Why Every Cyclist Needs a Pool Noodle

It’s late March and my friend Erik and I are on the first leg of our 2,000-mile bicycle trip from Los Angeles to Denver. After sweating my way up a hill in Southern California, I bask in a glorious downhill. To protect myself from stumbling off the edge and make myself more visible to cars, I do what I normally do on long, steep downhills: take up the full lane. Through my eyeglass-mounted mirror, I watch cars inevitably pile up behind me. When the terrain flattens out and I move back to the shoulder, a stream of cars pass me.

A woman in one of the passing cars rolls down the window, and instead of the typical words of encouragement, her shriek nearly scares me off my bike as she yells at the top of her lungs, “SELFISH BITCH!”

The hard truth is that bicycles are still largely seen as a nuisance on the road. We’re on the margins—literally. Cyclists are reminded of this every time we get skimmed by a car. According to the World Health Organization, over half of international traffic deaths involve vulnerable road users such as cyclists. And because Americans are among the least avid cyclists in the world, they’re among the most likely to get killed by a car.

But I’ve discovered a life-saving device that allows cyclists to protect themselves and take back the road: the pool noodle.

Find one for about $2 anywhere: dollar stores, shopping malls, even the supermarket. Choose from the array of fun colors and use a bungee cord to strap this light, flexible toy to your bike rack so that it sticks out to the left side (or the right side, if you’re in a country where cars drive on the left). Start pedaling and watch as car after car moves over to the other lane.

The pool noodle may look silly, but since strapping it on our loads, it has made our lives safer every day. (Plus, it’s a fun conversation starter at pitstops, and it also reminds us not to take life too seriously.) On roads with zero road shoulder, the pool noodle becomes our shoulder. It makes us more visible to passing cars and the 18-wheelers that used to skim us constantly.

by Annalisa van den Bergh, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Annalisa van den Bergh

Netflix Has 175 Days Left To Pull Off A Miracle... Or It's All Over

Last year, half of Americans aged 22 to 45 watched zero hours of cable TV. And almost 35 million households have quit cable in the past decade.

All these people are moving to streaming services like Netflix (NFLX). Today, more than half of American households subscribe to a streaming service.

The media calls this “cord cutting.”

This trend is far more disruptive than most people understand. The downfall of cable is releasing billions in stock market wealth.

Combined, America’s five biggest cable companies are worth over $750 billion. And most investors assume Netflix will claim the bulk of profits that cable leaves behind.

So far, they’ve been right. Have you seen Netflix’s stock price? Holy cow. It has rocketed 8,300% since 2009, leaving even Amazon in the dust:

But don’t let its past success fool you.

Because Netflix is not the future of TV. Let me say that one more time… Netflix is not the future of TV.

The Only Thing That Matters

Netflix changed how we watch TV, but it didn’t really change what we watch…

Netflix has achieved its incredible growth by taking distribution away from cable companies. Instead of watching The Office on cable, people now watch The Office on Netflix.

This edge isn’t sustainable.

In a world where you can watch practically anything whenever you want, dominance in distribution is very fragile.

Because the internet has opened up a whole world of choice, featuring great exclusive content is now far more important than anything else.

For example, about 20 million people tuned in to watch the first episode of the latest season of hit show Game of Thrones.

It was one of the most-watched non-sporting events in TV history.

Netflix management knows content is king. The company spent $12 billion developing original shows last year. It released 88% more original programming in 2018 than it did the previous year.

And spending on original shows and movies is expected to hit $15 billion this year.

It now invests more in content than any other American TV network.

To fund its new shows, Netflix is borrowing huge sums of debt. It currently owes creditors $10.4 billion, which is 59% more than it owed this time last year.

The problem is that no matter how much Netflix spends, it has no chance to catch up with its biggest rival…

Disney Enters the Race

The Walt Disney Company (DIS) is one of America’s most iconic companies. (...)

More than a third of Disney’s revenue comes from its cable business. As you may know, Disney owns leading sports network ESPN and ABC News.

It makes money delivering this content to millions of Americans through cable providers like AT&T. As you can imagine, cord cutting has hit this business hard.

Disney’s cable business has stagnated over the past seven years. But in about 175 days, Disney is set to launch its own streaming service called Disney+.

It’s going to charge $6.99/month—around $6 cheaper than Netflix.

And it’s pulling all its content off of Netflix.

This is a big deal.

by Stephen McBride, Forbes | Read more:
Image: RiskHedge

The Comet is Coming

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Insurance Covers Mental Health, But Good Luck Using It

The U.S. is in the midst of a mental health crisis. In 2017, 47,000 Americans died by suicide and 70,000 from drug overdoses. And 17.3 million adults suffered at least one major depressive episode. The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, a landmark law passed more than a decade ago, requires insurers to provide comparable coverage for mental health and medical treatments. Even so, insurers are denying claims, limiting coverage, and finding other ways to avoid complying with the law.

Americans are taking to the courts to address what they see as an intrinsic unfairness. DeeDee Tillitt joined one lawsuit in 2016, months after she lost her son Max. He’d been an inpatient for three weeks at a treatment center to recover from a heroin addiction and seemed to be making progress. His addiction specialist wanted him to stay. United Behavioral Health, a unit of UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest insurer, declined to cover a longer stay for Max. Reluctantly, his family brought him home. Ten weeks later, Max was dead of an overdose. He was 21.

Tillitt soon discovered that Max’s death wasn’t an isolated tragedy. Across the country, people who need mental health and addiction treatment encounter roadblocks to care that could save their lives. United Behavioral Health was already the target of a class action alleging that it improperly denied coverage for such treatment. UnitedHealth’s headquarters is in the Minneapolis suburbs, not far from where Tillitt lived. She says she spent hours on the phone getting passed from one rep to another in her quest to find Max care the insurer would cover. “I felt like, God, could I just drive down to the lobby and scream at them?’ ” she says.

Tillitt became part of the suit against the company in February 2016. In March of this year, a judge found United Behavioral Health liable for breaching fiduciary duty and denying benefits, saying the insurer considered its bottom line “as much or more” than the well-being of its members in developing coverage guidelines. United Behavioral Health says it’s changed its guidelines and that “our policies have and will continue to meet all regulations.” In May the company asked the court to decertify the class, which would mean only the named plaintiffs would be eligible for remedies.

Failures of the mental health system contributed to trends that have lowered U.S. life expectancy over the past three years. From 2008, when Congress passed the parity act, to 2016, the rate at which Americans died by suicide increased 16%. The rate of fatal overdoses jumped 66% in the same period. “The health insurers are not following the federal law requiring parity in the reimbursement for mental health and addiction,” President Trump’s commission on the opioid crisis wrote in its report in November 2017. “They must be held responsible.”

The Lawmaker

Patrick Kennedy, a former Rhode Island congressman, was the force behind the parity law. In the early hours of May 4, 2006, he crashed his car on Capitol Hill. In a press conference the next day, Kennedy disclosed lifelong trouble with depression and addiction and announced he was going to rehab. Two years later he helped push through legislation to strengthen access to mental health care.

The law was problematic from the start. Passed in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, the parity act was tacked onto the emergency bill that bailed out the U.S.’s failing banks. “We didn’t pass the mental health parity legislation because there was this big public outcry, because we had this great march on the mall and we had 100,000 people show up,” Kennedy says. “The good news is that we got it passed. The bad news is no one knew that we got it passed because the underlying bill was secondary to the fact that we were facing a potential Great Depression.” Kennedy now works on several initiatives to improve compliance with the law.

In 2010 the Affordable Care Act became law, mandating that commercial health insurance plans offer mental health benefits. Combined with the parity act, federal law appeared to guarantee that Americans would have access to mental health services like never before. And there are signs the laws have helped. A federal report published in February 2019 concluded that the law increased the use of outpatient addiction treatment services and, for those already getting mental health care, the frequency of their visits.

Ghost Networks

Insurers fought the requirements from the start. The industry formed a group called the Coalition for Parity that sued to block the regulations to implement the law, saying they would be unduly burdensome. A judge dismissed the challenge.

In the years since, health insurance companies have eliminated many of the explicit policies that violate the law. Benefit plans can no longer set higher out-of-pocket limits on mental health care than on medical care, for example. But patients and their families say insurers use more subtle methods to stint on treatment. Their directories of providers are padded with clinicians who don’t take new patients or are no longer in an insurer’s coverage network. They request piles of paperwork before approving treatment. They pay mental health clinicians less than other medical professionals for similar services.

Patients frequently complain of “ghost networks”—insurance directories full of clinicians listed as in-network who aren’t contracted with the plan. Brian Dixon, a Fort Worth child psychiatrist, no longer accepts insurance. But Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas’ directory indicates he’s still part of the network. He says he regularly has to tell patients who call his office that he won’t take their coverage. “It’ll look like they have all these psychiatrists,” Dixon says of the network, “but they actually don’t.” The insurer says it updates its directory based on information received from physicians.

Some practitioners who want to join networks are turned away. Melissa Davies, a psychologist in Defiance County, Ohio, was part of Anthem’s network for years when she worked in a larger medical group. But the insurer refused to contract with her after she started a solo practice in 2012, saying the area was saturated, even though Davies is one of only three psychologists in the county. When Davies examined Anthem’s directory, “I found a great number of their providers were no longer practicing, or were dead,” she says. Anthem says it works to ensure its network can meet members’ needs and is dedicated to adding behavioral health providers.

It all adds up to a wall between people and the help they need, the kind of barrier that would never be tolerated if the illness were diabetes or leukemia. “You have parity coverage on paper,” says Angela Kimball, acting chief executive officer of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “But if you can’t find an in-network provider in your coverage, it can become meaningless for you if you can’t afford care or find it.”

by Cynthia Koons and John Tozzi, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: DeeDee Tillitt

Snack Attack

There was a time, at an old job of mine, when the snack options were so plentiful they required their own room: a closet filled with plastic freshness-preserving bins, like the kind the rich people I nannied for as a teenager had, full of cereals and Goldfish and wasabi peas and peanut-butter-filled pretzels. We also had a fro-yo machine, complete with a toppings bar, and on the first Tuesday of every month, we had birthday treats for any and all employees with a birthday that month: cupcakes, or doughnuts, or giant, gooey cookies. While working there, I made enough money to eat as much as I needed, and then some, as did most (if not all) of my co-workers. And yet, when birthday treats were announced, or a new fro-yo flavor debuted, we rushed the kitchens and pantries like starving children.

I regularly get mad at my well-fed, spoiled dog for lunging at every discarded sidewalk chicken bone she sees, but I am no better when it comes to free office food, and neither, I suspect, are you. Though I now work at an office that doesn’t routinely provide free food, on those blessed occasions snacks do become available, I will be one of the first alerted as a member of a Slack channel called “snackers-of-nymag,” which has nearly 200 members.

What is it about the workplace that makes snacking so serious an enterprise? Why do so many of us rise like the reanimated dead from our desks anytime the presence of anything free and edible is made known? I know it’s not hunger. It’s not even usually genuine interest. I have eaten so many small, bad cupcakes just because they are there. I don’t need any of this stuff, so why, when it isn’t there, do I feel somehow deprived?

I think there are a number of things going on here, psychologically. But let us first consider the human-resources angle: Snacks, actual studies show, can make employees happy. Or happier, anyway. In his book The Surprising Science of Meetings, Steven G. Rogelberg, an organizational psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, writes: “Snacks at meetings are a good predictor of positive feelings about meetings. Not only do people enjoy treats, snacks help build an upbeat mood state and foster camaraderie that can carry into the substance of the meeting itself.” It’s true: Who among us hasn’t taken refuge in the mediocre breakfast spread at an otherwise intolerably boring meeting? We know it’s bait, and we accept it willingly.

But what of snacks provided not at meetings — the snack drawers, or closets, ready to be picked over at anytime of day? Jessica Methot, a professor of human-resource management at Rutgers University, says this form of office snack is so prized because it enables us to take “micro-breaks” from work. “Snacking gives us a chance to step back from the work that we’re doing and recuperate,” she says. Most often, we seek these micro-breaks when we’re stressed, or frustrated, and we look to a packet of Cheez-Its to alleviate those feelings. According to Methot, and some academic research, this only works when the snack you select is “healthy.” From an organizational perspective, says Methot, leaders who want “healthy” employees are often motivated to “gamify” snacking by encouraging employees to snack publicly, in front of each other, where their co-workers will see what they choose to eat. “When we involve everyone in the act of eating, people tend to be healthier, but if we just leave a bunch of snacks out all day, and we leave it up to people to eat when they want, people eat a lot less healthy,” she says. To this I would say neither my employer nor yours knows more about what’s healthy for us than we do, and I’ll take a better health-care plan and 401(k) matching over a free seaweed packet any day. But I digress. (...)

Choosing a snack is one of relatively few moments of true freedom each workday — and with this tiny bit of agency, we go truly crazy. My wife is an office manager, and I have learned from her experience to see the other side of employees’ long-waged battle for free, diverse, and extravagant workplace snacks. Shortly after she was hired, she revamped the entire snack section, providing her co-workers with high-ticket items like Babybel cheese, Cheerios, fruit, and hot Cheetos. For this, her co-workers thanked her profusely. And then they started to ask for things.

“Hi!!” one co-worker Slacked. “i wondered if we could get more healthy snacks like fresh fruit, please? we also used to get babybel cheese, which i really loved… ” The same co-worker went on to request more options “that aren’t heavily processed.”

I have memorized this anecdote because my wife told me about it in a daily post-work recap, and I was so horrified that I transcribed the story in full to someone else. Do we all behave this way? Do I behave this way?

I asked other office managers/office snack providers to weigh in, and basically — yes. We are all like this, and not only that: we are demanding, but also inconsistent. “There’s one guy who always insists that we get salads and other ‘healthy options’ and then literally never eats them,” an events manager told me. Another (former) provider describe the reaction to his decision to replace his co-workers’ Hostess-brand snack selection with V8 juice and granola bars as an “absolute uprising.”

by Katie Heaney, The Cut |  Read more:

Image: Peter Dazeley/Getty Images

[ed. Cheetos were my weakness, but someone could have put out broken glass and it would've been gone within an hour.]

Wayne Shorter

[ed. Elvin Jones on drums, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on Bass, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet. Doesn't get any better than that.]

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The Great Work: Ralph Nader On Taking Back Power From The Corporate State

Ralph Nader ran for president four times, but most people only remember when he ran against Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000. As the Green Party nominee Nader got nearly 3 million votes, 97,421 of them in Florida — a pivotal state where, after a contentious recount and a Supreme Court decision, Bush beat Gore by 537 votes. Democrats excoriated Nader, calling him a spoiler. He lost many friends. Even Public Citizen, the advocacy group he founded in 1971, distanced itself from him. Nader has no regrets about running and has remained steadfast in his belief that democracy requires multiparty elections: it is not good enough to have people cast votes for the candidate they find less distasteful than the other one. (...)

It’s estimated that at least 3.5 million lives were saved between 1966 and 2014 because of Nader’s campaign against dangerous automobiles, and many more lives were saved or improved by his other investigations. He and the idealistic people who worked with him, called “Nader’s Raiders,” helped provide us with clean air and water; less-toxic foods; nutritional labels; cigarette warning labels; protective X-ray aprons; workplace-safety laws; toys that don’t choke kids; and medical devices that don’t electrocute patients. Nader is the country’s safety inspector, keeping an eye on the leaking roof, the cracked pipes, the seep of sewage into our daily lives.

A tall, solitary man with no wife or children (and apparently no car, cellphone, or romantic partners), Nader has founded more than fifty public-interest groups and watchdog agencies. Now eighty-five, he still resembles the somber, youthful David who battled Detroit’s mighty Goliath with a slingshot made of hard facts.

Barsamian: What’s your take on what’s going on in the country?

Nader: There’s a relentless increase in corporate control of our elections, of government, and of democratic institutions. I would say this is the high point of corporate control in a mature corporate state. The media are concentrated in a few hands. We have an uncontrollable military-industrial complex. Corporations are controlling people’s money through credit cards, debit cards, and online payment systems. Corporations have so much control in Washington, D.C., and state capitals that they can turn the government against its own people. And now they’re getting their favorites appointed to the courts.

Corporations strategically plan our lives. They plan the food we eat: junk food and junk drink, leading to huge obesity rates among children. They market directly to children, circumventing parental authority. They’re certainly trying to strategically plan our elections, our government policies, and our public budgets to produce more F-35s and nuclear weapons and fewer public works and public facilities. They don’t have to have a conspiracy to do this. If they had a conspiracy, it would mean there was some resistance that they had to conspire against.

Corporations are strategically planning a lot of our military and foreign policy. They’re strategically planning our education system. They’re commercializing education. They want all children to be computer-literate but not civics-literate.

And election campaigns are commercialized. That’s why even some of the best candidates rarely use phrases like “corporate welfare,” “corporate crime,” “corporate domination,” or “corporate control,” even though back in 2000 Business Week polled the American people and found that more than 70 percent of them thought corporations had too much control over people’s lives. People know who’s running the show, but they haven’t organized to take advantage of the huge asset called the Constitution, which starts with “We the people,” not “We the corporation” or “We the Congress.” We have all kinds of support on both the Left and the Right for Medicare for All, living wages, and cracking down on corporate crime. This idea of red state versus blue state doesn’t quite hold up when you go down to where people live, work, and raise their children. They want clean air; they want clean water; they want adequate health care; they want good public schools and public transportation.

Every major advance for justice in our country took no more than 1 percent of adults — around 2.5 million people — with public opinion behind them, mobilizing to change government policy. If you’ve got 2.5 million people, you can recover our country, recover our government, recover our hopes and dreams. Is that too much to ask, 1 percent?

Barsamian: The novelist Ursula K. Le Guin once said, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”

Nader: This isn’t really capitalism as we used to know it. My father and mother had a restaurant. That’s capitalism. What’s taken over now is big corporate capitalism. Corporations tie up small businesses in franchise agreements. The little guys are disadvantaged because the big guys get more tax breaks. Corporate capitalism is literally destroying traditional, small-scale capitalism. (...)

Barsamian: Do you think those corporations you were describing earlier feel good about Trump’s global economic policies and tariffs?

Nader: They’re nervous. So far he’s done things they like. He’s cut corporate taxes. He’s cut taxes for the rich. So they like that. Deregulation — they like that, too, even though most regulations are so out of date they have hardly any bite to them. They love the huge expansion of the military budget. Trump gave the Pentagon $80 billion it wasn’t even asking for, which delighted Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics.

So they like him so far. But he is unpredictable, and they don’t like unpredictable politicians. They don’t want to get into a war that will mess up the stock market and the banking system. They’re worried about his instability, and they’re worried about the warmongers around Trump, like National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. (...)

Barsamian: Would you favor term limits for Supreme Court justices?

Nader: Yes, I favor twelve years and out. That’s enough. In fact, the appointment system has resulted in such corporatist judges that the court has repeatedly voted 5-4 to entrench the corporate state. The justices think corporations are people and have privileges and immunities real people don’t. I don’t think that would be the case if Supreme Court justices were elected.

Ask a tough question, will you?

by David Barsamian, The Sun |  Read more:

Image: Myrna Aguilar

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The Quest to Make a Bot That Can Smell as Well as a Dog

The dogs still make Andreas Mershin angry. “I mean, I love dogs,” says the Greek-Russian scientist, in his office at MIT. “But the dogs are slapping me in the face.”

He pulls up a video to show me what he means. In it, a black dog named Lucy approaches a series of six stations, each separated by a small barrier. At every one, a glass cup of human urine with a screened lid sits at the level of the animal’s nose. Lucy takes a brief sniff of each sample, sometimes digging her snout in to get a better whiff. She is performing a kind of diagnostic test: searching for the telltale scent of prostate cancer, which, it turns out, leaves a volatile, discernible signature in a man’s pee. Discernible if you’re a dog, anyway. When Lucy finds what she’s looking for, she sits down and receives a treat.

Among humans—whose toolmaking prowess has given the world self-driving suitcases and reusable rocket boosters—prostate cancer is notoriously difficult to detect. The prevailing method is to check a patient’s blood for elevated levels of a protein called prostate-specific antigen. But the test has a miserable track record. The scientist who first discovered PSA has described the test as “hardly more effective than a coin toss.” A false positive can lead to a prostate biopsy, a harrowing procedure that involves inserting a large, hollow needle through the wall of the rectum to retrieve a tissue sample from the prostate itself.

Properly trained dogs, on the other hand, can detect prostate cancer with better than 90 percent accuracy, and with sleek, tail-­wagging efficiency. In the video, Lucy works her way through six samples in just a couple of minutes. This drives Mershin up the wall. “We have $100 million worth of equipment downstairs. And the dog can beat me?” he says. “That is pissing me off.” (...)

Mershin’s lab, where he keeps that $100 million worth of equipment, sits a few floors down from his office at MIT. In one room, researchers are trying to invent new colors; in another, to create the lightest, strongest materials on earth. But I’m here because this facility is doing some of the most important research in the world toward developing AO—artificial olfaction.

Plenty of robots these days can see, hear, speak, and (crudely) think. But good luck finding one that can smell. In part, that’s simply because olfaction has always been deeply underrated by humans—a species of cerebral, hypervisual snobs. Kant dismissed smell as the “most dispensable” of our five senses. One 2011 poll found that 53 percent of people ages 16 to 22 would rather give up their sense of smell than give up their smartphones and computers.

But in the past several years, it has become increasingly clear that smell, in the right snout, can be a kind of superpower. For millennia, humans have prized dogs for their tracking abilities; police and armed forces have long used them to sniff out bombs, drugs, and bodies. But since about the early 2000s, an avalanche of findings has dramatically expanded our sense of what dogs can do with their noses. It started when researchers realized that canines can smell the early onset of melanoma. Then it turned out they can do the same for breast cancer, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and ovarian cancer. They can smell the time of day in the movement of air around a room; sense diabetic episodes hours in advance; and detect human emotional states in the absence of visual cues. And it’s not just dogs. Tipped off by a Scottish nurse with a highly attuned nose, scientists have recently learned that people with Parkinson’s disease begin emitting a distinct “woody, musky odor” years before they show symptoms.

All this adds up to a revelation not just about dogs but about the physical world itself. Events and diseases and mental states leave reports in the air—ones that are intelligible to highly attuned olfactory systems but otherwise illegible to science. Smell, it appears, is sometimes the best way of detecting and discriminating between otherwise hidden things out in the world. And often, the next-best method of detecting that same thing is expensive (gas chromatography/mass spectrometry) or excruciating (tissue biopsies) or impossible (mind reading).

Unfortunately, the other reason we don’t have robots that can smell is that olfaction remains a stubborn biological enigma. Scientists are still piecing together the basics of how we sense all those volatile compounds and how our brains classify that information. “There are more unknowns than knowns,” says Hiroaki Matsunami, a researcher at Duke University.

Mershin, however, believes that we don’t really have to understand how mammals smell to build an artificial nose. He’s betting that things will work the other way around: To understand the nose, we have to build one first. In his efforts with a brilliant mentor named Shuguang Zhang, Mershin has built a device that can just begin to give dogs—his panting adversaries—a run for their money.

by Sara Harrison, Wired |  Read more:
Image: Bobby Doherty

When He Was Gone

Paul goes away for business a lot, and I try not to think about how OK I am with it. I’m OK, you’re OK. We’re OK, I tell people.

I neatly fold that thought up and put it in a drawer, along with the single hair on my chin and the TV show they just canceled that I was heavily relying on to get me through the next few years maybe. But I’m OK. If the place I order takeout from most nights ever closes, I’ll confront all these feelings in one drunken argument that will end with me telling Paul I like it better on my own anyway. But for now we’re OK. What we are is what that little word, OK, is for.

Friends think it must be exciting when he comes back from a trip. They mean the sex. They’re projecting their fantasies onto us, and we mostly let them. We’ve always been that couple: The writer and the computer guy. Living the dream, if the dream is having separate lives and being OK with it. In reality, when Paul comes back from a trip, I’m usually asleep on the couch with my laptop open to whatever I’m supposed to be writing, food spilled on my lap, a cat from the neighborhood that climbed in the window eating the food from my lap and making me have weird almost-sex dreams, which Paul interrupts. Maybe I left some kitchen appliance on, so there’s a burning smell. This is how we live, in this IKEA-induced fugue. But it’s OK.

Friends picture him coming home to New York like a soldier in uniform, even though his uniform is hoodies and obscure foreign sneakers he’s not cool enough to wear. He wishes he could ride a skateboard to work, because that’s the closest thing to his childhood hoverboard fantasy. I know the boy who lives inside him, you see. I chose that boy from all the boys. I chose this life. They picture him bursting in and carrying me off to bed, like he’s been away at war or at sea, when really he’s just been hanging out in Japan under the guise of business. Business, business, business — say it enough and it might mean something.

Paul was in high spirits when he left. He was going to Japan, motherfuckers, which is how I imagine his boss gave him the news. As he packed, he told me what he’d be doing while he was away, like not recognizing anything he ate and barely bathing, which pretty much described what I do all the time. I was busy trying to write an e-mail to a grumpy editor about some changes he had made that I did not think needed to be made, so I was only half listening, one foot in, one foot out of our life, always somewhere else but never sure quite where.

He tried to tickle me at one point, and I shouted, I’m trying to do important business! and he thought that was hilarious because he knew how I felt about business.

From what he can make out, my business is lying horizontally in different places around the apartment, not writing, mostly watching cooking shows or reading what other people have written and thinking, Well, I don’t need to write that now. To me his business is just standing vertically in different exotic locations, looking at the latest video games. The biggest misconception about his job is that he sits around and plays video games all day. It’s all virtual reality now, so he actually stands a lot, golfing, skiing, boxing, killing zombies, or whatever people do virtually that they could do quite as easily — or more easily, even — in the real world. He always tries to get me to go to those 3-D movies that are almost theme-park rides, the ones that have surround sound and smells and wind, and I just roll my eyes and say, Or we could go outside. I made him go to a park once, and a pigeon shat on him, and I said, See, you don’t get that at the movies. I told him it was a sign of good luck as he frantically dabbed at his shirt.

You write articles online, he said, to remind me I’m just as far gone from reality as he is. He doesn’t know all the secret ways I try to write off-line, keep one foot in the world still. Like at Whole Foods there’s a suggestion book where you can leave a comment, and some days I write things in it like Where’s the black garlic? or How do I make bread? or Thank you for existing. I always write in different handwriting so they don’t think I’m crazy. I’d love to just be crazy.

Paul doesn’t know who I am when he’s away, and I don’t know who he is when he’s away, but when we’re together, we’re Paul and Julia again. We are who we’re supposed to be, and the rest isn’t real. I assume it’s like that for everyone.

When he said he was going away this time, I immediately thought of it as an opportunity to sleep more and wash less, but after he left, I felt like I should get up and bathe, and I ended up making a bigger effort than usual, and then I felt obliged to go out and take advantage of not looking like a teenage boy for once. There are some impeccably groomed and dressed writers, but I avoid them at all costs. When Paul called to say he’d gotten there safely, I had to pretend I was on the couch in my pajamas and not in a bar day-drinking. It was confusing. He wanted me out there in the world, but I felt I was supposed to pretend I was a little sad he was gone — at least, for the first few days. I told him I missed him, because I did. I’m not a complete monster.

Once, when he was away, I told him I had sniffed his shirt, because I’d seen someone do that in a movie. I don’t think people really do that though, or I hope they don’t. But then, people are gross, so they might.

I was trying not to think about how much I liked having my own space, though it was technically our space, and day-drinking helped me forget. Paul was doing what he needed to do, and I was doing what I needed to do, which just happened to be day-drinking and then going home and eating family-size bags of chips and watching all the TV. I was listening to my body. That’s what we’re supposed to do now, right?

by Lucie Britsch, The Sun |  Read more:

Image: Jon Kral

Eardrum Suck

Thanks to recent research, we now understand a lot about headphones. But there’s one part of the headphone puzzle that I haven’t understood at all, and until a few weeks ago, neither did anyone else I’d talked with. It’s a phenomenon I call “eardrum suck,” and it occurs with some noise-canceling headphones. When you put the headphones on and activate the noise-canceling function, it can cause a feeling like riding a high-speed elevator, where you’re whisked abruptly into a region of lower atmospheric pressure, and the higher-pressure air inside your ear pushes your eardrums out slightly. For many, including me, it’s an effect so uncomfortable it can cause us to leave our expensive noise-canceling headphones in a drawer, unused.

Until recently, the models most notorious for eardrum suck have been Bose over-ear noise-canceling headphones, such as the QC25s and QC35 IIs. Yet as anyone who’s taken a commercial airline flight in the last decade can attest, these models are immensely popular. Clearly, some people either don’t experience eardrum suck, or do experience it but aren’t bothered by it.

Also, I and others noticed that the problem doesn’t seem to occur with Bose’s QC20 and QC30 noise-canceling earphones, even though those models deliver noise-canceling performance comparable to the over-ear models.

The question arose again when Sony came out late last year with the WH-1000XM3s, the first headphones I’ve found that deliver measurably better noise canceling than the Bose equivalents. Against my hopes but confirming my fears, I and some of my colleagues noticed that the WH-1000XM3s’ eardrum suck seemed about as bad as the Bose QC35 IIs’.

I’d asked some of the best minds in the headphone business to explain what’s going on, but no one was able to give me a plausible answer; “We’ve been wondering about that, too,” was the most common response. I searched around on the Internet, but none of the purported explanations (such as the idea that the noise canceling allows you to hear the blood pumping through your ears) survived more than a few moments of scrutiny.

Last fall, I even built a test rig to measure the pressure inside a headphone. But while it was sensitive enough to pick up the minuscule pressure difference caused by lightly tapping a finger on the earcup, it didn’t detect any pressure difference when I switched the noise canceling on and off. The more I thought about it, the more I realized this shouldn’t have surprised me. If there were added pressure in the headphones, the pressure would be relieved merely by shifting the earpads slightly to let the pressure leak out.

Then I remembered I’d once met an audio engineer whose previous work in headphone noise canceling has resulted in several patents. I thought that because he doesn’t work directly for a headphone manufacturer, he might be willing to shed some light. Through a mutual acquaintance, I was able to connect with him over Skype. At his request, I won’t share his name, but his comments gave me the first plausible answer I’ve found on this topic.

Before we continue, it’s important to understand how noise-canceling headphones work. In all noise-canceling headphones, there’s a microphone inside the earcup, near your ear, that picks up the sound inside the earcup, which is a mixture of the music coming from the driver plus environmental noise leaking in through the headphones. The headphones route the sound from the microphone back into the headphones’ internal circuitry, out of phase with the music signal. This cancels out most of the music signal and leaves the noise. The resulting noise signal -- which is out of phase with the environmental noise coming in through the headphones -- is then routed back into the amplifier’s input. Because the driver then reproduces this noise that’s out of phase with the environmental noise, it cancels the environmental noise.

This is called feedback noise canceling. More advanced noise-canceling headphones, such as the Bose QC35 IIs and Sony WH-1000XM3s, add feed-forward noise-canceling, which uses a microphone (or two) on the outer shell of the headphones to pick up the environmental noise. The noise signal from the microphones is inverted in phase and sent into the driver, so the noise is canceled. Combining the feedback and feed-forward systems results in the maximum possible noise canceling available with today’s technology.

At last, the answer

According to the engineer, eardrum suck, while it feels like a quick change in pressure, is psychosomatic. “There’s no actual pressure change. It’s caused by a disruption in the balance of sound you’re used to hearing,” he explained. “People sometimes report the same effect when they go into anechoic chambers, which absorb high frequencies but allow low frequencies to come through. With noise-canceling headphones, it’s the opposite -- you’re canceling the bass but not the high frequencies -- but it can have the same effect.”

by Brent Butterworth, Soundstage! Solo |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: The Best Noise-Cancelling Headphones (Wirecutter).]

Dan Clarke / Arkotype / DTL–H300/0/½ / Graphics / 2018
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‘Knitting is Coding’ and Yarn is Programmable

On the eve of the American Physical Society’s annual March meeting, a Sunday “stitch ‘n bitch” session convened during happy hour at a lobby bar of the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel.

Karen Daniels, a physicist at North Carolina State University, had tweeted notice of the meet-up earlier that day: “Are you a physicist into knitting, crocheting, or other fiber arts?” she asked. “I’ll be the one knitting a torus.” (A torus is a mathematized doughnut; hers was inspired by a figure in a friend’s scientific paper.)

At the bar, amid tables cluttered with balls of yarn, Dr. Daniels absorbed design advice from a group of specialized knitters, among them Elisabetta Matsumoto, an applied mathematician and physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a co-host of the gathering.

For Dr. Matsumoto, knitting is more than a handicraft hobby with health benefits. She is embarking on a five-year project, “What a Tangled Web We Weave,” funded by the National Science Foundation, to investigate the mathematics and mechanics of “the ancient technology known as knitting.”

Some of the oldest examples date to the 11th century B.C.E. in Egypt. But despite generations of practical and experiential knowledge, the physical and mathematical properties of knitted fabric rarely are studied in a way that produces predictive models about how such fabrics behave.

Dr. Matsumoto argues that “knitting is coding” and that yarn is a programmable material. The potential dividends of her research range from wearable electronics to tissue scaffolding.

During the happy-hour meetup, she knitted a swatch illustrating a plastic surgery technique called Z-plasty. The swatch was for a talk she would deliver at 8 a.m. on Wednesday morning called “Twisted Topological Tangles.” Scores of physicists turned up, despite a competing parallel session on “The Extreme Mechanics of Balloons.”

“I’ve been knitting since I was a kid,” Dr. Matsumoto told her (mostly male) audience. “That was the thing I did to get along with my mom when I was a teenager. It’s just been a dream to take all of this stuff that I learned and played with as a child and turn it into something scientifically rigorous.”

As a first step, her team is enumerating all possible knittable stitches: “We know there’s going to be uncountably many, there’s going to be a countably infinite number. How to classify them is what we are working on now.”

The investigation is informed by the mathematical tradition of knot theory. A knot is a tangled circle — a circle embedded with crossings that cannot be untangled. (A circle with no crossings is an “unknot.”)

“The knitted stitch is a whole series of slipknots, one after the other,” said Dr. Matsumoto. Rows and columns of slipknots form a lattice pattern so regular that it is analogous to crystal structure and crystalline materials.

By way of knot theory, Dr. Matsumoto essentially is developing a knit theory: an alphabet of unit-cell stitches, a glossary of stitch combinations, and a grammar governing the knitted geometry and topology — the fabric’s stretchiness, or its “emergent elasticity.” (...)

Dr. Matsumoto’s presentation opened a three-hour session entitled “Fabrics, Knits and Knots” — the first time that the subject had been addressed at the American Physical Society’s annual meeting. (...)

Derek Moulton, of the University of Oxford, mentioned variants of sailor’s knots, DNA and protein knots, and worms that tie themselves into knots in order to minimize dehydration. He went on discuss “whether a knotted filament with zero points of self-contact may be realized physically.” That is, can a knot exist wherein none of its crossings touch? (It can; try it at home with a strip of paper, or a cord.)

And Thomas Plumb-Reyes, an applied physicist at Harvard, presented his research on “Detangling Hair” to a standing-room-only audience.

“What is going on in tangled hair?” he asked. “What is the optimal combing strategy?”

Shashank Markande, a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Matsumoto, reported on their stitch classification work so far. Together, they had derived a conjecture: All knittable stitches must be ribbon knots. (A ribbon knot is a very technical tangle.) And they pondered the corollary: Are all ribbon knots knittable?

Back in February, Mr. Markande (who started knitting only recently for the sake of science) thought he’d found an example of an unknittable ribbon knot, using a knots-and-links software program called SnapPy. He sent Dr. Matsumoto a text message with a sketch: “Tell me if this can be knitted?”

Dr. Matsumoto was just heading out for a run, and by the time she returned, having manipulated the yarn every which way in her head, she had worked out an answer. “I think that can be knitted,” she texted back. When Mr. Markande pressed her on how, she added: “It’s knittable by our rules, but it isn’t trivial to do with needles.”

Mr. Markande said later, “I was pretty surprised. With my limited knowledge, I thought it could not be knitted. But Sabetta managed to knit it.”

by Siobhan Roberts, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Johnathon Kelso for The New York Times

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Dinosaur Jr.

Can CBD Really Do All That?

Despite the hype, the CBD molecule is actually pretty amazeballs

CBD is definitely screaming up toward the peak of inflated expectations, but it's not pure grift: the actual molecule and the way it interacts with our bodies is pretty amazing.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Moises Velasquez-Manoff dives deep into the history of therapeutic uses of CBD (which are necessarily small-scale and inconclusive, thanks to both legal prohibition and centuries of intense selective breeding to increase the THC content of marijuana, which downregulates production of CBD).

Small-scale studies and personal experimentation produced a wealth of anecdata, but not much by way of solid conclusion. That may change soon, thanks to both the breathless commercial hype and the true believers whose lives have been altered by taking CBD (maybe). In the wake of state-level legalizations (and Canada's national legalization), there is a renaissance in the science of CBD, and in more rigorous manufacturing standards (many "high-CBD" marijuana products have little or no CBD in them, and the people who claim health benefits from these are experiencing some combination of a placebo effect and just getting really high).

Preliminary data shows that CBD has 65 cellular target ("CBD may provide a kind of full-body massage at the molecular level") which may account for the very wide range of symptoms and pathologies it has been used to treat, from opioid addiction to "autism spectrum disorders... [an] aggressive brain cancer called glioblastoma... [lessening the] incidence of graft-versus-host disease in bone-marrow transplant patients" and more. In the meantime, actual CBD vendors no longer make actual health claims because the FDA has (quite rightly) told them to cut it out with that shit.

And yet, for millenniums people have used cannabis itself with relatively few side effects. (These can include dry mouth, lethargy and paranoia.) THC hits CB1 and CB2 receptors, but how CBD works is less clear. It seems to interact with multiple systems: increasing the quantity of native cannabinoids in the human body; binding with serotonin receptors, part of the “feel good” molecular machinery targeted by conventional S.S.R.I.s; and stimulating GABA receptors, responsible for calming the nervous system. With more than 65 cellular targets, CBD may provide a kind of full-body massage at the molecular level.

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: Gartner Hype Cycle

[ed. Full article here: Can CBD Really Do All That? (NY Times Magazine).]

How the Hell Has Danielle Steel Managed to Write 179 Books?

There's a sign in Danielle Steel's office that reads, "There are no miracles. There is only discipline." It's a dutiful message, and yet the sheer amount that Steel has accomplished in her five-decade career does seem like the stuff of dreams.

Let's look at the numbers, shall we? The author has written 179 books, which have been translated into 43 languages. Twenty-two of them have been adapted for television, and two of those adaptations have received Golden Globe nominations. Steel releases seven new novels a year—her latest, Blessing in Disguise, is out this week—and she's at work on five to six new titles at all times. In 1989 Steel was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having a book on the New York Times best-seller list for the most consecutive weeks of any author—381, to be exact. To pull it off, she works 20 to 22 hours a day. (A couple times a month, when she feels the crunch, she spends a full 24 hours at her desk.)

Steel writes in her home office. Most of the time, that's in Paris, but sometimes she's at her home in San Francisco, where she writes on her 1946 Olympia standard typewriter, which she's nicknamed Olly. "Olly's a big, heavy machine and it's older than I am," Steel tells Glamour. "It has a very smooth flow to it . I have anywhere between 12 to 15 of them that I've bought over the years, but they're not good enough to work on. I keep them for parts in case there's ever a problem, because this is a very endangered species!"

Steel is a creature of habit. She gets to her office—by 8:30 A.M., where she can often be found in her cashmere nightgown. In the morning she'll have one piece of toast and an iced decaf coffee (she gave up full-throated caffeine 25 years ago). After lunch and as the day wears on, she'll nibble on miniature bittersweet chocolate bars. "Dead or alive, rain or shine, I get to my desk and I do my work. Sometimes I'll finish a book in the morning, and by the end of the day, I've started another project," Steel says.

She credits her boundless energy for her productivity and also her drive to push through moments when she's stuck. "I keep working. The more you shy away from the material, the worse it gets. You're better off pushing through and ending up with 30 dead pages you can correct later than just sitting there with nothing," she advises. Her output is also the result of a near superhuman ability to run on little sleep. "I don't get to bed until I'm so tired I could sleep on the floor. If I have four hours, it's really a good night for me," Steel says.

She's always been like this, even as a kid growing up in France. Before playing with friends after school, she'd come home and immediately complete her homework. By 19, Steel had written her first book—she’d promised herself that if she got it to sell, she'd be content, prepared to give up writing and focus on her family. The novel sold in a week. One hundred and seventy-nine books later, she still hasn't been able to quit.

Steel never set out to be a best-seller. In fact, she was made to feel embarrassed of her success. "I grew up in Europe, where it was not considered polite for a woman to be working, and I was married to two different men who did not like that I worked," she says. "But I was lucky because I could work at home when my kids were asleep." (Steel has nine children.) "It was kind of this invisible thing that I did," she adds. "I never had success as a goal. I had this drive to to write the stories that came to me—and to conquer them. It came from the gut, not from the cash register." Even now Steel still encounters people who are put off by her illustrious career. "About 10 years ago someone asked me, 'Oh, do you have an agent?' I mean, do they think I stand on the street corner and try to sell this stuff?" she says. Or another time at a party, "Someone said to me, 'Are you still writing?' And I wanted to say, 'I guess you don't read The New York Times.'"

by Samantha Leach, Glamour |  Read more:

Image: Danielle Steel

Transcript: Don Felder

This week we speak to Don “fingers” Felder, lead guitarist for the Eagles. The classic band has sold over 150 million albums worldwide. Their album, the Eagle’s Greatest Hits, was the best selling album of the 20th century. The band accumulated five number-one singles, six Grammy Awards, five American Music Awards, and six number-one albums.

Felder is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and writer of the Eagle’s biggest hit, Hotel California — #3 on the all time best-selling albums. The Eagles are the only band that have 2 albums in the top 10 best sellers (The Beatles have two in top 20).

He is proud of his ongoing charity work for the likes of the Starkey Hearing Foundation.

His latest album is “American Rock ’N’ Roll.” The album was an opportunity to jam with some of his closest musical pals, including Sammy Hagar, Slash, Richie Sambora, Peter Frampton, Joe Satriani, Mick Fleetwood, Bob Weir, and more.

He tells the story of how he wrote the music to Hotel California — about a year before the band recorded it. The album Hotel California was an attempt to move the band away from the Soft Country genre and more towards a harder Rock sound. He created a guitar duel for the song so he could play with his pal and new band member, Joe Walsh. Felder also tells about crafting a new intro for the song for their live MTV acoustic show.

His favorite books are here; A transcript of our conversation is available here. [ed. Ignore the typos, it's a transcript.]

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VOICE-OVER: This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.

RITHOLTZ: This week on the podcast I have an extra special guest and I know everybody bust my chops when I say that, but my guest is extra special. His name is Don Felder. He was the lead guitarist for the Eagles. He wrote Hotel California. He is a legend in the music industry and really a very nice guy and an informative raconteur who tells wonderful stories.

If you are at all interested in music or 70’s, or the Eagles, or the 80’s or guitar history, or the 90’s, you will find this to be an absolutely fascinating conversation. So with no further ado, my interview with Don Felder.

FELDER: Thank you. It’s fabulous to be back here again.

RITHOLTZ: So you have really a fascinating background, and I was really, you know, stunned when I was reading you — you grew up in Gainesville, Florida, which somehow became a hot bed of music. Is that a fair statement?

FELDER: Yeah, for some reason and I don’t know if it was something that was in the water or in something that we were all smoking at the time that so many people came out of Gainesville that went on to become rock and roll legends, rock and roll hall of fame inductees, platinum-selling artist. We were all just kids in different garage bands down there. One of my guitar students was a kid named Tommy Petty who I taught how to play guitar. He was playing …

RITHOLTZ: Little Tommy Petty.

FELDER: Little Tommy Petty. He was playing base in this band called the Epics, and he thought it was kind of awkward and keekee to be fronting a band playing bass and singing. So he wanted to learn to play guitar so he could write songs instead of playing base, so I gave him guitar lessons. I helped with a little bit of the arrangement on a couple of their songs and their shows. I went to just hang out. We were friends. We were in Battles of the Bands together.

Stephen Stills and I had a band together in Gainesville. I think we were 14 and 15 years old. My mom would drive us around in these little events because we didn’t have a car or a driver’s license or anything.

Duane Allman and Gregg Allman were in different bands in that time called, like the Allman Joys or The Spotlights. Duane taught me how to play slide guitar one night on the floor of his mom’s house in Daytona Beach about 2:30 in the morning. Who else was around there?

Lynyrd Skynyrd was right over in Jacksonville, Florida. Bernie Leadon actually moved to Gainesville because his dad was given the appointment of heading up the Nuclear Research Department at the University of Florida, so he moved his family, all eight kids over to Gainesville. And Stephen stills had just left to move to California. Bernie showed up and picked me up actually at a bus station where I was coming back from a little town called Lake City, about 30 minutes away, where I’ve gone up by myself and played this little women’s tea party in the afternoon.

So he had a car, he was 16. He picked me up at the bus station and actually wound up replacing Stevens Stills in that band. And Bernie went on to become one of the founding members of the Eagles. We’ve known each other since high school. So Stephen, Bernie, and Tom and myself all went to the same high school, Gainesville High School, together so …

RITHOLTZ: That’s astonishing.

FELDER: I don’t know how that all happened, but it did.

RITHOLTZ: And — and what first got you interested in music? The — the legend is you see Elvis Presley on television and that just sparks a lifelong interest.

FELDER: Well, there was a huge interest in that explosion of rock and roll in that time. It had a just a really strong, exciting energy about it, whether it was Little Richard singing Tutti Frutti or Elvis on stage shaking and gyrating, and flipping his greasy hair around, snarling his upper lip. And watching all those young girls screaming at him, I kind of said, you know, I think I’d like to do that. That looks like fun.

And so I traded a handful of cherry bombs to a kid that lived across the street for a broken guitar. It had a crack in it, it was missing strings. And I found the guy around the corner that helped me tune the thing, replace some of the strings on it. And I used to sit on my front porch down there on this dirt road in Gainesville on this metal collider just sliding back and forth and back and forth, trying to figure out how that guitar work. Where do you put your fingers? How do you make chords?

And there wasn’t a music school. There was no money to be had in my family for lessons if there was a music school. So I was pretty much self-taught, and it turned out that I gave myself kind of basic ear training by listening new stuff on the radio or listening to my stuff on my dad’s tape recorder and just playing it over and over and over until I could figure it out on guitar. And eventually, even today I can hear something two or three times and just play it right away because I’ve trained my mind and my body and my inside into music to be able to hear something and play it. (...)

RITHOLTZ: You start working at a music store, like an instrument store, and you were working essentially to be able to earn money for instruments. Is that …

FELDER: Yeah, I wasn’t getting paid money, I was given credit for every hour or every lesson that I taught there. I was given a credit on the store card. They had this thing, you know, they put in the register and give me $5 or $10 for every much I done, and I could use that money for strings, for pedals, for chords. If I saved up enough I could trade in my old guitar and get a better guitar and — or an amp or some tubes or I blew out a speaker and my amp had needed to be replaced, which happened frequently in those days. I would be able to work until I got enough money to get a speaker replacement. So yes, that’s where I was learning how to make money was in working in a music store.

RITHOLTZ: And — and where did the music theory in Gainesville first come into your experiences?

FELDER: There was a great guitar player that lived there whose name was Paul Hillis. He left the Gainesville and went to the Berklee School of Music in Boston and came back a few years later, but he given up guitar and started playing piano cause he thought you could see in compositions, and chord clusters, and progressions much easier on piano than on guitar, which is true. It’s a repetitive octave on piano, and guitar, everything is a different fingering as you go up the scale or up the neck.

So he opened a school of music, and for every hour that I taught there these incoming young kids who had gotten a guitar for Christmas who were complaining about their calluses hurting on their fingers, for every hour I taught them, he would teach me music theory, composition, chord progressions, how to read music. And I basically got a — the cheap version of a Berklee College of Music education for ball. (...)

RITHOLTZ: I want to talk about California right now. Hotel California, let’s talk a little bit about your writing that song because my — I — I mentioned my pet theory is the Eagles were kind of thought of as like a kickback mellow country, not quite rock band. And I know the rest of the band really wanted to be more of a Led Zeppelin type of both with hotels destruction and with rock and roll. And Hotel California just took the band to an entirely different level, not only is the song ranked 49 on the list of greatest songs of all time.

The album sold 17 million copies in the U.S., 32 million worldwide. I think it was number three on the all-time list, something like that. So — so you deserve a whole lot of credit for really taking the band up and to the next level. I have to ask because it’s so different from everything else that was done. How did you come up with that that intro and then how did you basically just write the music for that song?

FELDER: At the time I was living in a rental beach house on Malibu Beach, and I had two little kids. One was about a year old, one was about 2.5 years old. And I was sitting on the couch one day just playing an acoustic guitar and looking out at the sun glistening on the Pacific Ocean, and watching my two kids playing in the sand and this little swing set we had on the beach. And out came that progression two or three times and I — I had to go record a little bit of it so I wouldn’t forget it.

Much like a dream, when something comes through me, I have to write it down or record it or, you know, two days later I can’t remember what it was.

RITHOLTZ: It’s gone, right.

FELDER: It’s gone, you know. So I run into my daughter’s back bedroom who was almost a year, and when she was awake I’d set up this little recording studio back there where I could go in and make demos. So I went back and recorded that little progression three or four times, and turned it off, and went out and played with my kids on the beach.

Years — well, months later when it was time to sit down and write the songs that we’re going to become candidates for what was going to be the Hotel California record, I had put together about 15 or 16 song ideas. And I heard the little three-time loop through the progression and I said, “I got to finish that,” so I really rebuilt the whole idea of playing acoustic guitar, 12 strings starting it off, and I played bass on the overdub. I played the drum machine that ran through it. This sounded kind of like a cha-cha beat or something.

And I thought Joe how should just joined the band and was going to be the first appearance on this record Joe Walsh should just the band and was going to be the first appearance on this record. And Joe and I had been playing together a lot before he joined the band. If you go online and look at Joe Walsh and friends, you can see him and I doing all this guitar trading and jamming together. I wanted to have something on this record that he and I could do together. (...)

RITHOLTZ: So — so let me ask you a few questions about that because I’m — I’m fascinated by this process. First, the — the guitar duel at the end, so you want to incorporate Joe Walsh more into the band, what — what did you use as inspiration for that because when I was thinking about this I immediately think of the end of — of Layla or the Beatles Abbey Road Medley where there’s three guys swapping a — a guitar licks back and forth. What — what was the driving force that said, hey, let’s do a little guitar duel on here.

FELDER: I think Joe and I had already been doing that, and you were talking about Layla, that was Duane Allman playing …

RITHOLTZ: Right.

FELDER: … the high slide guitar part on that and Eric playing below it. It was just — it was something that all guitar players like to do, to go together against somebody that plays really well, and it pushes you up to another level. And so I wanted to do that with Joe on this record, so I kind of designed that whole track with that in mind.

by Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture |  Read more:

Image: via