So You Want to Start a New Restaurant

Take this open letter as my formal apology.

If it were a video, it would start with me, hands clasped, eyes down, in a display of humility and repentance. Throw in the fiery backdrop of a Bible Belt billboard, because sometimes it does seem like the End is Coming. This industry I’ve found myself in is imbued daily with both rapture and peril.

Let me introduce myself: I am a recovering San Francisco–based food writer who entered the world of restaurants in 2010 by way of marriage to my restaurateur husband. (Yes, I met him while on assignment.) Since then, despite having good sense, we have opened five outposts of Tacolicious in the Bay Area, arguably the toughest market in the country.

During my 15 years as a magazine editor for San Francisco magazine, I wrote trend pieces and annually selected the city’s Best New Restaurants. I was never a star-slinging restaurant critic per se. But there’s no denying the power of any kind of press—demonstrated by the fact that people pony up $5,000 a month to keep a publicist on retainer. It can make a writer a little delusional. After 20 years of covering what seemed like every nook and cranny of the restaurant industry, I passed judgment blithely. I thought I knew what I was talking about.

If this were a video, there would now be a dramatic pause. Then I would laugh hysterically. It turns out that there are some things you just can’t know until a restaurant is your livelihood and your life. Here are my top ten lessons learned.

1. Openings are like birth. Your taco/omakase/Macanese/farm-to-table fantasy, which started as a twinkle in your eye, begins with drumming up names and envisioning how you’re going to dress it up and quickly dissolves into a gestation period of permits and health inspections. On the heels of writing a business plan and wining and dining investors to raise (beg) for the million-plus to open a restaurant, you juggle architects, contractors, electricians, plumbers, and crazy landlords. Things for which you’ve had no training. In San Francisco you shell out around $300,000 for a liquor license and negotiate with NIMBYs who fight you as if you’re building a nuclear power plant instead of a restaurant patio. It’s like having a baby: You carry that thing for nine months and then defy all pain thresholds to push it out into the public. Hopefully on the day its born you have an epidural or a few shots of tequila.

2. Practicing is not an option. Most restaurants don’t have enough money to do mock service for more than a few nights. Which means on opening day, your staff—from cooks to servers—are just getting to know the recipes, the table numbers, each other’s names. They’re actors performing a play when they’ve just received the script. Chaos is inevitable. It’s also inevitable that Yelpers/critics/bloggers/my former self are all in a mad dash to report on the latest opening. They will come in to dine and feel it is their duty to their fellow foodie citizens to write something that will live forever on the internet about the fact that your two-week-old baby restaurant was misbehaving and screaming its head off. One star.

3. Stars matter. Particularly on Yelp. Studies show that sales can increase by 5-9 percent with an additional star. You start to regard Yelp like a horror show, hands over the eyes, never knowing where a killer is lurking. Also, influencers—those impossibly dewy, calorie-impervious smiling girls wrapping their mouths around a triple doughnut burger—with their 2 million Instagram followers matter too. They come with promises that their emoji-blinking boomarang of your margarita will garner your restaurant more followers and more fame. Every other day you will get an email from one asking to “collaborate” with you. For free food and a sum of money.

4. Making great food isn’t the half of it. If your favorite art-project of a restaurant closes, be sad but don’t be surprised. Unless it’s funded by a billionaire, a restaurant’s longevity has little to do with ’grammable cement tiles, gold die-cut pasta, or a live-fire menu. Nor can it be measured by a line out the door or a feature in a glossy food mag. It’s a business equation. Restaurants run on wafer-thin profit margins—the national average is 3 to 5 percent—and the key to keeping the doors open means maintaining an iron grip on overhead and costs. Monitoring staffing, taking a monthly inventory of your bar, budgeting for equipment repairs, and negotiating the price of your janitorial crew—all things invisible to the diner—are the kinds of things that keep the bills paid. It’s not sexy stuff, which is why it’s not part of the restaurant-dream narrative; ratings would not go up if Top Chef contestants were challenged to find the best deal on toilet paper.

5. A lot is out of your control. Particularly the weather, which you monitor obsessively. Restaurant owners pray for sun because people go out for margaritas when it’s 80 degrees. When it’s cold and rainy, they stay home and make pot roast. And since 28 percent of our seating is on our patios, the weather can determine a night’s profits. On a sunny day, or during the horrendous 2016 drought, diners flock to the outdoor tables. In contrast, this August was one of the foggiest in San Francisco’s history and our sales dipped by 20 percent. Other outside factors that impact our business: national holidays, Warriors games, and Burning Man.

6. A labor shortage + millennials = the perfect storm. Restaurants across the nation are experiencing a labor crisis, making retention a challenge. In San Francisco a server or cook can quit one job and get another in a hot second. Add to this the fact that 20-somethings, who make up a lot of our workforce, are part of a generation that wants “work-life balance.” It doesn’t seem to matter that servers at our restaurants can make $15 an hour plus $200 a night in tips. Last minute, dog-ate-my-homework call-outs are typical and result in operational chaos. And if Iyengar calls a server to go do yoga instructor training at an ashram in India, he knows he can have his job back the minute the soul searching is done because the labor pool is a mirage and we are thirsty.

7. Delivery is a blessing and a curse. According to a National Restaurant Association study, by 2020, 70 percent of customers will be ordering food off of restaurant premises. The likes of Caviar and DoorDash can be a financial boon despite the fact that their service charges to restaurants start at 30 percent. They can also cause drama: An unwitting diner walks in the door to a quiet dining room, which gives the impression we’re twiddling our thumbs in back. In truth, the kitchen staff is madly assembling a 100-taco delivery, the order received 20 minutes earlier. Meanwhile, a pissed-off Caviar driver is standing in the doorway, his car is double-parked in our pissed-off neighbor’s driveway. The diner’s salad takes forever, and now he’s pissed off enough to go home and post something poetic on Yelp like “Service so slow and inattentive I entered as a young man and left as a weathered, sad old soul.” Two stars. (Yes, this is a real quote.)

by Sara Deseran, Bon Appetit |  Read more:

Image: Aubrie Pick

What the Gut Knows

The proximity of the anus to the genitals, Freud tells us, is the source of much if not all human neurosis. It’s fashionable to distance oneself from Freud these days, to say “I wouldn’t go that far” and “of course Freud was sex-obsessed”. But I would go that far, and most humans are sex-obsessed.

The gut, frankly, is a problem. What it does is not only mysterious and puzzling – as are all our internal organs – but also difficult for us to bear. And when we start to think about the symbolism of the gut, we might understand what Freud meant.

At one end of the gut is the mouth – a delightful place of many different kinds of joy. At the other end, there’s the anus. It produces farts, which stink of decay and poison. It makes poo, also sometimes foul-smelling, bearing disease, a sticky contaminant. And it comes out of us! And not just out of our own bodies, but out of a hole right next to the parts of the body that can give us great pleasure, whose development indicates adulthood, which can produce new life. It’s like a terrible joke played by human biology, to drag us down from the heights to the depths, to remind us that whatever ecstasy we find, we’re also, essentially and at all times, full of shit. This is why poo is so funny. This is why we have to laugh at it. If we didn’t laugh, we’d cry.

For Ernest Becker, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, the anus and the shit it produces are more than just a joke – they’re a terror. They represent the corruption of the flesh, the fate that awaits us all. “What am I?” a child might ask herself. “I am a thing which takes in beautiful, glowing, healthy, delicious, colourful, exciting food. And then what happens? I turn it into shit.” This is the inevitability of decay writ small, writ daily. It is the inevitability of death. “The anus and its incomprehensible, repulsive product,” says Becker, “represents not only physical determinism and boundness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay and death.” (...)

We are worried about food, about digestion, about our stomachs. The intestine is the seat of our anxiety. And our anxieties are meaningful. To be anxious about something is to be obsessed with it. If you have constant anxious thoughts about a topic it’s because, on some level, you are enjoying thinking about it. What is it about food and eating that gives such satisfaction in contemplation? I suspect that it has something to do with Thanatos. It’s been remarked before that the Victorians were obsessed with death, but couldn’t bear to talk about sex, and we are the other way around. We talk about food and about youth and about sex. The starts of things. We live in those beginnings, as if it could be the first day of spring forever.

If we keep on worrying about food – am I eating enough, or too much, is it the right sort? – we can just flush our shit away in a clean tide of water and never think about it, or what it represents, again. If we focus on youth, we can send our elderly to nursing homes and not have to look at them or think about them. If we’re always talking about sex, the beginning of everything, there won’t be room for death: the end of it all. Is it possible, therefore, to be delighted by shit? And might we do better as a society and as individuals if we worked out how? I suspect it is, and I suspect that a full appreciation of the workings of our own horrifying poo machine, the intestine, could lead us in good directions in this enterprise.

Of course, shit can be delightful, as anyone who’s ever suffered from constipation will affirm. My brother and his wife recently had a baby girl, making me an aunt for the first time. They’ve been so thrilled, we’ve all been thrilled, when she’s done a long and healthy poo. Pooing means everything’s working right. Inflow, outflow. Pooing means: this is how it’s supposed to go. Death, at least when it comes at the end of a long and useful life, means the same thing. It might be that nature knows what it’s doing; it might be that the process of decay, utterly out of our hands, has some beauty to it.

Contemplating the wonderful things that “nature” knows, and that we have no idea about, might be a good point to introduce the neurons in your stomach and the nature of the mass of bacteria living in your gut. Did you know that you have brain cells in your stomach? They cover the walls of your gut. You have as many neurons in your digestive tract as a cat has in its head. Think of all the things a cat knows: what’s nice and what’s nasty, who to trust and who to steer clear of, where good food comes from and how to hunt it down. That’s the kind of thing your stomach might know. No wonder we talk about a “gut instinct”.

The neurons in the gut are connected directly to the brain via the vagus nerve, which enters your brain right next to the parts that deal with emotions. The stomach can seem to know things that we don’t know ourselves. Experiments have been done in which people are fed food through a tube – they cannot taste or smell or chew it, but the entry of their favourite foods into their stomachs makes them predictably happier than some equally nutritious slurry. Your stomach knows things. You get butterflies in your stomach because those neurons down there have some idea about what’s going on.

There are parts of ourselves which we cannot access. In her memoir The Shaking Woman, Siri Hustvedt writes of a sense of duality she experiences when in the grip of a shaking fit. She has “a powerful sense of an ‘I’ and an uncontrollable other”. Our bodies, full of intelligence, our stomachs, full of neurons, are in some sense other “selves” within us, communicating with the brain but not fully part of it.

There’s an even more real “uncontrollable other” within the gut, though. We think of ourselves as single, unitary, contained within this envelope of flesh; everything inside the outline of our skin is “us”. And yet. Your gut contains a “microbiome” – an ecological community of micro-organisms. They’re the “good bacteria” so beloved of adverts for probiotic yogurt. The cells of our gut flora are much smaller than the cells of our own tissue – so much so that we actually contain more gut flora cells than human body cells. If I were to hold a referendum inside my skin with each cell getting a vote, I wouldn’t come close to taking office.

And that analogy isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds. Gut flora can influence mood and health – everything from depression to rheumatoid arthritis can be improved by increasing the variety of flora in the gut (our guts, apparently, would like to be a proportional-representation government, the more variety the better).

Our gut flora can release hormones which encourage us to eat more of the food they like. Moreover, we’ve only been able to culture about 5 per cent of the flora in the gut. We have no idea what the other 95 per cent are. All you can get in your probiotic drinks are that measly 5 per cent – for the rest, you’ll have to wait until we’ve gene-sequenced the missing gut flora, a process which is ongoing. Or, if in dire straits, you might consider a faecal transplant, which is exactly what you think it is. Miracle cures have been achieved by inserting the poo of one person with a “golden stool” into the gut of another, via a drip or a faecal enema. The new colonies of bacteria grow, and the recipients of the transplant start to feel better – it’s worked on a range of conditions including rheumatoid arthritis and killer bacteria C. difficile. But don’t try this at home.

by Naomi Alderman, The New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Musee D'Histoire De La Medecine, Paris, France/Archives Charmet/ Bridgeman Images

Hsiao Chin 蕭勤 , Mutualita in Crescita, 1964
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The Stock-Market Meltdown That Everyone Saw Coming

Now seems like the right time to offer an after-the-fact explanation in great detail and with complete and utter certainty of what just occurred in the markets, and why.

Hindsight bias permitting, the factors that led to this sudden and unexpected decrease in share prices are just so obvious. Simple, compelling language describing cause and effect is both comforting and reassuring. The alternative to this soothing narrative is an unimaginable world of random disconcerting events. This stands in stark contrast to how we prefer to see the world around us: orderly, predictable, subject to expert management and prediction.

Sorry, to say, but that isn't how it works.

We would have shared this explanation before the market dropped, had we been so inclined, but that would have spoiled the fun. Our powers of rationalization are somewhat less persuasive a priori than our overly optimistic belief in our own abilities. Besides, it is much easier to convince you of the reasons for what just happened than persuade of what is about to happen.

Thus, often wrong, seldom in doubt, we opine with great certainty about things of which we know next to nothing. It almost goes without saying, but the less knowledge we are burdened with, the greater the degree of confidence in our forecasts.

Why did the market suddenly drop 3 percent on Wednesday? It is as obvious as the nose on your face that the Fed’s tightening of monetary policy by raising interest rates to curb financial risk-taking is to blame. But we’ve known about this for a while, haven’t we?

As an alternative, maybe you'd like to blame elevated stock valuations, which surely is a valid point in the U.S., except that lagging emerging markets fell just as hard, and they are cheap, very cheap -- certainly much less richly valued than U.S. and European markets.

No, you're all wrong: It’s the trade war started by President Donald Trump. Not only is the U.S. dollar too strong, but tariffs are crushing an already weakened China, which hurts all of its emerging-market suppliers. But we’ve known about this too for a while, haven’t we?

Wrong again, say the partisan fire-breathers: It’s the Demon-Rats, and the possibility they will take control of the House of Representatives in the midterms, putting at risk all of the Trump pro-growth policies that are solely responsible for the healthy U.S. economy. Again, has anything changed in terms of the electoral outlook?

This market panic -- or is it a crash, or a bear market? -- was the worst day we have experienced since February of this year. It has now brought markets all the way back to levels not seen since – wait for it – July of this year. Was the market so bad then? This decline follows a market that has tripled since 2009, had zero volatility in 2017, and has continually confounded all experts who in one way or another couldn’t explain why the market was as good as it was.

Just for the sake of a little more perspective: This was the 20th time since the bear market ended in 2009 that the Standard & Poor's 500 Index had a one-day loss of 3 percent. The Nasdaq-100 Index had its eighth 4 percent down day (although it was the biggest one-day fall since August 2011). Meanwhile, Wednesday's decline has left the Standard & Poor's 500 Index all of 5.2 percent below its September high.

by Barry Ritholtz, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Portland Press Herald/Getty Images

Scuzz Twittly

[ed. See also: Party Like Charlie Sheen]

USA - East Coast 2018
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[ed. The new normal.]

90% of All the Scientists That Ever Lived are Alive Today

90% of all the Scientists that ever lived are alive today. 

(via: Less Wrong: The funnel of human experience.]
Image: Wikipedia

Paul Klee, Blue bird pumpkin

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Kenji Ishikawa
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Portrait of a Campaign

The Problem

With a month to go before the midterms, there are more than a dozen districts where a progressive woman is running for office as a first-time candidate against an absentee Republican incumbent, and has polling in hand showing her able to win outright if she can reach independent voters with a short statement along these lines:

I don't take corporate money, and I support universal health care. My opponent takes corporate PAC money, voted against the Affordable Care Act, and has refused to hold a town hall.

These same polls show that the incumbent has less than 50% of the vote, and that a large proportion of voters has never heard of the challenger. Once the large group of undecided respondents hear a two-sentence message about the two candidates, they break decidedly for our challenger.

This polling evidence suggests that reaching independent voters in those districts in time for the election, using any tools available, should be a top priority of the Democratic Party.

And yet, candidates in these districts are struggling to find the means to get their message out, in an environment where marginal candidates and candidates running in completely safe districts are marinating in millions of dollars.

In many cases, the shortfall amounts to something like $100-$200K, the cost of a block of TV ads in a smaller media market.

While I don't believe that every candidate in this situation is guaranteed to win if she can reach independent voters, I believe that they will all lose if they don’t.

Given the relatively small sums at play, a national party flush with money, and the critical importance of winning the House in 2018, it confounds me that these campaigns can't get the resources to win. (...)

The Candidate

Our archetypal candidate in 2018 is a progressive woman running for Federal office for the first time. Some combination of the events on Election Day and the Women's March in 2017 led her to make the most difficult decision of her professional life—to run for Congress.

She's running in a district that voted for Trump, but not overwhelmingly so. It is a district where she has deep roots, and has spent much of her life. She understands the people there.

Our candidate began her run in mid-2017, initially working out of her home, more recently working from a small campaign office tucked away in a strip mall or shared office building. Her paid staff consists of three to six people, most of them also working on their first election, a few of them the kind of young political science addicts who rove from campaign to campaign, never finding succor. The campaign is run mostly by volunteers, a mix of retired people and students.

Campaigning has required our candidate to put her life on hold. She is either retired or has the kind of job (like non-profit public service) that allows her to take a leave of absence, but the decision to run has had a serious impact on her family and her financial well-being.

Very early on, she had to develop the two near-sociopathic skills required of a politician in 2018: the ability to repeatedly tell a truncated version of her life story with unaffected sincerity, and the ability to shake down a list of wealthy strangers on the phone for money.

The Money

The principal activity of any Congressional candidate is call time.

Call time is the period of four to six hours each day the candidate spends phoning potential donors, like it's 1983. All but the most depraved extroverts hate it. Many campaigns have a person whose job it to bully the candidate back onto call time to meet her quota, either while driving between campaign events or locked inside her office.

Call time kills the soul.

It requires raising something like a million dollars to run a House race. Unless you are wealthy enough to fund your own campaign (which the Democratic Party encourages!), you must collect this money in pieces of up to $2,700 from individuals, or $5,000 from political action committees.

Call time puts strong constraints on the kind of people who can seek office. Without a list of wealthy donors, or the ability to procure such a list, it is difficult to get a candidacy off the ground.

In Democratic primaries, you find people running campaigns who happen to be well connected because they went to an ivy league law school, or worked at a major nonprofit, or otherwise have strong ties in the corporate/philanthropy complex. You will also find very wealthy people (the DCCC avidly recruits self-funders), business owners, and people whose personal story is so compelling that it can serve as a fundraising prop in its own right.

People who are good at schmoozing with the rich, and who can take eighteen months off of work, do well running for Congress. People who are bad at going hat-in-hand to the wealthy do not.

This is why you will rarely find teachers, office workers, tradespeople, union reps, farmers, scientists, or anyone in the service professions running in a party that claims to represent the working class. Nobody who must work a day job can sustain the pressures of running for Congress.

The process selects for candidates who are good at raising money, not winning votes.

Fundraising consumes an inordinate amount of our candidate's time. A campaign that was supposed to be about the voters is instead focused entirely on a class of fickle donors. Going through the slog of perpetual fundraising convinces our candidate that there has to be a better way.

There is! And her opponent has found it.

The Incumbent

The incumbent is a middle-aged Republican man who haunts his district like a ghost, appearing once or twice a year for just long enough to frighten children, though never long enough for witnesses to gather. He got elected a few terms ago and has coasted through re-election ever since, often with over 60% of the vote. His comfortable victory margins are less a reflection of his political prowess, and more a symptom of the fact that he has never faced a strong opponent. Every two years, a political novice appears, fails to raise significant money, loses to him by 80,000 votes, and exits the political stage.

With every such victory, the incumbent cements the impression that his is a safely Republican district, which discourages serious candidates from running against him the next time around, in a vicious circle. The spreadsheets that matter begin to list this district, where most people don't vote, as "solid red".

Unlike our candidate, the incumbent doesn't have to worry about fundraising. The money comes to him. Most of his donations come from corporations, who donate through political action committees (PACs) that are allowed to give individual candidates up to $10,000.

As the incumbent climbs the seniority latter in Congress, the list of corporations interested in giving him money grows, making his financial position stronger.

The incumbent also gets large contributions from the network of rich donors mobilized by the Republican party. In 2018, in the kinds of districts I'm talking about, it's normal for the incumbent to have a 5:1 advantage in cash on hand.

If the race should threaten to become competitive despite this cash advantage, the incumbent can count on one of the large outside spending groups to come bail him out. These are the “dark money” groups you hear about in connection with people like the Mercers, or the Koch brothers. (...)

The Voters

The voters are so unhappy!

Part of the challenge of winning a Congressional election is convincing people they should bother to vote. They’re disenchanted with a political system that has done little to help them, and many are also disengaged—they don’t know there’s an election, don’t plan to vote, don’t want to hear more, and don't want you knocking on their door again.

When our candidate holds town halls, the voters rarely mention Trump. But they do ask pointed questions about 'partisan bickering in Washington', and how she plans to move past it.

To an outside observer, this can sound like an infuriating kind of both-sides-ism, but I have come to perceive it as an expression of anger. The voters see paralysis in the political system and ascribe it to a political class, not a party. They want assurances that the candidate will not become part of the problem.

There are three issues in particular that seem to get voters riled up at campaign events...

by Maciej Cegłowski, Idle Words | Read more:
Image: Toothfish, Idle Words
[ed. Important.]

DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities

DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities

"To present information in an unclassified format, we do not disclose details regarding weapon system vulnerabilities, which program offices we interviewed, or which cybersecurity assessments we reviewed. The examples we cite from cybersecurity assessments are unique to each weapon system and are not applicable to all weapon systems. Furthermore, cybersecurity assessment findings are as of a specific date, so vulnerabilities identified during system development may no longer exist when the system is fielded. In addition, we illustrated some concepts using fictitious depictions. In some cases, we were deliberately vague and excluded some details from examples to avoid identifying specific weapon systems. We also presented examples of publicly known attacks in sidebars to illustrate how poor cybersecurity can enable cyber attacks. DOD conducted a security review of the report and cleared it for public release. We will provide a classified briefing of our findings to Congress.

This is our first report specific to cybersecurity in the context of weapon systems acquisitions. For that reason, we did not look in depth at related issues in the context of weapon systems, such as the security of contractor facilities, so-called “Internet of Things” devices, microelectronics, contracting, and industrial control systems. In addition, we are not making recommendations in this report, but plan to continue evaluating key aspects of DOD’s weapon systems cybersecurity efforts in the future."

by GAO |  Read more:

[ed. Full report in .pdf format here. See also: US Weapons Systems Are Easy Cyberattack Targets, New Report Finds. I suppose now we'll have to supplement DoD's 2018 $650 billion defense budget to fix cybersecurity issues that should have been secure from the get go (fyi: Dept. of Education budget in 2018: $59 billion. A 17 percent decrease from 2017).]

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Projects I Wish I Had Time For

1. Everyone Is Lying Again: A blog dissecting how, in response to the majority of even slightly controversial or partisanship-evoking news stories, all “sides” (right, left, etc.) grossly misrepresent the facts and/or their scientific, historical, or cultural context. Probably one dissection per week, allowing time for substantial research for each post.

2. The Story of Rock Music: This podcast would guide the listener through the history of rock music, playing extended clips of >10 tracks per episode and helping the listener hear exactly how different styles developed, split off from their roots, and recombined later. For example in one episode I might explain what a raga is and play an example clip, then explain what modal vs. chordal improvisation is and play contrasting clips, then explain what blues rock is and play an example clip, then explain what post-bop jazz is and play an example clip, and finally talk through (with example clips) how these forms were fused together in the classic Mike Bloomfield track “East-West,” one of the earliest examples of “raga rock.” Episodes would proceed in roughly chronological order, so that the listener could “hear” the evolution of music over time, as later episodes build on the stylistic evolutions described in past episodes.

3. Evolving Sounds: Relatedly, I’ve long wanted to research, compose, and record a many-hour continuous piece of music that recapitulates the entire history of “Western music” (which is better documented than other traditions). The piece would begin with sections composed in accordance with scholarly guesses about how prehistoric music might have sounded, eventually transition into the earliest styles from recorded history, then evolve into styles covered in e.g. Burkholder’s History of Western Music, up to the present day. This is a pretty obvious idea and I’m upset that nobody has attempted it yet.

4. Everything is Awesome and We’re All Going to Die: This book would start off like a more thorough and epistemically scrupulous version of the empirical sections from Enlightenment Now, and would then proceed to explain in detail why global catastrophic risk is nevertheless increasing over time via Moore’s Law of Mad Science, inescapable asymmetry in the difficulty of creation vs. destruction, inadequate equilibria, and related phenomena.

by Luke Muehlhauser |  Read more:

[ed. With respect to #3, see also: The King's Singers - Masterpiece (YouTube)]

Partisan Polarization

Exposure to opposing views on social media increases partisan polarization. It’s not true that if people read the other side they would appreciate or like them more. I think this is probably related to everyone giving up on convincing the other side and focusing on radicalizing the base instead. If people were trying to convince you, listening to them would make you more convinced; if people are trying to radicalize your enemies, listening to them will make you more concerned. And here’s an article about people trying to do this right.

via: Slate Star Codex

Image: Bojack Horseman

[ed. See also: The partisan makeup of different occupations. Note the consistent pattern where professions that manipulate the physical world are conservative and professions that manipulate ideas are liberal (in a way that doesn’t seem to depend entirely on skills or salary).]

Jackson Browne & David Lindley

How to Write About a Vanishing World

The losses on our human-dominated planet keep coming, and so, too, do the stories. These days, it’s not just species that are vanishing. Entire features of the earth are disappearing—thus, the latest batch of “witness-to” books, written by geologists.

Peter Wadhams, the author of “A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic” (Oxford), is the head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group, at the University of Cambridge. He first visited the polar north in 1970, when, as an undergraduate, he got a job on a Canadian research vessel, the Hudson, which was attempting to circumnavigate the Americas. Although the Hudson was built for travel through sea ice, on the last leg of the journey it got stuck in the Northwest Passage and had to be rescued by an icebreaker. Evidently, Wadhams enjoyed the experience—in the stiff-upper-lip tradition of British adventurers, he’s largely mum on the topic of emotion—because he returned to northern Canada a few years later to work on his Ph.D. This involved flying over the ice cap in a sort of aeronautical jalopy—a Second World War-era DC-4 with the cockpit bubble of a Sabre fighter jet welded to the fuselage. The flights left from Gander, and Wadhams recalls a bar in town, called the Flyers’ Club, where a band played topless.

At the time, Wadhams imagined himself part of a glaciological tradition stretching back to the Napoleonic Wars. The idea was to map the extent of the Arctic sea ice and then, basically, forget about it. (Many died trying.) The ice cap’s size varied, expanding in winter, when the polar darkness descended, and then contracting in summer. But this cycle, like the seasons themselves, was supposed to be unchanging. The assumption, Wadhams writes, was that “everything in the ocean is constant.”

In the nineteen-eighties, satellites replaced scientists eyeballing the Arctic from DC-4s. The satellite data revealed that the ice was shrinking. By this point, the earliest climate models had been assembled, using I.B.M. punch cards, and they predicted that global warming would be felt first and foremost at the poles. In 1990, Wadhams compared surveys of the sea ice north of Greenland that had been conducted from British submarines, using upward-looking sonar. The comparison showed that the ice cap, in addition to contracting, was thinning; during the previous decade, its thickness had declined by fifteen per cent.

By the end of the summer of 2007, the ice cap was about half the size it had been at the start of the satellite era, and the Arctic sea ice had entered what an American scientist, Mark Serreze, has dubbed its “death spiral.” Today, a decade deeper into the spiral, older Arctic sea ice has mostly melted away. What’s left, in large part, is first-year ice, which forms over the winter and, since it’s thinner, is that much more prone to melt the following spring. The most recent climate models predict that within a few decades the Arctic Ocean will be entirely ice-free in summer. Based on his own observations, Wadhams believes that the time frame is more like the next few years. “It is clear that the summer Arctic sea ice does not have long to live,” he writes.

For his part, Serreze, who directs the National Snow and Ice Data Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder, has also written a farewell to ice. In “Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North” (Princeton), he relates that when he first started out in polar research, in the early eighties, he was taken with the idea of global cooling. “Deep down I was hoping for an ice age,” he confesses.

As the satellite and sonar images began to pile up, Serreze continued to hold out that hope. Perhaps, he theorized, the ice cap was shrinking due to a natural cycle that would eventually reverse. Years passed, the ice continued to melt, and Serreze came to favor fire. “The weight of evidence turned me,” he observes. “And then I turned hard.” He gives the perennial sea ice until 2030 or so. “That the Arctic Ocean will become free of sea ice in late summer and early autumn is a given,” he writes.

Both Wadhams and Serreze anticipate the loss will have disastrous and, as it were, snowballing consequences. Sea ice reflects sunlight, while open water absorbs it, so melting ice leads to further warming, which leads to more melt, and so on. (This past winter, parts of the Arctic saw temperatures of up to forty-five degrees above normal, even as parts of the United States and Europe were being buried under snow; some scientists believe the two phenomena are related, though others note that the link is, at this point, unproved.) Arctic soils contain hundreds of billions of tons of carbon, in the form of frozen and only partially decomposed plants. As the region heats up, much of this carbon is likely to be released into the atmosphere, where it will trap more heat—another feedback loop. In the Arctic Ocean, vast stores of methane lie buried under frozen sediments. If these stores, too, are released, the resulting warming is likely to be catastrophic. “The risk of an Arctic seabed methane pulse is one of the greatest immediate risks facing the human race,” Wadhams writes.

“This is definitely disaster movie material” is how Serreze puts it.

by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Emiliano Ponzi
[ed. See also: What genuine, no-bullshit ambition on climate change would look like.]

Akira Asakura, Steps (Koza, Okinawa) 沖縄市, 2016

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Murakami is Terrible Now

There is no way to put this nicely: Haruki Murakami is terrible now.

I say this as one of the novelist's biggest fans. For years, I was that person, the one who would exclaim wait, you haven't read Murakami!? and proceed to hand over a list of what to read and in what order (start with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, don't neglect his short stories). But with the publication of his latest novel, Killing Commendatore, into English on Tuesday, I have to admit at last that Murakami is getting harder and harder to defend. At this point, it feels as if he is just filling in Murakami Bingo spaces at the neglect of actual engaging storytelling.

A perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Murakami is one of the most beloved writers in the world, with his work published in more than 50 languages. He is the only author in translation who can pack midnight release parties in the United States. In his native Japan, Killing Commendatore got an eye-popping first-run of 1.3 million copies last year. More than being known for, say, his prose style or his richly plotted narratives, Murakami is beloved for the genre he has created, his own particular take on magical realism, recognizable by tropes like pasta, cats, an oppressive sense of loneliness, and secret worlds that coexist in or beside our own.

It is a formula that has worked well for him for decades although after finishing Killing Commendatore this weekend, I couldn't help but look back at Murakami's last three novels and wonder ... were they even any good? While Killing Commendatore's predecessors, 1Q84 (published in English in 2011) and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (published in English in 2014), received generally positive reviews in the U.S., both were deeply flawed books: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is a vague probing of the fallout of a false rape allegation, more interested in the impact on the male victim than the motivations of his female friend, and 1Q84 is an unwieldy door-stopper in desperate need of an editor. Where was the depth of Wind-Up Bird? Or the concision of A Wild Sheep Chase?

Killing Commendatore is at least the best of Murakami's most recent novels — it is coherent and not outwardly offensive — although it still succumbs to the author's worst tendencies. Modeled very roughly after The Great Gatsby, the novel follows an unnamed portrait painter during the nine months he is living in the mountains while separated from his wife. Yet over the course of 700 pages, you come to deeply feel Killing Commendatore's length; passages of exposition are redundant, and the excruciatingly slow build to action makes you wonder about Murakami's strategy of not having "any plan at all" when he begins a new book. What's more, the tropes that served as delightful flavoring in his earlier works begin to feel practically meme-like in their appearances, almost like mechanical inclusions by the author. Of 19 spaces on Grant Snider's "Haruki Murakami Bingo" board, I counted 16 in reading Killing Commendatore, including "weird sex," "dried-up well," and "unusual name." By the time a "secret passageway" was mentioned, I was practically rolling my eyes.

While Murakami has never been known for being a brilliant prose writer, on a sentence-by-sentence level Killing Commendatore is a sadly unimpressive effort: "Look deep enough into any person and you will find something shining within," the narrator reflects, although not very deeply. The mysterious Gatsby-like neighbor Menshiki is always smiling "faintly." Murakami uses variations of the simile "like a cat" 12 different times. Certain turns of phrase indicate the author still has a unique eye he can turn on the world — a night is as hushed "as if I were at the bottom of a deep sea," clouds are "like some wandering spirits from the past ... in search of lost memories" — but too often mornings are "chilly," coffee "as black as a moonless night," and silence "too quiet." (...)

Without 1Q84 and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, Killing Commendatore might have just feel like a misstep in Murakami's career, a misguided effort to revisit the weird themes and images that helped make him a household name. But looking at the last decade of the author's career, it is hard to dismiss another terrible book as a fluke.

by Jeva Lange, The Week |  Read more:

Image: Knopf

[ed. I'd agree, although I actually enjoyed 1Q84 (except for all the Little People and Air Chyrsalis nonsense). I'd recommend Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84, and maybe Norwegian Wood. Everything else just seems repetitive (and the surrealism grating). See also: Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami review (The Guardian).]

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Naoko Matsubara, Egg hatching (2007)
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