Where the U.S. has a commanding lead?
America remains the most innovative country in the world. But its overwhelming commanding lead in innovation is only, really strongly apparent, still, in the social media sector. If you look across sectors like biotech and semiconductor, they have been losing that overwhelming advantage in Silicon Valley and elsewhere for quite a while now.
What happened to Treece, Kansas?
Given what I learned in the aftermath of Fukushima, a toxic town like Treece does not register as high on the shock scale. And then I kept on reading:
“Local kids used to skinny-dip here all the time,” Dennis said, grinning and pointing at the glassy water. “We’d see kids with sunburns all over their bodies.” But it turns out the kids hadn’t been burned by the sun, he said; they had been chemically burned by all the acids in the water.
How bad is it?
There are 112 sites like Treece on the E.P.A.’s National Priorities List, an inventory of the most environmentally devastated places in the country.
Interesting….
1. A new book on the Third Reich at Kiev.
2. Evan Osnos on G-Zero World.
3. Recap of Facebook’s first day at the NASDAQ.
Dear God, I hope this won’t be my case
I long believed that weddings are just live, variety shows the brides and grooms do to please their parents, friends and others. No one I talked to could fully remember the details of their biggest day atop their heads, without been spoon fed by their mothers or mother-in-laws.
Tell me if I am being cynical here and this is a unique stage I am experiencing right now as I wait for my turn.
Cybernetic ethics
I find the expectation that the internet should be “free” of federal regulations very unreasonable. The more I read about the Anonymous hacking group and its offshoots, the more damaging I find they are. The internet is a communication platform and not the message itself. Regulating the platform does not equate regulating the message.
Free speech activists will fight the losing battle if they think the internet should be free of governmental monitoring. They should instead focus on the real safeguards against policy abuse: Due process.
I thought about this when I read Jeffrey Toobin’s piece on Citizen United. Until the decision came down,
[...] even in a legal system that protects free speech, the government had long been able to regulate speech in all kinds of ways. Copyright infringement was subject to civil and criminal remedies; extortion and other crimes involving the use of words were routinely punished. Campaign contributions, if they were considered “speech” at all, had been regulated for more than a century.
That was the case, of course, until Cit. United.
Goodbye Tokyo Boy
This is a monologue about a former couple, meeting again ten years after their break up, through her eyes. She arrived to find him stuck in his childish mind and tragically unable to break out.
This recording was a rough reading, in preparation for a July theater festival. And I truly love this festival. The stories people tell here are often unvarnished and free of stylization. They have just their words, their voice and their verbal quirks. The last time I was here, it was a short riff on taxi. The reception was beyond warm. People laughed. Everyone had a good time because in the background, everyone had to deal with the Fukushima disasters in a very personal way. This year, the goal is still making people laugh, but has to tie in some ways to last year’s torment. As you can tell, I think I struck gold here.
For a long time I thought of what would make me a different type of tellers. If left to my own device, I would abuse the word “like” to link my thoughts or the phrase “and then” as the untamed transitive. Lately, my reading changed too. Spontaneous humor started to pop out as I rewrote or reread the words. People started laughing in places I did not set out to be funny. Some parts of the recording reflected this, as the stage producer just chortled at me. It got quite bad at a certain point that the sound engineer had to cut out some milliseconds to preserve the pristine sanity.
There is absolutely nothing special about my writing process. I set the pacing to the confession booth experience, which every Catholic is well trained. Maybe this was why I got invited back several years in a row now. Either this or they just desperately needed people to fill up the schedule and I was the eager volunteer. ■
Is Andrew Sullivan too supportive of Obama?
Glenn Greendwald thinks so. Sullivan, Greenwald wrote, “spent the past three years continuously insisting that President Obama’s opposition to same-sex marriages was largely irrelevant,” but now hailed the pronouncement as “why we elected him. That’s the change we believed in.”
Sullivan has his own reasons, as should anyone believing their civil rights had been deprived for decades, as someone who had to lie to the world about who he was.
I tried so hard to fall in love with a woman. I was young and sex was not a problem. I could have screwed a tree at that point and gotten off. But there was a moment during sex with my only real girlfriend that I closed my eyes and visualized the hot dude I had showered next to in the gym that day. It was then that I knew it was wrong to do this. This was the real sin: to lie, deceive another person in such an intimate moment. She deserved so much better. If natural law is our guide, it seemed to me unnatural for me to violate how God had made me. Eventually, I told my girlfriend that I was bisexual. She replied with such grace and love I recall it today: “Well, that makes twice as many people for me to be jealous of.” We hugged. It ended soon after.
And when she invited me to her wedding years later, I RSVPed yes. And then, on the day, I couldn’t do it. I felt the weight of my deception and was ashamed. For me, heterosexual sex felt like an unforgivable betrayal.
I think Greenwald just wanted to remind Sullivan that he should dial back the praises of Obama on this issue. At the same time, I think Sullivan is very pragmatic on the issue. Yes, a gay person should not expect this president to go far above and beyond to do something the previous presidents could not. One should always push and pull their president toward an issue, but not shove. And now that Obama stepped forward, arguably because of the not-so-gently nudging of his vice-president, one should celebrate that and be as exuberant as one could muster the energy.
Personally I also hope that Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage will not blind Sullivan away from criticizing the other flaws of the current White House, namely the ongoing drone murders, that Sullivan had been doing so well all these years, so on and so forth.
I am her fan
This 11-year-old girl, Ashima Shiraishi, is a boulder climber pro.
This summer, she will accompany a group of American climbers for an expedition in South Africa, where she will be the only child climber in the bunch.
Tribes in the new century
A week before Facebook went public, a close friend convinced me to join the social network. Up until now, I was pretty much one of the few holdouts among the group. And it was not until joining the network, did I realize I now belonged to a tribe. The people here related to each other not of a single nationality, clan, or bloodline. But they were mostly women, young and successful in their craft. Above all, they were all attractive, edgy, photogenic, and interested the things that interested me.
This cannot be an accident. By the end of the day, we have to admit that the people we surround ourselves with are those whose ideologies, hobbies, interests, aesthetics we share. We might not group with or befriend with these faces and personalities consciously, but in the large picture, where everyone gathered for a group smile, there are not enough variants to distinguish one of us from the next.
In the early days of online social networking, people added as many names to their friend column as possible. Over time, this activity became more selective. We don’t just add people we met offline and deemed them cool. We added them to the list because it was a better way at keeping contact. Sure, they are just one text message or phone call away, but we add them because Facebook provides us with yet one more way to stay in touch.
This explains why the company’s IPO did not strike my fancy. Five years from now, I surmise the network would just be like Google: dominant, ubiquitous, and part of the human vocabulary. It won’t stand out as something buzz-worthy as it is now and will probably swallow itself in its own pool of success, the way Microsoft was and is with Windows. In other words, Facebook will just be like a utility company, providing the baseline for things that once deemed hot, but now crucial and mundane.
This is not a prediction that Facebook will not hit the $500 price per share line. If it does, good for the company. If it does not, I won’t be surprise. But judging from yesterday debut performance, the company is marching slowly behind its hype. In the end, Facebook is a structure built on the concept of image uploading, content generating, and communication. It did a good job combining all of this in a coherent manner, much more so than Yahoo or Friendster, or MySpace. And for that it deserves to reign as king. But that’s it.
Those merchants tagging along with Facebook will be in shock to learn that one day, the network will be boring because most people have grown immune to their product pitches. It will just feel like watching TV and reflexively tuning away when the ads pop out. What will Facebook do then? Come to think of it, if everyone on the planet has an account, the only way for the company to strike another buzz is to open up the network to an entirely new species. ■
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Businessweek had the early statistics:
Gretchen Morgenson follows the flat hype:
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