The Sommeliers of Everything

My training as a honey sommelier at the American Honey Tasting Society culminates with eight wineglasses filled with various honeys, lined up from light to dark. My instructor, Carla Marina Marchese, tells me that when we taste honey, we don’t do the ceremonial swirl — the wine expert’s ritual — before we sniff. Honey sommeliers smear. “Smear it on the sides of the glass like this,” she says, using a tiny plastic spoon. Once the honey is smeared, I can stick my nose in the glass to properly evaluate the aroma, then spoon a dollop onto my tongue.

Perhaps you are someone who thinks honey is just honey. Or tea is just tea. Or olive oil is just olive oil. Or water is just water. Or a cigar is just a cigar. Or mustard is just mustard. If so, you’re likely skeptical of a honey sommelier, a tea sommelier, an olive oil sommelier, a water sommelier, a cigar sommelier or a mustard sommelier. But over the past several years, there’s been a creeping wine-ification in every realm of gourmet endeavor. Now, in our era of hyper-credentialism, there’s almost no sphere of connoisseurship without a knowledgeable, certified taste expert, someone who’s completed serious coursework and passed an exam. A two-day tea sommelier certification course (followed by eight weeks of home study) from the International Tea Masters Association costs $1,475. A six-day olive oil sommelier certification program at the International Culinary Center in New York costs $2,800. A nine-day water sommelier certification program at the Doemens Academy in Germany costs $2,600 (travel not included).

These programs prepare you to be a taste authority, a sensory expert, an arbiter and evangelist in the field, but you’re likely not producing anything. Even so, they’re in demand. What is it about this epoch that values such mastery over taste? Were we all truly so clueless and naive about these matters once upon a time? Has life become so fraught and complicated that even decisions over our smallest pleasures now require expert intervention?  (...)

I learn about the American Cheese Society’s T.A.S.T.E. Test, which launched in the summer of 2018. Passing this exam will confer the title of Certified Cheese Sensory Evaluator (cheese sommeliers don’t call themselves sommeliers). Cheese feels like something I can handle. I’d recently spent time on assignment for The Washington Post in Bra, Italy, reporting from the Slow Food cheese event, tasting from among 300 cheesemakers from 50 countries. The founder of Slow Food declared the event to be “the beating heart of cheese” and those of us attending the “cheese intelligentsia.” Well, as a member of the cheese intelligentsia, surely I can pass the T.A.S.T.E. Test.

“You can’t study the day before and take this test,” says Jane Bauer, the certification manager for the American Cheese Society. The professionals taking this test need at least 4,000 hours of work experience in the cheese business. “There’s a difference between certification and certificates. A lot of people try to call things certifications, and they’re not.”

I ask Bauer if cheese is any more complex than wine. “Oh yes,” she says. “With cheese, every day is different. There’s a new vintage every day depending on what the animal ate the day before. Some cheesemakers have 365 vintages per year.”

Despite my lack of the requisite hours, Bauer agrees to let me sit for the three-hour exam, held in a hotel ballroom in Pittsburgh during the society’s annual conference. I arrive along with 50 other candidates and am shown to my table, which has a clipboard of evaluation sheets for a dozen categories of cheese — from soft-ripened to cheddars to blue mold to goat cheese to washed rind — as well as cups of aroma samples, unidentified liquids marked A to J that I will have to sniff and identify blind. The proctor tells us there are to be no photos, and no posting or sharing on social media. “Though there’s not much in your phone that can help you now,” he says. Along the back wall of the ballroom are a team of cheesemongers cutting samples, where we will go to get our cheeses to evaluate.

The aroma part seems straightforward: I think I identify garlic, hazelnut, green apple, horseradish, smoke and one that smells “butyric” (think baby vomit). I guess on some others, including one liquid I think is either buttermilk or “old milk” — which I clumsily spill all over my table.

When I move to the evaluation portion, however, I immediately realize I am in way over my head. Any hubris I had cracks when I pop my first sample, a soft-ripened cheese, into my mouth. I chew. It just tastes like … soft cheese. I am supposed to evaluate this based on 70 characteristics and flaws in four categories (appearance, aroma, texture and flavor). And not just the presence of, say, a nutty or herbal aroma or an animal or grassy flavor, but “much too little,” “too little,” “just about right,” “too much” or “much too much.” At the table in front of me I see another candidate spit into a bucket. Wait a minute! I think. Are we supposed to spit cheese when we taste it, like wine? I spit my soft-ripened cheese into the bucket on my table (which is gross, to be honest). Still, I gamely trudge on for almost three hours. When I get to the evaluation sheet for Emmental-style (i.e., Swiss) cheese, there is a category for “Eye Development,” with characteristics such as blind, underset, irregular and dead/dull eyes. So cheese has eyes? When I approach the cheesemongers for a sample of cheddar, I steal a glance at the clipboard of a bearded guy in a Hawaiian shirt and Birkenstocks standing next to me. He marks “seamy” on one of his score sheets. What does it mean to have a seamy cheese? I am so out of my league, I don’t even know what I don’t know.

After I finish the test, I see Bauer outside. “Are you okay? You’re looking at little …”

“Glazed?” I say.

“Yes, glazed,” she says. “That’s the word I was looking for.”

A couple of months later, I am not surprised to learn that I did not pass the exam and that the title of Certified Cheese Sensory Evaluator has eluded me. Humbled, I realize if I want to gain some certified cheese expertise, I will have to begin at a much lower level and work my way up.

by Jason Wilson, Washington Post |  Read more:
Image: Stacy Zarin Goldberg

Trump Gets the Clap

[ed. "Fuck you" clap by Nancy Pelosi, 2019 SOTU address (not to be confused with the more common "golf clap").]

The Porta-Potty King of New York City

Charles W. Howard is the porta-potty king of New York City. The seat of his vast empire is Broad Channel, Queens; from this windswept rock in Jamaica Bay, you can see the lights of Manhattan twinkling across the water. Early every morning, while the city sleeps, dozens of trucks — tagged with WE’RE #1 AT PICKING UP #2 decals — snake through the five boroughs to clean his 18,000 toilets. The company boasts more than $35 million in annual revenue, thanks in part to “salesgirls” who head out each day in the company’s signature Volkswagen Beetles to poach contracts from competitors who are too shy to sell with sex. Charlie himself arrives at work only around midday in a black Cadillac Escalade. Young female dispatchers and clerks cry “Charlie! Charlie!” while men in orange slickers hose down toilets in the yard.

On a recent Thursday, the gleaming Escalade stops at a pizzeria, and Charlie, 53, steps out, a bit heavy and wearing a rumpled purple dress shirt. He’s brought along Kimberly, the star of his company’s YouTube channel. She’s beautiful, blonde, and his wife. Charlie favors superlatives, like another Queens businessman, and speaks with the accent you’d expect from a man so old-school New York there’s a neighborhood named after his family. And now, not far from Howard Beach, he explains why he’s the greatest toilet man in America. “I had different theories about business,” he says, “and they all turned out to be correct.”

Nationally, portable toilets are a $2 billion business. Construction rentals are three-quarters of New York’s market, and as America’s real-estate sector has rebounded over the past half-decade, the industry has exploded. Developers pay $100 a month for a pump truck to visit once a week and hoover up blue-tinged waste. Profits are made by building dense routes: lots of toilets at a stop and lots of job sites close together. Events are a growing corner of the business. Go to Smorgasburg and count the toilets: Daily rentals run about $225 each. Use a luxury restroom trailer with flushing toilets at an upstate wedding? It cost the bride’s parents a few thousand bucks just for the night.

You can’t get denser routes than in New York City, which makes it a major prize. But the market is a nightmare to navigate — traffic, tolls, angry unions, toilets that need to be lowered by crane from skyscrapers. A small group of competitors controls the industry: “the big five.” Mr. John is clean-cut and corporate. Abe Breuer, a wiry Hasidic Jew, runs John to Go from Rockland County. A Royal Flush owns the special-events market and enjoys an enviable 7,000-toilet contract with New York Road Runners to clean up after nervous, caffeinated runners. Johnny on the Spot is now part of a national chain. Over a four-decade career, Charlie’s Call-a-Head has held its own.

But now, Charlie might fall off his throne. More than 1,300 former pump-truck drivers, the men who literally haul his shit, are part of a class-action lawsuit that could put him out of business. The rest of the big five covet his empire.

“They would love for us to get destroyed,” Charlie says, though it’s quite a vague “they.” Spend enough time in his world and you wonder if he’s perhaps the most hated man in the city. Kimberly Howard nods. “Business,” she says, “is war.”

by David Gauvey Herbert, Intelligencer | Read more:
Image: Brian Finke

Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts
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Going to the Galápagos Is Easier and Cheaper Than Ever

That Might Not Be a Good Thing

“The archipelago is a little world within itself,” a young Charles Darwin mused in his London study in 1839. Four years earlier, the aspiring naturalist had spent five weeks on the Galápagos Islands, some 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador. So taken by the “extreme tameness” of the species he encountered, he wasn’t an ideal visitor by today’s standards: He hopped on the backs of giant tortoises and “pushed a hawk off the branch of a tree” with the muzzle of a gun.

These days, that “little world” is brand-name nature, drawing an increasing number of visitors from around the world to see, among other creatures, blue-footed boobies, marine iguanas that swim alongside equatorial penguins, and the giant tortoises for which the islands are named. In 2017, 241,800 people visited the islands, according to the Observatorio de Turismo de Galápagos, up from 173,419 a decade earlier.

Much of the growth — more than 90 percent from 2007 to 2016 — is from land-based tourism: visitors who fly into airports on the islands of Baltra and San Cristóbal, check into hotels and take à la carte tours that are considerably cheaper than the expensive cruises that traditionally are how most visitors have seen the islands. With round-trip flights from Quito costing as little as $400 or so, and hostel accommodations starting at $20 a night, the Galápagos Islands are no longer just for upscale travelers.

For the Galápagos National Park, which uses a portion of the $100 fee that visitors are required to pay ($6 for Ecuadoreans) to oversee the 97 percent of the islands that hasn’t been settled by humans, land-based tourism offers much-needed funds. But that doesn’t mean conservation groups — including Unesco, which lists tourism growth as one of the primary threats to the islands — aren’t alarmed by the lack of an enforced cap on land-based visitors. (Cruise passengers, on the other hand, are limited by the space available on expedition ships; last year, there were some 70 ships with room for about 1,700 passengers.) More people on the islands means more pressure on existing infrastructure, encroachment on animal habitats and a heightened risk of introducing invasive plant and animal species.

“It is simply not sustainable to have never-ending growth in land-based tourism in this fragile environment,” said Jim Lutz, the president of the International Galápagos Tour Operators Association, who expressed the same sentiment in a letter to Ecuador’s tourism minister last February.

On a recent visit to the islands, I observed land-based tourism in action, and spoke to naturalists, guides and others about the effects of the travel boom, which, along with climate change, illegal — and legal — fishing and other threats, make the Galápagos a microcosm of conservation’s modern challenges.

On The Ground

Along with more visitors, the islands’ permanent population (now about 30,000) has also swelled. About half of those residents — many from mainland Ecuador who were drawn here by the tourism business — are in Puerto Ayora, on the island of Santa Cruz.

In some ways, the town seems like any other tropical locale, with coffee shops, cafes and stores selling T-shirts; there is even a bit of a party scene when the sun goes down.

On an overcast Friday night in Puerto Ayora, I sat with Ulf Torsten Hardter, an environmental manager turned guide, on the patio of OMG Galápagos, a cafe with a life-size statue of Darwin sporting a Santa Claus-like beard, popular with the selfie set.

“The problem is that the islands lack basic infrastructure like waste, energy, water,” Mr. Hardter said over an iguana-branded I.P.A. As we talked, the misty rain called garúa started, and one of Darwin’s finches scavenged from my unfinished plate.

by Adam Popescu, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Josh Haner/The New York Times

Now and Then

  

 

via: here, here, here, here and here

Pot Without Plants

A $255 million deal to convert sugar into cannabis-chemicals is opening the door to an era of pot without plants.

Amyris Inc. already works with genetically modified yeast that excrete designer molecules to make sweeteners and skin-care products. Now it plans to use that fermentation technology to convert sugarcane syrup into the active ingredients found in marijuana, the California-based company said in a statement Tuesday. Those ingredients can be used in consumer products ranging from beverages to skin creams and deodorant.

The project’s initial focus is to make cannabidiol, or CBD, the molecule used to treat medical conditions such as anxiety and sleeplessness. But Amyris and its undisclosed partners are targeting multiple cannabidiol molecules that have medical and therapeutic uses without being psychoactive, spokeswoman Beth Bannerman said by phone. THC, the mind-bending molecule that gets people high, is not a focus, she said. (...)

Rival Projects

Amyris’s venture comes on top of two smaller deals announced in September that also aim to ferment cannabinoids. Marijuana producer Cronos Group Inc. struck a $122 million partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks Inc., and Organigram Holdings announced a C$10 million ($7.6 million) strategic investment in Hyasynth Biologicals.

By manufacturing CBD and other cannabinoids in a brewing process, makers can control quality and dosage, Amyris said. Cutting plants out of the equation ensures the molecules will be completely free of pesticides.

The marijuana molecules Amyris produces could be used in the company’s current slate of products, Bannerman said. Amyris makes Biossance, a skin care line sold at Sephora cosmetics shops, and it recently introduced a zero-calorie beverage sweetener.

Infused Beverages

Interest in pot-infused drinks is soaring now that cannabis is legal in Canada and hemp-derived CBD is legal in the U.S. Canadian pot company Canopy Growth Corp. is spending up to $150 million on a facility in New York to extract CBD from hemp.

Constellation Brands Inc., maker of Corona beer, has invested $3.8 billion in Canopy Growth, while Molson Coors Brewing Co. has started a joint venture with Quebec-based Hexo Corp. to sell nonalcoholic cannabis drinks. Even Coca-Cola Co. has said it’s interested in CBD-infused beverages, although it doesn’t have immediate plans to enter the market.

Plant-based CBD also can be found in personal-care products including moisturizing creams to deodorants and soaps, mostly made by small manufacturers.

by Jack Kaskey, Bloomberg |  Read more:
Image: Stephan Wermuth, Bloomberg 
[ed. For an interesting persective on how culture leads politics, see: Respectability Cascades (Slate Star Codex). Also: Ketamine Could Be the Key to Reversing America’s Rising Suicide Rate (Bloomberg).]

Evidence Mounts That Gut Bacteria Can Influence Mood, Prevent Depression

Of all the many ways the teeming ecosystem of microbes in a person’s gut and other tissues might affect health, its potential influences on the brain may be the most provocative. Now, a study of two large groups of Europeans has found several species of gut bacteria are missing in people with depression. The researchers can’t say whether the absence is a cause or an effect of the illness, but they showed that many gut bacteria could make substances that affect nerve cell function—and maybe mood.

“It’s the first real stab at tracking how” a microbe’s chemicals might affect mood in humans, says John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland who has been one of the most vocal proponents of a microbiome-brain connection. The study “really pushes the field from where it’s been” with small studies of depressed people or animal experiments. Interventions based on the gut microbiome are now under investigation: The University of Basel in Switzerland, for example, is planning a trial of fecal transplants, which can restore or alter the gut microbiome, in depressed people.

Several studies in mice had indicated that gut microbes can affect behavior, and small studies of people suggested this microbial repertoire is altered in depression. To test the link in a larger group, Jeroen Raes, a microbiologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, and his colleagues took a closer look at 1054 Belgians they had recruited to assess a “normal” microbiome. Some in the group—173 in total—had been diagnosed with depression or had done poorly on a quality of life survey, and the team compared their microbiomes with those other participants. Two kinds of microbes, Coprococcus and Dialister, were missing from the microbiomes of the depressed subjects, but not from those with a high quality of life. The finding held up when the researchers allowed for factors such as age, sex, or antidepressant use, all of which influence the microbiome, the team reports today in Nature Microbiology. They also found the depressed people had an increase in bacteria implicated in Crohn disease, suggesting inflammation may be at fault.

Microbiome results in one population often don’t hold up in another. But when the team looked at data from another group—1064 Dutch people whose microbiomes had also been sampled—they found the same two species were missing among those who were depressed, and they were also missing in seven subjects suffering from severe clinical depression. The data don’t prove causality, Raes acknowledges, but they are “an independent observation backed by three [groups of people].”

Looking for something that could link microbes to mood, Raes and his colleagues compiled a list of 56 substances important for proper nervous system function that gut microbes either produce or break down. They found, for example, that Coprococcus seems to have a pathway related to dopamine, a key brain signal involved in depression, although they have no evidence how this might protect against depression. The same microbe also makes an anti-inflammatory substance called butyrate, and increased inflammation is implicated in depression.

Linking the absence of the bacteria to depression “makes sense physiologically,” says Sara Campbell, a physiologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Still, no one knows how microbial compounds made in the gut might influence the brain. One possible channel is the vagus nerve, which links the gut and brain.

by Elizabeth Pennisi, Science | Read more:
Image: V. Altounian/Science

Events Are the New Magazines

On a recent Thursday evening, Jordan Roth, a Broadway producer of “Angels in America” and “Kinky Boots,” was serving as the M.C. of a party hosted by Town & Country magazine on the top floor of the Standard Hotel in downtown Manhattan. Wearing sequined pants and a jeweled hairpin, he kvelled with Kelly Ripa, dressed in blue velvet.

Ms. Ripa presented an award to Lizzie Tisch, a supporter of jewelry designers, whom the event was honoring. Adam Rippon, the effervescent skating star, was there too, as was Lady Kitty Spencer, an English fashion model who perched on a chair, dripping in Bulgari, which pays her to do just that.

The celebrities were all being tended to by Nicole Vecchiarelli and Andrea Oliveri, the founders of a company called (with insidery resonance for anyone in the magazine business) Special Projects. That has long been a euphemistic term for editors who wrangle celebrities and are cozy with publicists.

Ms. Oliveri and Ms. Vecchiarelli, both 43, are former special projects and entertainment editors, at publications including Details, W, Teen Vogue and InStyle, and now work with people like Stellene Volandes, the editor in chief of Town & Country, founded more than a century ago.

In an era when glossy print publications are floundering and relying on revenue and publicity from conferences and the like, Special Projects is helping take the page to the stage.

They are what the Business of Fashion events, a New York magazine/The Cut “How I Get It Done Day,” speaking opportunities at the women’s club the Wing, a Kate Spade advertising campaign, a Kanye West listening party in Wyoming and a WSJ. Magazine dinner hosted by Julia Roberts all have in common.

This week, the company was hired by Glossier, the cosmetics brand that grew out of the Into the Gloss blog, to broker talent for a forthcoming marketing campaign.

A big part of Ms. Vecchiarelli and Ms. Oliveri’s business is predicting who tomorrow’s stars will be. (...)

Special Projects’ offices (one in New York, where Ms. Vecchiarelli lives; one in Los Angeles, where Ms. Oliveri does) are now an essential stop on the press tours of young and rising celebrities. There, the women meet and chat with the young artists, to get a sense of their personal stories, charm, intelligence and ambitions.

by Katherine Rosman, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Nina Westervelt

Hanford Nuclear Waste Cleanup Continues

A $17 billion federal facility for treating and immobilizing radioactive waste has hit a slew of construction milestones in recent months. The Hanford Vit Plant, in Washington state, is now on track to begin “glassifying” low-activity nuclear waste as soon as 2022, a year ahead of a court-mandated deadline, officials say.

Still, an air of uncertainty surrounds the project. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has proposed reclassifying some of the nation’s radioactive waste as less dangerous, and it's unclear how that could affect the Hanford facility's long-term prospects.

Hanford houses about 212 million liters of high-level waste, the leftovers of the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Built in 1943, the sprawling 1,518-square-kilometer complex produced plutonium for more than 60,000 nuclear weapons, including the atomic bomb that detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, forcing an end to World War II. The remaining radioactive sludge is now stored in dozens of aging, leaky, underground tanks near the Columbia River.

After decades of discussions, federal and state officials agreed to vitrify the nuclear waste to keep it from further contaminating the soil and groundwater. Construction on the Hanford Vit Plant, known formally as the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, began in 2002.

As planned, technicians will mix the waste with glass-forming materials to create molten glass, which they’ll pour into stainless steel containers to cool and harden. About 90 percent of the tank waste is considered “low-activity.” It’s the waste that remains after the DOE drew off as much radioactivity as was technically and economically practical from the stream. Once vitrified, this portion could be buried at a Hanford landfill. The other 10 percent of tank waste, containing that highly radioactive material that was drawn off, is considered too dangerous to store on site and thus must be vitrified and stored in a deep geologic repository such as the long-delayed Yucca Mountain site. (...)

When finished, the Vit Plant will feature 56 buildings and systems, including: electric power distribution that could light up 2,250 houses; a compressed air system that could fill the Goodyear blimp in three minutes; and a chilled water system capable of air conditioning 23,500 houses.

by Maria Gallucci, IEEE Spectrum | Read more:
Image: Bechtel National

Yosemite Closed Indefinitely After Bear Spotted In Park

YOSEMITE VILLAGE, CA—Claiming their responsibility to protect the lives of visitors and employees outweighs any potential inconvenience, officials announced Monday that Yosemite National Park would be closed indefinitely following a confirmed black bear sighting in the park’s Hodgdon Meadow region. “We’ve made an executive decision to shut down all park activities until the bear can be found and killed,” said Yosemite park ranger Derek Osman, clarifying that all campers had been escorted from the park, with more remote climbers and hikers evacuated via helicopter, immediately after the bear was first sighted. “We’re not sure if the bear is male or female, or how old the bear is, but we know it’s a bear, and that’s enough. You don’t want to mess with a bear, believe me. Everyone in the vicinity needs to use serious caution because this thing is on the loose somewhere in an area nearly the size of Rhode Island.” Yosemite officials confirmed that if attempts to find and tranquilize the bear with a rifle dart fail, they would smoke the bear out by setting the park’s entire 1,170 square miles ablaze.

via: [The Onion]

Sea and Air Exhibition - Tokyo, 1930
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Adidas ZX 4000 4D
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Cruel and Unusual Punishment

I have a new fear. And this one’s a doozy.

I write a fortnightly column for the British barely right-­of-­center magazine (that’s left-­of-­center, in the United States) The Spectator. Having weathered more than one social-­media shit storm, I’m one column away from the round of mob opprobrium that sinks my career for good. As Roseanne Barr and Megyn Kelly can testify, it doesn’t take a thousand words, either. A single unacceptable sentiment, a word usage misconstrued, a sentence taken out of context suffices these days to implode a reputation decades in the making and to trigger ­McCarthyite blacklisting. When I’ve floated this anxiety past the odd friend and colleague, their universal response has been a sorrowful shake of the head. Repeatedly I hear, “You’re exactly the sort of person this happens to.”

But that isn’t the fear in its entirety. Suppose a perceived violation of progressive orthodoxy translates into the kind of institutional cowardice on display in the forced resignation of Ian Buruma from The New York Review of Books. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones in the United Kingdom, my literary agent, my publishers in translation, and ­HarperCollins worldwide would decide they could no longer afford association with a pariah. My current manuscript wouldn’t see print, nor would any future projects I’m foolish enough to bother to bash out. Journalistic opportunities would dry up. Yet what I most dread about this bleak scenario is my thirteen published titles suddenly becoming unavailable—both online (gosh, would piracy sites be morally fastidious, too?) and in shops.

Because that’s the direction we’re traveling in. For reasons that escape me, artists’ misbehavior now contaminates the fruits of their labors, like the sins of the father being visited upon the sons. So it’s not enough to punish transgressors merely by cutting off the source of their livelihoods, turning them into social outcasts, and truncating their professional futures. You have to destroy their pasts. Having discovered the worst about your fallen idols, you’re duty-­bound to demolish the best about them as well. (...)

Back in the day when your mother spotting your name in the newspaper was mortifying, sheer social embarrassment was punishment enough. But in the rush to judgment of the modern shaming mill, disgrace is no longer sufficient. In numerous instances during the #MeToo scandals, accusation has stood in for due process, and criminal offenses like rape (Cosby and Weinstein) and unwelcome advances (Keillor) have been thrown indiscriminately into the same basket. Thus the career consequences of violating the law and violating subjective norms of “appropriateness” have too often been identical. Culprits are sentenced to cultural erasure. (...)

This erasure impulse hails primarily from terror: that the roving black cloud of calumny will move on to any individual or institution complicit in distributing a vilified artist’s work. If you join in denouncing whoever’s got it in the neck this week, presumably they won’t come for you. Severing ties even to an artist’s output also provides cultural middlemen a precious opportunity for public moral posturing, to the benefit of the brand. Erasure is also a form of rewriting history—a popular impulse of late. In this touched-­up version of events, we were never taken in by these disgusting specimens. In the historical rewrite, there was always something fishy about Bill Cosby; he was never America’s dad.

Only a restricted range of misbehaviors qualifies one for being disappeared: any perceived intolerance of minorities, and any delinquency to do with sex. Other misdeeds are less likely to be career ending: fraud, tax evasion, or drug possession, say. Winona Ryder recovered from being caught shoplifting. Domestic violence will get you into trouble, but other outbursts of violence are survivable. Yet there’s no sensible reason that only bigotry and sexual misconduct should doom artists to cultural purdah. The question is whether we condition our consumption of what artists produce on their moral purity.

by Lionel Shrivner, Harper's |  Read more:

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Shoshana Zuboff's “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is already drawing comparisons to seminal socioeconomic investigations like Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and Karl Marx’s “Capital.” Zuboff’s book deserves these comparisons and more: Like the former, it’s an alarming exposé about how business interests have poisoned our world, and like the latter, it provides a framework to understand and combat that poison. But “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” named for the now-popular term Zuboff herself coined five years ago, is also a masterwork of horror. It’s hard to recall a book that left me as haunted as Zuboff’s, with its descriptions of the gothic algorithmic daemons that follow us at nearly every instant of every hour of every day to suck us dry of metadata. Even those who’ve made an effort to track the technology that tracks us over the last decade or so will be chilled to their core by Zuboff, unable to look at their surroundings the same way.

An unavoidable takeaway of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is, essentially, that everything is even worse than you thought. Even if you’ve followed the news items and historical trends that gird Zuboff’s analysis, her telling takes what look like privacy overreaches and data blunders, and recasts them as the intentional movements of a global system designed to violate you as a revenue stream. “The result is that both the world and our lives are pervasively rendered as information,” Zuboff writes. “Whether you are complaining about your acne or engaging in political debate on Facebook, searching for a recipe or sensitive health information on Google, ordering laundry soap or taking photos of your nine-year-old, smiling or thinking angry thoughts, watching TV or doing wheelies in the parking lot, all of it is raw material for this burgeoning text.”

Tech’s privacy scandals, which seem to appear with increasing frequency both in private industry and in government, aren’t isolated incidents, but rather brief glimpses at an economic and social logic that’s overtaken the planet while we were enjoying Gmail and Instagram. The cliched refrain that if you’re “not paying for a product, you are the product”? Too weak, says Zuboff. You’re not technically the product, she explains over the course of several hundred tense pages, because you’re something even more degrading: an input for the real product, predictions about your future sold to the highest bidder so that this future can be altered. “Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends,” writes Zuboff. “At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.”

Zuboff recently took a moment to walk me through the implications of her urgent and crucial book. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

I was hoping you could say something about whatever semantic games Facebook and other similar data brokers are doing when they say they don’t sell data.

I remember sitting at my desk in my study early in 2012, and I was listening to a speech that [Google’s then-Executive Chair] Eric Schmidt gave somewhere. He was bragging about how privacy conscious Google is, and he said, “We don’t sell your data.” I got on the phone and started calling these various data scientists that I know and saying, “How can Eric Schmidt say we don’t sell your data, in public, knowing that it’s recorded? How does he get away with that?” It’s exactly the question I was trying to answer at the beginning of all this.

Let’s say you’re browsing, or you’re on Facebook putting stuff in a post. They’re not taking your words and going into some marketplace and selling your words. Those words, or if they’ve got you walking across the park or whatever, that’s the raw material. They’re just secretly scraping your private experience as raw material, and they’re stockpiling that raw material, constantly flowing through the pipes. They sell prediction products into a new marketplace. What are those guys really buying? They’re buying predictions of what you’re gonna do. There are a lot of businesses that want to know what you’re going to do, and they’re willing to pay for those predictions. That’s how they get away with saying, “We’re not selling your personal information.” That’s how they get away also with saying, as in the case of [recently implemented European privacy law] GDPR, “Yeah, you can have access to your data.” Because the data they’re going to give you access to is the data you already gave them. They’re not giving you access to everything that happens when the raw material goes into the sausage machine, to the prediction products.

Do you see that as substantively different than selling the raw material?

Why would they sell the raw material? Without the raw material, they’ve got nothing. They don’t want to sell raw material, they want to collect all of the raw material on earth and have it as proprietary. They sell the value added on the raw material.

It seems like what they’re actually selling is way more problematic and way more valuable.

That’s the whole point. Now we have markets of business customers that are selling and buying predictions of human futures. I believe in the values of human freedom and human autonomy as the necessary elements of a democratic society. As the competition of these prediction products heats up, it’s clear that surveillance capitalists have discovered that the most predictive sources of data are when they come in and intervene in our lives, in our real-time actions, to shape our action in a certain direction that aligns with the kind of outcomes they want to guarantee to their customers. That’s where they’re making their money. These are bald-faced interventions in the exercise of human autonomy, what I call the “right to the future tense.” The very idea that I can decide what I want my future to be and design the actions that get me from here to there, that’s the very material essence of the idea of free will.

I write about the Senate committee back in the ’70s that reviewed behavioral modification from the point of view of federal funding, and found behavioral mod a reprehensible threat to the values of human autonomy and democracy. And here we are, these years later, like, La-di-da, please pass the salt.This thing is growing all around us, this new means of behavioral modification, under the auspices of private capital, without constitutional protections, done in secret, specifically designed to keep us ignorant of its operations.

by Sam Biddle, The Intercept |  Read more:
Image: Public Affairs Books
[ed. See also: Facebook uses artificial intelligence to predict your future actions for advertisers says confidential document. (The Interecpt)]

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The Ugly Truth of Stadium Bathrooms

Inside a women's restroom on the southwest concourse of Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Scott Jenkins, the stadium's general manager, reaches down and, without hesitating, places his right hand on the floor. Uric acid, he says -- you know, the corrosive compound in our urine that often gets spilled by the gallon inside stadium bathrooms just like this one -- can eat through regular epoxy-based paint in practically no time at all. Which is why, before the $1.6 billion MBS opened in 2017, Jenkins made sure every one of his bathroom floors was coated in the shiny, space-age, dual-system polymer under his fingertips right now. It's called MMA, or methyl methacrylate, and, judging by Jenkins' reaction, this is the first time anyone's ever bothered to ask about it. "Oh, I'm geeking out right now," he laughs. "I love potty talk."

When it comes to the home of Super Bowl LIII and the taboo, bizarre but often revealing world of stadium bathrooms, well, there's quite a lot to discuss.

In Atlanta, most visitors want to know more about the flower-petal retractable roof, the 360-degree, 1,100-foot halo video screen or the 1,260 beer taps. Nobody ever discusses the building's 30 percent increase over the Georgia Dome in female toilets (22 percent for the men), the swan-neck, stainless steel hands-free faucets that actually match the building's architecture or the drum-sized JBL ceiling speakers that give the toilets better sound than most of the nightclubs in Buckhead. It's a shame, really, since the ugly (and, yes, slightly gross) truth of the matter is that the stadium bathrooms will probably end up having a much greater impact on the overall fan experience at the Super Bowl, an event often plagued by ridiculously long lines at the loo.

"You add a restaurant or a walkway feature to the stadium, some people will use it, but everyone is going to use the restroom," Jenkins says. "So the functionality, the quantity, the aesthetics of your bathrooms is critical. It seems unremarkable to most people, but, trust me, you invite 70,000 people to your house and you get the bathrooms wrong -- you've got a huge problem."

Just ask the folks in Minneapolis. At the Super Bowl, where crowds produce -- wait for it -- about 8,000 gallons of urine and where more wastewater (nearly a million gallons) is used than what flows over Niagara Falls every second, the bathrooms are often a crowded, disgusting, leaky time bomb. Horrific conditions and outrageous lines at the bathroom have become as much a part of Super Bowl Sunday as lame commercials and Bill Belichick hoodies. "The restroom experience will make or break a fan's experience, especially at the Super Bowl," says Kathryn Anthony, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois and a board member of the American Restroom Association. "And, more often than not, my guess is it makes it more unpleasant."

Sure enough: During Super Bowl LII, even at the brand new billion-dollar U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, a building equipped with 979 toilets, while most female fans breezed in and out of the bathrooms, lines for the men's rooms snaked all the way across the concourse. The long waits meant male fans who spent upward of 30 minutes in line and paid $5,000 for a ticket -- the going rate on the street -- were essentially forced to pay $1,000 to pee. After decades of subtle but powerful gender discrimination in this part of stadiums, building codes now require teams to provide at least a 2-to-1 female-to-male toilet ratio. Which means, if sociologists are right, and public restrooms do, in fact, reflect our cultural values, then the contrast in bathroom lines at last year's Super Bowl might have also signaled a seismic shift in the evolving demographics, and power dynamics, of sports fandom.

And you thought stadium bathrooms were just a place to get rid of all that beer. Think again.

by David Fleming, ESPN |  Read more:
Image: Edmund D. Fountain

About Saving Capitalism

“This is about saving capitalism,”

If so its not the capitalism that most contemporary capitalists recognise.

Sure there was the post WWII golden age but that had more to do with the class and social solidarity established within nations and between the Western allies in the face of a common enemy and the steadily rising wages for the working and middle class arising out of the economic boom created in America's centralised and socialised wartime economy.

The US quickly realised that this could not last without viable trading partners and set about rebuilding the two most effective economies it could find, those of the erstwhile enemy: Japan and Germany.

But in establishing the new world economic order at Bretton Woods the American delegation steamrolled the British and John Maynard Keynes in the name of anti-communism (with a liberal dose of unenlightened self-interest) and sowed the seeds of the current crisis by promoting the hidden hand of markets at the expense of globally agreed regulation to mediate human society.

Fast forward to the 1980s and the victory of the Neoliberals led by Milton Friedman and his fellow Mont Pellerin Society fanatics (who had worked so hard to assume the commanding heights) and the doomed future of capitalism was sealed.

Ever since Margaret Thatcher told us there was no such thing as society and Ronald Reagan told us that government was the problem not the solution to our problems, the Davos Emperors and the current perversion of capitalism was inevitable.

To 'fix' capitalism, the damage caused by the last 40 years of neoclassical and neoliberal economic thought must be reversed.

Thorlar1

[ed. Amazingly concise summary of post-war economics (from the comments section of): 'This is about saving capitalism': the Dutch historian who savaged Davos elite (The Guardian)]

McKinsey & Company: Capital's Willing Executioners

To those convinced that a secretive cabal controls the world, the usual suspects are Illuminati, Lizard People, or “globalists.” They are wrong, naturally. There is no secret society shaping every major decision and determining the direction of human history. There is, however, McKinsey & Company.

The biggest, oldest, most influential, and most prestigious of the “Big Three” management consulting firms, McKinsey has played an outsized role in creating the world we occupy today. In its 90+ year history, McKinsey has been a whisperer to presidents and CEOs. McKinsey serves more than 2,000 institutions, including 90 of the top 100 corporations worldwide. It has acted as a catalyst and accelerant to every trend in the world economy: firm consolidation, the rise of advertising, runaway executive compensation, globalization, automation, and corporate restructuring and strategy.

I came into my job as a McKinsey consultant hoping to change the world from the inside, believing that the best way to make progress is through influencing those who control the levers of power. Instead of being a force for good, I found myself party to the most damaging forces affecting the world: the resurgence of authoritarianism and the continued creep of markets into all parts of life.

Your views of McKinsey’s impact on the world will be largely determined by your views on capitalism’s impact on the world, for few firms have made a greater impact on the prevailing economic system. If you believe, as I once did, that capitalism is the least bad system devised so far, that its worst excesses can be reined in through effective regulation, that it has been the largest engine for human progress in human history, then McKinsey is a Good Thing. As missionaries for capital, it has helped spread the Good Word far and wide, making the world more productive and efficient as a result.

If, however, you believe that, whatever capitalism’s role in history, its continued practice poses an existential threat to governments, the biosphere, and poor people the world over, then the firm’s role is that of a co-conspirator to a crime in which we are all victims. McKinsey is capitalism distilled. It is global, mobile, flexible, and unabashedly pro-market and pro-management. The firm has an enormous stake in things continuing more or less as they are. Working for all sides, McKinsey’s only allegiance is to capital. As capital’s most effective messenger, McKinsey has done direct harm to the world in ways that, thanks to its lack of final decision-making power, are hard to measure and, thanks to its intense secrecy, are hard to know. The firm’s willingness to work with despotic governments and corrupt business empires is the logical conclusion of seeking profit at all costs. Its advocacy of the primacy of the market has made governments more like businesses and businesses more like vampires. By claiming that they solve the world’s hardest problems, McKinsey shrinks the solution space to only those that preserve the status quo. And it is through this claim that the firm attracts thousands of “the best and the brightest” away from careers that actually serve the public.

“The firm does execution, not policy.” I remember the phrase vividly. We were on a conference call with the entire client-service team, including senior leadership. Trump had just begun his term, and the direction of our client, a federal agency, had markedly but predictably shifted. Our team of mostly young do-gooders were concerned about the role we were playing to enable this shift. We were up-in-arms! Well, as up-in-arms as overachieving Ivy League graduates get. To quell dissent, the leader reassured us: We only do execution, not policy.

This categorical claim was meant to assuage our fears. We weren’t the ones steering the ship towards the cliffs, we were merely tasked with keeping the ship afloat until it reached its destination.

But politics touches all things. When the direction of an agency is set by the president, helping execute on that direction means participating in politics. Had McKinsey been as global in the 1940s, the “no policy” line of reasoning would not have prohibited them from helping Bayer optimize its production of Zyklon B, adding a grim double meaning to the partner’s promise to only focus on execution.

How did things turn out this way? McKinsey consultants gave 27 times more money to Hillary Clinton’s campaign than to Donald Trump’s. The members of my team attended the Women’s March while serving an agency shaped by the man they marched against. The firm hires from top universities and many of its consultants have graduate degrees, both strong predictors of liberal political tendencies. McKinsey is at the top of its field, affording it the unique opportunity to turn down lucrative work that other firms cannot. The firm’s 14 values serve as a gold standard for professional services firms and are actually discussed and largely adhered to.

The best explanation is structural. McKinsey’s governing model, when compared to other firms of its size and age, is anarchy. The Managing Director (CEO equivalent) has surprisingly little ability to control who the firm serves (said a partner about the Managing Director, “you are definitely not in charge”). McKinsey remains the world’s largest partnership, and partners rule. The general rule of thumb is that if a partner can staff a team, the firm will do the work. If associates don’t want to work with a tobacco company or a defense contractor, they don’t have to. As a result, only a small portion of the consultants need to buy into a client relationship for McKinsey to do work with them. What this means in practice is that the firm doesn’t work with North Korea, but that’s about it.

McKinsey has grown to the point that it is taking on work that prior incarnations of the firm would have turned down due to the political risk involved. To keep lavishing its partners with multimillion dollar annual compensation packages, the firm needs to sustain double digits year over year growth. In a world that’s been thoroughly McKinseyfied, this requires a loosening of standards. With its fingers in more pots than ever, McKinsey continues to be at the epicenter of world-shaping events.

by Anonymous, Current Affairs |  Read more:
Image: Mike Freiheit
[ed. See also: Quiz: Could You Be a Management Consultant?]

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