelope with ever-riskier versions of the original invention, they crashed the economy.
Thus, the breakdown came when their intelligence, daring, creativity and resources enabled them to push aside any effort to rein them in. They did what comes naturally – they kept winning. And they did it with the protection of an alluring, defensible narrative that shielded them from pushback, at least initially. They won not with the brazen corruption of the robber barons of old, but by drawing on the core values that have always defined American greatness.
They didn’t do it cynically, at least not at first. They simply got really, really good at taking advantage of what the American system gave them and doing the kinds of things that America treasures in the name of the values that America treasures.
And they have invested their winnings not only to preserve their bounty, but also to root themselves and their offspring in a new meritocracy-aristocracy that is more entrenched than the old-boy network. Forty-eight years after Inky Clark gave me my ticket on the meritocracy express in 1967, a professor at Yale Law School jarred the school’s graduation celebration. Daniel Markovits, who specializes in the intersection of law and behavioral economics, told the class of 2015 that their success getting accepted into, and getting a degree from, the country’s most selective law school actually marked their entry into a newly entrenched aristocracy that had been snuffing out the American Dream for almost everyone else. Elites, he explained, can spend what they need to in order to send their children to the best schools, provide tutors for standardized testing and otherwise ensure that their kids can outcompete their peers to secure the same spots at the top that their parents achieved.
“American meritocracy has thus become precisely what it was invented to combat,” Markovits concluded, “a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. Meritocracy now constitutes a modern-day aristocracy.”
The frustrated, disillusioned Americans who voted for President Trump committed the ultimate act of rejecting the meritocrats – epitomized by the hardworking, always prepared, Yale Law – educated Hillary Clinton – in favor of an inexperienced, never-prepared, shoot-from-the-hip heir to a real estate fortune whose businesses had declared bankruptcy six times. He would “drain the swamp” in Washington, he promised. He would take the coal industry back to the greatness it had enjoyed 80 years before. He would rebuild the cities, block immigrants with a great wall, provide health care for all and make the country’s infrastructure the envy of the world, while cutting everyone’s taxes. Forty-six percent of those who voted figured that things were so bad, they might as well let him try.
by Steven Brill, Time | Read more:
Image: Ross MacDonald[ed. See also: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy. (Excerpt):
New forms of life necessarily give rise to new and distinct forms of consciousness. If you doubt this, you clearly haven’t been reading the “personal and household services” ads on Monster.com. At the time of this writing, the section for my town of Brookline, Massachusetts, featured one placed by a “busy professional couple” seeking a “Part Time Nanny.” The nanny (or manny—the ad scrupulously avoids committing to gender) is to be “bright, loving, and energetic”; “friendly, intelligent, and professional”; and “a very good communicator, both written and verbal.” She (on balance of probability) will “assist with the care and development” of two children and will be “responsible for all aspects of the children’s needs,” including bathing, dressing, feeding, and taking the young things to and from school and activities. That’s why a “college degree in early childhood education” is “a plus.”
In short, Nanny is to have every attribute one would want in a terrific, professional, college-educated parent. Except, of course, the part about being an actual professional, college-educated parent. There is no chance that Nanny will trade places with our busy 5G couple. She “must know the proper etiquette in a professionally run household” and be prepared to “accommodate changing circumstances.” She is required to have “5+ years experience as a Nanny,” which makes it unlikely that she’ll have had time to get the law degree that would put her on the other side of the bargain. All of Nanny’s skills, education, experience, and professionalism will land her a job that is “Part Time.” (...)
My 16-year-old daughter is sitting on a couch, talking with a stranger about her dreams for the future. We’re here, ominously enough, because, she says, “all my friends are doing it.” For a moment, I wonder whether we have unintentionally signed up for some kind of therapy. The professional woman in the smart-casual suit throws me a pointed glance and says, “It’s normal to be anxious at a time like this.” She really does see herself as a therapist of sorts. But she does not yet seem to know that the source of my anxiety is the idea of shelling out for a $12,000 “base package” of college-counseling services whose chief purpose is apparently to reduce my anxiety. Determined to get something out of this trial counseling session, I push for recommendations on summer activities. We leave with a tip on a 10-day “cultural tour” of France for high schoolers. In the college-application business, that’s what’s known as an “enrichment experience.” When we get home, I look it up. The price of enrichment: $11,000 for the 10 days.]
Sunday, May 27, 2018
The Joy of Voting by Mail
California’s top-two primary, which will choose candidates regardless of party for the November election, is approaching on June 5. But like a growing majority of Golden State voters, my wife and I will vote by mail well before what is technically Election Day (ballots must be postmarked by June 5 and received by county election officials three days later or less, though ballots can also be dropped off at precincts or “voting centers”). Because we are registered as permanent vote-by-mail voters, we get ballots automatically as long as we keep eschewing the increasingly less crowded Election Day polling places.
So this weekend, Dawn and I plan to sit down with our mail ballots and our handy-dandy state and county voter guides. Those reflect a wonderful California institution that provides every voter with detailed explanations of, and pro-and-con advocacy statements concerning, every state and local ballot initiative (a Golden State institution dating back to the Progressive Era, though today’s special-interest-financed initiatives are frequently everything other than progressive) along with declarations from every candidate coherent enough to complete a sentence. We will have the leisure to make our way through the incredibly extensive list of statewide candidates facilitated by California’s “jungle” nonpartisan top-two primary (in which all candidates from every party compete for a general election spot offered to the top two finishers, regardless of party or percentage of the vote). That means there are 32 U.S. Senate candidates and 27 gubernatorial candidates on the June 5 ballot. It’s really not something you want to first encounter alone, in a voting booth.
As Dave Roberts, a distinguished environmental writer who is a resident of all-voting-by-mail Oregon (a system also embraced by Colorado and Washington) notes, voting by mail ought to be strongly considered as the wave of the future nationally. It has raised voter turnout every place it’s been used. It’s cheaper than voting systems that rely on polling places and polling workers. It is attractive to all sorts of voters — particularly people who may not find it easy to take off work to stand in line during working hours on a random Tuesday — who value convenience. Indeed, there’s not much of a downside for abandoning the old system, argues Roberts:
Some critics think voting-by-mail facilitates voter fraud. As Roberts responds, that makes little sense:
by Ed Kilgore, NY Magazine | Read more:
So this weekend, Dawn and I plan to sit down with our mail ballots and our handy-dandy state and county voter guides. Those reflect a wonderful California institution that provides every voter with detailed explanations of, and pro-and-con advocacy statements concerning, every state and local ballot initiative (a Golden State institution dating back to the Progressive Era, though today’s special-interest-financed initiatives are frequently everything other than progressive) along with declarations from every candidate coherent enough to complete a sentence. We will have the leisure to make our way through the incredibly extensive list of statewide candidates facilitated by California’s “jungle” nonpartisan top-two primary (in which all candidates from every party compete for a general election spot offered to the top two finishers, regardless of party or percentage of the vote). That means there are 32 U.S. Senate candidates and 27 gubernatorial candidates on the June 5 ballot. It’s really not something you want to first encounter alone, in a voting booth.As Dave Roberts, a distinguished environmental writer who is a resident of all-voting-by-mail Oregon (a system also embraced by Colorado and Washington) notes, voting by mail ought to be strongly considered as the wave of the future nationally. It has raised voter turnout every place it’s been used. It’s cheaper than voting systems that rely on polling places and polling workers. It is attractive to all sorts of voters — particularly people who may not find it easy to take off work to stand in line during working hours on a random Tuesday — who value convenience. Indeed, there’s not much of a downside for abandoning the old system, argues Roberts:
Most of the time, for most people, voting in the U.S. is a big bunch of bullshit hassle. It’s been made a hassle on purpose — and not for all people equally, but, like so many things, disproportionately for the poor, minorities, young people, and students.
Just the idea that in 2018, people have to schlep down to a gym or something between particular hours on a particular weekday and stand in line for hours to poke at choices on a touchscreen, all while being monitored by creepy onlookers … it’s an insult to modernity, all of it. We can do better.Voting on something other than Election Day is a more familiar experience than ever in a country where early voting — in some places in-person early voting at traditional polling places — is growing as fast as hostile Republican election officials will allow. So voting-by-mail mostly violates increasingly archaic taboos, which mostly upsets political consultants who realize get-out-the-vote and persuasion strategies focused on Election Day only aren’t very efficient any more.
Some critics think voting-by-mail facilitates voter fraud. As Roberts responds, that makes little sense:
[A]bout a quarter of all votes were cast by mail in 2016. Absentee ballots have long been available in dozens of states. Since 2000, overall, about a quarter-billion votes have been cast by mail. Thus far, there have been virtually no documented incidents of coercion or abuse. As NVHC notes in a white paper on this subject, “Oregon has mailed-out more than 100 million ballots since 2000, with about a dozen cases of proven fraud.” That’s a 0.00000012 percent rate of fraud.That’s attributable to a combination of felony charges for voting-by-mail tampering, and the difficulty involved in rigging so decentralized a voting system. It’s surely a safer system than using voting machines that are inevitably vulnerable to hacking by Russians or God knows who.
by Ed Kilgore, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
[ed. It is a joy. When I was living in Washington state it was the easiest thing to do. Why would anyone not want to make voting easier?]
Saturday, May 26, 2018
Goat Rodeo
It's strange to say, but there is an upside to the goat rodeo way in which President Donald Trump has cancelled, for the moment, his North Korea summit. No president has done a better job of making clear that the United States is an impediment to peace on the Korean Peninsula.
Is this a disaster? It could be, because anything Trump touches can turn to nuclear ash. But the summit cancellation — or postponement or revival or who knows what to call it, given Trump’s garbled moods — has the prospect of being useful if South Korea and North Korea seize the moment to take matters into their own hands, improving their ties despite the toxic clown show in the Oval Office.
“Ultimately, this cannot just go back to how it was before the Winter Olympics,” tweeted Abraham Denmark, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia. “North Korea is in a stronger position, Kim has far more legitimacy, China is more engaged, South Korea has invested a lot into diplomacy, and the U.S. role is more circumscribed.”
While officials in North Korea and South Korea were apparently unaware of the cancellation until Trump announced it, South Korean President Moon Jae-in indicated that his reconciliation efforts would move ahead (and who knows, maybe the summit will move ahead, too). “The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and ensuring a permanent peace are historic tasks that cannot be delayed or forsaken,” Moon said after an emergency session of his national security council.
This is an emperor-has-no-clothes moment, but not only in the sense of Trump and coherent thinking. For more than a century, the Korean Peninsula has been the unlucky target of more foreign intervention than arguably any other spot on the planet (which, I know, is saying a lot). Trump has shown just how capricious and prejudicial the actions of outsiders can be, doing little to serve the interests of the 75 million people who live there.
From 1910 to 1945, Korea was a Japanese colony. Koreans were forced to adopt Japanese names, forced to work in Japanese mines, and women were forced into prostitution for Japanese soldiers. After the Japanese empire collapsed at the end of World War II, the Korean Peninsula was divided into American and Russian zones along the 38th parallel — Koreans had no choice or role in that. In the Korean War that broke out in 1950, more than 5 million soldiers and civilians were killed – a calamity of historic proportions. Most of the slaughter occurred in North Korea, where the U.S. dropped more bombs than during its entire Pacific campaign against Japan.
While North Korea has been understandably condemned for its nuclear weapons program, guess who started the nuclear race? It was the U.S. that brought nuclear weapons to South Korea in 1958 and kept them there for more than three decades (the last ones were removed in 1991). “The presence of those American weapons probably motivated the North Koreans to accelerate development of their own nuclear weapons,” noted Walter Pincus. “The Seoul government still remains under the American nuclear umbrella — and the impetus for Kim Jong Un to have his own remains.”
[ed. Good move. Take out the (clueless) middle man.]
Is this a disaster? It could be, because anything Trump touches can turn to nuclear ash. But the summit cancellation — or postponement or revival or who knows what to call it, given Trump’s garbled moods — has the prospect of being useful if South Korea and North Korea seize the moment to take matters into their own hands, improving their ties despite the toxic clown show in the Oval Office.
“Ultimately, this cannot just go back to how it was before the Winter Olympics,” tweeted Abraham Denmark, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia. “North Korea is in a stronger position, Kim has far more legitimacy, China is more engaged, South Korea has invested a lot into diplomacy, and the U.S. role is more circumscribed.”While officials in North Korea and South Korea were apparently unaware of the cancellation until Trump announced it, South Korean President Moon Jae-in indicated that his reconciliation efforts would move ahead (and who knows, maybe the summit will move ahead, too). “The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and ensuring a permanent peace are historic tasks that cannot be delayed or forsaken,” Moon said after an emergency session of his national security council.
This is an emperor-has-no-clothes moment, but not only in the sense of Trump and coherent thinking. For more than a century, the Korean Peninsula has been the unlucky target of more foreign intervention than arguably any other spot on the planet (which, I know, is saying a lot). Trump has shown just how capricious and prejudicial the actions of outsiders can be, doing little to serve the interests of the 75 million people who live there.
From 1910 to 1945, Korea was a Japanese colony. Koreans were forced to adopt Japanese names, forced to work in Japanese mines, and women were forced into prostitution for Japanese soldiers. After the Japanese empire collapsed at the end of World War II, the Korean Peninsula was divided into American and Russian zones along the 38th parallel — Koreans had no choice or role in that. In the Korean War that broke out in 1950, more than 5 million soldiers and civilians were killed – a calamity of historic proportions. Most of the slaughter occurred in North Korea, where the U.S. dropped more bombs than during its entire Pacific campaign against Japan.
While North Korea has been understandably condemned for its nuclear weapons program, guess who started the nuclear race? It was the U.S. that brought nuclear weapons to South Korea in 1958 and kept them there for more than three decades (the last ones were removed in 1991). “The presence of those American weapons probably motivated the North Koreans to accelerate development of their own nuclear weapons,” noted Walter Pincus. “The Seoul government still remains under the American nuclear umbrella — and the impetus for Kim Jong Un to have his own remains.”
by Peter Maass, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Yuri Gripas/Bloomberg via Getty Images[ed. Good move. Take out the (clueless) middle man.]
Power Trip
Two new books explore how psychedelics can change your life
Tao Lin's eighth book, Trip, is his best yet, and it’s all thanks to drugs. Well, perhaps not entirely thanks to drugs. With exercise comes mastery, or at least competence, and Lin has been practicing his idiosyncratic craft for over a decade. His first book was published in 2006, when he was twenty-three; improvement during the intervening years may have been inevitable. But Lin—whose authorial voice, notoriously, is so assiduously literal that it sometimes seems transcribed from a robot failing a Turing test—has never been more creative, precise, or inspired than when he details psychedelics-begotten behavior and theories. The behavior is mostly his own, while the theories are often borrowed from Terence McKenna, the late psilocybin advocate whose YouTube videos started Lin down the path to revitalization. While studying McKenna, Lin began to make radical adjustments to his daily drug routines, which in turn radically affected his mind-set. “My default state in 2012 while sober was an easily annoyed grumpiness,” he explains. “I was chronically not fascinated by existence, which . . . did not feel wonderful or profound but tedious and uncomfortable and troubling.” After bingeing on McKenna recordings—“for more than thirty hours”—everything changed. (...)
It's extremely difficult to put words to a psychedelic (or mystical, or sublime, or transcendent) experience, because the event eradicates so much of what we take for granted as the ground from which we speak. In a periodically viral video clip from the 1950s in which a “housewife” takes LSD, the man administering the solution, Dr. Sidney Cohen, prompts her to narrate her altered state. “Tell me,” he prods her. “Well, I just couldn’t!” she replies, shaking her head in wonder and confusion. “I couldn’t possibly tell you.” When he continues to coax her toward explication—“How do you feel inside?”—she repeats “inside” like it’s the name of a lover she hasn’t heard from in years. As if he’d asked for gum, she answers, “I don’t have any ‘inside.’”
With normal ways of speaking rendered useless, a degree of poetry must be employed. Lin’s writing is considerably improved by this predicament. He used to excise all figurative language from his prose, but in Trip he allows himself lines like “A flock of things I’d told myself to remember flew mutely out of view in the sky outside the stuffy cabin of my mind,” because this formulation is more truthful than a less metaphorical alternative. But it took a lot of practice for him to alter the style he’d spent many years establishing: He writes that he has “enjoyed LSD at least eighty times since 2010 at measured doses of [up to] 150 micrograms—and some higher, unmeasured doses—with only, I feel, positive, sanity-promoting effects.” And that’s just LSD; Trip has entire chapters dedicated to DMT, salvia, cannabis, and psilocybin.
Compared with Lin’s rate of drug use, Michael Pollan is . . . behind. In his late twenties he tried mushrooms a few times, and after that, cocaine—maybe? he’s coy about it—but never LSD. “I’m less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked,” he says at the start of his latest book about humans’ relationship to ingestible plants. But now “psychedelics are having a renaissance,” and How to Change Your Mind is an attempt to understand why. (...)
As “a staunch materialist, and as an adult of a certain age,” Pollan has an abundance of skepticism. That moral panic, for him, has not fully subsided, and it renders How to Change Your Mind repetitive and hamstrung. Trip, in its best moments, is a little like having a good one—exhilarating, moving, enlivening—because the writing is clear and sincere but also relaxed, curious, and devoid of expectations. Lin’s previous books (and this one, too) focus on a narrator happy to spend entire days in his bedroom, sequestered from others, lost in his own world, but Pollan isn’t interested in the interior self. “Did I really want to go there?” he asks himself when contemplating what he knows about the mental and emotional extremes he might encounter while tripping. “No!—to be perfectly honest. . . . I have never been one for deep or sustained introspection.”
Nervous, he approaches taking drugs in the spirit of a “harrowing” contract negotiation: fixated on expectations he fears will not be met. He wants to have a spiritual experience even as he suspects there might not be anything “out there” to have a spiritual experience of. He doesn’t want to change his life, but still wants to know if he could learn “something new about it.” Resistance characterizes his emotional state before and after he undergoes guided psychedelic journeys: The rituals are “ridiculously hokey,” what he says while tripping “embarrasses” him, and “dissatisfaction” persists even after moments of beauty and wonder. “It had brought me no closer to a belief in God or in a cosmic form of consciousness or in anything magical at all—all of which I might have been, unreasonably, expecting (hoping?) it might do.”
I get it and sympathize, to a degree, though I mainly find his ambivalence exhausting. Pollan half wanted to find a chemical so powerfully effective that in spite of his colossal doubt, anxiety, and pride, he would cross over into the ranks of the blessed. He was poised for an experience like those documented in the Psychopharmacology study, the one that encouraged him to write about these drugs in the first place. There, participants ranked their trips among “the most meaningful [events] in their lives.” He wanted to be delivered; he wanted a single religious experience that left him with a faith so unshakable he wouldn’t need it to be backed by scientific evidence. Yet he also feared that outcome. As he repeats throughout the book, “set” (mind-set) and “setting” (environment) play a crucial role in what happens to a person who takes a psychedelic. Clinging to his current way of being, and swaddled in trepidation, Pollan was destined to be underwhelmed by his trips.
It’s also telling that while the reported “spiritual” angle of psychedelics is what hooked him, Pollan had no interest in these drugs until they began receiving high-profile institutional approval, in the form of both Times coverage and university studies, like one testing psilocybin’s power to alleviate “existential distress” in terminal cancer patients. There are, of course, more than two “types” of drug users, but I bet you could cleave the lot of us fairly neatly between those who believe institutions have people’s best interests at heart—that they should be trusted to figure out the “best” way to take drugs—and those who see institutional attention as a sign of dark developments to come. At the risk of sounding like a teenager with pot-themed socks and a pot-themed skateboard, I’m confident that many drugs are illegal because they threaten the status quo and not because they’re any more dangerous than alcohol or sugar. As Lin writes while channeling McKenna and perusing “a CIA-LSD-suicide-homicide thread” on the internet: “Psychedelics are illegal not because the government wants to protect us from us, but because they catalyze intellectual dissent.” Pollan says much the same thing when he explains that LSD became so controversial in the ’60s primarily because it was tightly linked to the anti-war, anti-authority counterculture: “Psychedelics introduced something deeply subversive to the West that the various establishments had little choice but to repulse.” If those same establishments are suddenly willing to welcome psychedelics into the fold, we should at least ask why.
We already know what the GOOP-ification of a newly trendy, formerly reviled drug looks like. It is, in a word, bad. White families make millions from selling huge quantities of marijuana, while people of color are incarcerated for possession of minor amounts. Young white people broadcast paeans to microdosing on their podcasts, and wealthy white moms write about it in books, but there’s no national conversation about meaningfully reconsidering the incoherent and murderous “war on drugs.” (LSD and psilocybin are Schedule 1 substances, alongside heroin, cannabis, and MDMA, meaning the government regards them among the most addictive and the least medicinally useful.) How to Change Your Mind is steeped in the belief that drugs might be OK in institutionally circumscribed contexts, when overseen and administered by professionals, but that they should not be left in the hands of the pleasure-seeking masses. (“[Do] I think these drugs should simply be legalized? Not exactly,” Pollan writes in his conclusion.) Take a moment to picture the populations best positioned to benefit from an arrangement like that, and imagine how much opportunity for mismanagement, price gouging, and general abuse it might allow.
Lin regards psychedelics as subversive, and powerfully pure, because they can make people happy and healthy. (Overwhelmingly, this is the case, and even terrifying trips rarely result in lasting damage—though the drugs can have disastrous results in schizophrenics.) But Pollan looks at an aspect of the psychedelics trend that Lin doesn’t: Its role in Silicon Valley. He mentions Steve Jobs’s claim that dropping LSD was “one of his two or three most important life experiences,” and name-checks Stewart Brand, who thinks that “LSD was a critical ingredient in nourishing the spirit of collaborative experiment . . . that distinguish[es] the computer culture of the West Coast.” As a further endorsement, he adds, “I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training. A handful of others have instituted ‘microdosing Fridays.’”
While some drugs can guide a user toward enduring openness or empathy, no drug will instantly render a selfish man selfless, or a cruel woman kind. And if psychedelics are becoming somewhat ubiquitous in Silicon Valley, it’s proof that they can’t automatically instill ethics in a community used to operating without them. (Would you take a drug that made you as a creative as Steve Jobs, if it also made you just as much of an asshole? Don’t answer that.)
Tao Lin's eighth book, Trip, is his best yet, and it’s all thanks to drugs. Well, perhaps not entirely thanks to drugs. With exercise comes mastery, or at least competence, and Lin has been practicing his idiosyncratic craft for over a decade. His first book was published in 2006, when he was twenty-three; improvement during the intervening years may have been inevitable. But Lin—whose authorial voice, notoriously, is so assiduously literal that it sometimes seems transcribed from a robot failing a Turing test—has never been more creative, precise, or inspired than when he details psychedelics-begotten behavior and theories. The behavior is mostly his own, while the theories are often borrowed from Terence McKenna, the late psilocybin advocate whose YouTube videos started Lin down the path to revitalization. While studying McKenna, Lin began to make radical adjustments to his daily drug routines, which in turn radically affected his mind-set. “My default state in 2012 while sober was an easily annoyed grumpiness,” he explains. “I was chronically not fascinated by existence, which . . . did not feel wonderful or profound but tedious and uncomfortable and troubling.” After bingeing on McKenna recordings—“for more than thirty hours”—everything changed. (...)
It's extremely difficult to put words to a psychedelic (or mystical, or sublime, or transcendent) experience, because the event eradicates so much of what we take for granted as the ground from which we speak. In a periodically viral video clip from the 1950s in which a “housewife” takes LSD, the man administering the solution, Dr. Sidney Cohen, prompts her to narrate her altered state. “Tell me,” he prods her. “Well, I just couldn’t!” she replies, shaking her head in wonder and confusion. “I couldn’t possibly tell you.” When he continues to coax her toward explication—“How do you feel inside?”—she repeats “inside” like it’s the name of a lover she hasn’t heard from in years. As if he’d asked for gum, she answers, “I don’t have any ‘inside.’”With normal ways of speaking rendered useless, a degree of poetry must be employed. Lin’s writing is considerably improved by this predicament. He used to excise all figurative language from his prose, but in Trip he allows himself lines like “A flock of things I’d told myself to remember flew mutely out of view in the sky outside the stuffy cabin of my mind,” because this formulation is more truthful than a less metaphorical alternative. But it took a lot of practice for him to alter the style he’d spent many years establishing: He writes that he has “enjoyed LSD at least eighty times since 2010 at measured doses of [up to] 150 micrograms—and some higher, unmeasured doses—with only, I feel, positive, sanity-promoting effects.” And that’s just LSD; Trip has entire chapters dedicated to DMT, salvia, cannabis, and psilocybin.
Compared with Lin’s rate of drug use, Michael Pollan is . . . behind. In his late twenties he tried mushrooms a few times, and after that, cocaine—maybe? he’s coy about it—but never LSD. “I’m less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked,” he says at the start of his latest book about humans’ relationship to ingestible plants. But now “psychedelics are having a renaissance,” and How to Change Your Mind is an attempt to understand why. (...)
As “a staunch materialist, and as an adult of a certain age,” Pollan has an abundance of skepticism. That moral panic, for him, has not fully subsided, and it renders How to Change Your Mind repetitive and hamstrung. Trip, in its best moments, is a little like having a good one—exhilarating, moving, enlivening—because the writing is clear and sincere but also relaxed, curious, and devoid of expectations. Lin’s previous books (and this one, too) focus on a narrator happy to spend entire days in his bedroom, sequestered from others, lost in his own world, but Pollan isn’t interested in the interior self. “Did I really want to go there?” he asks himself when contemplating what he knows about the mental and emotional extremes he might encounter while tripping. “No!—to be perfectly honest. . . . I have never been one for deep or sustained introspection.”
Nervous, he approaches taking drugs in the spirit of a “harrowing” contract negotiation: fixated on expectations he fears will not be met. He wants to have a spiritual experience even as he suspects there might not be anything “out there” to have a spiritual experience of. He doesn’t want to change his life, but still wants to know if he could learn “something new about it.” Resistance characterizes his emotional state before and after he undergoes guided psychedelic journeys: The rituals are “ridiculously hokey,” what he says while tripping “embarrasses” him, and “dissatisfaction” persists even after moments of beauty and wonder. “It had brought me no closer to a belief in God or in a cosmic form of consciousness or in anything magical at all—all of which I might have been, unreasonably, expecting (hoping?) it might do.”
I get it and sympathize, to a degree, though I mainly find his ambivalence exhausting. Pollan half wanted to find a chemical so powerfully effective that in spite of his colossal doubt, anxiety, and pride, he would cross over into the ranks of the blessed. He was poised for an experience like those documented in the Psychopharmacology study, the one that encouraged him to write about these drugs in the first place. There, participants ranked their trips among “the most meaningful [events] in their lives.” He wanted to be delivered; he wanted a single religious experience that left him with a faith so unshakable he wouldn’t need it to be backed by scientific evidence. Yet he also feared that outcome. As he repeats throughout the book, “set” (mind-set) and “setting” (environment) play a crucial role in what happens to a person who takes a psychedelic. Clinging to his current way of being, and swaddled in trepidation, Pollan was destined to be underwhelmed by his trips.
It’s also telling that while the reported “spiritual” angle of psychedelics is what hooked him, Pollan had no interest in these drugs until they began receiving high-profile institutional approval, in the form of both Times coverage and university studies, like one testing psilocybin’s power to alleviate “existential distress” in terminal cancer patients. There are, of course, more than two “types” of drug users, but I bet you could cleave the lot of us fairly neatly between those who believe institutions have people’s best interests at heart—that they should be trusted to figure out the “best” way to take drugs—and those who see institutional attention as a sign of dark developments to come. At the risk of sounding like a teenager with pot-themed socks and a pot-themed skateboard, I’m confident that many drugs are illegal because they threaten the status quo and not because they’re any more dangerous than alcohol or sugar. As Lin writes while channeling McKenna and perusing “a CIA-LSD-suicide-homicide thread” on the internet: “Psychedelics are illegal not because the government wants to protect us from us, but because they catalyze intellectual dissent.” Pollan says much the same thing when he explains that LSD became so controversial in the ’60s primarily because it was tightly linked to the anti-war, anti-authority counterculture: “Psychedelics introduced something deeply subversive to the West that the various establishments had little choice but to repulse.” If those same establishments are suddenly willing to welcome psychedelics into the fold, we should at least ask why.
We already know what the GOOP-ification of a newly trendy, formerly reviled drug looks like. It is, in a word, bad. White families make millions from selling huge quantities of marijuana, while people of color are incarcerated for possession of minor amounts. Young white people broadcast paeans to microdosing on their podcasts, and wealthy white moms write about it in books, but there’s no national conversation about meaningfully reconsidering the incoherent and murderous “war on drugs.” (LSD and psilocybin are Schedule 1 substances, alongside heroin, cannabis, and MDMA, meaning the government regards them among the most addictive and the least medicinally useful.) How to Change Your Mind is steeped in the belief that drugs might be OK in institutionally circumscribed contexts, when overseen and administered by professionals, but that they should not be left in the hands of the pleasure-seeking masses. (“[Do] I think these drugs should simply be legalized? Not exactly,” Pollan writes in his conclusion.) Take a moment to picture the populations best positioned to benefit from an arrangement like that, and imagine how much opportunity for mismanagement, price gouging, and general abuse it might allow.
Lin regards psychedelics as subversive, and powerfully pure, because they can make people happy and healthy. (Overwhelmingly, this is the case, and even terrifying trips rarely result in lasting damage—though the drugs can have disastrous results in schizophrenics.) But Pollan looks at an aspect of the psychedelics trend that Lin doesn’t: Its role in Silicon Valley. He mentions Steve Jobs’s claim that dropping LSD was “one of his two or three most important life experiences,” and name-checks Stewart Brand, who thinks that “LSD was a critical ingredient in nourishing the spirit of collaborative experiment . . . that distinguish[es] the computer culture of the West Coast.” As a further endorsement, he adds, “I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training. A handful of others have instituted ‘microdosing Fridays.’”
While some drugs can guide a user toward enduring openness or empathy, no drug will instantly render a selfish man selfless, or a cruel woman kind. And if psychedelics are becoming somewhat ubiquitous in Silicon Valley, it’s proof that they can’t automatically instill ethics in a community used to operating without them. (Would you take a drug that made you as a creative as Steve Jobs, if it also made you just as much of an asshole? Don’t answer that.)
by Charlotte Shane, Bookforum | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Perhaps we are finally having a much needed 'moment': See also: Why We Should Say Yes to Drugs (NY Mag):
"And the word “drug,” like “psychedelic,” is horribly loaded. Like the miraculous weed, psilocybin comes from the earth. LSD comes from bacteria. They are not addictive; yes, they can be abused, but very few who have had a psychedelic experience want to have it again and again. There is something profound about it that stays with you, for a long time. You see something you cannot unsee. And that space of unity and compassion is always something you can reach back to, a mountaintop you can see from a distance. It helps the most addicted smoker quit, simply because, in the context of awe and love, smoking becomes irrelevant. It reconciles people to death, the way religion used to. It can break depression — by scrambling the furrows and rigid patterns of thought that keep us in a groove of self-orbiting misery. The medical potential is extraordinary. (...)
I think of them also as the real and most powerful antidote to opioids and to the condition the opioids are a misbegotten response to: loneliness, depression, and a lack of meaning. Opioids are one solution to our crisis of meaning, in as much as they numb you to sleep. Psychedelics are another: a new unveiling of awe and awakening. In that respect, the ’60s got the metaphor wrong. These are not a means to drop out; they are a path to dropping back in."]
[ed. Perhaps we are finally having a much needed 'moment': See also: Why We Should Say Yes to Drugs (NY Mag):
"And the word “drug,” like “psychedelic,” is horribly loaded. Like the miraculous weed, psilocybin comes from the earth. LSD comes from bacteria. They are not addictive; yes, they can be abused, but very few who have had a psychedelic experience want to have it again and again. There is something profound about it that stays with you, for a long time. You see something you cannot unsee. And that space of unity and compassion is always something you can reach back to, a mountaintop you can see from a distance. It helps the most addicted smoker quit, simply because, in the context of awe and love, smoking becomes irrelevant. It reconciles people to death, the way religion used to. It can break depression — by scrambling the furrows and rigid patterns of thought that keep us in a groove of self-orbiting misery. The medical potential is extraordinary. (...)
I think of them also as the real and most powerful antidote to opioids and to the condition the opioids are a misbegotten response to: loneliness, depression, and a lack of meaning. Opioids are one solution to our crisis of meaning, in as much as they numb you to sleep. Psychedelics are another: a new unveiling of awe and awakening. In that respect, the ’60s got the metaphor wrong. These are not a means to drop out; they are a path to dropping back in."]
Friday, May 25, 2018
Code to Joy
Like most people, I have spent my life entirely ignorant of how the code that increasingly corrals me actually works. I know that microprocessors use tiny electrical switches to create and manipulate great waves of 0s and 1s. But how do these digits mesh with the world? Programmers speak to machines in impenetrable “languages” and coding, as the pop-cultural cliché suggests, appeared to be the impregnable domain of spectrumy maths geniuses. Though code makes our lives easier and more efficient, it is becoming increasingly apparent how easily it can be turned to malign purposes. It’s used by terrorists to spread viruses, car manufacturers to cheat emissions tests and hostile powers to hack elections. As the line between technology and politics blurs, I wondered whether my ignorance of its workings compromised my capacity to understand what it should and should not do. Being unable to speak to these mavens in their own terms, as they encoded the parameters of my world, brought a sense of helplessness for which only I, as a citizen, could take responsibility. And two questions that embraced all the others began to form. Should I learn to code? Could I learn to code? With a trepidation I later came to recognise as deeply inadequate, I decided there was only one way to find out.There are now more than 1,700 computer languages that enable human desires to be translated into the only language a computer understands: numbers and logic. Most have been written by unpaid, clever individuals out of some opaque mix of glory and the hell of it. If you want to program a computer, you have to learn one of them. A daunting task, you might think. But even before that, you must engage in the hair-pulling frustration of picking your language.
To make my choice I trawl the web and consult every programmer I know. Each person either hedges or contradicts the last one. At first the litany of names sound like cleaning products or varieties of roses – Perl, Python, C, Ruby, Java, PHP, Cobol, Lisp, Pascal, Fortran. All have different specialisations and affinities that I feel unprepared to assess. Nevertheless, aided by websites that rank languages in terms of popularity on a monthly basis (the pace of coding fashion makes haute couture look agricultural), three scroll into view as not-stupid options: Python, JavaScript and C++. All are widely employed and on the rise, and have lots of fans and learning resources. Which to go for?
On a trip to New York I beg help from someone I trust. Paul Ford is co-founder of Postlight, a digital-production studio based on 5th Avenue. He is also the author of a superb and improbably entertaining novella-sized essay entitled “What is Code?” If anyone can help me choose a language, it’s him. The son of an experimental poet, Ford came to programming late, after a career in journalism. Unlike most single-track peers, he can empathise with my discombobulation.
Computer scientists use the metaphor of a stack to describe how directly a language communicates with the computer hardware. Lowest in the stack is machine code. It consists of orders issued directly to a silicon chip, where tiny electrical switches called logic gates create and process binary and hexadecimal numbers. At the very top are beginner’s languages such as the child-friendly Scratch, where most of the machine’s weirdness is hidden behind user-friendly shortcuts and guardrails designed to prevent mistakes. But ease of use comes at the expense of fine control and speed of processing. In an inversion of civilian usage, coders employ the soubriquet “low-level” to describe the difficult languages that engage computer processors most directly; and “high-level” to denote the more accessible ones further up the stack. When I meet Ford, I’m still reeling from my terror-breeding assumption that “low-level” was the best entry point for a beginner.
“That stuff is not comfortable, is it?” Ford says with a grimace when I ask if even a seasoned coder can translate seamlessly between different levels. “A mature programmer can go from very high in the stack to very low in the stack and explain how the pieces work. But that’s maturity: there are really good [software] developers who, once you get below the level of what the web browser is doing, have no idea.”
He points me in the direction of a Playboy interview Steve Jobs gave to coincide with the launch of the Apple Macintosh home computer in 1985. Jobs compares computation to showing the way to the toilet to someone with no sense of direction or instinctual control of their own body: “I would have to describe it…in very specific and precise instructions. I might say, ‘Scoot sideways two metres off the bench. Stand erect. Lift left foot. Bend left knee until it is horizontal. Extend left foot and shift weight 300 centimetres forward…’ and on and on.” Computers operate on the same principle, just a million times quicker. “They don’t know how to do anything except add numbers very fast,” Ford concludes.
Ford steers me away from C++, which he likens to a shotgun: fast, efficient and ready to blow your foot off. If a misplaced semi-colon indicates a wish to erase the British archive of a major Hollywood movie studio – a friend of a friend claims this happened to him – C++ will follow through with unquestioning obedience. Not for me, I think.
JavaScript, by contrast, has the advantage of ubiquity: it is high level and serves as the primary language of interactive web pages. But it’s also hard to think your way into, which is the price it pays for having evolved chaotically – like the web – with no central authority. Devotees claim that JavaScript is improving rapidly, which sounds great until you consider that your hard-won skills might be obsolete in six months’ time. This fear haunts all coders and explains why they defend their own languages so fiercely, in what techies only half-jokingly refer to as “Religious Wars”. Like a lot of professional coders, Ford uses JavaScript and Python. He admires the latter, he says, for its svelte, modern syntax, its relative logic and versatility and the proactive disciples who generate lots of useful support. It has been used for everything from website development to algorithmic trading on the stockmarket.
In the course of our discussion, Ford offers nothing to allay the monumental nature of my choice. Languages are not expressive, he explains, but they do form cultures with attendant ways of seeing and being. My choice isn’t simply a practical matter. Much like the musical decisions I made as a teenager, I have to ask myself who I want to hang with. Python was named after “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and within the community is considered hip. All of which I find discreditably appealing – until, out of the blue, Ford asks a question I hadn’t considered.
“What do you want to do?”
Do? What? Of course. Programming is about making things happen. My mind goes blank, until slowly an answer emerges. A few years ago someone built a website for me but it doesn’t work and I would love a flashy replacement. And if I want to work on the web, most roads lead to JavaScript.
by Andrew Smith, The Economist/1843 | Read more:
Image: via
Vulture Capitalists Destroyed Toys R Us
Ann Marie Reinhart Smith worked at Toys “R” Us for 29 years. Now, the Durham, North Carolina grandmother is unemployed after being laid off as part of the iconic American toy store’s bankruptcy and liquidation.
Smith is just one of more than 30,000 US workers who face unemployment as the 70-year-old retail chain unwinds its business after a decade of disastrous management by the Wall Street firms that purchased the company and saddled it with billions of dollars of debt.
Workers with decades of retail experience are being left with no jobs, no benefits and no severance pay.
Meanwhile, the private-equity barons who bought the company in 2005 have reaped nearly $500 million in extracted profits, and top executives are set to leave with $16 million worth of golden parachutes.
Smith’s story is a potent reminder of the human cost that Wall Street vulture capitalists inflict on working-class people in their seemingly never-ending pursuit of profit. “Retail workers are already poorly paid,” Smith says. “Now, to be let go without any severance is devastating. Not knowing how you’re going to pay your rent, feed your family, and pay your bills is absolutely humiliating.”
Private-equity and hedge-fund managers are taking advantage of retail workers to bolster their profits without regard for the middle-class communities that they are destroying. In the process, these bankers are perpetuating a vicious cycle in which the rich get richer at the expense of working people.
Despite bringing in almost $12 billion in sales in 2016, once-profitable Toys “R” Us was losing money every year since 2013, burdened by crippling long-term debt payments of more than $400 million to service its crushing $5.2 billion debt pile. This debt is a legacy of a 2005 leveraged buyout by two of the most notorious private-equity companies in the United States: Bain Capital and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), among other companies.
Now the fabled toy store chain has finally collapsed under this crushing debt, causing the third-largest retail Chapter 11 bankruptcy in US history, and threatening the livelihoods of more than 30,000 working-class families.
The Wall Street fund managers at KKR and Bain Capital don’t seem to care about that—in fact, they’re laughing all the way to the bank, having raided Toys “R” Us for nearly $500 million in profits over the last decade. Meanwhile, more than 30,000 workers are facing the prospect of losing their jobs with no severance pay. Hundreds of communities across the country will bear the social and economic cost of this plunder. (...)
Now more than ever, Wall Street fund managers are using dangerous highly leveraged buyouts to loot retail businesses like Toys “R” Us. Like vultures, they scavenge on struggling companies, and then dump the remains into bankruptcy court before moving on to their next victim.
by Winnie Wong and Michael Kink, The Nation | Read more:
Smith is just one of more than 30,000 US workers who face unemployment as the 70-year-old retail chain unwinds its business after a decade of disastrous management by the Wall Street firms that purchased the company and saddled it with billions of dollars of debt.Workers with decades of retail experience are being left with no jobs, no benefits and no severance pay.
Meanwhile, the private-equity barons who bought the company in 2005 have reaped nearly $500 million in extracted profits, and top executives are set to leave with $16 million worth of golden parachutes.
Smith’s story is a potent reminder of the human cost that Wall Street vulture capitalists inflict on working-class people in their seemingly never-ending pursuit of profit. “Retail workers are already poorly paid,” Smith says. “Now, to be let go without any severance is devastating. Not knowing how you’re going to pay your rent, feed your family, and pay your bills is absolutely humiliating.”
Private-equity and hedge-fund managers are taking advantage of retail workers to bolster their profits without regard for the middle-class communities that they are destroying. In the process, these bankers are perpetuating a vicious cycle in which the rich get richer at the expense of working people.
Despite bringing in almost $12 billion in sales in 2016, once-profitable Toys “R” Us was losing money every year since 2013, burdened by crippling long-term debt payments of more than $400 million to service its crushing $5.2 billion debt pile. This debt is a legacy of a 2005 leveraged buyout by two of the most notorious private-equity companies in the United States: Bain Capital and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), among other companies.
Now the fabled toy store chain has finally collapsed under this crushing debt, causing the third-largest retail Chapter 11 bankruptcy in US history, and threatening the livelihoods of more than 30,000 working-class families.
The Wall Street fund managers at KKR and Bain Capital don’t seem to care about that—in fact, they’re laughing all the way to the bank, having raided Toys “R” Us for nearly $500 million in profits over the last decade. Meanwhile, more than 30,000 workers are facing the prospect of losing their jobs with no severance pay. Hundreds of communities across the country will bear the social and economic cost of this plunder. (...)
Now more than ever, Wall Street fund managers are using dangerous highly leveraged buyouts to loot retail businesses like Toys “R” Us. Like vultures, they scavenge on struggling companies, and then dump the remains into bankruptcy court before moving on to their next victim.
by Winnie Wong and Michael Kink, The Nation | Read more:
Image: Kristoffer Tripplaar/Sipa via AP Images
[ed. See also: How Venture Capitalists Ate Toys R Us. You may remember Bain Capital? Co-founded by former (hopefully) Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney?]
[ed. See also: How Venture Capitalists Ate Toys R Us. You may remember Bain Capital? Co-founded by former (hopefully) Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney?]
The 22 Best US National Parks to Escape the Crowds
The 22 Best US National Parks to Escape the Crowds
photo: markk, Diablo Lake, North Cascades National Park
[ed. Not to quibble, but with the exception of Denali you could put every national park in Alaska on this list.]
How Amazon Plans to Use Whole Foods to Dominate the Retail Industry
The Seattle giant believes selling you groceries is the key to selling you everything else.
At 9 a.m. on June 16, 2017, Whole Foods employees packed into the main level of the company’s Austin headquarters. Only an hour earlier Amazon had announced that it was acquiring the high-end natural grocer, and the corporate staffers were as shocked as the rest of the public. Amazon had been militant about leaks during the seven weeks that the two companies had been in negotiations, and the vast majority of those working inside the building had been unaware that the deal was afoot.
Now they were meeting their new overlords for the first time. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey introduced Jeff Wilke of Amazon, who had flown in for the gathering. Wilke, the e-commerce giant’s CEO of Worldwide Consumer, decided to play to his foodie audience.
“I wanted to tell you just a little bit about how Whole Foods changed my life as a start,” he said. “As I was sitting this morning, eating breakfast, watching the sun rise over this beautiful city—by the way, quinoa, blueberry, and some other vegetables…”
That’s when Mackey, a vegan who avoids refined foods and travels with a rice cooker, lightheartedly corrected him. “Those aren’t vegetables,” he said. “That’s okay. We’re learning.”
In that moment, it was clear why Wilke and his team needed Whole Foods. His comment may have been just a slip of the tongue, but it reflected a persistent issue for the company: Amazon has expertise in many areas, but food is not one of them. For a decade, Amazon—a company with $178 billion in revenue and seemingly limitless resources—had not come close to breaking the billion-dollar sales mark in its fresh food operation.
The lack of progress is not entirely the retail giant’s fault. Grocery is a notoriously difficult business—and that’s before you start layering on the costs and challenges of delivery. Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, boils the problem down to this: A head of lettuce has a margin of less than a dollar and can survive outside the fridge for no more than a day. How can a retailer deliver it at peak quality—and make a profit?
But with the $13.7 billion acquisition, Amazon had bought itself a real shot at remaking the $800 billion U.S. grocery sector—the last frontier of e-commerce and a massive one at that. Some 20% of retail spending goes toward food, but only 2% of those sales take place on the Internet. “Grocery is the Wild West for online,” says Carrie Bienkowski, the chief marketing officer of online grocer Peapod. “The size of the prize is huge, and it’s growing.”
The very thing that makes grocery delivery hard—that food goes bad—is the reason it’s so desirable to a company like Amazon. Because cheese grows mold and meat goes rancid and milk sours, consumers can’t hoard it in their cupboards or refrigerators indefinitely as they might toilet paper or laundry detergent. As a result, the average family hits the supermarket at minimum once a week; there’s nothing else you purchase or consume so much or so often. For Amazon, getting in on that frequency is critical to further ingraining itself in our routines and behaviors. “Food is the platform for selling you everything else,” says Walter Robb, the former co-CEO of Whole Foods. “It’s an everyday way into your life. There’s nothing else that happens quite that way.” Amazon’s quest is therefore about much more than just food. (...)
Amazon is partial to building businesses rather buying them. But after a decade of trying to grow its grocery operation on its own, it was time for the latter. The company started exploring the possibility of an acquisition, and spent the two years leading up to the Whole Foods deal “walking around to every grocer in the U.S. asking them to be its fresh supplier,” says Bain’s Cheris.
Then, in April 2017, Amazon got a call from a consultant working on behalf of Whole Foods. The grocer had seen a report that Amazon may have been interested in buying the chain in the past. Would there be any appeal in setting up a meeting?
That first rendezvous came during a tumultuous period for Whole Foods. Competition was fierce in natural and organics, the very category it had essentially created, and the grocer was struggling to shake its “Whole Paycheck” reputation. Facing slowing sales growth and a flagging share price, Whole Foods was now clearly in play. Just weeks earlier, activist investor Jana Partners disclosed an 8.8% stake in the company. In addition to Amazon, four private equity firms and reportedly supermarket chain Albertsons were among those who had expressed interest in a potential deal.
The tie-up solved a lot of problems for both parties. For Whole Foods, Amazon offered freedom from the relentless cycle of short-term quarterly pressures as it tried to fix the business. For Amazon, Whole Foods gave the company instant scale and the built-in demand it had lacked in fresh food. In a logistics operation, companies have a set of fixed costs and become more profitable by layering on incremental business. Thanks to Whole Foods, Amazon now had guaranteed and predictable volume for its grocery infrastructure.
Along with scale, Amazon was buying credibility. Most of the products consumers buy on Amazon are branded—a Sony TV, a Hot Wheels car, a S’well water bottle. But with the exception of a few products, such as Bolthouse Farms carrots or Cuties clementines, fresh goods don’t have brands, or at least not ones that the consumer knows. Instead, we decide where to buy our broccoli and tomatoes based on our trust in the retailer. That authority was something Amazon just didn’t have in fresh. Whole Foods supplied it—as well as providing Amazon shoppers with a more appealing story about where their food originated. “The idea of ordering groceries online is conceptual,” says Barnaby Montgomery, cofounder and CEO of Yummy.com, a Los Angeles–based online grocer with brick-and-mortar stores. “I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t see it. I don’t get it. It’s a barrier.” Having a physical place to shop turns “the conceptual offer into something more tangible.”
At 9 a.m. on June 16, 2017, Whole Foods employees packed into the main level of the company’s Austin headquarters. Only an hour earlier Amazon had announced that it was acquiring the high-end natural grocer, and the corporate staffers were as shocked as the rest of the public. Amazon had been militant about leaks during the seven weeks that the two companies had been in negotiations, and the vast majority of those working inside the building had been unaware that the deal was afoot.
Now they were meeting their new overlords for the first time. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey introduced Jeff Wilke of Amazon, who had flown in for the gathering. Wilke, the e-commerce giant’s CEO of Worldwide Consumer, decided to play to his foodie audience.
“I wanted to tell you just a little bit about how Whole Foods changed my life as a start,” he said. “As I was sitting this morning, eating breakfast, watching the sun rise over this beautiful city—by the way, quinoa, blueberry, and some other vegetables…”That’s when Mackey, a vegan who avoids refined foods and travels with a rice cooker, lightheartedly corrected him. “Those aren’t vegetables,” he said. “That’s okay. We’re learning.”
In that moment, it was clear why Wilke and his team needed Whole Foods. His comment may have been just a slip of the tongue, but it reflected a persistent issue for the company: Amazon has expertise in many areas, but food is not one of them. For a decade, Amazon—a company with $178 billion in revenue and seemingly limitless resources—had not come close to breaking the billion-dollar sales mark in its fresh food operation.
The lack of progress is not entirely the retail giant’s fault. Grocery is a notoriously difficult business—and that’s before you start layering on the costs and challenges of delivery. Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, boils the problem down to this: A head of lettuce has a margin of less than a dollar and can survive outside the fridge for no more than a day. How can a retailer deliver it at peak quality—and make a profit?
But with the $13.7 billion acquisition, Amazon had bought itself a real shot at remaking the $800 billion U.S. grocery sector—the last frontier of e-commerce and a massive one at that. Some 20% of retail spending goes toward food, but only 2% of those sales take place on the Internet. “Grocery is the Wild West for online,” says Carrie Bienkowski, the chief marketing officer of online grocer Peapod. “The size of the prize is huge, and it’s growing.”
The very thing that makes grocery delivery hard—that food goes bad—is the reason it’s so desirable to a company like Amazon. Because cheese grows mold and meat goes rancid and milk sours, consumers can’t hoard it in their cupboards or refrigerators indefinitely as they might toilet paper or laundry detergent. As a result, the average family hits the supermarket at minimum once a week; there’s nothing else you purchase or consume so much or so often. For Amazon, getting in on that frequency is critical to further ingraining itself in our routines and behaviors. “Food is the platform for selling you everything else,” says Walter Robb, the former co-CEO of Whole Foods. “It’s an everyday way into your life. There’s nothing else that happens quite that way.” Amazon’s quest is therefore about much more than just food. (...)
Amazon is partial to building businesses rather buying them. But after a decade of trying to grow its grocery operation on its own, it was time for the latter. The company started exploring the possibility of an acquisition, and spent the two years leading up to the Whole Foods deal “walking around to every grocer in the U.S. asking them to be its fresh supplier,” says Bain’s Cheris.
Then, in April 2017, Amazon got a call from a consultant working on behalf of Whole Foods. The grocer had seen a report that Amazon may have been interested in buying the chain in the past. Would there be any appeal in setting up a meeting?
That first rendezvous came during a tumultuous period for Whole Foods. Competition was fierce in natural and organics, the very category it had essentially created, and the grocer was struggling to shake its “Whole Paycheck” reputation. Facing slowing sales growth and a flagging share price, Whole Foods was now clearly in play. Just weeks earlier, activist investor Jana Partners disclosed an 8.8% stake in the company. In addition to Amazon, four private equity firms and reportedly supermarket chain Albertsons were among those who had expressed interest in a potential deal.
The tie-up solved a lot of problems for both parties. For Whole Foods, Amazon offered freedom from the relentless cycle of short-term quarterly pressures as it tried to fix the business. For Amazon, Whole Foods gave the company instant scale and the built-in demand it had lacked in fresh food. In a logistics operation, companies have a set of fixed costs and become more profitable by layering on incremental business. Thanks to Whole Foods, Amazon now had guaranteed and predictable volume for its grocery infrastructure.
Along with scale, Amazon was buying credibility. Most of the products consumers buy on Amazon are branded—a Sony TV, a Hot Wheels car, a S’well water bottle. But with the exception of a few products, such as Bolthouse Farms carrots or Cuties clementines, fresh goods don’t have brands, or at least not ones that the consumer knows. Instead, we decide where to buy our broccoli and tomatoes based on our trust in the retailer. That authority was something Amazon just didn’t have in fresh. Whole Foods supplied it—as well as providing Amazon shoppers with a more appealing story about where their food originated. “The idea of ordering groceries online is conceptual,” says Barnaby Montgomery, cofounder and CEO of Yummy.com, a Los Angeles–based online grocer with brick-and-mortar stores. “I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t see it. I don’t get it. It’s a barrier.” Having a physical place to shop turns “the conceptual offer into something more tangible.”
by Beth Kowitt, Fortune | Read more:
Image: The Voorhes
Thursday, May 24, 2018
Writing American Fiction
And what is the moral of so long a story? Simply this: that the American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.
by Philip Roth, Commentary | Read more:
What’s in a Food Truck?
First of all, no matter what you think is in there, there’s probably more. Most modern food trucks — at least the ones special enough to make it into your regular lunch rotation — are operated by serious foodies whose wheeled restaurants roam more than 300 U.S. cities as part of a $2.7 billion industry. They’re often veteran chefs who are used to the amenities of commercial kitchens or entrepreneurial home cooks who demand the perfect tools.
None of these folks are willing to compromise on equipment, even if it all has to fit, Tetris-like, into the space of a large minivan.
First in: The basics
Before a new food truck owner can shop for the perfect griddle or pizza oven, they have to figure out how much room is left after they pencil in the equipment required by their jurisdiction.
These basic requirements are similar around the country, according to Jason Tipton, co-owner of East Coach Mobile Business Launchpad, which has outfitted more than 400 food trucks in his Manassas shop over the past decade. [ed. See annoying graphic.]
Fortunately, not all of that takes up valuable kitchen space. Water tanks are often stored below the truck, and generators sometimes ride shotgun in the cab. Fire suppression and ventilation are built into the hood and ceiling. After these basics, owners are limited only by their budgets and their ability to shoehorn their culinary visions into a space as small as 70 square feet.
A small budget and a big oven
Start-up costs for a food truck average about $100,000, far lower than the several hundred thousand required for even a tiny brick-and-mortar place in the D.C. area, Tipton said. Some trucks get on the road for far less.
“When I was a kid, I’d eat cookies until there weren’t any more cookies,” said Kirk Francis, who began baking as a 4-year-old with his mom. He had supplied cookies to a local coffee shop before deciding to bring chocolate chips (and fresh milk, of course) to the masses.
His budget was just $30,000 for the entire truck, and he wanted to make sure his cookies were baked fresh at the curb.
So he found a used, 625-pound Vulcan convection oven on Craigslist, stuck it into a 1988 Washington Post delivery van that he bought for $2,400, and Captain Cookie and the Milkman was born.
The truck is small — the 6-foot-1 Francis has maybe an inch of clearance when he stands inside — but the commercial oven is about twice the size of a normal kitchen oven and can bake 120 cookies at once, or 720 in an hour. Francis estimates that it has baked more than a million cookies since he launched the truck in 2012.
Francis now owns four Captain Cookie trucks, a food hall and a brick-and-mortar shop, so he has seen many sides of the business. He said trucks can be inspected a dozen or more times a year, much more often than most restaurants. And while the trucks have lower overhead costs and are more profitable — owners worry about potholes and parking tickets but not leases and rent — trucks are also less predictable.
Francis told all this to a culinary arts class at D.C. Central Kitchen on a frigid March day when steady rain and umbrella-shredding wind had kept most trucks off the road. When it’s raining, truck operators say, sales go down by half compared with a sunny day. When it’s cold and raining, sales drop to a quarter.
The cookie truck’s motor coughed and died as Francis pulled into the parking lot, and after the class of cooks-in-training checked out the truck and sampled cookies, he had to wait in the rain for a tow truck.
“You have to be able to roll with it,” he said, shrugging. “I never have to worry about the store breaking down by the side of the road.”
by Bonnie Berkowitz, Seth Blanchard, Aaron Steckelberg and Monica Ulmanu, WaPo | Read more:
None of these folks are willing to compromise on equipment, even if it all has to fit, Tetris-like, into the space of a large minivan.
First in: The basics
Before a new food truck owner can shop for the perfect griddle or pizza oven, they have to figure out how much room is left after they pencil in the equipment required by their jurisdiction.These basic requirements are similar around the country, according to Jason Tipton, co-owner of East Coach Mobile Business Launchpad, which has outfitted more than 400 food trucks in his Manassas shop over the past decade. [ed. See annoying graphic.]
Fortunately, not all of that takes up valuable kitchen space. Water tanks are often stored below the truck, and generators sometimes ride shotgun in the cab. Fire suppression and ventilation are built into the hood and ceiling. After these basics, owners are limited only by their budgets and their ability to shoehorn their culinary visions into a space as small as 70 square feet.
A small budget and a big oven
Start-up costs for a food truck average about $100,000, far lower than the several hundred thousand required for even a tiny brick-and-mortar place in the D.C. area, Tipton said. Some trucks get on the road for far less.
“When I was a kid, I’d eat cookies until there weren’t any more cookies,” said Kirk Francis, who began baking as a 4-year-old with his mom. He had supplied cookies to a local coffee shop before deciding to bring chocolate chips (and fresh milk, of course) to the masses.
His budget was just $30,000 for the entire truck, and he wanted to make sure his cookies were baked fresh at the curb.
So he found a used, 625-pound Vulcan convection oven on Craigslist, stuck it into a 1988 Washington Post delivery van that he bought for $2,400, and Captain Cookie and the Milkman was born.
The truck is small — the 6-foot-1 Francis has maybe an inch of clearance when he stands inside — but the commercial oven is about twice the size of a normal kitchen oven and can bake 120 cookies at once, or 720 in an hour. Francis estimates that it has baked more than a million cookies since he launched the truck in 2012.
Francis now owns four Captain Cookie trucks, a food hall and a brick-and-mortar shop, so he has seen many sides of the business. He said trucks can be inspected a dozen or more times a year, much more often than most restaurants. And while the trucks have lower overhead costs and are more profitable — owners worry about potholes and parking tickets but not leases and rent — trucks are also less predictable.
Francis told all this to a culinary arts class at D.C. Central Kitchen on a frigid March day when steady rain and umbrella-shredding wind had kept most trucks off the road. When it’s raining, truck operators say, sales go down by half compared with a sunny day. When it’s cold and raining, sales drop to a quarter.
The cookie truck’s motor coughed and died as Francis pulled into the parking lot, and after the class of cooks-in-training checked out the truck and sampled cookies, he had to wait in the rain for a tow truck.
“You have to be able to roll with it,” he said, shrugging. “I never have to worry about the store breaking down by the side of the road.”
by Bonnie Berkowitz, Seth Blanchard, Aaron Steckelberg and Monica Ulmanu, WaPo | Read more:
Image: Bill O'Leary
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