In the modern-day insurance industry, it is illegal to redline by race and ethnicity—that is, to charge higher premiums to certain groups—but it is perfectly permissible to redline by ZIP code. (California is the one exception.) And wouldn’t you know it? Price-gouging rates tend to target ZIP codes with a disproportionate number of racial and ethnic minorities. …
Staples, the office retailer, was among those exposed for offering better deals to customers in affluent ZIP codes. Residents of Hyde Park, Massachusetts won their battle this year to have USPS change their ZIP code: They were weary of the high insurance rates and low property values they faced because they shared a ZIP code with neighboring Mattapan, where poverty and crime are rife.
Today on the Dish, Andrew pushed neocons to the fringes of the Republican party, expressed his ambivalence about the Rand-Rush alliance, grimaced at Beltway clubbiness, As the Conclave began, he held on to hope for the future of the Papacy despite the lack of diversity among the Curia and chuckled at news of the Vatican’s bathhouse. Meanwhile, he responded to more reader comments on the Iraq War and unpacked another fallacy in his own support.
In the political realm, the courts iced Bloomberg’s soda ban, we negotiated NIMBY-ism for nuclear waste, and a small minority actually watched partisan cable news. Overseas, North Korea rattled the saber, as the Chinese rushed to censor Weibo and subsidized the arts.
Elsewhere on the web, a reader ran down the arguments against our using Amazon’s Affiliate program, Bruce Bartlett explained why the gains at the top haven’t been trickling down, and companies hired robot surrogates. Palin took up arms for Christmas, SXSW jumped the shark, sanitation workers kept us healthy, and we dissected the history of heart surgery procedures. Patrick Kurp grew nostalgic with age, Ian Stansel distinguished between suburbia and the suburbs, and leisure activities went longform. The fan fiction audience held no surprises, author “Acknowledgments” were either displays of gratitude or gratuitousness, and Bob Woodward penned a tone-deaf biography of John Belushi.
Autumn Whitefield-Madrano took pride in her self-care, we were traumatized by Q-tips on Girls, and the EU sought gender equality through banning porn. As an adult film actress prepped for filming in the FOTD, we featured a Sacramento Stonehenge in the weekly VFYW contest, snow fell on Flagstaff in the VFYW, and penguins tripped their way through the MHB.
I’m three years older than Updike when he published it, and he spends much time revisiting Shillington, Pa., where he grew up and frequently returned in his imagination. It’s an aging man’s reverie, one I share, and so forgive … Updike writes:
Also like my late Unitarian father-in-law am I now in my amazed, insistent appreciation of the physical world, of this planet with its scenery and weather—that pathetic discovery which the old make that every day and season has its beauty and its uses, that even a walk to the mailbox is a precious experience, that all species of tree and weed have their signature and style and the day is a pageant of clouds.
In a review of Robin Nagle’s book on sanitation workers, Lawrence Biemiller praises the work’s historical perspective:
A Civil War-era report found that more than 3,200 cases of smallpox and well over 2,000 cases of typhus a year—many of them fatal—could have been prevented by better sanitation, but it wasn’t until 1881 that the Department of Street Cleaning was organized. Fifteen more years passed before an election ousted the last of the corrupt Tammany Hall politicians and brought a new sanitation commissioner, Col. George E. Waring Jr., who drew on his Civil War experience to establish what Ms. Nagle calls “a military-style order.”
Within a matter of months, Waring succeeded in ridding New York’s streets of ash, manure, trash, and myriad other kinds of filth, and the department has never looked back—unless you count occasional strikes, which serve to remind New Yorkers what a mess the city would be without DSNY. On an average day, the department’s 7,400 uniformed employees and 1,800 civilians are responsible for collecting some 11,000 tons of household garbage and 2,000 tons of home recycling, in addition to emptying litter baskets and sweeping many of the city’s 6,000 miles of streets.
David Zweig catalogues the many ways that long-form art projects have surged in recent years – growing vinyl sales, the popularity of Longreads, projects like the Up series and the extended time-lapse:
It’s cliché at this point to deride YouTube as the land of inane cat videos and the like, and not without reason. But long-term projects, with intentions of being more than just entertainment, abound on the site. Among the more fascinating examples of these are the “picture of myself every day for X number of years” time-lapse montages. In turns tedious and recondite, over the minutes they allow us to watch the human face incrementally morph as it ages over the years. While these video projects highlight the profound, and potentially worrisome solipsism required of their creators, they also betray an extraordinary dedication and time commitment to one idea rarely seen, not only in the art world but in any endeavor in our culture. …
As the technologically-induced speed of everything continues to exponentially increase, people will desire, indeed, require, time-slowing havens to ground us, let us pause, and reposition how we experience and interpret the world.
Christopher Jobson captions the short film seen above:
Choros follows in the steps of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren, all of whom spent years studying the physical moment of animals and humans through film. [Director Michael Langan] takes the next step using new digital innovations to layer some 32 sequential instances of a single movement and then stretch it out over time.
A compelling collection of adult film actresses with and without their makeup. Ryan Broderick’s take:
These incredible transformations prove that just about anybody can “look like a porn star.” Here are the revealing images of the actresses with their stage name, the number of films they’ve appeared in, and their age. These photos are originally from xmelissamakeupx’s Instagram account, which were then uploaded to Imgur and shared on Reddit.
Update from a reader:
I’m a straight guy, and I was looking at today’s “Faces of the Day” and you know what? I didn’t see “anybody can look like a porn star.”
I saw a group of attractive women make a transformation that is pretty familiar to women and to those of us who date them. Almost across the board these were women you’d be flattered to talk to in a bar. I saw a group of women who were working *hard* – this isn’t powdering your nose, this is an elaborate process.
I saw a group of women demonstrating a skill that Broderick didn’t even seem to see: the ability to sell yourself as a fantasy. Not just their bodies, or their costumes and makeup, but a posture and an attitude that is completely calculated. I perform for a living – that requires deep knowledge of your audience and of yourself.
I’m not saying that pornography is massively skilled labor, but it’s clearly freakin’ hard work. If anyone can look like a porn star, then anyone can look like an Abercrombie model. Step one – three hours a day in the gym …
Starting World War III or a second Korean War would not serve any of Pyongyang’s interests. Whether or not it deploys its small but legitimately scary nuclear arsenal, North Korea could indeed cause substantial mayhem in the South, whose capital is mere miles from the border. But the North Korean military is antiquated and inferior; it wouldn’t last long against a U.S.-led counterattack. No matter how badly such a war would go for South Korea or the United States, it would almost certainly end with the regime’s total destruction.
Still, provocations and threats do serve Pyongyang’s interests, even if no one takes those threats very seriously. It helps to rally North Koreans, particularly the all-important military, behind the leader who has done so much to impoverish them. It also helps Pyongyang to control the regional politics that should otherwise be so hostile to its interests.
Ian Stansel wonders why his own experience in the suburbs didn’t match the portraits found in the novels of Richard Yates, John Updike and Richard Ford:
My streets in my suburbs were less affluent. There were many single parents. There were large minority and recent immigrant populations. There was frequent turnover in those rental townhouses and apartments, people moving either up or down the socioeconomic ladder, holding fast to what they had and hoping for better days ahead. There weren’t a lot of cocktail parties in my suburbs.
This is all to say that while I love these books, when I look at the genre of suburban fiction—particularly the suburban novel—I find a significant lacuna. The fact is that the American suburbs are diverse and complex in ways that contemporary novels rarely acknowledge. According to 2010 census data, the suburbs are home to more minorities, especially Hispanics and African-Americans, than ever. The ‘burbs are also older, as baby boomers age and remain in place while their children move to the cities.
And perhaps most significantly, the median income for families in the suburbs has dropped. According to the Brookings Institute, even before the housing/economic crisis of 2008, the percentage of suburbanites considered poor has grown by 25% just since the turn of the 21st century, which makes suburban areas home to a greater increase in poverty than cities.
The source of the disconnect:
When we talk about the suburban novel we are usually talking about books about suburbia, rather than about the actual suburbs. This seems to be an important distinction to keep in mind. The suburbs evolve. They grow and shrink. Their populations change, and with these changes so do the cultures of these towns. The suburbs are full of people.
Suburbia, on the other hand, is a static construct. It is more idea than place. It is populated by notions and types. It is homogenous and, generally, economically secure. And it is only when a book works on some level as a reaction to this construct of suburbia that we tend to think of it as a suburban novel. Suburbia has been frozen in time, so the settings of these volumes resemble more the suburbs of past decades than those of today.
According to FFN Research, the average user of FanFiction.Net in 2010 was a 15.8-year-old girl from the United States who didn’t write fan fiction herself. Not to say that 45-year-old mothers and adolescent boys don’t also read it, or that fan fiction is only written in English; but the odds are not good. And with a community that is 80 per cent teenage and 80 per cent female, with three-quarters signing in from Britain or one of its former colonies, can it be a surprise that the Harry Potter books have such a dedicated following?
Update from a few readers:
While I don’t doubt that the majority of fan fiction readers are teen-aged girls, the flawed methodology of the referenced study seriously undermines its conclusions.
The web site doesn’t require registered users to provides age/gender information, and the analysis is based solely on the small minority (10% or less) of users that voluntarily offer that data. It is not unreasonable to believe that younger facebook-generation readers are more willing to reveal their ages, or that boys might be less likely to fess up to reading fan fiction than girls. And while there are three times as many Harry Potter stories on the site than the second-most popular fandom (Twilight), the study was based on readers who registered in 2010 … after the peak of Pottermania. Those signing up in 2010 were far more likely interested in mindless-stories featuring angsty vampires.
The other:
As a longtime author and longer-time reader of fanfiction, I would submit that those statistics don’t show you who reads fanfiction so much as it shows you who reads fanfiction as a registered user at fanfiction.net. FF.net, despite its size and visibility, has had for years the (apparently well-deserved) reputation amongst the fanfic community of being entirely given over to giggling sixteen-year-old girls. Fanfiction.net is merely one of many archives, along with the collections at livejournal.com, on tumblr, at archiveofourown.org (the home site of the Organization for Transformative Works) and at innumerable fandom-specific sites.
And, honestly, I would suspect that getting any kind of accurate data on the true nature of the readership would be tricky: fanfiction is still Not Entirely Respectable, as hobbies go. I’ve been a fanfic author for years – and am proud of what I’ve written – but as far as my family and meatspace friends are concerned, I am so far in the fanfic-writing closet that I can see Narnia from here.
I am the talent buyer and promoter at a couple of Chicago music venues, and this week I’ll be attending my 13th straight SXSW – which will also be my last. The attached photo (yes, that is a giant Doritos vending machine) from last year’s fest was when it officially jumped the shark for me and I vowed not to return this year. However, the city of Austin and the face time with agents, managers and other promoters that SXSW provides drew me back one last time. From here on out, I plan to get that face time by attending the many other festivals that take place throughout the U.S. Maybe I’ll start with next year’s XOXO in Portland.
While attending the fourth day of this year’s SXSW conference, Chicago-based marketing associate Tim Danner told reporters today that the music, film, and interactive festival is just about as cool, as alternative, and as real as it gets. “The great thing about South By is that practically everyone here is talking about the newest cutting-edge ideas, but the whole scene still has this super-chill underground vibe,” said the 33-year-old who went to business school, makes a six-figure salary, and develops marketing strategies for a living. “What I like most of all is that it’s not in New York or Los Angeles, but in Austin, which is like this cool little artsy town. That’s so awesome and so authentic, you know?
GigaOM’s Eliza Kern rounds up photos of “some of the weirdest marketing gimmicks we saw at SXSW.”
The Dish 