Tag: Premium

John Birdsall makes the case that today’s foodies owe a debt to three gay men – James Beard, Richard Olney, and Craig Claiborne – who propelled American dining past the “stale international haute cuisine of the 1950s.” Consider Beard:

Beard’s cookbooks have the whiff of sublimated desire: the open-air fantasies, stout flavors, abundant fats, and tons and tons of gorgeous meat. Beard’s public persona was the bow-tied bachelor gourmand with an unquenchable appetite, and he remade American food in his own triple-XL image. Even before McDonald’s mass-produced them, burgers had always been cheap lunch-counter food. Beard made them seem as monumental as an Abercrombie model’s torso: three-inch dripping slabs of sirloin you’d ground yourself, grilled over charcoal, and hoisted onto thickly buttered homemade buns—they’re the burgers on menus of serious restaurants across America. Beard convinced us that burgers had always been that way, a reinvention that made the pursuit of pleasure seem like some timeless American virtue. Beard made it okay for Americans to be hedonists at the table.

(Hat tip: Daniel Fromson)

Annie Lowrey expects the big money in legal pot will come from mass-market products, noting that “thousands of people and millions of dollars are hard at work to make [marijuana] as predictable and dependable” as a fast-food hamburger:

In spite of marijuana’s significant popularity, there is still an element of roulette when it comes to smoking a legal joint or eating a legal brownie. Federal law does not require companies to test for and disclose levels of the drug’s active ingredients, like tetrahydrocannabinol. (Federal law does not hold that pot is legal, after all.) Many dispensaries and producers fail to test for potency, contaminants or mold. And different states have different disclosure laws with different levels of efficacy. As such, a gram of “AK-47” bought in an Oakland dispensary might affect you differently than a gram of the same purchased in Colorado. …

Sensing the opportunity for something more predictable, [Jon] Cooper and his partner at Ebbu, a Colorado pot start-up, are creating a variety of predosed products – like prerolled joints, or little Listerine-style strips. They have eschewed the silly strain names, instead labeling their products “high-energy,” “relaxed,” “bliss,” “create,” and “giggles.” Lauren Ely, a librarian from Erie, Colo., is working on a start-up called DisposaBowls – prepacked, disposable ceramic pipes. “I joke around and tell everyone I’m the old, fat Nancy Botwin,” she said, referring to the character from the HBO show Weeds. She said that she hoped the product would appeal to experienced smokers looking for a convenient way to bring the product with them while they go on a hike, for example. But she also saw it as a good way to introduce novices, seniors, and medicinal smokers to pot, with gentle, predictable results.

Citing a slew of recent novels told from the perspective of “we” or “us” – such as Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to an End, Justin Torres’s We the Animals, and Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea – TaraShea Nesbit suggests that the rise of the first-person plural may be especially suited for our times:

Is life in the 21st-century social network less about the node and more about the links between nodes? In first-personal plural fiction, individuated characters can dissolve into the background, as our relationships and responsibilities to our fellow humans are foregrounded. This social awareness is not exactly new – it also exercised Victorian authors writing about town consciousness, as George Eliot did in Middlemarch. However, this new iteration is perhaps a move away from the character-driven plot of the individual “I”. How does one create one’s self in relation to the groups we are a part of? Where do our loyalties lie? What gets lost, and what is gained by group membership? This sense of social responsibility and selfhood, as well as uncertainty about how to act on such feelings, describes, in part, our contemporary moment.

In a similar vein, Art Edwards considers how an author’s method of narration helps him identify with a piece of fiction as a reader:

That’s where the power of fiction truly lies: Despite my wanting to know more about the novelists who write the novels I love, reading one isn’t the act of me learning about the writer’s life. It’s a metaphoric meeting place outside both writer and reader where the two come together. The novel can bridge further physical, cultural, emotional and experiential points, creating a connection that feels deeper. “Look at how different we are on the outside, how similar on the inside.”

Writers shouldn’t be looking for narrators to hide behind but to understand the effects their narrator choices have on the reader, and to make decisions accordingly. If the writer’s story is the whole point, and the writer doesn’t mind being front and center, then it’s best to employ memoir (or its longer sibling autobiography). … A first person point of view (The Name of the World [by Denis Johnson]) keeps the author in the fiction to the greatest degree with third person (Rabbit, Run [by John Updike]) the more distant mode, although even it doesn’t provide perfect cover. Having a detached third person narrator (most of Madame Bovary) leaves only the vaguest shadow of the author, but it’s still there, if only in its conspicuous absence. While fiction may always on some level be a disguise, its imaginative elements invite us to contemplate why the writer bothered to imagine them at all, and therefore, perhaps, to know him best.

In an excerpt from The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading, Phyllis Rose explains how librarians decide which books to cull from their collections. Perhaps not surprisingly, it involves a lot of acronyms:

CREW stands for Continuous Review Evaluation and Weeding, and the [industry-standard] manual uses “crew” as a transitive verb, so one can talk about a library’s “crewing” its collection. It means weeding but doesn’t sound so harsh. At the heart of the CREW method is a formula consisting of three factors – the number of years since the last copyright, the number of years since the book was last checked out, and a collection of six negative factors given the acronym MUSTIE, to help decide if a book has outlived its usefulness. M. Is it Misleading or inaccurate? Is its information, as so quickly happens with medical and legal texts or travel books, for example, outdated? U. Is it Ugly? Worn beyond repair? S. Has it been Superseded by a new edition or a better account of the subject? T. Is it Trivial, of no discernible literary or scientific merit? I. Is it Irrelevant to the needs and interests of the community the library serves? E. Can it be found Elsewhere, through interlibrary loan or on the Web?

She adds, “People who feel strongly about retaining books in libraries have a simple way to combat the removal of treasured volumes”:

Since every system of elimination is based, no matter what they say, on circulation counts, the number of years that have elapsed since a book was last checked out, or the number of times it has been checked out overall, if you feel strongly about a book, you should go to every library you have access to and check out the volume you care about. Take it home awhile. Read it or don’t. Keep it beside you as you read the same book on a Kindle, Nook, or iPad. Let it breathe the air of your home, and then take it back to the library, knowing you have fought the guerrilla war for physical books. This was the spirit in which I checked out the third book in Etienne Leroux’s Welgevonden trilogy with no intention of reading it.

This weekend, Byliner has unlocked for Dish readers Simon Winchester’s memoir of his struggles with mental illness, The Man with the Electrified Brain. The first terrifying episode of his condition began the morning after he, then an Oxford undergraduate, stayed up late working on a paper and began reading Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage:

I began the volume—it weighed in at more than seven hundred pages, far too heavy for a casual bedtime read—with avid attention. I did so until I reached—unforgettably, and with the bookmark to be set in place for the next forty years or more—page 32. I fretted: poor Philip Carey, the novel’s thoroughly tested hero, now lame and lonely at the vicarage. What would happen next? But then it was three, and I knew I had a good deal to do the following day and so had to sleep. I put the book on the floor, said my nightly prayers—as I did back in those days, lying supine rather than kneeling at the bedside—and switched out the lamp.

When I woke five hours later, the whole world seemed to have changed, to have suddenly gone entirely and utterly mad.

That much was clear—to the extent that anything could be described as clear—from the moment I first opened my eyes. My tiny basement room was not wholly dark: dawn was filtering in through its scarlet curtains, and I could see the walls and the cheap paintings and posters with which I had decorated them. I could see the little sideboard, piled with the plates from last night’s tea, and there was the chair with my clothing thrown across its arm. My desk, with the essay papers in their folder, was laden with books. Closer to hand ticked my Westclox alarm, showing a little after eight, but with its ringer unset since this was a Saturday, no lectures on the schedule. On the door, my blue dressing gown hung from its hook, and beneath it the hem of my raincoat and the sleeve of my commoner’s gown, still to be worn were I to decide to dine in college hall. All of these things I could see, quite clearly—and yet all of it now looked, in some strange and menacing way, entirely unfamiliar.

Continue reading here. Purchase it as a Kindle Single here.

Michael Bond rejects the idea of the “crazed crowd,” noting research that indicates “people in crowds define themselves according to who they are with at the time; their social identity determines how they behave”:

Years of field research have taught [researchers Clifford] Stott, [Stephen] Reicher and other social psychologists not only that mindless irrationality is rare within crowds, but also that co-operation and altruism are the norm when lives are at stake. …

At the University of Sussex, researchers led by the social psychologist John Drury have coined the term ‘collective resilience’, an attitude of mutual helping and unity in the midst of danger, to describe how crowds under duress often behave. There are many documented examples of this.

In 2008, Drury’s team interviewed survivors of 11 tragedies from the previous 40 years, including the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster when 96 Liverpool supporters died after being trapped in overcrowded pens, and the IRA bombing that killed six outside Harrods in London in 1983. In each case, most of Drury’s interviewees recalled feeling a strong sense of togetherness during the crisis, and an inclination to help strangers. Without such co-operation, the casualty rates could have been far higher, says Drury, who refers to crowds as ‘the fourth emergency service’ – an attitude not often shared by police. In Drury’s view, it is wrong-headed to blame crowd disasters on the behaviour of the crowd. More often the real problem is poor organisation – too many people in one place – or inadequate venue design.

Drury explains that a crisis, even a minor one such as a train breaking down in a tunnel, creates a ‘psychological crowd’ out of what was previously an aggregate of strangers. You suddenly share a common fate and your sphere of interest ramps up from the personal to the group.

Recent Dish on the Hillsborough 25th anniversary here.

Leon Neyfakh describes his experience attending a conference in Toronto as a telepresent robot he controlled from his apartment in New York:

When I hit a clearing, a friendly young woman comes up to me, introduces herself as Leila, and asks where I am. I am very briefly confused by the question: We’re in Toronto, of course! But when I catch her drift and admit I am actually in New York, she doesn’t seem to hear me. Before long, it becomes clear that the volume on the People’s Bot just doesn’t go loud enough to carry my voice in this noisy hallway. To hear what I’m saying, Leila has to put her face right up against mine. This seems to work, and after a bit of basic back and forth, I ask her what it feels like to be talking to me. “Do I seem like a human or a robot to you?” Leila thinks this over, and after a moment, says something thrilling: “It’s like a hybrid of both. Like a cyborg!” …

Soon it is time for my meeting with Irene Rae, the researcher from the Wisconsin Human-Computer Interaction Lab, and her adviser, Bilge Mutlu. When Rae tracks me down, she says cautiously, leaning into the frame of my camera, “I think I’m supposed to be meeting you?”

It feels like we’re two strangers who have agreed to meet for lunch but have neglected to describe what we look like. When we find a quiet place to talk, Rae explains that robotic telepresence research is still in its early stages—that at this point, experts still don’t know exactly what is needed to make people feel physically present in a place where they are not, or how best to help them interact with people who are.

Mutlu, who has joined us, notes that this is not merely a question of technology, but of social norms as well. According to one study, people who are telepresent feel “violated” when people who are present-present move them around without their permission, or put their feet up on them as if they were furniture. Then there’s the question of how close people should get when they’re interacting with someone who is telepresent. “Right now,” Mutlu admits, “I’m getting very close to you, in order to hear you, and it feels a little uncomfortable for me.”

(Video: Edward Snowden appears, via telepresent robot, at a TED Talk in March)

Ross Perlin is intrigued by the Dictionary of Untranslatables, a compendium of words with no direct equivalent in other languages:

[T]he Dictionary is revealing for the way it sketches, lexically, a set of parallel but alternate intellectual traditions. What language teachers call “false friends” are everywhere, inspiring a constant alertness to nuance.

Did you know that French classicisme summons up Versailles (which we’d call baroque) but it was German Klassizismus that crystallized our idea of the “neoclassical”? Or that the vital feminist distinction between “sex” and “gender,” current in English since the 1970s, was “nearly impossible to translate into any Romance language,” not to mention the problems posed by the German Geschlecht, as Judith Butler writes in the Dictionary? Further probing may even make us wonder whether the nature/culture distinction so sharply drawn (and now promoted) by the English idea of “sex” vs. “gender” is the right distinction—the languages of the world offer many other possibilities.

This is the kind of “philosophizing through ­languages” that the Dictionary’s editors have in mind, and they’re right: philosophy has always been about bending (and coining) words to work in particular ways, about consciously harnessing and creating abstraction out of linguistic systems already engaged willy-nilly in much the same task. A century ago, analytic philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein saw the problems of philosophy as all boiling down to unclear language; contributors to the Dictionary lay a similar stress on words but revel in their contested indeterminacy.

Previous Dish on untranslatable words here, here, here, and here.

Nina Strochlic notes that Nigerians threatened by Boko Haram militants don’t count on the military or the police to protect them:

In northeastern Nigeria, where Boko Haram enjoys a stronghold, kills with impunity, and kidnapped more than 270 schoolgirls last month, young civilians have been taking protection and justice into their own hands. In June 2013, discontent with Nigeria’s official Joint Military Task Force (JTF) spawned an unofficial offshoot—widely dubbed the Civilian Joint Task Force—a loosely organized network of vigilantes facing down AK-47-wielding militants with axes, knives, and bows and arrows.

They’ve had, according to some accounts, remarkable success. On Tuesday morning a group of vigilante villagers from a town 150 miles from the capital reportedly fought off a major assault, killing 200 militants and arresting 10, with no villagers reported killed. Such claims are hard to confirm, but it may be true, as one local told the Associated Press, that “it is impossible” for Boko Haram to attack since the vigilante group was organized.

Laura Seay zooms in on the phenomenon:

Variation among vigilante groups operating in Nigeria is high on almost every metric. Some are officially registered with local police, with the tacit understanding that the vigilantes will respond to local crimes of a non-serious nature (like petty theft) while the police will be called in for more serious crimes like kidnapping or rape. Many vigilante groups operate under some form of accountability to local customary authorities, and as the membership in the vigilante groups are usually known to communities, they will be held accountable for any abuses by their fellow citizens as well. Other vigilantes operate on subscription-based models; if you have a problem with a crime committed against you and are a subscriber, you can call the vigilantes for help.

Vigilantism in Nigeria is an example of what scholars term hybrid forms of governance in weak states. These forms of governance are not fully undertaken by the state, but neither is the state completely uninvolved in regulating, overseeing or even partially providing the public services it cannot independently provide. The process of hybrid governance  is seen in widely varying sectors around the world, from public trash collection by community organizations to public education  systems run by religious actors.