As part of the magazine's annual The Lives They Lived issue, publishing in print on Dec. 29, we invited readers to contribute a photograph and a story of someone close to them who died this year. Additional stories will be added in the coming days.
By Joshua Z Weinstein
I got to know Spider while making a documentary about New York cabbies called "Drivers Wanted." Hanging around the garage in Queens, Spider was hard to miss, with a bodega cigar always dangling between his lips and a neon-lettered hat that read "Old Dude." He moved to New York City in the 1930s to escape racism in Florida and started driving a cab in 1945. He didn't like driving when it was drizzling, sleeting or dark. But he found comfort in other conditions that would irritate most New Yorkers. "I love the traffic," he told me. "The worser the traffic gets, the better I like it."
This is one of five short films commissioned by the magazine's editors, in collaboration with The Times's Op-Docs team, for this issue.
Illustration by Kelsey Dake
When my wife and I first visited the supersize Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in 2008, we didn't take time to stop for the lingonberry jam or meatballs. Soon after we walked in, we just wanted to leave. We realized that the place was a crowded, labyrinthine mess lacking the adequate amount of staff to help us chose between the Ekby Hensvik and the Ekby Bjarnum. We left angry and exhausted, and we swore — for the sake of our marriage — never to return. Ikea, I thought, was just like Walmart or countless other big-box retailers that seemed to have embraced a Faustian bargain with their customers. The chains would sell absurdly inexpensive stuff — like a Lovbacken coffee table for $60 — but as a consequence, customers would have to put up with huge stores manned by small, often unhappy and unhelpful staffs.
Deep thoughts this week:
1. Big retailers classify workers as a "cost."
2. But they can be a major source of profit.
3. If stores understood this, they'd make a lot more money.
Adam Davidson translates often confusing and sometimes terrifying economic and financial news.
One recent Sunday, however, my wife and I caved. We needed to buy four separate closets and all the interior trimmings, and Ikea was the only place we could find them for less than $600. Coincidentally, it was the same weekend in which I was reading "The Good Jobs Strategy," by Zeynep Ton, a business professor at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management. Ton, 39, grew up in Turkey and spent several summers working at her father's apparel factory, often sewing pockets for bathrobes. The job was, like many menial low-wage tasks, both pressure-filled and boring, and Ton wished she could find a way to make such workers happier. After a volleyball scholarship brought her to the United States as a young adult, she eventually dedicated her academic career to figuring out how to make low-paid work more rewarding for employees and employers alike.
In the last few years, Ton has become a revolutionary force in a field that would seem unlikely to generate many — the Kafkaesque-titled Operations Management. Her central thesis is that many of those big-box retailers have been making a strategic error: Even the most coldhearted, money-hungry capitalists ought to realize that increasing their work force, and paying them and treating them better, will often yield happier customers, more engaged workers and — surprisingly — larger corporate profits. This sounds Pollyannaish, sure, but a study co-authored by Marshall Fisher, a Wharton professor who specializes in retail-management studies, backs it up. For every dollar of increased wages, one retailer that was studied by Fisher brought in $10 more in revenue. For more-understaffed stores in the study, the boost was as high as $28.
The problem results from the way many companies consider their workers. Ikea, for instance, has more than 130,000 global workers. In order to manage all these people, it uses something called work-force-management software, which ensures that there are enough workers — but not too many — to handle the forecasted in-store shopping traffic. (Walmart, which has 16 times as many workers, does, too, as do most larger retailers.) The software typically codes workers as a cost — one of the biggest — and aims to find the most efficient number of employees that can handle expected traffic. A trip to a big-box store reveals this algorithm's logic in practice. There always seem to be endless aisles of merchandise but no one to answer your questions.
Ton, however, argues that workers are not merely a cost; they can be a source of profit — a major one. A better-paid, better-trained worker, she argues, will be more eager to help customers; they'll also be more eager to help their store sell to them. The success of Costco, Trader Joe's, QuikTrip and Mercadona, Spain's biggest supermarket chain, indicate, she argues, that well-paid, knowledgeable workers are not an indulgence often found in luxury boutiques with their high markups. At each of the aforementioned companies, workers are paid more than at their competitors; they are also amply staffed per shift. More employees can ask customers questions about what they want to see more of and what they don't like, and then they are empowered to change displays or order different stock to appeal to local tastes. (In big chains, these sorts of decisions are typically made in headquarters with little or no line-staff input.) Costco pays its workers about $21 an hour; Walmart is just about $13. Yet Costco's stock performance has thoroughly walloped Walmart's for a decade.
I was thinking about this as my wife and I re-entered Ikea. From the moment we walked into the store, we realized that something changed. A greeter at the entrance pointed out a shortcut to get to the closet department, which probably saved us half an hour. When we got there, a salesman guided us through the options. Suspicious that this was a fluke, I made a point of asking questions of every worker we passed, but every one was pleasant, knowledgeable and helpful. Even on a crowded Sunday, there seemed to be plenty of roving employees looking to answer, direct and expound upon the various differences between the Pax and the Stuva closet systems — of which, I can now tell you, there are many.
Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR's "Planet Money," a podcast and blog.
As part of the magazine's annual The Lives They Lived issue, publishing in print on Dec. 29, we invited readers to contribute a photograph and a story of someone close to them who died this year. Additional stories will be added in the coming days.
By Elaine McMillion Sheldon and Kerrin Sheldon
When we started working on this video, we never imagined the impact one person could have on his homeland or the extent to which we would witness that legacy. People from all areas of Ireland and all walks of life would offer to help. "For Seamus, I'd do anything," they would say. It was witnessing this pride in Ireland's most famous poet that drove us to make this film. We developed a huge amount of respect for the way that Heaney was able to reach the dinner table of a farmer in the country and captivate crowds at a poetry reading in the city. He seemed to create a bridge between those two worlds. As filmmakers, we strive to achieve the same.
This is one of five short films commissioned by the magazine's editors, in collaboration with The Times's Op-Docs team, for this issue.
By Joshua Z Weinstein
I got to know Spider while making a documentary about New York cabbies called "Drivers Wanted." Hanging around the garage in Queens, Spider was hard to miss, with a bodega cigar always dangling between his lips and a neon-lettered hat that read "Old Dude." He moved to New York City in the 1930s to escape racism in Florida and started driving a cab in 1945. He didn't like driving when it was drizzling, sleeting or dark. But he found comfort in other conditions that would irritate most New Yorkers. "I love the traffic," he told me. "The worser the traffic gets, the better I like it."
This is one of five short films commissioned by the magazine's editors, in collaboration with The Times's Op-Docs team, for this issue.
By Elaine McMillion Sheldon and Kerrin Sheldon
When we started working on this video, we never imagined the impact one person could have on his homeland or the extent to which we would witness that legacy. People from all areas of Ireland and all walks of life would offer to help. "For Seamus, I'd do anything," they would say. It was witnessing this pride in Ireland's most famous poet that drove us to make this film. We developed a huge amount of respect for the way that Heaney was able to reach the dinner table of a farmer in the country and captivate crowds at a poetry reading in the city. He seemed to create a bridge between those two worlds. As filmmakers, we strive to achieve the same.
This is one of five short films commissioned by the magazine's editors, in collaboration with The Times's Op-Docs team, for this issue.
As part of the magazine's annual The Lives They Lived issue, publishing in print on Dec. 29, we invited readers to contribute a photograph and a story of someone close to them who died this year. Additional stories will be added in the coming days.
By Joshua Z Weinstein
I got to know Spider while making a documentary about New York cabbies called "Drivers Wanted." Hanging around the garage in Queens, Spider was hard to miss, with a bodega cigar always dangling between his lips and a neon-lettered hat that read "Old Dude." He moved to New York City in the 1930s to escape racism in Florida and started driving a cab in 1945. He didn't like driving when it was drizzling, sleeting or dark. But he found comfort in other conditions that would irritate most New Yorkers. "I love the traffic," he told me. "The worser the traffic gets, the better I like it."
This is one of five short films commissioned by the magazine's editors, in collaboration with The Times's Op-Docs team, for this issue.
By Elaine McMillion Sheldon and Kerrin Sheldon
When we started working on this video, we never imagined the impact one person could have on his homeland or the extent to which we would witness that legacy. People from all areas of Ireland and all walks of life would offer to help. "For Seamus, I'd do anything," they would say. It was witnessing this pride in Ireland's most famous poet that drove us to make this film. We developed a huge amount of respect for the way that Heaney was able to reach the dinner table of a farmer in the country and captivate crowds at a poetry reading in the city. He seemed to create a bridge between those two worlds. As filmmakers, we strive to achieve the same.
This is one of five short films commissioned by the magazine's editors, in collaboration with The Times's Op-Docs team, for this issue.
As part of the magazine's annual The Lives They Lived issue, publishing in print on Dec. 29, we invited readers to contribute a photograph and a story of someone close to them who died this year. Additional stories will be added in the coming days.
By Joshua Z Weinstein
I got to know Spider while making a documentary about New York cabbies called "Drivers Wanted." Hanging around the garage in Queens, Spider was hard to miss, with a bodega cigar always dangling between his lips and a neon-lettered hat that read "Old Dude." He moved to New York City in the 1930s to escape racism in Florida and started driving a cab in 1945. He didn't like driving when it was drizzling, sleeting or dark. But he found comfort in other conditions that would irritate most New Yorkers. "I love the traffic," he told me. "The worser the traffic gets, the better I like it."
This is one of five short films commissioned by the magazine's editors, in collaboration with The Times's Op-Docs team, for this issue.
As part of the magazine's annual The Lives They Lived issue, publishing in print on Dec. 29, we invited readers to contribute a photograph and a story of someone close to them who died this year. Additional stories will be added in the coming days.
Room for Debate asks: Should men and women be more open about their beauty secrets? Or maintain the mystique?
How the Union helped destroy the South by destroying its access to the mundane but absolutely crucial spice.
As part of the magazine's annual The Lives They Lived issue, publishing in print on Dec. 29, we invited readers to contribute a photograph and a story of someone close to them who died this year. Additional stories will be added in the coming days.
Though the Italian market has largely been flat since the start of 2012, Sardinia presents a contrast, with wealthy buyers competing for seafront properties.
A man who has mostly owned old Jeeps and Volvos gets to spend time with the 2013 Aventador. The experience, he writes, is an itch he can get used to scratching.
Find the best job in the New York metro area and beyond.
A man who has mostly owned old Jeeps and Volvos gets to spend time with the 2013 Aventador. The experience, he writes, is an itch he can get used to scratching.
Find the best job in the New York metro area and beyond.
As part of the magazine's annual The Lives They Lived issue, publishing in print on Dec. 29, we invited readers to contribute a photograph and a story of someone close to them who died this year. Additional stories will be added in the coming days.
A man who has mostly owned old Jeeps and Volvos gets to spend time with the 2013 Aventador. The experience, he writes, is an itch he can get used to scratching.
Find the best job in the New York metro area and beyond.
As part of the magazine's annual The Lives They Lived issue, publishing in print on Dec. 29, we invited readers to contribute a photograph and a story of someone close to them who died this year. Additional stories will be added in the coming days.
Jens Mortensen for The New York Times
In the early 1960s, Duane Pearsall tinkered in his engineering lab with a machine he called a "static neutralizer" — an ion generator designed to control static electricity in factories and photo labs. But when one of his technicians lit up a cigarette, a meter measuring the ions went haywire. Pearsall realized he'd just hit on a low-cost, low-power method for sniffing smoke. During the next decade, he and his team developed the SmokeGard, which hung from the ceiling and made a noxious noise whenever it sensed a fire. Soon, smoke detectors were in most homes in America and had saved hundreds of lives. Yet they could also be irritating. "You have no way of knowing whether it's operational unless you set fire to your house," wrote one newspaper humorist in 1977 of a cheap smoke detector he bought in a local store. "Merely holding the smoke detector in your lap while you watch Farrah Fawcett-Majors is not a true test."
You can now push a button on smoke alarms to test whether they're working, but the button is usually out of reach. The plastic puck, so perversely hard to control, has inspired several anti-fan pages on Facebook. Hundreds of people shared their rage at the way when the battery runs low it would chirp merrily as you lay in bed wishing it would die. "You'd hear it in the middle of the night: beep, beep," says Tony Fadell, an industrial designer known for his work at Apple on the iPod. "Then the family comedy would ensue." In 2010, Fadell co-founded a company called Nest to take aim at what he calls the "unloved object" in our homes. The smoke detector struck him as an obvious target for redesign. Fadell and his team noted that people particularly resented the way smoke detectors bully us in the kitchen — it feels as if we're being shrieked at by an unreasonable husband or wife. "You're like, 'I'm just burning the toast!' " Fadell says. A new device had to be able to distinguish a wisp of smoke from a dangerous fire. In a nonemergency, it needed to tell you, " 'Hey honey, I smell something,' " he says. And so his Nest Protect alarm reacts to cooking smoke with a suitably low-key alert, saying, "Heads up!" in a woman's voice. To turn off the alarm, you wave your hand underneath it or control it with your phone. That, says Fadell, is like telling the machine, "Honey, I got this." The Nest Protect has many moods, which it conveys with a blush of colored light: "When it glows green, it's saying, 'Everything's working just fine.' If it glows yellow, you just wave at it, and it will say, 'Batteries are low,' " according to Fadell.
But this cheerful smoke detector costs almost 10 times as much as the cranky plastic disc you can pick up from the hardware store. And — heads up! — if you neglect its batteries, the Nest Protect will eventually start chirping in the night, just like all the others.
AIR-QUALITY CONTROL
Mark Belinsky invented a "smart air monitor" called the Birdi that sniffs for smoke and also reports on pollutants and allergens in the home; it has just become available for preorder.
How did you hit on this idea? In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, my grandmother was heating her home with her gas stove, releasing dangerous amounts of carbon monoxide into the air. I wanted a device that would call her to explain the danger and would also warn me. Nothing like that exists, and so in May my friend and I built the prototype at the Big Apps hackathon in New York. We lit a fire underneath a circuit board, and then everyone in the audience who had signed up for our app got a phone call telling them there was an emergency. People were excited because they saw this idea could work. From there, the orders started rolling in.
You've designed the Birdi so it will monitor the air pollution in the room, as well as sniffing for smoke and carbon monoxide. Why? We thought it could do more. Of course it's there to detect smoke, but why not have it also sense everyday problems and make my life better? It should be able to detect particulate matter and tell you not only what's in your house, but also what's in the neighborhood and your city.
And how's your grandmother doing? Things turned out O.K. for her. Once the lights came on, so did her heat.
The Fiesta ST joins Ford's stable of rowdy front-wheel-drive machines. The Fiesta's small turbo engine is strong enough for thrills, but not so brawny as to overwhelm the front tires.
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A LOST BOY GROWS UP
As someone who runs a nonprofit with a mission to help newly arrived refugees in the job market, I understand the challenges that Jacob Deng Mach faces. Most refugees desperately want to work, and work itself can be healing, but survival and resilience aren't always enough to enter the job market in a new country. I was especially struck by how Jacob would unintentionally press the gas and brake at the same time while driving — what a great metaphor for the transition he is navigating: hoping, pressing on, backing up, starting over. KEITH COOPER, Director, Beautiful Day, Providence, R.I., posted on nytimes.com
Jacob sounds very nice, and I am glad he has a good job. But I am also glad that he won't be an armed policeman. I found it strange that the instructors were pushing him forward rather than taking note that he was struggling to shoot. It certainly makes me wonder how many have passed the test, perhaps just barely, while struggling in similar fashion. It can't be wise to arm a person whose past was so full of violence and strife. His inability to shoot was a signal that something was wrong; it was time to stop, not push forward. P.S., Massachusetts, posted on nytimes.com
LIFE ALONG THE 100TH MERIDIAN
I'm from Nebraska. I think people tend to construct narratives that seem beautiful to them and impose them on people they see as ''other.'' You wouldn't guess from this article and the photos that people in the Sand Hills spend a lot of time watching satellite TV, for example. One of the most interesting things about the myth of the West is that it was constructed primarily by Easterners. Frederic Remington lived in New York, and the dime-novel industry was based here. In a sense, the West has often functioned as a kind of Rorschach test for Easterners, who saw what they wanted or needed to see in it. ALEX STRASHEIM, New York, posted on nytimes.com
THERE'S A REASON THEY CALL THEM 'CRAZY ANTS'
Thank you for the crazy-ants article. I was in need of a long sigh of exasperation. In 2006, the U.S. Invasive Species Advisory Committee, of which I was a member, asked the secretary of agriculture to investigate these ants and recommend containment action. The U.S.D.A. concluded that action wasn't warranted. Clearly it was. We need the federal government to evaluate the potential impacts of invasive animals on infrastructure and wildlife (not just agriculture and human health) and act in a precautionary manner when detailed scientific information is lacking. Many organisms have not been technically described and named, nor their biology studied. JAMIE K. REASER, Stanardsville, Va.
There is something wonderfully ironic about this ''new'' breed of insect: the idea that it likes to make its group home inside electronics and inhabit our gadgets. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with the overflow of ants slipping out of your USB slots, your smartphone ports and the vents of your flat-screen TVs. RICHARD KOPPERDAHL, New York, posted on nytimes.com
THE WEDDING FIX IS IN
Those of us in the wedding industry are standing up for ourselves in response to this article. I don't charge more just because it's a wedding. And I'm open with my price ranges before I meet with a client so that no one's time is wasted. I ask questions about the event because there is no way I can provide flowers for people who don't tell me what they want. I charge for the amount of work that goes into it. When I work on an event for over a year with multiple meetings, dozens of emails, proposal changes and production hours and then see someone upset that they have to pay for that, it definitely hits a nerve. Weddings are parties, and if we were charging too much for our services, the market would self-correct and drive prices down, or we wouldn't have a market at all. CORINNE SEBESTA SISTI, Philadelphia, posted on nytimes.com
NOT JUST FOR BREAKFAST ANYMORE
"What do you mean 'anymore'?" @meganbungeroth, via Twitter
Illustration by Tom Gauld
On Christmas Day, Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone will open in "Grudge Match," a movie about a couple of old, rival boxers spoiling for one last fight. This may seem like an unpromising premise, but perhaps the movie will please the same audience that went for the recent comedy "Last Vegas," which is about three AARP-appropriate Brooklyn guys from the old neighborhood — one married, one divorced and one widowed — who get together for one last ring-a-ding-ding Vegas weekend to toast the impending wedding of their fourth pal, a holdout bachelor who has spontaneously decided to tie the knot. (Gentle life lessons ensue.) The fact that the preternaturally tan and swinging groom to be is played by Michael Douglas (age 69) adds a dribble of amusement to the premise. So does the paycheck-collecting participation of aging movie stars like De Niro (him again), Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline.
As ingratiating geezer group projects go, "Last Vegas" would make a swell double feature with the 2000 action-drama "Space Cowboys," in which the elderly former test pilots Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner share one last blast, rocketing into the unknown to save a failing satellite. (Cosmic life lessons ensue.) Or perhaps a viewer might want to pair the film with the recent comedy "Stand Up Guys," in which Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin play Medicare-eligible mobsters who get together for a last hurrah. (Goodfella life lessons ensue.)
By this point, you may be noticing a pattern.
The entertainment aims of these stars-of-a-certain-age vehicles are fairly modest. Yet the tagline of "Last Vegas" — "It's going to be legendary" — hints at the mini-genre's more grandiose aims. That declaration reads as a haunting plea rather than as a jaunty boast, an admission of longing that deserves to be treated with forbearance, especially by women.
By my count, "Grudge Match" and "Last Vegas" are the umpteenth stories for men, about men and by men in which men do something one last time and with the goal of making that last time epic. And always, in one way or another, these men yearn to stop time, at least for a moment.
Consider the middle-aged suburban crew in the 2007 Dockers-friendly comedy "Wild Hogs" (with John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, Tim Allen and William H. Macy) on a legendary motorcycle trip. Or the Gen-X bros in the 2009 aged-frat-boy comedy "The Hangover" (with Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Justin Bartha) on a legendary bender. Or the barmy, midlife Brits in the 2013 sci-fi comedy "The World's End" (with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan) on a legendary crawl with the goal of repeating, and this time completing, a 12-pub circuit of beer chugging first attempted more than 20 years earlier.
If these Arthurian quests tend to put a jokey face on the core mission — Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman (him again) are two guys living large and legendary while dying of cancer in "The Bucket List" — the implication is nevertheless tinged with pathos: Men crave one last victory before coming to terms with . . . well, something. Death, I guess. Or, if they're not quite Eastwood's age, perhaps they're making peace with routine. Responsibility. Maturity. The old ball and chain that constitutes commitment. They're hoping that maybe one phenomenally fun night of boozing, flirting, smashing things, driving fast, fighting, vomiting and slapping one another on the back will ease the pain of creaking knees, pouching gut, dimming memory and domestic servitude. Excelsior!
Or something like that. I wouldn't know. Because we women, we don't play like that. I can't think of one movie pitched to a female audience in which a gaggle of ladies or a pair of best gal pals go wild in an effort to recapture feelings of long-past girlish abandon. Unlike the dissatisfied guys, for example, in the 2010 way-back fantasy "Hot Tub Time Machine" — magically beamed backward to the party-hearty years of the mid-1980s they all remember so fondly — the title characters in, say, the delightful 1997 comedy "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion" are under no illusions that the old days were the grooviest days. On the contrary, while attending a 10-year school get-together, Romy and Michele (Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino) try to fake one-night-only improvements on their dweeby former selves to impress the grown women who still loom large in memory as disdainful popular girls, with unfortunate (and hence amusing) results. On-screen and in real life, women look to the future. We go for the forward-motion makeover, not the backward-glancing do-over.
Jens Mortensen for The New York Times
In the early 1960s, Duane Pearsall tinkered in his engineering lab with a machine he called a "static neutralizer" — an ion generator designed to control static electricity in factories and photo labs. But when one of his technicians lit up a cigarette, a meter measuring the ions went haywire. Pearsall realized he'd just hit on a low-cost, low-power method for sniffing smoke. During the next decade, he and his team developed the SmokeGard, which hung from the ceiling and made a noxious noise whenever it sensed a fire. Soon, smoke detectors were in most homes in America and had saved hundreds of lives. Yet they could also be irritating. "You have no way of knowing whether it's operational unless you set fire to your house," wrote one newspaper humorist in 1977 of a cheap smoke detector he bought in a local store. "Merely holding the smoke detector in your lap while you watch Farrah Fawcett-Majors is not a true test."
You can now push a button on smoke alarms to test whether they're working, but the button is usually out of reach. The plastic puck, so perversely hard to control, has inspired several anti-fan pages on Facebook. Hundreds of people shared their rage at the way when the battery runs low it would chirp merrily as you lay in bed wishing it would die. "You'd hear it in the middle of the night: beep, beep," says Tony Fadell, an industrial designer known for his work at Apple on the iPod. "Then the family comedy would ensue." In 2010, Fadell co-founded a company called Nest to take aim at what he calls the "unloved object" in our homes. The smoke detector struck him as an obvious target for redesign. Fadell and his team noted that people particularly resented the way smoke detectors bully us in the kitchen — it feels as if we're being shrieked at by an unreasonable husband or wife. "You're like, 'I'm just burning the toast!' " Fadell says. A new device had to be able to distinguish a wisp of smoke from a dangerous fire. In a nonemergency, it needed to tell you, " 'Hey honey, I smell something,' " he says. And so his Nest Protect alarm reacts to cooking smoke with a suitably low-key alert, saying, "Heads up!" in a woman's voice. To turn off the alarm, you wave your hand underneath it or control it with your phone. That, says Fadell, is like telling the machine, "Honey, I got this." The Nest Protect has many moods, which it conveys with a blush of colored light: "When it glows green, it's saying, 'Everything's working just fine.' If it glows yellow, you just wave at it, and it will say, 'Batteries are low,' " according to Fadell.
But this cheerful smoke detector costs almost 10 times as much as the cranky plastic disc you can pick up from the hardware store. And — heads up! — if you neglect its batteries, the Nest Protect will eventually start chirping in the night, just like all the others.
AIR-QUALITY CONTROL
Mark Belinsky invented a "smart air monitor" called the Birdi that sniffs for smoke and also reports on pollutants and allergens in the home; it has just become available for preorder.
How did you hit on this idea? In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, my grandmother was heating her home with her gas stove, releasing dangerous amounts of carbon monoxide into the air. I wanted a device that would call her to explain the danger and would also warn me. Nothing like that exists, and so in May my friend and I built the prototype at the Big Apps hackathon in New York. We lit a fire underneath a circuit board, and then everyone in the audience who had signed up for our app got a phone call telling them there was an emergency. People were excited because they saw this idea could work. From there, the orders started rolling in.
You've designed the Birdi so it will monitor the air pollution in the room, as well as sniffing for smoke and carbon monoxide. Why? We thought it could do more. Of course it's there to detect smoke, but why not have it also sense everyday problems and make my life better? It should be able to detect particulate matter and tell you not only what's in your house, but also what's in the neighborhood and your city.
And how's your grandmother doing? Things turned out O.K. for her. Once the lights came on, so did her heat.
Illustration by Tom Gauld
On Christmas Day, Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone will open in "Grudge Match," a movie about a couple of old, rival boxers spoiling for one last fight. This may seem like an unpromising premise, but perhaps the movie will please the same audience that went for the recent comedy "Last Vegas," which is about three AARP-appropriate Brooklyn guys from the old neighborhood — one married, one divorced and one widowed — who get together for one last ring-a-ding-ding Vegas weekend to toast the impending wedding of their fourth pal, a holdout bachelor who has spontaneously decided to tie the knot. (Gentle life lessons ensue.) The fact that the preternaturally tan and swinging groom to be is played by Michael Douglas (age 69) adds a dribble of amusement to the premise. So does the paycheck-collecting participation of aging movie stars like De Niro (him again), Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline.
As ingratiating geezer group projects go, "Last Vegas" would make a swell double feature with the 2000 action-drama "Space Cowboys," in which the elderly former test pilots Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner share one last blast, rocketing into the unknown to save a failing satellite. (Cosmic life lessons ensue.) Or perhaps a viewer might want to pair the film with the recent comedy "Stand Up Guys," in which Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin play Medicare-eligible mobsters who get together for a last hurrah. (Goodfella life lessons ensue.)
By this point, you may be noticing a pattern.
The entertainment aims of these stars-of-a-certain-age vehicles are fairly modest. Yet the tagline of "Last Vegas" — "It's going to be legendary" — hints at the mini-genre's more grandiose aims. That declaration reads as a haunting plea rather than as a jaunty boast, an admission of longing that deserves to be treated with forbearance, especially by women.
By my count, "Grudge Match" and "Last Vegas" are the umpteenth stories for men, about men and by men in which men do something one last time and with the goal of making that last time epic. And always, in one way or another, these men yearn to stop time, at least for a moment.
Consider the middle-aged suburban crew in the 2007 Dockers-friendly comedy "Wild Hogs" (with John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, Tim Allen and William H. Macy) on a legendary motorcycle trip. Or the Gen-X bros in the 2009 aged-frat-boy comedy "The Hangover" (with Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Justin Bartha) on a legendary bender. Or the barmy, midlife Brits in the 2013 sci-fi comedy "The World's End" (with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan) on a legendary crawl with the goal of repeating, and this time completing, a 12-pub circuit of beer chugging first attempted more than 20 years earlier.
If these Arthurian quests tend to put a jokey face on the core mission — Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman (him again) are two guys living large and legendary while dying of cancer in "The Bucket List" — the implication is nevertheless tinged with pathos: Men crave one last victory before coming to terms with . . . well, something. Death, I guess. Or, if they're not quite Eastwood's age, perhaps they're making peace with routine. Responsibility. Maturity. The old ball and chain that constitutes commitment. They're hoping that maybe one phenomenally fun night of boozing, flirting, smashing things, driving fast, fighting, vomiting and slapping one another on the back will ease the pain of creaking knees, pouching gut, dimming memory and domestic servitude. Excelsior!
Or something like that. I wouldn't know. Because we women, we don't play like that. I can't think of one movie pitched to a female audience in which a gaggle of ladies or a pair of best gal pals go wild in an effort to recapture feelings of long-past girlish abandon. Unlike the dissatisfied guys, for example, in the 2010 way-back fantasy "Hot Tub Time Machine" — magically beamed backward to the party-hearty years of the mid-1980s they all remember so fondly — the title characters in, say, the delightful 1997 comedy "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion" are under no illusions that the old days were the grooviest days. On the contrary, while attending a 10-year school get-together, Romy and Michele (Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino) try to fake one-night-only improvements on their dweeby former selves to impress the grown women who still loom large in memory as disdainful popular girls, with unfortunate (and hence amusing) results. On-screen and in real life, women look to the future. We go for the forward-motion makeover, not the backward-glancing do-over.
A LOST BOY GROWS UP
As someone who runs a nonprofit with a mission to help newly arrived refugees in the job market, I understand the challenges that Jacob Deng Mach faces. Most refugees desperately want to work, and work itself can be healing, but survival and resilience aren't always enough to enter the job market in a new country. I was especially struck by how Jacob would unintentionally press the gas and brake at the same time while driving — what a great metaphor for the transition he is navigating: hoping, pressing on, backing up, starting over. KEITH COOPER, Director, Beautiful Day, Providence, R.I., posted on nytimes.com
Jacob sounds very nice, and I am glad he has a good job. But I am also glad that he won't be an armed policeman. I found it strange that the instructors were pushing him forward rather than taking note that he was struggling to shoot. It certainly makes me wonder how many have passed the test, perhaps just barely, while struggling in similar fashion. It can't be wise to arm a person whose past was so full of violence and strife. His inability to shoot was a signal that something was wrong; it was time to stop, not push forward. P.S., Massachusetts, posted on nytimes.com
LIFE ALONG THE 100TH MERIDIAN
I'm from Nebraska. I think people tend to construct narratives that seem beautiful to them and impose them on people they see as ''other.'' You wouldn't guess from this article and the photos that people in the Sand Hills spend a lot of time watching satellite TV, for example. One of the most interesting things about the myth of the West is that it was constructed primarily by Easterners. Frederic Remington lived in New York, and the dime-novel industry was based here. In a sense, the West has often functioned as a kind of Rorschach test for Easterners, who saw what they wanted or needed to see in it. ALEX STRASHEIM, New York, posted on nytimes.com
THERE'S A REASON THEY CALL THEM 'CRAZY ANTS'
Thank you for the crazy-ants article. I was in need of a long sigh of exasperation. In 2006, the U.S. Invasive Species Advisory Committee, of which I was a member, asked the secretary of agriculture to investigate these ants and recommend containment action. The U.S.D.A. concluded that action wasn't warranted. Clearly it was. We need the federal government to evaluate the potential impacts of invasive animals on infrastructure and wildlife (not just agriculture and human health) and act in a precautionary manner when detailed scientific information is lacking. Many organisms have not been technically described and named, nor their biology studied. JAMIE K. REASER, Stanardsville, Va.
There is something wonderfully ironic about this ''new'' breed of insect: the idea that it likes to make its group home inside electronics and inhabit our gadgets. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with the overflow of ants slipping out of your USB slots, your smartphone ports and the vents of your flat-screen TVs. RICHARD KOPPERDAHL, New York, posted on nytimes.com
THE WEDDING FIX IS IN
Those of us in the wedding industry are standing up for ourselves in response to this article. I don't charge more just because it's a wedding. And I'm open with my price ranges before I meet with a client so that no one's time is wasted. I ask questions about the event because there is no way I can provide flowers for people who don't tell me what they want. I charge for the amount of work that goes into it. When I work on an event for over a year with multiple meetings, dozens of emails, proposal changes and production hours and then see someone upset that they have to pay for that, it definitely hits a nerve. Weddings are parties, and if we were charging too much for our services, the market would self-correct and drive prices down, or we wouldn't have a market at all. CORINNE SEBESTA SISTI, Philadelphia, posted on nytimes.com
NOT JUST FOR BREAKFAST ANYMORE
"What do you mean 'anymore'?" @meganbungeroth, via Twitter
Jens Mortensen for The New York Times
In the early 1960s, Duane Pearsall tinkered in his engineering lab with a machine he called a "static neutralizer" — an ion generator designed to control static electricity in factories and photo labs. But when one of his technicians lit up a cigarette, a meter measuring the ions went haywire. Pearsall realized he'd just hit on a low-cost, low-power method for sniffing smoke. During the next decade, he and his team developed the SmokeGard, which hung from the ceiling and made a noxious noise whenever it sensed a fire. Soon, smoke detectors were in most homes in America and had saved hundreds of lives. Yet they could also be irritating. "You have no way of knowing whether it's operational unless you set fire to your house," wrote one newspaper humorist in 1977 of a cheap smoke detector he bought in a local store. "Merely holding the smoke detector in your lap while you watch Farrah Fawcett-Majors is not a true test."
You can now push a button on smoke alarms to test whether they're working, but the button is usually out of reach. The plastic puck, so perversely hard to control, has inspired several anti-fan pages on Facebook. Hundreds of people shared their rage at the way when the battery runs low it would chirp merrily as you lay in bed wishing it would die. "You'd hear it in the middle of the night: beep, beep," says Tony Fadell, an industrial designer known for his work at Apple on the iPod. "Then the family comedy would ensue." In 2010, Fadell co-founded a company called Nest to take aim at what he calls the "unloved object" in our homes. The smoke detector struck him as an obvious target for redesign. Fadell and his team noted that people particularly resented the way smoke detectors bully us in the kitchen — it feels as if we're being shrieked at by an unreasonable husband or wife. "You're like, 'I'm just burning the toast!' " Fadell says. A new device had to be able to distinguish a wisp of smoke from a dangerous fire. In a nonemergency, it needed to tell you, " 'Hey honey, I smell something,' " he says. And so his Nest Protect alarm reacts to cooking smoke with a suitably low-key alert, saying, "Heads up!" in a woman's voice. To turn off the alarm, you wave your hand underneath it or control it with your phone. That, says Fadell, is like telling the machine, "Honey, I got this." The Nest Protect has many moods, which it conveys with a blush of colored light: "When it glows green, it's saying, 'Everything's working just fine.' If it glows yellow, you just wave at it, and it will say, 'Batteries are low,' " according to Fadell.
But this cheerful smoke detector costs almost 10 times as much as the cranky plastic disc you can pick up from the hardware store. And — heads up! — if you neglect its batteries, the Nest Protect will eventually start chirping in the night, just like all the others.
AIR-QUALITY CONTROL
Mark Belinsky invented a "smart air monitor" called the Birdi that sniffs for smoke and also reports on pollutants and allergens in the home; it has just become available for preorder.
How did you hit on this idea? In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, my grandmother was heating her home with her gas stove, releasing dangerous amounts of carbon monoxide into the air. I wanted a device that would call her to explain the danger and would also warn me. Nothing like that exists, and so in May my friend and I built the prototype at the Big Apps hackathon in New York. We lit a fire underneath a circuit board, and then everyone in the audience who had signed up for our app got a phone call telling them there was an emergency. People were excited because they saw this idea could work. From there, the orders started rolling in.
You've designed the Birdi so it will monitor the air pollution in the room, as well as sniffing for smoke and carbon monoxide. Why? We thought it could do more. Of course it's there to detect smoke, but why not have it also sense everyday problems and make my life better? It should be able to detect particulate matter and tell you not only what's in your house, but also what's in the neighborhood and your city.
And how's your grandmother doing? Things turned out O.K. for her. Once the lights came on, so did her heat.
Photo illustration by Grant Cornett. Prop Stylist: Janine Iversen.
A blue BMW crossed the cracked parking lot and rolled to a stop outside a tired-looking Macy's.
The passenger door opened, and out sprang John Donahoe, the chief executive of eBay, who began striding toward the store. It was earlier this year, and from the outside the Westfield Valley Fair mall near San Jose had a kind of ghost-town feel to it. But Donahoe thinks he can change that. As he walked from store to store — a nearly empty GNC, a quiet Foot Locker — he pointed out how little had changed in physical retail stores over the last 30 or 40 years and what would have to change in the next few years in order for these stores to compete with Amazon and Walmart.
As he sat in a patisserie on the mall's ground floor, Donahoe touched on his usual themes: how technology has driven scale and automation; how the big-box retailers have crushed Main Street; the way in which our shopping experiences have become less dependent on human interaction. And these changes in the commercial landscape, he said, tend to be ''phrased in zero-sum terms: big retailers versus the little guy. Local versus global. The Chinese imports will kill you. Online is going to disrupt offline.''
There has been much talk about Amazon driving retailers out of business — most recently, and somewhat unbelievably, by proposing to use drones to deliver purchases. For some time now, physical retailers have lived in fear of the various ways in which Amazon can undercut them. If you're looking for a product that you don't need to try on or try out, Amazon's customer analytics and nationwide network of 40-plus enormous fulfillment centers is awfully tough to compete with. And even if you do need to try something on, Amazon conveniently includes a bar-code scanner in its mobile application so you can compare prices while you're in a store and then have the same item shipped to your home with just a few clicks. (Retailers call this act of checking out products in a store and then buying them online from a different vendor ''showrooming.'') Amazon holds such sway that for many it's the default place to buy things online.
And yet online commerce currently accounts for only about 6 percent of all commerce in the United States. We still buy more than 90 percent of everything we purchase offline, often by handing over money or swiping a credit card in exchange for the goods we want. But the proliferation of smartphones and tablets has increasingly led to the use of digital technology to help us make those purchases, and it's in that convergence that eBay sees its opportunity. As Donahoe puts it: ''We view it actually as and. Not online, not offline: Both.''
Most people think of eBay as an online auction house, the world's biggest garage sale, which it has been for most of its life. But since Donahoe took over in 2008, he has slowly moved the company beyond auctions, developing technology partnerships with big retailers like Home Depot, Macy's, Toys ''R'' Us and Target and expanding eBay's online marketplace to include reliable, returnable goods at fixed prices. (Auctions currently represent just 30 percent of the purchases made at eBay.com; the site sells 13,000 cars a week through its mobile app alone, many at fixed prices.)
Under Donahoe, eBay has made 34 acquisitions over the last five years, most of them to provide the company and its retail partners with enhanced technology. EBay can help with the back end of websites, create interactive storefronts in real-world locations, streamline the electronic-payment process or help monitor inventory in real time. (Outsourcing some of the digital strategy and technological operations to eBay frees up companies to focus on what they presumably do best: Make and market their own products.) In select cities, eBay has also recently introduced eBay Now, an app that allows you to order goods from participating local vendors and have them delivered to your door in about an hour for a $5 fee. The company is betting its future on the idea that its interactive technology can turn shopping into a kind of entertainment, or at least make commerce something more than simply working through price-plus-shipping calculations. If eBay can get enough people into Dick's Sporting Goods to try out a new set of golf clubs and then get them to buy those clubs in the store, instead of from Amazon, there's a business model there.
A key element of eBay's vision of the future is the digital wallet. On a basic level, having a ''digital wallet'' means paying with your phone, but it's about a lot more than that; it's as much a concept as a product. EBay bought PayPal in 2002, after PayPal established itself as a safe way to transfer money between people who didn't know each other (thus facilitating eBay purchases). For the last several years, eBay has regarded digital payments through mobile devices as having the potential to change everything — to become, as David Marcus, PayPal's president, puts it, ''Money 3.0.''
Jeff Himmelman is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of "Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee."
Editor: Dean Robinson
By Brandon Cruz
Lorna Sass's Pressure-Cooker Meatballs: Cookbook author and pressure-cooking expert Lorna Sass shows Mark Bittman how to make lamb meatballs with a Greek-inspired tomato sauce in under five minutes.
Not long ago, I found a piece of what I assumed was beef in the freezer. My choices were to cook it or throw it out, and because time was short — defrosting was not an option — the pressure cooker seemed the right option.
Thus began another pressure-cooker experiment. I threw the meat in, and added onion, carrots, garlic, water, cinnamon, star anise, a chile, Sichuan peppercorns, soy sauce, honey — things I knew would yield a dark, spicy sauce.
I brought the pressure up and cooked it for 40 minutes. Upon opening the pot, I saw that I'd made short ribs — how nice! I boiled off a bit of the extra liquid, and in less than an hour had produced something that normally would have taken four hours, not to mention defrosting time.
The next obvious step was to call the cookbook author Lorna Sass, a pressure-cooker maven who has always been a step or two ahead of her time. (Her "Recipes From an Ecological Kitchen," published 20-plus years ago, was among the first mainstream vegan cookbooks, and it has not been bettered. Sadly, it's out of print.) I needed a lesson.
As Sass explained to me, by increasing pressure, these pots raise cooking temperatures and thereby speed up the time a dish requires. And they're safer than they once were. (They can be more expensive too. The pricey ones are gorgeous, but the less-expensive ones still work well.) There should be no fear in using one: The locking systems are foolproof, and the safety systems are redundant — you will not spew beef stew all over your ceiling.
Sass and I spent an afternoon together in her kitchen. I know a little bit about pressure-cooking — for example, that beans don't get soaked, take around 30 minutes to cook and turn out better than they do by other methods — but there were surprises. The 15-minute risotto, for instance, that Lorna has been bragging to me about for years is nothing short of incredible.
And there were many fine points worth learning, all of which you'll pick up through cooking these recipes. (Needless to say, Sass's books about pressure-cooking contain many more.) My recommendation is this: Start using a pressure cooker for beans and long-cooking braises, in order to save time. You'll quickly see that its strengths can be exploited in cooking almost any dish that contains liquid. And some of those discoveries will happen, happily, by accident.
Related Recipes: Lamb Meatballs in Greek-Inspired Tomato Sauce | Porcini Risotto With Peas | Short Ribs in Gingered Plum Sauce | Black Bean Soup With Avocado Salsa
We are once again inviting readers to contribute to The Lives They Lived, the magazine's celebration of people who died in the past year. We would like photographs that illustrate a moment in the life of someone close to you who died in 2013. This is not a place for eulogies or obituaries, but for stories. (View submissions from 2012 and 2011.)
Your submission may run on The New York Times website or in the issue of the magazine that comes out on Dec. 29, 2013. If you would like to be featured in the magazine, it is especially important to provide working contact information and submit a high-resolution image (at least 300k or 300 d.p.i.), and that we receive your submission no later than Dec. 15. Submit by Dec. 27 to be considered for publication in the online feature.
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Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times
David Russell, the director of "American Hustle."
You could argue that, with his new film, "American Hustle," coming on the heels of "The Fighter" and "Silver Linings Playbook," David O. Russell has put together the best trifecta of any active American filmmaker. "The Fighter" earned seven Oscar nominations; "Silver Linings" received eight; and "American Hustle" was just named the year's best film by the New York Film Critics Circle. Early in his career, Russell developed a reputation as a brilliant but difficult director; George Clooney said the two actually came to blows on the set of Russell's third film, "Three Kings," and later a YouTube video circulated of Lily Tomlin and Russell in a full-throated, expletive-laced shouting match on the set of his fourth film, "I Heart Huckabees." Whether the characterization was fair, Russell has since undergone a personal, artistic and, ultimately, professional transformation. He regards "Hustle," a highly fictionalized version of the Abscam scandal of the late '70s and early '80s, as the third in a loose trilogy of films about ordinary people trying to live passionate lives. It's a journey he has had some experience with firsthand.
Russell on the set of "Three Kings" (1999), with George Clooney.
Neal Gabler: "American Hustle" is your third film in the last four years. There were six years between "I Heart Huckabees" in 2004 and "The Fighter" in 2010, during which you didn't release a single picture. What happened?
David O. Russell: A lot of things happened. I was very humbled. But that was good. Humbled in the sense that I had gotten divorced and I was helping to raise a son who faces bipolar issues. But I had also lost my way in terms of what kind of movie did I want to make. I knew the feelings I wanted to put in "Huckabees." But you're trying to make a kind of movie that you've never made before, and maybe it's not your kind of movie, and maybe it leans too much on ideas. With "The Fighter," I was at a place where I was ready to know where my heart and mind were going to be invested. And it became those people. I love these people — the details of these people who live in these ways that are very rich. To me, it was about the world of these people, how they felt and how they talked to each other. They are always in a predicament at the beginning where they're at a place they don't want to be, and they spend the whole movie reckoning how to get through, and if they want to get through, if life is worth living, and if they cannot only survive but feel a passion for life. It's the enchantment of lives. I really don't want to make a film that doesn't have that enchantment in it.
N.G.: Your last three films have been very emotion-rich, which is different from your first four films — "Spanking the Monkey," "Flirting With Disaster," "Three Kings" and "I Heart Huckabees" — which were very idiosyncratic.
D.R.: I feel like I have a direction that's very clear to me now. I have a great love and a feeling for a particular kind of character and story, which I don't think I ever could have said earlier of my first four films. It started with "The Fighter." I had written "Silver Linings Playbook" before that, but I didn't have the chance to make it. After "The Fighter," I got a chance to make it, and it became a companion volume. If I had leaned a little bit more on the fabric of the emotion, I think "Huckabees" would feel more like these last three films.
N.G.: What you're describing sounds like a kind of artistic revelation.
D.R.: I had overthought certain films so much that I walked away from a couple of them. When I made "The Fighter," I said to myself, "Mr. Overthinking Things, how about really, really just do it as good as you can from your heart. Can you do that? Well, actually just try to do that. That would be an achievement." For whatever reason, I came to appreciate and respect the honor and privilege of telling such human stories. The emotion is what I want.
N.G.: You are not exactly the first director anyone would have thought of for "The Fighter." You were known for black comedies.
INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 16, 2013
Because of a transcription error, an earlier version of this interview misquoted David O. Russell. He said, "You must leave out the painful parts, or you would never do certain things" — not "live out" the painful parts.
Illustration by Kelsey Dake
About 20 years ago, in the midst of a recession, New Jersey decided to boost its minimum wage to $5.05 an hour from $4.25. Its neighbor to the west, Pennsylvania, chose not to tinker with its wage floor. Two bright young economists at Princeton, David Card and Alan B. Krueger, recognized in that dull occurrence a promising natural experiment.
Deep thoughts this week:
1. Raising the minimum wage doesn't lower employment.
2. It lowers turnover.
3. Which doesn't help the jobless.
4. Cynicism to the rescue!
Translating confusing and sometimes terrifying economic and financial news. More columns »
The two found fast-food joints along the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border, and surveyed them twice over the course of 11 months about how many people they employed. They figured that when New Jersey's minimum wage went up, Garden State burger joints would hire fewer workers. The ones on the Pennsylvania side, acting as a kind of control, would see no change.
They were wrong. To everyone's surprise, there was actually no change in employment in the New Jersey restaurants, relative to the Pennsylvania ones. The price of low-wage work had gone up, and somehow, demand had remained the same.
That paper completely upended prevailing economic thought on the issue of minimum wages, leading to a flurry of studies and counterstudies, editorials and countereditorials. (It even got personal, Card said, describing the debate among economists as a "very, very nasty spat.") Since those days, the economy has grown about 63 percent in real terms, not that anyone working at a McDonald's in Trenton would have noticed. Their 1992 raise brought their wage to about $8.40 an hour, adjusted for inflation. Today, they earn $7.25 an hour, the federal minimum.
Recently, New Jersey voted by public referendum to raise its baseline wage by a dollar and peg it to inflation. On a national level, stagnant wages and a generally crummy economy for millions of workers have spurred politicians to push for a $10 federal minimum wage. Fast-food workers are organizing and lobbying for $15. But even given Krueger and Card's work, economists wonder how much an increase can really help the economy, considering how many Americans are out of work right now.
What Krueger and Card did was undermine the once-dominant rationale against raising the minimum wage: that it might lead to fewer workers being employed. The IGM forum at the University of Chicago acts as a barometer of opinion within the field. It recently asked its panel of experts — all top economists, from various backgrounds, disciplines and political tendencies – — whether raising the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour would make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment. About a third said yes, a third said no and a quarter said they were not sure. As always in economics, nobody seems to agree on anything.
Some academics argue that Card and Krueger's conclusion is wrong, and that one relatively small-scale study does not prove anything. Among them is David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine, who described the study as "flawed," questioning how the data was collected and whether it made sense to extrapolate lessons about the whole economy from a relatively small number of KFCs, Burger Kings and the like. Other studies he has conducted have shown the expected, conventional-wisdom result: Wage increases mean less employment.
But other, larger studies have since confirmed Krueger and Card's results, and there are signs that the prevailing wisdom in labor economics has shifted over time, too — away from treating labor as a commodity like any other.
"If you go to the supermarket and the price of beef goes up, people buy less beef and more fish," said Michael Reich, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, who contributed to one such study. But labor markets are much more complicated than that, he said. The types of jobs available to workers at the minimum wage — meatpacking, box-stuffing, burger-flipping — tend to be hard, unpleasant, dull work. Employees rarely stick around for long, and their productivity is typically low. "Companies like Walmart can have turnover rates of 100 percent a year," Reich said. According to Reich's reasoning, when New Jersey raised its minimum wage, businesses ended up having less trouble filling vacancies and workers stuck around for longer.
Annie Lowrey is an economics reporter for The Times.
Benjamin Lowy/Reportage, for The New York Times
A backstage crew watches McCain being interviewed at the Washington Ideas Forum in November.
When I walk into John McCain's office a week before Thanksgiving, he is not at all happy — and seems to be enjoying it quite a bit.
He is sampling none of the usual flavors of upset we tend to associate with the Arizona senator: not the "McCain is bitter" or "get off my yard" varieties, not even the "deeply troubled" umbrage that politicians of all stripes love to assume. Here is a man, instead, who is gleefully seizing an opportunity for outrage.
"I am very angry," McCain says through a smiling grimace. He hands me a photocopied compilation of old quotes from the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, from back when Democrats were in the minority and Republicans were threatening to enact a rule — the so-called nuclear option — that would require only a 51-vote majority to confirm most presidential and judicial nominations. Turns out Reid believed this was a bad idea when the Republicans were in charge but was a good one now, and McCain is packing bullet points.
"I'm going to go kick the crap out of Harry Reid," he keeps announcing as we walk from his office to the Capitol. Once on the Senate floor, McCain approaches Reid, puts his hands on the majority leader's shoulders, smiles and says something I can't make out from the visitors' gallery above. Reid smiles back, says a few words in reply and places his hands on McCain's sides. It looks as if they are dancing.
Minutes later, McCain stands to address the chamber. He is, as advertised, very, very unhappy. Today is a "black chapter in the history of the Senate," he says, referencing something Reid said back in 2008, as a way of pointing out his hypocrisy. He then goes on to explain that this is as "historic" a vote as he can remember casting and that he feels great "sorrow" for the harm done to the institution on this "sad day."
After McCain leaves the floor, I ask him what he said to Reid before his speech. "I said, 'Harry, I'm going to go kick the crap out of you.' Then he said, 'John, I would expect nothing less.' " McCain grins big to conclude this dark chapter in the history of the United States Senate.
John McCain is a cliché.
It is not his fault, or not entirely. Many of us become walking self-caricatures at a certain point, and politicians can be particularly vulnerable, especially those who have maneuvered their very public lives as conspicuously as McCain. They tell and retell the same stories; things get musty. They engage in a lot of self-mythologizing, and no one in Washington has been the subject and the perpetrator of more mythmaking than McCain: the maverick, the former maverick, the curmudgeon, the bridge builder, the war hero bent on transcending the call of self-interest to serve a cause greater than himself, the sore loser, old bull, last lion, loose cannon, happy warrior, elder statesman, lion in winter . . . you lose track of which McCain cliché is operational at a given moment. He does, too. "I think I was the brave maverick when I was taking on Bush," McCain told me, "and then I was the bitter old man when I was criticizing Obamacare."
Critics will take their shots, he says, it comes with being "in the arena." That cliché isn't McCain's exclusively — it's the self-consoling Teddy Roosevelt line that politicians are always trotting out. "It's not the critic who counts" but "the man who really was in the arena."
McCain has another favorite Teddy Roosevelt phrase, "the crowded hour," which I have heard him invoke several times over the years. It comes from a poem by the English writer Thomas Mordaunt, and T. R. used it to famously describe his charge on San Juan Hill. In McCain's philosophy, "the crowded hour" refers to a moment of character testing. "The 'crowded hour' is as appropriate for me right now as any in a long time," McCain told me as we walked through the Capitol. In some respects, this is just a function of public figures' tendency to overdramatize the current moment and their role in it. But five years after losing to Barack Obama, after enduring the recriminations between his splintered campaign staff and rogue running mate, Sarah Palin, and after returning to the Senate and falling into a prolonged funk, McCain finds himself in the midst of another crowded hour, maybe his last as an elected leader.
Benjamin Lowy/Reportage, for The New York Times
A backstage crew watches McCain being interviewed at the Washington Ideas Forum in November.
When I walk into John McCain's office a week before Thanksgiving, he is not at all happy — and seems to be enjoying it quite a bit.
He is sampling none of the usual flavors of upset we tend to associate with the Arizona senator: not the "McCain is bitter" or "get off my yard" varieties, not even the "deeply troubled" umbrage that politicians of all stripes love to assume. Here is a man, instead, who is gleefully seizing an opportunity for outrage.
"I am very angry," McCain says through a smiling grimace. He hands me a photocopied compilation of old quotes from the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, from back when Democrats were in the minority and Republicans were threatening to enact a rule — the so-called nuclear option — that would require only a 51-vote majority to confirm most presidential and judicial nominations. Turns out Reid believed this was a bad idea when the Republicans were in charge but was a good one now, and McCain is packing bullet points.
"I'm going to go kick the crap out of Harry Reid," he keeps announcing as we walk from his office to the Capitol. Once on the Senate floor, McCain approaches Reid, puts his hands on the majority leader's shoulders, smiles and says something I can't make out from the visitors' gallery above. Reid smiles back, says a few words in reply and places his hands on McCain's sides. It looks as if they are dancing.
Minutes later, McCain stands to address the chamber. He is, as advertised, very, very unhappy. Today is a "black chapter in the history of the Senate," he says, referencing something Reid said back in 2008, as a way of pointing out his hypocrisy. He then goes on to explain that this is as "historic" a vote as he can remember casting and that he feels great "sorrow" for the harm done to the institution on this "sad day."
After McCain leaves the floor, I ask him what he said to Reid before his speech. "I said, 'Harry, I'm going to go kick the crap out of you.' Then he said, 'John, I would expect nothing less.' " McCain grins big to conclude this dark chapter in the history of the United States Senate.
John McCain is a cliché.
It is not his fault, or not entirely. Many of us become walking self-caricatures at a certain point, and politicians can be particularly vulnerable, especially those who have maneuvered their very public lives as conspicuously as McCain. They tell and retell the same stories; things get musty. They engage in a lot of self-mythologizing, and no one in Washington has been the subject and the perpetrator of more mythmaking than McCain: the maverick, the former maverick, the curmudgeon, the bridge builder, the war hero bent on transcending the call of self-interest to serve a cause greater than himself, the sore loser, old bull, last lion, loose cannon, happy warrior, elder statesman, lion in winter . . . you lose track of which McCain cliché is operational at a given moment. He does, too. "I think I was the brave maverick when I was taking on Bush," McCain told me, "and then I was the bitter old man when I was criticizing Obamacare."
Critics will take their shots, he says, it comes with being "in the arena." That cliché isn't McCain's exclusively — it's the self-consoling Teddy Roosevelt line that politicians are always trotting out. "It's not the critic who counts" but "the man who really was in the arena."
McCain has another favorite Teddy Roosevelt phrase, "the crowded hour," which I have heard him invoke several times over the years. It comes from a poem by the English writer Thomas Mordaunt, and T. R. used it to famously describe his charge on San Juan Hill. In McCain's philosophy, "the crowded hour" refers to a moment of character testing. "The 'crowded hour' is as appropriate for me right now as any in a long time," McCain told me as we walked through the Capitol. In some respects, this is just a function of public figures' tendency to overdramatize the current moment and their role in it. But five years after losing to Barack Obama, after enduring the recriminations between his splintered campaign staff and rogue running mate, Sarah Palin, and after returning to the Senate and falling into a prolonged funk, McCain finds himself in the midst of another crowded hour, maybe his last as an elected leader.
Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times
David Russell, the director of "American Hustle."
You could argue that, with his new film, "American Hustle," coming on the heels of "The Fighter" and "Silver Linings Playbook," David O. Russell has put together the best trifecta of any active American filmmaker. "The Fighter" earned seven Oscar nominations; "Silver Linings" received eight; and "American Hustle" was just named the year's best film by the New York Film Critics Circle. Early in his career, Russell developed a reputation as a brilliant but difficult director; George Clooney said the two actually came to blows on the set of Russell's third film, "Three Kings," and later a YouTube video circulated of Lily Tomlin and Russell in a full-throated, expletive-laced shouting match on the set of his fourth film, "I Heart Huckabees." Whether the characterization was fair, Russell has since undergone a personal, artistic and, ultimately, professional transformation. He regards "Hustle," a highly fictionalized version of the Abscam scandal of the late '70s and early '80s, as the third in a loose trilogy of films about ordinary people trying to live passionate lives. It's a journey he has had some experience with firsthand.
Russell on the set of "Three Kings" (1999), with George Clooney.
Neal Gabler: "American Hustle" is your third film in the last four years. There were six years between "I Heart Huckabees" in 2004 and "The Fighter" in 2010, during which you didn't release a single picture. What happened?
David O. Russell: A lot of things happened. I was very humbled. But that was good. Humbled in the sense that I had gotten divorced and I was helping to raise a son who faces bipolar issues. But I had also lost my way in terms of what kind of movie did I want to make. I knew the feelings I wanted to put in "Huckabees." But you're trying to make a kind of movie that you've never made before, and maybe it's not your kind of movie, and maybe it leans too much on ideas. With "The Fighter," I was at a place where I was ready to know where my heart and mind were going to be invested. And it became those people. I love these people — the details of these people who live in these ways that are very rich. To me, it was about the world of these people, how they felt and how they talked to each other. They are always in a predicament at the beginning where they're at a place they don't want to be, and they spend the whole movie reckoning how to get through, and if they want to get through, if life is worth living, and if they cannot only survive but feel a passion for life. It's the enchantment of lives. I really don't want to make a film that doesn't have that enchantment in it.
N.G.: Your last three films have been very emotion-rich, which is different from your first four films — "Spanking the Monkey," "Flirting With Disaster," "Three Kings" and "I Heart Huckabees" — which were very idiosyncratic.
D.R.: I feel like I have a direction that's very clear to me now. I have a great love and a feeling for a particular kind of character and story, which I don't think I ever could have said earlier of my first four films. It started with "The Fighter." I had written "Silver Linings Playbook" before that, but I didn't have the chance to make it. After "The Fighter," I got a chance to make it, and it became a companion volume. If I had leaned a little bit more on the fabric of the emotion, I think "Huckabees" would feel more like these last three films.
N.G.: What you're describing sounds like a kind of artistic revelation.
D.R.: I had overthought certain films so much that I walked away from a couple of them. When I made "The Fighter," I said to myself, "Mr. Overthinking Things, how about really, really just do it as good as you can from your heart. Can you do that? Well, actually just try to do that. That would be an achievement." For whatever reason, I came to appreciate and respect the honor and privilege of telling such human stories. The emotion is what I want.
N.G.: You are not exactly the first director anyone would have thought of for "The Fighter." You were known for black comedies.
INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 16, 2013
Because of a transcription error, an earlier version of this interview misquoted David O. Russell. He said, "You must leave out the painful parts, or you would never do certain things" — not "live out" the painful parts.
