Rolling Stones

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How Premium Mediocre Conquered Fashion

Last year the blogger Venkatesh Rao coined the term “premium mediocre.” He was referring to a segment of economic activity largely dreamed up by marketers to give the masses the illusion that they are consuming luxury, when in reality they were doing nothing of the sort. Some examples of what is proving to be a highly profitable sector — craft beer, artisanal pizza, $25 “signature” burgers, and my personal favourite, premium economy on domestic flights.

The idea is simple — by dressing up something mediocre as premium with a few extra touches, real and imagined, companies play on people’s aspirational drive to give them the illusion that they are purchasing into something elevated. The marketing-speak created around the premium mediocre sector uses terms like “preferred,” “signature” and “collection” — best used piled on top of each other to make, say, “signature collection.” Here, the paradox of providing an air of exclusivity without excluding anyone is key.

This is an old story in fashion, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Starbucks and Delta executives have taken a page out of fashion’s playbook. What’s relatively new is how pervasive premium mediocre fashion has become. Take a look around, and it won’t be hard for you to spot premium mediocre fashion virtually everywhere — from Uniqlo cashmere (that doesn’t feel like cashmere at all) to Balenciaga baseball hats and Gucci headbands, from logoed Burberry keychains to pretty much anything at the fragrance counter in Bloomingdale’s. (...)

Premium mediocre extends to the higher echelons of fashion as well, largely at its entry-level product range. Premium mediocre is the Prada nylon backpack, the Louis Vuitton bag in coated canvas, the $375 Celine card holder. This segment of luxury fashion has been doing extremely well, because the margins in the premium mediocre segment are uncommonly high. As far as 2015, according to Euromonitor International, luxury small leather goods accounted for $5.7 billion in sales, projected to grow to $7.5 billion by 2020. On Lyst.com, the fashion shopping aggregator, plastic sandals by Givenchy and Gucci routinely top the most sought-after product category.

Premium mediocre in fashion is not a new phenomenon. During the ‘80s some Parisian couturiers licensed their name to mass market manufacturers. All of a sudden office workers could buy fifty-dollar Pierre Cardin button-up shirts. What followed was brand dilution and the perception that those names were no longer associated with luxury. During the ‘90s licensing was broadly reigned in and the image of those luxury houses had to be rebuilt.

What’s different this time around? Several things, such as the culture of entitlement of the millennial generation (and everyone else), its impact on consuming experiences rather than products, democratisation of fashion, and the rise of the curated life on social media. (...)

The impact on shopping as an experience also plays well into premium mediocre. Smart stores know this. You go to Dover Street Market to buy a Comme des Garçons PLAY t-shirt as much, if not more, for the experience as for the t-shirt itself. The new 10 Corso Como store in New York feels more like a gift shop with a high-end boutique attached to it. The first half of its space is devoted to 10 Corso Como merch, where you can buy a $5 Bic lighter ($1 at your local convenience store, but without the logo).

You can also buy a bunch of coffee table books that you could get in your local bookstore or on Amazon, only on Amazon you won’t get a nice shopping bag to go with it. At Gucci Garden in Florence, nominally a museum, but really a show space attached to a gift store and a restaurant, you can buy a $20 box of matches and a $90 box of pencils with the Gucci logo on it.

The logo is key, because in the age of Instagram, where people curate their lives in two dimensions on a small screen, the logo is more important than the product itself. And the best part about consuming premium mediocre today is that no one will scoff, because it’s no longer in good taste for the rich to turn their noses up at the rest of us.

by Eugene Rabkin, BoF | Read more:
Image: Getty

PG&E Files For Bankruptcy Protection With $50 Billion In Debt

In what's expected to be one of the most complicated bankruptcies in recent memory thanks to the involvement of indignant state and federal regulators, activist shareholders, worried bond holders and angry fire victims, PG&E has officially filed for bankruptcy.

The Wall Street Journal reported that as we previewed last night, the troubled utility which serves 16 million California customers, filed for bankruptcy early Tuesday, claiming more than $50 billion in debt. Facing what some analysts estimate could be some $27 billion in fines relating to the role of malfunctioning equipment in causing wildfires, the bankruptcy process is expected to be a protracted mess as state and federal regulators try to figure out the best plan for holding the country's largest utility accountable. When it's all said and done, the outcome is expected to have wide-ranging implications for utility customers, fire victims, shareholders and wholesale power providers.

In the filing, the utility revealed that it's facing some 750 complaints on behalf of 5,600 fire victims, with fire-related liabilities amount to some $30 billion.

Though PG&E was cleared last week of involvement in the 2017 Tubbs fire that tore through the state's wine country, its equipment has been implicated in 18 other wildfires that burned nearly 200,000 acres, destroyed 3,256 buildings and homes and killed 22 people during the 2017 wildfire season. And investigators are still working to figure out whether PG&E's equipment played a role in starting November's Camp Fire, which killed 86 people, making it the deadliest fire in state history. The company's shares soared on the news that it would be freed from liability in the Tubbs fire, which reduced its potential liabilities by as much as $11 billion.

While it's true that utilities rarely declare bankruptcy because of state guarantees, California law allows utilities to be held responsible for fires caused by their equipment, even if the company wasn't negligent. PG&E previously declared bankruptcy back in 2001 thanks to the California energy crisis.

One thing is clear: the bankruptcy is bad news for Californians, who could face double-digit increases in their energy bills despite already paying some of the highest rates in the country. (...)

"There are some bankruptcy cases that get finished very quickly," said Melissa Jacoby, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "This is just not one of those cases."

Some state officials have publicly mulled a state-sponsored plan to break up the utility, the country's largest. At one point, lawmakers had considered a plan to help PG&E pass on fire-related liabilities to its customers, but reluctance to be seen as bailing out the utility ultimately killed that plan and led to PG&E trying - and failing - to call lawmakers' bluff.

by Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Last sentence is the kicker.]

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The Tao of Wi-Fi

In the fall of 2009, Alexandra Janelli, an environmental consultant, was sitting in a bar on the Lower East Side, fiddling with her iPhone. A window popped up asking if she’d like to join a wireless network called Alcoholics Shut In. “I was, like, well, that’s really odd,” Janelli recalled recently. “I’m not a huge techie, but I thought to myself, There must be other funny names out there.”

Janelli started taking long walks around Manhattan with her dog, Finnley, a miniature Australian shepherd. (Her thirty-pound cat, after whom her own network, Don Gato, was named, stayed home.) In every neighborhood, she collected wireless names—a city dweller’s version of catching butterflies. The specimens were strange and wonderful. Janelli started a Web site, wtfwifi.com. “The more I started looking at it, the more I realized that it was really just a new form of media that people were using to express themselves,” she said. You used to send a pigeon, or post a note in the vestibule of your apartment building. Now you come up with an S.S.I.D.

Janelli calls herself a “WiFi detective,” stalking the fragmentary consciousness of the city. “People are taking it to the next level in terms of being able to be really cryptic and send a message,” she said. Her site is a treasury of passive-aggressive messages to neighbors (Stop Cooking Indian!!!), self-promotion (FutureLawyersofCharlieSheen), flirtation (*~*~cOuGaRviLLe~*~*), and frustration (We can hear you having sex). Some of the names are poetry (Dumpling Manor, More Cowbell). Some of them are mere description (taco breath 2). Janelli says that wireless names can act as welcome mats, luring their beholder into a store or a discussion, or as gargoyles, patrolling a patch of virtual turf. A certain genre of befuddling names are meant to send a wireless poacher scrambling to Google, and then to Urban Dictionary, to learn something he wishes he hadn’t. “You also find really creepy ones, like I Eat Babies,” Janelli said. “There’s weird stuff. I could see an amazing ‘Law & Order’ episode coming from this.”

Like other forms of self-expression, wireless names are subject to trends. For a few months last year, Janelli kept seeing Pretty Fly for a WiFi; then it was FBI Surveillance Van. Like architecture and restaurants, wireless names suggest the character of a neighborhood. “You cruise through all the streets, and there are certainly some areas that are much more affluent, I guess, in WiFi names,” Janelli said. “The Lower East Side has funny ones”—for example, DieTrustFundersDie—“as opposed to uptown, where it will be much more like Robinson Family. You also get, like, Empty Sighs and Wine,” evoking “the really lonely person on the Upper West Side.” Janelli’s favorite name is one that she found in 2009, in the financial district: fat man on 7fl is douche. “There aren’t that many residential buildings around,” she said. “You could probably narrow down who it is.”

by Lauren Collins, New Yorker |  Read more:
Image: Sila Tiptanatoranin / Alamy

Emotional Support Alligator

A Pennsylvania man says his emotional support alligator helps him deal with his depression.

Joie Henney, 65, said his registered emotional support animal named Wally likes to snuggle and give hugs, despite being a 5-foot-long alligator. The York Haven man said he received approval from his doctor to use Wally as his emotional support animal after not wanting to go on medication for depression, he told Philly.com .

“I had Wally, and when I came home and was around him, it was all OK,” he said. “My doctor knew about Wally and figured it works, so why not?”

Wally was rescued from outside Orlando at 14 months old and is still growing; Henney said Wally could be 16 feet long one day. Henney says Wally eats chicken wings and shares an indoor plastic pond with a smaller rescue alligator named Scrappy.

Wally, who turns 4 this year, is a big teddy bear, in Henney’s words. The cold-blooded reptile likes to rest his snout on Henney’s, and “he likes to give hugs,” he said.

by Associated Press |  Read more:

Image: Ty Lohr

The Feud That Birthed the Electric Guitar

“More circuitry was necessary.”

How is it that in a book as rich in description, as full of imagist sound-summonings, spot-on human characterizations, and erotic paeans to the bodies of guitars as Ian S. Port’s The Birth of Loud, this rather bald little line should be my favorite? Two reasons, I think.

First, it comes at a mythic moment in the story. It’s 1966, and Jimi Hendrix, newly arrived in London, is looking for a heavier sound. The universe, in other words, is tensing up for another leap in self-awareness; dimensions of noise are about to disclose themselves. Hendrix already has some of the required equipment. He’s got his Fender Stratocaster (quite atypical—most of his fellow guitar heroes like the Gibson Les Paul); he’s got his 100-watt Marshall amplifier; and he’s got his own supple and godlike relationship with electricity. He’s got power. But he wants more; he wants, as Port puts it, “nuclear distortion.” To achieve that, somebody—some wizard/boffin/mad professor—is going to have to invent something. More circuitry is necessary.

Second, in these four words is contained, philosophically, the whole book. Les Paul, born in 1915, was an auteur, a pop star, a musical innovator, and an unstoppable tinkerer who could hear sounds just beyond the rim of the technically possible. Leo Fender, born in 1909, was a low-key workshop sorcerer who ate a can of spaghetti for lunch every day and would scramble onstage with a screwdriver, while the musicians were playing, to fiddle with the gear he had built for them. Opposites in style and temperament, both men had the Promethean itch; both men sought, in the name of music, to master the strange and volatile element of loudness. And it led them both in the same direction—toward the creation of the solid-bodied electric guitar. More circuitry was always necessary.

At the beginning they were fellow voyagers, companions in obsession. Port conjures the scene at Les Paul’s Hollywood garage in the late 1940s, where Paul, Fender, and like-minded gearheads would mingle with a seasoned crew of country-and-western sidemen, swapping tips and stories. “None could have foreseen the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll, but it was clear that music was growing louder and more driving, challenging the limits of acoustic instruments … There was a sense among these men that the potential for electric amplification in music hadn’t yet been realized, that there was still a lot of power waiting to be harnessed, incredible new tools waiting to be built.” Later they became competitors and rivals in the legend, with different versions of the origin story.

by James Parker, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: AFP/Getty

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Linda Ronstadt/Nelson Riddle Orchestra

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[ed. See also: What's New and Lover Man]

When the Top U.S. Tax Rate was 70 Percent—or Higher

This post has a simple purpose: to remind people of the historical realities of tax rates in the United States. It’s mainly setup for the chart you’ll see a few paragraphs below.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computers, was asked about the idea of raising the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent. (It’s now 37 percent.)

He said—to laughs—that from his personal perspective it would be a bad idea. But he also thought it would be bad for the country’s growth. When the moderator, Heather Long of the Washington Post, asked him to explain why, Dell said, “Name a country where that’s worked. Ever.”

You can see the exchange in a CNN video here.

Sitting on the same panel was the economist Erik Brynjolfsson, of MIT, who spoke up immediately to say: actually there is such a country. It is the United States, through most of its post-World War II expansion.

by James Fallows, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Tax Policy Center

Patrick Modiano Acceptance Speech: Nobel Prize in Literature

I would just like to tell you how lucky I am to be here and how moved I am with the honor you have bestowed on me by awarding me this Nobel Prize in Literature.

This is the first time I have to give a speech to so many people and I am apprehensive about it. One would be tempted to believe that for a writer, it is natural and easy to engage in this exercise. But a writer - or at least a novelist - often has difficult relationships with speech. And if one remembers this academic distinction between the written and the oral, a novelist is more gifted for the written than the oral. He has the habit of keeping quiet and if he wants to penetrate an atmosphere, he must blend in with the crowd. He listens to the conversations without seeming to, and if he intervenes in them, it is always to ask a few discreet questions to better understand the women and men around him. He has a hesitant speech, because of his habit of scratching his writings.

Of course, after multiple erasures, his style may seem limpid. But when he speaks, he no longer has the resource to correct his hesitations. And I belong to a generation where children were not allowed to speak, except on rare occasions and if they asked permission. But we did not listen to them and often they were cut off. This explains the difficulty of speech of some of us, sometimes hesitant, sometimes too fast, as if they feared every moment to be interrupted. Hence, no doubt, this desire to write that took me, like many others, out of childhood. You hope the adults will read you. They will be obliged to listen to you without interrupting you and they will know once and for all what you have on your heart.

The announcement of this prize seemed unreal and I was eager to know why you had chosen me. That day, I think I have never felt so strongly how a novelist is blind to his own books and how much readers know more than he does about what he wrote. A novelist can never be his reader, except to correct mistakes in his manuscript, repetitions, or to delete one paragraph too much. He has only a confused and partial representation of his books, like a painter busy making a mural on the ceiling and who, lying on a scaffolding, works in the details, too closely, without an overall vision.

Curious lonely activity than writing. You go through moments of discouragement when you write the first pages of a novel. You have every day the impression of going wrong. And then, the temptation is great to go back and engage in another way. We must not succumb to this temptation but follow the same path. It's a bit like driving a car, at night, in the winter and riding on the ice, without any visibility. You do not have a choice, you can not go back, you have to keep going, telling yourself that the road will eventually be more stable and that the fog will dissipate.

On the verge of completing a book, it seems to you that he is beginning to break away from you and that he is already breathing the air of freedom, like children, in the classroom, on the eve of the summer holidays. They are distracted and noisy and do not listen to their teacher anymore. I would even say that when you write the last paragraphs, the book shows you some hostility in its haste to free yourself from you. And he leaves you scarcely have you drawn the last word. It's over, he does not need you anymore, he's already forgotten you. It is the readers now who will reveal it to himself. You feel at that moment a great emptiness and the feeling of having been abandoned. And also a kind of dissatisfaction because of this link between the book and you, which was decided too fast. This dissatisfaction and feeling of something uncompleted pushes you to write the next book to restore balance, without you ever reaching it. As the years go by, the books follow each other and the readers will speak of a "work". But you will have the feeling that it was only a long flight forward.

Yes, the reader knows more about a book than its author himself. It happens, between a novel and its reader, a phenomenon similar to that of the development of photos, as it was practiced before the digital era. At the time of its drawing in the dark room, the photo was gradually becoming visible. As one moves forward in reading a novel, the same chemical process unfolds. But for there to be such an agreement between the author and his reader, it is necessary that the novelist never force his reader - in the sense that a singer is said to force his voice - but the imperceptibly and leaves a sufficient margin for the book to permeate it little by little, and that by an art that looks like acupuncture where it is enough to prick the needle in a very precise and the flow is spread in the the nervous system.

This intimate and complementary relationship between the novelist and his reader, I think we find the equivalent in the musical field. I always thought that writing was close to music but much less pure than this and I always envied musicians who seemed to me to practice an art superior to the novel - and the poets, who are closer to the musicians as novelists. I started to write poems in my childhood and it is without doubt thanks to that that I understood better the reflection that I read somewhere: "It is with bad poets that one makes of "And then, as far as music is concerned, it's often a novelist's job to train all people, landscapes, the streets he could observe in a musical score where we find the same melodic fragments from one book to another, but a musical score that seems imperfect to him. There will be, in the novelist, the regret of not having been a pure musician and not having composed "The Nocturnes" of Chopin.

The lack of lucidity and critical distance of a novelist vis-à-vis all of his own books is also a phenomenon that I noticed in my case and in that of many others: each new book at the time of writing, erases the previous one to the point that I have the impression of having forgotten it. I thought I wrote them one after the other in a discontinuous way, with successive mistakes, but often the same faces, the same names, the same places, the same sentences come back from one to the other, like the patterns of a tapestry woven into a half-sleep. A half-sleep or a waking dream. A novelist is often a somnambulist, so much he is penetrated by what he has to write, and one may fear that he will be crushed when he crosses a street. (...)

It also happens that a writer of the twenty-first century feels, at times, prisoner of his time and that the reading of the great novelists of the nineteenth century - Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky - inspires him a certain nostalgia. At that time, time was running slower than today, and this slowness was in keeping with the novelist's work because he could concentrate his energy and attention better. Since then, time has accelerated and moved by jerks, which explains the difference between the great Romanesque massifs of the past, the architectures of cathedrals, and the discontinuous and fragmented works of today.

In this perspective, I belong to an intermediate generation and I would be curious to know how the following generations that are born with the internet, the laptop, emails and tweets will express by literature this world to which everyone is "connected" in permanence and where "social networks" begin the part of intimacy and secrecy that was still our good until recently - the secret that gave depth to people and could be a great novelistic theme. But I want to remain optimistic about the future of literature and I am convinced that the writers of the future will take over as each generation has since Homer ...

And, moreover, a writer, like any other artist, may be so closely bound to his time that he can not escape it and that the only air he breathes is what is called "The air of the times", he always expresses something timeless in his works. In the staging of Racine's or Shakespeare's plays, it does not matter whether the characters are dressed in antique style or that a director wants to dress them in bluejeans and leather jackets. These are unimportant details. We forget, while reading Tolstoy, that Anna Karenina wears dresses of 1870 as she is close to us after a century and a half. And then some writers, like Edgar Poe, Melville or Stendhal, are better understood two hundred years after their death than by those who were their contemporaries. (...)

It is the role of the poet and the novelist, and also of the painter, to unveil this mystery and this phosphorescence which are at the bottom of each person. I think of my distant cousin, the painter Amedeo Modigliani whose most moving paintings are those where he chose as models anonymous, children and street girls, maids, small farmers, young apprentices. He has painted them with a sharp line reminiscent of the great Tuscan tradition, that of Botticelli and the Sienese painters of Quattrocento. He gave them - or rather he revealed - all the grace and nobility that was in them in their humble appearance.

The work of the novelist must go in that direction. His imagination, far from distorting reality, must penetrate deeply and reveal this reality to itself, with the power of infrared and ultraviolet to detect what is hidden behind appearances. And I would not be far from believing that in the best case the novelist is a kind of seer and even a visionary. And also a seismograph, ready to record the most imperceptible movements.

by Patrick Modiano, LeMonde |  Read more:

Image: Nicola Lo Calzo for The New York Times via

Antonio Carlos Jobim

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: The Rolling Stone Interview

When Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2006, he had no idea he and his colleagues were creating what would become a universally accessible, global, seamless, 24/7 platform for tens of thousands of people to yell at him. In any case, back then, billionaire tech execs were still — at least in some circles — figures of admiration, rather than a locus of fear and suspicion for many on the left and right alike. Social media has succeeded all too well in its disruptive mission, reshaping societies in ways they’re still struggling to understand. That leaves the likes of Dorsey, who’s been the CEO of Twitter since 2015 (after an abortive initial run from 2006 to 2008), grappling, Sorcerer’s Apprentice-style, with an ever-growing slate of issues of daunting complexity.

In two interview sessions — one over dinner (fried chicken, oysters; the day’s only meal on his intermittent fasting regimen) at New York’s Blue Ribbon Brasserie, where he brought his own bottle of organic, low-alcohol wine; the other in a glass-doored conference room in Twitter’s bustling San Francisco headquarters — Dorsey addressed those challenges, and talked about his life, work, career and ideas. The night of the first conversation, he was headed for the airport to kick off a three-week trip to India and Myanmar. His decision to spend time at a grueling silent-meditation retreat in the latter country — where the military is perpetrating atrocities against minority Rohingya Muslims — sparked a significant backlash. Addressing that subject in our second meeting was the only time an ounce of irritation broke through his otherwise formidably tranquil demeanor.

He is, especially judged against certain Silicon Valley stereotypes, highly personable; he makes (sometimes very intense) eye contact, laughs easily, has excellent manners. Dorsey, 42, is a serious music fan (the Twitter masses were unimpressed when he designated Kendrick Lamar his “favorite poet”), who is at his core a digital aesthete, à la Steve Jobs. He even followed Jobs’ exile-and-return career path. After Dorsey was cast out of Twitter in 2008, he co-founded Square, the now-multibillion-dollar mobile-payment company (it’s the reason you can use a credit card at your local food cart) — and his old company eventually pulled him back in. He’s now CEO of both.

In San Francisco, he wore black jeans, running sandals that facilitate his daily five-mile walk to work, and a hooded cashmere sweater that he notes is more than three years old. His nose ring and voluminous facial hair — which prompted a Republican congressman to inform him last year that he doesn’t look like a CEO — make more sense in light of his peripatetic pre-Twitter life, in which he trained as a massage therapist, studied botanical illustration and considered a career in fashion design. What follows is an edited and condensed version of our conversations. (...)

The model in Silicon Valley for a long time was “we are a neutral platform.” It’s obviously not quite the case anymore. So if it’s not a platform, what is it?

People see Twitter as a public square, and therefore they have expectations that they would have of a public square. Washington Square Park, for instance — I just had an hour and a half there, today. I sat, and I did my phone calls, and I watched people. There’s a lot going on in Washington Square Park. There’s tourists, students, filmmakers, musicians, street hustlers, weed dealers, chess players. And there’s people talking out in the open. The park itself is completely neutral to whatever happens on top of it. But if you stop there, you don’t realize what I believe the park actually is. It does come with certain expectations of freedom of expression, but everyone is watching one another. So if someone gets up on a little soapbox, with a megaphone, and starts yelling, a crowd comes around them and listens. That person can also yell across the park and say, “Hey, you idiot, yeah, you, I’m talking to you, come over here.” Then it’s really harassing behavior and people notice that, and they’re like, “Hey, man, don’t do that. Stop.” And then there’s the park police as well, who maintain the standard of decency within the park.

Dealing with harassment seems easy compared with grappling with the idea of false information. Sometimes it seems like your approach is “If there’s false information, the nature of Twitter is such that we count on the real information to overcome it.” Is that correct?

Well, I think it happens, but it’s not something that we should make a model. It can unfold that way, but that doesn’t mean we can rely upon it. An example, there was this tweet, before the [2016] elections. Someone tweeted out an image of a code that supposedly allowed you to register to vote. It was misinformation. So the way that this plays out on Twitter is that the tweets calling it out as false got more impressions than the original. More people saw the tweets calling it out as false than saw the original tweet.

What do you conclude from that?

We could just sit back and be neutral and passive, like, “OK, we’re good,” because the thing self-corrects. But instead we should learn what that means and how we can make more of those things happen. We can’t be arbiters of truth. I think that would be dangerous for anyone to want us to be. So what can we do? What we’re deciding to do is [focus on] misleading information, which intends to lead someone in a particular direction, intends them to take a particular action. The voter-suppression tweet was certainly misinformation, but more dangerously it was misleading people to take an action that would harm society and maybe themselves. I don’t think we should just say, “The network takes care of itself.” We need to say, “How do we not determine true or false, but how do we determine is it misleading?” Then, how do we stop the dissemination of misleading information before it reaches significant exposure? (...)

Do you yourself have any degree of Twitter addiction? Do you compulsively check Twitter the way many of the rest of us do?

In context, I do. During events, I do. During election night it was nonstop, during a basketball game it’s nonstop. That’s when I have the recent-tweets feature on; all the other time I have the most-relevant tweets on. I know this is gonna sound way out there, because we’re nowhere near what I’m about to say, but when I close the app, I want to have learned something new. We’re just so far off. If I asked anyone in this restaurant, “After closing Twitter, did you learn anything?” Most of them are gonna say no, or they learned something they already knew. Ultimately, I want every single person that uses Twitter to not spend hours, or days, or minutes consuming content, but [instead] to be notified when there’s something that potentially they could learn from, and, to the highest degree, that they’d want to participate in a conversation around it. That, to me, would contribute to the health aspect. Like, I’d walk away from Twitter feeling empowered, I’d feel more informed, I’d feel happy. Right now, I just feel overwhelmed, because I don’t think I’m learning anything new, ultimately.

There’s obviously been an overall shift from a techno-optimism to a techno-pessimism. What’s your case for Twitter, in particular, as an overall force for good?

I think it’s a net positive that everyone has more potential to have a voice. Because it benefits those who traditionally didn’t the most. The thing I’m most proud of Twitter for is that it has been a vehicle for historically marginalized groups to share their story. (...)

How are you not in a constant state of agitation that something terrible is going to trend, or that a war or some other calamity is going to start over a tweet?

We have a global team. And I trust them to make decisions. And I trust them to make decisions without me having to interject or oversee them at all. And I trust that we have a learning mindset. That we’re gonna do retros on what we fucked up. And we’re going to learn from that. And we’re not going to repeat the same mistakes. So in terms of what happens in the platform, I am concerned. I am a citizen in this world. I feel the weight of how our tool is used in society and how it’s been used for good and how it’s used for stuff I’m not proud of.

For instance?

Like creating bubbles and echo chambers. I’m not proud of that. Like, we definitely help divide people. We definitely create isolation. We definitely make it easy for people to confirm their own bias. We’ve only given them one tool, which is follow an account that will 90 percent confirm whatever bias you have. And it doesn’t allow them to seek other perspectives. It contributes to tribalism. It contributes to nationalism. And it’s counter to what we need the world to consider, which is, how do we solve climate change? There’s no country anywhere on the planet that’s gonna solve it alone. How do we solve AI taking all of our jobs or nuclear war? These are global conversations, and it’s gotta be pointed in that direction. Right now it’s pointed inward. (...)

Based on the time you spent with him, would you be able to lay out your philosophical differences with someone like Mark Zuckerberg? Twitter and Facebook have approached the world in different ways.

I would love to. I just don’t know what his philosophies are. I don’t know what their purpose is.

Facebook’s purpose?

Mm-hmm. I know what they say, but I don’t know. I see Mark as a very, very smart businessman. He will excel to gain as much market share as possible.

If you were CEO of Facebook instead, would you know what to do with them?

No. I’ve got enough on my plate. I think the intention of a lot of people at the company is right. If the philosophy is helping the world realize that we’re all facing the same problems. We should end this distraction of nationalism. That is a promise of the internet. I would rather us be proactive around solving these problems together than reactive. If that’s the goal and that’s the stated intention, then I would know a few things to do.

What was your most memorable encounter with Zuckerberg?

Well, there was a year when he was only eating what he was killing. He made goat for me for dinner. He killed the goat.

In front of you?

No. He killed it before. I guess he kills it. He kills it with a laser gun and then the knife. Then they send it to the butcher.

A . . . laser gun?

I don’t know. A stun gun. They stun it, and then he knifed it. Then they send it to a butcher. Evidently in Palo Alto there’s a rule or regulation that you can have six livestock on any lot of land, so he had six goats at the time. I go, “We’re eating the goat you killed?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Have you eaten goat before?” He’s like, “Yeah, I love it.” I’m like, “What else are we having?” “Salad.” I said, “Where is the goat?” “It’s in the oven.” Then we waited for about 30 minutes. He’s like, “I think it’s done now.” We go in the dining room. He puts the goat down. It was cold. That was memorable. I don’t know if it went back in the oven. I just ate my salad.

It’s hard to find a metaphor in that.

I don’t know what you’re going to do with that, but hopefully that’s not the headline. Revenge is a dish best served warm. Or cold.

by Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Illustration by Jimmy Turrell. Photograph used in illustration by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

We May Finally Know What Causes Alzheimer’s

If you bled when you brushed your teeth this morning, you might want to get that seen to. We may finally have found the long-elusive cause of Alzheimer’s disease: Porphyromonas gingivalis, the key bacteria in chronic gum disease.

That’s bad, as gum disease affects around a third of all people. But the good news is that a drug that blocks the main toxins of P. gingivalis is entering major clinical trials this year, and research published today shows it might stop and even reverse Alzheimer’s. There could even be a vaccine.

Alzheimer’s is one of the biggest mysteries in medicine. As populations have aged, dementia has skyrocketed to become the fifth biggest cause of death worldwide. Alzheimer’s constitutes some 70 per cent of these cases and yet, we don’t know what causes it.

Bacteria in the brain

The disease often involves the accumulation of proteins called amyloid and tau in the brain, and the leading hypothesis has been that the disease arises from defective control of these two proteins.

But research in recent years has revealed that people can have amyloid plaques without having dementia. So many efforts to treat Alzheimer’s by moderating these proteins have failed that the hypothesis has been seriously questioned.

However evidence has been growing that the function of amyloid proteins may be as a defence against bacteria, leading to a spate of recent studies looking at bacteria in Alzheimer’s, particularly those that cause gum disease, which is known to be a major risk factor for the condition.

Bacteria involved in gum disease and other illnesses have been found after death in the brains of people who had Alzheimer’s, but until now, it hasn’t been clear whether these bacteria caused the disease or simply got in via brain damage caused by the condition.

Gum disease link

Multiple research teams have been investigating P. gingivalis, and have so far found that it invades and inflames brain regions affected by Alzheimer’s; that gum infections can worsen symptoms in mice genetically engineered to have Alzheimer’s; and that it can cause Alzheimer’s-like brain inflammation, neural damage, and amyloid plaques in healthy mice.

“When science converges from multiple independent laboratories like this, it is very compelling,” says Casey Lynch of Cortexyme, a pharmaceutical firm in San Francisco, California.

In the new study, Cortexyme have now reported finding the toxic enzymes – called gingipains – that P. gingivalis uses to feed on human tissue in 96 per cent of the 54 Alzheimer’s brain samples they looked at, and found the bacteria themselves in all three Alzheimer’s brains whose DNA they examined.

“This is the first report showing P. gingivalis DNA in human brains, and the associated gingipains, co-lococalising with plaques,” says Sim Singhrao, of the University of Central Lancashire, UK. Her team previously found that P. gingivalis actively invades the brains of mice with gum infections. She adds that the new study is also the first to show that gingipains slice up tau protein in ways that could allow it to kill neurons, causing dementia.

The bacteria and its enzymes were found at higher levels in those who had experienced worse cognitive decline, and had more amyloid and tau accumulations. The team also found the bacteria in the spinal fluid of living people with Alzheimer’s, suggesting that this technique may provide a long-sought after method of diagnosing the disease.

When the team gave P. gingivalis gum disease to mice, it led to brain infection, amyloid production, tangles of tau protein, and neural damage in the regions and nerves normally affected by Alzheimer’s.

Cortexyme had previously developed molecules that block gingipains. Giving some of these to mice reduced their infections, halted amyloid production, lowered brain inflammation and even rescued damaged neurons.

by Debora MacKenzie, New Scientist | Read more:
Image: A. Dowsett/Public Health England

No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime

No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime (The Atlantic)

At first glance, the hagfish—a sinuous, tubular animal with pink-grey skin and a paddle-shaped tail—looks very much like an eel. Naturalists can tell the two apart because hagfish, unlike other fish, lack backbones (and, also, jaws). For everyone else, there’s an even easier method. “Look at the hand holding the fish,” the marine biologist Andrew Thaler once noted. “Is it completely covered in slime? Then, it’s a hagfish.”

via:

[ed. See also: The name is hagfish but you can call it a ‘slime eel’: Meet a fledgling Alaska fishery (ADN).]

Why Are Glasses So Expensive?

It’s a question I get asked frequently, most recently by a colleague who was shocked to find that his new pair of prescription eyeglasses cost about $800.

Why are these things so damn expensive?

The answer: Because no one is doing anything to prevent a near-monopolistic, $100-billion industry from shamelessly abusing its market power.

Prescription eyewear represents perhaps the single biggest mass-market consumer ripoff to be found.

The stats tell the whole story.

• The Vision Council, an optical industry trade group, estimates that about three-quarters of U.S. adults use some sort of vision correction. About two-thirds of that number wear eyeglasses.
• That’s roughly 126 million people, which represents some pretty significant economies of scale.
• The average cost of a pair of frames is $231, according to VSP, the leading provider of employer eye care benefits.
• The average cost of a pair of single-vision lenses is $112. Progressive, no-line lenses can run twice that amount.
• The true cost of a pair of acetate frames — three pieces of plastic and some bits of metal — is as low as $10, according to some estimates. Check out the prices of Chinese designer knockoffs available online.
• Lenses require precision work, but they are almost entirely made of plastic and almost all production is automated.

The bottom line: You’re paying a markup on glasses that would make a luxury car dealer blush, with retail costs from start to finish bearing no relation to reality. (...)

I reached out to the Vision Council for an industry perspective on pricing. The group describes itself as “a nonprofit organization serving as a global voice for eyewear and eyecare.”

But after receiving my email asking why glasses cost so much, Kelly Barry, a spokeswoman for the Vision Council, said the group “is unable to participate in this story at this time.”

I asked why. She said the Vision Council, a global voice for eyewear and eyecare, prefers to focus on “health and fashion trend messaging.”

And because it represents so many different manufacturers and brands, she said, it’s difficult for the association “to make any comments on pricing.”

Which is to say, don’t worry your pretty head.

What the Vision Council probably didn’t want to get into is the fact that for years a single company, Luxottica, has controlled much of the eyewear market. If you wear designer glasses, there’s a very good chance you’re wearing Luxottica frames.

Its owned and licensed brands include Armani, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Polo Ralph Lauren, Ray-Ban, Tiffany, Valentino, Vogue and Versace.

Italy’s Luxottica also runs EyeMed Vision Care, LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Sunglass Hut and Target Optical.

Just pause to appreciate the lengthy shadow this one company casts over the vision care market. You go into a LensCrafters retail outlet, where the salesperson shows you Luxottica frames under various names, and then the company pays itself when you use your EyeMed insurance.

A very sweet deal.

by David Lazarus, LA Times |  Read more:

Image: Getty
[ed. This is not exactly new news.]

Goodbye Big Five

Week 1: Amazon

Apparently, I am a masochist.

I am on a mission to live without the tech giants—to discover whether such a thing is even possible. Not just through sheer willpower but technologically, with the use of a custom-built tool that would literally prevent my devices from accessing these companies, and them from accessing me and my data.

I start the experiment by eliminating the company I thought would be most challenging: the Everything Store.

Like millions of other Americans, we use a lot of Amazon products in our house. We have an Echo, an Echo Dot, two Kindles, two Amazon Prime Chase credit cards, Amazon Prime Video on our TV, and two Prime accounts. (Note to self: Why are my husband and I each paying Amazon $119/year?)

So, suffice to say, Amazon is getting a good chunk of my money and a lot of my data. I alone average about $3,000 a year in purchases on Amazon.com. I’ve become such a loyal shopper that I barely know where else to go online to buy things. It’s the first place I head when I need something, anything—sheets, diapers, toilet paper, a Halloween costume, Bluetooth headphones, roulette cufflinks for a friend who likes to gamble. Basically, anytime I need a random material object, I open up the Amazon app on my phone.

Yes, fuck, I have Amazon’s app on my phone. I’m that addicted to this company. And I’m not alone: Amazon reportedly controls 50 percent of online commerce, which means half of all purchases made online in America, which is obscene.

Amazon is not just an online store—that’s not even the hardest thing to cut out of my life. Its global empire also includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), the vast server network that provides the backbone for much of the internet, as well as Twitch.tv, the broadcasting behemoth that is the backbone of the online gaming industry, and Whole Foods, the organic backbone of the yuppie diet.

Keeping myself from walking into a Whole Foods is easy enough, but I also want to stop using any of Amazon’s digital services, from Amazon.com (and its damn app) to any other websites or apps that use AWS to host their content. To do that, I enlist the help of a technologist, Dhruv Mehrotra, who built me a custom VPN through which to route my internet requests. The VPN blocks any traffic to or from an IP address controlled by Amazon. I connect my computers and my phone to the VPN at all times, as well as all the connected devices in my home; it’s supposed to weed out every single digital thing that Amazon touches.

Ultimately, though, we found Amazon was too huge to conquer.

AWS is the internet’s largest cloud provider, generating 0ver $17 billion in revenue last year. Though Amazon makes much more in gross sales—over $100 billion—from its retail business, if you scrutinize its earnings reports, you’ll see that the majority of its profits come from AWS. Tech is where the money is, baby.

Launched in 2006, AWS has taken over vast swaths of the internet. My VPN winds up blocking over 23 million IP addresses controlled by Amazon, resulting in various unexpected casualties, from Motherboard and Fortune to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s website. (Government agencies love AWS, which is likely why Amazon, soon to be a corporate Cerberus with three “headquarters,” chose Arlington, Virginia, in the D.C. suburbs, as one of them.) Many of the smartphone apps I rely on also stop working during the block.

Luckily, Yale Law’s website works, so I can download antitrust expert Lina Khan’s 2017 paper making the argument that Amazon is a monopoly that American antitrust law, as it is currently practiced, is ill-equipped to regulate—essential reading for the week.

With the VPN up and running, I start to wonder why so many sites still work. Airbnb, for example, is a famed user of AWS, but I can search for a Thanksgiving vacation home there. I email Airbnb to ask if it still uses AWS for hosting, and a spokesperson confirms the company does. (I also could have confirmed it with this cool tool, which tells you about the digital provenance of a website.)

That’s how Dhruv and I discover a major flaw in our blocking technique. It turns out many sites, in addition to using a company like AWS to host their digital content, employ a secondary service called a content delivery network, or CDN, to load web pages faster.

The internet may seem like invisible vapor in the air around us, but it has a crucial physicality, too. AWS has huge buildings of servers around the world, while CDNs have a larger number of smaller ones. Think of AWS as the central warehouse for a site’s digital packets; the CDNs are the storefronts around the world that help people get the packets faster so that web visitors don’t have to wait for their data to come all the way from the main warehouse. (...)

We speak in links, even for the most devastating of news, and tech giants have made themselves indispensable for link translation.

Dhruv keeps track of all the times my devices try to ping Amazon’s servers during the week. It happens nearly 300,000 times, probably in part because apps frustrated not to get a reply from the mothership keep pinging repeatedly until I close them. My devices try to reach Amazon via 3,800 different IP addresses, which suggests that there are a lot of different apps and websites attempting to connect to Amazon throughout the week.

My failure to succeed in a total Amazon ban doesn’t stop with the CDN problem. One day, my husband goes out to get lunch for us and comes back with sushi from Whole Foods. I eat a piece of inari before I remember I am consuming Amazon-produced food. (I am not willing to purge for the sake of the stunt.)

Another time I unintentionally patronize Amazon is when I realize we need a phone holder for our car, one of those little plastic things that attach to the air vents. I would usually immediately order a weird doodad, probably within two minutes of realizing I needed it, using the Amazon app on my phone, but not this week. I ultimately order it from eBay. When the package arrives, however, it is a yellow envelope with the tenacious “smile” logo alongside the words “Fulfillment by Amazon”—even the eBay seller relies on it.

Amazon has embedded itself so thoroughly into the infrastructure of modern life, and into the business models of so many companies, including its competitors, that it’s nearly impossible to avoid it.

by Kashmir Hill, Gizmodo | Read more:
Image: uncredited

via:

Crusher of Sacred Cows

One of the first things you learn covering American politicians is that they’re not terribly bright.

The notion that Hill denizens are brilliant 4-D chess players is pure myth, the product of too many press hagiographies of the Game Change variety and too many Hollywood fantasies like House of Cards and West Wing.

The average American politician would lose at checkers to a zoo gorilla. They’re usually in office for one reason: someone with money sent them there, often to vote yes on a key appropriation bill or two. On the other 364 days of the year, their job is to shut their yaps and approximate gravitas anytime they’re in range of C-SPAN cameras.

Too many hacks float to the capital on beds of national committee money and other donor largesse, but then — once they get behind that desk and sit between those big flags — start thinking they’re actually beloved tribunes of the people, whose opinions on all things are eagerly desired.

So they talk. What do they talk about? To the consternation of donors, all kinds of stuff. Remember Ted Stevens explaining that the Internet “is not a big truck”? How about Hank Johnson worrying that Guam would become so overpopulated it would “tip over and capsize”? How about Oklahoma Republican Jim Bridenstine noting that just because the Supreme Court rules on something, that “doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s constitutional”?

There’s a reason aides try to keep their bosses away from microphones, particularly when there’s a potential for a question of SAT-or-higher level difficulty in the interview. But the subject elected officials have the most trouble staying away from is each other.

We’ve seen this a lot in recent weeks with the ongoing freakout over newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Lest anyone think any of the above applies to “AOC,” who’s also had a lot to say since arriving in Washington, remember: she won in spite of the party and big donors, not because of them.

That doesn’t make anything she says inherently more or less correct. But it changes the dynamic a bit. All of AOC’s supporters sent her to Washington precisely to make noise. There isn’t a cabal of key donors standing behind her, cringing every time she talks about the Pentagon budget. She is there to be a pain in the ass, and it’s working. Virtually the entire spectrum of Washington officialdom has responded to her with horror and anguish.

The mortification on the Republican side has come more from media figures than actual elected officials. Still, there are plenty of people like Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) doing things like denouncing “this girl, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whatever she is” for preaching “socialism wrapped in ignorance.” A group of GOP House members booed her on the floor, to which she replied, “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.”

The Beltway press mostly can’t stand her. A common theme is that, as a self-proclaimed socialist, she should be roaming the halls of Rayburn and Cannon in rags or a barrel. Washington Examiner reporter Eddie Scarry tweeted a photo of her in a suit, saying she didn’t look like “a girl who struggles.” (...)

Which brings us to elected Democrats, who if anything have been most demonstrative in their AOC freakout. We had Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) saying, “We don’t need your sniping in our Democratic caucus.” Recently ousted Sen. Claire McCaskill expressed alarm that she’s “the thing” and a “bright shiny new object.”

This is in addition to the litany of anonymous complaints from fellow caucus members, some of whom felt she jumped the line in an attempt to get a Ways and Means committee assignment. There were whispers she did this through some online-pressure sorcery she alone could avail herself of thanks to her massive Twitter following (nearly every news story about Ocasio-Cortez mentions her 2.47 million Twitter followers).

“It totally pissed off everyone,” one senior House Democrat said about the Ways and Means campaign. “You don’t get picked for committees by who your grass-roots [supporters] are.”

“She needs to decide: Does she want to be an effective legislator or just continue being a Twitter star?” said another Democrat, whom Politico described as being “in lockstep” with AOC’s ideology.

All of which brings us back to the issue of Washington’s would-be 4-D chess players. Time and again, they reveal how little they understand about the extent of their own influence, or anti-influence, as it were.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Harnik/AP/REX/Shutterstock