A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon

A panel of critics tells us what belongs on a list of the 100 most important books of the 2000s … so far.

Why Now?

Okay, assessing a century’s literary legacy after only 18 and a half years is kind of a bizarre thing to do.

Actually, constructing a canon of any kind is a little weird at the moment, when so much of how we measure cultural value is in flux. Born of the ancient battle over which stories belonged in the “canon” of the Bible, the modern literary canon took root in universities and became defined as the static product of consensus — a set of leather-bound volumes you could shoot into space to make a good first impression with the aliens. Its supposed permanence became the subject of more recent battles, back in the 20th century, between those who defended it as the foundation of Western civilization and those who attacked it as exclusive or even racist.

But what if you could start a canon from scratch? We thought it might be fun to speculate (very prematurely) on what a canon of the 21st century might look like right now. A couple of months ago, we reached out to dozens of critics and authors — well-established voices (Michiko Kakutani, Luc Sante), more radical thinkers (Eileen Myles), younger reviewers for outlets like n+1, and some of our best-read contributors, too. We asked each of them to name several books that belong among the most important 100 works of fiction, memoir, poetry, and essays since 2000 and tallied the results. The purpose was not to build a fixed library but to take a blurry selfie of a cultural moment.

Any project like this is arbitrary, and ours is no exception. But the time frame is not quite as random as it may seem. The aughts and teens represent a fairly coherent cultural period, stretching from the eerie decadence of pre-9/11 America to the presidency of Donald Trump. This mini-era packed in the political, social, and cultural shifts of the average century, while following the arc of an epic narrative (perhaps a tragedy, though we pray for a happier sequel). Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, one of our panel’s favorite books, came out ten days before the World Trade Center fell; subsequent novels reflected that cataclysm’s destabilizing effects, the waves of hope and despair that accompanied wars, economic collapse, permanent-seeming victories for the once excluded, and the vicious backlash under which we currently shudder. They also reflected the fragmentation of culture brought about by social media. The novels of the Trump era await their shot at the canon of the future; because of the time it takes to write a book, we haven’t really seen them yet.

You never know exactly what you’ll discover when sending out a survey like this, the results of which owe something to chance and a lot to personal predilections. But given the sheer volume of stuff published each year, it is remarkable that a survey like this would yield any kind of consensus—which this one did. Almost 40 books got more than one endorsement, and 13 had between three and seven apiece. We have separately listed the single-most popular book; the dozen “classics” with several votes; the “high canon” of 26 books with two votes each; and the rest of the still-excellent but somewhat more contingent canon-in-utero. (To better reflect that contingency, we’ve included a handful of critics’ “dissents,” arguing for alternate books by the canonized authors.)

Unlike the old canons, ours is roughly half-female, less diverse than it should be but generally preoccupied with difference, and so fully saturated with what we once called “genre fiction” that we hardly even think of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, Colson Whitehead’s zombie comedy Zone One, Helen Oyeyemi’s subversive fairy tales, or even the Harry Potter novels as deserving any other designation than “literature.” And a whole lot of them are, predictably, about instability, the hallmark of the era after the “end of history” that we call now.

At least one distinctive new style has dominated over the past decade. Call it autofiction if you like, but it’s really a collapsing of categories. (Perhaps not coincidentally, such lumping is better suited to “People Who Liked” algorithms than brick-and-mortar shelving systems.) This new style encompasses Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels; Sheila Heti’s self-questing How Should a Person Be?; Karl Ove Knausgaard’s just-completed 3,600-page experiment in radical mundanity; the essay-poems of Claudia Rankine on race and the collage­like reflections of Maggie Nelson on gender. It’s not really a genre at all. It’s a way of examining the self and letting the world in all at once. Whether it changes the world is, as always with books, not really the point. It helps us see more clearly.

Our dozen “classics” do represent some consensus; their genius seems settled-on. Among them are Kazuo Ishiguro’s scary portrait of replicant loneliness in Never Let Me Go; Roberto Bolaño’s epic and powerfully confrontational 2666; Joan Didion’s stark self-dissection of grief in The Year of Magical Thinking. They aren’t too surprising, because they are (arguably as always, but still) great.

And then there’s The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt’s debut: published at the start of the century, relegated to obscurity (and overshadowed by a bad and unrelated Tom Cruise movie of the same name), and now celebrated by more members of our panel than any other book. That’s still only seven out of 31, which gives you a sense of just how fragile this consensus is. Better not launch this canon into space just yet.

by Boris Kachka/Editors, Vulture | Read more:
Image:Tim McDonagh

Wanna Get Really High?

Dabbing, consuming a cannabis concentrate using a vaporizing device, has moved into the mainstream as companies produce high-THC concentrates

Concentrates, a rapidly growing segment of the legal marijuana market, reduce the plant to its chemical essence. The point is to get as high as possible. An't reed it works.

Manufacturing concentrates involves using solvents like alcohol, carbon dioxide and other chemicals to strip away the plant’s leaves and then processing the potent remains. The final products can resemble cookie crumbles, wax and translucent cola spills.

A standard method of concentrate consumption, known as dabbing, uses vaporizing devices called rigs that resemble bongs, but instead of a bowl to hold the weed, there’s a nail made from titanium, quartz or a similarly sturdy material. The dabber heats the nail with a blowtorch and then uses a metal tool to vaporize a dab of concentrate on the nail.

Common sense suggests a dabbing habit could be more harmful than an ordinary marijuana habit, but the research is limited. Visually, the process is sometimes compared to smoking strongly stigmatized drugs like crack and crystal methamphetamine.

For years, dabbing has been considered an outcast subculture within the misfit world of cannabis. With so many companies angling to associate themselves with moderate use for functional adults, many want nothing to do with dabbing.

But as cannabis consumption has moved into the mainstream, dabbing has followed. Today a number of portable devices aim to deliver the intense high of dabbing concentrates in a more user-friendly way. At cannabis industry parties, there’s often a “dab bar” where attendants fire up the rigs, and wipe off the mouthpieces after each use. Machines called e-nails allow users to set a rig’s exact temperature to maximize vapor and flavor. On YouTube, there’s a lively competition among brain surgeons and rocket scientists to see who can inhale the heftiest dab.

Strong west coast weed can approach 30% THC. Concentrates, which dispensaries sell by the gram, range between 60% and 80%, but they can be even stronger. One form called crystalline is reportedly 99% THC. (The oil in increasingly ubiquitous vape pens can also be 70% or higher THC but it’s vaporized in smaller doses.)

Concentrates aren’t a new concept; hash or hashish, the compacted resin of the cannabis plant, has been used in central and south Asia for more than 1,000 years. But legalization in North America has laid the groundwork for innovation in the craft. As with most things cannabis, concentrate fanatics can argue endlessly about their preferences – solvent-free, whole-plant, resin, live resin, shatter – and the uninitiated struggle to discern much difference in the effect.

by Alex Halperin, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: George Wylesol
[ed. This at the local pot shop: The Most Exotic Hash on the Market.]

What Dying Traditions Should Be Preserved?

Castles, postcards, drive-in theaters, artistic matchboxes, home economics classes, sitting on porches, neon signs, two martini lunches, manual transmissions, cursive writing, handwritten letters, handkerchiefs, canning and preserving, Viking funerals, manners/politeness, taxidermy, knitting, listening to full albums, bridge (card game), stamp/coin collecting, whistling, corn cob holders, rolling joints, learning new languages, shoe repair, friendship bracelets, civilized debate, and more...

And the apparent winner (by predominant number of posts): a nice sit-down dinner with good conversation, home-cooked food, no hats, and no distractions (phones, tv, games, etc.).

[ed. From the Reddit post: What is a dying tradition you believe should be preserved?]
Image: via

Sparks, Kimono My House, Island Records, UK LP, 1974
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Edward Snowden Reconsidered

This summer, the fifth anniversary of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance passed quietly, adrift on a tide of news that now daily sweeps the ground from under our feet. It has been a long five years, and not a period marked by increased understanding, transparency, or control of our personal data. In these years, we’ve learned much more about how Big Tech was not only sharing data with the NSA but collecting vast troves of information about us for its own purposes. And we’ve started to see the strategic ends to which Big Data can be put. In that sense, we’re only beginning to comprehend the full significance of Snowden’s disclosures.

This is not to say that we know more today about Snowden’s motivations or aims than we did in 2013. The question of whether or not Snowden was a Russian asset all along has been raised and debated. No evidence has been found that he was, just as no evidence has been found that he was a spy for China. His stated cause was the troubling expansion of surveillance of US citizens, but most of the documents he stole bore no relation to this avowed concern. A small percentage of what Snowden released of the 1.7 million documents that intelligence officials believe he accessed did indeed yield important information about domestic programs—for example, the continuation of Stellar Wind, a vast warrantless surveillance program authorized by George W. Bush after 9/11, creating legal structures for bulk collection that Obama then expanded. But many of them concerned foreign surveillance and cyberwarfare. This has led to speculation that he was working on behalf of some other organization or cause. We can’t know.

Regardless of his personal intentions, though, the Snowden phenomenon was far larger than the man himself, larger even than the documents he leaked. In retrospect, it showed us the first glimmerings of an emerging ideological realignment—a convergence, not for the first time, of the far left and the far right, and of libertarianism with authoritarianism. It was also a powerful intervention in information wars we didn’t yet know we were engaged in, but which we now need to understand.

In 2013, the good guys and bad guys appeared to sort themselves into neat and recognizable groups. The “war on terror” still dominated national security strategy and debate. It had made suspects of thousands of ordinary civilians, who needed to be monitored by intelligence agencies whose focus throughout the cold war had been primarily on state actors (the Soviet Union and its allies) that were presumed to have rational, if instrumental intentions. The new enemy was unreason, extremism, fanaticism, and it was potentially everywhere. But the Internet gave the intelligence community the capacity, if not the legal right, to peer behind the curtains of almost any living room in the United States and far beyond.

Snowden, by his own account, came to warn us that we were all being watched, guilty and innocent alike, with no legal justification. To those concerned primarily with security, the terrorists were the hidden hostile force. To many of those concerned about liberty, the “deep state” monitoring us was the omnipresent enemy. Most people managed to be largely unconcerned about both. But to the defenders of liberty, whether left liberals or libertarians, Snowden was straightforwardly a hero. Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian at the time, said of him:

His motives are remarkable. Snowden set out to expose the true behaviour of the US National Security Agency. On present evidence he has no interest in money… Nor does he have the kind of left-wing or Marxist sentiments which could lead him to being depicted as un-American. On the contrary, he is an enthusiast for the American constitution, and, like other fellow “hacktivists,” is a devotee of libertarian politician Ron Paul, whose views are well to the right of many Republicans.

The patriotic right, the internationalist left: these were the recognized camps in the now far-distant world of 2013. Snowden, who kept a copy of the US Constitution on his desk at the NSA, could be regarded by his sympathizers as a patriot engaging in a lone act of bravery for the benefit of all.

Of course, it wasn’t a solitary act. Snowden didn’t want to be purely a whistleblower like Mark Felt or Daniel Ellsberg; he wanted to be a figurehead. And he largely succeeded. For the last five years, the quietly principled persona he established in the public mind has galvanized opposition to the American “deep state,” and it has done so, in part, because it was promoted by an Academy Award-winning documentary film in which Snowden starred, a feature film about him directed by Oliver Stone in which he made an appearance, and the many talks he gives by video-link that have become his main source of income. He now has 3.83 million Twitter followers. He is an “influencer,” and a powerful one. Any assessment of the impact of his actions has to take into account not just the content of the documents he leaked, but the entire Edward Snowden Show.

In fact, most of what the public knows about Snowden has been filtered through the representations of him put together by a small, tight circle of chosen allies. All of them were, at the time, supporters of WikiLeaks, with whom Snowden has a troubled but intimate relationship. He initially considered leaking documents through WikiLeaks but changed his mind, he claims, in 2012 when Assange was forced into asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London under heavy surveillance, making access to him seem too difficult and risky. Instead, Snowden tried to make contact with one of WikiLeaks’ most vocal defenders, the independent journalist Glenn Greenwald. When he failed, he contacted the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, whom Greenwald had also vociferously defended when she drew unwanted government scrutiny after making a documentary film that followed a man who had been Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard. The scrutiny turned into harassment in 2011, she claims, when she began making a film about WikiLeaks.

Poitras had been a member of the Tor Project community (which developed the encrypted Tor web browser to make private online interactions possible) since 2010 when she reached out to Jacob Appelbaum, an important member of both the Tor Project and also WikiLeaks, after becoming a close friend and ally of Assange. We know from Wired’s Kevin Poulsen that Snowden was already in touch with the Tor community at least as early as 2012, having contacted Tor’s Runa Sandvik while he was still exfiltrating documents. In December 2012, he and Sandvik hosted a “crypto party” in Honolulu, where Snowden ran a session teaching people how to set up Tor servers. And it was through Tor’s Micah Lee (now working for The Intercept) that Snowden first contacted Poitras. In order to vet Snowden, Poitras turned to Appelbaum. Given the overlap between the Tor and WikiLeaks communities, Snowden was involved with the latter at least as early as his time working as a contractor for the NSA, in a job he took specifically in order to steal documents, in Hawaii.

Few people knew, when Citizenfour was released in 2014, how deeply embedded in both Tor and WikiLeaks Poitras was or how close an ideological affinity she then had with Assange. The Guardian had sensibly sent the experienced news reporter Ewen MacAskill with Poitras and Greenwald to Hong Kong, and this helped to create the impression that the interests of Snowden’s confidants were journalistic rather than ideological. We have subsequently seen glimpses of Poitras’s complex relationship with Assange in Risk, the version of her WikiLeaks film that was released in 2017. But Risk is not the movie she thought she was making at the time. The original film, called Asylum, was premiered at Cannes in 2016. Steven Zeitchik, of the Los Angeles Times, described it as a “lionizing portrait,” presenting Assange as a “maverick hero.” In Risk, on the other hand, we are exposed more to Assange’s narcissism and extremely unpleasant attitudes toward women, along with a wistful voiceover from Poitras reading passages from her production diary, worrying that Assange doesn’t like her, recounting a growing ambivalence about him.

In between the two films, Assange lost many supporters because of the part he played in the 2016 US elections, when WikiLeaks published stolen emails—now believed to have been hacked and supplied by Russian agents—that were damaging to Hillary Clinton. But Zeitchik discovered, when he asked Poitras about her own change of heart, that it wasn’t political but personal. Assange had turned his imperious attitude toward women on her, demanding before the Cannes screening that she cut material relating to accusations of rape by two women in Sweden. His tone, in particular, offended her. But her view of his actions leading up to the US election remained consistent with that of WikiLeaks supporters; he published the DNC emails because they were newsworthy, not as a tactic in an information war.

When Snowden initially contacted Poitras, she tells us in Risk, her first thought was that the FBI was trying to entrap her, Appelbaum, or Assange. Though Micah Lee and Appelbaum were both aware of her source, she tells us that she left for Hong Kong without Assange’s knowledge and that he was furious that she failed to ensure WikiLeaks received Snowden’s documents. Although Poitras presents herself retrospectively as an independent actor, while filming Snowden in Hong Kong she contacted Assange about arranging Snowden’s asylum and left him in WikiLeaks’ hands (through Assange’s emissary, Sarah Harrison). Poitras’s relations with Assange later became strained, but she remained part of the Tor Project and was involved in a relationship with Jacob Appelbaum. (She shows in the film that Appelbaum was subsequently accused of multiple counts of sexual harassment over a number of years.)

In Risk’s added, post-production voiceover, Poitras says of the Snowden case: “When they investigate this leak, they will create a narrative to say it was all a conspiracy. They won’t understand what really happened. That we all kept each other in the dark.” It’s not clear exactly what she means. But it is clear that “we all” means a community of like-minded and interdependent people; people who may each have their own grandiose ambitions and who have tortuously complex, manipulative, and secretive personal relationships with one another. Snowden chose to put himself in their hands.

If this group of people shared a political ideology, it was hard to define. They were often taken to belong to the left, since this is where criticisms of the national security state have tended to originate. But when Harrison, the WikiLeaks editor and Assange adviser, flew to Hong Kong to meet Snowden, she was coming directly from overseeing Assange’s unsuccessful electoral campaign for the Australian Senate, in which the WikiLeaks Party was apparently aligned with a far-right party. The WikiLeaks Party campaign team, led by Assange’s father and party secretary John Shipton, had made a high-profile visit to Syria’s authoritarian leader, Bashar al-Assad, and Shipton had heaped praise on Vladimir Putin’s efforts in the region, in contrast to America’s, in an interview with the state radio network Voice of Russia. The political historian Sean Wilentz, in what at the time, in 2014, was a rare critical article on Assange, Snowden, and Greenwald, argued that they shared nothing so coherent as a set of ideas but a common political impulse, one he described as “paranoid libertarianism.” With hindsight, we can also see that when they first became aligned, the overwhelming preoccupation of Poitras, Greenwald, Assange, and Snowden was the hypocrisy of the US state, which claimed to abide by international law, to respect human rights, to operate within the rule of law internally and yet continually breached its own purported standards and values.

They had good grounds for this view. The Iraq War, which was justified to the public using lies, fabricated evidence, and deliberate obfuscation of the overall objective, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, as well as the rendition and torture of suspected “enemy combatants” at CIA black sites and their indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay. The doctrine of preemptive war had been revived, along with imperialist ambitions for a global pax Americana.

But cynicism about the rule of law exists on a spectrum. At one end, exposing government hypocrisy is motivated by a demand that a liberal-democratic state live up to its own ideals, that accountability be reinforced by increasing public awareness, establishing oversight committees, electing proactive politicians, and employing all the other mechanisms that have evolved in liberal democracies to prevent arbitrary or unchecked rule. These include popular protests, the civil disobedience that won civil rights battles, and, indeed, whistleblowing. At the other end of the spectrum is the idea that the law is always really politics in a different guise; it can provide a broad set of abstract norms but fails to specify how these should be applied in particular cases. Human beings make those decisions. And the decision-makers will ultimately be those with the most power.

On this view, the liberal notions of legality and legitimacy are always hypocritical. This was the view promulgated by one of the most influential legal theorists of the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt. He was a Nazi, who joined the party in 1933 and became known as the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich. But at the turn of the millennium, as Bush took America to war, Schmitt’s criticisms of liberalism were undergoing a renaissance on both the far right and the far left, especially in the academy. This set of attitudes has not been limited to high theory or confined to universities, but its congruence with authoritarianism has often been overlooked.

In Risk, we hear Assange say on the phone, regarding the legality of WikiLeaks’ actions in the US: “We say we’re protected by the First Amendment. But it’s all a matter of politics. Laws are interpreted by judges.” He has repeatedly expressed the view that the idea of legality is just a political tool (he especially stresses this when the one being accused of illegality is him). But the cynicism of the figures around Snowden derives not from a meta-view about the nature of law, like Schmitt’s, but from the view that America, the most powerful exponent of the rule of law, merely uses this ideal as a mask to disguise the unchecked power of the “deep state.” Snowden, a dissenting agent of the national security state brandishing his pocket Constitution, was seen by Rusbridger as an American patriot, but by his chosen allies as the most authoritative revealer of the irremediable depth of American hypocrisy.

by Tamsin Shaw, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty Images
[ed. See also: The Known Known.]

Aerial Views of Fish Farms, Bernhard Lang
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Teens Are Protesting In-Class Presentations

For many middle- and high-school students, giving an in-class presentation was a rite of passage. Teachers would call up students, one by one, to present their work in front of the class and, though it was often nerve-racking, many people claim it helped turn them into more confident public speakers.

“Coming from somebody with severe anxiety, having somebody force me to do a public presentation was the best idea to happen in my life,” one woman recently tweeted. According to a recent survey by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, oral communication is one of the most sought-after skills in the workplace, with over 90 percent of hiring managers saying it’s important. Some educators also credit in-class presentations with building essential leadership skills and increasing students’ confidence and understanding of material.

But in the past few years, students have started calling out in-class presentations as discriminatory to those with anxiety, demanding that teachers offer alternative options. This week, a tweet posted by a 15-year-old high-school student declaring “Stop forcing students to present in front of the class and give them a choice not to” garnered more than 130,000 retweets and nearly half a million likes. A similar sentiment tweeted in January also racked up thousands of likes and retweets. And teachers are listening. (...)

Students who support abolishing in-class presentations argue that forcing students with anxiety to present in front of their peers is not only unfair because they are bound to underperform and receive a lower grade, but it can also cause long-term stress and harm.

“Nobody should be forced to do something that makes them uncomfortable,” says Ula, a 14-year-old in eighth grade, who, like all students quoted, asked to be referred to only by her first name. “Even though speaking in front of class is supposed to build your confidence and it’s part of your schoolwork, I think if a student is really unsettled and anxious because of it you should probably make it something less stressful. School isn’t something a student should fear.”

“It feels like presentations are often more graded on delivery when some people can’t help not being able to deliver it well, even if the content is the best presentation ever,” says Bennett, a 15-year-old in Massachusetts who strongly agrees with the idea that teachers should offer alternative options for students. “Teachers grade on public speaking which people who have anxiety can’t be great at.” (...)

Those campaigning against in-class presentations said that it was important to distinguish between students with actual diagnosable anxiety disorders and those who might just want to get out of the assignment. Addie, a 16-year-old in New York, said that schools like hers already make accommodations for students with certain learning issues to get extra time on tests. She thinks similar processes could be put in place for students with public-speaking anxiety. “I think it’s important these accommodations are accessible, but that they’re also given to those who are need it instead of those who just say they don’t want to present,” she said. “There’s a big difference between nervousness and anxiety.”

Students who have been successful in the campaign to end in-class presentations credit social media. Unlike previous generations, high schoolers today are able to have a direct impact on their educational system by having their voices heard en masse online. Teenagers, most of whom are extremely adept at social media, say that platforms like Twitter and Instagram have allowed them to meet more kids at other schools and see how other school districts run things. They can then wage campaigns for changes at their own school, sometimes partnering with teens in other districts to make their voice louder.

Henry said that he’s seen the effects of these types of campaigns firsthand. This year his district shifted the school start time an hour and fifteen minutes later, something he and his fellow students campaigned for aggressively on social media, which he believes played a role in the decision. High-school students across the country have also waged social-media campaigns against discriminatory dress codes, excessive homework, and, most notably, to advocate for gun-control policies on campus. “Teens view social media as a platform to make changes,” Carver says.

Part of why students feel social media is such a powerful mechanism for changing education is because so many teachers are on these platforms. Nicholas Ferroni, a high-school teacher in New Jersey, said that “a lot of teachers use social media as a great way to learn methodologies.”

“Instead of trying to go to a school-board meeting with a bunch of adults in suits—that’s how it was—you can just talk to everyone directly,” said Addie. “We don’t have to do all that stuff formally. We can go online and say what we want to say and people have to listen to us.” “I think social media is a great way to reach educators,” said Bennett.

by Taylor Lorenz, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Why Zillow Addicts Can’t Look Away

A couple of times a week, Nick Spencer checks the value of his four-bedroom house in Haddon Heights, N.J., on Zillow. He has no plans to move, describing the town, located about 10 miles from Philadelphia, as “Americana at its best,” and his Cape Cod style home as “a labor of love.”

Yet there he is, clicking on Zillow every few days to see what the house he bought for $399,900 in 2006 is now worth. The last time he looked, the Zestimate — a Zillow algorithm that not only calculates current values for 110 million homes, but also predicts what they’ll be worth in the future — pegged Mr. Spencer’s home at $503,744. A little green arrow showed it up 1.7 percent from a month ago.

Mr. Spencer thinks it’s extremely unlikely that anyone would pay anywhere near that much for his house, charming as it may be. A neighbor down the street just took his house off the market after two years, even after dropping the price by more than $100,000, to $369,000. Zillow has that house pegged at $447,000, and rising.

Mr. Spencer blames location for the discrepancy. He and his neighbor live along the border of two other towns, including Haddonfield, where home prices are much higher, a fact that might skew Zillow’s algorithm. The numbers might be divorced from reality, but that doesn’t stop Mr. Spencer from tracking them.

“It’s entertainment,” he said. “Like a hobby.” The Zestimate has been a Zillow mainstay since the company started in 2006, drawing so many curious visitors that the site crashed within hours of its launch. With nothing comparable at the time, the Zestimate became a post-party snooping activity — on the ride home, you could gawk at the presumed price of the host’s house. It also became an exercise in aspirational ownership, with email updates reminding you to chart the ebbs and flows of your home’s worth like a 401(k). Except, unlike a 401(k), this graph is based on an algorithm, not actual money.

The Zestimate is marketed as a tool designed to take the mystery out of real estate for consumers who would otherwise have to rely on brokers and guesswork. But where Zillow sees transparency, some brokers and homeowners see fantasy, arguing that an algorithm, its clever graphics notwithstanding, cannot account for the nuances that determine a home’s worth, like whether your kitchen is brand new or from the disco era.

“Most people are kind of obsessed” with the Zestimate, said Stacey Simens, a saleswoman for Coach Realtors in Hewlett, N.Y., on Long Island. Once a potential seller has a number in mind, it can be hard to pull them away from it, regardless of reality. “They’re looking for that magic button that will tell them that their house is worth exactly what they want it to be,” she said.

But unless you’re actually thinking about selling, and invite a parade of brokers into your house to look at the granite countertops, all you’ve got is neighborhood gossip and the estimates you see on Zillow and other sites like Redfin and Trulia, a Zillow-owned company.

A Nerdwallet survey released this month found that of the 78 percent of homeowners who thought they knew what their home was worth, nearly a quarter got their information from an online calculator. (...)

Why are we obsessively clicking on fuzzy calculators for homes we are not selling? The answer lies in how we think about our homes. When Zillow arrived in 2006, at the height of the last housing bubble, houses were seen as liquid investments you could track like a stock. Now, a dozen years later, with many of us still traumatized by the housing crash, we keep checking in for reassurance that the ground is stable.

Get a green arrow, and you know that all is right; a red one gives you incentive to check back a few days later in the hope of better news. But the information you’re getting, even with all the charts and graphs, is just a rough draft.

“It’s conveying a truth that doesn’t exist,” said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers and Consultants. So why do we keep doing it? “Why do you read your horoscope?” he said.

by Ronda Kaysen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Trisha Krauss

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The Uncle Package

'Uncles' are coming to the rescue for the bullied students.

According to a report by Chosun Ilbo on September 12, the 'Uncle Service' is now a growing business.

The 'Uncle Service' comes in 3 different packages - the 'Uncle Package', the 'Evidence Package', and the 'Chaperone Package'.

The 'Uncle Package' is a service where a big, intimidating man in their 30s-40s pretends to be a student's uncle. The 'uncle' will give a stern warning to the bullies, and accompany the student on their way to and back from school. The service is provided for 500,000 KRW (443 USD) per day.

For the 'Evidence Package', the uncle obtains evidence of bullying by filming the scene with mini cameras. The uncle will report the evidence to the school, and tell them, "I'll submit an official complaint to the school board if you guys do not properly investigate the case. We want a clear resolution." The 'Evidence Package' is provided for 400,000 KRW (354 USD).

Lastly, the 'Chaperone Package' is where the 'uncle' visits the job sites of the bully's parents. The 'uncle' will protest in front of their office buildings, and scream, "A parent of a bully works here." The service is provided for 2 million KRW (1,772 USD) for a total of 4 visits.

by yckim124, allkpop |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. I could do this. In Hawaii if you're around 50 or older every young person tends to call you 'Uncle' (or Auntie as the case may be, which is actually kind of endearing). I just need to get some Yakuza-style tats like this guy.]

CEO Of California’s $350B Pension Fund Has No Degree

The chief executive of California’s $350 billion pension fund does not have a college degree and the revelation has startled some retirees.

Marcie Frost, who leads the California Public Employee Retirement System — the largest in the U.S. — did not claim to have a college degree when she was hired to lead CalPERS in 2016, the Sacramento Bee reported Thursday.

But Frost now faces criticism after a blogger pointed out Frost implied in her application and in a statement announcing her hiring that she was working on obtaining a college degree.

Blogger Susan Webber wrote Frost said she was pursuing dual degrees at The Evergreen State College in Olympia when she applied to CalPERS but she had not taken any classes there since 2010.

“We are surprised. You just assume in today’s market if you’re going to be CEO of the nation’s largest retirement system that you’d have some kind of degree,” Tim Behrens, president of California State Retirees, told the newspaper. He added, “I don’t think anything happened badly because of her lack of a degree.”

Frost, 54, said her career accelerated first in Washington state and then at CalPERS since she first took classes at Evergreen in 2010. She did not enroll in a class after that year, although she said she still intends to obtain a degree.

“It’s something that I will finish in my life but this position at CalPERS is the most important thing I’m doing today,” she said.

She earned $387,000 at CalPERS last year, according to state salary records.

Five board members told The Sacramento Bee they knew of Frost’s lack of degree but said they chose her because they believed she was someone who could work to advance the fund’s goals.

“Quite frankly it’s not a piece of paper. It’s about somebody who can do a job. She presented herself as the best person who could do the job in that interview,” said CalPERS Board of Administration Vice President Rob Feckner.

by AP |  Read more:

Image: Getty via 

[ed. Evergreen? See also: Evergreen Ranks as One of the Worst Colleges in the U.S. for Free Speech and Evergreen State College Hit with ‘Catastrophic’ Enrollment Crisis.]

BPA-Free Plastics Are Just as Toxic as BPA-Laden Ones

BPA is a chemical compound that has long been used to make plastic products including water bottles and to coat cans. But in recent years, following studies warning of the potential health consequences of minute traces, many companies have substituted similar chemicals into their food and drink containers that they then label “BPA-free.”

The widespread use of BPA has, in theory, been reduced.

The problem is that the chemical composition of BPS, short for bisphenol S, varies very little from BPA, or bisphenol A. This means that the supposed health benefits of replacing BPA with BPS and other similar compounds simply don’t exist, according to a new study in the journal Current Biology.

An estimated 93% of Americans have BPA in their bodies, potentially impacting the human body’s endocrine system and causing fertility complications in men and women, according to a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). BPA has also been linked to early puberty in girls and genital deformation in boys, as well as metabolic conditions related to obesity and even some cancers.

In the latest study, researchers from Washington State University and the University of California at San Francisco, wrote that the effects of bisphenol exposure can persist for several generations. That means that even if safe in small doses, the accumulation over time would continue to impact people’s health.

The study wasn’t exactly intentional. When the authors noticed laboratory mice producing abnormal eggs and sperm, they looked for the cause and discovered replacement bisphenols were causing contamination. They then conducted subsequent studies to show how chromosomal abnormalities can persist for up to three generations.

This isn’t even the first time the study authors have stumbled upon BPA’s effects in their labs. In fact, some of the authors of this most recent study are the same that authored a definitive report on BPA in the same journal in 2003 after noticing BPA contaminants in their labs caused female mice to produce chromosomally abnormal eggs.

by Brittany Shoot, Fortune |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

[ed. See also: Chemical BPA Alternative 'Linked to Foetal Brain Changes']

Lou Feck, Argosy magazine, April 1969
via:

K.Flay

Something For Nothing

Over Labor Day weekend, the soundman for a third-tier country act slashed the logos off his socks in response to a multinational corporation signing an endorsement deal with an out-of-work football player best known for protesting police violence. This word assemblage, which reads like gibberish even if you get the cues, was the latest flashpoint in the never-ending culture wars. Colin Kaepernick was run out of the NFL because of his anti-racist activism; he’s still arguably the sport’s most popular player, in spite of not having played for two-plus seasons. He’s also the designated nemesis for MAGA types still fuming over the wave of anti-American kneeling he loosed upon the league.

Nike’s decision to feature Kaepernick in its upcoming sneaker campaign set off shockwaves throughout the world of sports and beyond. Reactionaries like Ben Shapiro and Clay Travis (a huckster who has carved out a niche for himself as the right’s go-to sports guy) were predictably aghast; non-notables like the Big and Rich soundman and a few randos on Twitter who burned their shoes, tried to stick it to Nike as if post facto boycott were possible. Ridicule taking aim at their misguided protests swamped social media—to the point that this meta-reaction nearly overshadowed the ad’s positive reception by pretty much everyone sympathetic to Kaepernick or his cause.

The ad itself is a fascinating piece of communication whose implications speak volumes. It’s spare—a black and white photograph of Kaepernick’s face emblazoned with the copy “Believe in something. Even it means sacrificing everything.” Kaepernick’s mere image alongside what is otherwise fairly boilerplate Nike-speak in the “Just Do It” vein is catnip to his supporters and an affront to conservatives. There is, at present, no reason for any company to endorse him as an athlete, which means that Nike (which has had him under contract all along) is forking over a hefty payday, a shoe, and potentially a line of apparel to someone on the basis of his activism. In the most simplistic branding terms, this decision means that social justice work is good, and its critics are therefore bad. Nike has trained the spotlight on Kaepernick when it could’ve easily remained silent.

But it’s just as instructive to look at what the ad didn’t say. It cosigns the Nike brand to Kaepernick’s determination and integrity, not the substance of his “something”—which, by his own admission, evolved over time as he gained a more sophisticated understanding of politics and activism. His message, which is perhaps best described as an inchoate structural critique of racist violence, is wholly absent; we have to settle for generic motivational copy that could easily apply to sports, or any other demanding endeavor off the field. It is impossible to agree or disagree with the ad. Nike pointedly does not decry white supremacy, police violence, the carceral state, or environmental racism—all themes Kaepernick has touched on via his public statements and charitable work. Much like the “Equality” campaign from last year or the much-praised utterances of LeBron James, its premier athlete, Nike here demonstrated clear limits to just how far it is willing to go.

Kaepernick is such a polarizing figure that a backlash was inevitable; Nike almost certainly had anticipated it and decided that the benefits of featuring him outweighed the downsides. The ad is provocative—but it’s a mistake to call it “brave” or “risky.” Nike knew exactly how much it stood to gain and lose and acted accordingly. It won’t explicitly mention what Kaepernick stands (or, ahem, kneeled) for—and to note this glaring omission isn’t to condemn the ad or its champions. It’s just worth noting that there’s only so much said here. You can go half-full, and be happy this is happening at all; there’s been some befuddling “yeah Kap, get paid!” sentiment, as if one individual’s windfall is a win if that person professes certain ideological leanings. And the allied sentiment in such discussions—holding, in essence, that “it’s easier to work with corporations unafraid to take sides”—presumes that Nike is actually going out on a limb. Still, the sheer gravity of seeing Colin Kaepernick in a major advertising campaign is huge. It shows, if nothing else, that he simply refuses to go away—and in at least this one case, a corporation is willing a play a role in heightening his visibility.

At the same time, there are some entirely valid reasons to be skeptical of Nike’s involvement here and this perspective has been markedly absent from the conversation. That the ad has been uncritically embraced says a lot about how credulously people interact with corporations these days. And this reflects a broader, informal social contract that governs much of our political and cultural discourse these days—the cold reality of what corporations represent, how they function, and what drives them has become eclipsed by the far more relatable, and pliable, notion of the consumer brand.

If corporations come off as sinister and oppressive, brands convey a message that’s relentlessly personable and accessible. We’re haunted by the aloof, godlike specter of corporations whenever we pay our bills or contemplate our election-season choices; we engage with brands on a daily basis, allowing them to define us even as we reciprocally try to define their uses and significations. And perhaps most essentially, we ascribe meaning to them apart from what they actually are. In what one might term the Citizens United style deregulation of commerce in our psyches, we relate to brands as if there were an ideology, agency, and governing sentiment underlying them. Brands are companions, friends, and allies. The alternative—that we’re all dupes incapable of imagining a life not circumscribed by our relationship with these entities—is absolutely grim and raises all sorts of difficult questions in its own right.

Viewed in the context of the charged psychic minefield of brand symbolism, the embrace of the Kaepernick ad as an unconditional triumph is a gesture of self-preservation. The current state of debate surrounding putative loyalty to the national anthem and the NFL—both patriotic brands cultivating a similarly charged sort of signification among a very different consumer demographic—requires us to interpret the Nike-branded message as a token of progress because otherwise we would have to admit how cut off we are from any real version of dissent or meaningful opposition. Our own capacity to trust Nike belies an underlying sickness that we would rather not address. That we are okay with a politics mediated by brands puts the onus on us—which is to say, where it should ultimately belong. Unless Nike stuns everyone by expanding its partnership with Kaepernick to the point of adopting his worldview to influence corporate practices, we should view these efforts neutrally. Having Kaepernick around is good for the discourse; but our own ready inclination to pat Nike on the back for the culture-war troubles it’s now fending off largely by design points to some disquieting truths about ourselves.

by Nathaniel Friedman, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: uncredited

How a Half-Educated Tech Elite Delivered Us Into Chaos

One of the biggest puzzles about our current predicament with fake news and the weaponisation of social media is why the folks who built this technology are so taken aback by what has happened. Exhibit A is the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose political education I recently chronicled. But he’s not alone. In fact I’d say he is quite representative of many of the biggest movers and shakers in the tech world. We have a burgeoning genre of “OMG, what have we done?” angst coming from former Facebook and Google employees who have begun to realise that the cool stuff they worked on might have had, well, antisocial consequences.

Put simply, what Google and Facebook have built is a pair of amazingly sophisticated, computer-driven engines for extracting users’ personal information and data trails, refining them for sale to advertisers in high-speed data-trading auctions that are entirely unregulated and opaque to everyone except the companies themselves.

The purpose of this infrastructure was to enable companies to target people with carefully customised commercial messages and, as far as we know, they are pretty good at that. (Though some advertisers are beginning to wonder if these systems are quite as good as Google and Facebook claim.) And in doing this, Zuckerberg, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and cowrote themselves licences to print money and build insanely profitable companies.

It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters. Hence the obvious question: how could such smart people be so stupid? The cynical answer is they knew about the potential dark side all along and didn’t care, because to acknowledge it might have undermined the aforementioned licences to print money. Which is another way of saying that most tech leaders are sociopaths. Personally I think that’s unlikely, although among their number are some very peculiar characters: one thinks, for example, of Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel – Trump’s favourite techie; and Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber.

So what else could explain the astonishing naivety of the tech crowd? My hunch is it has something to do with their educational backgrounds. Take the Google co-founders. Sergey Brin studied mathematics and computer science. His partner, Larry Page, studied engineering and computer science. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, where he was studying psychology and computer science, but seems to have been more interested in the latter.

Now mathematics, engineering and computer science are wonderful disciplines – intellectually demanding and fulfilling. And they are economically vital for any advanced society. But mastering them teaches students very little about society or history – or indeed about human nature. As a consequence, the new masters of our universe are people who are essentially only half-educated. They have had no exposure to the humanities or the social sciences, the academic disciplines that aim to provide some understanding of how society works, of history and of the roles that beliefs, philosophies, laws, norms, religion and customs play in the evolution of human culture.

We are now beginning to see the consequences of the dominance of this half-educated elite. As one perceptive observer Bob O’Donnell puts it, “a liberal arts major familiar with works like Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, or even the work of ancient Greek historians, might have been able to recognise much sooner the potential for the ‘tyranny of the majority’ or other disconcerting sociological phenomena that are embedded into the very nature of today’s social media platforms. While seemingly democratic at a superficial level, a system in which the lack of structure means that all voices carry equal weight, and yet popularity, not experience or intelligence, actually drives influence, is clearly in need of more refinement and thought than it was first given.”

by John Naughton, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Evan Vucci/AP

[ed. See also: Inside Facebook’s Plan to Protect the U.S. Midterm Elections, and No News is Good News]

Michelle Branch

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A Cheap Windows Alternative for MacBook Users

I need a new lightweight laptop, as I travel a bit, but cannot afford a Mac at this time. I already own an iPad (and an iPhone) but the screen is too small for hosting group meetings. Also, I am a writer and photographer. What would be your suggestion for a lightweight, value-for-money laptop that won’t take me too far from the facilities of an Apple product that I’ve been accustomed to using for many years. Bernadette

If you’re a happy long-term Mac user then I recommend you stick with Apple. There’s not a huge amount of difference between MacOS and Windows 10, but you will have built up years of experience and “motor memory” reactions that you will lose if you change operating systems. Also, while Windows 10 does a reasonable job of working with smartphones, you will lose the integration that Apple provides between iPhones, iPads, MacBooks and iCloud.

And while MacBooks still cost more than mainstream Windows laptops, the saving may not be compelling if you view it over the life of the machine.

For example, let’s imagine that you would be happy to pay an extra 50p per day for the pleasure of staying with Apple. If you amortise your laptop purchase over three years, you could afford to pay a premium of £390 to buy a MacBook Pro (assuming a five-day working week). If you reckon you could make it last five years, you could justify a premium of £650. Of course, this argument is moot if you don’t have the cash.

The obvious alternative is a refurbished or secondhand MacBook Pro, either from Apple or a third-party supplier. The drawback is that only old Macs are cheap. A MacBook Pro from, say, late 2016 could still cost around £1,000, and you could buy a new 13in MacBook Air for that.

Windows’ advantages

It’s easier to switch systems if you have positive reasons for moving, rather than just the lower price. One example is the wide range of screen sizes from 7in (in the GPD Win 2) through 10.1in, 11.6in, 12.5in, 13.3in, 14in, 15.6in and 17.3in to the 21in curved screen in the Acer Predator 21 X gaming laptop. In your case, a 14in screen would provide good portability in a size that you cannot get from Apple, and where 1920 x 1080 pixels is acceptable resolution.

With Windows 10, the advantages include touch screens, the ability to run tablet apps, pen operation, logging in with face recognition using Windows Hello, and the “tent mode” you get with laptops that have 360-degree hinges.

Not all Windows laptops have all of these features – they add to the cost – so it would be useful if you could try them in advance to see which ones would work for you.

Of course, the iPad Pro offers some of them. However, a Windows 10 machine like a Microsoft Surface Pro offers all but one (tent mode) as well as the power of a MacBook in a single device.

A Surface Pro – alternatives are available from other suppliers – should also work well for a writer and photographer. You can run full Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop with a mouse or touchpad, do editing and annotation with a pen, then use it like a tablet for viewing or showing images. You can also handwrite notes in OneNote.

Some iPad apps are becoming available in MacOS, but Apple is still in denial about touch screens. I’ve been using them for six years now, and when I use a laptop that doesn’t have touch, it feels backward and broken.

Mac-like laptops

Asus stands out as the Windows PC manufacture with the most Mac-like products. Its manufacturing arm, Pegatron, has been a contract manufacturer for Apple and Microsoft so it knows the business. (Both company names are derived from Pegasus, the flying horse.) Asus Zenbooks tend to be better made and have screens with better colour gamuts than many alternatives, but may cost more as well.

The obvious laptop for your purposes is the 14in non-touch Asus UX410UA-GV544T, which is “crafted from solid aluminium” (but not a unibody design) and available in Quartz Grey or Rose Gold. The current version has a 2.2GHz Intel Core i3-8130U with 4GB of memory and a 256GB SSD. The screen resolution is 1920 x 1080 pixels (Full HD). The price from Asus is £643.89 (or 12 monthly payments of £56.96), which is around half the price of a 13in MacBook Pro with a seventh-generation Core i5 and 8GB.

The Asus UX410UA is the same as the Asus UX3410UA, while the Asus UX410UQ models have Nvidia 940MX graphics chips. The UX430UA models are newer, slightly thinner and a little more expensive. The UX490UA is the deluxe version. Any of these would do the job.

Some models with the previous (seventh) generation of Core processors are now being sold off at a discount. Amazon has a UX410UA-GV158T with a Core i3-7100U for £549.99, though this only saves £50 over the same laptop with a Core i3-8130U. Argos has a better deal with its clearance offer of the same machine (Core i3-7100U/4GB/128GB) for £469.99. This might be your best buy.

The main drawback is the 4GB of memory, but the Argos Q&A says that you can upgrade it, and this has generally been the case with UX410UA designs. However, there is only one memory slot, so you’d have to ditch the 4GB installed to fit 8GB or 16GB.

I’m less concerned about the 128GB SSD because you can slot in a cheap 64GB or larger SD card to store photos and presentations.

If you have the cash, consider either the UX410UA-GV350T for £659.98 (£140 off while stocks last) or the slimmer UX430-GV414T for £679.97 (£120 off). Both these laptops have new Core i5-8250U chips, 8GB and 256GB SSDs. UltrabookReview.com explains the differences.

As usual with Windows laptops, there are lots of variations with different processors, memory and SSDs, so shop around for the one that best matches your needs and your bank balance.

Touch and tent mode

If you fancy a touch-screen 14in laptop with tent and tablet modes then look at the HP Pavilion x360 and Lenovo Yoga 500 ranges. The Yogas support Lenovo’s optional Active Pen, while HP laptops support different active pens. (Non-active or capacitive pens just work like fingers.)

In this case, the cheap option is a 14in Yoga 520-141KB at Currys PC World for £399.97 (£130 off). This has a Core i3-7100U with 4GB and a 128GB SSD. The main drawback is the gold metallic finish. The identical machine costs £449.97 in grey and £499.98 in black.

There are two more expensive options with better specifications. The Yoga 530-141KB has a Core i3-8130U processor, 4GB of memory and 256GB SSD for £599.99 while the HP Pavilion x360 14-cd0008sa has a faster Core i5-8250U, 8GB of memory and 256GB SSD for £699.99. Expensive? A similar 13in non-touch MacBook Pro with a slower Core i5-7360U costs £1,449.

In general, it’s better to buy a Yoga direct from Lenovo because you can add three years of on-site support for £68.40.

by Jack Schofield, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Hinterhaus Productions/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Windows 10 Now Warns Users Not to Install Chrome or Firefox]