The Queer Art of Failing Better

‘What? You just said you have never shopped for a fucking mattress?!’—Jonathan Van Ness, Queer Eye, Season 1

Such an effort
If he only knew of my plan
In just seven days
I can make you a man
—Dr. Frank-N-Furter, The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Some things are just too pure for this weird and wicked world. That video of the golden retriever failing an agility test. Golden retrievers in general. Political science majors who truly believe they can change the system from within. And Queer Eye.

Queer Eye is a cultural intervention masquerading as a Netflix series. It has rapidly become essential to the well-being of a great many good and decent human beings who had otherwise stopped turning on the television for fear of the horror leaking out of it. I’m only slightly exaggerating: you’ve got to wonder what will become, for example, of the Guardian’s Hadley Freeman—who has now written a heart-wrenching daisy-chain of Queer Eye columns—if the show’s producers don’t make a third season. Which they will. I promise. Nobody panic.

Queer Eye is wonderful and terrible and probably the last significant statement to be made in reality television. The show, a Netflix-produced reboot of the original, squealsome mid-aughts judge-your-jeans extravaganza, instantly launched a thousand memes when it premiered in February, and the new second season has been a huger hit than anyone expected. In a culture awash in both mawkish reality vehicles dripping with kitsch and nostalgic reboots of shows from a softer world, Queer Eye is both. It manages to exceed the sum of its parts by not actually being about what we’re told it’s about. It’s not about queerness at all. It’s actually about the disaster of heterosexuality—and what, if anything, can be salvaged from its ruins.

On the surface of things, it’s a straightforward quest for “acceptance,” supposedly of homosexuality, dramatized via the no-longer-so-outlandish vehicle of sending five gay men on an outreach mission to small-town Georgia with a vast interior design budget and a vanload of affirmations. What it turns out to be, though, is a forensic study of the rampaging crisis of American masculinity. In each new installment of the reboot, queerness is gently suggested as an antidote to the hot mess of toxic masculinity under late-stage capitalism. I am absolutely here for it, as long as we all get paid.

The basic formula has barely changed: five gay men in an SUV descend on one hapless, shlubby, usually straight guy and sort his life out. In seven days, Jonathan Van Ness, Bobby Berk, Tan France, Karamo Brown, and Antoni Porowski give him a whole new look, redesign his home and wardrobe, teach him some basic kitchen skills, and provide scripted space to talk about his feelings with the cameras rolling.

In its aughts heyday, the original Queer Eye was catty and consumerist, with a side-order of snide eye-rolling and dreadful puns. The gimmick, the selling point, was that gay men are actually fun and fabulous and it’s safe to let them in your homes, because they might redecorate. The reboot follows the same beats with a more compassionate melody, and this time the gimmick is different. The gimmick is that heterosexuality is a disaster, toxic masculinity is killing the world, and there are ways out of it aside from fascism or festering away in a lonely bedroom until you are eaten by your starving pitbull or your own insecurities. The men typically featured as the show’s reclamation projects remind me of some of the men who I see on Tinder, sitting on that touring reproduction of the Iron Throne, staring into the middle distance, while in their real lives, and certainly on Queer Eye, they sit on ugly, painful furniture, faux-leather recliners that damage their backs, couches soaked in cat urine.

People on this show are extremely sweet to one another. That is rare enough within the reality TV genre, where “reality” is usually flattened into an exaggerated Hobbesian melee of shark-eyed competition and high-stakes back-stabbing. Most reality shows replicate the ruthless dogma of the age whereby life is made up of winners and losers and the trick is to hammer the other guy into the ground before he can do the same to you. On this show, men do not compete with each other. They touch each other, a lot, and seeing that brings home just how horrifyingly rare that is in untelevised reality. They cry and admit to one other how much it hurts to be alive while a handsome stranger teaches them how to make guacamole. There are no winners on Queer Eye—just better losers.

Failing with Style

Now and then, I get accused of not being able to enjoy anything good and pure, like a fluffy reality show, without subjecting it to rigorous political analysis. This is cruel and only slightly accurate—in fact, subjecting things to rigorous political analysis is exactly how I get off, and I’m far from alone in that. Like the Fab Five, I’m just lucky that my job is also my hobby.

What the Queer Eye guys seem to be gently teaching their subjects (and, by extension, their viewers) is that it is possible to live well without a woman to take care of you—and if you’re lucky enough to have one offer to do so anyway, maybe you should show her some consideration by picking up after yourself and learning how to apply the business end of a comb. When you put it like that, it sounds simple. But two thousand years of socialization and half a century of profit-oriented self-dealing throw up a few mental hurdles.

This show isn’t about how to win at life, but how to fail with style. It’s about giving straight guys permission to be more gracious losers. It helps that the show doesn’t actually have winners. This is not the ruthless, dick-smacking, alpha-primate pursuit of victory-for-victory’s sake that provides a plot line for most American reality television as well as for American politics, presuming you can still see clear water between the two. No, this is an oddly compassionate exit interview for the middle-managerial caste of straight dudes who are no longer steering a culture that prizes their skill set above everyone else’s. (...)

In 2018, Queer Eye is no longer necessarily “For The Straight Guy,” as it was in the aughts, but being a straight mainstream white guy now seems to come with an elevated risk of panic in the face of basic life-skills like learning to clean your room and deal with your childhood traumas. Up till now, this was the demographic that was always told that if they just hung on long enough, someone else would eventually do it for them. Probably a woman.

by Laurie Penny, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding a (Good!) Therapist

The process of finding a good therapist is unlike the process of finding most professionals. If your dentist nags you to floss more every time you see them, it's annoying, but unlikely to really affect the quality of their work. In therapeutic work, however, most of the work comes from the bond between therapist and client. If you find yourself worried about your therapist judging you or don't trust them to bring up important parts of your life, you won't be able to get the most out of therapy. Of course, this can make the process of starting therapy intimidating! It is very important to know that you can always talk to your therapist about changing what they're doing or referring you to someone else -- something I've written about previously in my guide to termination. Here, I'll instead talk about the first in these two bookends on therapy: finding a therapist.

The first thing to remember in finding a therapist is that if you have a bad experience, it is more likely that the therapist is a bad fit than "therapy doesn't work for me". Finding a good therapist is more like dating than it is like finding a mechanic, because of the emotional trust and freedom from judgment that I mentioned above. This means you may have to try a few times before finding The One, and once you do find someone good, there is no guarantee that they will be affordable, available, or local. Part of the reason I am writing this guide is that I am hoping the advice below will reduce the number of tries it takes to find someone who works for you.

What are your needs?

In order to find someone who works for you, you have to know what your needs are. The most obvious needs here are the practical: fees, location, timing, insurance, and accessibility. If you don't have much to spend on therapy, you may be confined to clinics and whatever your insurance covers. However, it is important to know that if you're working through insurance, they are required to find you someone who meets your practical and therapeutic needs, or else they must cover someone who is otherwise out of network. So if you're looking for an OCD specialist and nobody on your insurance has availabilities, they are still required to help you out. Working with insurance can be frustrating, for both therapist and client. Fees are often so high because a therapist working with insurance may get less than half of what they charge. Associates, Interns, and Trainees often have much lower fees, though they are significantly less likely to take insurance because they are prelicensed.

When it comes to therapeutic needs, we usually have a sense of what issues we're struggling with. However, there is much more in this category that many are unaware of before starting therapy for the first time. For starters, there is a difference between having expertise, knowledge, or familiarity with the important issues. On some directories, therapists may list any and all issues they have familiarity with, even if they don't have training or expertise. Checking their personal website (if they have one) may provide more information, but otherwise, this may be an important thing to ask in an email or over the phone. Someone who is struggling to come out as trans may need a gender specialist, while someone else who has already transitioned and is looking to work on something else may only require that their therapist be familiar with trans issues.

One of the most difficult areas to assess in ourselves is what we need the therapist to be doing in the room. There are so many theories and techniques, and often times, the websites that therapists advertise on don't explain what any of them mean or what they look like. Most people have a clear image of old school therapy (lying down on the couch and talking about your dreams and childhood), but this is only one school of therapy (psychodynamic, specifically). If you look at what sorts of introspection and regulation interactions and activities work for you, often times those are linked to therapeutic techniques. What many people think of as a "pros and cons list" is called Cost Benefit Analysis in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and if reflective listening feels most helpful, Rogerian Therapy (also called Person-Centered Therapy) is based in just that. If you have found a CFAR technique that works well for you, I can almost guarantee that there is a therapeutic technique that it is based on that you may find works as well.

There are a few parts of the therapeutic process that are not often spoken about, but can make a huge difference. One example is that some therapists allow you to text them to schedule and reschedule appointments, and this can make a big difference for someone who has phone anxiety. There is also who leads conversations and how much, and focus on solutions vs introspection. A therapist who listens and tries to prod on introspection isn't going to help someone who wants guidance and solutions, just as a therapist who leads and looks for solutions isn't going to help someone who needs to work through their emotions first.

For those who need a low fee therapist, there are training clinics associated with universities where prelicensed therapists practice under the supervision of a more experienced licensed therapist. If you find someone who calls themselves an Associate Therapist or a Therapy Intern, they are probably prelicensed and in training. You will find prelicensed individuals at training clincs run by universities and in private practice, though they rarely take insurance. This is a good way to get therapy for cheap, while still receiving all of the experience of the therapist's supervisor.

Finding a Therapist

Two of the most common ways to find a therapist are through insurance or through a directory. Insurance websites don't actually have much information on the therapists beyond location and a few areas of expertise; websites like Psychology Today and Good Therapy allow therapists to explain their practice in ways that are specific to their target clientele. Because of this, not all therapists have their own websites, but many (especially newer therapists) will. Psychology Today's therapist finder lets you search by insurance, though it is less reliable as to whether the therapist actually takes your insurance than going through your insurance company directly. It also lets you search by specialty, modality, gender, and much more. As I mentioned above, a therapist's listed specialty may not actually be something they're certified in, so it's often best to ask directly if this is important to you.

Another way of finding a therapist is through referrals. Most commonly, people get referrals through their general practitioner or psychiatrist. Sometimes, you can get a referral through a friend, though this can pose a problem if you and a very close friend are seeing the same therapist, and some therapists may refuse to see someone close to a client due to the possibility of each coming up in the other's sessions. This is also why you usually cannot have the same therapist for couples and individual counseling, or for individual for you and your partner. I am currently compiling a list of professionals in the Bay Area approved by those in the rationalist community, and other communities often times have similar lists (for LGBT, poly, kink, fat-friendly, etc). Often times, the best referrals come from an existing professional. All therapists have referrals ready in case they end up with a client who can't see them anymore, for any reason. The better and more well connected the therapist, the better their referrals are going to be. Thus, advice I often give for finding a good therapist is to find someone who is the best match for you (ie someone who wrote a book on your niche issue or did an important research study on a technique you love) and ask them for referrals (unless you luck out and they are available and affordable).

Online therapeutic services are getting more and more common. Some websites function as referrals, like Reflect (which matches people in SF and the East Bay to therapists who match their personality via video chat consultations). Others allow you to chat directly with a therapist, like Better Help. Some, like 7 Cups of Tea, match you to a trained listener rather than a therapist, so they can provide therapeutic services for free. There are also websites like Mood Gym, a CBT self help tool that is particularly helpful in pointing out bugs. Many therapists also do video sessions. This can be very important for people with chronic illness, disabilities, or social anxiety; you can get help without even leaving the house.

Once you've found someone, you can sometimes figure out whether or not they're a good fit based on online profile alone. If you want a tech-savvy therapist who can recommend apps and online tools, a therapist who doesn't have a website or doesn't check email very often is probably not a good fit. A therapist's website or directory profile often has a blurb that is directed at their target clientele. These tend to contain phrases like "Do you feel lost in your life?" and "It can be difficult to find a safe space to express our feelings". If a therapist's blurb doesn't speak to you, that doesn't necessarily mean it'll be a bad fit, but one that does is more likely to be a better fit. Sometimes, the blurb can give us insight into ourselves. You may read a sentence like "Do you ever get anxious and push people away?" and realize that yes, you absolutely do that. This is a good sign that this person may be a good fit, because the blurb is meant to attract the kind of person the therapist feels confident they can work with.

Initial Consultation

Of course, you can't fully judge whether a therapist is a good fit without talking to them. While it is possible to schedule an appointment blind, it is not recommended unless you feel confident that they are the therapist for you (ie if you are already familiar with their work via books or a blog). Ideally, a consultation would happen over phone or video, but sometimes it is just easier to talk via email. It is important to note, though, that if you and the therapist have difficulty scheduling time for a phone call, you are likely to also have difficulty scheduling sessions.

In the initial consultation, you will both be learning about each other. Your therapist will be listening to your description of your symptoms and needs to assess whether they feel they can take you on as a client, and you will be noticing their responses to decide whether you trust this person enough to make an appointment. Notice how comfortable they are or aren't to talk to, and how the experience of the consultation feels. Do you feel heard? Judged? Understood? Ignored?

This is also the time to make sure they actually fit your needs, practical and otherwise. Online information may be dated, your schedules may not mesh, and they may have only taken a class or two in a technique that you need an expert in. If you have questions about fees, this is also the time to ask about that; many therapists have sliding scale fees and can make accommodations for those paying out of pocket, though a lot of these therapists won't advertise this unless there is an expressed need for cheaper therapy, so it's good to ask. Try and settle on a fee before you schedule an appointment, so you aren't shocked by the numbers once you're charged. Once you're talking to them, you should also find out what the easiest way to reach them is in case you need to contact them before the session. It is good to know how to get in touch with them if you have trouble finding their office or are running late.

Clients often forget key information during initial phone consultations. Remember to mention your name and age, as well as what you're coming into therapy for. Including a general sense of your weekly schedule and any concerns about insurance or ability to pay can also be very helpful. Depending on how much time you have for a consultation, you may not have time to get to culture and experience in therapy, but these should be brought up either in the consultation or within the first couple of sessions. Culture includes elements of identity, such as sexuality, languages spoken, military background, etc. Depending on your concerns, these may be more important to bring up in consultation (ie if you need an LGBT friendly therapist or if you prefer a therapist who can speak your mothertongue). Similarly, previous therapy experience, diagnoses, and psychiatric meds taken can give your therapist important information about what your concerns are and what does or doesn't work. Some of this stuff may be covered in the intake (also called biopsychosocial), but it's important to discuss it in session nonetheless.

by squidious, Less Wrong |  Read more:

Image: Will & Deni Mcintyre/Getty Images/Science Source via

via: 

Grooming Beaches to Death

As Gavin Andrus takes a seat at the helm of a green John Deere tractor, it’s still dark out at the Santa Monica Pier. The stationary Ferris wheel is silhouetted against the city sky, and unseen waves crash against the pilings and lap against the sandy shore. The rhythmic onslaught brings with it the flotsam and jetsam of modern society: plastic grocery bags, cigarette butts, straws. Some of this refuse may have been expelled from the city storm drains. Some of it may have been cast off by thoughtless beachgoers the day before. And some of it may have been borne on the currents, washing in from Mexico or Japan or who knows where.

For the next five hours or so, Andrus’s job is to clean up as much of it as possible before the crowds arrive. He has the south side of the pier. Two other tractors will take care of the north. “Grandma needs a new facelift every day,” he tells me when I hop in the cab with him a little after sunrise. Behind him, the rake attached to the tractor kicks up a kaleidoscope of colored plastic and broken glass, churning in a vortex of liquified sand.

Andrus is a California boy in his mid-50s with the kind of bemused how-could-I-get-so-lucky-to-spend-my-whole-life-on-the-beach attitude that makes people living in colder climes curse. “I’m not the kind of person to sit behind a desk,” he says, gazing at the breaking waves from inside his glass-walled cab as he tunes in to the morning radio. Lest you think his job sounds a little too copacetic, consider that the sealed cab is necessary to protect him from the fine particles stirred up outside. Breathing those in day in and day out can cause silicosis, the lung disease known as potter’s rot or gravedigger’s disease. How about beach-groomer’s lung? Andrus doesn’t want that. “It’s terrifying,” he says.

The other great occupational hazard Andrus faces is running over a person at this wee hour. Off to his left, near a lifeguard station, a homeless man is cocooned in a sleeping bag—far from the only one he’ll see this morning. “Obstacles,” Andrus says. When it’s still dark and foggy, people can come out of nowhere drunk or tired or just not paying attention. “You’ve really got to be on your game down here.”

With each pass of his section of the 5.6-kilometer-long beach, he makes a loop away from the shoreline and flicks a lever, depositing garbage—a single, sad sandal on this pass—in a growing windrow, the speed bump of debris he leaves behind for a specialized vehicle to vacuum up and filter. “Everything shows up in a windrow,” he says. “You name it. From condoms to toys to money. Occasionally, jewelry.”

He jokes about painting baby diapers on the front of the tractor, like a Second World War fighter pilot memorializing the enemies he’s shot down. He would soon run out of canvas though—gathering a dozen or more nappies on a summer day is not unrealistic. Sticking out of the vents on his dashboard are two rubber killer whales retrieved from a windrow. Not that he’s a scavenger. Andrus just notices things sometimes. He circles around to make another pass along the beach as the morning’s first yoga class convenes for sun salutations.

Santa Monica State Beach, considered by some as the birthplace of beach volleyball, ranks among the busiest in California. As many as 50,000 people flock to this stretch of coastline on a typical summer day, and, at its widest, the beach could potentially accommodate more than 30 volleyball courts. Visiting a freshly raked urban beach like this, few people realize that it can amass over 10,000 kilograms of trash during a busy summer week. After the Memorial Day holiday in May 2015, cleaning crews gathered 39,862 kilograms. That’s the equivalent of 800 North Pacific giant octopuses. If Andrus and his coworkers failed to show up for a month, the beach would start looking like a dump.

While the US $3.3-million the city spends each year maintaining its beaches is undoubtedly good for keeping the tourist dollars rolling in and protecting some of the local marine life, there are some unfortunate side effects to all this cleanliness. Out of sight means out of mind, and when a city sweeps its pollution away, urbanites lose their biggest and best indicator of how much trash is in our oceans and befouling remote shores they rarely visit. “If they don’t see it, they don’t think it’s a problem,” says Heike Lotze, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who has studied the perception of marine threats around the world. And grooming itself has some unintended environmental consequences. When sweepers flatten the contours of the beach and strip the shoreline of the wrack—the rotting mess of kelp and seagrass that washes up—they turn a living beach into a sterile sandbox. When the beach hoppers and kelp flies vanish, so too do the shorebirds, including plovers and killdeer. (...)

While keeping our oceans and beaches clean of garbage is undeniably good for the environment, figuring out the best way to achieve that is complicated. Over 150 kilometers of Southern California beaches are regularly groomed, sometimes twice a day, and biologists and conservationists have begun to see the downside to tidiness.

You could call it the beach hygiene hypothesis. Just as humans may develop allergies from growing up germ-free, beaches are suffering from being too clean. Swept flat each day, the beach can become a biological desert, devoid of the rare plant and animal species that make the coastlines so special. Over two tonnes of decaying kelp get deposited on a kilometer of beach each day, a valuable resource for wildlife that is robbed by city cleanup crews on a daily basis.

Jenifer Dugan, a biologist with the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that beach hoppers, 14-legged “garbage” cleaners that thrive on wrack, have been disappearing from the coastline. “What habitat is disturbed as much as those beaches in Santa Monica?” she asks. “No agricultural practice disturbs the fields twice a day.”

On ungroomed beaches and other areas with little human impact, beach hoppers’ population can reach 100,000 individuals for every meter of beach. And on each meter of beach, they’ll devour 20 kilograms of wrack each month. “The kelp gets vaporized!” says Dugan, who has watched it happen. But when the beach hoppers, isopods, and other invertebrates that subsist on the wrack disappear, shorebirds also go hungry. That’s why barren beaches in California lose birds like killdeer and the endangered western snowy plover. Grooming can also destroy the eggs of the grunion, an unusual fish that lays its eggs in the sand at high tide.

What this research is telling us is that we need to accept that healthy beaches can sometimes be a little messy. Sure, most people going to the beach just want a clean place to lay out their towel, but they may not even realize what they’re missing. “There’s a whole ecosystem that would survive here without beach grooming,” says Karina Johnston, the director of watershed programs at the Bay Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded to protect the Santa Monica Bay.

On a cloudy May morning, she’s come out to one particular stretch of beach to show me what an ungroomed beach looks like in an urban environment, and the answer is, in part, flowers. Hundreds of canary-yellow flowers—the blooms of beach evening primrose—dot the rippling contours of the low dunes here. It’s the site of a pilot rewilding project that Johnston has been shepherding for the past two years.

In December 2016, the Bay Foundation, in partnership with the City of Santa Monica, erected a wooden sand fence on this section of the beach—a little larger than a stadium-sized soccer field—to keep the groomers out and encourage the formation of dune hummocks. Next, the organization seeded the sand with native plants, including primrose and sand verbena. These plants had been largely extirpated from the Los Angeles region until this project began. Remarkably, within four months of planting those seeds and putting up the fences, Los Angeles County also got its first western snowy plover nest in more than 70 years.

by Brendan Borrell, Smithsonian | Read more:
Image: Kyle Grillot

Bob Dylan and Guests

[ed. wow... haven't seen this version before.]

The Charcoal Smoothie

Just because something looks disgusting, it doesn’t mean it’s good for you

Growing up, my siblings and I enjoyed creating strange games and eating strange things. My sister swallowed coins, while one brother opted for sticks. I was found by the fireplace, aged two, with dust all over my hands and face, gleefully shoving a piece of charcoal into my mouth.

I was not a dunce, it turns out, but ahead of my time. In recent years, charcoal has been hailed as a “surprising superfood” that will “detoxify” your gut, prevent hangovers, whiten your teeth, buff away your acne…and make flying a more pleasant experience. A paper entitled “Flatulence on Airplanes: Just Let It Go”, published in the New Zealand Medical Journal in 2013, suggested airlines insert charcoal in the seats to “to absorb odours from intestinal gases”. Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle website, recommends charcoal lemonade and charcoal chai. On Instagram, there are thousands of pictures of inky lattes, smoothies that could be pond water and scoops of ice-cream that look like glistening balls of tar.

Charcoal has been used medicinally for thousands of years, ingested as a “cure” for all sorts of ailments and dusted over wounds to stop them from smelling. People realised that charcoal’s absorptive properties made it an antidote to poison. In the early 19th century, a French scientist, Pierre-Fleurus Touéry, took 10 times the fatal dose of strychnine, combining it with an equal amount of charcoal. He survived unscathed. Britain’s National Health Service still recommends activated charcoal (the processed kind, rather than what you would find after a bonfire) for people who have overdosed on drugs or swallowed poison.

Possibly because of its ability to absorb poison, charcoal has long been associated with everyday gut health. JL Bragg is the only licensed pharmaceutical manufacturer of activated charcoal in Britain. It recommends its products – their makeup “essentially unchanged” since the company was founded in 1848 – for wind, bloating and upset stomachs. In glowing testimonials, customers report how charcoal tablets have relieved their symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome.

But some nutritionists are sceptical about charcoal being a one-tablet-fits-all digestive wonder cure. “Sometimes it happens that someone comes to see me and they say that they have found charcoal particularly helpful to alleviate gas and bloating,” Petronella Ravenshear, of Chelsea Nutrition, tells me. “But I’d be more likely to recommend digestive enzymes and perhaps a change in diet.”

Still intrigued, and after a quick fix for that post-lunch slump, I buy myself some charcoal pills from a health-food shop. I’m instructed to take them six times a day, before and after every meal. That sounds excessive – and likely to turn my innards black – so I look for advice online. One website recommends 12 a day (four after each meal), while another says two should do the trick. I aim for three day, and continue to feel my usual bloated self.

Charcoal in juice form seems more straightforward, so I head to Pret a Manger to buy a “Charcoal Shot” – a bottle of liquid the colour of city sludge, which contains activated charcoal mixed with apple, lemon and coconut water. It has a pleasingly bitter flavour but afterwards a gritty texture lingers on my tongue and teeth. I have a Charcoal Shot three days in a row, and each time half-expect it to turn me into a new woman, emerging from a shower of stars like a Disney princess. The bloat remains.

When I tell other people about my experiment, they come forward with their own anecdotes. My sister, whose digestive issues stem entirely from her denial of her gluten intolerance, volunteers: “I’ve tried charcoal to help with wind. Can verify that it did not help.” A friend says that after a night of extremely heavy drinking she was offered a charcoal tablet to stave off the hangover. It didn’t work and, worse still, her vomit was black.

by Rachel Lloyd, 1843 | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Tongass: On the Chopping Block, Again

A Piece of Alaskan Paradise at Risk (The Guardian)

Image: Rafe Hanson

The Opposite of Aloha

Outrage after Aloha Poke Co tells Hawaiians to stop using 'Aloha' in business names

Hawaii residents are calling out a Chicago-based poke chain after it tried to stop other US restaurants selling the trendy sushi bowls from using “Aloha” in their business names, accusing the company of cultural appropriation.

In May, lawyers for Aloha Poke Co, sent cease-and-desist letters to a native Hawaiian family business in Anchorage, Alaska, ordering it to stop using “Aloha” or “Aloha Poke” in its name, Aloha Poke Stop. Aloha Poke Co had done the same to other shops around the country, including at least one in Hawaii, where poke originated.

Over the weekend, the Anchorage business announced that it had been bullied into changing its name, setting off a firestorm in the Hawaiian community. The business has since been pummeled with bad Yelp reviews and messages on social media, accusing it of bullying native Hawaiians out of using their own language.

“Aloha” literally means both “face to face” and “breath of life,” according to Davianna Pōmaikaʻi McGregor, a Hawaii historian. It is a Native Hawaiian word used around the islands in place of “hello” and “goodbye”. But the word is also an important cultural concept for the islands’ culture, and its generally peaceful, kind and welcoming way of life.

Poke is a native Hawaiian food – and recent foodie fad off the islands – consisting of raw fish seasoned with spices and served over rice.

Aloha Poke Co has allegedly been targeting poke restaurants around the country that have similar names for the past two years, citing a 2016 patent.

“We got a love letter from them in January,” Jeff Samson, co-owner of Aloha Poke Shop in Honolulu, said of the cease-and-desist order they received – identical to the one received by Aloha Poke Stop in Anchorage. It reads: “Your use of ‘Aloha’ and ‘Aloha Poke’ in promoting, marketing and selling your food … is a direct infringement of of Aloha Poke and Aloha Poke Co.’s registered (trademarks)… Your use of ‘Aloha’ and ‘Aloha Poke’ must cease immediately,” according to a copy obtained by the Guardian.

Like Aloha Poke Co, Samson opened his business in 2016. He considered patenting the name, but said it seemed ludicrous, in part because Hawaii already has multiple “Aloha Poke” businesses.

“We could have gone and tried to trademark the name,” he said. “But I was like, ‘How could you trademark aloha? How could you trademark poke?’” (...)

On Facebook, the company apologized and denied the claims against it.

“Perhaps the most important issue that needs to be set straight is the false assertion that Aloha Poke Co. has attempted to own either the word “Aloha” or the word “Poke.” Neither is true and we would never attempt to do so,” the company wrote. “What we have done is attempted to stop trademark infringers in the restaurant industry from using the trademark ‘Aloha Poke’ without permission. This is a very common practice … the company holds two federal trademarks for its design logo and the words ‘Aloha Poke’ … This means that the company has the exclusive right to use those words together in connection with restaurant services within the US.”

Phone calls and requests for comment to the company and one of its former owners were not returned.

Kaniela Ing, a Hawaii State Representative who is also a chair of Hawaiian Affairs, said in a video posted on Twitter: “It’s bad enough that [aloha] has been used and commodified over time. But this is the next level. To think that you have legal ownership over one of the most profound Hawaiian values – it’s just something else.” Ing encouraged people to boycott the Chicago-based chain.

Ing also pointed out that there were several Aloha Poke outfits in Hawaii that also use that name. “They should be suing you,” Ing said. “But they probably won’t, because that’s not ‘aloha’.”

by Breena Kerr, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: J. Kenji López-Alt via

Holger Eckstein
via: here and here

Veterans Speak Out Against The Militarization Of Sports

While researching my book “The Heritage,” I was struck by the enormous effect the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have had on sports — how they look, how they’re packaged and how they’re sold. Before 9/11, giant flags and flyovers were reserved for the Super Bowl. Today, they are commonplace. Even the players wear camouflage jerseys. The military is omnipresent. And it’s by design.

The public accepts this as supporting the troops, but one group of individuals — the veterans themselves — is more skeptical. One voice stood out: William Astore's.

"They bring out a humongous flag," he says. "Military jets fly overhead, sometimes it’s a B-2 stealth bomber, sometimes it’s fighter jets."

Bill Astore is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who writes about the increased militarization of sports — and its perils — on Bracing Views, his personal blog, as well as the website Tom Dispatch.

"I think, at first, there’s a sort of thrilling feeling," Astore says. "I’m like all the other fans: a big plane goes overhead — ‘Wow!’ That's kind of awe inspiring. But at the same time, to me, it’s not something that I see should be flying over a sports stadium before a baseball game or a football game. You know, these are weapons of death. They may be required, but they certainly shouldn't be celebrated and applauded."

Astore grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts, the bare-knuckle town of famed boxers Rocky Marciano and Marvelous Marvin Hagler. He’s an avid Red Sox fan, and when he watches sports, he sees the perpetual selling of war, and something very cynical: patriotism for sale, with troops as bait.

The MLB All-Star Game in Washington, D.C., this week was so awash in ceremony, it conjured thoughts of an old joke with a new twist: “I went to a military parade and a baseball game broke out.”

"I think our military has made a conscious decision, and that decision was, as much as possible, to work with strong forces within our society," Astore says. "I think our military made a choice to work with the sporting world — and vice versa. I think that's something that's in response to 9/11."

Before 9/11, an American flag the size of a football field was unheard of. Many NFL teams have incorporated extensive patriotic displays in their pregame routines. 

"What I remember from going to games is: I remember the national anthem, a conventional-sized American flag, and that’s all I remember," Astore says. "And I have to say that I thought that was enough.

"You know, after 9/11, there were so many people that I saw who broke out the flags and put them on their cars and had a spontaneous reaction to a feeling that we, as Americans, needed to come together. And that felt good."

In the years following 9/11, professional sports took a healing gesture and transformed it into a way to make money. In 2015, Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake released the report “Tackling Paid Patriotism,” which criticized the deceptive, taxpayer-funded contracts between the Pentagon and virtually every pro sports league. In 2012, the New York Army National Guard paid the Buffalo Bills $250,000 to conduct on-field re-enlistment ceremonies. In 2014, the Georgia National Guard paid the Atlanta Falcons $114,000 to sing the national anthem. In 2015, the Air Force paid NASCAR $1.5 million in part for veterans to shake hands with racing legend Richard Petty. Your tax dollars. At work.

"I hate to say it, but I wasn't completely surprised," Astore says. "But I was disgusted by it. Patriotic displays, they mean a lot more to me when they're spontaneous. But to learn that these had been paid for — that corporate teams, teams owned by billionaires, basically, were collecting money from the military. Paid for, obviously, by you and me, by the American taxpayer. Well, it was sad."

American flags are the ultimate Good Housekeeping seal. And thanking veterans for their service disconnects the public from what has been nearly two decades of war. The ballpark ceremony obscures the realities of war and, by focusing on soldiers, inoculates the government from antiwar criticism. Astore tells me it’s a form of emotional manipulation.

"Under the Bush-Cheney administration, we weren’t even able to see the caskets of dead soldiers," Astore says. "The cost of war — that very ugly face of war — was being kept from us.

"And the only time we see it, sometimes, is when they bring out a wounded soldier, for example. And maybe he or she has lost two or three limbs, but they’re brought out into an NFL stadium or an MLB baseball game. And the impression that you get is, 'Everything’s OK, see?' But we don’t see this person struggling to get around at home. And maybe being depressed because they’ve suffered this horrible wound in war." (...)

Nick joined the Marines, becoming a scout sniper platoon commander in Afghanistan.

"I remember my mom, at one point, wanted me to — she was, like, ‘Well, you can pick any of the jobs. Why don’t you be a comptroller or a finance-type of officer?’ " Nick recalls. "I'm like, ‘Mom, no one watches a Marine commercial and is, like, I really want to do the accounting for them.' "

Almost immediately, Nick felt the commercial effects of post-9/11 sports. In May 2010, even before he was deployed overseas, he was being sold as a hero. It felt inauthentic.

"They were having Marine Week in Boston, and it was a pretty big deal," Nick says. "They had wanted me to throw out the first pitch at Fenway during one of the games. It would’ve been a good story of having the manager’s son being a Marine and throwing out a first pitch at Fenway. But I was horribly uncomfortable with that and didn't think I had done anything to deserve that and gave them a firm pass on that one."

After he left the service, Nick worked in baseball for the Angels, Dodgers and Mets. Ostensibly, he was a liaison to veterans. But what was being sold to the public as patriotism felt like commercialism. What Astore wrote outside of the game, Francona felt working within it. Camo jerseys. Corporate sponsorship of service, without the authenticity of service. The veterans felt like props.

"And, I mean, if you look at kind of the tone of what Memorial Day has become about, it’s pretty gross," Nick says. "Even on the teams’ official Twitter accounts — a flame emoji for, like, 'Look how hot these camo hats are.' And it's, like, 'Really, guys? That's the plan?' I mean, you can imagine how some of these Gold Star families reacted to that. They were not remotely amused.

"I might have asked the question 100 times and said, 'OK, if you’re selling a $40 hat, how much of this is going to charity, and where is it going?' I think it’s fair to say, if you’re an average fan watching Major League Baseball, you’re going to be, like, ‘Man, these guys are really supportive of the military.’ "

This support, Nick says, does not exist within MLB. According to the league’s figures, only 10 of the league’s 5,000 employees are veterans.

"That's genuinely difficult to accomplish," Nick says. "Like, if your goal was to hire as few veterans as possible, that's pretty impressive. I’m almost certain that there’s more than 10. But they’ve really gone out of their way to avoid being able to even identify the veterans. I’ve been arguing that for 10 years. Like, 'Figure out who they are, so we can support each other and link up and try to address some of these issues.' And they patently refused to be involved in that."

Working with the Mets, one moment defined his frustrations. He created a Memorial Day program where he matched players with Gold Star families from similar backgrounds. The players recorded videos that told the stories of the fallen.

Players, he says, were emotional learning the stories of the dead soldiers from America’s wars. They wore bracelets naming soldiers they were matched with. It was authentic and personal, appropriately respectful of a day commemorating sacrifice.

"So I’m on the flight back, and I get an email from someone with the Mets asking, like, 'Oh, great job. Now we need to get all the families to sign these waivers, to waive the rights as licensees for the bracelets that these guys wore.' And I’m, like, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not ... like, absolutely not.'

"They referred to them as 'license holders.' The families. And I'm, like, 'I think you mean parent of dead Marine or soldier.' Patently offensive. And there was no way I was going to have them sign that and refused to do so. I wanted to know exactly whose bright idea this was and was going to give them a piece of my mind. And that ended it pretty quickly. And the next day was my last day there.

"They called me in and said, ‘You’ve done a great job here, really had a huge impact. You’ve also had a big impact on the veteran stuff with Major League Baseball, but your comments aren’t compatible with having a career in baseball. So we're going to have to part ways.’ "

The Mets fired him. Nick Francona is now out of baseball.

by Howard Bryant, WBUR | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. Also the premise of Ben Fountain's excellent book: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.]

via: misplaced

Art Pepper

Surrendering to Rising Seas

Monique Coleman's basement was still wet with saltwater when the rallying began. Just days after Superstorm Sandy churned into the mid-Atlantic region, pushing a record-breaking surge into the country’s most densely populated corridor, the governor of New Jersey promised to put the sand back on the beaches.

The “build it back stronger” sentiment never resonated with Coleman, who lived not on the state’s iconic barrier islands but in a suburban tidal floodplain bisected by 12 lanes of interstate highway. Sandy was being billed as an unusual “Frankenstorm,” a one-in-500-year hurricane that also dropped feet of snow. But for Coleman and many residents of the Watson-Crampton neighborhood in Woodbridge Township, the disaster marked the third time their houses had been inundated by floodwaters in just three years. Taxed by the repetitive assault of hydrodynamic pressure, some foundations had collapsed.

As evacuees returned home for another round of sump pumps and mold, Coleman considered her options. Woodbridge sits in the pinched waist of New Jersey, where a network of rivers and creeks drain to the Raritan Bay and then to the Atlantic Ocean. She heard that the Army Corps of Engineers wouldn’t be coming to build a berm or tide gate; the area had recently been evaluated, and such costly protections seemed unlikely. Spurred by previous storms, Coleman had already learned a bit about the ecological history of her nearly 350-year-old township. She discovered that parts of her neighborhood, like many chunks of this region, were developed atop low-lying wetlands, which had been elevated with poorly draining “fill” back around the early 20th century. As Coleman researched more deeply, a bigger picture emerged. “I started to realize that, in a sense, we were victims of a system because we were living in a neighborhood that should have never been built,” she says.

Although she had flood insurance—her mortgage required it—Coleman knew that her premiums would soon go up, and she worried that her property value would go down. She and her husband liked their house, a prewar colonial. Best of all, it was affordable, a rare find in a town so close to New York City. Coleman had only discovered she would be living in a “special flood hazard area” once she was reading the closing paperwork in 2006. That made her nervous. She recalls her attorney waving it off by saying that at the rate we’re going, everyone in New Jersey will live in a floodplain. That might be true in spirit, as a future-looking thought experiment, but it was severely misleading given the circumstances. Desperate to move her family away from a block in Newark with increasing drug activity, Coleman signed away one type of risk for another.

For four uneventful years, the marsh near the bottom of her street was an attractive amenity, a place where her three young sons could play freely. Then the drainages that wrapped around her neighborhood like a wishbone were overwhelmed by a nor’easter in 2010. And by Hurricane Irene in 2011. And again, by Sandy, in 2012.

When federal recovery money started trickling into New Jersey after Sandy, Coleman learned that she could apply for an elevation grant. But raising her house on stilts seemed silly if her car and the road were still on the ground. During Irene, she had witnessed what happens during a storm surge. “The high tide rushes in, and water envelops the entire area in no time at all,” she says. “The street becomes a river within a river.” Coleman didn’t want to be “made whole,” in the parlance of disaster-recovery law, if it meant rebuilding in place. Her stress levels spiked every time it rained during high tide. She didn’t feel safe, physically or financially.

While commiserating with a neighbor, Coleman heard about a program called Blue Acres. Its premise struck her as radically sensible: The government would “buy out” her repeatedly flooded property at its prestorm value instead of paying to repair it yet again. Demolition crews would then knock down the house and remove other markers of human habitation. She would transfer the deed to the state, and redevelopment would be blocked, forever.

Compared with selling her house, this process seemed overwhelming. But even if she could find a willing buyer, how could she ethically transfer this vulnerability to someone else? “All of us who live in high-risk flood zones were taken advantage of somewhere along the line,” Coleman says. “This was a way to end that cycle.”

Retreating from the coasts, in concept or practice, is not popular. Why would people abandon their community, the thinking goes, unless no better alternatives remained? To emergency responders, retreat is a form of flood mitigation. To environmental advocates, it’s ecological restoration. To resilience planners, it’s adaptation to climate change. Everyone agrees, however, that retreat sounds like defeat. It means admitting that humans have lost and that the water has won. “American political institutions, even our national mythology, are ill-suited to the indeterminacy and elasticity of nature,” wrote journalist Cornelia Dean nearly two decades ago in her book Against the Tide. “It would almost be un-American to concede ... that it is we who must adapt to the ocean, not the other way around.”

The U.S. has occasionally experimented with retreat on a tiny scale by offering voluntary buyouts to waterlogged families. The outcome is rarely promising. “Buyouts are extremely expensive, extremely disruptive, and many of the attempts have not gone well,” says Craig Fugate, former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). They invoke fear among citizens in every political stratum, bringing to mind land grabs, racist resettlement projects, class warfare, and, depending on your ideology, either federal overreach or federal abandonment. Because they require coordination among politicians, homeowners, lawyers, engineers, banks, insurers and all levels of government, they are enormously complicated to execute, even poorly. At their worst, buyouts break up community support systems, entrench inequality and leave a checkerboard of blighted lots in their wake. At their best, they avoid these things and still displace people from their homes.

Yet anyone who has looked at a map that forecasts sea-level rise can see that in low-lying neighborhoods exposed to the tides, some amount of retreat is inevitable. Regardless of how much and how quickly humans cut greenhouse gas emissions, climate change is already producing effects that cannot be reversed. Within a few decades, as saltwater begins to regularly block roads, kill wetlands, disrupt power supplies, bury popular beaches, undermine houses and turn common rainstorms into perilous floods, the most vulnerable pockets of coastal towns will become uninhabitable. As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has warned, “today’s flood is tomorrow’s high tide.” (...)

As flooding worsens, a few massive seawalls will likely be built to protect densely populated economic centers, such as lower Manhattan. But there is only so much money, and time, for cement enclosures. Residents in places such as Tangier Island in Virginia and Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana—and globally from Bangladesh to the Maldives to Senegal—are coping with the same reality as Coleman and her neighbors in Woodbridge Township: a wall isn’t coming to save them, and the floods are already here.

by Jen Schwartz, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Grant Delin

Motherhood in the Age of Fear

I was on my way home from dropping my kids off at preschool when a police officer called to ask if I was aware there was an outstanding warrant for my arrest.

“No, no,” I told him. “I didn’t know that.”

I needed to call my husband, but my fingers were shaking. I don’t remember if I was crying when he answered, only that he was saying he couldn’t understand me, that I needed to calm down, to tell him what had happened.

What happened began over a year before on a cool March day in 2011, at the end of a visit with my parents in Virginia. I needed to run an errand before our flight home to Chicago, and my son, then 4, didn’t want to get out of the car.

“Come on,” I said.

“No, no, no! I wait here.”

I took a deep breath. I knew what I was supposed to do. But I was tired. I was late. I didn’t want, at that moment, to deal with a meltdown. And there was something else: a small, quiet voice I’d been hearing more and more lately. “Why?” the voice asked.

Why did I have to fight this battle? He wasn’t asking to Rollerblade in traffic. He just wanted to sit in the car. Why couldn’t I leave him, just this once?

If it had been warm out, I would have said no. I knew about how quickly a closed car can overheat, even on a 60-degree day. But it was cool and cloudy. I’d grown up in that same town in the 1980s and had spent hours waiting in the back seat of my parents’ station wagon, windows open, reading or daydreaming, while they ran errands. Had so much really changed since then?

So I told him I’d be right back. I cracked the windows and child-locked the doors and set the alarm. When I got back five minutes later, he was still playing his game, smiling. We picked up his sister and our suitcases back at my parents’ house and caught our flight home.

It took me a while to figure out what had taken place in the parking lot — that a stranger had watched me go into the store, recorded my son, recorded the license plate on my mother’s car and called 911.

When our flight landed in Chicago, there was a message on my phone: “I’m trying to get ahold of Mrs. Kimberly A. Brooks. I need to speak with Mrs. Brooks about an incident this afternoon in a parking lot.”

Once I realized what had happened, I felt like a terrible mother. I felt as though I’d been caught doing something very bad, even if I didn’t understand what the bad thing was, exactly, or what the rationale was for its badness. I felt, I think, what just about every woman feels when someone attacks her mothering: ashamed.

But had I committed a crime? There’s no law in Virginia against letting your kid wait in a car — though, amazingly, 19 states do have statutes addressing this situation. The police seemed to think it was child abuse or neglect — that someone could have hurt or kidnapped my son while I was gone.

When I tried to explain this to my outraged father, he said: “Last I checked, kidnapping is a crime. Someone could break into my house and shoot me in the head, but the police aren’t showing up to arrest me if I forget to lock my door.”

“I don’t think they see it the same way when kids are involved,” I told him.

“The same way,” he said. “You mean rationally?”

I contacted a lawyer who said I would just have to wait to see if the police would press charges or contact the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. And so I waited, terrified, until the morning I received that second call and learned that I was being charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor (my son).

I spent the next months determining the best legal course of action, and also the best course of action for living with the humiliation of being accused of criminally negligent parenting. My story might have ended here. This is what shame does to women: It isolates us and makes us feel our stories aren’t really stories at all but idiosyncratic flaws. The only reason my story continued was that I started seeking out other mothers who had been through similar struggles. I found six willing to speak about their experiences, and I expect there are many more out there. I was not the only one who had paid the cost of parenting in the age of fear.

We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second.

We read, in the news or on social media, about children who have been kidnapped, raped and killed, about children forgotten for hours in broiling cars. We do not think about the statistical probabilities or compare the likelihood of such events with far more present dangers, like increasing rates of childhood diabetes or depression. Statistically speaking, according to the writer Warwick Cairns, you would have to leave a child alone in a public place for 750,000 years before he would be snatched by a stranger. Statistically speaking, a child is far more likely to be killed in a car on the way to a store than waiting in one that is parked. But we have decided such reasoning is beside the point. We have decided to do whatever we have to do to feel safe from such horrors, no matter how rare they might be.

And so now children do not walk to school or play in a park on their own. They do not wait in cars. They do not take long walks through the woods or ride bikes along paths or build secret forts while we are inside working or cooking or leading our lives.

I was beginning to understand that it didn’t matter if what I’d done was dangerous; it only mattered if other parents felt it was dangerous. When it comes to kids’ safety, feelings are facts.

As one mother put it to me, “I don’t know if I’m afraid for my kids, or if I’m afraid other people will be afraid and will judge me for my lack of fear.” In other words, risk assessment and moral judgment are intertwined.

This has actually been confirmed by researchers. Barbara W. Sarnecka, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and her colleagues presented subjects with vignettes in which a parent left a child unattended, and participants estimated how much danger the child was in. Sometimes the subjects were told the child was left unintentionally (for example, the parent was hit by a car). In other instances, they were told the child was left unsupervised so the parent could work, volunteer, relax or meet a lover. The researchers found that the participants’ assessment of the child’s risk of harm varied depending on how morally offensive they found the parent’s reason for leaving.

Dr. Sarnecka and her colleagues summarized the findings this way: “People don’t only think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They also think it is immoral and therefore dangerous.”

by Kim Brooks, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Eleni Kalorkoti
[ed. Read the comments. They're all over the map.]

The Death of Advertising

To this day, McDonald’s advertising campaigns target massive, heterogeneous audiences, because its products appeal to the median consumer. Watching McDonald’s television ads in which five millennials — all of different racial backgrounds, but none deeply attached to one; all lean and attractive, but none intimidatingly so — mill about, dancing and smiling while consuming small portions of McDonald’s food, is a reminder that McDonald’s isn’t trying to appeal to some of us. It’s trying to appeal to as many of us as it can, and reaching the median consumer does just that. Politicians use this strategy, too, and the ones who do it best get elected. Should they focus too heavily on fringe voters, they risk not garnering enough votes. The same applies to companies of the old world — there was little precedent for appealing to a niche market, and few means to do so. Thus, the successful companies of the old world, like the successful politicians of both that world and today’s, appealed to the median, because there was no other way to win. (...)

To elect a winner in the political market, voters vote. In a goods market, however, consumers pay. And while it is hard to imagine a political world not governed by the wishes of the majority, it is easier, given the current online landscape, to imagine a goods market no longer governed by the tastes of the “median consumers,” but by the needs of the niches — those who are willing to pay premiums for niche, high-quality products, like Bevel. Old world companies could rely on the moat of imperfect information to afford them long-term consumer loyalty, even with mediocre, one-size-fits-all products. Now, in a world of information immediacy and cheap advertising enabled by avenues like YouTube and Facebook, this advantage is dissipating.

The Death of Advertising (Medium)
Image: uncredited

The Productivity Gain: Where Is It Coming From And Where Is It Going To?

There are a lot of fears that technology of various sorts is going to reduce the need for human labor to a point where we may need to provide universal basic income, reduce the work week radically, and/or have mass unemployment.

I have a different take on where things are headed.

I think we are undergoing a radical productivity gain in certain aspects of certain jobs. This will lead to lots of dislocation for the workers who are effected by it. It will in cases be gruesome in the short term.

At the same time I think there will not be enough productivity gain in many parts of the world to compensate for an aging population and lower immigration rates. I am worried about a loss of standard of living because we will have too few human workers.

But in any case, we are going to have to change the relative value of some sorts of work that almost any person could do if sufficiently motivated. We will need to re-evaluate the social standing of various job classes, and encourage more people to take them up.

The politics are going to be nasty.

SOME DEFINITIONS

I think that most of the disruption that is coming is from digitalization. Note that this word has one more syllable than digitization, and the two words have different meanings. Worse than that, though, there is some disagreement on what each of these words mean. I will define them here as I understand them and as how I see more interesting writing using them.

Digitization is the process of taking some object or measurement, and rendering it in digital form as zeros and ones. Scanning a paper document to produce a .pdf file is the digitization of the visible marks on the paper into a form that can be manipulated by a computer; not necessarily at the level of words on the paper, but just where there is ink versus no ink. In automobiles of an earlier age the steering wheel was mechanically linked to the the axles of the front wheels so there was a direct mechanical coupling between the steering wheel and the front wheels of the car. Today the position of the steering wheel is digitized, the continuous angle of that wheel controlled by the human driver, is constantly turned into a very accurate, but nevertheless still approximate, estimation of that angle represented as string of zeros and ones.

Digitalization is replacing old methods of sharing information or the flow of control within a processes, with computer code, perhaps thousands of different programs running on hundreds or thousands of computers, that make that flow of information or control process amenable to new variations and rapid redefinition by loading new versions of code into the network of computers.

Digitization of documents originally allowed them to be stored in smaller lighter form (e.g., files kept on a computer disk rather than in a filing cabinet), and to be sent long distances at speed (e.g., the fax machine). Digitalization of office work meant that the contents of those digital representations of those documents were read and turned into digital representations of words that the original creators of the documents had written, and then the ‘meaning’ of those words, or at least ameaning of those words, was used by programs to cross index the documents, process work orders from them, update computational models of ongoing human work, etc., etc. That is the digitalization of a process.

Likewise in automobiles, once every element of the drive train of a car was continuously being digitized, it opened the possibility of computers on board the car changing the operation of the elements of the drive train faster than any human driver could do. That enabled hybrid cars, and eco modes even in all gasoline engines, where the drive train can be exquisitely controlled and the algorithms updated over time. That is digitalization of an automobile.

WHERE IS THE PRODUCTIVITY GAIN COMING FROM?

Let’s look at an example of where digitalization has come together to eliminate a whole job class in the United States, the job of being a toll taker on a toll road or a toll bridge.

The tech industry might have gone after this particular job by building a robot which would take toll tickets (they were used to record where the car entered a toll road), and cash, including crumpled bills and unsorted change, from the reached out hand of a driver, then examined exactly what it was given, and finally returned change, perhaps in a blowing wind, to the outreached hand of the driver. This is what human toll takers routinely did. To be practical the whole exchange would need to happen at the same speed as with a human toll taker–toll booths were already the choke point on roads and bridges.

It would have been a very hard problem and today’s robotics technology could not have done the job. At the very least there would have had to be changes to what sort of cash could be given; e.g., have the human throw coins into a basket where it gravity fed into a counter. If it was required to accept paper cash that would be very hard, as the human is not in an ideal situation to feed the bills into a machine, and with wind, etc., it would have been a very difficult task for most people.

Instead the solution that now abounds is to identify a car by a transponder that it carries, and or reading its license plate. The car does not have to slow down and so there is an added advantage of reducing congestion.

However, this solution relies on a whole lot more digitalization than simply identifying the car. It relies on there being readable digital records of who was issued what transponder, who owns a car with a given license plate if the car has no transponder, web pages where individuals can go and register their transponder and car, and connect it to a credit card in their name, the ability for a vendor to digitally bill a credit card without any physical presence of the card, and a way for a consumer to have their credit card paid from a bank account electronically, and most likely that bank account having their wages automatically deposited into it without any payday action of the person. There is a whole big digitalized infrastructure, almost all of which was developed for other purposes. But now toll road or toll bridge operators can tap into that infrastructure and eliminate not just toll taker jobs, but the need to handle cash, collect it from the toll booths, physically transport it to be counted, and then have it be physically deposited at a bank.

This solution is typical of how digitalization leads to fewer people being needed for a task. It is not because one particular digital pathway is opened up. Rather it is that an ever increasing collection of digitalized pathways are coming up to speed, and for a particular application there may be enough of them, which when coordinated together in an overall system design, that productivity can be increased so fewer humans than before are needed in some enterprise.

It is not the robot replacing a person. It is a whole network of digitalized pathways being coordinated together to do a task which may have required many different people to support previously.

Digitalization is the source of the productivity increase, the productivity dividend, that we are seeing from computation.

Digitalization does not eliminate every human task, certainly not at this point in history. For instance any task that requires dexterous physical handling of objects is not made easier by digitalization. Perhaps the overall amount of dexterous manipulation can be reduced in a particular business by restructuring how a task is done. But digitalization itself can not replace human dexterity. (...)

Increasingly digitalization is making more tasks more human efficient. Less people are needed to provide some overall service than were needed before. Sometimes digitalization replaces almost all the people who where necessary for some previous service.

Increasingly digitalization is replacing human cognitive processes that are routine and transactional, despite in the past them requiring highly educated people. This includes things like looking at a radiological scan, deciding on credit worthiness of a loan applicant, or even constructing a skeleton legal document.

Tasks that are more physical, even where they too are transactional, are not being replaced if they involve variability. This includes almost any dexterous task. For productivity increases in these cases the need for dexterity needs to be eliminated as our machines are not yet dexterous.

Likewise if there is a task step that absolutely involves physical interaction with a human that also is likely not yet ready to be eliminated. Large parts of elder care fall under this–we have no machines that can help an elderly person into or out of bed, that can help an unsteady elderly person get onto and off of a toilet, can wash a person who has lost their own dexterity or cognitive capability, can clean up a table where a person eats, or even deliver food right to their table or bedside.

Hmm. Not many of these things sound like tasks that lots of people want to do. Nor do they pay well right now. I assume many of these tasks will be hard to get robots to do in the next thirty years, so we as a society, with the support of our politicians, are going to have to make these jobs more attractive along many dimensions. (...)

The United States, from when it was an unfederated collection of proto-states, through to today, has relied on low cost immigrant labor for its wealth.

In the early days the “low paid” immigrants were brought, against their will, as human slaves. Thankfully those days are gone, if not all the after effects. There has also always been, up until now, a steady flow of “economic refugees”, coming to the United States, and taking on jobs that existing residents were not willing to do. In recent times a distinction has been made between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants. More than 10 million so called “illegal” (I prefer “undocumented”) immigrants currently live in the US and often they are exploited with lower wages than others would earn for the same work, as they have very little safe right of appeal. Now, in the United States, and many other countries, there has been a populist turn against immigrants, and the numbers arriving have dropped significantly. A physical wall has not been necessary to effect this change.

So, the good news is that now, just as we collectively have scared off immigrants who we can exploit with low wages, digitalization is coming along with a productivity bonus, which may well be able, in magnitude at least, plug that labor deficit which is about to hit us. With luck it will even also compensate for the coming elder care tsunami that is about to hit us– in a previous blog post I talked about how this is going to drive robotics development.

The big problem with this scenario is that there is by no means a perfect match between the skills gap demand that both reduced low cost immigrant labor and the need for massively increased elder care and services will drive, and the skills productivity that digitalization will supply.

There is going to be a lot of dislocation for a lot of people.

I am not worried at all that there will not be enough labor demand to go around. In fact I am worried that there still will not be enough labor.

And another piece of “good news” for the dislocated is that the unfilled jobs will not require years of training to do. Almost anyone will be able to find a job that they are mentally and physically capable of performing in this new dislocated labor market.

Easy for me to say.

The bad news is that those jobs may well not seem satisfying, that they will not seem as status admirable as many of the jobs that have disappeared, and that many of these jobs would, in our current circumstances, pay much less than many of the jobs that will have disappeared.

To fix these problems will require some really hard political work and leadership. I wish I could say that our politicians will be up to this task. I certainly fear they will not be.

But I think this is the real problem that we will face. How to make the jobs where we will have massive unfulfilled demand be attractive to those who are displaced by the productivity of of digitalization. This is in stark contrast to many of the fears we see that technology is going to take away jobs, and there just will not be any need for the labor of many many people in our society.

The challenge will really be about “different jobs”, not “no jobs”. Solving this actual problem, is still going to be a real challenge.

by Rodney Brooks |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. One thing you have to say about our present state of political, economic, and cultural upheaval: at least more people seem to be paying attention (but to what effect remains to be seen). See also: Almost 80% of US workers live from paycheck to paycheck. Here's why and With Greed and Cynicism, Big Tech is Fueling Inequalities in America]

I Walk Between the Raindrops

Valentine’s Day

This past Valentine’s Day, I was in Kingman, Arizona, with my wife, Nola, staying in the Motel 6 there, just off the I-40. You might not think of Kingman as a prime location for a romantic getaway (who would?), but Nola and I have been married for fifteen years now, and romance is just part of the continuum—sometimes it blows hot, sometimes cold, and we certainly don’t need a special day or place for it. We’re not sentimentalists. We don’t exchange heart-shaped boxes of chocolates or glossy cards with manufactured endearments inside, and we don’t go around kissing in public or saying “I love you” twenty times a day. (To my mind, couples like that are always suspect—really, who are they trying to fool?) Besides which, we were there to pay a visit to Nola’s father, who’s in his eighties and living in a trailer park a mile down the road from the motel, which made it convenient not only for seeing him but for strolling into Old Town, where there are a handful of bars and restaurants and the junk shops my wife loves to frequent, looking for bargains.

Were we slumming? Yes, sure. We could have stayed anywhere we liked, but this—at least when we’re in Kingman—is what we like, and if it’s not ideal, at least it’s different. The local police creep through the parking lot in the small hours, running license plates, and once in a while you’ll wake to them handcuffing somebody outside one of the rooms, which is not a sight we see every day back in California. Plus, there are a couple of lean white bums living in the wash just behind the place, and they sometimes give me a start, looming up out of the darkness when I step outside at night for a breath of air, but nothing’s ever happened, not even a request for spare change or a cigarette.

The afternoon of Valentine’s Day, after we’d visited my father-in-law (and treated him to lunch at Denny’s, the only place he’ll eat), Nola went up the street to cruise the antique emporiums and I made for the local bar, figuring we’d meet up there for a drink when she was done, then walk over to the Mexican restaurant for margaritas and enchiladas. This bar, which I’d been to before, is a cavernous place that was part of a now defunct hotel, and it features a high tin ceiling, a long, pitted bar top, three pool tables, and a jukebox that plays the hits of the sixties and seventies at hurricane volume. The front door stands perpetually open, so as to brighten the place up a bit with the best kind of light, the light that doesn’t cost anybody anything, and across the street is a web of train tracks that guide an endless procession of freight trains through town. Glance up from your beer or your gin-and-tonic and more often than not you’ll see a moving wall of freight cars rattling by.

The important thing to emphasize here is that this isn’t an unfriendly place, despite the neatly inscribed message over the urinal in the men’s room that says “Fuck you, liberal pussies,” which I choose to take as ironic. And I wasn’t unfriendly myself, happy to sidle up to the bar alongside the mostly middle-aged regulars and order a Jack-and-Coke, though normally—that is, back in our little coastal town in California—I would have had a Pinot Noir from the Santa Rita hills or a nice, full-bodied Zinfandel from Paso Robles. This wasn’t the place for Pinot Noir, and I’m not knocking it, just stating the obvious. Beyond that, I was content to bend over my phone (I’d been engaged off and on all day posting on a financial forum run by the company I used to work for) and wait for Nola to tire out and come join me for a Valentine’s Day drink, which in her case would likely be a gin-and-tonic, a drink that nobody, whether they were in Kingman or Irkutsk, could screw up.

There was a woman sitting at the deserted end of the bar, four stools down from me. I’d thrown her a reflexive glance when I came in, but chose to give her her space and sit one stool over from a knot of bearded regulars in plaid shirts, shorts, and work boots. This woman—late thirties, lean as one of the bums in the wash, jeans, running shoes, her face older than the rest of her, and a little rainbow-colored cap perched atop her dark, cropped hair—wouldn’t have been attractive to me even if I were in the market, which I wasn’t. But I was there without my wife, it was Valentine’s Day, and the single glance I’d given her must have meant more to her than to me, because three minutes later, before I’d had even a sip or two of my drink, she was standing beside me, so close we were practically touching.

“My name’s Serena,” she said, trying for a smile she couldn’t quite arrange.

“Brandon,” I said, and, because she was right there in my personal space, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I took her hand and shook it in a neutral way.

“Brandon?” she echoed. “What kind of name is that?”

“Just a name.” I shrugged. “It’s what my parents gave me.”

“I have E.S.P.,” she said.

by T. Coraghessan Boyle, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: William Mebane

via:

No, You Probably Don’t Have a Book in You

Has anyone ever said you should write a book? Maybe extraordinary things have happened to you, and they say you should write a memoir. Or you have an extremely vivid imagination, and they say you should write a novel. Maybe your kids are endlessly entertained at bedtime, and they say you should write a children’s book. Perhaps you just know how everything should be and imagine your essay collection will set the world straight.

Everyone has a book in them, right?

I hate to break it to you but everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them.

I am a literary agent. It is my full-time job to find new books and help them get published. When people talk about “having a book in them,” or when people tell others they should write a book (which is basically my nightmare), what they really mean is I bet someone, but probably not me because I already heard it, would pay money to hear this story. When people say “you should write a book,” they aren’t thinking of a physical thing, with a cover, that a human person edited, copyedited, designed, marketed, sold, shipped, and stocked on a shelf. Those well-meaning and supportive people rarely know how a story becomes printed words on a page. Here’s what they don’t know, and what most beginner writers might not realize, either.

Every story is not a book.

A story may be things that happened, embellished for interest, but that’s not a book. Many stories don’t get good until the end. Some stories — true ones even — are hard to believe. Other stories are just too short, don’t have enough tension, or frankly aren’t that interesting. The stories we tell that enrapture our friends and families may be extraordinarily boring to those who don’t know us. Those stories are not a book.

A book may also be things that happened or that we wished happened, embellished for interest, but it’s also so much more. It’s a story told artfully on the page, tailored to the reader. A book has a beginning, middle, and an end that keeps the reader invested for the five, six, ten hours it can take to read a book, because if it gets boring in the middle, most people stop reading. A book, when published by a traditional publisher to be sold in stores, has a defined market, a reader in mind, and that reader is one who usually buys books, not just some hypothetical person the publisher hopes to catch off the street.

You can tell a story to anyone who’s willing to listen. But writing a book that people will pay money for or take a trip to the library to read, requires an awareness few storytellers have. It is not performance, not a one-person show. It’s a relationship with the reader, who’s often got one foot out the door.

Writing is hard.

Remember writing papers in school? Remember trying to eke out 1,000 words or three pages or whatever seemingly arbitrary number a teacher set? Remember making the font bigger and the margins wider? You can’t do that to a book. I ‘m often sent stories that are way too long or too short for the publishing industry, and that makes them bad candidates for books. The average novel, for adults or children, is at least 50,000 words. That’s 50 three-page papers. Shorter books are not cheaper for the publisher to make, for many reasons too boring to get into here, and no, it’s not just cheaper to do ebooks, either. (No, really, it’s not.) If you’re an epic writer and think breaking up your 500,000-word fantasy series into five books is the key, you’re wrong there, too. A publisher doesn’t really want book two until they see how book number one is selling. And if your story doesn’t wrap up until book five, then you’re going to have nothing but disappointed readers. Writing — just getting the words on the page — is hard, period. Writing artfully so that someone enjoys what you’re writing is even harder.

by Kate McKean, The Outline | Read more:
Image: via