Month: May 2014

Artisanal Everything

Brianne Alcala observes how fast-food chains are jumping the shark and onto the bandwagon:

McDonald’s is not the first to co-opt “artisan.” Its rival Subway has “sandwich artisans”; Domino’s offers ARTISAN™ pizzas, such as Tuscan Salami & Roasted Veggies; Dunkin’ Donuts promoted Artisan Bagels; and Wendy’s sells the Artisan Egg Sandwich. No doubt the fast-food giants are trying to muscle into the higher-priced foodie realm, and sure, the ad copy is enticing. Wendy’s description of its “Artisan Egg Sandwich”: “fresh cracked Grade A Eggs, natural Asiago cheese, freshly cooked applewood smoked bacon or all natural sausage and Hollandaise sauce all atop a honey-wheat artisan muffin toasted to order.” What does “fresh cracked” eggs even mean? …

This copy writing taps into two modern cravings:

1) the desire for “real food,” for reassurance that something quick, cheap, and mass-produced is in the same family as the egg we cracked open on the frying pan last Saturday morning—hence, the “natural,” “all natural,” “freshly cooked,” and “fresh cracked.” 2) the desire for hand-crafted, that real people, not robots, made this sustenance—hence, “toasted to order.” The gourmet, bespoke, personalized, and designed just-for-you creation is so appealing on this planet of 7 billion people. You are not just a number. You are special. Even your burger roll is artisan.

The Myth Of Opting Out

Princeton sociologist Janet Vertesi tried to keep her pregnancy offline, hidden from “the bots, trackers, cookies and other data sniffers online that feed the databases that companies use for targeted advertising.” Though she steered clear of social media, avoided baby-related credit card purchases, and downloaded Tor to browse the Internet privately, she failed to escape the reach of big data:

Attempting to opt out forced me into increasingly awkward interactions with my family and friends. But, as I discovered when I tried to buy a stroller, opting out is not only antisocial, it can appear criminal. For months I had joked to my family that I was probably on a watch list for my excessive use of Tor and cash withdrawals. But then my husband headed to our local corner store to buy enough gift cards to afford a stroller listed on Amazon. There, a warning sign behind the cashier informed him that the store “reserves the right to limit the daily amount of prepaid card purchases and has an obligation to report excessive transactions to the authorities.”

It was no joke that taken together, the things I had to do to evade marketing detection looked suspiciously like illicit activities. All I was trying to do was to fight for the right for a transaction to be just a transaction, not an excuse for a thousand little trackers to follow me around. But avoiding the big data dragnet meant that I not only looked like a rude family member or an inconsiderate friend, I also looked like a bad citizen.

Her bottom line:

The myth that users will “vote with their feet” is simply wrong if opting out comes at such a high price. … It’s time for a frank public discussion about how to make personal information privacy not just a series of check boxes but a basic human right, both online and off.

In an interview, Vertesi explains why she quit using Google two years ago: “When Google knew I was engaged before anybody else did, that did it for me”:

Google reads your email, reads your chats. It knows what you’re searching for. It sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake. And the server is economically incentivized to remember. The way to make money on the internet these days is to get people to exchange personal information for free, and you get them to do that by making them think they’re just interacting with the service: sending an email or searching or chatting with a friend. But there’s this underlying architecture there. …

[This experiment] was one of the first times that I thought about what it would take to opt out from collection. Because you hear all the time: if people don’t like it, they’ll stop using the service. But people don’t stop using the service. And I know a lot of people really don’t like it, and it’s not just that they’re upset because Facebook made some change to its layout. I think the deep, underlying reasons that people are uncomfortable is how these interactions are being tracked. They don’t like being stalked by a pair of shoes they looked at once on the internet two years ago.

A Poem For Saturday

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Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

In the June 14th, 2003 issue of The New Yorker, a moving and beautiful poem entitled “The Clerk’s Tale” by Spencer Reece appeared on the back page, drawn from his debut volume of the same title chosen for The Bakeless Prize that year by Louise Gluck.

The poem began, “I am thirty-three and working in an expensive clothier,/ selling suits to men I call ‘Sir.’” The poem describes two gay men closing the store in a mall in Minneapolis on a snowy, winter evening. The speaker, younger of the two, says of his companion:

“Often, he refers to himself as ‘an old faggot.’
He does this bemusedly, yet timidly.
I know why he does this.
He does this because his acceptance is finally complete—
and complete acceptance is always
bittersweet.”

The poem later formed the basis for a short film directed and produced by James Franco. The poet, Spencer Reece, was subsequently ordained as an Episcopal priest. While working as a chaplain at Hartford Hospital, he felt inadequate without the Spanish language. Appealing to his bishop, he was transferred to an orphanage in Honduras, where he coached the schoolchildren to write poems. Now he has compiled an anthology of their poetry called Hope & Fury: Abandoned Childrens’ Voices, with gems like this one by Riccy, age 14:

Rose

This young
rose, it represents all of us here.
Careful! It is the prettiest young rose
we have: life needs love,
love needs life.

James Franco is now the executive producer of the documentary-in-the-making about the orphanage, Our Little Roses. Today and in the days ahead we’ll post poems from Spencer Reece’s new book of poems, The Road to Emmaus, just published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

“ICU” by Spencer Reece:

Those mornings I traveled north on I-91,
passing below the basalt cliff of East Rock
where elms discussed their genealogies.
I was a chaplain at Hartford Hospital,
took the Myers-Briggs with Sister Margaret,
learned I was an I drawn to Es.
In small group I said, “I do not like it,
the way young black men die in the ER,
shot, unrecognized, their gurneys stripped,
their belongings catalogued and unclaimed.”
In the neonatal ICU, newborns breathed,
blue, spider-delicate in nests of tubes.
A Sunday of themselves, their tissue purpled,
their eyelids the film on old water in a well,
their faces resigned in plastic attics,
their skin mottled mildewed wallpaper.
It is correct to love even at the wrong time.
On rounds, the newborns eyed me, each one
like Orpheus in his dark hallway, saying:
I knew I would find you, I knew I would lose you.

(From The Road to Emmaus © 2014 by Spencer Reece. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Photo of Spencer Reece © Lawrence Schwartzwald, used with his permission.)

A Grim Climate Milestone

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Eric Holthaus notes that, as of last month, carbon dioxide concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million for the first time in human history:

Over the very long term, taking data from ice cores in Antarctica, paleoclimatologists have determined that there’s never been as quick a spike in carbon dioxide levels in at least the last 800,000 years … These data are painstakingly compiled by finding tiny air bubbles trapped in the ancient ice, and then analyzing their chemical composition. By this method, scientists have literally measured nearly a million years’ worth of the Earth’s atmosphere. Of course, looking at historical data, scientists could have made the same statement—we’re at levels not seen in human history!—in any year since about 1914 and would have been accurate. Problem is, the data didn’t exist then.

In fact, Brad Plumer notes, scientists believe CO2 levels haven’t been this high since long before humans even existed:

Indeed, some studies go further and estimate that carbon-dioxide levels may be at their highest point in 4.5 million years. During the Pliocene era, scientists have found, carbon-dioxide levels appeared to be around 415 ppm. (This rise was likely caused by wobbles in the Earth’s orbit — humans weren’t around then.)

The climate of the Pliocene was much warmer and wetter than it is today. Global average temperatures were 3°C or 4°C hotter (that’s 5.4°F to 7.2°C) and sea levels were between 5 and 40 meters higher.

That doesn’t mean we’ll get exactly those things today — the Pliocene isn’t perfectly comparable, since a variety of different factors were at play. But it’s the best guide we have to a fairly unprecedented situation.Other features of the Pliocene era: more frequent and intense El Niño events in the Pacific Ocean, intense flooding in the western United States, and severe coral reef extinctions as the oceans warmed.

Happiness May Be Hazardous To Your Health

Many people view good cheer as “a state to be avoided or even feared,” according to new research in The Journal of Happiness Studies:

Psychologist Mohsen Joshanloo and philosopher Dan Weijers of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, note that in Western culture, “happiness is universally considered to be one of the highest human goods, if not the highest.” Furthermore, Weijers told me in an e-mail, “if many Americans think they live in the land of opportunity and freedom, and that their happiness is largely a result of their own efforts,” then squandering the chance of happiness may be seen as a moral failing, because the unhappy person may be “too lazy or selfish to pursue happiness diligently and honestly.”

In their surveys, however, Joshanloo and Weijers discovered that some people – in Western and Eastern cultures – are wary of happiness because they believe that “Bad things, such as unhappiness, suffering, and death, tend to happen to happy people.” In Russia, notes Stanford psychologist and happiness expert Sonja Lyubomirsky, the expression of happiness “is often perceived as inviting the ire of the devil.” And in many East Asian cultures influenced by Buddhism, the quest for personal happiness may be seen as misguided, because pleasure is focused on the self, leading to such vices as “cruelty, violence, pride, and greed.”

Email Of The Day

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A reader writes:

I just read your “The Best of The Dish Today” with all its great news about the Dish’s relative financial health and wellbeing. Congratulations, mazel tov, salud, and all those great good wishes.

However, the reason I moused over to your page moments ago was a more somber one, but one that left me feeling deeply grateful to you and your intrepid crew for the work you do creating a space on the web – the fucking web of all places! – that is enriching, thoughtful, and never cynical in that particularly despicable, webby way. Earlier today I received the troubling news that a college student from the tight-knit community I grew up in attempted suicide late last night. He’s a bright, sweet guy, and my dad’s been something of a mentor to him, so the story sent me reeling. A dear friend lost his father to suicide last summer, and if I’m honest, I’ve had depressions that I stubbornly wouldn’t treat that probably brought me closer to thinking about it than I ever care to be again. So the issue’s close to me (as it is for so many).

I thought back a month or so to Jennifer Michael Hecht’s incredible first Ask Anything video and needed to find and re-watch it. Andrew, I wept. As she offered her gratitude to those who choose to stay with us despite their pain, I wept for joy over Jennifer’s compassion, brilliance, and fierce moral intelligence. And I wept for joy that we have in you a man with both the pugnacity to make it in the rough-and-tumble world of media and the sensitivity to recognize the importance of conversations like that one; you’re a rare breed, Sully.

And as I sat there weeping and pondering the mystery of intrinsic, immutable human worthiness (which, to bring in another thread, if Jesus had any point it surely was that), I felt more grateful than ever for the community that you’ve made with the Dish, since, as Hecht’s work on suicide has taught us, community is the whole point, in the end.

Have you ever noticed that for all that the web’s social media networks and listservs and affinity groups and message boards claim to be “virtual communities,” they always fall short? That the web – but not the Dish – is actually terrible at community? I think what others miss and that you haven’t is that you can’t form a real community just by sticking together a bunch of people who like the same stuff or think the same way or have the same friends. Real community isn’t a place at all, but something more like thecomposite-staff phenomenon of people experiencing respect and love and admiration for others they might not share much with, or might not even particularly like. Being forced in with people unlike you is a necessary condition. Real community needs dissent and diversity.

And, my god, is that the Dish. When you’re taking a big, clear stand against the hypocrisy of our Church or teaching the tao of meep meep, I could kiss you on your beautiful, bearded mouth. When you’re prattling on about The Bell Curve or getting weirdly defensive about some untenable position you’ve staked out while readers kick your rhetorical ass, I could whack you on your shiny, bald pate. But either way I’m so glad that you’re here and that I get to read your work. That you’ve made a place for so many of us to share in this together is even more amazing. I’d bet a whole lot that the community you’ve made is the one that some readers most want to “stay” for. And I hope you’re damn proud of that.

So all of that’s to say please keep doing what you do. Please keep talking about suicide and the other impossible questions. And more importantly: thank you. For all of it.

(Top photos of Dish readers used with their permission. Bottom photos of Dish staff, clockwise from top-left: Matthew Sitman, Patrick Appel, Chris Bodenner, Katie Zavadski, Brian Senecal, Chas Danner, Alice Quinn, Jessie Roberts (inset), Tracy Walsh, and Jonah Shepp in the center square. Read a bit about each of them here.)

Human Science Is Only Human

Jerry Adler reports on how fabricated studies and manipulated data have created a crisis in the experimental social sciences:

Amid a flurry of retracted papers, prominent researchers have resigned their posts, including Marc Hauser, a star evolutionary psychologist at Harvard and acclaimed author, and Diederik Stapel, a Dutch psychologist who admitted that many of his eye-catching results were based on data he made up. And in 2012, the credibility of a number of high-profile findings in the hot area of “priming”—a phenomenon in which exposure to verbal or visual clues unconsciously affects behavior—was called into question when researchers were unable to replicate them. These failures prompted Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning psychologist at Princeton, founding father of behavioral economics, and best-selling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, to warn in an email to colleagues of an impending “train wreck” in social psychology. …

[T]he current critique of experimental social science is coming mainly from the inside. [Nina] Strohminger, [Joseph P.] Simmons, and a handful of other mostly young researchers are at the heart of a kind of reform movement in their field. Together with a loose confederation of crusading journal editors and whistle-blowing bloggers, they have begun policing the world of experimental research, assiduously rooting out fraud and error, as if to rescue the scientific method from embarrassment—and from its own success.

The Science Of DJing

Virginia Gewin checks in with a couple of scientists who bring data to the dance floor:

It may just seem like people having simple fun at a club, but there’s something deeper going on. “We use the crowd to communicate with each other,” says [DJ Johan] Bollen. “We’re encoding information in the crowd.” Bollen cites a technical term for this: stigmergy, a form of indirect coordination of actions. The term describes, for example, how ant colonies make effective “decisions” in complicated situations, even though each ant’s behavior is very simple. The ants use pheromones to exchange information; the environment serves as their shared memory. Complexity spontaneously emerges from simplicity.

Bollen and [Luis] Rocha are experts on stigmergy—for real.

They DJ by night, but by day they study cybernetics—how people, animals, and machines control and exchange information—at Indiana University in Bloomington. A focus on feedback runs through their both their research and DJing. And while they really just want to orchestrate a raging party, the crowd is, in a sense, an experiment. …

Songs are categorized along two primary dimensions: energy level (bpm) and “valence”—the feeling of the music, consisting of a spectrum of universal emotions, from dark or edgy (cold) to inviting or velvety (warm). At [a] February show, for example, Bollen picked up on the crowd’s vibe, ramped up the energy level, and, at 124 bpm, played “The Feeling” by Eden—a warm, inviting song that signaled that the party was truly underway. “Our research—the notion of feedback and complex systems—informs everything we do,” says Bollen. “A DJ and an audience are a cybernetic system, controlling each other’s state.”

(Video: Live mash-up of “Pop Culture” by Madeon)

Language Doesn’t Make The Man

John McWhorter objects to the notion, first expounded by linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s, that different languages produce different worldviews:

Some languages are more telegraphic than others. For an English speaker, to a large extent, learning Mandarin is a matter of learning how much is unnecessary to still communicate effectively. No articles. No way to express the past tense. It’s quite common not to mark things as plural. The first words of the Bible can be rendered as “Start-start God achieve-make sky-earth.” If we are to suppose that this aspect of Mandarin creates a “worldview”—if two blues means Russians see more blue—then can’t we assume that the Chinese aren’t seeing, well, as much as we are? …

There are many languages in New Guinea and Australia in which there is one word that means eat, drink, and smoke. Are we to designate these people as less attuned to gustatory pleasures than us? They give little evidence of it, and note how distasteful it feels to even suggest it. Or, Swedish and Danish have no single word for what we call wiping. You can rub, erase, and such, and the word they spontaneously give as a translation means dry—but there is no word that means, specifically, what we mean by to wipe. Yet we shall neither tell Scandinavians that they do not wipe nor even imply that the act is less vividly important to them than to the rest of us.