Sunday, September 25, 2016
The Democratization of Censorship: When Anyone Can Kill a Site as Effectively as a Government Can
On the eve of the Stuxnet attacks, half a decade ago, I found myself discussing what it all meant with William Gibson (I'd just interviewed him on stage in London), and I said, "I think the most significant thing about any of these sophisticated, government-backed attacks is that they will eventually turn into a cheap and easy weapon that technically unskilled people can deploy for petty grievances." We haven't quite got there yet with Stuxnet, but there's a whole class of "advanced persistent threat" techniques that are now in the hands of fringey criminals who deploy them at the smallest provocation.
Exhibit A is Brian Krebs (previously), a tireless and fearless cybercrime reporter who has outed spammers, scammers, carders, black pharmacy proprietors, pornographers, skimmers, and, significantly, DDoSers. Distributed Denial of Service attacks harness lots of hijacked or compromised computers to flood the target's site with so many malformed, computationally intensive request that it just shuts down -- sometimes taking its ISP with it. Boing Boing has been hit by some doozies in the past, but nothing like what Krebs has had to contend with.
Krebs gets hit often, seemingly in retaliation for his reporting. Naturally, the DDoS creeps he outs are most apt to use DDoS to attack his site. For years, he's relied on pro bono help from Akamai, a company that runs a huge content distribution network that is legendarily hardened against DDoS attacks.
But last week, Krebs went offline altogether, and Akamai let him know that this time, they couldn't shield him. The amount of traffic that was coming in was going to cost Akamai millions -- it was more than even they could absorb.
There's DDoSes and then there's DDoSes. In Krebs's case, the attack hit 620 Gbps, the kind of flood that you'd normally find in a state sponsored attack. In this case, the attacker was able to leverage Internet of Things devices with poor security to build the biggest-yet IoT botnet (a growth industry with no end in sight) that slammed Krebs's network without mercy.
Krebs's attack exists at the intersection of so many of the internet's dumpster-fires. It hit the same week that HP deployed DRM on its printers, making them off-limits to security researchers -- this is the same manufacturer that was outed as having 100,000,000 hijackable printers in the field that could be harnessed for botnets.
Then there's the crimeware industry, which works with scummy ISPs that secretly participate in DDoS attacks for their own financial benefit. Finally, there's the disturbing news that someone (cough China cough) is building an internet-killing weapon that relies on DDoS as its battering ram.
It looks like Krebs's attack was in retaliation for outing a couple of petty Israeli criminals who'd run a DDoS-for-hire service (the attack included the string "freeapplej4ck" in its payloads, a reference to one of the crooks' aliases). These two puny creeps, or their aggrieved dimwit pals, were able to muster the firepower of a government to attack a journalist.
Meanwhile, Krebs was eventually bailed out by Google's Project Shield, one of Jigsaw's anti-"surveillance, extremist indoctrination, and censorship" tools. That right there is another sign of the times: the attacks launched by state-level actors and those who can muster comparable firepower are no match for Google -- so far.
Exhibit A is Brian Krebs (previously), a tireless and fearless cybercrime reporter who has outed spammers, scammers, carders, black pharmacy proprietors, pornographers, skimmers, and, significantly, DDoSers. Distributed Denial of Service attacks harness lots of hijacked or compromised computers to flood the target's site with so many malformed, computationally intensive request that it just shuts down -- sometimes taking its ISP with it. Boing Boing has been hit by some doozies in the past, but nothing like what Krebs has had to contend with.Krebs gets hit often, seemingly in retaliation for his reporting. Naturally, the DDoS creeps he outs are most apt to use DDoS to attack his site. For years, he's relied on pro bono help from Akamai, a company that runs a huge content distribution network that is legendarily hardened against DDoS attacks.
But last week, Krebs went offline altogether, and Akamai let him know that this time, they couldn't shield him. The amount of traffic that was coming in was going to cost Akamai millions -- it was more than even they could absorb.
There's DDoSes and then there's DDoSes. In Krebs's case, the attack hit 620 Gbps, the kind of flood that you'd normally find in a state sponsored attack. In this case, the attacker was able to leverage Internet of Things devices with poor security to build the biggest-yet IoT botnet (a growth industry with no end in sight) that slammed Krebs's network without mercy.
Krebs's attack exists at the intersection of so many of the internet's dumpster-fires. It hit the same week that HP deployed DRM on its printers, making them off-limits to security researchers -- this is the same manufacturer that was outed as having 100,000,000 hijackable printers in the field that could be harnessed for botnets.
Then there's the crimeware industry, which works with scummy ISPs that secretly participate in DDoS attacks for their own financial benefit. Finally, there's the disturbing news that someone (cough China cough) is building an internet-killing weapon that relies on DDoS as its battering ram.
It looks like Krebs's attack was in retaliation for outing a couple of petty Israeli criminals who'd run a DDoS-for-hire service (the attack included the string "freeapplej4ck" in its payloads, a reference to one of the crooks' aliases). These two puny creeps, or their aggrieved dimwit pals, were able to muster the firepower of a government to attack a journalist.
Meanwhile, Krebs was eventually bailed out by Google's Project Shield, one of Jigsaw's anti-"surveillance, extremist indoctrination, and censorship" tools. That right there is another sign of the times: the attacks launched by state-level actors and those who can muster comparable firepower are no match for Google -- so far.
Most of the time, ne’er-do-wells like Applej4ck and others are content to use their huge DDoS armies to attack gaming sites and services. But the crooks maintaining these large crime machines haven’t just been targeting gaming sites. OVH, a major Web hosting provider based in France, said in a post on Twitter this week that it was recently the victim of an even more massive attack than hit my site. According to a Tweet from OVH founder Octave Klaba, that attack was launched by a botnet consisting of more than 145,000 compromised IP cameras and DVRs.
I don’t know what it will take to wake the larger Internet community out of its slumber to address this growing threat to free speech and ecommerce. My guess is it will take an attack that endangers human lives, shuts down critical national infrastructure systems, or disrupts national elections.
But what we’re allowing by our inaction is for individual actors to build the instrumentality of tyranny. And to be clear, these weapons can be wielded by anyone — with any motivation — who’s willing to expend a modicum of time and effort to learn the most basic principles of its operation.
The sad truth these days is that it’s a lot easier to censor the digital media on the Internet than it is to censor printed books and newspapers in the physical world. On the Internet, anyone with an axe to grind and the willingness to learn a bit about the technology can become an instant, self-appointed global censor.The Democratization of Censorship [Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security]
by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing | Read more:
Image: Teton Dam Flood - Newdale, WaterArchives.org
Hallucinogen Therapy Is Coming
Three years later Daniel Kreitman still chokes up when he talks about what he saw, and how it changed him. Kreitman, an upholsterer by trade, had taken psilocybin, a hallucinogen derived from mushrooms, in a trial at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for nicotine addiction. He was 52, and he’d smoked between one and two packs a day for nearly 40 years. After his first psilocybin session, his urge to smoke was gone. During his third and final session, he had the vision that helped him quit for good.
He saw lakes, roads, and mountains, and a broad-shouldered man at the helm of a ship, lassoing birds. Was it his dead father? He wasn’t sure. But he remembers giggling and feeling good. Music was playing in his headphones. During Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring he had the sensation of physically touching the music, which was smooth and bright yellow in his mind’s eye. As the music progressed, he traveled, flowing outward toward an immense space that never ended. He may have wept for joy—he’s not sure—but the beauty of the vision overwhelmed him. “I was seeing forever,” he told me.
Kreitman was brought up Jewish, but doesn’t consider himself to be particularly religious. Yet he falls back on religious language to explain the experience. “I think I saw God at one point,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. The day after the session, in his journal, he wrote: “The question is, if I saw God and infinity, what’s next? How does that change me and my life?”
When I spoke with him this August, Kreitman had an answer: he hadn’t had a cigarette for three years. He’d previously tried nicotine gum and patches, to no avail. He always returned to the habit, falling into the easy rhythms of smoking on the way to work and on the way home. It was taking a toll on his health, though. He was chronically short of breath and although they didn’t nag, his wife and children were concerned for his health. Since that session three years ago, however, cravings have barely registered. “It’s kind of crazy,” he told me. “I don’t feel like I’m fighting this addiction. It’s like it’s not even me.”
The trial was small, just 15 people, but it’s on the vanguard of resurgent research into the therapeutic potential of hallucinogens—a “psychedelic renaissance,” as one researcher described it. Work from the mid-20th century suggested that psychedelics held therapeutic promise. But those studies didn’t generally hew to modern scientific design.
Now, after decades of neglect, scientists are beginning to rigorously test hallucinogens as medicine. They’re trying to treat some of our most vexing afflictions, including addiction, depression, and the existential anxiety of having a terminal disease. The small studies so far conducted have yielded striking results. In one ten-person pilot study on alcoholics, participants more than halved their alcohol intake six months after taking psilocybin. In Kreitman’s study, 60 percent of smokers who took psilocybin hadn’t smoked two-and-a-half years later.
If hallucinogens prove effective in treating substance abuse, they would address a massive unmet need. They’d also possibly force a change in how we think about the dysfunction that underlies these conditions.
In the past, addiction was cast as a moral failing. Today it’s variously seen as a psychiatric condition, a learning disorder, or a disorder of the brain. Given that dependency on one’s drug of choice eventually emerges, a common treatment approach is to wean addicts off their drugs by, in the case of smoking, giving ever smaller quantities of nicotine in patches or gum.
Hallucinogen therapy dispenses with this gradualist approach, instead seeking a more sudden transformation. That’s in part because many studies, including the Johns Hopkins trial Kreitman participated in, suggest those who have mystical experiences while on psilocybin have the best outcome. This kind of sudden, divine-seeming insight, what William James termed a “conversion,” is central to many religious and meditative traditions. It can also occur in more prosaic contexts—a phenomenon one psychologist has dubbed “quantum change.” People can quickly and inexplicably, often after a profound epiphany, change.
The question of how, precisely, hallucinogens trigger these transformations has sent neuroscientists down an intriguing rabbit hole. They have observed similarities between what happens in meditators’ brains and people on hallucinogens. Neural networks that serve as control centers—the neural correlates of the old Freudian ego—may loosen their grip, freeing other regions of the brain.
Researchers often use an unusual language to talk about this transformation, one that emphasizes meaning and subjective experience over molecular pathways and neurotransmitters. Hallucinogen therapy seems to recast addiction not only as a disorder of the brain, but as a disorder of meaning—of framing and how we see ourselves.
Ultimately, hallucinogen researchers are addressing a mystery that’s central to psychology and psychiatry, not to mention the self-help section of the bookstore: the question of how people change, of how they escape limiting and often self-destructive behavioral patterns. Their early research suggests that hallucinogen therapy offers a radically new perspective on the self, showing people that they’re not slaves to their compulsions or fears, and providing them with a sense of connection to something ineffable, something greater than themselves.
He saw lakes, roads, and mountains, and a broad-shouldered man at the helm of a ship, lassoing birds. Was it his dead father? He wasn’t sure. But he remembers giggling and feeling good. Music was playing in his headphones. During Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring he had the sensation of physically touching the music, which was smooth and bright yellow in his mind’s eye. As the music progressed, he traveled, flowing outward toward an immense space that never ended. He may have wept for joy—he’s not sure—but the beauty of the vision overwhelmed him. “I was seeing forever,” he told me.
Kreitman was brought up Jewish, but doesn’t consider himself to be particularly religious. Yet he falls back on religious language to explain the experience. “I think I saw God at one point,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. The day after the session, in his journal, he wrote: “The question is, if I saw God and infinity, what’s next? How does that change me and my life?”When I spoke with him this August, Kreitman had an answer: he hadn’t had a cigarette for three years. He’d previously tried nicotine gum and patches, to no avail. He always returned to the habit, falling into the easy rhythms of smoking on the way to work and on the way home. It was taking a toll on his health, though. He was chronically short of breath and although they didn’t nag, his wife and children were concerned for his health. Since that session three years ago, however, cravings have barely registered. “It’s kind of crazy,” he told me. “I don’t feel like I’m fighting this addiction. It’s like it’s not even me.”
The trial was small, just 15 people, but it’s on the vanguard of resurgent research into the therapeutic potential of hallucinogens—a “psychedelic renaissance,” as one researcher described it. Work from the mid-20th century suggested that psychedelics held therapeutic promise. But those studies didn’t generally hew to modern scientific design.
Now, after decades of neglect, scientists are beginning to rigorously test hallucinogens as medicine. They’re trying to treat some of our most vexing afflictions, including addiction, depression, and the existential anxiety of having a terminal disease. The small studies so far conducted have yielded striking results. In one ten-person pilot study on alcoholics, participants more than halved their alcohol intake six months after taking psilocybin. In Kreitman’s study, 60 percent of smokers who took psilocybin hadn’t smoked two-and-a-half years later.
If hallucinogens prove effective in treating substance abuse, they would address a massive unmet need. They’d also possibly force a change in how we think about the dysfunction that underlies these conditions.
In the past, addiction was cast as a moral failing. Today it’s variously seen as a psychiatric condition, a learning disorder, or a disorder of the brain. Given that dependency on one’s drug of choice eventually emerges, a common treatment approach is to wean addicts off their drugs by, in the case of smoking, giving ever smaller quantities of nicotine in patches or gum.
Hallucinogen therapy dispenses with this gradualist approach, instead seeking a more sudden transformation. That’s in part because many studies, including the Johns Hopkins trial Kreitman participated in, suggest those who have mystical experiences while on psilocybin have the best outcome. This kind of sudden, divine-seeming insight, what William James termed a “conversion,” is central to many religious and meditative traditions. It can also occur in more prosaic contexts—a phenomenon one psychologist has dubbed “quantum change.” People can quickly and inexplicably, often after a profound epiphany, change.
The question of how, precisely, hallucinogens trigger these transformations has sent neuroscientists down an intriguing rabbit hole. They have observed similarities between what happens in meditators’ brains and people on hallucinogens. Neural networks that serve as control centers—the neural correlates of the old Freudian ego—may loosen their grip, freeing other regions of the brain.
Researchers often use an unusual language to talk about this transformation, one that emphasizes meaning and subjective experience over molecular pathways and neurotransmitters. Hallucinogen therapy seems to recast addiction not only as a disorder of the brain, but as a disorder of meaning—of framing and how we see ourselves.
Ultimately, hallucinogen researchers are addressing a mystery that’s central to psychology and psychiatry, not to mention the self-help section of the bookstore: the question of how people change, of how they escape limiting and often self-destructive behavioral patterns. Their early research suggests that hallucinogen therapy offers a radically new perspective on the self, showing people that they’re not slaves to their compulsions or fears, and providing them with a sense of connection to something ineffable, something greater than themselves.
by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Amanda Baeza
Clawing Back Bankers’ Pay Is Harder Than It Looks
[ed. I'd imagine they'd also be concerned with what the 'claw-ee' might have to say if such actions were taken.]
Members of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee are demanding that Wells Fargo & Co. claw back pay from Carrie Tolstedt, the executive whose community banking unit created 2 million unauthorized customer accounts. They’re not likely to get as much as they want.At a hearing in Washington on Tuesday, senators cited figures eclipsing $100 million. During her three-decade career at Wells Fargo and its predecessors, Tolstedt received about $44 million in shares, $34 million in vested options and still more from cash bonuses and stock sales. But the bank’s clawback policy, like that of most U.S. companies, doesn’t allow Wells Fargo to go after those assets unless there’s a financial restatement. When the damage is reputational harm, only unvested stock awards can be recouped -- in the case of Tolstedt, 56, whose retirement was announced in July, that’s about $19 million. (...)
Malus Awards
While clawback policies have exploded in popularity -- 76 percent of the biggest banks around the world have them, up from 44 percent in 2010, according to Mercer, a compensation-consulting firm -- they’re rarely used. During the past two years, only 10 percent of companies polled by Mercer in April used such policies to reclaim compensation that had already been paid.
“Clawbacks are easier said than done,” said Charles Elson, director of the University of Delaware’s John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance. “Once it’s out the door, it’s hard to get back.”
More common, and easier to pull off, is the cancellation of compensation a company has promised to pay executives and other employees in the future. Even more firms have this type of malus policy -- think opposite of bonus, both words from Latin. In Mercer’s survey, 90 percent of big banks had some clause to rescind unvested incentives for reasons ranging from misconduct to poor performance. Half the banks polled applied their malus policies in the past two years. (...)
While clawback policies have exploded in popularity -- 76 percent of the biggest banks around the world have them, up from 44 percent in 2010, according to Mercer, a compensation-consulting firm -- they’re rarely used. During the past two years, only 10 percent of companies polled by Mercer in April used such policies to reclaim compensation that had already been paid.
“Clawbacks are easier said than done,” said Charles Elson, director of the University of Delaware’s John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance. “Once it’s out the door, it’s hard to get back.”
More common, and easier to pull off, is the cancellation of compensation a company has promised to pay executives and other employees in the future. Even more firms have this type of malus policy -- think opposite of bonus, both words from Latin. In Mercer’s survey, 90 percent of big banks had some clause to rescind unvested incentives for reasons ranging from misconduct to poor performance. Half the banks polled applied their malus policies in the past two years. (...)
Businesses end up reserving clawbacks for the most extreme circumstances. JPMorgan Chase & Co. went after the traders who lost $6.2 billion during the London Whale scandal. In addition to canceling unvested bonuses, the firm asked them to return some cash they already had been paid. All but one agreed to do so, and JPMorgan sued holdout Javier Martin-Artajo in a case settled three months later. While the bank didn’t reveal how much it managed to recoup from him, the total recovered from those involved exceeded $100 million in cash and unvested stock, according to its 2012 annual report. The figure was equal to two years’ compensation for the four former employees.
“Malus is applied frequently, but clawbacks are very rare,” said Vicki Elliott, head of global financial-services talent at Mercer. “It has to be a big, transparent blowout for a firm to attempt clawing back money already paid out.”
In many European countries, labor laws prevent clawbacks, while in the U.S. the legal process can drag on for years and be costly, Elliott said.
“Malus is applied frequently, but clawbacks are very rare,” said Vicki Elliott, head of global financial-services talent at Mercer. “It has to be a big, transparent blowout for a firm to attempt clawing back money already paid out.”
In many European countries, labor laws prevent clawbacks, while in the U.S. the legal process can drag on for years and be costly, Elliott said.
by Caleb Melby and Yalman Onaran, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Bloomberg
Saturday, September 24, 2016
Ray Gun
Ray Gun Magazine and The Rise and Fall of Grunge Typography
[ed. btw... Nirvana's Nevermind turns 25 today.]
Who Speaks for the Trees?
On the corner of South Finley and Dearing Streets in Athens, Georgia, the small college town where I grew up, there is a tall white oak, and a small weathered stone plaque that reads:
For and in consideration of the great love I bear this tree and the great desire I have for its protection, for all time, I convey entire possession of itself and all land within eight feet of the tree on all sides.
—William H. Jackson
The Tree That Owns Itself is a beloved local landmark, one I visited many times as a child. Standing under its branches provoked a subtle awe, a respect not usually granted to mere plants. The Tree was imbued with rights, not an object but a subject, animate, existing with a kind of inviolability and autonomy. It had also achieved that elusive quality that so many self-possessing humans desire: fame.
The Tree got its first taste of notoriety in a front-page Athens Weekly Banner article published on August 12, 1890, under the headline “Deeded to Itself,” although in truth, the Tree had been in self-possession for more than half a century by that time. Another half-century after the Banner article was published, the original oak, so beloved by Mr. Jackson, fell after an unusually strong storm. The community rallied to plant a seedling cultivated from one of the Tree’s acorns; the new oak has thrived in the same plot since 1946. Thus, as noted on another small plaque, the Tree That Owns Itself is technically “the scion” of the Tree That Owns Itself. Nevertheless, the Scion of the Tree inherited its parent’s unusual claim to independence. This claim is not necessarily binding, because Georgia common law, like that of all other states, does not recognize the capacity of trees to hold property, since plants, like nonhuman animals, have the legal status of things and thus lack the right to have rights. Yet the Tree’s self-possession is an accepted part of local identity and lore and has never been challenged in court. In the minds of Athenians, the Tree owns itself and its plot.
Perhaps in the near or distant future, the Tree That Owns Itself will not be regarded as a charming curiosity but as a political pioneer, the embodiment of an imaginary and ethical leap that foreshadowed what will seem, from the future’s transformed vantage point, the inevitable and necessary expansion of rights to the natural world. In 1972, law professor Christopher Stone provided a sketch of what such a future might look like in a groundbreaking scholarly essay, written on a whim after he found himself arguing “the unthinkable” in a class lecture. Still widely read more than forty years later, Should Trees Have Standing? doesn’t go so far as to contend that all flora should be given a deed to the soil in which they are planted—like our arboreal outlier in Athens—but it does systematically and dispassionately make the case for granting baseline “legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers, and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment—indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.”
It’s not as strange as it may sound, for the uncanny entity that is the nonhuman “person” is already omnipresent. “The world of the lawyer is peopled with inanimate rights-holders: trusts, corporations, joint ventures, municipalities, Subchapter R partnerships, and nation-states, to mention just a few,” Stone reminds us. Corporations were granted legal personhood in 1886—and oddly, it happened in an almost backhanded way. The Supreme Court did not directly rule on the matter. In a headnote that wasn’t part of the formal opinion in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., the court reporter (who had sympathies with the railroads) noted that chief justice Morrison Waite affirmed the personhood of corporations under the Fourteenth Amendment in a passing comment as proceedings began. Of course, railroad attorneys and business interests had been opportunistically demanding for years that the “equal protection” clause of the amendment designed to secure equal rights for former slaves be twisted to apply to corporations. The Santa Clara trial affirmed their Gilded Age aspirations as fact, even though the suit was decided on other grounds: “defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the . . . Fourteenth Amendment.” Later cases built on that thin precedent. Today, corporations are entitled to an ever-expanding array of constitutional protections, from the Fourth Amendment ban on warrantless search and seizure to the First Amendment guarantee of free speech.
“Convincing a court that an endangered river is ‘a person,’” Stone acknowledges, “will call for lawyers as bold and imaginative” as Southern Pacific Railroad’s counsel—and, one might add, considerably less mercenary. That’s because extending rights to other forms of nonhuman life entails fighting to counteract the rights of corporations and the remarkable power personhood allows profit-seeking ventures. The intrepid lawyers and citizens who have taken up this gauntlet challenge our legal and economic systems, while chipping away at the moral framework of human separateness and superiority that has evolved and solidified over millennia.
For and in consideration of the great love I bear this tree and the great desire I have for its protection, for all time, I convey entire possession of itself and all land within eight feet of the tree on all sides.
—William H. Jackson
The Tree That Owns Itself is a beloved local landmark, one I visited many times as a child. Standing under its branches provoked a subtle awe, a respect not usually granted to mere plants. The Tree was imbued with rights, not an object but a subject, animate, existing with a kind of inviolability and autonomy. It had also achieved that elusive quality that so many self-possessing humans desire: fame.
The Tree got its first taste of notoriety in a front-page Athens Weekly Banner article published on August 12, 1890, under the headline “Deeded to Itself,” although in truth, the Tree had been in self-possession for more than half a century by that time. Another half-century after the Banner article was published, the original oak, so beloved by Mr. Jackson, fell after an unusually strong storm. The community rallied to plant a seedling cultivated from one of the Tree’s acorns; the new oak has thrived in the same plot since 1946. Thus, as noted on another small plaque, the Tree That Owns Itself is technically “the scion” of the Tree That Owns Itself. Nevertheless, the Scion of the Tree inherited its parent’s unusual claim to independence. This claim is not necessarily binding, because Georgia common law, like that of all other states, does not recognize the capacity of trees to hold property, since plants, like nonhuman animals, have the legal status of things and thus lack the right to have rights. Yet the Tree’s self-possession is an accepted part of local identity and lore and has never been challenged in court. In the minds of Athenians, the Tree owns itself and its plot.Perhaps in the near or distant future, the Tree That Owns Itself will not be regarded as a charming curiosity but as a political pioneer, the embodiment of an imaginary and ethical leap that foreshadowed what will seem, from the future’s transformed vantage point, the inevitable and necessary expansion of rights to the natural world. In 1972, law professor Christopher Stone provided a sketch of what such a future might look like in a groundbreaking scholarly essay, written on a whim after he found himself arguing “the unthinkable” in a class lecture. Still widely read more than forty years later, Should Trees Have Standing? doesn’t go so far as to contend that all flora should be given a deed to the soil in which they are planted—like our arboreal outlier in Athens—but it does systematically and dispassionately make the case for granting baseline “legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers, and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment—indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.”
It’s not as strange as it may sound, for the uncanny entity that is the nonhuman “person” is already omnipresent. “The world of the lawyer is peopled with inanimate rights-holders: trusts, corporations, joint ventures, municipalities, Subchapter R partnerships, and nation-states, to mention just a few,” Stone reminds us. Corporations were granted legal personhood in 1886—and oddly, it happened in an almost backhanded way. The Supreme Court did not directly rule on the matter. In a headnote that wasn’t part of the formal opinion in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., the court reporter (who had sympathies with the railroads) noted that chief justice Morrison Waite affirmed the personhood of corporations under the Fourteenth Amendment in a passing comment as proceedings began. Of course, railroad attorneys and business interests had been opportunistically demanding for years that the “equal protection” clause of the amendment designed to secure equal rights for former slaves be twisted to apply to corporations. The Santa Clara trial affirmed their Gilded Age aspirations as fact, even though the suit was decided on other grounds: “defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the . . . Fourteenth Amendment.” Later cases built on that thin precedent. Today, corporations are entitled to an ever-expanding array of constitutional protections, from the Fourth Amendment ban on warrantless search and seizure to the First Amendment guarantee of free speech.
“Convincing a court that an endangered river is ‘a person,’” Stone acknowledges, “will call for lawyers as bold and imaginative” as Southern Pacific Railroad’s counsel—and, one might add, considerably less mercenary. That’s because extending rights to other forms of nonhuman life entails fighting to counteract the rights of corporations and the remarkable power personhood allows profit-seeking ventures. The intrepid lawyers and citizens who have taken up this gauntlet challenge our legal and economic systems, while chipping away at the moral framework of human separateness and superiority that has evolved and solidified over millennia.
by Astra Taylor, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Kathy Boake
Ever Had a Yahoo Account? Do This Now
[ed. See also: A Hack to Yahoo's Shrunken Reputation and The Privacy War's About to Get a Whole Lot Worse.]
If you’ve read the news in the past 36 hours you already know that at least a half billion Yahoo accounts were jeopardized by hackers. Names, email addresses, passwords, telephone numbers, dates of birth, security questions and answers, and more were “scraped” from Yahoo accounts. So if you’re a former or current Yahoo account holder, what does that mean to you and what can you do about it?
Well first off, take a breath. If nothing horrible has happened to your email or other password protected accounts so far, chances are you’re actually okay, for the moment anyway. But just because nothing has happened yet, that doesn’t mean you’re safe. Sometimes hackers themselves or people who buy hacked account info hoard the data for years before taking action.
So, if you had a Yahoo account anytime before the beginning of 2015, there are several steps you should take to be prudent, whether or not you use your Yahoo account now.
A general warning: Before you start to change passwords or anything else with your accounts, be very careful with any email you receive about the Yahoo security issue. Nothing Yahoo sends will ask you to click links or download attachments. Yahoo will not ask you to supply personal information via email. Even if you receive an email that looks like it’s from Yahoo, if you are asked to click a link, download an attachment, or provide personal information, the email was not actually sent by Yahoo and may be from someone trying to steal your personal information.
If you’ve read the news in the past 36 hours you already know that at least a half billion Yahoo accounts were jeopardized by hackers. Names, email addresses, passwords, telephone numbers, dates of birth, security questions and answers, and more were “scraped” from Yahoo accounts. So if you’re a former or current Yahoo account holder, what does that mean to you and what can you do about it?
Well first off, take a breath. If nothing horrible has happened to your email or other password protected accounts so far, chances are you’re actually okay, for the moment anyway. But just because nothing has happened yet, that doesn’t mean you’re safe. Sometimes hackers themselves or people who buy hacked account info hoard the data for years before taking action.So, if you had a Yahoo account anytime before the beginning of 2015, there are several steps you should take to be prudent, whether or not you use your Yahoo account now.
A general warning: Before you start to change passwords or anything else with your accounts, be very careful with any email you receive about the Yahoo security issue. Nothing Yahoo sends will ask you to click links or download attachments. Yahoo will not ask you to supply personal information via email. Even if you receive an email that looks like it’s from Yahoo, if you are asked to click a link, download an attachment, or provide personal information, the email was not actually sent by Yahoo and may be from someone trying to steal your personal information.
Change your password
Now let’s start with the different actions levels to take, from immediate to very soon.
If you have a Yahoo account, change your password and disable your security questions today. How do you do that? To start, be sure you know your current password – you’ll need it to make changes in any security settings.
In the upper right-hand corner of the Yahoo screen click on the little gear icon. If you see a menu item for “Settings,” that’s not it. Look for “Account Info,” which will probably be at the bottom of the menu. Next, click “Account Security.” At this point you will likely be required to enter your current password.
In the Account Security screen that comes up next, you will see “Change password” and “Disable security questions” in blue type while the other options are in black type. Yahoo has highlighted those two with blue letters because both were potentially compromised. Passwords were taken from all hacked accounts and unencrypted security questions and answers were stolen from many accounts.
When you click Change Password, you’ll see a new screen on which to enter a new password twice. Be sure to make up a brand new password, not one you use on any other account. More on that below.
Also remember you will need to reset your password on other devices where your old password — which will no longer work — may be stored. For example, you may check your email on a smartphone, tablet, or an e-reader – if so you’ll need to reset each one.
Now let’s start with the different actions levels to take, from immediate to very soon.
If you have a Yahoo account, change your password and disable your security questions today. How do you do that? To start, be sure you know your current password – you’ll need it to make changes in any security settings.
In the upper right-hand corner of the Yahoo screen click on the little gear icon. If you see a menu item for “Settings,” that’s not it. Look for “Account Info,” which will probably be at the bottom of the menu. Next, click “Account Security.” At this point you will likely be required to enter your current password.
In the Account Security screen that comes up next, you will see “Change password” and “Disable security questions” in blue type while the other options are in black type. Yahoo has highlighted those two with blue letters because both were potentially compromised. Passwords were taken from all hacked accounts and unencrypted security questions and answers were stolen from many accounts.
When you click Change Password, you’ll see a new screen on which to enter a new password twice. Be sure to make up a brand new password, not one you use on any other account. More on that below.
Also remember you will need to reset your password on other devices where your old password — which will no longer work — may be stored. For example, you may check your email on a smartphone, tablet, or an e-reader – if so you’ll need to reset each one.
Disable security questions
After changing your password, click “Disable security questions” on the Account Security screen. You’ll see what your questions were, and you’ll be prompted to disable them to protect your account. You can reset your security questions later.
The next screen after disabling your security questions will present any currently listed account recovery email addresses and phone numbers. If you don’t have either, it’s a good idea to set at least one of each so you won’t be locked out of your account.
When you’ve changed your password and disabled your security settings, your Yahoo account is protected. But there’s more to do.
After changing your password, click “Disable security questions” on the Account Security screen. You’ll see what your questions were, and you’ll be prompted to disable them to protect your account. You can reset your security questions later.
The next screen after disabling your security questions will present any currently listed account recovery email addresses and phone numbers. If you don’t have either, it’s a good idea to set at least one of each so you won’t be locked out of your account.
When you’ve changed your password and disabled your security settings, your Yahoo account is protected. But there’s more to do.
by Bruce Brown, Digital Trends | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Please Stop Calling Us ‘The Media.’ There Is No Such Thing.
Folks, I know a lot of you don’t like the people who work in my chosen profession, the news business. I’m aware you think we’re lazy and unfair (yes, I got your emails and tweets on this topic — a few thousand of them). Of course, I disagree with you. I know a lot of fine people in the newsgathering arts and sciences. But that’s not why I’m writing.
I’m writing because I have a request: Please stop calling us “the media.”
Yes, in some sense, we are the media. But not in the blunt way you use the phrase. It’s so imprecise and generic that it has lost any meaning. It’s — how would you put this? — lazy and unfair.
As I understand your use of this term, “the media” is essentially shorthand for anything you read, saw or heard today that you disagreed with or didn’t like. At any given moment, “the media” is biased against your candidate, your issue, your very way of life.
But, you know, the media isn’t really doing that. Some article, some news report, some guy spouting off on a CNN panel or at CrankyCrackpot.com might be. But none of those things singularly are really the media.
Fact is, there really is no such thing as “the media.” It’s an invention, a tool, an all-purpose smear by people who can’t be bothered to make distinctions.
Consider: There are hundreds of broadcast and cable TV networks, a thousand or so local TV stations, a few thousand magazines and newspapers, several thousand radio stations and roughly a gazillion websites, blogs, newsletters and podcasts. There’s also Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and who knows what new digital thing.
All of these, collectively, now constitute the media.
But this vast array of news and information sources — from the New York Times to Rubber and Plastics News — helps define what’s wrong with referring to “the media.” With so many sources, one-size-fits-all reporting is impossible. Those who work in the media don’t gather in our huddle rooms each morning and light up the teleconference lines with plots to nettle and unsettle you. There is no media in the sense of a conspiracy to tilt perception.
Instead, we are tens of thousands of people making millions of individual decisions about how we perceive the world and how to characterize it. We all don’t agree on how to frame a candidate, an issue or last night’s ballgame.
So even if something on Fox News alarmed or infuriated you, Fox isn’t “the media.” Nor is NBC or MSNBC. Nor The Washington Post, the New York Post, the Denver Post or the Saturday Evening Post.
Lumping these disparate entities under the same single bland label is like describing the denizens of the ocean as “the fish.” It’s true, but effectively meaningless.
I’m writing because I have a request: Please stop calling us “the media.”
Yes, in some sense, we are the media. But not in the blunt way you use the phrase. It’s so imprecise and generic that it has lost any meaning. It’s — how would you put this? — lazy and unfair.As I understand your use of this term, “the media” is essentially shorthand for anything you read, saw or heard today that you disagreed with or didn’t like. At any given moment, “the media” is biased against your candidate, your issue, your very way of life.
But, you know, the media isn’t really doing that. Some article, some news report, some guy spouting off on a CNN panel or at CrankyCrackpot.com might be. But none of those things singularly are really the media.
Fact is, there really is no such thing as “the media.” It’s an invention, a tool, an all-purpose smear by people who can’t be bothered to make distinctions.
Consider: There are hundreds of broadcast and cable TV networks, a thousand or so local TV stations, a few thousand magazines and newspapers, several thousand radio stations and roughly a gazillion websites, blogs, newsletters and podcasts. There’s also Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and who knows what new digital thing.
All of these, collectively, now constitute the media.
But this vast array of news and information sources — from the New York Times to Rubber and Plastics News — helps define what’s wrong with referring to “the media.” With so many sources, one-size-fits-all reporting is impossible. Those who work in the media don’t gather in our huddle rooms each morning and light up the teleconference lines with plots to nettle and unsettle you. There is no media in the sense of a conspiracy to tilt perception.
Instead, we are tens of thousands of people making millions of individual decisions about how we perceive the world and how to characterize it. We all don’t agree on how to frame a candidate, an issue or last night’s ballgame.
So even if something on Fox News alarmed or infuriated you, Fox isn’t “the media.” Nor is NBC or MSNBC. Nor The Washington Post, the New York Post, the Denver Post or the Saturday Evening Post.
Lumping these disparate entities under the same single bland label is like describing the denizens of the ocean as “the fish.” It’s true, but effectively meaningless.
by Paul Farhi, WP | Read more:
Image: Princess Bride
Friday, September 23, 2016
Shock Migration
Eyebrows would be raised if American crocodiles, found on the southern tip of Florida, decided to relocate to New York’s Fifth Avenue or Moroccan camels suddenly joined the tourist throng outside Buckingham Palace in London. Yet this is the scale of species shift that appears to be under way in Alaska.
In July, researchers in Cape Krusenstern national monument on the north-west coast of Alaska were startled to discover a nest containing Caspian terns on the gravelly beach of a lagoon. The birds were an incredible 1,000 miles further north than the species had been previously recorded.
“There was plenty of shock, it is a very unusual situation,” said Dr Martin Robards, Arctic program director at the Wildlife Conservation Society, which found the nest. “We checked with Caspian tern experts and they were all very surprised they were this far north. We get Arctic terns here but these terns are much bigger, they really stand out.”
The terns, usually found in Washington state, successfully bred and chicks have now flown the nest. While it remains to be seen whether Caspian terns will become ensconced long-term within the Arctic circle, the epic relocation is emblematic of how warming temperatures are causing a huge upheaval in the basic rhythms of Alaska’s environment. Next week, scientists will gather at the White House’s first ever Arctic science meeting to deliver the confronting news.
“I’ve been up here 25 years and the amount of change that has occurred in Alaska is shocking,” said Robards. “We’ve been focusing on things such as the temperature and sea ice here but now we are thinking ‘oh my God what is going on with the wildlife?’”
Alaska is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the US, with the winter temperature 6F (3.3C) warmer than it was 60 years ago. Snow and ice has retreated, spring is coming earlier. The landscape is changing and so are its residents.
“To be 1,000 miles further north attests to how much the globe has warmed,” said Terry Root, a biologist and senior fellow at Stanford University. “Birds follow their physiology, nothing else. If they think they should move, they move. Alaska has warmed so much that it is causing havoc to a lot of nature.”
While most species aren’t able to move as far as terns, scientists are noticing shifts across Alaska. Moose and beavers have moved north of the Brooks Range and onto the Arctic plain, which increasingly offers suitable vegetation as the region warms up and greens.
Red foxes have moved in and have started to outcompete Arctic foxes. A similar thing may happen if the beefy Caspian terns start to push out their smaller cousins. The relationship between grizzly bears and polar bears may be a little more amicable – as their range starts to overlap there have been reports of a hybrid “pizzly” bears in the Arctic.
But the situation for polar bears is otherwise grim – they are losing life-sustaining sea ice critical for hunting and breeding across the Arctic. They are being forced onto land, where they risk starvation. This desperate scenario is shared with walruses, which have already suffered a 50% drop since the 1980s. In recent years tens of thousands of the tusked beasts have had to crowd ashore, with many perishing in stampedes.
The melting on land is just as stark. Over the past decade, Alaska has lost 850 gigatonnes of water from its shrinking glaciers, enough to raise the global sea level by 2.9mm. We are living through the fastest Arctic glacier decline in at least 6,000 years, according to Dr Martin Sharp, professor of Earth and atmospheric science at the University of Alberta.
“If the warming trends continue then we expect to see continuous retreat,” Sharp said. “We are seeing the complete loss of glaciers, areas that had ice caps in the 1950s don’t have them now. That trend will probably increase.”
In July, researchers in Cape Krusenstern national monument on the north-west coast of Alaska were startled to discover a nest containing Caspian terns on the gravelly beach of a lagoon. The birds were an incredible 1,000 miles further north than the species had been previously recorded.
“There was plenty of shock, it is a very unusual situation,” said Dr Martin Robards, Arctic program director at the Wildlife Conservation Society, which found the nest. “We checked with Caspian tern experts and they were all very surprised they were this far north. We get Arctic terns here but these terns are much bigger, they really stand out.”
The terns, usually found in Washington state, successfully bred and chicks have now flown the nest. While it remains to be seen whether Caspian terns will become ensconced long-term within the Arctic circle, the epic relocation is emblematic of how warming temperatures are causing a huge upheaval in the basic rhythms of Alaska’s environment. Next week, scientists will gather at the White House’s first ever Arctic science meeting to deliver the confronting news.“I’ve been up here 25 years and the amount of change that has occurred in Alaska is shocking,” said Robards. “We’ve been focusing on things such as the temperature and sea ice here but now we are thinking ‘oh my God what is going on with the wildlife?’”
Alaska is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the US, with the winter temperature 6F (3.3C) warmer than it was 60 years ago. Snow and ice has retreated, spring is coming earlier. The landscape is changing and so are its residents.
“To be 1,000 miles further north attests to how much the globe has warmed,” said Terry Root, a biologist and senior fellow at Stanford University. “Birds follow their physiology, nothing else. If they think they should move, they move. Alaska has warmed so much that it is causing havoc to a lot of nature.”
While most species aren’t able to move as far as terns, scientists are noticing shifts across Alaska. Moose and beavers have moved north of the Brooks Range and onto the Arctic plain, which increasingly offers suitable vegetation as the region warms up and greens.
Red foxes have moved in and have started to outcompete Arctic foxes. A similar thing may happen if the beefy Caspian terns start to push out their smaller cousins. The relationship between grizzly bears and polar bears may be a little more amicable – as their range starts to overlap there have been reports of a hybrid “pizzly” bears in the Arctic.
But the situation for polar bears is otherwise grim – they are losing life-sustaining sea ice critical for hunting and breeding across the Arctic. They are being forced onto land, where they risk starvation. This desperate scenario is shared with walruses, which have already suffered a 50% drop since the 1980s. In recent years tens of thousands of the tusked beasts have had to crowd ashore, with many perishing in stampedes.
The melting on land is just as stark. Over the past decade, Alaska has lost 850 gigatonnes of water from its shrinking glaciers, enough to raise the global sea level by 2.9mm. We are living through the fastest Arctic glacier decline in at least 6,000 years, according to Dr Martin Sharp, professor of Earth and atmospheric science at the University of Alberta.
“If the warming trends continue then we expect to see continuous retreat,” Sharp said. “We are seeing the complete loss of glaciers, areas that had ice caps in the 1950s don’t have them now. That trend will probably increase.”
Alaska is being locked into an unhappy cycle of events. As the declining glaciers lose albedo, or reflectivity from sunlight, they absorb more heat and therefore melt further.
by Oliver Milman, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: David McNew/Getty Images
The Perfect High for Credit Card Junkies
Somewhere in the middle of Ohio there’s a nondescript office park, the kind you could drive by for years and never really notice. One of the buildings in that park is basically windowless; you might mistake it for a warehouse or, if you were feeling exotic, a data center. The only thing that’s remarkable about the structure, signaling there’s something of great value inside, is an imposing floor-to-ceiling metal turnstile in a guarded vestibule.
This building is a modern-day mint. It’s where JPMorgan Chase, the largest issuer of credit cards in the U.S., manufactures around 60 percent of the 95 million cards it issues each year. The company requires visitors to keep its exact location secret. For more than 15 years, the facility has hummed along, embossing numbers onto plastic cards and stuffing them into envelopes. During that time, only three things have really disrupted BAU, Chase-ese for “business as usual”: the Target data breach of 2014, which required the factory to quickly reissue millions of cards; the industrywide 2015 switch from magnetic-stripe cards to ones that include microchips; and in August the frenzied demand for the company’s newest offering—the Chase Sapphire Reserve.
Ned Lindsey, Chase’s managing director of customer fulfillment, runs the Ohio plant and a sister facility in Texas. On Aug. 24, Lindsey noticed something strange—card requests were coming in at an extremely high rate, all for the Reserve. “We were seeing demand that was eight- to tenfold more than what we expected,” he says. Lindsey, it seems, doesn’t read credit card blogs. Since July, a fever had been building on social media among points-and-miles obsessives aware that Chase was preparing a premium card—one that would sit above its already-popular Sapphire Preferred, and offer rewards to match. Almost a month before Chase introduced Reserve, the community discovered the card’s perks through some leaked information: a sign-up bonus of 100,000 points, triple points on travel and dining, airport lounge memberships, and credits that offset a $450 annual fee, among other goodies. Of course, like its Sapphire Preferred brethren, the card would have a weighty metal core that creates what is known in the trade as “plunk factor.” Plasticheads got the vapors. “When I first heard the details,” wrote Brian Kelly, aka The Points Guy, probably the most influential card blogger, “I had to sit down, because it sounded way too good to be true.” The Sapphire Reserve, wrote another, Ben Schlappig, is “beyond a no-brainer, possibly the most compelling card we’ve ever seen.” On Reddit, a user shared that Chase had accidentally published a Reserve application link, and thousands of applications poured in before the page was deactivated. By the official launch date of Aug. 23, anticipation had built to the point that the Chase site was bumrushed by a horde of deal-seekers.
In Ohio, Lindsey brought in extra staff and added shifts. “We had to have a backup plan to the backup plan,” he says. The plant ran hot for about three weeks. During that time, Chase burned through its inventory of metal cards—a stock that was supposed to last 10 to 12 months. (The company declined to say how many Preferred or Reserve cards it’s issued.) To continue to sate the appetite for the Sapphire Reserve, Chase had to switch to standard plastic cards as placeholders. The bank says it’s now sent out as many plastic cards as metal—two years’ worth of cards, gone in less than a month.
When the first cards were shipped, some customers posted “unboxing” videos on YouTube, reverently exhibiting terms-and-conditions pamphlets to the camera. The videos have garnered more than 60,000 views; the Reddit thread has 10,000 comments. The hype usually reserved for a new iPhone was now being applied to a high-interest line of credit. And until mid-September, Chase hadn’t spent a dime on advertising.
Chase is not the first issuer to offer a big-annual-fee-but-mucho-points card. American Express and Citibank have been playing in that part of the market for years. But Chase has entered at the right time—when a growing community of enthusiasts will do the company’s marketing online for free—and with the right card, one that assiduously checks every box the modern credit card deal-hunter cares about. None of this happened by accident. The process to create new credit cards is little different from the research Procter & Gamble does to develop a new laundry detergent or Honda does to develop a new crossover SUV. A credit card is a means of payment and the extension of a loan, but it’s also a collection of perks and points that confer experiences and status upon its user, as well as an object people typically touch several times a day. In a country with more than half a billion credit cards already in circulation, it’s not a given that any new combination of attributes will work.
Chase had already learned a thing or two about how to make a card more than a card. The Sapphire Preferred, introduced in 2009 with a $95 annual fee, was the reigning “It card” before Reserve came along. One especially devoted cardholder is Bryan Denman, a 35-year-old New York creative director, who has taken advantage of Preferred’s perks to treat his girlfriend to Chase-sponsored private dinners at the restaurants Craft, Rebelle, and Le Bernardin, as well as to get good seats at venues like Madison Square Garden. Denman recognizes that loyalty to a credit card is unusual. “Everyone’s brought up to distrust their credit card company,” he says. “You don’t want to be on the phone with them; why would you want to spend the night with them?” But his experiences with Chase have conferred upon Denman the zeal of a convert. “I am a complete fanboy,” he says. “I’m telling everyone to get this card.” He’s not alone. “When I go to dinner, there might be three cards that get thrown down. They’re all Chase Sapphire.”
This building is a modern-day mint. It’s where JPMorgan Chase, the largest issuer of credit cards in the U.S., manufactures around 60 percent of the 95 million cards it issues each year. The company requires visitors to keep its exact location secret. For more than 15 years, the facility has hummed along, embossing numbers onto plastic cards and stuffing them into envelopes. During that time, only three things have really disrupted BAU, Chase-ese for “business as usual”: the Target data breach of 2014, which required the factory to quickly reissue millions of cards; the industrywide 2015 switch from magnetic-stripe cards to ones that include microchips; and in August the frenzied demand for the company’s newest offering—the Chase Sapphire Reserve.
Ned Lindsey, Chase’s managing director of customer fulfillment, runs the Ohio plant and a sister facility in Texas. On Aug. 24, Lindsey noticed something strange—card requests were coming in at an extremely high rate, all for the Reserve. “We were seeing demand that was eight- to tenfold more than what we expected,” he says. Lindsey, it seems, doesn’t read credit card blogs. Since July, a fever had been building on social media among points-and-miles obsessives aware that Chase was preparing a premium card—one that would sit above its already-popular Sapphire Preferred, and offer rewards to match. Almost a month before Chase introduced Reserve, the community discovered the card’s perks through some leaked information: a sign-up bonus of 100,000 points, triple points on travel and dining, airport lounge memberships, and credits that offset a $450 annual fee, among other goodies. Of course, like its Sapphire Preferred brethren, the card would have a weighty metal core that creates what is known in the trade as “plunk factor.” Plasticheads got the vapors. “When I first heard the details,” wrote Brian Kelly, aka The Points Guy, probably the most influential card blogger, “I had to sit down, because it sounded way too good to be true.” The Sapphire Reserve, wrote another, Ben Schlappig, is “beyond a no-brainer, possibly the most compelling card we’ve ever seen.” On Reddit, a user shared that Chase had accidentally published a Reserve application link, and thousands of applications poured in before the page was deactivated. By the official launch date of Aug. 23, anticipation had built to the point that the Chase site was bumrushed by a horde of deal-seekers.In Ohio, Lindsey brought in extra staff and added shifts. “We had to have a backup plan to the backup plan,” he says. The plant ran hot for about three weeks. During that time, Chase burned through its inventory of metal cards—a stock that was supposed to last 10 to 12 months. (The company declined to say how many Preferred or Reserve cards it’s issued.) To continue to sate the appetite for the Sapphire Reserve, Chase had to switch to standard plastic cards as placeholders. The bank says it’s now sent out as many plastic cards as metal—two years’ worth of cards, gone in less than a month.
When the first cards were shipped, some customers posted “unboxing” videos on YouTube, reverently exhibiting terms-and-conditions pamphlets to the camera. The videos have garnered more than 60,000 views; the Reddit thread has 10,000 comments. The hype usually reserved for a new iPhone was now being applied to a high-interest line of credit. And until mid-September, Chase hadn’t spent a dime on advertising.
Chase is not the first issuer to offer a big-annual-fee-but-mucho-points card. American Express and Citibank have been playing in that part of the market for years. But Chase has entered at the right time—when a growing community of enthusiasts will do the company’s marketing online for free—and with the right card, one that assiduously checks every box the modern credit card deal-hunter cares about. None of this happened by accident. The process to create new credit cards is little different from the research Procter & Gamble does to develop a new laundry detergent or Honda does to develop a new crossover SUV. A credit card is a means of payment and the extension of a loan, but it’s also a collection of perks and points that confer experiences and status upon its user, as well as an object people typically touch several times a day. In a country with more than half a billion credit cards already in circulation, it’s not a given that any new combination of attributes will work.
Chase had already learned a thing or two about how to make a card more than a card. The Sapphire Preferred, introduced in 2009 with a $95 annual fee, was the reigning “It card” before Reserve came along. One especially devoted cardholder is Bryan Denman, a 35-year-old New York creative director, who has taken advantage of Preferred’s perks to treat his girlfriend to Chase-sponsored private dinners at the restaurants Craft, Rebelle, and Le Bernardin, as well as to get good seats at venues like Madison Square Garden. Denman recognizes that loyalty to a credit card is unusual. “Everyone’s brought up to distrust their credit card company,” he says. “You don’t want to be on the phone with them; why would you want to spend the night with them?” But his experiences with Chase have conferred upon Denman the zeal of a convert. “I am a complete fanboy,” he says. “I’m telling everyone to get this card.” He’s not alone. “When I go to dinner, there might be three cards that get thrown down. They’re all Chase Sapphire.”
by Sam Grobart, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Finlay MacKay
Jane Jacob's Street Smarts
What the urbanist and writer got so right about cities—and what she got wrong.
Jane Jacobs’s aura was so powerful that it made her, precisely, the St. Joan of the small scale. Her name still summons an entire city vision—the much watched corner, the mixed-use neighborhood—and her holy tale is all the stronger for including a nemesis of equal stature: Robert Moses, the Sauron of the street corner. The New York planning dictator wanted to drive an expressway through lower Manhattan, and was defeated, the legend runs, by this ordinary mom. (...)
Her admirers and interpreters tend to be divided into almost polar opposites: leftists who see her as the champion of community against big capital and real-estate development, and free marketeers who see her as the apostle of self-emerging solutions in cities. In a lovely symmetry, her name invokes both political types: the Jacobin radicals, who led the French Revolution, and the Jacobite reactionaries, who fought to restore King James II and the Stuarts to the British throne. She is what would now be called pro-growth—“stagnant” is the worst term in her vocabulary—and if one had to pick out the two words in English that offended her most they would be “planned economy.” At the same time, she was a cultural liberal, opposed to oligarchy, suspicious of technology, and hostile to both big business and the military. Figuring out if this makes hers a rich, original mixture of ideas or merely a confusion of notions decorated with some lovely, observational details is the challenge that taking Jacobs seriously presents. (...)
Jacobs found her vocation quickly but her subject very late. She spent several years working for a magazine called Amerika, published by the U.S. State Department for distribution in the Soviet Union. Only in the mid-nineteen-fifties did she begin writing about urban issues and architecture, first for Architectural Forum and then for Fortune, which offered a surprisingly welcoming home to polemics against edifice-building.* She married an equally cheerful, nonconformist architect, Robert Jacobs, and they moved—just before the first of their three children was born—into a house at 555 Hudson Street, an address that, for certain students of American originals, has attained the status of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden. (...)
It was against this background of established notoriety that Jacobs published, very much under the guidance of the editor Jason Epstein, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” The book is still astonishing to read, a masterpiece not of prose—the writing is workmanlike, lucid—but of American maverick philosophizing, in an empirical style that descends from her beloved Franklin. It makes connections among things which are like sudden illuminations, so that you exclaim in delight at not having noticed what was always there to see.
A celebration of the unplanned, improvised city of streets and corners, Jacobs’s is a landscape that most urban-planning rhetoric of the time condemned as obsolete and slummy, something to be replaced by large-scale apartment blocks with balconies and inner-courtyard parks. She insisted that such Corbusian super blocks tended to isolate their inhabitants, depriving them of the eyes-on-the-street crowding essential to city safety and city joys. She told the story of a little girl seemingly being harassed by an older man, and of how all of Hudson Street emerged from stores and stoops to protect her (though she confesses that the man turned out to be the girl’s father). She made the still startling point that, on richer blocks, a whole class of eyes had to be hired to play the role that, on Hudson Street, locals played for nothing: “A network of doormen and superintendents, of delivery boys and nursemaids, a form of hired neighborhood, keeps residential Park Avenue supplied with eyes.” A hired neighborhood! It’s obvious once it’s said, but no one before had said it, because no one before had seen it.
The book is really a study in the miracle of self-organization, as with D’Arcy Thompson’s studies of biological growth. Without plans, beautiful shapes and systems emerge from necessity. Where before her people had seen accident or exploitation or ugliness, she saw an ecology of appetites. The book rises to an unforgettable climax in a passage on the Whitmanesque “sidewalk ballet,” one of the most inspired, and consciousness-changing, passages in American prose:
Some of Jacobs’s theories were falsified by subsequent history: she expounds on how the block lengths on the Upper West Side keep its streets stagnant, compared with those of her beloved Village, but in fact Columbus Avenue later on became as lively as Hudson Street. Block lengths prove very secondary to attractive rents. Other insights remain evergreen: she shows that bad old buildings are as important to civic health as good old buildings, because, while the good old buildings get recycled upward, the bad ones prove to be a kind of urban mulch in which prospective new businesses can make a start. (One sees this today in Bushwick.)
Two core principles emerge from the book’s delightful and free-flowing observational surface. First, cities are their streets. Streets are not a city’s veins but its neurology, its accumulated intelligence. Second, urban diversity and density reinforce each other in a virtuous circle. The more people there are on the block, the more kinds of shops and social organizations—clubs, broadly put—they demand; and, the more kinds of shops and clubs there are, the more people come to seek them. You can’t have density without producing diversity, and if you have diversity things get dense. The two principles make it plain that any move away from the street—to an encastled arts center or to plaza-and-park housing—is destructive to a city’s health. Jacobs’s idea can be summed up simply: If you don’t build it, they will come. (A third is less a principle than an exasperated allergy: she hates cars, and what driving them and parking them does to towns.) (...)
Books written in a time of crisis can make bad blueprints for a time of plenty, as polemics made in times of war are not always the best blueprint for policies in times of peace. Jane Jacobs wrote “Death and Life” at a time when it was taken for granted that American cities were riddled with cancer. Endangered then, they are thriving now, with the once abandoned downtowns of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and even Cleveland blossoming. Our city problems are those of overcharge and hyperabundance—the San Francisco problem, where so many rich young techies have crowded in to enjoy the city’s street ballet that there’s no room left for anyone else to dance. The first stirrings in Jacobs’s day of what we call “gentrification” she called, arrestingly, “unslumming,” insisting that the process works when a slum, amid falling rents and vacated buildings, becomes slimmed down to a “loyal core” of residents who, with eyes on the street, keep it livable enough for new residents to decide to enter. (This sounds right for, say, Crown Heights or Williamsburg, where the core of Hasidim and Caribbeans, staying out of convenience or clan loyalty, made the place appealing to new settlers.) It now seems self-evident to us, but did not then, that a city can fend off decline by drawing in creative types to work in close proximity on innovative projects, an urban process that Jacobs was one of the first to recognize, and name: she called it “slippage,” and saw its value. We live with the consequences of slippage, called by many ugly names, with “yuppie” usually thrown in for good measure.
The complexity of city housing and city streets becomes plainer if you objectively analyze the career of one of Jacobs’s contemporaries. In her writings, the urban planner Ed Logue is, along with Edmund Bacon, of Philadelphia, a prominent villain. Logue was the author of large-scale urban-renewal projects up and down the East Coast; he fathered Roosevelt Island here. In the new book of conversations, Jacobs speaks of him contemptuously. “I thought they were awful,” she says of his plans. “And I thought he was a very destructive man.” (Her interlocutor, outdoing her, likens Logue to Hitler.)
The reality is considerably more complicated than the caricature suggests, and Logue’s work is more of a challenge to Jacobs’s ideas than we might like. Logue is the subject of an illuminating study by the Harvard historian Lizabeth Cohen, who describes him as a man determined “to balance public and private power in order to keep American cities viable, even flourishing.” He may have made bad buildings, but he did it in pursuit of an urban vision in many ways more egalitarian and idealistic than anything that the small-street ideal could encompass. He was a passionate integrationist, and his plan for Boston put a huge emphasis on racial mixing, recognizing that the drive to “protect” neighborhoods most often meant keeping blacks out. In a confrontation at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1962, he accused Jacobs’s anti-planning polemics of winning her too many friends “among comfortable suburbanites,” who, he said, “like to be told that neither their tax dollars nor their own time need be spent on the cities they leave behind them at the close of each work day.” By our usual standards, Logue is the social-democratic, public-minded hero struggling for diversity and equity against the stranglehold of neighborhood segregation, and a progressive ought to side with him against the hidebound defender of organic communities inhospitable to outsiders. (Are there black folks on Hudson Street? Jacobs doesn’t say, and, as Kanigel makes plain, she was impatient when the question came up.) Jacobs pits the small-scale humanist against the brutal, large-scale city planner. But it is just as reasonable to pit the privileged apartment dweller, celebrating her own privilege, against the social democrat trying to produce decent mixed housing for the homeless and the deprived at a price that the city can afford.
By their fruits you shall know them, and by their concrete villages. A cable-car visit to Roosevelt Island is sobering for those briefly inclined to abandon Jacobs for Logue. This is surely not anyone’s idea of successful urbanism. Who would not rather live in the West Village than on Roosevelt Island? If they could afford to. But almost no one can—and the reality is that good housing that will alleviate the San Francisco problem will probably look more like Roosevelt Island than like the West Village, simply because more Roosevelt Islands can be built for many, and the West Village can be preserved for only a few. Refusing to look this truth in the face and think about how the Roosevelt Islands can be made better, rather than about why they are no good, is not to be honest about the challenges of the modern city. The solution can’t be pining for old neighborhoods, sneering at yuppies, and vilifying social planners.
Her admirers and interpreters tend to be divided into almost polar opposites: leftists who see her as the champion of community against big capital and real-estate development, and free marketeers who see her as the apostle of self-emerging solutions in cities. In a lovely symmetry, her name invokes both political types: the Jacobin radicals, who led the French Revolution, and the Jacobite reactionaries, who fought to restore King James II and the Stuarts to the British throne. She is what would now be called pro-growth—“stagnant” is the worst term in her vocabulary—and if one had to pick out the two words in English that offended her most they would be “planned economy.” At the same time, she was a cultural liberal, opposed to oligarchy, suspicious of technology, and hostile to both big business and the military. Figuring out if this makes hers a rich, original mixture of ideas or merely a confusion of notions decorated with some lovely, observational details is the challenge that taking Jacobs seriously presents. (...)Jacobs found her vocation quickly but her subject very late. She spent several years working for a magazine called Amerika, published by the U.S. State Department for distribution in the Soviet Union. Only in the mid-nineteen-fifties did she begin writing about urban issues and architecture, first for Architectural Forum and then for Fortune, which offered a surprisingly welcoming home to polemics against edifice-building.* She married an equally cheerful, nonconformist architect, Robert Jacobs, and they moved—just before the first of their three children was born—into a house at 555 Hudson Street, an address that, for certain students of American originals, has attained the status of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden. (...)
It was against this background of established notoriety that Jacobs published, very much under the guidance of the editor Jason Epstein, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” The book is still astonishing to read, a masterpiece not of prose—the writing is workmanlike, lucid—but of American maverick philosophizing, in an empirical style that descends from her beloved Franklin. It makes connections among things which are like sudden illuminations, so that you exclaim in delight at not having noticed what was always there to see.
A celebration of the unplanned, improvised city of streets and corners, Jacobs’s is a landscape that most urban-planning rhetoric of the time condemned as obsolete and slummy, something to be replaced by large-scale apartment blocks with balconies and inner-courtyard parks. She insisted that such Corbusian super blocks tended to isolate their inhabitants, depriving them of the eyes-on-the-street crowding essential to city safety and city joys. She told the story of a little girl seemingly being harassed by an older man, and of how all of Hudson Street emerged from stores and stoops to protect her (though she confesses that the man turned out to be the girl’s father). She made the still startling point that, on richer blocks, a whole class of eyes had to be hired to play the role that, on Hudson Street, locals played for nothing: “A network of doormen and superintendents, of delivery boys and nursemaids, a form of hired neighborhood, keeps residential Park Avenue supplied with eyes.” A hired neighborhood! It’s obvious once it’s said, but no one before had said it, because no one before had seen it.
The book is really a study in the miracle of self-organization, as with D’Arcy Thompson’s studies of biological growth. Without plans, beautiful shapes and systems emerge from necessity. Where before her people had seen accident or exploitation or ugliness, she saw an ecology of appetites. The book rises to an unforgettable climax in a passage on the Whitmanesque “sidewalk ballet,” one of the most inspired, and consciousness-changing, passages in American prose:
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. The order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance . . . an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole . . . Mr. Halpert unlocking the laundry’s handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia’s son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement’s superintendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning the English that his mother cannot speak. . . . When I get home after work, the ballet is reaching its crescendo. This is the time of roller skates and stilts and tricycles, and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys; this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s; this is the time when teen-agers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips show or their collars look right; this is the time when beautiful girls get out of MG’s; this is the time when fire engines go through; this is the time when anybody you know around Hudson Street will go by.Reread today, the passage (it goes on for pages) may seem a touch overchoreographed. One imagines that other contemporary Village dweller S. J. Perelman reading it with a wince: where are the desultory dry cleaners and depressed delicatessen slicers in this Pagnol movie version of Village life? Still, anyone who lived on a New York block would have recognized its essential truth: a single Yorkville block, when I moved there, thirty-five years ago, had a deli, a playground, and a funeral home; the guys from Wankel’s Hardware on an avenue nearby gathered for lunch at the Anna Maria pizza place on the corner. The ballet happened.
Some of Jacobs’s theories were falsified by subsequent history: she expounds on how the block lengths on the Upper West Side keep its streets stagnant, compared with those of her beloved Village, but in fact Columbus Avenue later on became as lively as Hudson Street. Block lengths prove very secondary to attractive rents. Other insights remain evergreen: she shows that bad old buildings are as important to civic health as good old buildings, because, while the good old buildings get recycled upward, the bad ones prove to be a kind of urban mulch in which prospective new businesses can make a start. (One sees this today in Bushwick.)
Two core principles emerge from the book’s delightful and free-flowing observational surface. First, cities are their streets. Streets are not a city’s veins but its neurology, its accumulated intelligence. Second, urban diversity and density reinforce each other in a virtuous circle. The more people there are on the block, the more kinds of shops and social organizations—clubs, broadly put—they demand; and, the more kinds of shops and clubs there are, the more people come to seek them. You can’t have density without producing diversity, and if you have diversity things get dense. The two principles make it plain that any move away from the street—to an encastled arts center or to plaza-and-park housing—is destructive to a city’s health. Jacobs’s idea can be summed up simply: If you don’t build it, they will come. (A third is less a principle than an exasperated allergy: she hates cars, and what driving them and parking them does to towns.) (...)
Books written in a time of crisis can make bad blueprints for a time of plenty, as polemics made in times of war are not always the best blueprint for policies in times of peace. Jane Jacobs wrote “Death and Life” at a time when it was taken for granted that American cities were riddled with cancer. Endangered then, they are thriving now, with the once abandoned downtowns of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and even Cleveland blossoming. Our city problems are those of overcharge and hyperabundance—the San Francisco problem, where so many rich young techies have crowded in to enjoy the city’s street ballet that there’s no room left for anyone else to dance. The first stirrings in Jacobs’s day of what we call “gentrification” she called, arrestingly, “unslumming,” insisting that the process works when a slum, amid falling rents and vacated buildings, becomes slimmed down to a “loyal core” of residents who, with eyes on the street, keep it livable enough for new residents to decide to enter. (This sounds right for, say, Crown Heights or Williamsburg, where the core of Hasidim and Caribbeans, staying out of convenience or clan loyalty, made the place appealing to new settlers.) It now seems self-evident to us, but did not then, that a city can fend off decline by drawing in creative types to work in close proximity on innovative projects, an urban process that Jacobs was one of the first to recognize, and name: she called it “slippage,” and saw its value. We live with the consequences of slippage, called by many ugly names, with “yuppie” usually thrown in for good measure.
The complexity of city housing and city streets becomes plainer if you objectively analyze the career of one of Jacobs’s contemporaries. In her writings, the urban planner Ed Logue is, along with Edmund Bacon, of Philadelphia, a prominent villain. Logue was the author of large-scale urban-renewal projects up and down the East Coast; he fathered Roosevelt Island here. In the new book of conversations, Jacobs speaks of him contemptuously. “I thought they were awful,” she says of his plans. “And I thought he was a very destructive man.” (Her interlocutor, outdoing her, likens Logue to Hitler.)
The reality is considerably more complicated than the caricature suggests, and Logue’s work is more of a challenge to Jacobs’s ideas than we might like. Logue is the subject of an illuminating study by the Harvard historian Lizabeth Cohen, who describes him as a man determined “to balance public and private power in order to keep American cities viable, even flourishing.” He may have made bad buildings, but he did it in pursuit of an urban vision in many ways more egalitarian and idealistic than anything that the small-street ideal could encompass. He was a passionate integrationist, and his plan for Boston put a huge emphasis on racial mixing, recognizing that the drive to “protect” neighborhoods most often meant keeping blacks out. In a confrontation at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1962, he accused Jacobs’s anti-planning polemics of winning her too many friends “among comfortable suburbanites,” who, he said, “like to be told that neither their tax dollars nor their own time need be spent on the cities they leave behind them at the close of each work day.” By our usual standards, Logue is the social-democratic, public-minded hero struggling for diversity and equity against the stranglehold of neighborhood segregation, and a progressive ought to side with him against the hidebound defender of organic communities inhospitable to outsiders. (Are there black folks on Hudson Street? Jacobs doesn’t say, and, as Kanigel makes plain, she was impatient when the question came up.) Jacobs pits the small-scale humanist against the brutal, large-scale city planner. But it is just as reasonable to pit the privileged apartment dweller, celebrating her own privilege, against the social democrat trying to produce decent mixed housing for the homeless and the deprived at a price that the city can afford.
By their fruits you shall know them, and by their concrete villages. A cable-car visit to Roosevelt Island is sobering for those briefly inclined to abandon Jacobs for Logue. This is surely not anyone’s idea of successful urbanism. Who would not rather live in the West Village than on Roosevelt Island? If they could afford to. But almost no one can—and the reality is that good housing that will alleviate the San Francisco problem will probably look more like Roosevelt Island than like the West Village, simply because more Roosevelt Islands can be built for many, and the West Village can be preserved for only a few. Refusing to look this truth in the face and think about how the Roosevelt Islands can be made better, rather than about why they are no good, is not to be honest about the challenges of the modern city. The solution can’t be pining for old neighborhoods, sneering at yuppies, and vilifying social planners.
by Adam Gopnik, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Elliot Erwitt
The Trouble with Sombreros
[ed. Ms. Shriver's reply: Will the Left Survive the Millennials?]
In early September, the novelist Lionel Shriver gave a speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival in which she expressed her hope that identity politics and the concept of cultural appropriation would turn out to be passing fads. During her lecture, several audience members walked out in protest, and the text of her address has sparked a controversy that has spread across the Internet and the British and American press. It has stoked a debate already raging on college campuses, in the literary world, in the fashion and music industries, on city streets, and in other areas of our social and political lives. But while this debate has raised important issues—for writers and the public—both Shriver and her critics may have overlooked some of its larger implications.
“Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission” is the definition of cultural appropriation that Shriver quotes from a book by Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University. The topic is a complicated and sensitive one, and Shriver’s first mistake, I think, was to ignore that complexity and sensitivity by adopting a tone that ranged from jauntiness to mockery and contempt. I can think of only a few situations in which humor is entirely out of line, but a white woman (even one who describes herself as a “renowned iconoclast”) speaking to an ethnically diverse audience might have considered the ramifications of playing the touchy subjects of race and identity for easy laughs.
Shriver began with the story of a “tempest-in-a-teacup” that erupted after two Bowdoin College students hosted a tequila party and gave out miniature sombreros “which—the horror—numerous partygoers wore.” The hosts were censured for “ethnic stereotyping” and threatened with removal from their student government posts; their guests were criticized in the student newspaper for lacking “‘basic empathy.’”
“I am a little at a loss,” Shriver said,
For many Mexicans, the sombrero (now worn almost exclusively as a costume accessory by mariachis) perpetuates the myth of the backward, old-fashioned campesino, a throwback to an earlier century, chattering away in the heavily-accented, high-pitched, rapid-fire rhythms of Speedy Gonzales, the cartoon mouse, in his big yellow sombrero. In the past one more often saw—painted on dinner plates and tourist knick-nacks, embroidered on felt jackets—a caricature of a Mexican peasant dozing off, drunk or just lazy, leaning against a cactus, his face obscured by an enormous sombrero. And this is an unfortunate moment in which to mock a college for trying to reassure its Mexican and Latino students: Donald Trump has yet to call for the mass deportation of lederhosen-wearing, weissbier-swilling German-Americans.
Even as Shriver insisted on the writer’s right to imagine and empathize with people of different classes and races, she appears to have had some trouble empathizing with the people in her audience. It’s not hard to understand why the members of minority groups have grown impatient with the inability or unwillingness of governments and societies to confront the harsh realities of racism, of economic and social inequality, of de facto segregation. Nor is it difficult to find egregious examples of cultural appropriation: the sorry spectacle of feather bonnets and fake turquoise jewelry for sale at Native American fairs staffed and attended solely by white people. White musicians who get rich performing the songs of black soul and blues singers who live and die in poverty. The fast-food chain Taco Bell, which purveys a bastardized form of Mexican cuisine while paying its workers (who, in the West and Southwest, are often Mexican-Americans) wages that average between eight and nine dollars an hour.
Choosing to ignore the real inequities that exist, Shriver takes a familiar tack often used on Fox News: trivializing valid concerns by ridiculing their most absurd manifestations and extreme proponents. She cites the Oberlin students who (forgetting that our country has long functioned as a cultural and culinary melting pot) protested a piratization of Japanese culture: serving sushi in the school dining hall! (...)
Misdirecting our indignation, we let powerful individuals and institutions get away with murder while we fight enemies (academics and novelists) whose power is marginal at best, who may reflect prevailing prejudices but whose work, like it or not, hardly affects the larger society. Surely, corporate greed and the governments that have allowed our schools and health care systems to degenerate are more accountable than the authors of short stories. Though we all share the responsibility for the society in which we live, poets and painters are hardly to blame for the fact that we live in a racist country—or for having gotten us into the economic and political mess we are in.
by Francine Prose, NYR Daily | Read more:
Image: Alex Webb/Magnum Photos
In early September, the novelist Lionel Shriver gave a speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival in which she expressed her hope that identity politics and the concept of cultural appropriation would turn out to be passing fads. During her lecture, several audience members walked out in protest, and the text of her address has sparked a controversy that has spread across the Internet and the British and American press. It has stoked a debate already raging on college campuses, in the literary world, in the fashion and music industries, on city streets, and in other areas of our social and political lives. But while this debate has raised important issues—for writers and the public—both Shriver and her critics may have overlooked some of its larger implications.
“Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission” is the definition of cultural appropriation that Shriver quotes from a book by Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University. The topic is a complicated and sensitive one, and Shriver’s first mistake, I think, was to ignore that complexity and sensitivity by adopting a tone that ranged from jauntiness to mockery and contempt. I can think of only a few situations in which humor is entirely out of line, but a white woman (even one who describes herself as a “renowned iconoclast”) speaking to an ethnically diverse audience might have considered the ramifications of playing the touchy subjects of race and identity for easy laughs.Shriver began with the story of a “tempest-in-a-teacup” that erupted after two Bowdoin College students hosted a tequila party and gave out miniature sombreros “which—the horror—numerous partygoers wore.” The hosts were censured for “ethnic stereotyping” and threatened with removal from their student government posts; their guests were criticized in the student newspaper for lacking “‘basic empathy.’”
“I am a little at a loss,” Shriver said,
to explain what’s so insulting about a sombrero—a practical piece of headgear for a hot climate that keeps out the sun with a wide brim. My parents went to Mexico when I was small, and brought a sombrero back from their travels, the better for my brothers and I to unashamedly appropriate the souvenir to play dress-up. For my part, as a German-American on both sides, I’m more than happy for anyone who doesn’t share my genetic pedigree to don a Tyrolean hat, pull on some lederhosen, pour themselves a weissbier, and belt out the Hofbräuhaus Song.
But what does this have to do with writing fiction? The moral of the sombrero scandal is clear: you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats. Yet that’s what we’re paid to do, isn’t it? Step into other people’s shoes, and try on their hats.Like much of Shriver’s talk, this paragraph contains a kernel of truth encased by a husk of cultural and historical blindness. It seems clear that one part of the fiction writer’s job is “to step into other people’s shoes.” But to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a hat is more than just a hat. Sometimes it is a symbol—and a racist one, at that.
For many Mexicans, the sombrero (now worn almost exclusively as a costume accessory by mariachis) perpetuates the myth of the backward, old-fashioned campesino, a throwback to an earlier century, chattering away in the heavily-accented, high-pitched, rapid-fire rhythms of Speedy Gonzales, the cartoon mouse, in his big yellow sombrero. In the past one more often saw—painted on dinner plates and tourist knick-nacks, embroidered on felt jackets—a caricature of a Mexican peasant dozing off, drunk or just lazy, leaning against a cactus, his face obscured by an enormous sombrero. And this is an unfortunate moment in which to mock a college for trying to reassure its Mexican and Latino students: Donald Trump has yet to call for the mass deportation of lederhosen-wearing, weissbier-swilling German-Americans.
Even as Shriver insisted on the writer’s right to imagine and empathize with people of different classes and races, she appears to have had some trouble empathizing with the people in her audience. It’s not hard to understand why the members of minority groups have grown impatient with the inability or unwillingness of governments and societies to confront the harsh realities of racism, of economic and social inequality, of de facto segregation. Nor is it difficult to find egregious examples of cultural appropriation: the sorry spectacle of feather bonnets and fake turquoise jewelry for sale at Native American fairs staffed and attended solely by white people. White musicians who get rich performing the songs of black soul and blues singers who live and die in poverty. The fast-food chain Taco Bell, which purveys a bastardized form of Mexican cuisine while paying its workers (who, in the West and Southwest, are often Mexican-Americans) wages that average between eight and nine dollars an hour.
Choosing to ignore the real inequities that exist, Shriver takes a familiar tack often used on Fox News: trivializing valid concerns by ridiculing their most absurd manifestations and extreme proponents. She cites the Oberlin students who (forgetting that our country has long functioned as a cultural and culinary melting pot) protested a piratization of Japanese culture: serving sushi in the school dining hall! (...)
Misdirecting our indignation, we let powerful individuals and institutions get away with murder while we fight enemies (academics and novelists) whose power is marginal at best, who may reflect prevailing prejudices but whose work, like it or not, hardly affects the larger society. Surely, corporate greed and the governments that have allowed our schools and health care systems to degenerate are more accountable than the authors of short stories. Though we all share the responsibility for the society in which we live, poets and painters are hardly to blame for the fact that we live in a racist country—or for having gotten us into the economic and political mess we are in.
by Francine Prose, NYR Daily | Read more:
Image: Alex Webb/Magnum Photos
Thursday, September 22, 2016
The Strange Second Life of String Theory
String theory strutted onto the scene some 30 years ago as perfection itself, a promise of elegant simplicity that would solve knotty problems in fundamental physics — including the notoriously intractable mismatch between Einstein’s smoothly warped space-time and the inherently jittery, quantized bits of stuff that made up everything in it.
It seemed, to paraphrase Michael Faraday, much too wonderful not to be true: Simply replace infinitely small particles with tiny (but finite) vibrating loops of string. The vibrations would sing out quarks, electrons, gluons and photons, as well as their extended families, producing in harmony every ingredient needed to cook up the knowable world. Avoiding the infinitely small meant avoiding a variety of catastrophes. For one, quantum uncertainty couldn’t rip space-time to shreds. At last, it seemed, here was a workable theory of quantum gravity.
Even more beautiful than the story told in words was the elegance of the math behind it, which had the power to make some physicists ecstatic.
To be sure, the theory came with unsettling implications. The strings were too small to be probed by experiment and lived in as many as 11 dimensions of space. These dimensions were folded in on themselves — or “compactified” — into complex origami shapes. No one knew just how the dimensions were compactified — the possibilities for doing so appeared to be endless — but surely some configuration would turn out to be just what was needed to produce familiar forces and particles.
For a time, many physicists believed that string theory would yield a unique way to combine quantum mechanics and gravity. “There was a hope. A moment,” said David Gross, an original player in the so-called Princeton String Quartet, a Nobel Prize winner and permanent member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We even thought for a while in the mid-’80s that it was a unique theory.”
And then physicists began to realize that the dream of one singular theory was an illusion. The complexities of string theory, all the possible permutations, refused to reduce to a single one that described our world. “After a certain point in the early ’90s, people gave up on trying to connect to the real world,” Gross said. “The last 20 years have really been a great extension of theoretical tools, but very little progress on understanding what’s actually out there.”
Many, in retrospect, realized they had raised the bar too high. Coming off the momentum of completing the solid and powerful “standard model” of particle physics in the 1970s, they hoped the story would repeat — only this time on a mammoth, all-embracing scale. “We’ve been trying to aim for the successes of the past where we had a very simple equation that captured everything,” said Robbert Dijkgraaf, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. “But now we have this big mess.”
Like many a maturing beauty, string theory has gotten rich in relationships, complicated, hard to handle and widely influential. Its tentacles have reached so deeply into so many areas in theoretical physics, it’s become almost unrecognizable, even to string theorists. “Things have gotten almost postmodern,” said Dijkgraaf, who is a painter as well as mathematical physicist. (...)
String theory today looks almost fractal. The more closely people explore any one corner, the more structure they find. Some dig deep into particular crevices; others zoom out to try to make sense of grander patterns. The upshot is that string theory today includes much that no longer seems stringy. Those tiny loops of string whose harmonics were thought to breathe form into every particle and force known to nature (including elusive gravity) hardly even appear anymore on chalkboards at conferences. At last year’s big annual string theory meeting, the Stanford University string theorist Eva Silverstein was amused to find she was one of the few giving a talk “on string theory proper,” she said. A lot of the time she works on questions related to cosmology.
Even as string theory’s mathematical tools get adopted across the physical sciences, physicists have been struggling with how to deal with the central tension of string theory: Can it ever live up to its initial promise? Could it ever give researchers insight into how gravity and quantum mechanics might be reconciled — not in a toy universe, but in our own?
“The problem is that string theory exists in the landscape of theoretical physics,” said Juan Maldacena, a mathematical physicist at the IAS and perhaps the most prominent figure in the field today. “But we still don’t know yet how it connects to nature as a theory of gravity.” Maldacena now acknowledges the breadth of string theory, and its importance to many fields of physics — even those that don’t require “strings” to be the fundamental stuff of the universe — when he defines string theory as “Solid Theoretical Research in Natural Geometric Structures.” (...)
Researchers have developed a huge number of quantum field theories in the past decade or so, each used to study different physical systems. Beem suspects there are quantum field theories that can’t be described even in terms of quantum fields. “We have opinions that sound as crazy as that, in large part, because of string theory.”
This virtual explosion of new kinds of quantum field theories is eerily reminiscent of physics in the 1930s, when the unexpected appearance of a new kind of particle — the muon — led a frustrated I.I. Rabi to ask: “Who ordered that?” The flood of new particles was so overwhelming by the 1950s that it led Enrico Fermi to grumble: “If I could remember the names of all these particles, I would have been a botanist.”
Physicists began to see their way through the thicket of new particles only when they found the more fundamental building blocks making them up, like quarks and gluons. Now many physicists are attempting to do the same with quantum field theory. In their attempts to make sense of the zoo, many learn all they can about certain exotic species.
Conformal field theories (the right hand of AdS/CFT) are a starting point. You start with a simplified type of quantum field theory that behaves the same way at small and large distances, said David Simmons-Duffin, a physicist at the IAS. If these specific kinds of field theories could be understood perfectly, answers to deep questions might become clear. “The idea is that if you understand the elephant’s feet really, really well, you can interpolate in between and figure out what the whole thing looks like.” (...)
Inflationary models get tangled in string theory in multiple ways, not least of which is the multiverse — the idea that ours is one of a perhaps infinite number of universes, each created by the same mechanism that begat our own. Between string theory and cosmology, the idea of an infinite landscape of possible universes became not just acceptable, but even taken for granted by a large number of physicists. The selection effect, Silverstein said, would be one quite natural explanation for why our world is the way it is: In a very different universe, we wouldn’t be here to tell the story.
This effect could be one answer to a big problem string theory was supposed to solve. As Gross put it: “What picks out this particular theory” — the Standard Model — from the “plethora of infinite possibilities?”
Silverstein thinks the selection effect is actually a good argument for string theory. The infinite landscape of possible universes can be directly linked to “the rich structure that we find in string theory,” she said — the innumerable ways that string theory’s multidimensional space-time can be folded in upon itself.
by K.C. Cole, Quanta | Read more:
It seemed, to paraphrase Michael Faraday, much too wonderful not to be true: Simply replace infinitely small particles with tiny (but finite) vibrating loops of string. The vibrations would sing out quarks, electrons, gluons and photons, as well as their extended families, producing in harmony every ingredient needed to cook up the knowable world. Avoiding the infinitely small meant avoiding a variety of catastrophes. For one, quantum uncertainty couldn’t rip space-time to shreds. At last, it seemed, here was a workable theory of quantum gravity.
Even more beautiful than the story told in words was the elegance of the math behind it, which had the power to make some physicists ecstatic.To be sure, the theory came with unsettling implications. The strings were too small to be probed by experiment and lived in as many as 11 dimensions of space. These dimensions were folded in on themselves — or “compactified” — into complex origami shapes. No one knew just how the dimensions were compactified — the possibilities for doing so appeared to be endless — but surely some configuration would turn out to be just what was needed to produce familiar forces and particles.
For a time, many physicists believed that string theory would yield a unique way to combine quantum mechanics and gravity. “There was a hope. A moment,” said David Gross, an original player in the so-called Princeton String Quartet, a Nobel Prize winner and permanent member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We even thought for a while in the mid-’80s that it was a unique theory.”
And then physicists began to realize that the dream of one singular theory was an illusion. The complexities of string theory, all the possible permutations, refused to reduce to a single one that described our world. “After a certain point in the early ’90s, people gave up on trying to connect to the real world,” Gross said. “The last 20 years have really been a great extension of theoretical tools, but very little progress on understanding what’s actually out there.”
Many, in retrospect, realized they had raised the bar too high. Coming off the momentum of completing the solid and powerful “standard model” of particle physics in the 1970s, they hoped the story would repeat — only this time on a mammoth, all-embracing scale. “We’ve been trying to aim for the successes of the past where we had a very simple equation that captured everything,” said Robbert Dijkgraaf, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. “But now we have this big mess.”
Like many a maturing beauty, string theory has gotten rich in relationships, complicated, hard to handle and widely influential. Its tentacles have reached so deeply into so many areas in theoretical physics, it’s become almost unrecognizable, even to string theorists. “Things have gotten almost postmodern,” said Dijkgraaf, who is a painter as well as mathematical physicist. (...)
String theory today looks almost fractal. The more closely people explore any one corner, the more structure they find. Some dig deep into particular crevices; others zoom out to try to make sense of grander patterns. The upshot is that string theory today includes much that no longer seems stringy. Those tiny loops of string whose harmonics were thought to breathe form into every particle and force known to nature (including elusive gravity) hardly even appear anymore on chalkboards at conferences. At last year’s big annual string theory meeting, the Stanford University string theorist Eva Silverstein was amused to find she was one of the few giving a talk “on string theory proper,” she said. A lot of the time she works on questions related to cosmology.
Even as string theory’s mathematical tools get adopted across the physical sciences, physicists have been struggling with how to deal with the central tension of string theory: Can it ever live up to its initial promise? Could it ever give researchers insight into how gravity and quantum mechanics might be reconciled — not in a toy universe, but in our own?
“The problem is that string theory exists in the landscape of theoretical physics,” said Juan Maldacena, a mathematical physicist at the IAS and perhaps the most prominent figure in the field today. “But we still don’t know yet how it connects to nature as a theory of gravity.” Maldacena now acknowledges the breadth of string theory, and its importance to many fields of physics — even those that don’t require “strings” to be the fundamental stuff of the universe — when he defines string theory as “Solid Theoretical Research in Natural Geometric Structures.” (...)
Researchers have developed a huge number of quantum field theories in the past decade or so, each used to study different physical systems. Beem suspects there are quantum field theories that can’t be described even in terms of quantum fields. “We have opinions that sound as crazy as that, in large part, because of string theory.”
This virtual explosion of new kinds of quantum field theories is eerily reminiscent of physics in the 1930s, when the unexpected appearance of a new kind of particle — the muon — led a frustrated I.I. Rabi to ask: “Who ordered that?” The flood of new particles was so overwhelming by the 1950s that it led Enrico Fermi to grumble: “If I could remember the names of all these particles, I would have been a botanist.”
Physicists began to see their way through the thicket of new particles only when they found the more fundamental building blocks making them up, like quarks and gluons. Now many physicists are attempting to do the same with quantum field theory. In their attempts to make sense of the zoo, many learn all they can about certain exotic species.
Conformal field theories (the right hand of AdS/CFT) are a starting point. You start with a simplified type of quantum field theory that behaves the same way at small and large distances, said David Simmons-Duffin, a physicist at the IAS. If these specific kinds of field theories could be understood perfectly, answers to deep questions might become clear. “The idea is that if you understand the elephant’s feet really, really well, you can interpolate in between and figure out what the whole thing looks like.” (...)
Inflationary models get tangled in string theory in multiple ways, not least of which is the multiverse — the idea that ours is one of a perhaps infinite number of universes, each created by the same mechanism that begat our own. Between string theory and cosmology, the idea of an infinite landscape of possible universes became not just acceptable, but even taken for granted by a large number of physicists. The selection effect, Silverstein said, would be one quite natural explanation for why our world is the way it is: In a very different universe, we wouldn’t be here to tell the story.
This effect could be one answer to a big problem string theory was supposed to solve. As Gross put it: “What picks out this particular theory” — the Standard Model — from the “plethora of infinite possibilities?”
Silverstein thinks the selection effect is actually a good argument for string theory. The infinite landscape of possible universes can be directly linked to “the rich structure that we find in string theory,” she said — the innumerable ways that string theory’s multidimensional space-time can be folded in upon itself.
by K.C. Cole, Quanta | Read more:
Image: Renee Rominger/Moonrise Whims
Yahoo Hack Steals Personal Info From at Least 500M Accounts
Computer hackers swiped personal information from at least 500 million Yahoo accounts in what is believed to be the biggest digital break-in at an email provider.
The massive security breakdown disclosed Thursday poses new headaches for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer as she scrambles to close a $4.8 billion sale to Verizon Communication.
The breach Thursday dates back to late 2014, raising questions about the checks and balances within Yahoo - a fallen internet star that has been laying off staff to counter a steep drop in revenue during the past eight years.
At the time of the break-in, Yahoo's security team was led by Alex Stamos, a respected industry executive who left last year to take a similar job at Facebook.
Yahoo didn't explain what took so long to uncover a breach that it blamed on a "state-sponsored actor" - parlance for a hacker working on behalf of a foreign government. The Sunnyvale, California, company declined to explain how it reached its conclusions about the attack, but said it is working with the FBI and other law enforcement as part of its ongoing investigation.
MOST ACCOUNTS EVER STOLEN
"This is a pretty big deal that is probably going to cost them tens of millions of dollars," predicted Avivah Litan, a computer security analyst for Gartner Inc. "Regulators and lawyers are going to have a field day with this one."
Litan described it as the most accounts stolen from a single email provider.
The stolen data includes users' names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, scrambled passwords, and the security questions - and answers - used to verify an accountholder's identity.
Last month, the tech site Motherboard reported that a hacker who uses the name "Peace" boasted that he had account information belonging to 200 million Yahoo users and was trying to sell the data on the web.
Yahoo is recommending that users change their passwords if they haven't done so since 2014. The company said the attacker didn't get any information about its users' bank accounts or credit and debit cards.
THE VERIZON IMPACT
News of the security lapse could cause some people to have second thoughts about relying on Yahoo's services, raising a prickly issue for the company as it tries to sell its digital operations to Verizon Communications.
That deal, announced two months ago, isn't supposed to close until early next year. That leaves Verizon with wiggle room to renegotiate the purchase price or even back out if it believes the security breach will harm Yahoo's business. That could happen if users shun Yahoo or file lawsuits because they're incensed by the theft of their personal information.
 |
| “We’d have found the security breach earlier, but even we don’t search Yahoo.” |
The breach Thursday dates back to late 2014, raising questions about the checks and balances within Yahoo - a fallen internet star that has been laying off staff to counter a steep drop in revenue during the past eight years.
At the time of the break-in, Yahoo's security team was led by Alex Stamos, a respected industry executive who left last year to take a similar job at Facebook.
Yahoo didn't explain what took so long to uncover a breach that it blamed on a "state-sponsored actor" - parlance for a hacker working on behalf of a foreign government. The Sunnyvale, California, company declined to explain how it reached its conclusions about the attack, but said it is working with the FBI and other law enforcement as part of its ongoing investigation.
MOST ACCOUNTS EVER STOLEN
"This is a pretty big deal that is probably going to cost them tens of millions of dollars," predicted Avivah Litan, a computer security analyst for Gartner Inc. "Regulators and lawyers are going to have a field day with this one."
Litan described it as the most accounts stolen from a single email provider.
The stolen data includes users' names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, scrambled passwords, and the security questions - and answers - used to verify an accountholder's identity.
Last month, the tech site Motherboard reported that a hacker who uses the name "Peace" boasted that he had account information belonging to 200 million Yahoo users and was trying to sell the data on the web.
Yahoo is recommending that users change their passwords if they haven't done so since 2014. The company said the attacker didn't get any information about its users' bank accounts or credit and debit cards.
THE VERIZON IMPACT
News of the security lapse could cause some people to have second thoughts about relying on Yahoo's services, raising a prickly issue for the company as it tries to sell its digital operations to Verizon Communications.
That deal, announced two months ago, isn't supposed to close until early next year. That leaves Verizon with wiggle room to renegotiate the purchase price or even back out if it believes the security breach will harm Yahoo's business. That could happen if users shun Yahoo or file lawsuits because they're incensed by the theft of their personal information.
by Michael Liedtke, AP | Read more:
Image: Scwartz, New Yorker
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