In a brief question and answer exchange between moot and TED’s Chris Anderson, moot said that money wasn’t the goal of creating 4chan. “The commercial picture is that there really isn’t one,” he said. More laughs, mostly uneasy, and I was left with a sense that many people in the room did not understand. I did, because like 4chan, Ars was started not to make money, but to service a community. Whether or not 4chan has a real commercial future isn’t clear, moot said, but he was going back to school and hoped to apply all he has learned from 4chan to some future venture.
Most of moots discussion (hat tip to waxy), however, centered around 4chan and the power of privacy, particularly in an age when transparency and publicity through social networking is lauded. The whole talk reminds me of why I love the flock’s Christopher Walken.
I think for a male, if you want to be successful in this type of venture, you’re not a prostitute. You’re a surrogate lover. You encompass everything that’s required of you—not only emotionally, physically—but psychologically. Because women are wired differently. They’re much more sensitive creatures. You actually have to enjoy what you do. You can’t necessarily say, “Oh, it’s just a job.” You actually have to say it’s a passion. I think it’s the same situation as with anything that happens when you break apart a social institution. There has to be some kind of change in terminology to describe persons like myself. And it’s more of a civil rights thing now. Basically this is the first time in the economy of the United States that a male has actually stood up and said, “I want to do this for a living.” And be protected under law to do it. It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front instead of the back. She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman. And I’m doing the same. I’m actually standing up now, and hopefully I can be supported by the male community and be understood as a person. This actually isn’t about selling my body. This is about changing social norms.
I can’t help but feel we’re missing a certain journalistic opportunity by not sending good correspondents to write about the Adult Entertainment Expo, which rolls out year after year almost untouched by good reporters. I mean, you can actually buy molds modeled after (and that supposedly emulate) your favorite pornstar’s anus or vagina. Pornstar vaginas! That’s how far they’ve taken this manufactured reality. Tell me this isn’t a gold mine of psychological and sociological commentary.
I am continually amazed at how many people incrementally bid up an item they want six days before an auction is over. It’s like watching someone walk around with a switch unknown to him flipped permanently to stupid. It’s easy, really. All it requires is patience, knowing what you want, what it is worth, what you are willing to pay for it, and then, again, and this is the important part — waiting.
It should be no surprise that academics are turning their analysis to this area, considering our widening girth. [...]
[The Fat Studies Reader] analyzes lawsuits stemming from weight discrimination and the handful of states and cities that have barred the practice (including San Francisco and Santa Cruz). It highlights the stigma of being fat in other countries, including mandatory weight reductions for children in Singapore.
One researcher makes an argument that, contrary to long-held beliefs, fatness causes poverty, not vice versa. Unemployment and low-paying work, he said, result from discrimination associated with being fat.
This is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”
Continuing our discussion on cities, I got this email from Foad Mardukhi, the contents of which I’ll post below. For those that have never heard of him, Foad Mardukhi is a news compiler/filter extraordinaire. His distro list consists mostly of academics (Jeff Sach’s wife is the one who turned me on to him). He has a knack for taking a current topic/trend and compiling all the interesting relevant news stories on the topic. For example, today’s email (he doesnt send them too often which is nice) was about cities. To get on his listserv, all you have to do is email him (foadmardukhi@hotmail.com) and ask to be added.
FURTHER READING:
NYT piece by Harvard economist Ed Glaeser titled “New York, New York: America’s Resilient City”:
Wall Street is just about to finish the worst year since 1931. American housing markets are finishing their worst year in recorded history. New York’s economy is highly dependent on Wall Street; about 40 percent of Manhattan’s total payroll was in finance and insurance in 2006. These three facts should have created the mother of all price crashes in New York City real estate.
Yet New York’s housing prices are doing remarkably well relative to elsewhere in America.
…The secret of New York’s post-1970 reinvention was that smart people, who knew each other and learned from each, innovated in ways that made billions in financial services. The same density that once served to get hogsheads onto clipper ships served to spread ideas.
What does this mean for the future?
New York still has an amazing concentration of talent. That talent is more effective because all those smart people are connected because of the city’s extreme population density levels. Historically, human capital — the education and skills of a work force — predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not. Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York’s human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city.
I won’t be surprised if Manhattan prices do drop in the next few years, but I also strongly believe that the future of New York City continues to be bright. Homo sapiens are a social species; almost all of what we know we learn from each other. Dense cities, like New York, succeed when they take advantage of this fundamental aspect of our humanity. They thrive by enabling us to connect with each other, which then promotes learning and innovation. The current downturn will only increase the returns to being smart, and you get smart by hanging around smart people. As long as New York continues to attract and connect those people, the city will continue to thrive.
Glaeser had a great BG op-ed on why urbanity was a necessary precondition for the American revolution:
The Fourth of July is an opportunity to reflect on the long, difficult path to liberty. The organized uprisings, like t he American Revolution, that toppled tyrants were often urban affairs that started with surreptitious meetings in crowded pubs and guildhalls. They were led by creatures of the city: merchants, lawyers, weavers, butchers, and brewers. As we celebrate our freedom at spacious suburban barbecues, we should remember that the road to freedom started on far more crowded city streets.
In the fight for freedom between dictatorship and democracy, dictatorship starts with a big edge.
Dictatorships have a small number of insiders who have strong incentives to fight for their regime. Because the benefits of democracy are so widely shared, no one has particularly strong incentives to fight to create or preserve representative government.
Democracies have a massive free-rider problem where all of us have a natural tendency to let someone else die for our liberty. Solving this free rider problem requires coordination and this is what urban density has done for millennia. Urban density connects citizens and enables them to meet and plan and talk. With enough talking, groups like the Sons of Liberty may even convince themselves that it is worth dying for a common cause. Monarchies flourished in our agricultural past, because effective democratic opposition was far more difficult to organize in a dispersed rural setting.
Johann Hari column titled “What? Copenhagen, Vancouver and Zurich are greater cities than London and New York?”:
Pack your bags! Sell your house! It’s time to leave behind sleepy, dull old London and head for the wild, crazy adrenaline-rush of… Copenhagen. Or Vancouver. Or Zzzzzzzurich. Yes, another one of those “studies” to discover The Best City In The World has come up with these excruciating museum-cities, and left us off the list. Who draws up these charts – ninety-year old valium addicts?
I have been to five of the top ten cities. The experience was invariably like being in a coma, with Rowan Williams talking incessantly at your bedside. When I arrived in Munich, I thought it was closed. When I visited my relatives in Zurich, I found the city riveted by a debate about parking offences. It had been going on for six years. I have been to Helsinki, Stockholm and Minneapolis – and I cannot remember a single thing about them. The only vaguely interesting city on the list is Paris – and even she has become the Disney-Land of Love, selling a parody of herself for a tossed-aside euro.
These lists pose as impartial assessments of “quality of life”, but they involve value judgments most of us don’t share. They assume we would choose serenity over excitement. Monocle magazine chose Copenhagen as the best city because life there is, they said, “frictionless” – but it is friction that causes sparks. Those of us who choose to live in this big dirty stretch of concrete on the Thames knowingly sacrifice peace for something we value more: the thrill of knowing we are at the centre of the world.
Hitchens’ ode to the West Village in Vanity Fair (“Last Call, Bohemia”):
It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran. It was Jean-Paul Sartre who to his last days lent the patina to the Saint-Germain district of Paris, just as it is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, last of the Beats, who by continuing to operate his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco’s North Beach still gives continuity with the past.
In aspect and design, New York’s West Village is the opposite of Soho in London in that it began its existence before the famous evolution of Manhattan as a grid had taken shape. As Malcolm Cowley phrased it, evoking the Village just after the First World War, “Most of us drifted to Manhattan to the crooked streets south of Fourteenth, where you could rent a furnished hall-bedroom for two or three dollars weekly.… We came to the Village … because living was cheap, because friends of ours had come already … because it seemed that New York was the only city where a young writer could be published.” Trying to sum up the ethos, Cowley wrote that for his generation the Village was something more than “a place, a mood, a way of life: Like all bohemias, it was also a doctrine.”
“Doctrine” might sound a shade pretentious. But try picturing American culture without the contribution of this unique square mile. Inter alia, you would have to subtract Bob Dylan and the Cafe Wha?, Norman Mailer and The Village Voice, Isadora Duncan, John Reed and Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Beats, the gay movement and Christopher Street and the Stonewall Inn, Lauren Bacall as “Miss Greenwich Village of 1942,” Eugene O’Neill, Dylan Thomas at the White Horse Tavern, Dawn Powell and Djuna Barnes. In his book which has the wonderful title Republic of Dreams, Ross Wetzsteon managed to evoke what he admitted was sometimes “a cult of carefree irresponsibility, but in the service of transcendental ideas.” That could be Bohemia defined.
NYT columnist Roger Cohen on returning to New York:
All the debt, personal and national, notwithstanding, I have to second that. As it happened, I’d been up very early that morning to talk to CNN’s excellent John Roberts about Iran. Waiting for the show, I looked east across Central Park to the rising sun just knotting its tie over the serried high rises of midtown and the Upper East Side.
It was a magnificent sight, the city resplendent. New York has recovered, if not its stride, at least its balance.
…My dawn moment with the skyline is a moment every New Yorker knows, when the demanding city suddenly gives back, yields beauty from its pounding restlessness, grants some miracle of iron and light, and in so doing summons the energy and civility that has helped set things right.
Cohen had an elegiac piece comparing Havana and Paris:
Since visiting Cuba a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about the visual assault on our lives. Climb in a New York taxi these days and a TV comes on with its bombardment of news and ads. It’s become passé to gaze out the window, watch the sunlight on a wall, a child’s smile, the city breathing.
In Havana, I’d spend long hours contemplating a single street. Nothing — not a brand, an advertisement or a neon sign — distracted me from the city’s sunlit surrender to time passing. At a colossal price, Fidel Castro’s pursuit of socialism has forged a unique aesthetic, freed from agitation, caught in a haunting equilibrium of stillness and decay.
Such empty spaces, away from the assault of marketing, beyond every form of message (e-mail, text, twitter), erode in the modern world, to the point that silence provokes a why-am-I-not-in-demand anxiety. Technology induces ever more subtle forms of addiction, to products, but also to agitation itself. The global mall reproduces itself, its bright and air-conditioned sterility extinguishing every distinctive germ.
Paris, of course, has resisted homogenization. It’s still Paris, with its strong Haussmannian arteries, its parks of satisfying geometry, its islands pointing their prows toward the solemn bridges, its gilt and gravel, its zinc-roofed maids’ rooms arrayed atop the city as if deposited by some magician who stole in at night.
It’s still a place where temptation exists only to be yielded to and where time stops to guard forever an image in the heart. All young lovers should have a row in the Tuileries in order to make up on the Pont Neuf.
Yet, for all its enduring seductiveness, Paris has ceased to be the city that I knew. The modern world has sucked out some essence, leaving a film-set perfection hollowed out behind the five-story facades. The past has been anaesthetized. It has been packaged. It now seems less a part of the city’s fabric than it is a kitschy gimmick as easily reproduced as a Lautrec poster.
I know, in middle age the business of life is less about doing things for the first than for the last time. It is easy to feel a twinge of regret. Those briny oysters, the glistening mackerel on their bed of ice at the Rue Mouffetard, the drowsy emptied city in August, the unctuousness of a Beef Bourguignon: these things can be experienced for the first time only once.
Leon Wieseltier column (“Scratches”) elevating elegy to an art form:
Once upon a time, before the panicked society-wide attempt to expel contingency from American life, existence was organized, or left sufficiently unorganized, for the refreshments of serendipity. The domination of the days and the years by logistics had not yet gone from authoritarian to totalitarian: interventions of experience, and island paradises of idle time, still got through. There were walks, and on those walks, finds. On a snowy afternoon a few years ago, for example, I stopped in a record store (more evidence of the antiquity of my tale) and discovered–but first I must introduce a distinction, to clarify my complaint. It is the distinction between searching and browsing. On that lucky day I was not searching, I was browsing. They are antithetical activities in their pace, in their range, and in their yield. The one is curious and the other is efficient. Anyway, what I found while I was loafing in the record store in Dupont Circle was the compact disc of one of Dizzy Gillespie’s most exquisite records, called Portrait of Jenny, from 1970. I had feared that it had not survived the war on vinyl, but some fratelli in Florence finally made the transfer. And my thrill did not end with its acquisition. I put the CD on and at the very beginning, just as the trumpet first stated its simmering theme, I heard a sound that excited me even more. I heard a scratch! I mean on the record, not on the CD. And then another scratch, and then another. And the sounds of the scratches were beautiful to me. They were the traces of human use, of human ardor. They restored me to the liberal age that preceded the frigid perfectionism of the new technologies of reproduction. The more you listened to a record, and studied it, and deployed it as a soundtrack for intimacy or interiority, the more scars it bore, and they were the scars of true feeling. You listened past them, the way you listened past the muffled panting of a Russian pianist or the clinking of glasses on a far table in Birdland. I know that CDs also get scratched, but their flaws have no significance: they are only interferences with a silvery promise of pristinity. A scratched disc is worthless, but a scratched record is a madeleine.
Vittorio Colao, chief executive of Vodafone, is moving to London. He has decided that the market town of Newbury in Berkshire is not the place for the headquarters of the world’s biggest mobile phone operator.
The company said last week that, while hundreds of employees would remain at Vodafone’s Newbury premises, the leadership team would be joining Mr Colao in London, where he already lives.
I recall some years back going up to St Helens in the north-west of England to interview another Italian chief executive of a British company – Paolo Scaroni, then head of Pilkington, the glass maker. I asked how he had settled in, expecting warm words about the local hospitality and his new love of rugby league. He looked at me as if I was mad. He didn’t live in St Helens, he said. He lived in London and came up to St Helens for a day-and-a-half a week.
In the view of two recent surveys, however, London is no place to live. Nor is New York. Tokyo perhaps passes muster. Shanghai? Forget about it.
The two surveys – one by Monocle magazine, the other by the Economist Intelligence Unit – rank cities for their “liveability”. This sounds like a dreadful neologism, but the Oxford Shorter Dictionary is quite happy with it, defining liveable as “conducive to comfortable living”.
Zurich is the world’s most liveable city, declares Monocle. My colleague Tyler Brûlé, who is editor-in-chief of that excellent publication, writes that Zurich gets the wink for its “high-quality housing, impeccable public transport network, a refreshing lake at its core, a well-connected and user-friendly airport, cosy little cinemas, well-tended bars and diverse population”. Copenhagen took second place. Neither London nor New York made the top 25.
Vancouver, 14th in the Monocle survey, won top spot in the Economist Intelligence Unit liveability table, which ranked cities for their stability, healthcare, culture, environment, education and infrastructure. Vienna came second, Melbourne third.
Tokyo came only 19th in the Economist table, well behind the third slot Monocle assigned it. But then, as readers of his Financial Times Weekend column know, Tokyo is a personal favourite of Tyler’s. I have visited the city twice, and loved it too. But one FT letter writer declared it “traffic-snarled, polluted and architecturally challenged”. That is the fun of these city rankings. They get people worked up.
Of course, no city is intrinsically better than any other. Which you find more amenable depends on your preferences. If you like to get around by bicycle, London is pretty horrible (so, perhaps as a consequence, are its cyclists). If you want to be on your surfboard after work, Honolulu (11th in the Monocle hierarchy) is a better bet than Amsterdam (ranked 21st).
I can’t, however, help noticing one feature of these supposedly liveable cities. Not that many people live in them. Zurich has a population of only 360,000. Copenhagen has a little over 600,000.
Leaving aside Tokyo, you have to get down to Monocle’s 13th place before you find a city (Sydney) with more than 4m people.
Many people are choosing new cities. Every week, one million people move to cities around the world, according to a study carried out late last year by AT Kearney, the management consultants, Foreign Policy magazine and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
They are going to places such as São Paulo, Mumbai and Shanghai, with populations of more than 11m. They are not choosing cities for their liveability, but because that is where the opportunities are. Of course, the quality of life for many in these expanding metropolises is awful.
Is there a way to combine urban dynamism with, if not pristine cycle paths and spotless metro stations, a reasonable quality of life?
The AT Kearney researchers had a go. They looked at cities’ business activity – the value of their capital markets and how many global companies were headquartered there. They examined the number of international schools and the percentage of residents with degrees. They considered how many international news bureaux had set up and how much world news there was in the newspapers. They looked at the cultural attractions, at how many think-tanks were located in each city and how many political conferences took place there.
The result? New York first, London second, Paris third and Tokyo fourth. Of the “liveable” cities, Zurich ranked 26th and Copenhagen 36th. Vancouver did not make it into the top 60, kept out by the likes of Buenos Aires, Milan and Tel Aviv.
The AT Kearney cities are, in its words, those “whose ideas and values shape the world”. I’ll take that over liveability. So, it seems, will Vodafone’s Mr Colao.
I have read five of the 61 essential postmodern books (via), The Scarlet Letter, Metamorphosis, Maus I & II, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,and Hamlet. I also got bored with Everything Is Illuminated, so I put it down, and read an entirely different City of God.
“Leiningen!” he shouted. “You’re insane! They’re not creatures you can fight–they’re an elemental–an ‘act of God!’ Ten miles long, two miles wide–ants, nothing but ants! And every single one of them a fiend from hell; before you can spit three times they’ll eat a full-grown buffalo to the bones. I tell you if you don’t clear out at once there’ll he nothing left of you but a skeleton picked as clean as your own plantation.”
Consider yourselves warned: Argentine ants are unifying into one super massive mega colony rivaling ours for world domination.
These ants rubbed antennae with one another and never became aggressive or tried to avoid one another.
The most plausible explanation is that ants from these three super-colonies are indeed family, and are all genetically related, say the researchers. When they come into contact, they recognise each other by the chemical composition of their cuticles.
In short, they acted as if they all belonged to the same colony, despite living on different continents separated by vast oceans.
Most of the 277 survey respondents reported no positive correlation between a professional focus on ethics and actual moral behavior. Respondents who were ethicists themselves shied away from saying that ethicists behave worse than those outside the discipline – generally reporting that ethicists behave either the same or better – but non-ethicists were mostly split between reporting that ethicists behave the same as or worse than others.
Even those ethicists who did rank their peers’ behavior as better than average said their moral behavior is just barely better than average – hardly a ringing endorsement.
In another of Schwitzgebel’s papers forthcoming in a peer review journal, he looks at whether ethics books are more likely to be missing from libraries than non-ethics books.
“Pol Pot was cremated here. Please help to preserve this historical site,” reads a sign next to a mound demarcated by bottles stuck into the ground and protected by a rusting, corrugated iron roof. A few wilting flowers sprout around the unguarded grave site, which officials complain has been virtually stripped of Pol Pot’s cremated remains by foreign tourists.
“People come here, especially on holy days, because they believe Pol Pot’s spirit is powerful,” says Tith Ponlok, who served as the leader’s bodyguard and lives near the burial ground.
Cambodians in the area, he says, have won an unusual number of lotteries, prompting Thais to come across the border and beseech Pol Pot to reveal winning numbers in their dreams. Government officials from Phnom Penh and others also make the pilgrimage, asking his spirit to make assorted wishes come true.
Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.
“No other religious bloc has kept such a pace in every state,” the study’s authors said.
In mainstream U.S. culture, “bubble butts” have typically been associated with “lowly” subject positions or “vulgar” sexuality. Calling too much attention to one’s behind is considered uncouth in polite society, a nasty reminder of forbidden or distasteful acts. A big butt is associated with “unnatural” sex, excrement, or the excess and physicality identified with “darker” races. This body metaphor helps us constitute social identities and subject positions. Like most females growing up in America, I learned early on that bodily attributes such as butt size, hair texture, skin color, and body shape could convey a woman’s status and desirability. During my teens, achieving the “all American girl” look that graced the covers of fashion magazines meant dieting the butt into submission. A woman’s failure to reign in an unruly butt connoted her lack of discipline and self-control, and by association, her inferior moral character. It also marked her place in the social order: “high class” women did not carry excess baggage in the trunk. A skinny ass identified you with the elegant and never too rich, never too thin social elite, big butts with the mammies and maids.
