Year: 2013

An entire country – Uruguay – is now poised to end prohibition of a plant much less dangerous to your health than alcohol or nicotine:

Under the legislation, Uruguay’s government would license pot-growers, sellers and consumers, and update a confidential registry to keep people from buying more than 40g a month. Carrying, growing or selling marijuana without a licence could bring prison terms, but licensed consumers could grow up to six plants at a time at home. Growing clubs with up to 45 members each would be encouraged, fostering enough marijuana production to drive out unlicensed dealers and draw a line between marijuana smokers and users of harder drugs.

That makes it the first country to allow free cultivation of marijuana for recreational use and the first to set up a legal and regulatory framework to manage it. A lot rides on the outcome, but Tim Padgett was optimistic only recently:

Uruguay over the past decade has proved to be one of Latin America’s more competent states. (A few years ago, in fact, a U.S. diplomat told me, “It’s a shame Uruguay’s Presidents don’t head a bigger country.”) It has one of the strongest economies on the continent as well as one of the highest rankings on the U.N. Human Development Index and Transparency International’s corruption gauge. And as the pragmatic [President José] Mujica pointed out last week, experiments like this are often best undertaken by smaller nations like Uruguay and Portugal, which can serve as more-controlled laboratories for larger countries to study.

Sadly, the US is leading globally from behind on this (via Washington and Colorado). But the direction across South America is becoming quite clear. The prohibition of marijuana is now a much bigger problem than marijuana itself. If you really want to tackle the chaos of the drug cartels, reduce their range of products.

Zachary Seward notes a growing trend in movie names, especially among video-on-demand titles:

Film studios have figured out that, all else being equal, it’s better for a movie to appear toward the top of the A-to-Z listings where people increasingly pick what they’re going to watch next.

“We call it alpha-stacking,” says Paul Bales of the Asylum, an independent studio that specializes in straight-to-video horror films. Last year, the company generated $16 million in revenue with movies that included Adopting Terror, Air Collision, Alien Origin, American Worships, and Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies.

But movie studios aren’t the first to play this game:

Phonebooks are typically front-loaded with small businesses that all seem enamored of the letter “A.” Authors writing under pseudonyms have been known to pick names that appear closer to the start of fiction shelves in bookstores. But it’s worse for digital media, with seemingly endless supply but few good ways of navigating among the competitors. Companies depend on their products to appear in hand-selected feature menus, crowdsourced most-popular lists, or algorithmic picks. (Netflix recently said that 75% of viewing on the service is driven by its personalized recommendations.) Short of that, it comes down to tricks. People who make mobile apps, for instance, admit to naming conventions they hope will compete alphabetically in crowded app stores.

Update from a reader:

My friend’s dad growing up was the president of a bank named BancFirst, and I was told it was so it would appear in front of all those loser banks that used the “K”.

Strange how foreign media ignore how Russians wrote Edward Snowden’s name in English. Namely: Eduard Dzhozef Snouden pic.twitter.com/7RW8sNCq1R

— Russian Market (@russian_market) August 1, 2013

Snowden is already getting job offers in his new host country. Julia Ioffe speaks to the leaker’s lawyer:

“[H]is father is coming [to Moscow] soon, his American lawyer is coming. He won’t be left to face his fate alone.” He added, “He has American friends here. So everything will be okay.”

It is unclear who those “American friends” are, and how Snowden, who has not had visitors for 39 days, and has never been to Moscow, made them. What we do know is that Moscow is still crawling with American spooks—as we learned from the CIA agent nabbed in Moscow while wearing an obscene blond wig—so maybe those are his American friends in Moscow. Likely, though, Snowden will live in an apartment that is bugged to the hilt, as any of my American (and British) friends in Moscow can tell you. They’d also likely tell you about how the Russian security services will regularly pay visits your apartment, usually when you’re not there, and leave overt “we were here” clues behind: missing rugs, opened emails, a ladder in the bedroom, a gun on your welcome mat. It may not be as excruciating as intercom announcements from a world now closed to you, but it’s a close second, believe me.”

Well, Snowden wanted to protest a surveillance state, so we await his resistance to the full metal version in Russia. Or will he stay mum? Is it only when the US engages in surveillance that he is troubled? A week ago, Ioffe imagined what life would be like for Snowden in Russia:

The reality that lies before [him] is not that of a Petersburg slum or a cherry orchard. More likely, he will be given an apartment somewhere in the endless, soulless highrises with filthy stairwells that spread like fields around Moscow’s periphery. He will live there for five years before he will be given citizenship. He’ll likely be getting constant visits from the SVR (the Russian NSA) to mine the knowledge he carries in his brain. Maybe, he will be given a show on Russia Today, alongside the guy who got him into this pickle to begin with, Julian Assange. Or he, like repatriated Russian spy Anna Chapman, might be given a fake job at a state-friendly bank where he will do nothing but draw a salary. (Chapman, by the way, recently tweeted this at Snowden: “Snowden, will you marry me?!”) Maybe he will marry a Russian woman, who will quickly shed her supple, feminine skin and become a tyrant, and every dark winter morning, Snowden will sit in his tiny Moscow kitchen, drinking Nescafe while Svetlana cooks something greasy and tasteless, and he will sit staring into his black instant coffee, hating her.

Update from a reader:

Maybe I’ve read too many spy thrillers (and I adore “The Americans” on FX) but what if this all an elaborate plot by the US to plant Snowden in Moscow as a spy! He’s a double double agent!

Amanda Palleschi profiles blogger-turned-therapist John Kim, whose practice is conducted on a site called The Angry Therapist:

After logging years in L.A. coffee shops working on a screenplay, [Kim] decided to become a licensed therapist. He began a Tumblr blog chronicling career change and post-divorce struggles. One day, a Tumblr follower wrote him an email asking for advice on how to cope with a recent breakup. Kim wrote an insightful email back. The girl followed up, sending Kim an unsolicited $20 bill. Not long after, she became Kim’s very first client, and the site acquired a donation button. The rest is every blogger’s fever dream: He quit his day job, had to start a waiting list of clients, started hiring a team to assist with marketing and product development as well as run his online groups.

Nearly one million page views, over 100 clients and over 3,000 tumblr “followers” later, Kim hopes he is giving talk therapy a needed image tune-up.

[Both patient Charlene] Corpus and Kim say today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings are more open to therapy and self-improvement practices than their parents’ might have been, and that, paired with their tech know-how, could change the market of psychotherapy. A one-on-one Google Hangout session with Kim runs around $90 an hour and group sessions are $25 (like many therapists in brick-and-mortar offices today, Kim does not accept health insurance), but it costs just $9 a month to become a “member” of The Angry Therapist’s “community”: a word Kim uses often when describing the goals of his practice. Clients find Kim online – through their own tumblr blogs, through friends’ referrals on Facebook, through someone posting an Instagram of a quote from his blog. Kim’s clients are all over the U.S. and abroad. They are college kids with eating disorders, young professionals going through breakups and divorces, busy business travelers, even high-class escorts.

Palleschi points out, “Experts believe that 80 to 90 percent of all therapy will be done remotely within 10 years” but therapists like Kim also face unknown regulatory hurdles. Since I moved to New York, almost my entire talk-therapy has been via phone, as it always is when I’m in Provincetown. It works for me, but I’m not sure if it would if I hadn’t spent an intensive amount of time in her office in her presence for several years. Sometimes, especially with issues like transference, you need to be physically with a therapist. But sometimes, depending on the type of therapy, you don’t. I can see the logic of expanding online shrinkage.