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‘I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible.’ — http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/10/03/111003sh_shouts_kaling?currentPage=all

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‘I am charismatic. I am just the only person aware of it.’ — Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council

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‘What if sending an e-mail is an excuse to not think through a problem — a hope that we can grab a bite of someone else’s attention and make them do our thinking for us? What if we send a half-baked note when what we need is to risk personal contact via phone, through setting up a lunch or just by walking to the other side of the office? Maybe we send an e-mail when we want to pretend, to ourselves or someone else, that we’re being productive.’

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‘Rather than thoughtfully discussing race, Americans love to reduce racial politics to feelings and etiquette. Racial debate, in public and private, is trapped in the sinkhole of therapeutics.’

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I wonder if people in other countries watch American sitcoms and think we’re all constantly visiting each other at work.

The Next Tech Fad: Self-Monitoring

Last year for my birthday my brother got me a speedometer for my bike. It’s super-easy: You attach a sensor to your front-wheel spoke and a meter to your handlebars and presto, you can see how fast you’re going and how far you’ve gone. It even does automatic averages and times your rides. I’m such a fucking rocking chair, I didn’t even know this technology existed.

It’s a great gift because I never would have bought it for myself. I’m not constitutionally a gadget-guy, and my kneejerk reaction is to roll my eyes at technology that meets a need I never explicitly articulated. I got my first cellphone in 2006. 

Now that I have the speedometer, it’s startling how much harder I work when I’m biking. I have an objective, blinking, real-time report on how fast I’m going and how far I’ve gone, and I want to beat it with every pedal. No matter how tired I am or how raining it is, I’ll get off and walk before I let my speed dip below 24 kilometers an hour. Even when I’m biking uphill. It’s a sickness.

In the past few months of doing this, I’ve come to see it as a metaphor. As soon as you start monitoring something, you want to improve it. Before I had the speedometer, if I was tired or it was windy, I simply biked slower. Now that I have constant feedback on my performance, I strain myself harder to reach a target, no matter how self-generated or arbitrary it is.

I wonder if the next wave of technology will be an extension of this concept: Quantitative monitoring of things that you used to only estimate.

A few years ago we were all smitten with pedometers, which measure how many steps you take per day:

In a review of more than two dozen studies, researchers at Stanford University found that people who used pedometers to monitor their daily activity walked about 2,000 more steps every day, or about one extra mile, compared to those who weren’t counting steps. People who used pedometers also showed statistically meaningful drops in body mass index and blood pressure.

Now we have the FitBit and Philips’ DirectLife, which monitor daily activity, sleep patterns and link you to online reports and IM-dates with fitness coaches.

Imagine a gadget that could quantify how many calories you take in every day, and of what nutrients. Having a real-time meter of, say, carb intake that leapt up with each bite at Applebee’s could be a ferocious motivator of cutting portion sizes (OK, so I have no idea how such a gadget would work without being surgically installed, but still, it would be really cool).

A real-time meter of, say, how many kilowatts of energy you consumed or how many particles of pollutants you breathed in could also be a powerful driver of behavior change and political activism.

You could easily do this with other areas too. Imagine a little microphone that counted and recorded all the words you use all day and gave you a summary report on your average number of syllables and daily functional vocabulary. Or a word-cloud! Or a graph of your average swears!

OK, I’m getting carried away. And again, I have no remote inkling of how such gadgets would actually work, but self-monitoring culminates the two most fundamental things we use technology for: Self-improvement and narcissism. Anything that gives us a new way to watch ourselves is bound to be gangbusters.

As soon as you start measuring something, you want to improve it. Maybe the best way for us to use technology isn’t to make our lives easier, but to give us a reason to make it a little harder.

Berlin Becomes International City, Whines About It

Titled ‘A Victim of Its Own Success: Berlin Drowns in Tourist Hordes and Rising Rents‘, this Der Spiegel article is a distillation of a lot of the bitching you hear from Berliners.

This new city could soon become the actual city. If that happens, Berlin will no longer be primarily a home for Berliners, but a stage for an international audience. Some ugly terms to describe this new city have been making the rounds in Berlin, with some calling it a “giant Ballermann,” a reference to a notoriously rowdy beach bar on the Mediterranean resort island of Mallorca. Others call it a giant Disneyland, because of a growing sense of artificiality and absence of authenticity.

The ‘tourist hordes’, goes the argument, are gentrifying Berlin into an expat playground at the expense of the locals. They push up rents and genericize neighborhoods, pushing out the artists and layabouts that made these neighborhoods vibrant in the first place.

There’s something kneejerkically appealing about this argument. If you’ve lived in a neighborhood for 20 years through thick and thin (and Berlin has seen some thin, son), then it must be irritating to see a bunch of rookies show up the minute the place becomes livable. Hearing people rave about ‘low cost of living’ when you’ve barely been getting by in a 300-euro-a-month apartment has got to sting.

But if you think about it any harder than that, tourists and expats moving here is a sign of progress, not destruction.

First, Berlin doesn’t actually have all that that many interlopers. In Berlin, 13.5 percent of the population was born somewhere other than Germany. In London it’s 33 percent.  In Paris, 19.5 percent. London has significantly more tourists, expats and short-termers than Berlin. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who lives there who considers this a bad thing.

Second, tourists and expats contribute disproportionately to quality-of-life services like restaurants, cafes, nightclubs and art galleries. They support citywide events like the Berlin Festival, and incentivize city leaders to organize more of them. Think of how much Munich gets out of the annual Octoberfest, both in terms of easy income and city branding. Smart Berlin politicians should start coming up with Berlin equivalents.

Last I read, unemployment in Berlin was 13 percent. According to this irritating brochure, tourism employs 300,000 people in Berlin and Brandenburg, and contributes 17 billion euros to the economy. Every fanny-packed tourist taking pictures of the Brandenburg Gate represents a string of businesses that might not have a chance in Berlin without his dollars, rubles or yen.

It’s understandable that Berliners are wary of how their city is changing, and miss the Berlinier Berlin of yore. But all of this is a symptom of the fact that Berlin is finally becoming a place that people want to live. That brings rising rents, yes, but it also brings jobs and quality-of-life upgrades. Legitimate concerns about the impact of rising tourism should acknowledge the broader context of the city and its economy. A lot of what makes Berlin so terrific wouldn’t be sustainable without the tourists.

Der Spiegel paints a dystopian future for Berlin: ‘Perhaps the day will come when the budget tourists will realize that they aren’t experiencing a Berlin party, but a party in Berlin.’

Not unlike, in other words, a party in New York, London or Hong Kong. Berlin is the 4th largest city on the world’s most economically and culturally important continent.  Eventually it will have to get used to that.

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‘Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.’
– Oscar Wilde

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‘The U.S. government needs to realize that smaller government is a meaningless goal, but efficient, effective government—one that uses cost-effective methods to perform tasks appropriate to its mission—is something worth striving for.’ — http://bit.ly/pj6pgC

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Has anyone ever actually listened to the lyrics to ‘Ignition’? I’m concerned that R. Kelly doesn’t know what the idiom ‘playing the field’ means…

Fuck Celebrity Chefs

Like I said, I’ve been sick this week, so I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shoes. These are the least mentally taxing form of entertainment available to human beings, so I always fall into them whenever I’m swamp-headed and couch-bound for a few days.

Now that I’m better, I thought I should try out some of the recipes I’ve watched other people make on TV. My parents are visiting this week, so I thought I would make Nigella Lawson’s no-dairy, no-gluten carrot cake, which looks both easy and amazing:

I followed the recipe to a T: Whatever she did, I did. Measure, stir, pour. And at every single step, mine didn’t look like hers. She mixes in the eggs and her dough is the color of a Mediterranean midday; I mix mine and it’s the color of a football field behind a middle school in Chechnya. Her cake fluffs up in the oven, mine falls and bedenses to the point of having a gravitational pull. Not to mention that her recipe calls for a fucking waterfall of lemon juice, which totally overpowers the almond flour and the carrots.

Anthony Bourdain says cooking shows are the new pornography: ‘It’s watching people make things on TV that you’re never going to be doing yourself.’ I should have known this in the first place, and anticipated that Lawson’s show is designed to entertain, not instruct. (Come to think of it, we should probably tell boys this when they get to porn-clicking age too: Entertainment may overlap with education, but we shouldn’t confuse one for the other).

So here I am, icing a crummy, lemony, fax-machine version of a carrot cake. We’ll eat it anyway. Next time I want to make a new recipe, though, I’ll try to remind myself of today’s mini-piphany: Cooking shows are to food what monster truck rallies are to commuting.

 

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Ahhh, Europe: Where blackface is still funny — http://www.thelocal.de/national/20110915-37617.html

“If your boss says, ‘I want you to come in the next two Saturdays,’ what are you going to say—no?”

That quote is from a Mother Jones article on how American workers have been squeezed by the recession into working longer hours, for less relative compensation, than before.

Meanwhile, the NYTimes tells us that

Americans now feel worse about their jobs — and work environments — than ever before. People of all ages, and across income levels, are unhappy with their supervisors, apathetic about their organizations and detached from what they do. And there’s no reason to think things will soon improve.

This sort of shit just utterly breaks my heart. The American ethos of personal responsibility tells you over and over that you have to meet every requirement asked of you, no matter how unreasonable.

The worst thing about this ethos is that it obscures the structural components of your relationship to your employer. If you work 60-70 hours every week, your manager has failed. It’s not that you can’t meet the requirements of your job, it’s that your job has been mis-allocated to one person instead of two. Everything about the American working environment is designed to make you forget this, but it’s true.

This is an inevitable consequence of building an economy on the backs of employees that are terrified of losing their jobs. You’ll lose your healthcare if you lose your job. You know this, and so does your boss. And so does his boss. And so on.

Just like providing worker housing allowed factories in the late 1800s to push their workers ever harder, the American system of employer-provided healthcare and meager unemployment benefits allows employers to squeeze you as hard as they can: You, the employee, are easily replaced. We, the employer, aren’t.  

It might not be as stark as child labour or forced labour, but it’s exploitation just the same. I hope that in the near future American workers start seeing it as such.

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‘You lost control of your life, so you bought some sweatpants.’ — Karl Lagerfeld

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Berlin population statistics are really interesting. I can’t believe that in a city of 3.5 million people, only 1.5 million of them have a full-time job.

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Aside from the political bias, Fox News is just kind of a dick.

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Wow, Bush Sr and Reagan sound incredibly sane on immigration in 1980. When did it become impossible to talk like this? — http://www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/7224779/bush-and-reagan-on-immigration.thtml

‘Individual Action Does Not Work’

I totally agree with this, but I pause at phrases like

Every ton of carbon dioxide pollution causes around $20 of damage to economies, ecosystems and human health. That sum times 20 implies $400 worth of damage per American per year.

Remember those posters in your middle school that said ‘every cigarette you smoke takes 13 minutes off your life’? As important as it is to quantify the impact we as consumers have on the earth, this is a number designed to mobilize, not to inform.

The environmental movement has enough enemies already. The argument they’re making is just as strong without adding statisticians to the list.

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“American television studios almost concede before they start: ‘Well, it won’t be good, but at least it’ll be good-looking. We’ll have nice-looking girls in tight shirts with F.B.I. badges and fit-looking guys with lots of hair gel vaulting over things. So at least we’ll have achieved that base standard of entertainment.’ … I think that’s hugely misguided. The glory of American television is Dennis Franz.” — http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2011/09/06/311922/hollywood-for-ugly-people/

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‘Nearly 6% of commuters bike to work in Portland, the highest proportion in America. But in five out of the past ten years there have been no cycling deaths there. In the nearby Seattle area, where cycling is popular but traffic calming is not, three cyclists, have been killed in the past few weeks.’ — http://www.economist.com/node/21528302